Chapter 23

Walt finally breaks through Law's repeated refusals.

23

An Embrace Between Friends

I stared at Walt until the match in my hand burned my fingers.  I dropped it to the floor.  It extinguished itself on the way down.  I tried to refuse Walt’s offer.  “I can’t.”

Walt argued very gently with me.  “Yes, you can.”  He said in a soft voice full of understanding.  “Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything.  You need this and I’ve missed it.  No strings, no expectations.  Just an embrace between two old friends.”

My body ignored my better judgement and moved automatically.  It got up from my chair and crossed to where Walt waited for it.  He pulled me against him.  He wrapped me in his strong arms and pulled me into his body.  He leaned his forehead against mine just to the side of the tender spot.  I felt his heat and breathed his scent.  His robust presence and the protection of his strength banished my cares.  My whole world shrank until it existed only in him.

“Law.”  He breathed my name as a question over my face.

“Yeah.”

“Would you kiss me?”

I tilted my head back, a little to the side, and leaned into him to bring my mouth to his.  We kissed.  Our lips parted and I tasted his salty mouth.  With that, the last of my senses to surrender to him.  We lingered in the doorway, to savor each other, to remember the pleasure we once shared.  ‘My God, I missed you.’ I thought because I was unable to say it aloud.

Walt broke our kiss.  As he did, he ended a moment I could have lived the rest of my life within.  “Are you ready?”  He asked tenderly, like it was my first time.

“Yeah.”  I said and abandoned my will to whatever he had planned.  Walt led us into my room and shut and locked the door.

That late night or early morning, Walt guided us both.  We moved like we had during the dance we shared so many years before.  He used his athletic strength and natural grace to move us smoothly from one pleasure to the next.  My body became an instrument in the hands of a virtuoso.  Our music was a concerto of passion that rose steadily to a shattering climax and tender denouement.  What he’d given me, transcended ‘sex.’  It was a glorious religious experience, the worship of all the possibilities of the male body.

When we finished, Walt settled next to me.  He turned onto his side to face me.  He reached over my body and almost rolled on top of me as he did.  He reached to fish in my nightstand.

The drawer yielded a cigar and box of matches.  Walt trimmed the end of the cigar with his teeth, then lit it carefully by roasting the end in the flame of three matches until it glowed.  He drew on it just enough for a tip of cool ash to establish itself on the ember.  He passed it to me.

I accepted the erotic dessert to the sexual feast we’d just finished.  Walt returned to his side, propped himself on his elbow, and used his free hand to trace the scars of my torso with gentle fingers.

I wanted to thank my old friend, my only friend, for what he’d given me.  I wanted to, but I was afraid of too much tenderness.  Walt had said the session wouldn’t mean anything, but I didn’t know how it was possible for something that beautiful to be without meaning.  I thanked Walt, but I added some teasing to blunt the thanks.  “Thanks, Walt…for the cigar.”

I heard Walt’s voice smirk when he answered me.  “Right, no comment on the other thing?”

“What other thing?”  I asked in the impossible attempt to pretend that I didn’t know what he was talking about.  “Oh, that.  Average I’d say.”

“You’re impossible.”  Walt laughed.  I laughed too.

“Do you want to talk about it?”  He asked in his ‘afterglow tone,’ so named because it was a loving honeyed tone he only used after sex.

I didn’t want to.  I didn’t even want to think about it.  Walt had lifted my mood and I didn’t want it to come crashing down again.  Still, he’d asked a pertinent question and I felt that I owed him a real answer.  I tried to explain the situation as I understood it.  “This kid, this Preston, he deserves more than he got.  Came into this world queer, mother died, father disowned him.  He tried to make his own way and was murdered for his efforts.  Something is right in front of me and I’m missing it.  It’s killing me because he reminds me of…of someone else.”

I didn’t want to expose the story about David.  I’d never told Walt anything about him, or about that time in my life.  He knew a little about Peter.  I’d told Walt just enough about Peter to explain the scars that I wore, but I’d always kept David just for me.

Walt was too perceptive to be satisfied by a vague reference like the one I’d given him.  “That David you mentioned?  Who was he?  Why is he important?”

I didn’t want to say, but I didn’t think I had any choice.  As much as Walt had promised the sex wouldn’t mean anything, it had.  In the aftermath of what we’d shared, I couldn’t help but tell Walt anything he wanted to know.

“Before we met, there were only two men I cared for.  I had lots of casual sex, and sex I paid for.  In the twenties, if I wasn’t working, I was looking for anything warm in pants to lay down with.  It meant nothing, but it was fun, and I had the stamina for it.  The first man cared for, was Peter.”

Walt’s hand came to rest amongst the worst of the damage on my torso.  His hand spread itself over my soft belly.  His palm centered over the place my navel used to be.  The scars were so thick there, I could barely feel the weight of Walt’s hand through the rubbery flesh.  The coarse callouses of his hand made no impression on my scars.

The butchers in the military hospital had told me that the splinters of Peter’s shattered pelvis had ripped open my insides.  His blood and flesh contaminated my own.  My waste from my perforated intestines added to the contamination.  They’d had to gut me like a fish to clean the mess out of me.  Even with what they claimed were their best efforts, I had suffered from festering infection and blood poisoning.  They’d always told me I was ‘lucky to be alive.’  My life since that time had done little to bear them out.

I didn’t know why Walt’s hand came to rest in that spot during our tender moments.  His hand always found its way to the most unnatural part of my horrifically scarred and unnatural body.  It was like his kindness was drawn to my carnage.  I wondered if that’s why he stayed around me, like a missionary among the heathens.  Walt seemed to sense how little I could feel of his touch.  The fingers of his hand kneaded my flesh to remind me that he was there.

I savored his touch and his presence and tried to go on with my story.  “I never told Peter I loved him.  I tried to tell him what I was, because I convinced myself he was like me, like us.  He rejected me.  I think he was scared.  I don’t think he understood.  I don’t blame him.  How could I?  He was so helpless and innocent.  I tried to protect him, to save him, but there wasn’t anything I could do.  Peter was the first man I saw destroyed for the sin of being where he didn’t belong.  I had to watch the violence of the war break his gentle spirit until a shell shattered his body.”

I took a deep breath and felt my insides lurch as I approached dangerous ground.  Walt felt the lurch and asked about it.  “What just happened?  I felt your muscles clench.”

I drew on the cigar that I’d forgotten about.  I did it to give myself time to think, time to figure out how to explain my stomach trouble to Walt.  That was something else I’d never completely exposed to my friend and onetime lover.  I had to draw on the cigar several times because it had almost gone out.  I knocked the ash off the end of it over the side of the bed.  I shifted it to my left hand and put my right on top of Walt’s hand that rested on my stomach.  I pressed down until I could feel his hand through my scars.

“That cramp you felt is part of what Peter gave me.  I only ever told you about what you could see, about the visible scars.  The other half, the half I hid from you is what I feel.  Strong emotion, stress or grief, and my insides spasm.  Sometimes they only do it a little but sometimes it’s enough to bring me to my knees.  The doctors say it’s in my head.  F**k them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”  Walt asked.  There was no accusation in his tone.  His question was merely a request for information.

“I was afraid you’d think I was nuts.”  I admitted.  “Plus…plus the pain, it’s part of Peter and that time of my life.  Peter was kind to me when I was badly in need of kindness.  The pain I live with keeps him alive inside me.  It reminds me of someone who treated me like a real person, instead of…instead of what I am.  It’s the only way I have to pay him for what he gave me.  Do you think that’s crazy?”  I asked and studied the ember on my cigar so I wouldn’t have to look at Walt when he answered.

Walt craned his head and kissed my cheek.  “You’re not crazy.  I don’t think your friend would want you to hurt for him, but if that’s how you want it, that’s how it is.”

“Thanks, Walt.”  I said and the spasm relaxed.  I drew on my cigar and got ready to walk in the minefield that was David.  “The second man was David.  He was an Iowa farm boy, an earthbound angel, disowned for what he was, for what we are.  He came to the city to find work.  He found it, but the evil of the city found him.

“He was beaten by four men who hated what they didn’t understand.  I gave him money and sent him away.  He didn’t understand why I did it.  I did it because I couldn’t watch the malevolence of the city taint his perfect purity.  I knew he was queer, and he knew I was.  I never asked for his sex and he never offered, except once.”

I had to pause for another deep breath and to swallow the lump in my throat.  “On the train platform, the last time I saw him, he asked me to go with him to start a farm.  Could you see me on a farm?  If the horse wouldn’t pull the plow, I’d probably punch his face.”

Walt chuckled at my self-deprecating joke.  I heaved a sad sigh.  “I hope his life has been good.  I never heard from him again.  I loved him, but I sent him away because I knew I couldn’t protect him.  I couldn’t protect him from the evil of the city because…because I’m part of it.  I’m part of the city.  I’m part of the evil that would have destroyed him if he stayed.

“The difference between the two, between Peter and David, the surgeons had to carve Peter out of my body, and they did what they could to repair the damage.  I carved David from my life, but I didn’t know how to stitch up the hole.  This boy is like David.  He even looks like David.  He’s a little like me when I was very young, before my father’s hate set me on this path.  If I can find the man who killed him, if I can see that man punished, it will be like giving him back his purity.”

I finished my story and waited while a pregnant silence blanketed the room.  The quiet was so complete; I could almost hear Walt as he concentrated in the dark.  “You’re asking a lot of yourself.”  He said after a while.  “I don’t know if it’s possible to give this boy his purity back.  You don’t really know that he is pure.  You only know what his sister told you about him.  As for the wound left from David, maybe closing that hole isn’t something you can do on your own.  I can tell you, because I’ve known you a long time, that you’re not part of the evil.  Living with it doesn’t make you part of it.”

I disagreed with Walt and used an example that he’d given me to prove my point.  “Says the guy that called me an animal.”

“Why did that bother you so much?”  Walt asked me.  “You looked like you wanted to kill me when I called you that.”

I took my hand from the back of Walt’s so I could look at it in the dark.  I couldn’t really see it, just its shadow, but I could picture it.  I could picture the thick fingers and big palms.  I could picture the meaty fists my hands would become when I was angry.  I knew the violence those fists were capable of.  I hated those hands and the damage they did.  I hated them, but I appreciated them as tools that kept others away from me.

I told Walt about them, about what my hands could do.  “They started calling me that in the war.  They called me that because of the way I fought.  They said I fought like a cornered animal.  I fought constantly back then, and I never lost.  I earned the name again when I was on the force.  Both times I wore it like a badge because if I was an animal, I couldn’t be a f*g.”

Walty drew a logical, but incorrect conclusion from my story.  “So, it was a label you liked.”

“I hated it, but it was useful.  It was even more useful when I was a cop.  I’d started living in the open then because I told myself I wasn’t going to hide what I was from anyone.  I told myself I wasn’t going to be ashamed.  The fights I won and the nickname I earned kept anyone from f*****g with me.  I knew what they thought of me, the other cops and detectives.  I knew that most of them hated to have a f*g on their team.  I told myself I didn’t care.  Their opinion never mattered.  It hurt to find out that you saw me that way.”

Walt gripped at my flesh with his hand.  He kneaded it like he wanted to push his feelings through the scars.  “But I don’t, really.  It was just the heat of the moment.”

“I know that, but I was in that moment too.  It was good you left the way you did.”

Walt made a statement that he tried to sound sure of, but I knew was a question.  “You wouldn’t have hit me.”

I covered my face with my free hand to hide my shame from Walt.  “I don’t know, Walt.  I just don’t know.”

Walt rolled onto his back and settled against me.  The motion seemed to set the whole of the conversation aside, like we’d talked enough for one night.  “Shut your mind off and get some sleep.  Tomorrow is a new day.”

I dropped my hand and looked toward the dark shape that was Walt.  “If that’s supposed to be comforting…never mind.  Good night, Walt and…and thanks.”

I stubbed out what was left of my half-forgotten cigar.  I mashed the ember on the side of the nightstand and dropped the butt to the floor.  I shut my eyes to sleep.  Walt slept almost immediately.  I could tell when his body stilled, and his breathing slowed.

‘The sleep of the innocent.’ I thought as I remembered a small piece of something I’d heard my mother say.  The word ‘innocent’ stuck in my mind.  It occurred to me as I thought of that word that Walt had as much in common with the people I’d seen in the bars earlier, as day has in common with night.  That was an interesting and compelling thought, but I was too tired to reason out what it meant.  I took some small comfort in the fact that I knew at least one queer man who wasn’t an emotional cripple, or a drug addict, or both.

I tried to sleep, but my mind churned despite its exhaustion.  It wouldn’t let me rest.  I resorted to a trick I’d learned during one of my stints as Walt’s domestic partner.  I focused on the soft, even sound of his breathing and counted his breaths like one would count sheep.  ‘In and out, in and out, in and out, in and out…’ I mentally repeated as I listened.  Sleep found me in minutes.