In the back corner there’s another kerosene lamp. For going out to the outhouse. And something else. Music. There’s a guy back there by the lantern and he’s cranking an old Victrola. Billie Holiday singing “April in Paris.” I do a quick look at Hank, but Hank doesn’t remember his “April in Paris” dance that night in Pennsylvania. He’s busy shaking hands with a woman with bright red hair in a blue parka who’s introducing herself as Misty Rivers.
Magic. The big casement windows that line the west wall shine out of the dark as if church windows, four frames of bright red-orange fire.
We all sit in the Mormon chairs around the low table. I sit next to Hank. We both know to sit our asses near the stove. On the table, cheeses spread out on thick white plates, baguettes, bottles of red wine, a huge plate of cookies, stemware, a coffee press, old coffee mugs, hot water, tea bags. Cream and sugar in those kind of blue dishes.
By the time everyone has their coffee or their wine, the bright shine of the windows is gone. Everything is black. Pitch. Just us human beings there crowded around the kerosene lamp and the stove. There’s maybe twelve of us. One chair is empty. The kerosene flame from the table below us comes up light into our faces. The guy who was playing the Victrola sits down in the empty chair. His hair is gray but he looks young, something wild, rugged about him. Gray chest hair coming out his shirt collar. He’s not wearing shoes. He looks over to Hank and me. Like everybody else is looking, he looks too.
I’ve never heard a place be so silent. The way time is not a measurement but something you are perfectly still in.
Hank puts a chocolate chip cookie in his mouth, then two more. He presses his knee into mine. That knee press means I should go ahead and do something. Since usually I go first, I open my book. I have to push the pages down into the light. My voice in the big dark room, echoes of it, all the spirits listening. Maybe even one Most Miserable in particular. At first my words tremble, finally I hit my stride.
Those twenty minutes I read that night in the Atlanta Club, while I am reading, more than ever before or since, in all the world the feeling I love the most. When I’m finished reading, nobody claps, nobody steps up, takes charge, pours more wine all around. The way the faces all look at me it’s as if I’m still reading. Or maybe some other guy is reading now only I can’t hear him.
The black dark, the silence, the light of the kerosene flame. The flicker on the faces of the people in the circle. Twelve, I count them, twelve of us sitting, including Reuben and Sal and Gary, Hank and me, Misty Rivers and the Victrola Guy.
I’ve never felt so listened to.
Those of us around the table, it’s as if we are dark houses in the dark, windows shuttered to the night, a light on inside. Each of us with our front door wide open.
Or this is a séance and Hank and I are the channelers.
The dead speak as Hank begins to read. My favorite story of his. The same story he read at the Blind Lemon in Pocatello. About the little girl who calls in the cows. I cover my mouth with my hand because I don’t trust my mouth not to lip-synch. Why I love Hank’s story so much is why I love it even more that night, because more than anything the story is about light, fading light, and the little girl narrator, her lists of cows’ names and family members, how her voice becomes a litany of blessings on them all.
With my mouth covered like that, I look my eyes around the circle. I make a blessing, too. On this strange gathering of people, or spirits, who sit in high-backed Mormon chairs around a low oak table and a kerosene lamp 6,000 feet high in the middle of the Sawtooths. Seven people I don’t know. Five, including me, I do.
Reuben, not like the sandwich, but roo-BEN, is directly across the low table from us. He looks French in his black beret. A big mug of Earl Grey tea in his hands. He’s just had his teeth capped and the kerosene lamplight shines off his white teeth. Sal is sitting next to Reuben, as close to the cookie dish as he can get. He’s particularly fond of the double chocolate fudge. Sal’s wearing his trademark big white long-sleeved shirt. Not his red baseball cap though. He just wears his hats in the sun.
I met Reuben Flores and Sal Nash on a September afternoon in 1973. The very next day was my first day as a high school English teacher and my hair was down to my shoulders.
I could’ve gone to any barbershop in Boise. Three bucks and I’d have been acceptable. But I’d given up hope on so many things. The Sixties were over and the Seventies looked like married and a job. And now I was even going to give up on letting my freak flag fly. But I just couldn’t let some redneck give me an American haircut. I figured if I was going to sell out, then at least I could take the risk.
Truth was I wanted more than it looked like I was going to get.
Beauty by Gustav, I opened the cut-glass, big, heavy door. Man, the smell in that big beautiful old house. Smelled dangerous. The problem was you needed an appointment.
But then Reuben Flores walked out. Really, this guy’s a cross between John Leguizamo and Diana Ross. What a smile. If I could wait just ten minutes, he’d be right with me.
What I remember about that haircut was that Reuben offered me a cocktail, and the offer surprised me, and I tried not to act surprised, and then I was sitting in his barber chair drinking a rye and ginger, and we were talking talking. Not guy talk. We were talking about life and breath, his guru named Bhabhiji, and I felt so at ease. I wasn’t searching for words.
Reuben has a story about that day as well. The tall lanky man with long ash-blonde hair standing in the foyer of the beauty parlor and how surprised he was when I got in his barber chair that I asked him if he was homosexual.
I don’t remember that. What I do remember is that Reuben pointed out the window. Outside in the garden was a young man wearing a red baseball cap. His lover, Sal Nash. The strong back muscles under his white shirt. His hands dug deep into a flowerbed. The way Reuben spoke of him, Sal Nash was no corporeal human being. Sal Nash was a heavenly angel. I didn’t doubt it for a moment.
And something else. Something Reuben said just as he pulled the drape from my shoulders and I was about to get out of the chair.
“You know, Ben, what it all boils down to is love.”
That’s when Sal walked in from outside. Actually, at first I couldn’t tell it was Sal. All I could see was a huge bundle of red flowers.
“Ben, this is Sal,’” Reuben said.
The red flowers parted and under the bill of the red ballcap were two blue eyes. Maybe not blue. Maybe crystal or silver and just the red flowers made them blue. Like to look right through you, those blue eyes. His thick dark-red hair and full beard. Fucking Alan Bates right there in Boise, Idaho.
“Hi Ben,” Sal said. “Would you like a dahlia?”
Reuben, Sal, the beautiful big house, my new haircut, the smell of the salon, red dahlias, love.
Maybe the Seventies weren’t going to be so bad after all.
And. Homosexual. Maybe one day, I just might start walking on the other side of the street.
HANK’S READING THE part about Grandma Julia Mae. Nobody in our circle has made a move. As if we’re in a trance. Gary Whitcomb, Atlanta’s honorary mayor, keeps his knee a steady press against mine. He’s done a lot of work setting this reading up. He owns the Atlanta Club and everything in it. Even the Mormon chairs are his. Gary’s a big guy, solid. Sandy red hair, what he has of it. So he mostly shaves his head. Usually a beard, sandy red, too and trimmed short. Tall, rugged-looking. You’d think he was a real Idaho Spud, but when he opens his mouth, that voice. High-pitched and so gay. That’s what attracted me to him in the first place, I mean besides his big shoulders, and a quiet way that made him seem sad. Then that laugh would come out of him. Mostly I liked him because he was a painter who always had paint on his Levi’s and on his boots.
It was a mosquito. I couldn’t sleep because there was a mosquito in the room. It was just after I’d left my wife, Evie, and I was staying in the extra bedroom with Bette Podegushka and her roommates, Will and Leo. Everybody w
as out dancing. I’d turned on the bright overhead light and I was standing naked on my bed jumping up and down trying to kill the fucker with my pillow.
That’s when Gary Whitcombe walks into the room.
I quick sat down and pulled the sheets up around me. Gary let out that laugh. I had to laugh, too. Turns out I’d left the front door unlocked. Gary had a six-pack he was going to share with Will, so we started in on beers. After a while, Gary turned off the light and we sat there in the dark. I smoked cigarettes and we talked. About everything. Evie and Bette and sex and Idaho and art. That’s the first time I heard about a place called Atlanta, Idaho. Gary talked about his house up there and the hot springs. The old gold mines. Greylock mountain. I remember how comfortable I started to feel. In the middle of all the changes, all that fear, that night I felt comfortable. It wasn’t long and Gary and I were lying on the bed and I was curled up into Gary’s armpit.
I remember something else, too. Gary didn’t get hard either. When I asked Gary if that upset him, he said, “No, I never get hard the first time.”
That a man could know that about himself and be okay with it and then say it out loud. I liked that.
YEARS AND YEARS these guys, my pals. Reuben Flores, Sal Nash, Gary Whitcombe. Like Ephraim, they’re men who’ve known me through it all. Beauty by Gustav, a married man, a high school teacher, buying a home on Boise’s North End. Then 1978 comes along and everything changes. My affair with Bette, maybe a bisexual, for sure a disco sister. Then a few years later, I’m a full-blown homosexual. Currently a resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a graduate of Columbia University, and now a published author. 1988. And we’re together again in Atlanta, Idaho, in a big dark concrete room, huddled around a kerosene lamp and a potbellied stove, no electricity, way high up a mile closer to the moon and the stars, sitting around a low table listening to Hank Christian’s little girl call in the family’s cows.
A family.
ONLY THE FLICKER of the kerosene lamp when Hank is finished. Inside the stove, a chunk of wood settles deeper into the fire. So quiet. The faces stare at us, stare more. Their front doors wide open.
Hank grabs a handful of chocolate chip cookies, hands me one. It’s only then I realize I’d forgotten about dinner. After a while, Sal starts clapping and then everybody else claps too. Misty Rivers unzips her blue parka, lights a cigarette, takes a deep inhale. On the exhale she says:
“Both of you read us some more. Please.”
“Yeah,” the Victrola Guy says, “I haven’t been read to since my grandpa died.”
Around the table, all of a sudden, everybody’s moving, talking back and forth. People grab their coffee cups, pour more wine, move their chairs, uncross their legs, stretch their backs, light cigarettes.
Don’t stop. Keep reading. No, don’t stop reading.
Hank’s black eyes, a spark inside, bright as the kerosene lamp. I’m surprised, too. Magic. The silence, what we took for bored locals, has turned out to be something else.
Hank reads his story about live nude girls. I read the part of the novel about the Blackfoot State Fair. Then Hank’s story of his high school sweetheart. Then me, the part about my father’s saddle room. We don’t get out of there ’til midnight.
Everybody carries the dishes from the low table to the sink behind the bar. There’s two chocolate chip cookies left. I take one and Hank takes one. Gary opens the door to the stove and checks the fire, turns the dampers down. As everybody is leaving, Misty Rivers unzips a pocket of her blue parka, pulls out a checkbook. She lays the checkbook onto the table, opens it, bends down, and begins writing. The kerosene lamp shows the silver roots under her dyed-red hair. One check for Hank’s book, one for mine.
When she hands Hank his check, she looks him straight in the eyes and shakes his hand.
“You’ve made a wonderful evening for us in Atlanta,” she says. “Thank you.”
And to me:
“And you’re from Idaho,” she says. “We’re real proud of you.”
Her hands are small and strong, the skin is slick.
OUTSIDE, GARY LOCKS the Atlanta Club’s front doors. Sal’s got the Wagoneer going.
“Let’s walk,” Gary says.
It’s chilly after sitting by the stove, but the night air feels like pure oxygen. We walk together, Reuben, Gary, Hank, and me. At first, it’s so dark we can’t see our feet. No moon in the night sky. The night sky so full of stars so close you know the earth you’re walking on is part of the cosmos. I take a step and where I step the bottom isn’t there, and my foot goes down and down and finally hits the ground. For all I know that step could have been a cliff. Ahead of us, Sal driving slow in the Wagoneer. The headlights make a place of light onto the dirt road. The brake lights more stars. Red stars.
“You guys are part of Atlanta history now,” Reuben says.
“How’s that?” Hank says.
“Misty Rivers just bought your books for the Elmore County Public Library.”
GARY’S HOUSE, THE Main Spread, is darkness inside of darkness. On the back porch, Gary takes a flashlight hanging from a nail and turns the flashlight on. Everything is blacker on the edges of the light. I can see an old table. A washtub on the table. A brick chimney, and an old screen door painted white. Gary pulls open the screen door, pushes open the back door. Hank steps back and lets me walk in first.
Each step I take into the house is a decade back into history. And with the flashlight beam bouncing around onto things, the house feels like an old silent movie. Through the kitchen, it’s more like the museum of a kitchen than a kitchen. But there’s no red velvet rope and you’re not a tourist and you’re just walking deeper into the past. Over the polished creaking floorboards, past the iron and chrome Majestic cook stove. Past an oak table with four wooden high-backed chairs. A tall wooden bookcase full of books. The big white dishes in the cupboards, the glasses in the hutch, rattle with every step.
I know I’m haunted, but by the time I’m in the hallway I am a firm believer in spirits. Fucking spirits are all around me, crowding in. They seem more curious than anything. They touch me the way you want to touch things sometimes because they are exotic. On the right of the hallway is Gary’s bedroom. A bed, neatly made, covered in an old quilt. The light through the window, the way it makes the lace curtains glow, proves that we’ve entered another reality. Ahead of us down the long narrow hallway is an old full-length mirror. The flashlight beaming into it shows us that we’re the ones who are the spirits. I look away as fast as I can. Hank bumps into me from behind and my throat makes a high gargle sound. Hank’s hand grabs my shoulder, doesn’t let go.
We walk through a door to the left and through a bedroom. On one side of us a midget stove, stove pipe straight as an arrow through the roof. A double bed in the corner covered in quilts, two big white pillows.
“Reuben and Sal will sleep in here,” Gary says. “You guys are in here.”
Gary opens heavy wine-red curtains and points the flashlight down three steep wooden steps, then steps down into the room.
“Watch your step,” he says, and points the light to our feet.
Hank’s still got his grip on my shoulder. I step down the steps, then Hank.
The room is a larger than the first bedroom and across the room it has a door, painted white, that Gary opens. It leads outside.
“If you got to pee in the night, stick close to the house,” Gary says. “There’s been a bear around town causing some trouble. Some wolves, too, but they’re as scared of you as you are of them.”
Gary’s high-pitched voice talking about bears and wolves makes me think he’s joking. But then when he closes the door, the way he pushes the door in with his shoulder, so the latch snaps tight, I know this ain’t no joke. Hank standing in the dark next to me, knows it too. His hand on my shoulder is a tight squeeze.
The flashlight goes to the double bed. A white chenille bedspread with white pillows at the head and a folded quilt at the foot of the bed.
“This is a great old bed,” Gary says, “from the 1860s. Quite some stories about that bed. Some say it used to be Peg-Leg Ida’s, but there’s no real documentation.”
“Peg-Leg Ida?” I say.
“She was a whore up here got her leg froze off,” he says.
Gary’s got the flashlight up close to the ironwork at the base of the bed.
“You see how the iron work links two circles in the middle?” Gary says.
“It’s what they call a wedding ring bed.”
Hank’s hand is off my shoulder soon as he hears wedding ring bed. Gary sets the kerosene lamp on the desk.
“Sleep tight,” Gary’s high voice. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite!”
Gary’s up the three steep steps. He closes the heavy wine-red velvet curtains behind him. Hank and I, taking off our clothes, make strange huge shadows onto the walls.
“Can I sleep on the outside?” Hank says.
“Sure,” I say.
I’m stripped down to my undershorts. The bed bounces and creaks and the sheets are cold against my legs and arms. I pull the covers up to my chin. Just as Hank blows out the kerosene lamp, I see the painting on the wall. It’s that painting of George Washington, his shoulders and his head, looks like he’s floating on a cloud. The room is so fucking dark. Hank stands in the dark for a moment. I guess that’s what he’s doing. It’s not long and his warm body settles in next to me. No doubt about it, we’re both freaked out being in the same bed. And we haven’t really talked since the sweat lodge. If it was up to Hank we’d probably lie there and not say a thing. But we have to say something. Something.
“Best reading so far,” I say.
“Unbelievable,” Hank says.
“Misty Rivers,” I say.
“Elmore County Library,” Hank says.
“The Victrola guy,” I say.
Hank is a big deep low snore. I’m worried about that snore at first. That I’ll have to touch him, get him to lie on his side or something.
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