by Noah Harris
Richard replied with a grunt as he undressed. After a pause, Tyrone spoke again.
“Look, man. I don’t want to be the cause of any trouble when you got a funeral and everything to go to. I could get a motel or—”
“No.”
“But it wouldn’t be no tr—”
“No.” Richard said a little more forcefully.
Richard lay on his bed. Tyrone put a hand on his shoulder, then reached up and stroked his cheek. Richard interlaced their fingers together. They held hands for a few minutes and Richard began to relax, but his father’s heavy tread in the hallway made Richard jerk his hand away.
It took a long time for Richard to get to sleep that night.
Cletus was what Richard called a “country cousin.” He lived in Galt, a place most Missourians hadn’t even heard of. While Chillicothe was a hick town it actually had stores, a school, and even a movie theater. Galt was nothing more than an intersection of two county roads with a grain silo, a couple of dozen houses, and a gas station.
He arrived with his wife Janis and their baby just after breakfast. Richard’s father had gotten up early and was out of the house by the time Richard and Tyrone had made it downstairs.
Even though Cletus was only 27, he owned his own farm, having inherited his dad’s land when his Uncle Dyson died two years ago. Cletus had been out of Missouri twice: once to visit a friend who moved south to Arkansas and once when his school went on a trip to Chicago. He had hated both Arkansas and Chicago.
“Missouri born, bred, and died.” That’s what his t-shirt said. Richard could almost have believed he designed it himself except for the fact that Cletus had never done anything creative in his life. The t-shirt could have just as easily said, “Hunting, fishing, drinking, and fucking. What else do you need?”
He banged through the screen door with a big hello for everyone and stomped into the dining room, his work boots leaving a trail of dirt.
“Richard, you slimy city slicker, about time I saw you again!” Cletus gave him a bear hug that almost cracked his spine. He let go quick. “Well I’ll be…”
Cletus stared at Tyrone, who was just getting up from his breakfast and wiping his hands.
“This is my friend from New York, Tyrone Jackson.”
“Um, hi,” Cletus said, blinking. After a moment, he remembered himself and shook Tyrone’s hand.
Janis came in behind him, wearing cutoff jeans and a low-slung t-shirt. She cradled their six-month old baby in her arms.
“How’s it hanging, little man?” Tyrone said, smiling at the kid and waving his fingers in front of his face. The baby reached out and wrapped his tiny fingers around Tyrone’s thumb.
“Hey, he likes you,” Janis said, and gave Tyrone the first real smile he’d received since he’d arrived in Missouri.
“My momma keeps bugging me to have kids,” Tyrone said. “This little guy must notice that.”
“You got a girlfriend?” Cletus asked.
“Yeah, um, a fiancée in fact.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you folks did that,” Cletus said.
“He’s from New York, not the Moon,” Richard said, although he knew Cletus hadn’t been talking about New Yorkers.
They all sat down around the breakfast table while Richard’s mom served coffee. After talking about his grandfather for a time, they switched to farming, comparing the crop yields between Galt and Chillicothe. Cletus’ farm was doing pretty well, but shipping costs had risen and were cutting into his profits.
“It’s the damn unions,” Cletus grumbled. “We should take all them Commies and ship them to Russia.”
“I’m all for the free market myself,” Tyrone said. “And when I say free, I mean everyone should be free to be what they are and do what they want.”
“Dang straight,” Cletus said, nodding in the black man’s direction. “Government’s always pushing us around.”
“When they say ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ they should let people do that in their own way,” Tyrone went on.
“Hell, yeah. Get the government out of our lives, that’s what I say,” Cletus agreed.
Richard shook his head in awe. If his cousin only knew what Tyrone really meant.
“You ever go fishing in New York?” Cletus asked Tyrone.
“You don’t want to eat what comes out of the Hudson,” Tyrone said with a grin.
“No, I guess not. But the Grand River just south of town has some great flathead and blue catfish. I brought my rod and I know Richard has a spare. Let’s go after lunch.”
Tyrone shrugged. “All right. I’ll try anything once.”
An hour later, they were sitting on the grassy bank of the Grand River. It’s muddy waters flowed sluggishly past them. Trees pressed in close on either bank and the buzz of insects sounded loud in their ears. Not a building or another person was in sight.
Richard brought along his spare fishing pole for Tyrone and the two Missourians showed him how to use it. Pretty soon he was sitting on the bank next to his boyfriend, both of them holding their poles as the lines trailed in the water. A flock of birds skimmed along the surface of the water before lifting up into the air and cawing as they flew away.
Richard smiled to himself. He had missed this.
The vision Anton Black had shown him came to his mind. He imagined what this would be like if a dozen gay men could frolic naked in this river with no fear of persecution. It was a strange variation of what he really did do back in high school. Everyone used to head to the swimming hole to go skinny dipping. You started around age twelve and did it until you graduated. When he’d first gone there the oldest kids said that their older brothers, then off fighting in Vietnam, went there when they were in high school. A stray comment from a friend’s dad told him the older generation had done it too and Richard wondered if his grandfather had gone skinny dipping back in the 1920s.
The sexual side of swimming naked had always been suppressed. No one ever talked about it, and if you got a boner you had better stay in the water until it went away, as Richard himself discovered when he wasn’t so careful. He got harassed about it for years.
That was the rule. You could enjoy a naked swim with your guy friends as long as you pretended there was nothing arousing about it. How stupid. He’d love to bring all his gay friends here and throw a big party, to feel the water on his naked flesh one more time.
Except that would be breaking another rule. Only teenagers went skinny dipping in Chillicothe, because supposedly they were innocent, even though teenaged boys were the horniest creatures on the planet.
Richard took a deep breath and tried to relax. He was better off living in New York. For all the city’s dirt and danger, at least you could act like yourself and not be forced to live the life of a hypocrite.
“Must be a far cry from the big city, huh?” Cletus asked Tyrone as he made a long cast that landed his sinker a third of the way across the river.
“It’s real nice,” Tyrone said. “What you do for fun around here?”
“Well, there ain’t no disco music or Broadway shows, but we have ourselves a good time. We got hay rides and hunting and drinking parties and, aw never mind, you’d probably be bored out of your skull.”
“Naw, this fishing thing is kinda relaxing.”
“I know something that will relax you even more,” Cletus said, pulling a fat joint out of his shirt pocket.
Tyrone’s eyes lit up. “Now you’re talking!”
“Missouri homegrown. I got a little patch in the middle of my north forty. Corn grows taller than weed so the law don’t know a thing about it.”
“Man after my own heart,” Tyrone said.
“You got any of that New York weed on you?” Cletus asked.
“You mean did a black man carry drugs across five state lines?”
“No, I guess not,” Cletus said with a resigned shrug. He lit up the joint, took a long drag, and handed it to Tyrone. After he let out a long, slow breath h
e said, “We’ll just stick with the Missouri original.”
“I’ll smoke you out when you come to the city, my man,” Tyrone said, taking a long drag himself.
“That’ll be the day!” Richard laughed. “Cletus thought the half hour drive down here was a round-the-world trip.”
“Who needs to go anywhere else when you have all this?” Cletus asked waving his arms about indicating the local scenery.
Tyrone passed the joint to Richard and he took a toke, breathing the smooth smoke into his lungs and luxuriating as the calmness spread through his body. He felt a brief spike of paranoia at thoughts of his family and the funeral tomorrow and the two football players who might come back any day now, and then he let it slide. Here he sat on a beautiful, quiet riverbank with his boyfriend and best cousin, and they didn’t have to be anywhere else until dinner.
Time stretched out, and the three men said little. They just watched the water flow by. Once a little motorboat purred up the river, an old man in overalls and a grimy John Deere baseball cap at the steering wheel. He stared at Tyrone with curiosity and surprise, but no hostility. Tyrone waved and the man waved back.
Richard smiled. If only it could always be this way.
“Whoa!” Tyrone shouted.
His fishing pole jerked this way and that. Tyrone leapt up, nearly dropped his pole, and fumbled with it before getting a good hold.
“Looks like you got a big one!” Cletus said.
“Now what?” Tyrone said.
“Reel her in.”
“How?”
“Like I showed you.”
“That was before you got me stoned!”
“Pull on it and wind up the line. No, wind the other way. Now pull again. Slow and steady. She ain’t going nowhere.”
“It’s gonna break!”
“Fishing rods are designed to bend that much. It’s fine,” Richard said. “Damn, you really do have a big one.”
Tyrone planted his feet and hauled the line in as the other two encouraged him. His eyes went wide and Richard looked at the water. A huge catfish splashed near the surface, fighting against Tyrone with all its might.
“Dang, pardner,” Tyrone said in a mock southern accent, “I got me a sea monster!”
Cletus waded out into the water as Tyrone finally pulled the fish above the surface. His rod was a perfect curve, Tyrone leaning back to keep the fish above the water. Cletus grabbed it and pulled it in.
“Wow, it’s got to be thirty pounds at least,” Cletus said as he threw it onto the bank.
“Felt like a hundred pulling on the end of that line,” Tyrone said, breathing hard.
“They’re real fighters in the water.”
Tyrone watched the fish flop around in the grass. “Wow, we’re gonna eat good tonight. Slap me five, my man.”
He turned to Cletus and held out his hand, palm up. Cletus slapped it and when Tyrone raised his hand he hesitated, then put his hand palm up. Tyrone slapped it and made a fist. Cletus blinked and did the same. Tyrone gave him a fist bump.
“So that’s how they shake hands in New York City?”
“That’s how the cool people do. Richard didn’t get it right for weeks.”
“I’ve always been more hip than Richard,” Cletus said with a serious tone.
They all burst out laughing.
When they got back for dinner a couple hours later, Richard’s little sister Traci burst out of the door and flew into his arms, a skinny blur of tanned limbs and blonde hair.
“Hey, I missed you!”
Richard swung her around. “I missed you too, kiddo!”
“I’m not a kid. I’ll be fourteen next month!”
“And I got you an early birthday present straight from New York City.”
“Cool! Oh, hi Cletus. Oh hey, you must be Tyrone.”
Tyrone grinned. “I’m not the birthday present.”
The joke did not go down well with anyone but Traci. The girl blushed and giggled. Cletus looked as uncomfortable as Richard felt, and his father standing in the doorway looked ready to fetch one of his guns.
Richard broke the silence. “Wait till you see your present!”
He and his little sister rushed upstairs. Tyrone followed at a bit of a distance, obviously not wanting to stay downstairs alone.
Richard led his sister into his bedroom and pulled a brown suede jacket out of his bag. It had long fringes down both sleeves and along the bottom hem.
“Oh, groovy!” Traci put it on and hugged her brother again. “It’s perfect, thanks!”
“Now you look like a real New Yorker,” Tyrone said from the doorway.
Traci turned to him and smiled. “Really?”
“Yeah, lots of cats wearing those these days.”
“When I’m eighteen I’m moving to New York too,” Traci whispered. “Don’t tell my folks though.”
Richard didn’t say anything. While it could be just an adolescent fantasy, Traci had a stubborn streak just like he did. She’d always complained that Chillicothe was boring. Would she really head out to the city?
If she did, she’d want to stay with him. Even if he tried to hide his lifestyle she’d find out about it sooner or later.
Be cool, man, that’s four years in the future. Who knows if she’ll even do it?
It may be four years in the future, but do you really think you can hide from your family forever?
Put it out of your mind. You got plenty of trouble to worry about in the next two days. Don’t worry about what might happen four years from now.
By the time they sat down to dinner, several of his aunts, uncles, and cousins had shown up. Most seemed uncomfortable around his boyfriend but made an effort to be polite. Richard’s father sat at the opposite end of the table from Tyrone.
“Traci,” he barked, “come sit by me!”
“I want to sit next to Richard and his friend,” she whined.
“Traci!”
“Oh, let her sit where she wants, Donald,” his mother said as she set down the roast in front of him. His father shook his head and started carving.
Traci stared at Tyrone.
“So how did Richard meet you?” she asked, the emphasis on “you” making it clear what she meant. Richard had never brought a black man home. He’d never had a black friend before. None of them had.
Tyrone laughed. “Oh, he didn’t tell you? Check this out. I was going in to see a movie and I saw him enter the theatre as well. I could have spotted him a mile away. Dressed just like he is now—big old cowboy hat, jeans, a belt buckle the size of Manhattan. Nobody dresses like him where I’m from.”
Traci giggled.
“So anyway I spot this country guy who looks like he just stepped out of a John Wayne movie. He sits down and takes his hat off so it doesn’t get in the way of the people behind him. Your brother is courteous like that. Your parents raised him right. So after the movie, I look around for him, because I’m just dying to lay eyes on this country boy in the big city one more time, and you know what? He was walking out of the theater without his hat! He’d left it on the seat. So I went back and found the hat then ran up and gave it to him.”
“Really?” Traci asked, looking wide eyed at Richard.
“He tossed it on my head like he was playing horseshoes,” Richard said.
“Horseshoes?” Tyrone asked, looking confused.
“The game,” Richard replied.
“Horseshoes is a game?”
Some people laughed, good naturedly or otherwise. His father just shook his head and silently shoveled food in his mouth.
“Never mind,” Richard said, trying to stop from snickering.
“We got horseshoes out back,” Traci said. “After dinner I’ll teach you.”
Her father glared at her. “After dinner you’ll help your mother wash the dishes, young lady.”
Richard caught a few nods of approval from his relations.
Through the main course, dessert, and coffee, tension seethed thro
ugh the room. Most of it emanated from his father, but everyone felt it. Tyrone tried to cover it up with jokes about how much of a country bumpkin Richard had been when he first made it to the city, but as those jokes fell flat, he stopped telling them. Cletus tried to help too, by bragging about the catfish Tyrone caught. Traci made things worse by pestering Tyrone with questions. Richard’s mother fell silent, and his father only glared. Janis fussed over the baby and didn’t say a word. The rest of his family talked among themselves.
Once the women had gone to the kitchen to clean up and the men sat in the living room drinking beer, Richard went out onto the porch to get some air. He had to get away from that mess inside. It wasn’t fair leaving Tyrone in there all by himself but Richard felt that if he didn’t get out of that atmosphere right that instant, he was going to start throwing plates, kicking holes in the walls or something else equally drastic.
He breathed a sigh of relief to see that Mr. Billings wasn’t on his porch. One of his other neighbors passed by and nodded a hello. Richard swore he saw anger in the woman’s eyes. She must have heard about Tyrone. He tried to think if anyone on their street had ever had a black person over for dinner and couldn’t recall a single time.
He shook his head and took another gulp from his beer.
The screen door banged and Richard turned. Cletus came out, holding a beer can. He set it on the railing, pulled out some chewing tobacco, and placed some between his cheek and gum.
He held some out to Richard.
“No thanks.”
Cletus shrugged. “I didn’t think so. Nice fishing today.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Richard said.
“Your buddy sure had beginner’s luck with that catfish!”
Richard smiled. “He’ll be telling that story for a long time to come.”
“He ain’t half bad.”
Richard didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
Cletus shook his head and chuckled, picking up the beer can and spitting some tobacco juice into it.
“You sure got everybody jawing by bringing him along.”
“Look, I don’t—”
Cletus held up a hand. “Save it, bud. He’s one of the good ones. Glad you’re making friends out there. You never did fit in here.”