Uncle Sean

by Ronald L Donaghe

  “I’m not afraid!” he said, though I knew he was. He was afraid that if he didn’t buy my affection with his body as he had all those other men, I would lose interest.

  “Well, maybe not afraid,” I said. “I didn’t mean that. I’ve got to know that you feel the same way about me as I feel about you.”

  There was confusion in his face, now, and his breathing had slowed a little. “How you feel about me?”

  “Yes. Lance, we haven’t even known each other for 24 hours. Can you believe that?”

  He shrugged and grinned and pulled my t-shirt down on my chest, then laid his head on my chest. “Tell me what you mean,” he said. His voice was muffled, and I felt his hot breath on my skin through the t-shirt.

  “I want us to love each other. I made a promise to myself one night that that’s how it had to be. It’s too sad, otherwise.” Even now I could hear Uncle Sean asking me to promise him I wouldn’t give my body to the first boy that came along, to promise myself.

  Sweat trickled under my armpits. Lance was lying on my chest and wasn’t saying anything, but his breathing had slowed to normal, and he hadn’t pulled away. So I just waited.

  I looked down on his small body, noting how thin he was and remembered how ineptly he had doubled his fists and tried to look menacing out on the rock ledge. Now, he looked vulnerable and small and I squeezed him to me a little closer. I brushed his hair with my fingers, and waited some more.

  ***

  When Lance and I got back to the house it was close to noon. The girls were fixing sandwiches, and just as I figured, without Mama around to make them work in the yard or something, they stayed indoors and were nice and cool in comparison to Lance and me—cool in another way, too. I was still worked up from what Lance and I had been doing, and so was he, and it was all I could do to keep my hands to myself.

  When I told him how I felt, it took him a while to understand what I was trying to say. I was afraid to tell him that I was falling in love with him, and he was afraid to tell me the same thing, so he lay on my chest for awhile and then he finally looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes.

  “I love you, Angel. I don’t know how it happened so fast. But I loved you when you put your arm around me five minutes after we met.” Then he grinned. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  It was, and so I told him back, “I love you, Lance.”

  And for awhile we just kissed gently, though we both had stiff-ons and were sweating and every time he touched me somewhere with his hands it was like a shock of electricity, or maybe more like my skin was sunburned and it was so sensitive his touch almost hurt.

  So when we walked into the kitchen at lunch, May took one look at us and burst out laughing, and Trinket and Rita looked as confused as I felt, but May just grinned, her freckled face and red hair making her look impish. “What have you two been up to!?” she screamed with laughter and, had it been in her consciousness to even think that we’d practically raped each other, she might have screamed in disgust.

  “Well, unlike you,” I said, feeling my face turn hot, “we’ve been working, and we’re sweating like pigs.”

  There was some knowing gleam that didn’t go away in May’s eyes, however, that left me wondering if she knew the truth.

  But I didn’t have time to wonder because, as soon as we were finished eating, the phone rang, and it was Mama, telling us that Daddy had been put in the hospital over in Deming.

  Rita was the one who answered the telephone, and she started crying, so it was all I could do to finally get a few words with Mama.

  “It’s bad, honey,” she told me. “Some kind of infection down there. They’re going to have to open him up.”

  “Is it his ulcers, again?” was all I could think to ask.

  “They don’t know, Will,” Mama said. Her voice sounded so far away. “They have to operate, first thing in the morning, so I won’t be home, tonight. So you’re gonna have to take care of things.”

  “Well, when”—

  The phone went dead, and so I placed it back on the hook and told my sisters what Mama said, not knowing any more than they did.

  I really did have work to do, but I didn’t want Lance out in the heat, because he did look bad, now that May had brought it to my attention. His lips were swollen (and I knew why), but so were those purple welts, and I was afraid they would get worse out in the sun, so I got him to take a bath, and told him I’d be back a little later.

  When he was down the hall, I went back into the kitchen. Rita was making cookies and crying and Trinket was crying because Rita was, and May just looked distressed.

  “We need to move some pipe,” I said to May, and she seemed relieved to get out of the house with her two younger sisters crying and ran to change into her work shoes.

  Five minutes later, we were heading out to the grain field, south of the barn.

  “What’d you think Lance and I had been up to?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it. “You know, when we came in for lunch?”

  May was sitting on the far side of the pickup with her arm out the window, looking about as much like a tomboy as I’d ever seen her. I knew she had come, because she knew I needed help, but I could also tell that my question was one she’d been waiting for me to ask, the way she grinned at me, as though she had something funny to share. She was eighteen and had already graduated high school in May, but she hadn’t left home like our two oldest sisters. They had married right out of high school. May hadn’t decided what she was going to do. All she ever cared about was athletics. At the moment, especially with Daddy in the hospital, I was glad she still lived at home. She was a help in the field and didn’t mind getting dirty, and I had come to depend on her. She looked at me with that same gleam in her eye from lunch. “You know what I meant, Will. The only work you and Lance did was work each other up.”

  It felt like she had splashed cold water on my face, and I found it hard to breathe.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, not daring to look her straight in the eye.

  But she laughed. “Oh, Will, for Pete’s sake! You never date, and when Uncle Sean was here, you followed him around like a little puppy, and grieved when he left, and maybe you and he never—”

  “We didn’t do anything!” I said, a lot louder than I intended.

  But May just laughed. “Okay! Don’t get so fried! You won’t be the first boy that’s ever experimented, you know.”

  My heart was beginning to pound so much I thought I was going to have an attack, and my head swam at May’s words. But I fought to keep my calm. “Maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do, May.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I heard Mama and Daddy talking about Uncle Sean one night, if you want to know the truth. That was like the day before Daddy went into Uncle Sean’s room. And you know what came of that.”

  “Then how come you never told me before now?” I asked. “It hurt me really bad, because Uncle Sean wouldn’t do anything with me if you want to know the truth.”

  “See!?” May said, triumphantly. “I knew you were in love with him.”

  “Then how come you didn’t run tell Mama and Daddy?”

  “Because maybe you’re not the only one experimenting.”

  It was like a big, deep canyon opened up in front of us at the way May was talking and we were both driving head-long into it. I didn’t know if I liked the idea of what she’d just said about herself, either.

  “You mean with other girls?”

  This time May smiled. “Yes! Dossier Duffus! But it’s not all that weird among girls. It used to be that my friends and I practiced kissing each other, so we’d know what to do on a date.”

  “Only you don’t want to date boys. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “I’ll just have to see. But I’m kind of sure you already know what you want. And when you and Lance came in for lunch, it was so-o-o obvious the way your hair was all messed up and how rubbery your li
ps looked. They don’t get that way unless you’ve been kissing.”

  And then a whole lot of things about May came to mind, like the way she said Uncle Sean was too pretty, and the way she took in things at home, quiet but observant, as though she were analyzing things constantly—and even how she was always running around with other girls and not goo-goo over boys the way Rita was, even though Rita was a lot younger than May. But I was too uncomfortable with those thoughts to continue, and so we just poured ourselves into the work, to get it done, so we could get back to the house, soon.

  We both wanted to be there in case we got any more calls from Mama. And I didn’t want to be away from Lance any longer than I had to.

  ***

  So that afternoon, I didn’t do the work I knew I should. I still had to get the combine ready, since the grain was heading out and old man Hill and some of the other ranchers would be wanting to put up the grain in their silos come August. But I was too worried about Daddy to stay away, and I was anxious to see Lance, again. I figured I’d bathe, too, and get nice and clean and shave, and put on some of my Old Spice and brush my teeth. Deep down in my gut, I was excited, in exactly the same place where the dread about Daddy built more and more.

  So we were all in the living room half watching television and half listening for the phone when it rang. It still made me jump. And it was Mama. She told us that they had Daddy on drugs to try to kill the infection, if that’s what it was, and that he was resting.

  Then Rita’s boyfriend came by, and I was kind of relieved that she would go off with him, but kind of worried too that she might not be here if Daddy got worse. Then the little Collins girl came by with her mother and asked if Trinket could spend the night. Everybody looked to me to make the decision, even though I wasn’t the oldest—even Marge Collins expected me to make the decision, though she was hesitant when we told her that Daddy was in the hospital.

  “Will you kids be all right, then?” she asked. “Too bad your Uncle Sean’s not here any more,” she added, looking around, and making me grin to myself. “You kids need an adult around, times like these.”

  “We’ll be all right, Mrs. Collins,” I told her, as we stood by the front door, waiting for Trinket to gather up her things, including a teddy bear she liked to sleep with. “Only could you bring Trinket back early in the morning? I want her to be here when Daddy comes out of his operation.”

  She crinkled her heavily made up eyes into a smile, nodding. “About eight o’clock, I think,” Mrs. Collins said. She was at least as old as Mama, though I thought she dressed a little younger, and I thought about the way she had gone bug-eyed over Uncle Sean. Lately, I thought she was a little bug-eyed when she looked at me, and it always made me feel kind of funny, since she was so old and married, even though I knew she ran around—or sure acted like she did.

  She wrapped her fingers around my upper arm, and I noticed she had long nails that she kept painted a fire-engine red to match her lipstick. She leaned close to me there in the doorway, and I could smell her perfume, like roses dipped in sweat. “Call me if you need anything, won’t you, Will? I just don’t know if I ought to leave you kids alone. Somebody should have called me up.”

  “Honest, we’ll be all right, Mrs. Collins,” I said, again. I was relieved when Trinket tugged my arm, ready to go.

  “Say hi to Mama, if she calls, again,” Trinket said.

  A moment later I let out a breath as I watched Mrs. Collins drive off with Trinket.

  Then it was just me and Lance and May in the house, and it was late afternoon, and May was grinning from ear to ear, when I went back and sat on the couch by Lance. She was sitting in Mama’s platform rocker looking across the room at us.

  “Don’t mind me, boys,” May said in a voice like Aunt Bea on The Andy Griffith Show, and I knew she was making a dig out of what she and I had talked about.

  I was sitting on Lance’s left, and he looked confused at May’s comment. He had already bathed and even though his bruises still looked bad, his hair was nice and combed and he looked fresher than he had when we came in for lunch, and even more beautiful. I could feel myself getting nervous, because I was sure we’d be getting into bed together that night.

  May wasn’t going to say anything, and she seemed to be egging us on with her comment.

  So, on impulse, I put my arm around Lance’s shoulder, though I didn’t dare kiss him in front of my sister. But even that small gesture made him stiffen and frown, so I got up quickly and told them I was going to bathe.

  “You can go in and watch,” May said to Lance, grinning. “I’m sure you’d rather be in there than out here with me.”

  Lance looked really confused and a little frightened.

  “Come on,” I said to him, frowning over at May. “I need to tell you some things, anyway.” Then I looked straight at May and back at Lance. “Besides, she knows about us, Lance. So she’s going to tease us one way or another.”

  When Lance and I went into the bathroom, I turned on the water for a bath, getting it as hot as I could stand it and, in just a few minutes, the steam had risen in there, clouding the mirror and making the whole room feel like an Indian smoke hole. The mirror began to run streams of water and the air was cloudy when I started undressing.

  “You don’t have to stay in here,” I said to Lance. He was sitting on the toilet with the lid down, and he was sweating, but also grinning at me.

  “No, Angel, I’m going to stay with you,” he said in his oily and somewhat deep voice. It was still a bit of a surprise to hear such a beautiful, grown-up voice come out of such a small person.

  “I don’t want you to get too hot,” I said, grinning back and pulling my t-shirt up over my head and tossing it onto the floor by the sink. I removed Uncle Sean’s dog tags, then, and decided that I had worn them for the last time, though I was not putting him away. I had finally found my own Uncle Sean, the dream that is of Uncle Sean in Lance.

  Then I struggled out of my boots, and Lance just watched me, grinning. Our eyes met and he got up suddenly and came over to me.

  “Let me help you out of those pants,” he said.

  That simple statement caused me to pop a stiff-on in an instant, but I stood with my arms away from my body and looked down as he undid the buttons on the fly of my Levi’s, one-by-one, slowly, with such concentration, I knew he was savoring that moment. When he pushed them down I stepped out of them, and then he knelt on the floor in front of me and slid my jockey’s off, and I came out of the underwear like I was spring-loaded.

  There had been times in the showers at school when one boy or another suffered a stiff-on in front of everyone else but, because being a queer or faggot was something to be ashamed of, we usually just ignored it. It was natural, in a way, I thought, that sometimes our little willies wouldn’t behave themselves, especially when we were coming into manhood. Of course, it was considered queer if the guy who popped a stiff-on didn’t at least turn away and get dressed as quick as he could.

  But this was different, and I was feeling little insects of excitement running up and down my legs, and strings being pulled inside my chest and heart, allowing Lance to look as closely at me as he wanted.

  I was reminded of the time at the Hill stock tank when I had deliberately let Uncle Sean see that I was excited. It was after he and I had kissed and, even though he had made it clear that it would go no further than that, I felt I didn’t have to hide myself.

  I reluctantly moved away and turned off the water and stepped into the tub and eased myself down into the water. Lance began ripping his clothes off, as well, until he stood in the steamy room as naked as I was, and I took his hand and brought him into the tub with me.

  He was skinny, and his ribs showed in his chest, but he wasn’t bony everywhere, and I liked what I saw. He could have been a long-distance runner with his build, and maybe part of why he was so thin was because he probably had run a lot in his life, no doubt running away from his stepfather, maybe running scared thro
ugh the streets of New Orleans, in one way or another running away from home for a long time. But he had landed here, with me, and as he sank into the hot water, grinning at me from the opposite end of the tub, I leaned forward and put my much larger, more muscular arms around him and pulled him to me.

  It was so hot in the tub that even when our bodies touched, whose arms or whose legs were where wasn’t that easy to distinguish by feel. But when our lips met, and Lance opened his mouth and breathed into my mouth with a groan of pleasure, I felt his lips and the slick of his face and tasted him, and my whole body began shuddering as I drew him closer. I looked into his eyes, wet and questioning, and kissed him and he kissed back.

  I see now why Uncle Sean did not want to ruin such moments for me by trying to put into words what it was like to be with someone—in my case, another boy. Words fail and cannot possibly describe the sheer physical sensations. I was so deeply in love with Lance Surfett, so much with him physically there in the hot bath, I could not imagine anything more full and wonderful; yet we did not make love, only loved each other, learning to trust each other’s touch.

  We bathed each other and kissed, and plastered our bodies together, and stepped out and dried each other off; and we both knew we were going to wait until later that night to make love.

  ***

  We gathered up our hot, damp clothing and ran down the hall naked to my room, laughing. I was on the lookout for May, but we made it to my room and closed the door. It felt great to be out of the steamy bathroom, and for a little while, even though the sun had not yet set and it was a hot July day outdoors, the air cooled our skin as we stood in my room. I got Lance underwear and a t-shirt from my dresser and got some for myself.

  It was then that I realized that if Lance stayed here very much longer, he was going to need some clothes that fit. So when Lance was dressed in the smallest clothes I could find, I took our dirty clothing, along with a few other things from my hamper, into the utility room off the kitchen and threw Levi’s, shorts, socks, and t-shirts all together into the Maytag. Lance was with me. We had passed May in the kitchen, where she was finishing up supper for the three of us, and even though she winked at me when we passed by, she didn’t make any catty remark, for which I was grateful.