Divisions (Dev and Lee) (12 page)

“I guess we’ll figure that out when it happens.” We both go quiet, and I’m not sure what he’s thinking, but I’m just thinking I’m happy to be with him, thinking about our future. Knowing there will be a future and that we’ll be together in it is something new to me.

I give Dev a nice sendoff to the plane in the morning, teasing his erection until he’s fully awake, then going down on him, then finally rolling over so he can jump on me and come under my tail. We lie there panting and (in my case) wagging, and then he kisses my ears and slips out and off. “Let’s shower,” he says, and drags me into the shower with him.

“I’ll wash the sheets,” I say as I soap him up.

He perks up. “Wow, there are all kinds of benefits to you living here that I hadn’t thought about.”

“Just don’t start thinking of me as the maid.” I grip his shaft and soap it extra hard, so he squirms.

“Does that mean you won’t wear one of those cute outfits?” He grins down at me.

I just grin back and arch my eyebrows, and we finish up the shower. Then I kiss him and send him off to Yerba. “See you at the game,” I say.

“Maybe for dinner that night,” he says.

“I’ll text you.”

“Me too.”

“Fly safe.”

“You too.”

“Shoo!” I push him out the door in his neatly tailored suit, with his two Firebirds-logo duffel bags over his shoulder, and I go back to the apartment—our apartment—for the day.

One thing about Chevali: it sure as hell beats Hilltown for winter. It’s fifty degrees out at nine in the morning. Hilltown could go months without sniffing fifty. I’m sure in the summer I’ll be much less happy, but on the other paw, Chevali probably doesn’t have Hilltown’s nasty humidity.

And I probably won’t be here in the summer. I’ll be in Yerba, or maybe somewhere else around the league. Who knows?

That’s months away. I throw the sheets in the laundry and walk out to do some more shopping.

The thing I didn’t tell Dev was that Hal agreed with me about Vince King’s death. “Looks like suicide,” he said when I called him and pointed him to the article. “You think he was bullied into it?”

“Maybe by his parents.”

He was quiet for a while. “You and parents,” he said. “Going to go put another one in the hospital?”

I have been trying not to think about that, but without Dev to distract me, it’s hard. I don’t know what I’ll do if it does turn out to be suicide, except bring it to light. And after what Dev said about Mother, I think I might have to call her. I know that’s not a good idea, but I can’t stop thinking about that web page, the people talking about being gay like it’s a drug addiction and praying for a cure. She might know who put up the page for Vince King. I wonder if she put up a page for me.

The last time I called, when I was worried about Father, she was colder than I’d expected considering the fox she’d been married to for twenty-five years was missing. Just remembering that pisses me off all over again, but if I’m going to get information from her, I have to put that aside.

She hadn’t been working, and even though my father’s moved out, she probably has enough family money to go without a job for a little while. She and Father used to talk about it as though it were a hoard of gold: “if we can do that without touching the family money,” and “we’ll put that in with the family money,” and “the family money is doing well this year.” So I take a chance and call her at home.

Her voice is suspicious when she picks up, that tone reserved for probable telemarketers and bad news. It doesn’t improve when I identify myself. “What, has Harold wandered off again?” she says.

“No.” I grit my teeth. “I just wanted to ask how you and those Families United people are getting along.”

“I’m not going to stand here while you try to tell me lies about them.” I guess that’s fair, considering I’ve never talked to her about them before.

“Farthest thing from my mind,” I say, blandly. “I just wanted to know who puts up those pages that ask people to pray for the souls of homosexual degenerates.”

“Good-bye,” she says.

“Wait, wait!” I listen for the click, but she hasn’t hung up. “I just want to know if you put up a page for me.”

The silence is so long that I think maybe she did hang up, and I just didn’t hear it. Then she says, “My involvement with Families United is not about you.” Before I can call her on that, she goes on. “It’s about me finding a community of people who will listen to my worries and concerns.”

“About me.”

“Among other things.” Her tone gets sharper. “Wiley, I tried to steer you away from the path you were on…”

“I didn’t need steering. Just understanding.”

She’s quiet again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t provide that to you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So about those pages. You know who puts them up? I’d like to talk to them.”

“I’m not going to give you permission to harass my friends,” she says.

“So you do know who it is.”

“All of Families United is one group of friends. We can call upon each other for support in anything.”

“Sounds great. Do you all wear purple robes and drink Kool-Aid?”

“Good-bye, Wiley,” and this time she does hang up.

Well, shit. That didn’t help at all.

I’m on my way back with a small bag of groceries when Hal calls me. I flip open my phone and answer with, “Gumshoe results already?”

“They get up early on the east coast,” he says. “Puritan work ethic.”

“Also it’s two hours earlier.”

“Right. So look, want to get together for lunch, or are you consumed with domestic chores?”

I heft the grocery bag onto my wrist so I can open the door to Dev’s—to our apartment building. “What, have you been faxed a top-secret file you can’t tell me about over the phone?”

He snickers. “I haven’t seen you since the Hellentown game and I thought you might like to see a friendly nose in your new hometown.”

“Why, Mister Kinnel,” I say in my breathy female voice, “are you flirtin’ with me?”

He takes on an exaggerated private dick voice. “Our usual place,” he says. “Wear that dress I like. And,” he lowers his voice, “come alone.”

“You want to meet me ‘Between the Sheets,’ is that it?” Between the Sheets is a sandwich shop that features “well-stuffed sandwiches” and lots of double entendres. The sandwiches are sloppy but good, and reasonably priced. When Hal thought I was Dev’s ex-girlfriend, trying to get his story out of me, he met me there a couple times.

“You know it, shweetheart.”

For kicks, and because it gets me to unpack the last of my non-book boxes, I do get out a nice blue dress that I wore a lot back when I was dating Dev at Forester and wanted to go to games without anyone knowing I was a boy. It’s less formal than the dress I wore to Dev’s coming-out press conference, the first one Hal saw me in, but that’s kind of a “special occasions” sort of dress.

His eyes widen when I walk in, and his ears flick back under the fedora he’s wearing. “I was kidding,” he says.

I slide into the booth across from him. “Oh, were you? Nice hat, by the way.”

He’s wearing a pretty nice collared shirt, light green with dark blue stripes, and it goes well with the fedora, which I think he put on just to keep up the shamus effect. It looks a little dusty; he probably got it out of the back of his closet. Kind of cute, actually, even if he is ten or fifteen years older than me.

He takes the hat off and sets it on the seat beside him, letting his dust-colored fox’s ears spring up. “See, now I’m going to spend the whole conversation tryin’ to see where I should’ve guessed you aren’t a girl.”

“You’re a fox. You should know better than to let another fox distract you.”

“I’m a straight guy. We’re susceptible to a whole other level of distraction.”

I adjust the dress’s shoulders and my fake chest, and Hal crosses his eyes theatrically. “Oh, come on,” I say.

“It’s been a while since my divorce,” he grumbles.

“Haven’t you been dating?”

“Matter of fact,” he says, “got a date tomorrow night with a coyote.”

He looks a little like a coyote himself, the swift fox does. Same desert-rock colored fur, but slightly smaller ears, and more orange in the edges, like the sides of his muzzle where it shades to ivory underneath. “Nice. How’d you meet?”

“Oh.” He brushes his whiskers with a paw, very self-consciously. Like when my father talks about trying something new through the Internet. “Mutual friend.”

I nod. “A friend named E. Harmony?”

He scowls at my grin. “Match dot com, okay? I have a good feelin’ about it, though.”

“All right, all right.” I start to say more, but he holds up a paw.

“And look, if it’s okay with you, I’ll save the King file until after we eat. It’s kind of heavy and I’d rather enjoy my lunch.”

My grin fades. “So it was suicide.”

He lifts his sandwich and takes a big bite out of it, and doesn’t meet my eyes. So I do the same, and I try to savor the creamy tuna salad and the soft wheat bread while we make small talk about Chevali and what neighborhood I’m in and where are the good places to eat around there. I live here now, I have to remind myself. This is my neighborhood. It’s a weird feeling, but I still have trouble concentrating because I’m worried about what he’s going to tell me.

When the last glop of mayo is licked up and our napkins are lying crumpled on our empty plates, I brush the trappings of the lunch aside and lean forward. “Okay, so tell me.”

His ears go back, and he takes a deep breath. “Vince King took one of his father’s guns from the garage. He went up to his bedroom and shot himself in the head.”

Even though I’d already guessed it, the cold reality of it bites hard. “Christ.”

“Not much way to spin it as an accident. As a favor to the family, the sheriff kept the papers mostly out, but there’s only so much you can hide. Both parents devout churchgoers. And on Friday morning, a couple people from the church paid a visit to the King family—only know that because they were interviewed by the police, briefly. Couldn’t find out the names. Guy at the paper said the sheriff kept all that clamped down. But he did say that this group is pretty active in Nonsiquet. ‘Specially around the Kings’ church.”

He reaches into his pocket and takes out a folded piece of paper. It’s a printout of the front page of the Families United website. I glance down at the smiling raccoon family, the parents embracing the son, and then look back up. “I’m familiar with them.”

“Thought you might be.”

“So he just mentioned that group.” I don’t want to touch the paper. I don’t even want to acknowledge that it’s there.

“I mighta prompted him a bit. I’m sure there’s other active groups, but the Nonsiquet Bowling League don’t seem like it’d drive a kid to do something like that.”

I shake my head. “Talk to the parents at all?”

“Nah. Been less’n a week. Seems a little soon.”

Maybe. Maybe not. I nod. “Well, I appreciate the info.”

He gestures at the paper. “You want that?” When I shake my head, he crumples it and tosses it atop his plate.

I take it from his plate and throw it into the garbage near us. He nods. “Guess you really are familiar with them.”

“You seen some of the stuff they do?”

“Ayup.”

I think of Dev’s Auntie Za. “Hey, I know Equality Now has a chapter down here. Any other pro-gay organizations I could check out?”

He taps the side of his muzzle, thinking. “None that’d do anything on the level of Families. You want reach, pretty much they’re the only game in town. You could also call up Fair and Legal—”

“I know them.”

“—but they don’t have a chapter down here. It’d be all remote.”

“Also they mostly deal with legal briefs and cases. Not publicity and campaigns.”

“Right. Sounds like Equality Now is more what you want to do.” He pauses. “Speaking of…” I cup my ears forward. “A guy from them called me after that article I wrote about you. Wanted to reprint it in their newsletter.”

“Really.”

“Uh-huh. And I remembered some stuff you said, so when he said his name was Brian…”

“God dammit.”

“Yup. Seemed real interested in how well I’d gotten to know you. Made a few unsavory insinuations, if you want to know the truth.”

“Sounds like Brian. He believes everyone’s secretly gay.” Damn him.

“Wanted to know if I thought you and Miski were real serious, too. He put it like, ‘did you just make it sound good for the article,’ but then he asked a couple times.”

“I didn’t date him. For the record.”

“Didn’t ask.” His whiskers twitch.

“We were just best friends, and then…” I sigh. “It’s complicated.”

“I saw him at the press conference, going on about the truth.”

“Yeah, he has a blog where he wrote about Dev being gay. But before that, he got beat up by some football players at Forester. And he quit the college, moved down here, rather than stay and stand up.”

Hal leans back against the bench. “Seems like that’d rub you the wrong way, yeah.”

“Felt like he betrayed me. Or I betrayed him.” And that’s how I met Dev, trying to get revenge for what happened to Brian. I can’t ever seem to escape him, so it doesn’t really surprise me that he was talking to other people about me. He called me to brag about getting back into activism, for fuck’s sake. “Then after he pulled that shit with Dev, Dev hates him.”

“Can’t blame him.”

We part after agreeing to get together again for lunch soon. It is nice, as Hal said, to see a familiar nose in town, but it’s not his I’m thinking about all the way home. I’m thinking about Brian, and how now I know he’s working with Equality Now.

Well, so what? I don’t have to work with him, right? It’s a big national organization. I can certainly find someone else to talk to. But Dev is going to stress about it anyway. So I call him, and when his phone goes to voicemail, I say, “Hi, roommate-boyfriend. Listen, I want to do some work with this group called Equality Now. They do a lot of good work with publicity for gay rights and stuff, and I think I could help them. Thing is, Brian’s a member. I don’t have to work with him, and I’m going to try not to, but in any case I’m not going to call them until I hear back from you, but I do want to follow this up. Call me when you get a chance.” After a second’s pause, I add, “If you’re not already down at Korsat Boulevard with your bi-curious buddies.”

Then I go study up on my college football players. The interview Friday is with the general manager of Yerba, and I want to make a good impression, so I have to know his team inside and out, as well as the current class of players ready to come into the league. But I keep getting distracted, looking at the pictures and profiles of the players. This one doesn’t mention a girlfriend, and he looks withdrawn; that one says he wants to be politically active. This one is a polar bear with a charming smile.