The Front Runner (24 page)

starving, so I said no. I don't need being exploited any more than necessary . .."

And now, on top of this, it looked like Vince and Jacques were breaking up. I had always assumed that Vince would be the cruel one when the end came.

But the first night, Billy and I heard him arguing with Jacques in the next bedroom, through the thin paneled wall.

"You seduced me," said Jacques. "You were in such a big hurry. If you'd just let me find my way, maybe I wouldn't be paying a psychiatrist seventy-five dollars a week."

"Seduced you!" Vince's voice was breaking, incredulous. "You were moping around Eugene just dying for me to feel you up."

"What you did was, you played on all my insecurities," said Jacques. "You're a really insidious person. You do that with everybody. You're just an operator."

They went on and on, Jacques cutting and Vince bleeding. Finally we heard Vince crying. Billy and I looked at each other in the dark, and closed our eyes in sorrow and shame at having overheard.

How long would Billy and I last? We had already had several quarrels. Each time, we were never sure we would make up until we'd actually done it.

We tried hard to have a good time that weekend. I remember the tapping of Steve's typewriter echoing down the winding ladder stairway from the tower. I remember all of us cooking dinner together, and the drinking members of the party getting a little wrecked on Scotch and wine. We roasted a huge standing rib roast and Idaho potatoes. Billy made a bizarre salad.

That Saturday night, a huge spring storm was blowing in, and the house shuddered as the wind hit it. The noise of the surf deepened to a bellow. After the dishes were washed, Billy and I pulled on our jackets and went out for a walk on the dark beach.

We walked slowly along the sand, arms around each other, barefoot. The wind whipped Billy's bellbottoms around his ankles. His hair blew wildly and stung my cheek. In the dark, all we could see was the white

rumbling surf, and the few lonely lights of the other houses.

"I can't get Stevie's friend out of my mind," said Billy. "He messes up my dharma."

"Mine too," I said.

"You whipped people."

"I whipped grown men who paid me $200 to do it," I said. "I never tortured any children."

"Just looking at him, I think—I feel almost afraid, being happy with you. It could be taken away from us tomorrow."

I stopped and turned him to face me. "What would you do if I died?" I asked.

We were standing close together. I reached up gently and held the lapels on his leather jacket, and he clasped my wrists. I searched his face with my eyes. He looked so fine and so strange there in the dark, with the wind blowing his hair half across his face.

"Jesus, I don't know," he said in a low voice. "I haven't wanted to think about that."

"I hope we're lucky enough to die together," I said. "Like in an airplane crash or something."

"If you die first, do you want me to kill myself?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Suicide is a sin against God."

"I'll kill myself if you want me to," he said.

A black shock went through me. I could see him cutting his wrists or putting a pistol barrel in his mouth. I kept shaking my head, and found that I was trembling.

"Look, let's face it," he said. "Someday we're both going to die. Probably separately, probably you first. We have to have peace in our minds about that. That's what Buddha taught. There's just no way you're not going to lose the thing you love most. Peace is what sets you free from death."

"Do you feel you have that peace? I certainly don't."

He shook his head now. "I have a very big dread about that. Do you—" He hesitated. "Do you ever think that something might happen to one of us soon?"

"What do you mean?" My heart was beating wildly.

"People hate you more because you're the older one. They see you as having corrupted me. I'm always scared to death that someone might try to get you. Send you a bomb in the mail or something. Please be careful."

"But you're the one out there in plain sight. You're the one running."

He smiled a little. "We're both out there in front. And they always try to kill the front-runner."

We had to stop this depressing conversation. We walked on.

"Actually, we're going to be reborn," said Billy, "so why are we stewing? I wonder where our karmas will take us next. Are we going to be straight?
Women?"

I was relieved at the opportunity to smile. "You mean you want to be reborn as a gay?" I shook him a little.

He laughed, putting his arms around me. "Sure. As long as it's not as Steve's friend. Maybe I'll be reborn as your coach next time. Boy, have I got plans for you, Mr. Brown. You're gonna run 57-second quarters on your hands and knees."

The first raindrops were wetting our faces. He kissed me the way he had that first time in
Song of the Loon.

I lost count of the times we made love that weekend. We were laying up treasures for the lonely months ahead.

That night we slept with the wind shaking the house and rain lashing the windows. Spending an entire night together was still such a luxury. We went to sleep pressed tightly together, lying on our sides, Billy fitted into the curve of my body, his back against my chest, my arms around him. He was certainly not passive in our relationship, but I definitely had a fierce protec-tivist feeling. Even in sleep I had to shield him from the fury.                                                                 

The next morning, we woke before the others. It was still storming heavily, but the rain and wind were heady and warm. We pulled on T-shirts and bathing trunks, and went out.

The long beach was deserted, all footprints washed away by the rain. A lot of drift lumber and seaweed

was washed in. Huge breakers were rumbling in from far out. When they broke, they made incredible geyser-bursts of foam.

We ran east along the shore, our bodies streaming with the sweet rain. Patches of fog drifted over us. We were half-blinded by the rain blowing in our faces. Sometimes the wind hit us so hard that we staggered. But we kept pushing along, laughing.

Finally we were two miles up the shore. There were no houses here. All along the lonely dunes, the grass blew flat in the wind, and glittered in the rain.

We stopped there and Billy circled back to me. His curls were plastered to his head and neck, and his wet glasses blurred his eyes. He was laughing, and the rain was running down his thighs. I could see every bone and muscle in his torso through his wet T-shirt. He caught me by the shoulder, and I grasped his hips and drew him against me.

"You're the sexiest drowned rat I ever saw," I said.

We kissed with the clean rain lashing us, and our mouths tasted like rain. I peeled his trunks down around his thighs.

Billy started laughing. "Do you think there are photographers skulking around behind the dunes over there?"

"Listen," I said, "even if they get pictures in all this rain, where are they going to sell them?
Ladies' Home Journal?"

We put our clothes on the wet sand and lay on them, so we wouldn't get too gritty. His supple body was bent double under me, and after the cool rain, the heat of his entrails was a shock. On my hands and knees I cradled him under me. He was impaled, but safe there—I took the slashing rain on my back. Pressed hard into the curls between his buttocks, I looked down into his face. His eyes were shut against the rain. The tendons in his neck stood up whitely, and sand stuck to his hair as he rolled his head back and forth in a puddle. I wanted him to feel that hot gush clear up under his heart. The noise of the waves deafened us—I couldn't hear him moaning.

Then he had me on my back and took his sweet re-

venge. Straddling my torso, smiling pridefully a little, he jerked himself off over my face. That image of him stays burned in my memory: He was kneeling with knees spread, the rain streaming down him, his hair full of sand, and behind him the white boiling bursting waves. The roaring deafened us. I scarcely felt the warm spurts on my face—the rain sluiced it off right away.

We'd scarcely finished when a monster wave sent a flood of swirling foam extra far up the beach. It caught us cold, and in a second we were drenched, foamed, freezing, stung with sand. It nearly swept us back down the beach into the surf. We grabbed our clothes frantically and got up laughing so much we could hardly speak.

"Talk about boys in the sand," said Billy.

Endless gay films feature love scenes on the beach-he was alluding to this.

"The boys in the sand are a mess," I said. "They get clamshells up their ass."

We threw our clothes farther back on the beach, and Billy left his glasses there. Then he waded a little way into the icy surf. It wasn't very romantic swimming. The enormous waves were crumpling down with terrifying force, and every time the sweeping foam came up, it all but sucked us off our feet. Billy, with typical recklessness, started out to dive under the waves, but I held him back. So we just waded around thigh deep in the foam, watching each other dive and come up, the foam draining down over pur genitals.

Billy waded over to me and embraced me. Then he shoved me, so that we both went over in the water. We wrestled there at the edge of the surf, laughing, rolling over and over, being really rough with each other. Another big wave went over us and we nearly drowned.

We crawled out plastered with seaweed and sand, still laughing, and lay gasping safely away from the surf.

"We have to be out of our minds," said Billy.

"Do you think they have enough pictures?" I said.

"Am I behaving like a Virgo?" said Billy. "Seriously.

Is a Virgo supposed to let himself get balled on the beach in broad daylight in the middle of a hurricane?"

"Only by a Leo," I said.

We lay around choking with laughter, making various silly remarks like this. Finally we got up and went over to our clothes. The first thing Billy put on was his glasses.

"Men never make passes at boys who wear glasses," I said.

That broke us up again.

We stood around for a minute letting the rain wash the salt and sand off us.

Finally we put on our sticky sandy clothes and started walking back. We had sand in our crotches, and it itched. We walked with our arms around each other. The rain was finally stopping.

"Sometimes I think back on how afraid I was to love you," he said. "It makes me laugh now."

"Afraid?"

"I was always afraid of loving someone as strong as myself."

Those words moved me even more than when he'd said he loved me. I couldn't have stood anything effeminate in him.

Vince passed us with a sad little wave, going out for his own run alone. Then we passed a woman in a sou'wester, going out to walk her dog. She threw us an odd glance. We knew she was thinking that the fairies were moving in from Cherry Grove. It was a good thing she hadn't come along half an hour earlier.

Back in the house, the others were getting up with their sorrows and fixing their breakfasts, but we managed to stay happy. The hot shower was good, and dry clothes. We sat at the big redwood table by the window. I had eggs and toast and hot tea. Billy drank milk and ate some ripe pears, rubbing the juice off his chin. But then Steve and the Angel sat down, and Steve was trying to make him eat, and we both found it hard to keep laughing.

All that day Billy and I tried to shake off the sorrow. We inflicted the sight of our affection on the others. It was cold and dank in the house, so we built a fire in

the franklin stove. Billy and I sat wrapped up in a blanket together on the plaid couch. John Sive watched us with a. sad little smile and shook his head enviously.

"Oo la la," said Delphine.

The Angel Gabriel watched us curiously too. Possibly it was the first time that he had ever seen anything but sadism between two men. We put on a little show for him, kissing each other tenderly. The Angel watched with a grave stoned expression.

By afternoon the rain had stopped. The gale was still blowing, but it had shifted and was now blowing out to sea. The sky was a dark ominous blue. The ocean was a weird green. The huge waves were still rolling in, but now the wind was blowing their tops off. As each wave curled over, a cloud of snowy spume blew back from it like a comet's tail.

It was an awesome spectacle, and we all went out on the beach to look at it.

Then we walked over onto the National Seashore. The whole area was deserted. We might have been the last people left on earth after some terrible natural disaster, and we would, of course, not be able to re-populate it.

We wandered barefoot along the boardwalk that winds through the park. All around us, nature was giving life. In the marshes, the cinnamon ferns were pushing up their great silky heads. On the dunes, the bayberry was coming into bloom. We bent to sniff the masses of little waxen white flowers, but the wind blew the fragrance away before it could reach our nostrils. I thought how incredible it was that a drop of my semen on Billy's skin, or of his on mine, would not root into life somehow. Nothing of our feeling would survive our deaths.

I broke off a spray of bayberry and brushed it on his lips, so that they were yellow with pollen. He looked at me, possibly understanding what was bothering me, and kissed me so that both our mouths were dusted yellow.

We were six threatened men. Only Billy and I walked holding hands. Each of the others ambled along alone with his thoughts. Vince was hunched,

diffident, hands in pockets. Jacques was tight-faced, staring. Delphine played distractedly with his fluttering chiffon, scarf. John Sive strolled heavily, hands clasped behind his back European style. Steve kept looking anxiously at the Angel, whose hair was a tangled mess in the wind. Finally, gently, he took the boy's hand, but the Angel pulled his hand away.

We walked down along the tide ponds on the bay side of the island. There the wind ruffled the flat water.

"Look," said Jacques softly, "a snowy egret."

We stood still. Across the nearest pond, near the inlet, the tall bird stood in the shallow water. It was" startlingly white and pure against the desolate stretch of salt grass beyond. It waded along slowly, bending its slender neck down, looking at us suspiciously. Then  Vince moved, walking on, and the bird flapped up. It was frighteningly white against the stormy sky.