Divisions (Dev and Lee) (16 page)

“What if he finds out it’s a guy and freaks out?”

Ty laughs and picks up his drink when the bartender puts it down. “Dude, if Vonni was gonna freak out he wouldn’t have gone off with her. Anyway, he’s married. He’ll probably just feel her up and that’s that.” He spreads an arm, gesturing at the club and almost hitting Lee, who’s come up to stand near us. “Must make him feel alive again, after bein’ married.”

“Who was that wolf?” I don’t want to be the one who brought Vonni to a club where he cheated on his new wife.

“Ah.” Ty sips his drink. “Just a fan. I signed a napkin for him.”

I didn’t see the napkin, but I could’ve missed it. “Glad you’re having fun.”

“Yeah,” he says. “This ain’t like I imagined it. It’s fun. The guys here are pretty cool. I got my tail grabbed once.”

“Really?”

He takes another drink. “No biggie. I shook my head and the guy took off.”

“You’re pretty okay with this,” Lee says.

Ty grins. “I always stood up for Dev. Wideouts talked a bit when he first came out, and I said, hey, this guy’s a standup guy, leave him alone.”

I’m a little surprised, because he never told me that. Then again, he is a little drunk and in showoff mode for Lee, leaning back against the bar with his chest out and his muzzle up even though he has to look down it to talk to my fox. “Thanks,” I say.

He waves a black paw. “If you weren’t a good guy, I wouldn’ta done it.” He finishes his drink and checks his watch. “I’m gonna dance for another fifteen, then we gotta go. You guys coming?”

I start to demur, but Lee drags me out behind Ty and we dance close. I keep looking around for Vonni, but I don’t spot him. The funny thing that happens, which Lee has to point out a few minutes later, is a fox and coyote dancing near us, not slow dancing, just matching each other’s moves, both grinning. That’s a big fox, I think and it takes me a minute to realize that it’s Ty.

At twenty after eleven, Lee says, “We gotta get you back,” and I nod. Vonni’s still nowhere to be seen. I make my way to Ty, who’s still dancing with the coyote, and tap him on the shoulder. He nods, slaps paws with the coyote, and they lean in to say something, then he follows me and Lee out the front door, messing with his phone.

Pike and Jake are outside chatting with the bouncer, while a small crowd of guys watches and whispers among themselves. They shake paws when they see us come out and wave to the big leather-vested polar bear.

“Nice guy,” Pike says. “Got family up north too, but I don’t think I know any of ‘em. Where’s Vonni?”

“No idea,” I say.

“He hooked up,” Ty says.

The bears both grin. “What, with a guy?” Pike asks.

“Nah. Well, maybe. Leopard in a dress. Sure’s hell didn’t look like a guy.”

“Text him, tell him to get his tail out here.”

“Did already.” Ty holds up his phone. “No answer.”

“Maybe one of us should go back and look for him,” I say.

Pike waves a paw. “He’s a grownup. Hey, Steve!” he calls to the bouncer.

The other white bear looks up from his clipboard. “Yeah?”

“If our friend the fox comes out, put him in a cab, would ya?”

The bouncer shoots us a thumbs up. “There,” Pike says, and starts on down the street. “Problem solved.”

“Let’s wait another five minutes,” I say, but then Ty’s phone beeps and he holds it up, reading a text message.

“He says to head on back, he’ll grab a cab in half an hour.”

“He’ll miss check-in,” I say.

We all look at each other. “He won’t tell us where he is, that’s his lookout,” Pike says. When I hesitate, he says, “Look, Dev, what are you gonna do, search every room in that club? He told us to go back, we should go back.”

I don’t like it, but when Lee puts a paw on my arm and says, “He’ll be fine. Trust me,” I let it go and follow Pike back to the limo.

We make it back to the hotel at twenty to midnight, plenty of time for bed check. I let the other guys go in so I can say good-bye to Lee out front. The revolving door’s barely slid to a halt before Lee says, “Really, don’t worry about Vonni.”

I grip both his shoulders. “How can you be so sure he’s fine? You know that leopard personally?”

“Nah,” he says, stepping forward so I have to loosen my grip, “but she was a tourist, all starstruck. Did you see the dress?”

“Yes. You’re sure she was a girl?”

“Well, she was coming out of the ladies’ room.”

I shake my head. “Didn’t you use the ladies’ room when you cross-dressed?”

He lifts his muzzle. “I did it for authenticity. I don’t think she was that devoted to her performance.”

“Did you pay her to hook up with Vonni?”

“First of all, I wanted her to hook up with Ty. And second, pay her? With whose money?” He laughs. “I just happened to mention a little too loudly on my cell phone that my friend the pro football player was getting bored with the gay club but I didn’t know any good straight places to take him. And she stopped and said, ‘Pro football player?’”

I shake my head. “Christ, Lee.”

“Hey, it worked.”

I study his eyes, which seem wide and guileless. Seem. “So what’s the angle?”

He shrugs. “Maybe Vonni doesn’t know if he hooked up with a guy or a girl. Maybe he thinks about it some.”

I know he meant well. I know he just got a buddy of mine laid, or blown, or something, even if that buddy is married. That’s not Lee’s fault. But still. “Look, if you’re going to do your activism stuff again, fine, go join Brian’s Equality Now, whatever, just don’t use my teammates as your personal playpen.”

He gets a stubborn set to his jaw, and now he steps back. “They asked to come out to Korsat Boulevard,” he says, “and I didn’t do anything to the other guys, though if you ask me, Ty wanted it more than Vonni. Ty was the one who kept talking about hooking up, and wanting to be scoped out, and come on, he’s more than a little bi-curious. You don’t see it?”

When I came out, Ty came up to me, and all he wanted to know was whether I was the one on top. I can picture him being with a guy as long as he was the top, I guess. “You still shouldn’t…”

“Shouldn’t what?” He folds his arms. “If Vonni were really freaked out, he would’ve come out to the limo. He wouldn’t have texted that he was going to be late.”

“There!” I point at him. “You’re going to make him late. He’ll get in trouble.”

Lee grins. “Then he had a really good time.” He reaches out and puts one paw on my stomach. “You want to get in trouble, too?”

I shake my head, not to say no, but to clear it. “Not tonight. But that’s not the point.”

“We’re okay for Sunday?” He’s still smiling, and I feel like I’m not getting through to him.

“Yeah, but—”

“Good. Let me know how it goes with Ty.”

“You mean Vonni.”

He leans up and kisses my nose. “Him too. I’ll see you Sunday.”

He waits. If I don’t kiss him back, there’ll be an argument. All the stuff he said makes sense, so I’m not sure why I’m still upset. So I kiss him back and say, “See you then.”

“Snag a pick for me,” he says, and walks on down the street, tail swishing behind him. I stand there and watch him go. I want to follow him, to stay out late and get in trouble, but he’ll be at dinner Sunday night and he’ll be at home Monday night when I get there, and Tuesday night and all the nights after that for a little while. So I wait until he rounds the corner, and then I head back into the hotel. Vonni still isn’t back. I check in and then hang around until about five minutes before midnight, but the only other person to come through the lobby in that time is coming down from the rooms, a slender female coyote probably not more than nineteen.

She stops near me, arranging her fur and bringing out a little spray canister. She needs it, too—sex hangs around her in a cloud. I lean back, but just before I do, I catch another familiar scent. I mean, shit, the only guy whose musk I really know just took off down the street, but when you’ve worked out next to a guy and smelled his body odor and fur for weeks, the musky smell isn’t that dissimilar. And of all the guys I’ve been working with, the one whose scent I know best apart from my roommate’s is my leader on the defensive line. Gerrard.

The girl coyote gives me a little saucy wink and a flirty bounce to her hips and then puts her spray away, now smelling of rose petal. Lee might be able to catch the smell of sex below that, but I sure can’t.

Shit. If Gerrard is cheating on his wife with another coyote, that’s a big deal. It means maybe cubs, maybe disease. But, I remind myself, it’s not my big deal. I don’t have any responsibilities to his wife, nice as she might be. I’m mostly responsible for Vonni tonight, and it looks like he’s not going to make curfew.

Both of them, though, married and cheating on the road. Of course I know that shit goes on, but now I’m feeling guilty in a different way about the guy I was scoping out at the café. Thank God I was too distracted to do that at the club. That big wolf Ty was talking to…interesting in a “I wonder what it’d be like” kind of way, but not even tempting me to cheat on Lee. What must it feel like, to need sex so badly that you’d get it from anyone? Or is it that Vonni and Gerrard, both stars ever since college, are just used to getting whatever they want?

Not my problem to solve. I wait one last second for Vonni, and then head upstairs.

Charm’s snoring away when I open our door. I strip and sink into my own bed. Damn, it’s a good thing we’ve only got one more night out here. I try not to think about Gerrard. I hope Vonni’s okay.

And I think about the first time I went home with a guy dressed as a lady, and what it led to, and I call myself a big hypocrite. What if someone had stopped me from taking Lee home that night?

Well, I wouldn’t be losing sleep in a hotel room in Yerba, that’s for damn sure.

I have a whole Saturday to spend in Yerba by myself, so I check out some museums, do some shopping—they have fabulous stores here—and wait in vain for Vonni to give me a thank-you call for the hookup last night. That leopard jumped on my line about the football player like it was a half-off sale at McCauley and Fern. I’m sure she jumped on his cock with the same energy. And if he was married, well, he’s no different than lots of other players. At least she wasn’t a fox.

I do check the news to see if the football players at a gay club made any headlines, but even on the sports sites, there’s not even a mention. I guess I could call Hal, but there’s no real story there, more just a gossip piece. It’d be perfect for Brian’s blog, but that would require me talking to him. I want to put that off as long as possible, though I can see it approaching as I get more determined to work with Equality Now in the month and a half I have left until I will (hopefully) take the Yerba job.

What is all over the ’net is that the Firebirds are looking to trade Mitchell to the Devils for star disgruntled wideout Lightning Strike (he changed his name to that, legally—not the “star disgruntled wideout” part, although he might as well have), with a few bench players and cash considerations thrown in. The cheetah, of course, has words to say about it in the media.

“I would love to join the Firebirds,” he says, “or any other team that takes winning seriously. Of course, if nothing can be worked out before Monday,” which is the trading deadline, “I will continue to give my all to the Port City Devils and hope that we can at least finish the season respectably.”

The thing about Strike is, he’s a loudmouth, but he’s not always wrong. He’s being shopped around because basically he called out the offensive line for not giving his quarterback time to throw to him on the deep routes, he called out the quarterback for underthrowing him, he called out the coaches for not calling his number more often. He’s a me-first wideout, the kind the Firebirds currently don’t have.

He’s also a spectacular talent, the kind the Firebirds currently don’t have.

And he talks about Dev, too. “I’d be happy for the chance to play with a gay teammate,” he’s quoted as saying. It’s unclear whether anyone asked. “I’ve played with gay athletes in the past, but none that were open about who they were. I admire and respect Miski, and with cats like us on both sides of the ball, the Firebirds would be a force to be reckoned with.”

Bets are on as to what color he’d dye his fur for his first game in a Chevali uniform, if the trade happens. Traditionally he goes with the team colors, so maybe he’d be gold with red spots. But that might be too close to his natural colors, so maybe he’d be red with gold spots. Or he might dye an actual Firebirds logo into his arm. He did that with the Pilots three years ago when he went over there in a mega-deal.

He hasn’t won a title, and in Chevali, I’m sure he sees a team with a rising defense that needs a wideout to contend for a championship. I’m sure John Corcoran, the Firebirds’ owner, sees that too, and is opening up his purse to get there. But I wonder, now, about the bond the team has forged in putting together a winning season, and whether this addition would screw that up. Teams have fallen apart from adding the wrong guy.

Teams have also won championships by adding the right guy.

You could make a case that Dev was the right guy for their defense. Not as much raw talent as Mitchell has, but a lot more willing to mesh with the unit. His coming out helped bring the team together, and even though that’s faded now, it’s still an experience they all went through. A strong linebacking team can give the front line confidence, and Gerrard is doing a great job being the key on that defense.

But adding Strike…I dunno. Personally, I’d replace that boar they have on the left side, the one who keeps letting defenders in to chase Aston around the backfield. But I’m no longer employed by a UFL team, so what do I know?

I call my father in the early afternoon, and he hasn’t heard about the trade yet. We discuss it briefly; he’s more optimistic than I am about the possibility it’ll work out, and points out that, more importantly, it keeps Strike from going back to the division rival Pilots or another one of the Firebirds’ potential playoff opponents.

“How’s Yerba?” he asks when we’ve finished talking football.

“Good. Warm, for winter.”

“We’ve been below thirty for a week.”

I close my eyes to bask in the sun. “Awesome. I can’t wait to come back home.” Only after I say that do I remember that ‘home’ isn’t Hilltown any more. I don’t correct myself out loud. “How are you doing?”

“Getting by. Got the new apartment mostly set up.” He’s quiet a moment. I imagine him sitting by a window looking out at the cold city, only because I don’t know what his apartment looks like, I picture him at my window, his paw resting against the glass, spectacles halfway down the bridge of his muzzle. “I’m thinking about getting a fish.”

“Whoa,” I say. “Sure you’re ready to jump into that kind of commitment already?”

“This place doesn’t allow birds,” he says. “So.”

“Remember the lizard I had when I was eight?”

“Which one? There were three.”

“There were?” I think back. “The one that died when his heater malfunctioned in the winter.”

“It didn’t malfunction,” Father says. “It worked perfectly once I reminded you to turn it on.”

“The point is, it wouldn’t have died here. Or in Chevali for that matter.”

“Are you thinking of getting a lizard, Wiley?”

I laugh. “I just got a live-in boyfriend. I think that’s enough responsibility for one year.”

“Don’t forget to turn his heater on.”

My mind makes that dirty, and then I squelch the rejoinder because I’m talking to my father. “Helped with that last night.” I tell him briefly about our night out, leaving out the part where I set a girl on a married fox.

“Not worried about bad publicity?”

“Nobody’s said anything about it. Pity. Wish people would notice that football players can go to gay clubs and it’s not the end of the fucking world.” I say that intentionally loudly, but the people out here in tech-heavy Yerba are all cocooned in their own little worlds with their phones and conversations. One small black bird, hopping around pecking for crumbs, tilts its head and looks at me. I wonder if it has a blog.

“Remember last time you tried to get something in the paper? You ended up in jail.”

“Yeah, but it worked.”

He sighs. “Whose parent are you trying to teach a lesson to now?”

I close my eyes and turn toward the sun to feel its warmth on my fur. “Mine.”

His pause is longer than mine. “Your mother doesn’t read sports sites. And if it’s me, you can just tell me.”

“That group of hers, Families United.” I hate even saying the name. “They helped kill a college kid.” I tell him briefly about Vince King.

He’s silent for a good several seconds. “Well?” I say. “Horrible, right?”

“If that’s what happened.”

It’s my turn to be quiet. “It seems pretty clear. I mean, circumstantially.”

“Wiley, don’t get mixed up in that. Activism is one thing, but going around accusing people of what is essentially murder, that’s hard. And if you go too far, they could sue you, don’t forget that.”

“Now why would you ever think I would go too far?” Before he can answer, I say, “You can’t bring up jail twice in one conversation.”

“Oh, let me see. The time you tried to memorize the encyclopedia for Academic Challenge, the time you wore your pride jacket to church on Christmas Eve, the time you sprang your boyfriend on us at dinner…”

“That was him, not me.”

“I’m just saying there is precedent.”

My past paints a picture of me that I don’t know I want to acknowledge right now, so I go back to my main point. “If they were involved—”

“
If
.”

“—then they should pay the price for it. People should know.”

“You really think that’ll change the minds of anyone supporting them?”

I look around the small square where I’m sitting. In the café to my left, a pair of wolves sits shoulder to shoulder. Both female, I think. Nobody around seems to care. Then again, this is Yerba, so it’s probably not the best place to judge. There’s also an otter rollerblading by who is wearing nothing but a thong bikini bottom. Might be female too; his/her chest is fluffy enough that I can’t tell from here. The majority of people look like me: t-shirt, polo shirt (I’m wearing the over-large Firebirds polo I got from the owner’s plane on our way to the Hellentown game), jeans, slacks, light jackets. And while a few people look twice at the otter, nobody looks outraged. It makes me feel like I could kiss Dev right here in the square without anyone batting an eye.

“Not all of them,” I say. “Not even most of them. But maybe it’ll get people motivated to shut them down.”

“What was that story from two years ago with them? The guys who beat up that one gay fox in Kerina were members?”

I exhale. “Their wives were members, and they had pamphlets on them when they were arrested. But the national group disowned them. So there wasn’t much blowback.”

“And you think this’ll be different.”

A breeze ruffles the fur between my ears. I stretch my legs out, extend my tail, and enjoy it. “It’ll all add up. Enough of these things brought to the media form an impression in people’s minds.”

“War of attrition.”

“Exactly. And there are a lot of people like me trying to do this.”

“I find it hard to believe there are that many ex-pro-football scouts engaged in gay rights.”

I’m glad to hear his sense of humor again. “It’s an exclusive club. I got the key to the washroom just last week.”

“Speaking of…did you already have your interview?”

“Oh, yeah.” I tell him about Emmanuel and the job. “Sounds like I’m in as long as I don’t do anything stupid to piss off the other scouts.”

“Like start a gay rights campaign movement in the UFL?”

“I think as long as I don’t post some naked pics of me and Dev, I’m okay.” There was an actor, a black panther, who came out a couple years ago by posting naked pictures of him with his paw on his white-coated ermine boyfriend’s sheath.

We chat a little more. Father’s now living near my old neighborhood around Forester, so I know all the places to eat. I tell him to try Ketteridge’s and Goose’s, and for God’s sake not to go back to P.J. McGovern’s.

“We like P.J.’s,” he says. “I like P.J.’s.”

“Everything there is coated in butter or cheese or both. Seriously.”

“And your diner is much better, I expect.”

I grin. “They’re honest about it.”

“Do me a favor. Find a good place in Yerba. When you get the job there, I’ll fly out and you can take me to dinner.”

“Deal. I have a place in mind. Supposedly the chef is this amazing coyote who went and trained in Lutèce and he’s won all sorts of awards here.”

“Can you afford that?”

“Dev can. It’s our Sunday night plan. Tonight I’m eating something from a street vendor’s cart.” I pause. “I can afford
that
. As long as he doesn’t catch me.”

Father laughs, shortly. “Are you doing okay? I can send money…”

“It was a joke. I’m fine. Dev’s taking care of me. He’s got plenty of money and he’s not spending it on crazy things like some of his friends.”

There’s another short pause. “You know, if he wants someone to invest his money for him…that is my job.”

It’s my turn to be quiet. “You never offered before.”

“Well, I didn’t…know him very well, before.”

And Mother would have to have known about it. “I appreciate it. I’ll mention it and see what he says.”

We’re winding down the conversation when he says, “I’m still working out dates to move my things out of the house. Wiley, if you want to reconsider about coming home…”

“I don’t.”

“I mean. Please think about it. If you really want to, if it’s important to you, then come on home. If you’re just trying to stir up trouble, then maybe it would be best if you just let me clear out the house. We can have dinner and talk about it afterwards.”

I reach up and rub the ear the phone is clipped to. “I’m pretty sure I want to do it. It’s important to me.”

“I just don’t want you to start anything with this whole college student committing suicide thing.”

“I won’t if she doesn’t.”

He sighs. “Wiley.”

“If she’s starting to believe in these people who think nothing of making a kid feel so isolated and worthless that he believes his best option is suicide, then I think she should know about that, don’t you? And if she already knows, she should know that I know.”

“Don’t go there intending to start a fight.”

A coyote one table over has her ears perked in my direction. I lower my voice. “I’m not. But I won’t back down if she starts something.”

“No,” he says. “I guess you won’t.”

After the phone call, I feel restless, so I walk around the city some more. I go into a sports bar to watch some of the final college games of the season. The TV is better than nothing, though I keep itching to switch to a different view. Whenever I try to focus on one player in particular, I get to see about half of one play before the camera goes somewhere else.

The bar is festooned with Whalers gear, maroon and gold pennants, the iconic otter with eyepatch and harpoon all over. On the side is a board showing the Whalers’ schedule to date. They’re 6-6, with wins over Millenport, Gateway, Aventira, New Kestle, Boliat—impressive, that one—and Kerina. All except the Boliat game are games they should have won. On the flip side of the schedule, you can see where Yerba started off with a playoff hangover, losing their first three. Granted, it was a brutal start: on the road at Hellentown and Highbourne, then home against division-leading Crystal City, but they should have pulled at least one win out of that. That they’ve clawed their way back to .500 is pretty impressive. Even though Chevali is 9-3, this won’t be an easy game.

Sitting in the bar reminds me of watching games with Brian in the bars near Forester U., and that makes me think again of joining up with Equality Now in Chevali. My college protests were a long time ago and small-time compared to the national campaigns they’re doing, and having experience with this size organization would definitely serve me better with Emmanuel and Yerba, if I have to convince them to start an outreach program there.