His tongue explored Tory’s neck, ears, nose, mouth. Tory bit on Franklin’s nipples and roved his tongue over his chest, then licked down to his navel. Franklin writhed, thrusting his belly upward. Defeated by desire, he rolled Tory onto his stomach, onto his back, onto his side, repeating his movements over and over, tossing him about as if he were an extension of Franklin’s body, a new arm sprouting from his stump.
Tory whispered words in Franklin’s ears that sent him into overflowing passion. He was telling him what he wanted. Telling him what he needed. Flipping him onto his back, Franklin spread Tory’s legs with his thighs and pushed down into him; Tory pulled him closer. His stump, muscled with two decades of use, balanced him against his left arm while he went wild with Tory’s submission. Invincibility and power propelled Franklin. Tory’s moans and movements exclaimed that he wanted more. He pulled Franklin in tighter, demanding that Franklin follow through.
The earth rocked with the rhythm of their bodies. Pounding and thrusting, reaching and pulling. Tory chewed on Franklin’s horseshoe mustache; Franklin met his bites with his tongue. Ecstatic shivers coursed through his blood. Tory’s feet traced the length of Franklin’s legs. Franklin wrapped Tory with his arm, pushing onto him with his weight. The release of anger, tension, apprehension, fear, and hunger carried him into another consciousness.
They ended with a final biting spasm, Franklin’s back arched in a moment frozen in forever.
He collapsed on top of him. They remained motionless. Residual vibrations seemed to pitch the feather bed. Exhausted and drained, Franklin rested his head on Tory’s chest. He had never needed release so badly. But it was more than the stress of imprisonment and the trial. Burning desire for Tory sleeping mere steps from his bed had controlled his movements. Tory felt good in his one arm, under him, beside him, against him. Tory’s legs wrapped tight around his hips long after they had emptied themselves.
They did not speak. Heavy breathing lingered. Restless sleep overtook them. They dozed, twisting and sighing, pawing for each other in their dreams. During the night, feeling each other’s heated bodies near, they made love three, four more times, sleepily, dreamlike. Their open mouths tracing along their necks and ears. Their hands grabbing in the fog of their fatigue, yet propelled by a profound hunger. Franklin taking Tory more and more, deeper and deeper.
Finally, Franklin lay depleted. With the expanding morning light, he could see Tory more clearly in the blue glow as it descended over them like a solicitous mother pulling back the blanket of darkness. Tory had fallen into a full sleep. Wavy blond hair splashed over the pillow. Soft curls were matted to his moist forehead. His chest rose with each breath, still labored from their lovemaking.
Tory’s body had grown harder since Franklin had first seen him in the buff while bathing in the creek. Two weeks of rugged subsistence work had tightened his muscles. Franklin had felt it beneath his initial resistance. He gazed at the smooth lines, the subtle hairless and taut flesh that crested over mounds of muscle and bone.
He thought back to their lovemaking. He had been greedy, drunk for Tory. And during their second, third time making love, when he’d thought he wouldn’t survive, Tory had done something Franklin had never imagined a man would do for another, not even a renter. Tory had taken Franklin into his mouth. Completely and willingly. The sensation of his hot, moist tongue was like a million expressions of love, caring, desire. The ultimate submission. He grew aroused again.
Yet he left Tory undisturbed. He was in deep slumber, Franklin could tell. His eyes were closed like a porcelain doll’s, twitching as if in rapturous dreams. And so Franklin also lay beside him as if in a dream.
A mellow pink flush seeped from the window as twilight acquiesced to dawn. He could see the mountains awash in a salmon-colored glow. Groggy, he draped his arm over Tory’s pelvis and rested his head on his chest, listening to his drumming heartbeat, like the galloping of an approaching horse.
Franklin failed to realize it before it was too late, but blending with Tory’s heartbeat was the galloping of an approaching horse. He struggled to lift his heavy head to see who had come onto the homestead. But it was too late. To his astonishment, Bilodeaux stood staring down at him and Tory as they lay naked on the feather bed. Franklin froze in disbelief. Bilodeaux, his sidearm in hand, looked on unblinkingly. The smell of whiskey swept down from his flaring nostrils. Amid the emergence of a subtle sneer, he turned away, sans words, before Franklin could react. The sound of his stallion’s hooves faded.
Chapter 23
WHY had Bilodeaux shown up at Moonlight Gulch at the crack of dawn? What had he wanted? Had he come for some final attack after failing to accomplish his scheme to frame Franklin for Johnson’s murder? What would he do now that he’d seen him and Tory in bed together, their naked, tangled bodies plainly depleted after a night of voracious lovemaking?
These were the thoughts that had churned inside Franklin’s mind since he’d stirred to find Bilodeaux staring down at him and Tory in bed four mornings ago. Few answers surfaced. He needed a confidant. But how much could he reveal to his best friend, Wicasha? They were close, but both men had kept their personal lives mostly to themselves. Each appreciated the other’s lack of curiosity. Franklin had not even told Wicasha about the silly advertisement he’d placed in Matrimonial News what seemed like ages ago.
He needed to feel Wicasha out about what Bilodeaux might do, while giving away as little as possible about him and Tory’s relationship. The impulse to confide in Wicasha proved too overpowering to ignore.
He and Wicasha were building a barbwire fence that Franklin had ordered from Chicago back in July, which he’d stored in the barn, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. After Bilodeaux’s latest antics trying to implicate him for murder (and especially since his barging in on him and Tory), Franklin realized he had no choice but to erect it. They had started two days ago and were on the final segment. He had no idea how effective the fence would be, but he had to do something. The October sun was hot, and both men were building a healthy sweat.
Wiping his forehead under the brim of his hat with the back of his hand, Franklin said, “What do you think Bilodeaux might have next up his sleeve, Wicasha?”
He had phrased the question simply and directly. Wicasha, Franklin knew, appreciated such manner of phrase. Speaking equally straightforwardly, he said, “He has something planned, there’s no doubt. You can expect him to act ruthlessly. He’s desperate. Like a fox caught in a trap, he’s predictable only in that you can expect him to lash out in some unpredictable way.”
“Have you any thoughts of what that might be?”
Wicasha held a wooden post in place while Franklin, with his one arm, skillfully hammered it into the hole they had dug in the black soil. Both men had to spread their legs wide to balance themselves against the slope of earth. Franklin’s mule, Carlotta, snorted and swatted black flies with her tail while she waited to pull the cart loaded with the posts and barbwire. Wicasha delayed answering until Franklin finished hammering.
“He killed a man, Frank,” he said. “He shot him between the eyes in cold blood for no reason other than to frame you for it and get the untapped gold on your land. If I know mankind well enough, his violence will only get dirtier, much like how it works with war.”
They moved to the next foot-deep hole, one of about eighty they had already dug around the perimeter of the property. Carlotta followed with the cart, aware of her responsibility after already spending two days under the hot autumn sun. Most of the inserted posts had barbwire attached, and they had installed a small gate for Wicasha to come and go between his camp and the homestead and another larger one across the Spiketrout trail. They usually hammered five or six of the posts in place before backtracking and attaching the barbwire.
Franklin squinted into the sun, took a deep breath, and inspected a cut from the barbwire where his long-sleeved shirt and canvas glove had failed to protect his skin. “That worries me,” he said, disregar
ding the itchy abrasion on his wrist and reaching for a post. “I wonder in this war that he’s chosen to wage against me just which one of us will show the most violence.”
“Man can be pushed to defend himself to great lengths,” Wicasha said as he aided Franklin in securing the post.
They toiled in silence, Franklin ruminating on Wicasha’s blatant warning. Carlotta nickered as she followed the men. Eventually, they came to an even part of earth where, nine years before, Franklin had cultivated the soil for his field. He had chosen the site near a dense spruce grove that abutted the granite rock face, wanting to take advantage of the winds that came off the higher elevations. Whenever toiling in the field long hours, he always appreciated the invigorating breeze on his weary limbs, especially on harvest moon nights.
Franklin had to tread carefully with Wicasha. He did not wish to reveal the new development in his and Tory’s relationship. Yet he worried what ammunition Bilodeaux might unleash now that he’d discovered him and Tory in bed. “Do you think if Bilodeaux knew something about me… a secret that he thought might cause me trouble, that he’d use it against me?”
Franklin noticed only a fleeting flicker of curiosity flash in Wicasha’s black eyes when he lifted his head toward the cooling breeze off the rock face. Turning back to his work, Wicasha said, “He would use anything he could. He’s getting more desperate. To him, all is fair in war. The French have a saying: Le vainqueur rafle la mise.”
“What does that mean?”
“To the victor go the spoils.”
Franklin considered this. Wicasha was right. Bilodeaux had no scruples. Anything was just to a nefarious bandit like Bilodeaux if he thought it would carry him closer to his aims.
Should he warn Wicasha of the calamity that might come? He could risk losing the Lakota as a faithful friend if he confessed to him what even Bilodeaux now knew. At the moment, revealing his relationship with Tory seemed unwise. Best to keep the truth cached away, like his cured bacon and root vegetables in the storage barn.
A few posts later, with thoughts of Bilodeaux still banging inside his head, Franklin chose to ask Wicasha a question that had stewed in his mind for almost as long as he’d known him. Why he thought to ask at that precise moment, while they strapped wire to a series of wooden posts, when so many other worries splintered his brain, he was uncertain. Perhaps he was digging for something. The barbwire signified a shutting out of the world, more than even Franklin had wanted. A subconscious balance would be to open up to one another. Since Franklin was unprepared to reveal the truth about him and Tory, perhaps the alternative was to pry buried truths out of Wicasha.
“Wicasha,” he said, “why did you go against your own people and fight alongside the cavalry during the Indian wars?”
Wicasha stretched to his full five-ten frame. After a quick reprieve, he bent back to aiding Franklin. “It’s a long complicated story,” he said. “Not sure how or where to begin.”
“You don’t got to tell me,” Franklin said. “I guess the question just slipped out. It’s none of my business.”
“I figured you’d been wondering all these years. You should probably know. We’re good friends.” He had stated the last three words more like a question. Franklin jumped in to confirm.
“Yes.” He nodded while wiping sweat from his forehead. “Yes, of course, Wicasha. We are the best of friends.”
Wicasha rested his sweaty forearms atop a post that Franklin had just secured with soil. “Then I will tell you the story.”
Franklin took a respite from his toil and gazed at his friend with expectation. Carlotta seemed to sense a break had come, and she began nibbling on the grass that grew in a swath next to the field, her ears folded back.
“Have you ever heard of a winkte?” Wicasha asked him.
Franklin eyed Wicasha. “No. I haven’t.”
Wicasha seemed to chew on his words before speaking, as if he wanted to express himself precisely without pretense, as was the Lakota custom. He motioned for them to continue working. Franklin followed along.
“A winkte is a Lakota word that means ‘third sex’,” Wicasha said as they went about placing more posts. “A man who is a third sex is said to be attracted to other men in a way that most men are attracted to women.”
Franklin stiffened. Had Wicasha read his mind? He tried to steady his arm so that Wicasha would not think he was so utterly shocked he would hold back from telling him more. Yet the astonishment on Franklin’s face at what Wicasha might be alluding to could not be lost to the sharp Lakota.
Wicasha chuckled. “Yes, Frank. I’m a winkte,” he said. “I’m attracted to my own sex.” He hesitated, as if waiting for Franklin to speak, gauging his face. When Franklin remained mute, he looked away and continued. “I’ve known I was a winkte since I was a little boy, no taller than a pine marten standing on hind legs. In my band, a winkte was not frowned upon as the white man sometimes does. There were those Sioux who laughed, sneered, even taunted, but mostly it was tolerated. It was thought to have a purpose, a part of the balance of nature. And so, when I was sixteen, I was brought before our chief, and he decided to make me part of his large group of wives. That is just how things are with my people. I had no choice but to obey.”
Franklin worked in a trance. He brought the face of the sledgehammer against the post, but he no longer felt the vibration travel through his arm and across his shoulders and down his back. The sensation of Wicasha’s words was all that shook him.
“Do you want me to go on, Frank?” Wicasha asked.
“Yes.” Franklin swallowed. “Yes, please. Go on.”
Wicasha continued his story with only minor pauses between for their work. “I did not like living as someone’s concubine. The chief ruled the village. We obeyed his orders. The chief had asked for me, and I had to stay with him. For the next two years, I lived as his companion. Then I began to grow. I was a late bloomer, you might say, like the lupine that waits to blossom until fall, when all the other flowers have mostly faded. I grew tall, and my muscles expanded. I thought then that the chief would ask me to leave his harem since I had become larger than even him. I was wrong. He actually began to ask for me to sleep with him inside his lodge more often. His other wives grew to dislike me. They were jealous.”
They had almost reached one of the many narrow trails that wound toward the creek. Franklin was near sapped of strength listening to Wicasha. He could hardly believe his ears. Wicasha was—what had he called it?—a winkte. A man who liked other men in the same way most men liked women.
Rumors that the High Plains Indian chiefs took on spouses of both sexes had reached his ears in the past, but never had he heard it straight from a tribe member’s own mouth. Until now. It explained why Wicasha kept mostly to himself. And why he’d never frequented the Gold Dust Inn, where Madame Lafourchette took customers of any race or creed, as long as they carried plenty of greenbacks or gold dust. Negros, Indians, Chinamen, white men—they all frequented the whores. Even Franklin had, a handful of times. But never Wicasha.
Did Franklin have needs like Wicasha? Was it possible that he might be a winkte too, at least in part? For the past several nights, he had made love to another man, drunk only from passion, unlike that time with the renter in Richmond, when whiskey had taken him by the hand. He hardly identified with Wicasha’s history of his attraction to the same sex. Franklin had only felt such urges a handful of times, and only twice—that was, only with two men—had he acted upon them—the renter when he was sixteen and Tory Pilkvist, whom he had made love to at least a dozen times since their first time together four days ago.
Tory was different from the Richmond renter, of course. Franklin had already admitted that to himself. Uncertainty still poked around in his mind. Had desperation for affection—for love—forced him to turn to the closest human being in his life at that moment? Transforming himself into something he wasn’t? Had Tory evolved into a mere stress reliever from another war, the war waged between him and H
enri Bilodeaux?
Were his feelings for Tory the same as the Lakota chief’s were for the young Wicasha?
Carlotta bellowed. They left her grazing by the trailhead while they carried armfuls of posts into the grove and filled the holes they had dug leading to the creek’s bank. This time, Wicasha took the sledgehammer while Franklin held the posts in place with his hand and feet. Between posts, Wicasha continued with his riveting story.
“As I grew with strength and confidence,” Wicasha said, “I began to wander more on my own. I would travel for days, taking old trails into Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, which the Sioux had taken from the Crow many generations before. I would follow the ravens and see what they wanted to show me. Sometimes I would find them guiding me eastward to the Badlands, where I’d fast for several days and listen to the spirits tell me my future. I valued my time alone. The chief knew about my wanderings, and he’d said he understood. Yet he had cautioned me to remain nearby the village. Winkte were given more liberty than the women of the village; some were even honored as shamans. We are men, after all. Not really a ‘third sex’, as the Sioux like to call us. Mostly, it’s just a term to explain the aberration.
“It was during one of my wanderings west of our village, north of what is now Spiketrout, many years before the white man had discovered gold in the Hills, when I ran into a fellow roving spirit. He was a Crow, about my age. We spied each other over the next few weeks but kept our distances. Our bands were instinctive enemies, yet I sensed we did not fear each other. Both of us pretended like we hadn’t seen each other. After a while, it was as if we were putting on a show for the other to see. I would do something to demonstrate my strength, and he would, in turn, do something to show his skills in skinning or trapping. I reckoned we were observing each other to see if we were friend or foe, despite our peoples’ heritage of warfare.
“Eventually, he was bold enough to approach me while I skinned the fox I had been tracking. I actually skinned it much like I had observed him doing on previous days. He cut along the hind legs and up into the rectum, causing less blood spill, something I had never seen in my village. For many hours we found ourselves talking in French, and sometimes in English, the only two languages we had in common. Often we used sign language to communicate when we stumbled over our words. The sky grew dark, so we decided it best to stay put until daybreak. We lay down on the earth by the boulders that had absorbed the day’s sun to provide us warmth. We kept a good distance from each other. But during the night, we rolled closer and closer. Soon, we were within arm’s reach. After many sleepless hours, we proved what we both must have suspected during our many days of scouting out each other. We were winkte.”
On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch Page 22