by Sarah Black
It was kisses and his soft mouth—lips and tongue—that made Quanah Parker start to wiggle, and when David started sucking on that toe, lovely slow sucks, he had a perfect view of Quanah Parker getting turned on, stretching and moving his hips, his cock rising dark between his legs, touching his belly. He arched his back, the long line of his neck thrown back, his hand reaching for his cock, then stroking up and down to the rhythm of David’s mouth against his toe. David watched his breath come faster, chest rising and falling, a delicate flush of color rising on his neck, and he reached for David’s chest with his other foot, toes pressed hard against David’s heart. Quanah Parker started to come, moans from his throat in rhythm with his hand, and David’s mouth on his toe. David held Quanah Parker’s foot tightly against his chest so he could feel the excited beating of Quanah Parker’s heart all the way down in his beautiful brown toes.
* * *
David woke to the smell of bacon frying and coffee perking. Mr. Running Bear had brought a gigantic bottle of flaxseed oil capsules home from Boise and explained to David that he was going to save the beloved bacon and sausage in his diet by overwhelming the saturated fats with omega-3s. David learned quite a bit about DHA and EPA, and he tried a couple of the flaxseed capsules with his coffee. Mr. Running Bear patted him on the shoulder, teased him about the mountain of food in his cabin, and told him he was a good boy.
After a breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs with green chilies, David repaired to Quanah Parker’s bathroom. He put a couple of paper towels down on the edge of the sink so he wouldn’t plug up the drain, and he shaved himself for nearly half an hour before he thought he was fit for Sun Valley. His new alpaca socks were dry again after their dunking in the river and so were his fishing mocs. Quanah Parker set his boots next to the bed, but David told him he wanted to wear his mocs, and he shoved his elkskin bedroom mocs into Quanah Parker’s overnight bag. David could tell he was pleased. Something about wearing Quanah Parker’s moccasins made him feel like he was grounded. His feet gripped the earth in a different way. David thought he would never wear anything on his feet except moccasins again.
Quanah Parker looked over at him from behind the steering wheel of his big pickup truck. He had an empty stock trailer hooked up behind; he’d told David they had an alpaca to bring home on this trip. David felt himself color slightly at the approving look on Quanah Parker’s dark face. Quanah Parker was dressed in jeans, fancy moccasin boots, and a beaded buckskin shirt laced up the front with leather.
“Is this what your dad calls your cigar-store-Indian look? You look like something out of the movies.”
“It helps me sell moccasins for considerably more than imitation Indian moccasins,” Quanah Parker assured him. “They’re good mocs, though. Most of the mocs on the market are just cheap slippers. Paired with alpaca socks, I can practically guarantee you happy feet. People always want to take a picture of me in buckskins,” he continued. “Then, feeling some sort of residual white guilt, they come in and drop a wad on mocs and socks. Hey! Speaking of white guilt, why don’t you sell some copies of Sand Creek in the store?”
“That would be great,” David said. White guilt? “I thought I would check out the local bookstores and see if they had copies or wanted to arrange a signing or something.”
Quanah Parker studied him with a critical eye. “Let’s get that haircut first,” he said. “And I’ll go with you down to the bookstore. I know the guy who runs it.”
“Is he an old boyfriend?” David wondered if this would make him more or less likely to help.
“No. But we small business owners stick together. Don’t be looking for old boyfriends under every rock. I’ve spent most of the last few years working, David. Just like you.” Quanah Parker was in a very good mood this morning, and David surmised it was because he loved the new toe haiku written in his honor and acted out with passion. “We’re shopping and getting the haircut in Ketchum. Good-quality stuff there, but prices are better than Sun Valley. I’ve got a little studio in Ketchum for when Dad or I have to stay overnight.”
Quanah Parker pulled into the parking lot of a hair shop in the bottom of an old Victorian mansion. Inside, the crystal chandeliers and plush burgundy crushed-velvet sofas were a perfect foil for the guy who came sweeping out to greet them. He hugged Quanah Parker longer than was necessary and rubbed his hands over quite a bit of soft buckskin-clad back. He looked like Adam Lambert at forty—black steampunk clothes, fat diamond earrings—and David felt a touch of alarm that this gorgeous man was about to somehow transform him into someone fashionable. He was fussed into a chair that looked like an old dentist’s chair re-covered in red leather, and the man pumped him up slowly with a foot lift, staring at him with laughing eyes.
“Who is he?” the man asked, stroking David’s cheek. “You need a facial, baby. Did you shave with a pocketknife?”
“He’s a poet,” Quanah Parker said. “And my best friend when we were kids.”
“You look good in love,” the man commented, and Quanah Parker ignored him.
“I’m Damien,” he said, bending over and staring into David’s face. “Tell me what it was like being Quanah Parker’s best friend when you were kids.” He was beautiful up close, with perfectly applied eyeliner and pale pink lip gloss. David thought his face was kind, underneath all the makeup.
“He would stalk me through the woods and capture me,” David said. “Sometimes he would let me help him put on his war paint.”
“My God.” Damien breathed. “Quanah Parker, you’ve brought your soul mate. How can I thank you?”
“Do something about that rough beard, and cut his hair, I guess.” Quanah Parker put a big hand on the man’s shoulder. “You want to party tonight? I thought I’d take my boy out.”
“Sure,” Damien said, and David was left to wonder about this secret gay code: You want to party? He hoped Quanah Parker had not just asked this guy with blue eyes and pink lips if he would give him a blowjob. David suspected Damien was game and was in fact prepared to drop to his knees right then.
Damien was back to studying his face. “A poet. A poet. We need to keep these brown curls, then. A little longer than I would usually recommend, but we don’t have enough tumbled brown curls in the world. And what a face you have, so tender, and those wide brown eyes. No wonder Quanah Parker loves you.”
David didn’t know what to say and looked to Quanah Parker to rescue him, but he had been abandoned. Quanah Parker was leaning back on one of the sofas, reading a magazine, and Damien whipped the chair around and tilted David back.
“Leave everything to me. Close your eyes, young poet.” And Damien dropped sweet-smelling hot towels over his face.
An hour later, David gazed up into Damien’s eyes again. Quanah Parker had a lazy, satisfied smile on his face, like this was what he had been expecting, and David looked up at himself in the mirror. He looked just like himself, only…shinier. Sort of a healthy glow. His hair was definitely bouncier. He looked at Quanah Parker. “Is this okay?”
Quanah Parker nodded. Damien leaned over, and David was reminded again of the kindness in his eyes. “I am very happy to meet you, David,” he said and dropped a soft kiss onto David’s mouth. “A brown bomber, Quanah Parker, if you’re going to shop for clothes. The color of his eyes.”
“Yeah, we’re going to Jo Jo’s place. Thanks, Damien.”
“You’re very welcome, my friend.” He accepted a stack of bills from Quanah Parker’s hand. “I’ll see you two tonight.”
“What are we doing tonight?” They were back in the truck, and David turned the rearview mirror around to look at his hair. Quanah Parker moved it back so he could see.
“There’s a club I know up here. Friendly sort of place.”
“Thanks for the haircut and everything.”
“I’ve known Damien a long time. He’s a good guy.”
“Yeah, I liked him too. What’s Jo Jo’s? It isn’t too expensive, is it? I don’t want you to buy my clothes.”<
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“I’ll get you a couple of things,” Quanah Parker said, and it seemed that the subject was closed for discussion.
A couple of things turned out to be an indigo blue silk shirt, a brown leather bomber jacket with fleece inside, and a chunky fisherman’s turtleneck sweater. David checked the label in the truck and nearly fainted when he read 100% cashmere. Quanah Parker turned to him and pressed David’s hand to his mouth. “Thanks for indulging me,” he said. “That was fun.” And there was nothing David could say to that. The cashmere sweater was the softest and warmest thing he had ever held in his arms, other than Quanah Parker, and he pulled it on over his T-shirt from Opium’s Literary Death Match. He had been the clear winner of the LDM, and it felt good to have that remembered triumph next to his skin.
David spent the drive up to Sun Valley thinking about his planned book of poetry. He did enjoy about five minutes of uninterrupted bliss when Quanah Parker put his big hand down on David’s thigh in a way that was both possessive and tender. Haiku leapt from David’s tongue with happiness, and Quanah Parker was grinning through the windshield by the time David settled back down to think. His original plan to write about his year in Stanley was being superseded by the image from the river—three rocks, a path from himself to Quanah Parker. He wondered again about the second rock. Would it be something he could work toward, or would he just have to be prepared, and the test would swoop down on him unexpectedly, and he would either fail or move on to the third rock?
Maybe it would be some combination of both. He still loved the titles he had picked out, though. Sawtooth was such a beautiful word for a mountain range, so fierce. But he pulled out his memo book and pen and made a note of a couple of other possibilities—Three Rocks in the Salmon River. No, too obvious. How about something simple that still had the meaning he was looking for? A Year in Stanley. Would anyone recognize Stanley? He had chosen Sand Creek for the title of the first book because it was not one of the better-known massacres. A Year in the Sawtooths. No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t a mountain man, as Quanah Parker had reminded him. No need to pretend. He was…he was just himself. A poet. Trying to live in Stanley for a year without catastrophe. Okay, A Year in Stanley.
How would Quanah Parker feel if he wrote about him? If he wrote truthfully about what was happening between them?
“Would you be uncomfortable if I wrote poetry about us? And it was published?”
Quanah Parker thought about this for a long moment, rubbing his chin. “No, I would not be uncomfortable.”
“Thanks.” Okay, so he could write about his year in Stanley using the framework of the three rocks. He had never considered writing erotic poetry before, mainly because what he knew about erotic love and the joys of another man’s body were, up until very recently, small, gray, damp ideas, not the wild, blushing, rose-brown heat of making love to Quanah Parker’s toes. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and adjusted the seat belt to ride looser across his lap. Quanah Parker, Quanah Parker—what wonderful sounds and rhythms in his name. David could say his name all day. There had never been a more perfect name for the lover of a poet.
Quanah Parker pulled his truck around to the back of an old brick building in downtown Sun Valley. He was right—his store had a perfect location. Everyone in town would walk right by the doors. The bricks looked soft, an old rose color, and the wooden door and window trim were painted dark green. The windows were full of socks in every color.
The young woman behind the counter was lovely, native, with a chunky turquoise necklace against her brown throat. She smiled at Quanah Parker and turned back to the woman at the counter. “I think your moccasins just walked through the door!”
Quanah Parker went into cigar-store-Indian mode. In two minutes he had the customer sitting in a comfortable chair and was kneeling in front of her and slipping the moccasins on over her feet. Ravens on the toes, white buckskin. Quanah Parker was giving the ball of her foot a little massage. David put the rest of the boxes and the bag of socks on the counter and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m David.”
The woman behind the counter reached for his hand. “Hi, David. I’m Crystal Swan.”
“What a lovely name.”
“I picked it out in college. Up until then I was Ethel.” They grinned at each other, and then she took the socks out of the bag and started sorting them.
“Where’s the closest coffee shop, Crystal?”
“Two doors down.”
“Will you tell him that’s where I am?”
“Sure.” She studied his sweater. “That’s gorgeous. Is that cashmere?”
David felt his face turn pink, nodded, and slipped out the door. He’d better leave Quanah Parker alone to work. He must have spent five hundred bucks already today. Or more. The cashmere was so wonderfully soft. It would be hard to go back to being a poor poet after wearing cashmere.
In the virtual classroom, a couple of conversations had gotten out of hand. Things had deteriorated into snide comments about the difference between being published in e-zines and on paper, and he was sorry to see that by far most of the topics of conversation between the poets in the studio class were about publishing, not writing. He read through their submissions, then wrote a general ass kicking to the group. “None of you have written anything worth being published. Is this your best work? You get published, and someone may read that poem and never read another poem of yours ever. That may be the only chance you get with that reader, to share your mind and your ideas. You need to stop thinking about what poetry can do for you and start thinking about what you owe poetry. Your best. Every time. Did anybody even do the assigned readings?”
David felt a little guilty. He couldn’t just swoop in like a turkey vulture once a week and pick over their wasted bones. They needed a strong poetic voice to lead them out of the wilderness of American obsession with money and fame and into the cool blue waters of art. He spent a couple of hours reviewing poems, offering private words of encouragement to sweeten the general ass chewing. The Intro to American Poetry class was even worse. Two students submitted identical essays. Another spent his whole essay finding marks of alcoholism in each poem he read. One asked if he could do his essay on Byron, seemingly forgetting that Byron was not American. How could so many spelling errors exist in essays written in Word? They clearly weren’t smart enough to turn off spell-check. Grammar, spelling, sentence structure, logical theme development—the nation was illiterate! These were college students! David refrained from tearing at his curls, since Quanah Parker had just paid for him to have a new haircut. By six o’clock, when Quanah Parker came to fetch him, he felt like he’d spent the day being beaten by sticks.
“We’ve got twenty minutes for supper,” Quanah Parker said. “I’m keeping the shop open till eight. Then we’re going dancing. How about a sandwich from Pita Pocket?”
“Sounds good,” David said. “I think I’ll treat you. You want a bag of Sun Chips with your pocket, big spender?”
Quanah Parker laughed and shook his head. “Get me a gyro with everything, okay? And a bottle of water. I need to get back to the shop and let Crystal go home.”
Chapter Nine
Walking back to the store with a couple of gyros, David thought that spending all day talking about poetry and teaching poetry and kicking the butts of budding poets was a guaranteed way to drive the poetry totally out of a person’s mind. It was solitude and peace that allowed the mind to slip its gears a bit, run off on different rails. He didn’t think it was going to work. He didn’t like the college students. They were lazy and self-absorbed and obsessed with money. He needed to find a different way. And he couldn’t live in Quanah Parker’s lap making socks. That was a recipe for disaster. They would take each other for granted, start becoming annoyed and irritable, and he would not be happy if he wasn’t an equal, supportive member of the partnership. Okay, so what to do? He pushed open the door of the shop and looked up, his heart freezing in his chest.
Quanah Parker was l
eaning against his front counter, and a man was standing very close to him, too close to be buying socks. While David watched, the man reached for Quanah Parker’s hair, pushed a long black strand of it back over his shoulder. Surely the man knew David was standing there. It was a gesture of possession, and David didn’t like it. Neither did Quanah Parker.
He stepped away and took one of the bags out of David’s hands. “David, this is an old friend of mine, Colton Clay. Colton, David Miller.”
He was beautiful, with huge blue eyes and chestnut hair tumbling to his shoulders and a sweeping mustache. He was a cowboy, a modern-day Buffalo Bill, a real mountain man. David thought he looked familiar in that vague way of people you had seen on TV. Doing commercials. After his morning trip to Jo Jos, David also noticed the sheepskin coat and the hand-tooled Tony Lama boots. Beautiful and rich, and he was confident enough in Quanah Parker to touch his hair in public, in his place of business. David thought back to what Quanah Parker had told him. Something about a man he had loved, but who didn’t want to live his life. This was him. David felt like his tongue was half frozen. He held out the plastic bag of food. “Would you like my gyro?”
The man looked surprised and turned to Quanah Parker. “He’s a vegetarian,” Quanah Parker said but didn’t offer to run out and fetch some carrot sticks.
“You found you a little mountain man, Quanah Parker? Nice. Up from Boise for the weekend to play in the woods?” He was grinning like he’d made a joke, but David could hear the sneer behind his words. Quanah Parker put a restraining hand on his arm.
“David is a poet,” he said.
“Assistant professor at Boise State,” David said. “On temporary—” Quanah Parker gave him a little pinch, and David wondered, not for the first time, what made his tongue run like a river. “Little mountain man”? What a prick.