Billy's Bones (5 page)

“I
WARNED
you.”

“No,” Tom replied with a long-suffering look, “you did not warn me that he’d freak out when I told him I was gay.”

Sue waved a hand dismissively. “Not in those precise words. But I warned you about chasing after straight men.”

“I wasn’t chasing him. I had no delusions about him wanting to sleep with me.” Tom couldn’t deny he’d
wanted
Kevin to sleep with him, but he knew that was just a fantasy. A lot of men—gay and straight—fantasized about sleeping with attractive friends. It was harmless, as long as they knew it would never be more than a fantasy. “Certainly I didn’t make a pass at him.”

“No…,” Sue said, but she sounded skeptical.

“You’re not saying I should have just gotten naked with him, are you?”

Sue shook her head and absently brushed a stray tendril of her graying hair back into place behind her ear. “Absolutely not. You were right to be honest with him, before you found yourself in a more awkward position. I’m just saying you shouldn’t be wasting this much energy fretting about a relationship that you know is never going to go anywhere.”

“I’m not allowed to have a male friend who isn’t gay?”

“Oh, Tom,” Sue said in her best maternal tone, “you know you wouldn’t be this upset if you weren’t falling for the guy.”

He frowned at her, but he couldn’t think of a response because they both knew she was right.

T
OM
checked the hot tub again when he got home from work. It was definitely as hot as he expected a hot tub to be now. He considered taking the cover off and soaking for a while, but as soon as he thought about it, he remembered Kevin’s sudden about-face the night before, and he no longer had any enthusiasm for the idea. Maybe later.

The grill was still covered in hamburger grease, so he spent some time cleaning it. But again, he couldn’t muster up the desire to hang out on the deck by himself. It was ridiculous that Kevin’s bad reaction was putting him in such a funk, but he couldn’t help it. Tom tried reading for a bit, but he couldn’t concentrate, and eventually he just went to bed early.

He had a weird dream about Kevin hanging out with him, drinking beer and laughing. Tom stripped naked and climbed into the hot tub. Then he watched, with growing arousal, as Kevin stripped down, too, revealing the lean beautiful body Tom had already seen most of, but with a substantial endowment that was perhaps a bit exaggerated, fully erect. Kevin climbed the steps to get into the hot tub as Tom’s breathing grew heavy in anticipation.

Then, as Kevin dropped into the water, he suddenly jerked to a halt in midair. His body hung there, swinging slowly from side to side in a strange motion, his penis erect and twitching. Tom looked up and realized Kevin was hanging from a rafter that jutted out over the hot tub, dangling from a pair of blue jeans that were tied around the rafter and around his neck. His face was turning blue, and his eyes were bulging out as he made short gasping noises in his throat.

Tom awoke, drenched in sweat and terrified.

B
Y
F
RIDAY
afternoon, Tom had grown tired of moping around his empty house in the evenings. He hadn’t been motivated enough to unpack anything, and his aversion to the grill and the hot tub had become simply ridiculous. He decided to check out Lee’s Diner again. It would get him out of the house, and he’d at least eat more than the junk food he’d been surviving on for “dinner” all week.

Of course, it was possible he could run into Kevin there. Tom wasn’t sure if he was dreading that or secretly hoping for it. But he decided that, if Kevin’s truck was in the parking lot, he could always keep going and find somewhere else to eat.

This was a lie, of course. Kevin’s truck
did
turn out to be in the parking lot, and Tom pulled in anyway. It was hopeless. He might as well be seventeen again, pining for his friend, Jake—the one who called him a “faggot” and never spoke to him again. Tom had walked by his house night after night, running different scenarios on a loop in his mind, trying to figure out how he could patch things up and restore the easy, close friendship that had fooled him into thinking Jake would understand. It was agony, and the only thing that had put an end to his suffering was Jake’s father calling his house to tell Tom’s parents to keep their faggot son from stalking his boy before he called the police.

Kevin was sitting at the counter when Tom walked in. For a second, he seemed too distracted by the waitress—not Tracy, but an older woman with absurdly large breasts and too much eye makeup—to notice Tom walking by. But at the last second, he turned his head and fixed his eyes on Tom. The best Tom could think of was to nod and then hurry over to one of the booths. It looked like Kevin was on his way out, anyway. He’d probably just leave.

But he didn’t. He went to the cash register at the end of the counter to pay his bill, and then he wandered across the diner until he was standing beside Tom’s table. This close, Tom could smell him—an earthy scent of cut grass mixed with sweat, as if Kevin had spent his afternoon mowing somebody’s lawn.

Tom couldn’t look at him. “Uh… hey.”

“Mind if I sit down?”

“I guess not.”

Kevin slid into the booth opposite him, and Tom risked glancing up at his face. He was pleased to see that Kevin looked as uncomfortable as Tom felt.

Kevin cleared his throat and said, “I guess I was kind of a jerk, Monday night.” He paused for Tom to respond, but Tom really didn’t know what to say to that, so Kevin continued. “I mean, it must have been hard for you to tell me that….”

“No,” Tom corrected him. “It was awkward, I’ll admit. And the timing seemed bad. But I’ve come out a dozen times by now—to family, friends, coworkers. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t some big, epic moment either.” It pissed him off that Kevin seemed to think it was more than it really was—Tom being honest with him because he thought it was considerate. Perhaps it was because the way Kevin said it made it sound as if
he
was something special, as if Kevin was so important in Tom’s life that Tom had agonized over telling him. Tom was prepared to admit that he had a crush on the guy, but he wasn’t prepared to elevate Kevin to the same level as a family member or a close friend.

Kevin looked at him, his expression pained. “Well… I guess it was me that felt it was epic, then.”

Tom didn’t want to feel sympathy for Kevin. It wasn’t his fault Kevin felt uncomfortable. Kevin needed to get over it.

But Tom never would have become a psychologist if he couldn’t empathize with others, even if they were sometimes on the wrong side of political correctness. Kevin
did
need to get over being uncomfortable, but it was useless to insist he
couldn’t
be uncomfortable. People couldn’t always control the way they felt about things, even if it wasn’t appropriate.

The waitress came over to the table with a couple of glasses of water and set them down. “I thought you were leaving, sugar,” she said to Kevin. “Did you want something else?”

“That’s okay, Ellen. I’m fine.”

Ellen took Tom’s order (steak tips again—why mess with a good thing?) and left. Silence descended on the two of them until Tom couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Look, Kevin, if this is some kind of apology—”

“It is!”

“All right, fine. I accept your apology.”

There was a long moment after that, during which neither could think of anything to say. Tom had almost expected Kevin to say “Cool” and then get up and leave. But Kevin just sat there, staring at the tabletop. Tom felt something under the table and for a weird moment, he thought Kevin was deliberately rubbing against his leg. Then he realized Kevin was tapping his foot in agitation, and the brush of his jeans against Tom’s leg was unintentional.

“You want to come over to my place?” Kevin asked abruptly. “This weekend, I mean? We could throw some burgers on the hibachi. I’ll buy the beer this time.”

Jesus
. This was starting to feel surreal. Tom could almost see Jake again, sitting just like Kevin was now, at the truck stop near their high school. They’d had another argument, one more tedious fight, this one about Jake flirting with the girl at the 7-Eleven and Tom being jealous—except neither of them really understood what the fights were about. They both fooled themselves into thinking they were fighting about something stupid like Jake wanting money for a soda, when he hadn’t paid Tom back for the last time. Jake needed him with the intensity teenagers often had for their friendships, and he’d always been the one to patch things up. Until the last time, when Tom had laid everything bare and there had been nothing left to patch.

Tom could see something in Kevin’s eyes now, something like the raw need he used to see in Jake’s eyes. He really wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with it. But still, he found himself answering, “All right, if you’re buying.”

“Great! How’s tomorrow afternoon?”

“Fine.”

Kevin had his receipt pad in his back pocket, so he pulled it out and tore off a blank receipt. “This has my address on it. It’s just about a few miles south of your place, along Northside Road. You’ll see the truck parked out in front of the trailer.”

And then he left, obviously not comfortable enough to stick around any longer. If they could barely look each other in the eye now, Tom reflected, Saturday would probably be a hoot.

Six

A
S
K
EVIN
had promised, his trailer wasn’t hard to find. In addition to the truck in his driveway, he had a wooden sign on the lawn with Derocher Repairs and a phone number on it. The sign wasn’t fancy, and Tom suspected Kevin had made it himself, but it was a fairly professional job, demonstrating woodworking skill, if not necessarily artistic talent.

The trailer itself had a wooden porch with screened-in windows attached to it, and there was a separate garage off to one side. The yard was overgrown with weeds—if Kevin had been mowing a lawn yesterday, it hadn’t been here—and car parts and miscellaneous bits of metal machinery were scattered about the yard and spilling out of the garage.

Kevin came out from the garage as soon as he heard Tom’s car pull in, and he was grinning like an idiot, perhaps because Tom hadn’t snubbed him after all. As Tom got out of the car, carrying a six-pack of Smuttynose Shoals Pale Ale, Kevin shifted the spool of cable he was carrying from his right hand to his left.

“You didn’t have to bring that,” he said, waving the cabling at the six-pack. “I said I’d have beer.”

“Well, maybe I won’t like the shit you drink.”

“You’ll like it.”

Tom looked pointedly at the cable Kevin was carrying. “Are you planning on tying me up?”

“Only if we get really drunk,” Kevin replied cheerfully. Then he added, “I turn in scrap metal for cash over at the Recycling Transfer Station. You can make a decent amount if you’re willing to scavenge around for it. This stuff”—he held up the yellow cable—“has a copper core. It was left over from a housing project in Groveton. I can get two-fifty to two-seventy-five a pound if I strip the insulation off.”

While he was talking, he led the way into the garage and up to a workbench with some kind of mechanical device bolted onto it. To illustrate his point, Kevin fed the end of the cable into a hole in the device and turned a crank. The copper center of the cable came out the other end, while the yellow plastic peeled away and fell to the floor. There were several coils of yellow cable on the floor, awaiting this same treatment.

“How much does it take to make a pound?” Tom asked.

“With this grade, about twenty-five feet—with the insulation stripped off.”

Tom realized he must be a bit of a snob because he knew he wouldn’t be willing to go through that much effort for two dollars and some change. It didn’t look like the whole pile would net Kevin more than twenty bucks. But he smiled politely and listened to Kevin prattle on about it. He allowed his gaze to drift over the other odds and ends in the garage; all the tools mounted on the walls were well kept despite the clutter. Inevitably, he found himself looking up at the rafters. One of those beams, he recalled, was the one Kevin had tied himself to three years ago….

“It’s that one over there.”

Tom came back to himself and realized Kevin was looking at him with an amused expression on his face. When Kevin caught Tom’s eye, he nodded toward the front of the garage. “Don’t pretend you’re not curious. That rafter’s like crack cocaine to you. I knew you’d have to take a look when I invited you over.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s cool.” Kevin put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him forward. “Come on, I’ll show it to you.”

The rafter was near the front of the garage, and now that they were close to it, Tom could see the faint spot where Kevin’s pant leg had worn away at the wood for a short time, leaving a patch that was slightly less weathered.

“I backed the truck up to the garage door,” Kevin said casually, “so I could lower the tailgate and stand on it. Then when I had my pants off, I tied myself up and jumped off. The crotch of the jeans started ripping open, but it held.”