by Sarah Black
“And eat them.” He giggled again, his eyes dancing.
“Will you get undressed, Jesse? I haven’t seen you.”
I let him get up, and he looked at me, his face so tender I felt the weight of it crushing something in my chest. He lifted his shirt over his head, slid out of his jeans, and tugged his boxers off. He stood next to me, let me look at him. He was almost delicate, his chest ivory, nipples a delicate rose pink. He stood there while I looked at him, and a flush of color, wild rose, spread across his chest and up his neck. The hair on his belly, in a faint line down into his groin, was delicate and gold. I reached for him, lifted the heavy, full cock. It was rose pink, the same color as the flush on his chest. “What do you want me to do? How do you want me? Anything, baby.”
He climbed back into my arms, and we both shivered at the sensation, skin sliding against skin in the cool morning air, the rough glide of hair, and then our cocks were nestled together. “Hey, that’s what I’m supposed to say. Anything, baby.”
I wrapped my legs around him again, stroked the warm ivory skin of his back. I looked so dark with him in my arms.
He reached up, put both hands against my face, looked down into my eyes. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
I felt the breath catch in my throat, and I stared up at him. “Is this part of how you’re going to get me to come first, just by kissing me?”
He kissed me very delicately, just on the corner of my mouth. “Well, that’s something you’re going to have to figure out, now isn’t it?”
I sighed, lay back down. “I thought so.” He giggled again, kissed the other corner of my mouth, sucked my bottom lip into his mouth and nibbled on it, just a bit. “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Navajo boy.”
He had a good singing voice, and he kissed me in between lines, stared down into my eyes as he swore undying love, killed a wild cowboy who was vying for my attention, a cowboy wild as the West Texas wind, and ended with a bullet in his chest, dying for love, dying in my arms.
He rested his head on my chest, then he reached over the side of the couch, pulled something from the pocket of his jeans. In one hand he had a blue condom. In the other, a small plastic pouch of lubricant. I took the lube, looked at the label. Tequila flavored. Good God.
I looked at him for a long moment, seeing just a bit of shy in his eyes, just a bit of a question. Then I unwrapped my arms and legs, took the condom. This part I knew how to do. “Get on your knees, cowboy.”
He scrambled up, trembling, and he watched me roll the condom up my cock. I tore open the plastic on the lube, squirted it out on my fingers. Then I waited for him. His face was flushed, that wild rose color in his cheeks, and he was breathing hard, one hand rubbing his chest. He turned around, gave me his back, then climbed up on the couch.
I reached for his waist, pulled him to the edge. He looked back over his shoulder, and my heart did that slow roll again, turning over in my chest. The need in his face, wanton and shy at the same time, those wild blue eyes—the look of him burned through my mind. I slid my fingers against his anus. I couldn’t look at him again. I seated my cock, waited for him to lean back against me. He moaned, rocked a little, and I felt the head slip in. Jesse dropped his head, and I could see the bones of his back, the delicate bones of his neck. You’re mine, I thought, shoving roughly inside. This was what he wanted. Anything you want, Jesse. I’ll fuck you as hard as you want. Because what you need is mine to give.
I didn’t say it out loud. We were speaking without words, our needs travelling along our nerves, along our blood vessels, our skin damp and hungry. I shoved inside, shoved again until I was buried in his body up to the balls. I leaned over, slid my fingers along his spine until I could touch the damp hot skin at the back of his neck. He turned his head, slipped one of my fingers in the corner of his mouth, and dark passion crawled up out of my belly, started to wrap around my throat, but I stomped it down hard. This was for Jesse. I rocked him hard until he reached between his legs, stroked his cock once, twice, then he was coming, a groaning, thumping lusty cry that went straight to my balls, nearly tore them loose when I exploded inside of him.
He was shaking so hard I reached out, still deep inside him, held him against my chest, my mouth making its slow way along his shoulder. “Shhhh, hush, baby. Everything’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re right here in my arms, all safe and warm, and I’ll never let you go, I promise, Jesse. I promise.”
He turned his head, and his mouth found mine. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with those blue eyes, all warm and sleepy, studied me like he’d never seen me before. His lips curved into a smile. Then he reached over and kissed me, a sweet little sigh against my mouth, and I felt myself slip out of him.
JESSE took his clothes and went over to his side of the studio, and I went into the house and took a shower. When I was drying off, I caught sight of my ass in the mirror. The magic marker had faded, but I could still read it: I belong to Jesse, with a little heart drawn around the hickey. I was grinning when I got dressed and joined The Original out on the front porch. We leaned back, drinking coffee, and when Uncle George drove up, climbed out of his pickup truck, and joined us on the porch, it was just three old devil dogs, drinking coffee and contemplating the morning. The silence was a blessing.
Jesse came out of the studio, took some photographs of us sitting on the porch, then went back into the house. After a few minutes I heard some banging of pots coming from the kitchen. I stood up and stretched. “How about chili for lunch?”
The Original nodded.
“Sounds good,” said Uncle George. It was the first thing he’d said since he climbed out of his truck.
I went into the kitchen, put my coffee cup in the sink. Jesse had his head in the freezer. “Get some hamburger out. I’m gonna make chili.”
He looked at me then, a smile deep in his eyes, mouth curving sweetly, and I reached for him, pushed him against the kitchen wall, took a bite out of his mouth. His hands were gentle on my chest.
Uncle George sighed from the kitchen doorway. “I knew it was heading in this direction,” he said.
“I’m just trying to ignore it,” The Original said. “You boys want to make a pan of cornbread to go with that chili?”
After lunch I went out to the studio to work, found a folder on my desk marked Eyes Only. Jesse had drawn the two of us as Yoda and young Luke Skywalker. In the first frame, Yoda, with a Navajo face, was sitting, his robes around him, while young Jesse-Luke, lightsaber hanging from his belt, said, But Master Yoda, I’m not afraid!
In the second frame, I’d stood, parted my Yoda robes to reveal a massive erect green cock. Jesse-Luke cowered back against R2D2. You will be!
Chapter Eight
I WENT to work after lunch, and I could hear Jesse on his side of the studio, mixing paint, Marty Robbins playing on the little CD player. I had the first character. I’d remembered during lunch, a tall skinny kid from Pascagoula, Mississippi, telling me that B.B. King’s name stood for Blues and Barbecue. He was constantly getting asked to play basketball, something he seemed to be used to. He always accepted with good-natured resignation, but his real love was the Delta blues. I sketched him out on the whiteboard—long skinny legs, helmet pushed back on his head, the wires of his iPod in his ears. He would be listening to old recordings of Son House, maybe, or Robert Johnson. He was going to be my radioman.
Jesse stuck his head around the canvas and scarf barrier. “You have the Internet set up on your computer?”
“Yep.”
“Can you pull up a picture of Freida Kahlo’s Blue House? I want to double-check the colors.” I typed “Freida” and “blue house” into the search engine. Jesse held up his paper, covered in blue paint samples, compared them with the pictures. “Look at this painting,” he said, pointing to the screen. It was a self-portrait, and the area behind Freida’s head was blue, Bathtub Mary blue, and around this, like a frame, were colorful parrots, pink and
orange and yellow and green. “See what she did?”
“Yeah. She used those icon colors. Is that what you’re going to do with the cowboy angels?”
“I think so, but one color for each of the paintings.” He chewed on his lip. “I’m thinking of them as a group, and I really need to not do that. They sell one at a time, maybe to different people. Nobody’s going to buy all eight. So if I make them being together a criterion for the work to be successful, it will only work if they don’t sell.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or just talking to himself in my near vicinity. “So what’s your plan?”
“Don’t know yet.” He went back to his side of the studio, then turned around, came back, and kissed me, a lingering, sweet kiss that tasted like the lemon drop he had been sucking on.
Back to work. I was going to be the platoon leader. Or my alter ego, Devil Dog, was going to be platoon leader. I sketched him on the whiteboard. Now I needed my Jesse, my DADT boy. “Jesse. You mind if I put your face on a cartoon character? I need a gay character.”
“And I’m the only gay boy you know?”
“No, you’re just the prettiest.”
“Of course you can, zo-zo. Images in art, they’re symbols, you know? They don’t represent real people.”
I had my doubts about this. That may have been the intention of the artist, to use symbols, but people were very interested in other people. They wanted the details of who Picasso had slept with, and drawn. People were still debating the identity of the Mona Lisa, though I suspected Leonardo would echo Jesse: images of people are just symbols. I hesitated, my marker in my hand. How likely was it someone would see a resemblance to Jesse’s face and ask him about it? I didn’t want him to be embarrassed, and I didn’t want him to be known as a gay character in a comic strip. He was too complex and beautiful for that. No, that wouldn’t work. I’d have to find somebody else’s face.
What had he said about orange shoes, orange high-tops? I couldn’t remember now. I sketched in a character, slender, with delicate hands and a face like Peter Frampton on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive, pretty as an angel. I gave him orange high-top sneakers. And a large rifle. This was my gay marksman.
Who else? I wasn’t going to have a token dumb fuck. I’d never seen that, not in my years in the Corps. The quiet ones always seemed to get labeled as big and dumb, but in my experience, they were actually just quiet. When they did talk, they had usually seen something from an angle everyone else had missed. We needed a cowboy, a shit-kicker who always had his hands sliding up somebody’s skirt. Then we’d have Sir, though we’d never see him. He was always going to be a voice on the radio or the phone, telling us where we were going next, giving us our mission. I leaned back, stared at the board. I had my platoon.
I stuck my head on Jesse’s side of the studio. “You want a Coke?”
“Diet,” he said, frowning at his easel. He was still mixing and testing colors. “It looks like cantaloupe that’s been left out in the sun too long.” He tore the paper off the pad and threw it in the trash can in disgust. The can behind him was nearly full. “Fuck. How the fuck difficult is dusty fucking terra cotta? I can’t mix colors worth shit.” His voice sounded a bit fragile, so I left quietly, got us a couple of sodas, and put his on his desk without saying another word.
He worked through the afternoon, into the evening, and I sat on the porch with a book, listening to The Original and Uncle George talk over what was happening in the world. I went into the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on, and I could see the light in the studio going off, then on, then off again. I watched for a bit, wondering if this was some sort of artist Morse code, S-O-S. Then the light went out and stayed out. But no Jesse. When the coffee was done, I took cups to the old men on the porch, then walked back to the studio to see what was happening. It wasn’t dark inside, but dim. Jesse had the small desk lamp on, which cast a puddle of golden light through his half of the studio.
I stuck my head through the scarves. “Hey. Can I come in?”
“Sure.” He was lying on his couch and looked utterly exhausted, dark gray under his eyes.
“I saw the lights going on and off. I thought you were signaling you needed me to come rescue you.”
He grinned at that, and I pulled up a desk chair.
“I was looking at the paint colors under different lights. Making sure I had what I wanted.” I looked around the studio. He had color swatches on a piece of raw canvas, and their formulas were written below the samples. There was a Bathtub Mary Blue, bright pink, a pale muted orange color that I thought was probably the hard-won dusty terra cotta, and a bright, creamy yellow. “I finally got the pink right. I looked at pictures of some scarves woven by women in Bolivia.” He must have seen the look on my face, because he grinned tiredly up at me. “It’s worth it, I promise.”
There was a CD playing I’d never heard before, Western music, and the guy singing had a thin, beautiful voice. Jesse started singing along “…out here with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels….”
“I don’t know this music.” He reached over, handed me the CD case. Gram Parsons, Grievous Angel.
“That’s where I first got the idea for the paintings, from this song. It’s real cowboy music, beautiful and so self-destructive it nearly goes up in flames. He did this album with Emmy Lou Harris.” He gestured to the canvases. “I think I’m going to do them one at a time, make sure they can stand alone, and not only as a group. This first one is going to be the Grievous Angel.”
“It sounds powerful, but I don’t really understand what it means.”
He closed his eyes. “You’ll understand when you see the painting. Cowboys, we’re born into these Western mountains and deserts, and we get brave and strong, because that’s what the land is asking us to be. They tell us we need to fight, to defend our country and our freedom, and we send our very best, the strongest and most beautiful of all of us. Maybe they come back broken, or with scars, and later no one can even remember why we asked them to go. The strong men who’re left? We use them to sell pickup trucks and cigarettes. It’s not the land doing this. The land loves us like our mothers. But we have to go out into the world. This first cowboy angel, the Grievous Angel, he’s you. He’s been sent off to war. Your war, your continuous, anonymous war.”
I didn’t think he meant the Grievous Angel was really me. I was just one of his symbols. I scooted him over, lay down on the couch with him, and rolled him over into my arms. “You’re tired. Close your eyes, put your head on my chest, and I’ll hold you for a while.” His voice sounded full of tears.
He slid a hand over my chest until it settled over the shrapnel scar. “What artists do, their job in the world, is to see clearly. To lift up the blinders of money and greed and apathy, and then force everyone else to see what they see.” He curled against me. “Yeah, I am tired.”
It was funny, but I’d never thought of anyone but people like me fighting for America. We put on the uniforms, we picked up our guns, we went off and threw ourselves down between right and wrong. Back home, everyone was dancing in the streets and having picnics in the park, sitting happy and safe on their red-checked tablecloths. But people like Jesse, the artists, they were working on America too. The folks at the ACLU who were working for GLBT rights, they were working for America. It wasn’t just the Devil Dogs, keeping the Huns from the gate. It made me feel better, somehow, thinking that all these brilliant, beautiful minds were hard at work to make America as good as it could be.
Jesse settled his head over my chest. “I can hear your heart beating. It sounds strong.” He sighed. “Tomorrow I’m going to start.”
“You haven’t already started?”
“No. This was just getting ready. Getting things clear in my head. The real work starts in the morning.”
“I won’t bug you.”
“Bug me all you want. How did your work go today?”
“I got my crew. Tomorrow their names, backstory, then I�
�m gonna send them off to war.”
“Is Uncle George still here?”
“Yep. He’s drinking coffee on the front porch. Only Navajo people and Marathon cowboys drink coffee right before they go to bed.”
“Are they sitting there, not talking?”
“I heard maybe four or five words. They aren’t up in the double digits, yet. Course, they might have just been waiting for me to leave.”
“No, they’re always like that. He say anything about Sadie?”
“Not when I was around.”
“She hasn’t called me. They let you call in those rehab places, right?”
I shook my head. “I think some of them, they have a blackout period. A week, a month, I’m not sure. Some time when you can’t call out, and don’t have any visitors.”
“So you won’t beg your cousin to come and take you away?”
“Probably.”
JESSE was already in the studio when I went out for my run the next morning, and it wasn’t even six yet. We worked all day without talking, and I listened to the music from his side of the studio—Marty Robbins first, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, over and over, until late afternoon. Then he switched to Gram Parsons, and I could hear him over on his side, warbling with Gram’s sweet voice, singing about cowboy angels. I wondered if the music was some part of the way he painted. I’d never heard anyone keep music on a continuous loop like this. The second day he’d moved on to The Highwaymen, and by the third morning, Los Lonely Boys. The Original went out to the studio to drag him into the house for breakfast. We both stared at him. His eyes were crazy bright, and he looked like he’d dropped five pounds he couldn’t afford to lose.
I slid a couple of sunny-side-up eggs onto his plate. “Okay, listen up. Here’s what we need to do. You need to eat at least two meals a day, and if you do that, I won’t cut the cord on your CD player.”
He looked from me to The Original. “I’ve been eating.”