by E. F. Mulder
“Don’t try to rationalize his intentions.” Kellie was no-nonsense. She was older. Her gray hair was up in a messy bun and her earrings were bigger than her ears. “I asked you how it felt.”
Gideon took Rudy’s hand.
“Like that,” Rudy said. “Yes.”
“Is anyone else in the family that way toward you?”
“No.” Rudy was definitive. “Maybe someone said something that hurt my feelings or something once or twice, but I don’t believe it was in any way mean-spirited or prejudiced.”
“Good. There’s work to do. I hope you come out of it feeling better. The first step is to channel your anger into exercise or art. Dancing, writing, something.”
“Sex?” Rudy asked.
“I would suggest not.” Kellie smiled. “You never want to associate the two.”
“We can have sex after you run,” Gideon said. “Run…swim…or I’ll teach you how to build a bookshelf. Woodworking is relaxing and aerobic.”
“I see you have the start of a terrific support system in Gideon,” Kellie said. “Use him.”
* * * *
Gideon was out of breath, supporting himself up on the pool deck by his elbows a couple hours later. “Kellie said to use you,” Rudy reminded him.
“Holy shit!”
They’d swum a couple dozen naked laps. Then Rudy had fucked Gideon hard, half of him in the water, half of him out of it. As if the swimming hadn’t been exhausting enough, Gideon could barely walk when he went to work that night.
“Someone got rode hard and put away wet.” If ever there was a fitting metaphor, Eileen sure came up with it, the moment she saw Gideon hobbling.
* * * *
September brought fall, at least according to the calendar. Rudy continued his therapy sessions, and his anger with himself seemed to wane. He talked about going home for the anniversary party, about taking his brother and sister aside for a talk. “Maybe not Dad, but them, for sure.”
Gideon was filled with thoughts of Christmas already. He knew exactly what he wanted to get for Rudy, and was thrilled to find it on BidForIt.com.
He set up an account and offered the minimum amount set by the seller right away, twenty bucks. “Frank Funn’s shoes started at ten,” he muttered. “I hope I sent Capital One enough to get this, Prissy. Don’t tell Rudy. I want it to be a surprise.”
It was easy to check the bidding when Rudy was away. When he was home, especially when they were at the apartment, being sneaky became somewhat of a challenge.
“You’ve been in the bathroom quite a bit,” Rudy said when Gideon came out for probably the fourth time one Sunday. “It wasn’t my spaghetti, was it?”
The pasta had been pretty bad. Dare he use it as an excuse? “I’m sure it wasn’t,” Gideon said. “I must have eaten something else that didn’t agree with me.”
The bidding was cutthroat. The increases were small, but still, almost as soon as Gideon bid one thing, someone else raised it by something ending in nine to round it up. Unlike BuyBay, the user names on accounts weren’t made public. Gideon didn’t know if he was bidding against one person or ten.
“$42.51,” he said to Priscilla as he tapped in that amount. “At least it’s not up over fifty yet.”
Just forty-eight hours shy of the auction closing, it was. The current offer was $55.80.
“I can go up to seventy-five,” Gideon told Priscilla, just as Rudy came in the door from his morning run.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“Hmm.” Rudy pressed his sweaty body all over Gideon’s.
“Eew.”
Rudy stepped back. “Really?”
“Well…actually…not.” Gideon couldn’t keep up the façade. Rudy smelled pretty good and tasted even better, manly and salty. “Get back here.”
“I don’t know if I want to.” Rudy pouted. “You and Priscilla are being awfully secretive about something, and I feel left out.”
“Aww. It’s about your Christmas present, and that’s all I’m saying.”
“Christmas? It’s September!”
“I’m an early shopper…except when I’m not. I hope I can find that angel paper this year…the kind you wrapped the shoes in.”
“I still have a little.”
“I saved mine, too.”
“Did I ever tell you I wrapped it myself?”
“Who else would…? Oh. Melinda.” Rudy had met her before he’d met a single member of Rudy’s family. The irony of that was something Rudy himself had pointed out.
“Yup. I hadn’t wrapped a gift since I was a child, but I did…for you…even before we fell in love.”
“You’re amazing.”
“And gross.”
Gideon licked Rudy’s throat. “Let’s get you in the shower…or at least out of those shorts. We’ll see how things go after that.”
“That tickles,” Rudy complained.
Gideon was at his feet. “It’s business this time.”
“Business?” Rudy asked.
“Well…a project. I want to make you a stocking…like Gramma Star made all of us…Curtis, Beth and me.” Gideon stood. “I need to memorize your feet.”
“For a Christmas stocking?”
“Yup.” Taking Rudy by his wet hair, Gideon offered a kiss. “It’s gonna be big.”
“I can hardly wait until December now.”
Neither could Gideon. All through the next two days, he waged an online war.
$63.00
$63.01
$64.00
$64.01
He had to sneak a bid in under the covers at 11:58 on the final night, with Rudy lying right beside him in the big bed at the big house. They’d retired for the night around ten. Gideon had started yawning an hour before that. “I think I’ll turn in early tonight.” He’d picked up Priscilla and had headed for the stairs.
“I’ll come, too.” Rudy had gotten up from the cushy leather couch in the TV room.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
They’d climbed the stairs attached, which happened often. Rudy was in the back, his chin on Gideon’s shoulder. The way they went up was usually a clue as to who would be taking which position once their clothes came off. For the first night ever since their first time on New Year’s Eve, at least those when they were in the same place, Gideon tried to put off making love, though.
“You don’t want me tonight?” Rudy asked.
Gideon faked another yawn. “Maybe I can take a nap for a while, and then we can wake up and do it. You’re sleepy, right?”
Gideon had rubbed Rudy in the small of his back. He knew how that soothed Rudy by now, and sure enough, Rudy had fallen asleep.
About an hour later, Gideon was checking the bidding, preparing to submit the winning amount, $72.01.
“Hey!”
Gideon jumped. Rudy had startled him. “Jesus. I thought you were asleep.”
“$72.01?” Rudy was under the covers with him. He had his phone, too.
“Huh?”
“Your bid…my Christmas gift…”
“How did you…?”
“I put up the $72. Your birthday comes first. Monopoly.”
“Monopoly…with the original pieces. I should have known, 90sFandemonium!”
“Isn’t this how we met?”
“Just like. Except we weren’t naked.”
“And now we are. Merry birthday!” Rudy tackled Gideon. The duvet and both of their phones ended up on the floor as they thrashed around playfully. “Hey.” Rudy offered a nip on Gideon’s nipple, and then rolled right off his side of the bed to get up. “Come here.”
“Come where?”
“Over there.” Rudy pointed toward the closet doors. “And it’s your turn in the cuffs.”
“Oh boy.” Gideon was game.
* * * *
Eileen jumped out of a cardboard cake down at the bar on September 27th. Rudy baked one at home that tasted like cardboard, too. G
ideon ate a huge slice and went back for a second one, though. To him, that was love. He and Rudy played Monopoly from the time Gideon got off work at Elvis’s until nearly noon the next day. Gideon was the boot. Rudy was the racecar. Talk about cutthroat. Rudy played to win. He had twice as many properties as Gideon and houses on many early on.
“Houses are a better return than hotels,” he’d said. “Many people don’t realize that.”
Gideon had hotels on a couple of his properties. “Don’t tell me how to play.”
Rudy laughed. “It’s hard to come off all tough and grouchy when you’re naked.”
“Someone who never did get the racecar tattoo he talked about shouldn’t go telling other people they’re not tough.”
“Oh! It’s on!”
“It was on before.”
Park Place was still up for grabs. With only two players, somehow, they just kept skipping over it. Both wanted it badly, and both made that fact known.
Rudy rolled an eight on his next turn and ended up on Chance, the spot right before it. “Fuck.”
Gideon read it for him. “Go back three spaces.”
That put Rudy on Community Chest. He read that one himself. “I won second prize in a beauty contest. Fork over ten bucks.”
“If you won second, I have to wonder who won first.” Gideon preened.
“It’s good you can win something, because this board is mine.”
“We’ll see. Monopoly is part skill, part patience. What I lack in one area, I make up for in the other.”
Gideon hit Park Place on his next roll. After that, things turned quickly in his favor. “Well, well, well.” Rudy had landed on a property with three houses. “You owe me…two hundred bucks, and it looks like all you have left is a fifty, a twenty, and some ones. Hmm. What can we do?”
“Is there anything in the rules about paying rent with sexual favors?”
Gideon picked up the box top. “It does say right here kisses can be used as legal tender in some instances, but would Rudy Winner really mix business and pleasure?”
The houses and hotels went everywhere when Rudy threw himself across the bed and upended the board. “I would.” They kissed. “And I win!”
Gideon laughed. “No way! I didn’t say I accepted.”
* * * *
Just when things were looking perfect, around mid-October, Gideon got a call from Oregon. “My father’s father,” he relayed. “That was the social worker at his nursing home. There’s been a ‘heart episode.’ That’s what they’re calling it. He’s asking to see me.”
“Your grandfather…Grampa Star?”
“He was never that.”
“Oh. Are you going to go?”
“I’m tempted, for sure. He’s the only family I have left,” Gideon said. “By blood, even though he separated himself from the rest of us even before my dad died. I only met him a handful of times when I was really little. He didn’t even come to the funeral. I can’t imagine I’d recognize him anymore, but…”
“I’ll come with you, if you want,” Rudy said. “If that will help.”
He held Gideon’s hand the whole time, on the train, and even tighter in the hospital room up in Oregon.
“You look exactly like your father,” Alex Star said.
Gideon wanted to ask how he even remembered what his son looked like. He said, “Thank you,” instead, then shifted his feet uncomfortably, sliding around inside Frank Funn’s large shoes. Alex looked like Gideon’s father, too. Gideon tried to turn the clock back a little in order to find in his grandfather what his father might look like now.
“Tell me what you’re up to in your life.” Alex Star smiled. He was frail looking, appearing even older than his years. According to the physician who spoke with Gideon, decades of cigarette smoking had taken its toll, but Alex was stable.
“Well, this is Rudy. He’s an important part of my life…Alex.” No matter how many times Gideon tried to call the man “Grampa” in his head, he kept going back to Alex. “I work in a bar in Las Vegas…and I have a goldfish.”
“Good money?”
“Excuse me. Money? No…not really. But I lov—”
“I need some help, Son.”
“Should I get the nurse?”
“Not that kind,” Alex said. “My home is in foreclosure. By the time I’m ready to go back to it, it could be gone.”
“I’m sorry.” Gideon and Rudy exchanged glances. “How much?”
“$18,000.”
“Oh. I’m…I’m sorry,” Gideon said again. “I don’t have $18,000. I don’t even know how I could come up with that kind of money.”
“You’re all the family I have, Son.”
Gideon wondered if Alex was calling him “Son” because he couldn’t remember his name.
“I can send you a little something every month, maybe.”
Alex sat up in his bed. No longer frail, he shouted as if in perfect health. “What good is that going to do me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why did I even bother?”
“I’m…”
Alex turned his back.
Gideon spoke with the social worker personally, who told him Alex was well enough to go back to the nursing home, or back to his own. “First, we have to make sure he can keep it, though.”
“I could take him back to Nevada, I suppose.” Gideon looked to Rudy. “Put him up in the apartment? Stay with him there.”
Rudy’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
“If he’ll come,” Gideon said.
“He seems rather determined to have his own way.” The social worker had a lot of papers in front of her. “There is a daughter and a son I—”
“Wait. He told me I was the only family he had.”
“Oh.” She kept shuffling them. “Well, he’s divorced, so perhaps they aren’t close, though the daughter is his emergency contact.”
“So, he asked someone to get a hold of me specifically?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to help,” Gideon said.
“Your grandfather mentioned an inheritance.”
Gideon scoffed. “Twenty-five years ago? He wouldn’t know if there had been one. There wasn’t.” Gideon’s parents had left just enough life insurance for four funerals. They died so young, they’d still held a hefty mortgage on their own home, just like Gramma Star, which she paid off on her own with a little help from Gideon in his teen years, but no help from Alex. “I’ll ask him to come home with me. That’s all I can do.”
“Are you sure?” Rudy asked. “I can write a check.”
“No.”
“You’ll be taking on a lot if you bring him to Las Vegas…for a man who…”
“I know. I have to try, though.”
In the end, they went back alone. Alex refused to “uproot himself” at this point in his life. He refused to even tell that to Gideon face to face, opting to send a message through the social worker, a basic “Thanks for nothing.” Rudy kept his arm around Gideon during the entire ride home and followed him around like a puppy dog once back at the apartment.
“You okay?” He asked that at least a hundred times over the next couple of days. Though Gideon always answered “yes,” he wasn’t.
One night when he couldn’t sleep—one morning after work—he went up onto the roof. Sitting there with his feet dangling off one side, the sun still not quite ready to make an appearance, Gideon wasn’t surprised to hear Rudy’s shoes on the metal rungs of the fire escape ladder.
“I thought I might find you up here.”
“I was hoping for some advice from Mom and Dad.”
Rudy settled in beside him. “Are they saying anything?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Ooh. Not liking this.” Rudy pulled his feet up and moved back away from the edge.
“We can go back to bed. This isn’t helping, anyway.” Gideon shifted to stand.
“Or we can stay.” Rudy stopped him.
“I’ll just suck it up.”
“How about I put my arms around you, so we both feel better, and we’ll sit and listen a while longer?”
Rudy snuggled in. “Sounds good.”
Gideon never did get a definitive answer from above. He heard whispering, singing, and laughing, like always, which he took as a reminder that family was love. When he got paid at the end of that week, he sent his grandfather a check for fifty bucks. “If he cashes it, fine. If not, that’s his choice. I can’t just pretend he doesn’t exist, Rudy, especially not since I’ve seen how much he looks like my dad. If he wants to pretend we’re not related, that’s his choice.”
* * * *
Rudy had to go away for business the last two weeks of the month. He invited Gideon along, but Gideon’s work ethic and devotion to the gang at Elvis’s Vegas Sing-Along Bar made him want to stay behind, as difficult as that was.
Brett had put out pumpkins, witches, goblins, and bats way back on October first. Everyone was planning to come to the bar in costume on Halloween. The theme—if it could be called that—was “come as something that makes you happy.” Gideon decided to dress up as an angel. Putting something together with a white bed sheet from Good Will, a huge cardboard box from the bar for wings, and a hanger plus the gold tinsel garland he used at Christmastime for a halo, was no problem for someone so crafty. The whole gang was already there when he came down from his apartment around 8:15, a bit early because of his excitement for the holiday.
“Wow.” Gideon stopped in the doorway. “Wow.” Everyone was dressed the same. “Elvis makes you happy? All of you?”
There were red jumpsuits, green ones, yellow, and white. Elvis with boobs, ginger Elvis, tall, short, even one Elvis with snow white hair and fishnet stockings.
“We’re you, knucklehead.” Brett put his arm around Gideon’s shoulder. “You make us happy.”
“Aww.”
Even Rudy, when he showed up, had gotten in on it. “Elvis has entered the building…at least ten times, I see.”
“Mmm. Thank you.” Gideon had missed Rudy’s lips. “I missed all of you,” he said.
“I came right from the airport. Well, I did make one stop upstairs to dress.”
“You mean you didn’t wear this on the plane?” They were rocking back and forth, as if “Monster Mash” was a romantic waltz.