Mike and Danny:
Restless Hearts
by Rock Lane Cooper
This is
a work of homoerotic fiction. If you are offended by such material or if you
are not allowed access to it under the laws where you live, please exit now. This
work is copyrighted by the author and may not be copied or distributed in any
form without the written permission of the author, who may be contacted at: rocklanecooper@yahoo.com
Note that these stories, including this
one, are not an endorsement of unsafe sex. They take place many years before
the appearance of AIDS and before it was standard practice to use condoms to
reduce the risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases. Remember
always: that was then, this is now. Sex is precious, and so are life and
health.
Chapter 3
On the road to
In the end, Ty
had come along without a complaint. Rich had made love to him there in the
dark, on their last night at Mike’s, and afterwards Ty
had fallen asleep in his arms. He loved this tender young man, so different from
the other men he had known and loved in his life.
He let himself think for a moment about
the men in his platoon. In a way, he’d come to love one or two of the grunts
who humped the jungle with him, but then he quickly let go of those memories.
They would keep him awake all night, and nighttime was no time to be
remembering anything that had anything to do with
He reached farther back, and if he was
careful, he could avoid the painful memories there, too. Though he had finally
seen Kirk for what he was—a real sonofabitch—the
times with him had often made his still-young heart sing with joy he’d never
known before.
He’d give anything to feel that young
again, not knowing what he’d come to know of the world. And he wondered what it
would be like to meet Kirk now. What would he say to him that had gone unsaid
all this time? What would he feel?
And could he recover something of his
lost self? Not all of it, of course, but even just a memory of it, so he could
think of his life as a whole, not split apart, like the nerves that connected
the present with his past had been severed. And he understood now that one was
no good without the other.
Mike had helped him see that. Being here
again after all these years, where Mike had once given him shelter from the
storm when there was no place else to go, he’d got close enough to the trusting
and hopeful boy he once was.
If he saw Kirk again, would even more of
that time in his life come back to him? Or would it just push his past farther
out of reach?
Kirk had been the first real love of his
life. He’d fallen for him, and he’d fallen hard. And so it had taken him a long
time to realize that Kirk didn’t know how to love him back. He was all wrapped
up in himself. He didn’t know or didn’t care when anything he did or said hurt
someone else.
So fooling around with other guys was
something he couldn’t resist. Crazy Frank who found them when they were on the
run and got the two of them that night into his camper, that was one time. And
then getting himself mixed up with that college boy Bobby was another. Rich had
discovered them together giggling and naked in the bathroom at Ted’s house,
Bobby bent over the sink and Kirk behind him with his big old hard-on.
And Bobby had to be a shit, too, because
he’d been sleeping with Ted, who was a decent guy, and behaving like Ted meant
something to him. Which was apparently the case, until Kirk showed up and
couldn’t pass up having some fun at everyone else’s expense.
Yeah, it was hard to say whether seeing
Kirk again after all these years would help or not. Still, he’d been curious
one day when he came into the house and found Mike on the phone talking with
someone who turned out to be Kirk, his nephew.
“He’s working on a ranch up in the Sandhills,” Mike said when Rich asked about him. “He cowboyed for Don a while—you remember Don? Me and him used
to be old friends. I guess we still are—then he threw in with some other
rancher he met out there. According to him, they’re in business together.”
And Rich had learned just where Kirk was—the
name of the ranch and how to find it. He’d filed the information away as he did
almost everything else, not knowing for sure why it was worth keeping.
As he rode now on the open highway, with Ty tucked onto the bike right behind him, the trip westward
toward
But as they rode on, one hour becoming
two, he found himself thinking again of Kirk, and the fact that the ranch where
he worked was up ahead of them, off the road about fifty miles. To stop there
would add three maybe four hours to the trip, and that was only if Kirk was
around the ranch somewhere, easy to find, and they didn’t stay long.
Yet a short while seemed like all he’d
need—just to say a quick hello and be gone again. They’d still make
As they got to
Use your head, he heard himself saying.
You’re asking for trouble. The guy’s a stupid prick. He fucked you over, and
he’s just going to piss you off all over again.
But when he came to the exit in
“OK,” Ty said.
And they rode north through town, past
the signs pointing to Buffalo Bill’s Ranch, and then out into the open countryside
again, heading north now away from the flat river valley into the rolling,
grassy ridges that were the Sandhills.
— § —
Ted had been surprised—just plain
surprised. After years of being on his own he’d given up finding someone who’d
stick around long enough to make himself at home. Then there was suddenly Ed—as
unlikely a man as anyone who’d ever crossed paths with him—who moved in and
stayed.
Ed didn’t understand anything about Ted.
His idea of art was matadors painted on black velvet, and he’d puzzled over
Ted’s collection of jazz records as someone would whose idea of music ranged
from Buck Owens on the one hand to Waylon Jennings on the other.
But like a true salesman, he never let
that stop him. He wanted Ted to like him, and anything out of the ordinary for
him—like reading a book with hard covers—he was open to.
He’d learned about fine whiskey while
drinking in bars with prospective customers, and he’d ventured into restaurants
with them where there were foreign words on the menu. He knew how to adapt, and
it had often paid off. There was nothing to be gained by being set in one’s
ways.
He’d found Ted’s copy of Catch-22 and
spent several days around the house in his underwear, slowly reading it,
laughing sometimes, shaking his head at others, muttering “Fuck, that Yossarian,” and putting it down to go to the refrigerator
for another beer.
He’d stand behind Ted for a while,
thoughtfully watching him at work on another painting, sliding one hand down
the back of his jeans or reaching around him to unzip his fly and slip his
fingers inside in search of his dick—like he was after something to just hold
onto. Then he’d go back to the book and disappear into it for another hour.
Finally, sitting on the back porch with
his feet up on the railing, he’d read the last page and just stared out over
the fence into the cornfield that grew behind the house. Ted had found him
there when the afternoon light started to fail and he’d had to quit, the sun
dropping behind the trees outside and filling the room where he worked with
shadows.
“Where did you find a book like that?” Ed
said.
“Someone gave it to me,” Ted said.
“Anyway, I believe books find you. You don’t find them.”
“What kinda guy
was it—if it was a guy?”
Ted thought back a moment. “Actually, it
was somebody you know. It was Danny.”
“Figures. Danny, the professor. He would
read something like that.”
“You must have liked it. You finished
it.”
“Like? I dunno.
I just wanted to see how it turned out.”
Ted wanted him to talk more about it, but
he got the idea Ed wasn’t ready for that. He’d have to mull it over for a
while—if he was the kind of man given to mulling, and Ted doubted it. Ed never
seemed to give much thought to anything. He always seemed to know exactly what
he wanted and went after it. Of course, there was a first time for everything.
He looked down at Ed from where he stood,
leaning into the door jamb and wiping the paint from his hands with a cloth.
Ed’s bare feet were still on the porch railing, one foot crossed over the
other. He’d put on his jeans and a flannel shirt at some point during the day,
because it was cool where he sat on the shady side of the house.
The hair on the crown of his head was
starting to get thin, and Ted knew it was the reason he wore a hat whenever he
left to go somewhere. His big shoulders made the shirt pull tight across his
chest, and he’d left the top of it unbuttoned, the hair there thick and pushing
through.
He’d lamented once as Ted had admired his
naked body that he’d like to know some way to transplant what grew on his chest
to where it was disappearing on his head.
“Man, don’t ever do that,” Ted had told
him. “I like you this way.”
And it was the truth. He’d always had a
fondness for older men. A cowboy who probably wasn’t much more than thirty at
the time and worked for a rancher down the road when Ted was growing up had
helped out with the spring and fall branding.
Lean and tall in his levi’s
and boots, smoking his roll-your-owns, and grinning down at Ted from his horse,
he was the first man Ted had fallen in love with. All of ten or twelve at the
time, he couldn’t take his eyes off the man, riding so easy in the saddle as he
dragged calves to the fire and throwing a rope with such grace he made it look
like a kind of magic.
Coming into the ranch house for dinner
that first day, he’d taken off his hat to sit at the table, while Ted’s mom and
his sister set plates and platters of steaming food on it, and Ted had seen him
now as he really was—the top of his head almost bald. It was as if stepping
down from his horse and coming indoors, he’d taken all his clothes off and sat
there naked.
Ted felt himself flush with an excitement
he’d never known before. And though the cowboy had talked most of the time with
Ted’s dad, who sat at the head of the table, he’d glance over now and then at
Ted, to give him a wink, like there was some kind of secret between the two of
them.
Later, at the end of the day, they’d
toasted the calves’ nuts in what was left of the fire, and the cowboy had
joined them, his spurs jingling as he squatted there in the dust of the corral.
He dipped his fingers into the pan, while they were still hot, and popped two
into his mouth. They were tough and chewy, but they went down well with a can
of beer, and Ted’s dad handed the cowboy one from an ice chest in the back of
his pickup.
“Put hair on ya,” he said, winking again
at Ted. “That’s what they say.” He laughed lifting his hat and stroking the top
of his head. “Course you can’t believe everything they say.”
Ted would have given anything at that moment
to go home with him and be his buddy forever. It was a love so profound he felt
like he could float on air. He stood almost helpless with his feelings,
watching the man put his horse in his trailer and drive away at the end of the
day with only a quick so long and a wave of his hand. That night he had lain
awake for hours, unable to go to sleep with the yearning that filled him.
Over the years, he’d known a few other
men like that, but none had gripped his heart and soul with such intensity.
He’d heard talk of first love and how nothing ever comes close to it again. And
he wished that there was a memory he could fetch up of consummating that love,
a night of sweaty sex in the bunkhouse with this man—just to make it complete.
Instead, he’d made do with the ones who
came along years later in his life, when he was old enough for sex—but too old
for the love that a boy can feel. If there was a God who created man, he’d made
the error of letting love sweep through the heart way before the penis is ready
for the job it can do. By then, the one you’ve fallen head over heels in love
with is long gone.
As the years passed, there were just
these odd traces of it that showed up unexpectedly, like Ed, who would probably
never steal his heart, but who never disappointed him either—not in bed anyway.
Ed was happy to try anything, and he knew
an endless number of ways to do it. If you had to choose between love and sex,
Ed made the choice easy. With him, the heart was a fickle and unreliable organ,
but the penis was one you could count on pretty much always.
Instead of mulling over Catch-22, Ed got
to thinking about something else. And he’d come up with this scheme to go back
to work as a salesman—and not any kind of sales job would do. He’d become
convinced that—using his old razzle-dazzle that had lined his pockets with
commissions for big ticket stuff like thousand-dollar saddles and expensive
cars—he could sell Ted’s paintings.
It would please him to be back in
business again—his savings were running low anyway—and it tickled him even more
to be going into business for Ted. While it may not have been deep love they
felt for each other, it was clear they were both truly fond of one another. And
it was a way for them to keep a connection going that kept that fondness alive.
So Ed thought, anyway. Though Ted
couldn’t see how it would work. Ed knew nothing about art or how people bought
it. That, of course, didn’t seem to discourage him.
While Ted thought it was an idea that
would run its course before Ed ever put it into action, he did nothing to stop
him. And after a trip into town, Ed had come back with a Polaroid camera.
“I’ve always wanted one of these,” he
said, loading it up with a cartridge of film. And while Ted stood at his easel,
he started snapping pictures, ripping them from the camera and tossing the
paper wrappings on the floor to study them.
“Turn this way a little more,” he said
now. “Smile a little. Yeah, that’s it.” And he took another.
“Now give me that look when you’re
pulling off your pants at night,” Ted said, grinning.
“You want me to pull off my pants?”
“No, just the look.”
“What are you taking these for?”
“Just do what I say, OK?” Ed wasn’t
impatient, just determined to get what he wanted.
“Like this?”
“No, not that. Get that look, you know,
when I’m lying there and you know you’re about to get the best blowjob in your
life.”
“I dunno.
What’s that look like?”
Ed lowered the camera and gave Ted a sly,
sultry grin. “Like that,” he said.
“You gotta be kidding.”
“What, you want me to get naked to make
this easier for ya?” Ed said and put down the camera to pull off his clothes.
“Wait a minute. Does this have something
to do with selling my paintings?”
“It’s marketing,” Ed said, like he was
talking to a slow-witted seventh grader. “People are gonna
want to know what you look like.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“That’s it, that’s the look.”
“Disbelief?”
“If you say so.” He snapped another
picture.
And it went on like this for a while, Ed
trying different angles and giving him more instructions—“Unbutton your shirt a
little more”—until he’d shot up all the film.
“You’re not going to show these to
anybody,” Ted said when he looked at the pictures.
“Man, they’re gonna
love you.”
“No, they’re gonna
think you’re nuts.”
“You just wait,” Ed said, reaching up to
pinch Ted’s cheek. “You—just—wait.”
— § —
When Virgil saw Brian at his door, he
couldn’t believe his eyes, and he couldn’t help wanting to say, “What the fuck
are you doing here? I thought I’d never see you again.” But after a look in
Brian’s eyes, he knew something was up, and he decided he’d wait to find out
before he said what was on his mind.
Sitting in the Broken Wheel, a bar way
off campus where a few of the boys from the baseball team liked to slip off to
without Coach Stern finding out, Brian had ordered them a pitcher, putting a
five-dollar bill out on the table for the waitress. When it came, he poured
himself a beer and, as Virgil said later to Marty, it took him no time to start
crying in it.
Brian had spent the summer close to home,
working in his uncle’s carpet-laying business, covering people’s perfectly good
hardwood floors with shag. He’d let his hair and his sideburns grow and started
a mustache because his girlfriend Roxanne thought it made him look stylish and
less like a country hick, which he supposed he was.
To Virgil, who was no follower of
fashion, he looked a little ridiculous. “What’s Coach Stern have to say about
it?” he wanted to know.
Brian just shrugged and said he’d been
avoiding the coach, and besides, what he did off-season was his own business.
“He can go soak his head, for all I care,” he said, bitterly.
“I thought the two of you were real
close.”
“Well, we’re not. He’s a pain in the
ass.”
“Could have fooled me,” Virgil said, and
if Brian had been listening to him, he’d have heard the sarcasm.
But he was too submerged in what turned
out to be his own misery to notice. “It was Coach Stern told me to stop being
friends with you. It was him busted us up.”
Virgil was speechless for a moment. “What
the hell for?”
“He was always telling me I was all-star
material, and I should stop hanging around anybody who wasn’t.”
“Bastard.”
“Yeah, he’s an asshole.”
“No, I meant you. For believing him.”
Brian didn’t miss the tone in Virgil’s
voice this time. “I know. I owe you an apology.”
“That’s what this is about?” and he
pointed to the pitcher of beer. “You could have got that over in a minute and
saved yourself the money.”
“No, it’s not about that.”
“So I don’t get the apology?”
“OK, I’m sorry, all right?” Brian said
and then forged on. “I need to talk to you about something else.”
Virgil was ready to pour the pitcher of
beer over Brian’s head, but he stopped himself and just froze where he sat,
willing himself to listen.
“I got myself into sort of a predicament,”
Brian was saying. And he proceeded to explain the whole thing with Roxanne.
The summer had been kind of rocky. They
were having a lot of sex for a while, but he realized he was getting a little
bored. The fun had just started going out of it, and he’d begun noticing this
woman at his uncle’s office who kept the books, answered the phone, and paid
the bills. She was a little older, divorced, but still had a lot of miles on
her—as Brian put it.
Her name was Sally. And for a long time,
he’d suspected his uncle of carrying on with her when they had the place to
themselves, which was often. His uncle would leave a job for no reason, while
Brian and the other carpet-layer kept working, and he’d come back two hours
later in a different mood, like he’d gone to a bar for a stiff one.
“But I think I know where he was getting
a stiff one,” Brian said and poured himself another beer. “And he wasn’t taking
it home to my aunt.”
“Do you think she knows?”
“My aunt has Jesus. She and my uncle gave
up caring about each other years ago.” Forlorn now, he seemed to be drinking to
keep ahead of a tide of creeping misery.
“Anyway, all I figured was, she was
available.” He was talking about Sally, the woman in his uncle’s office. “But
not for me.”
Then one evening he’d stopped by looking
for his uncle, and she’d been there doing some paperwork—estimating
taxes—whatever that was, he didn’t know. She’d been home and come back, dressed
in something casual, like she had a date coming by later.
But she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to
get done what she was doing—or for him to go—and offered him a coke out of the
fridge in the back room. So he hung around for a while, just to see what would
happen.
Well, it happened, and it didn’t take
long. She had ample breasts that he’d been noticing for a while, and before
long—it all happened so quickly—he’d taken them out where he could get a good
look at them. Meanwhile, she was just laughing like he was a kid who didn’t
know how to behave himself.
And in about as much time as it takes to
tell it, they’d spun the office chair around a few times and ended up on the
floor—uncarpeted—where he’d got his hands up her skirt.
“There’s a couch in your uncle’s office,”
she’d said when it was clear they weren’t going to stop what they were doing.
The mention of his uncle had given him a
momentary pause, and the thought of doing it right there in sight of the old
guy’s golf trophies and family pictures on the shelf kind of squelched the urge
he’d already given in to. But getting to his feet and feeling how hard his dick
had gotten in his jeans, he figured he could put all that out of his mind. It
was an opportunity that might not come again.
They had relocated to the couch, and in
the minute or two it took to put on a rubber and fuck her—his heart pounding
with excitement—he’d suddenly had a clear vision of everything that mattered to
him about life. And Roxanne was not part of the picture.
Sally had hung onto him there on the
couch, long after he’d come, and he’d stayed so hard that she was able to keep
him inside her and finally have an orgasm of her own. And what he loved was
that she didn’t start right away babbling like Roxanne about how wonderful
their life would be together and when could they set a wedding date so she and
her mother could get busy with everything they needed to take care of—her
dress, the guest list, the invitations, the flowers, the reception, and on and
on.
Meanwhile, he’d be lying there beside
her, his dick shriveling, and wishing he could just put on his pants and get
the hell out of there.
With Sally, as they pressed together on
the couch, there was just this mellow afterglow, like they were on a hot air
balloon gently descending. She’d wanted nothing more from him, just the
pleasure of his warm body next to hers, and she’d sighed and stretched like a
cat, pressing her groin against his and giving him little kisses all over his
face, mothering him.
Afterwards, he stood in the john pulling
the sagging, full rubber from his dick and flushing it down the toilet. He
hadn’t quite come back down to earth, and he had yet to completely grasp that
he’d crossed some point of no return.
When he came out, Sally was back at her
desk, hard at work again, punching keys on a calculator. He stood beside her a
moment, not sure what to say or do, then reached for the coke that he’d left
half finished beside her typewriter. She didn’t stop working or even look up.
“Thanks,” he started to say.
“Go, Brian, just go,” she said, waving
him away. “I’ve got to get this in the mail yet tonight.”
A little crushed, he had backed toward
the door, aware that whatever had just happened was now over, and that to Sally
he was just his uncle’s nephew after all. He saw his ball cap lying on the
floor where it had fallen. He bent down to pick it up and just as quickly left.
But the real tough part was still ahead.
He didn’t know what to do about Roxanne. And until he figured something out,
they had carried on like nothing had happened. Only his growing lack of
enthusiasm finally got to irritating her and they had a big blow-up. Several of
them, in fact, for Roxanne seemed to think a good shouting match now and then
would clear things up.
“Keep me in line is more like it,” Brian
said.
“So what happened?”
“Trial separation, she’s calling it,”
Brian said and shook his head. “Can’t last long enough for me.”
He poured himself another beer and set
the pitcher down again.
“And here’s the worst part. Now she says
she’s missed a period. She thinks she’s pregnant.”
It seems he’d run out of rubbers once—he’d
have had an extra if it hadn’t been for Sally—and they’d taken a chance anyway.
But he thought Roxanne was just making it all up to force his hand. And he’d
told her so. Which had been the cause of another blow-up.
“Thing is,” he said, “I got no place to
stay. I was wondering if I could move in with you. You know, for a while.”
“I dunno,”
Virgil said. “You’d have to sleep on the floor.”
“S’okay. I got
a sleeping bag, and I can get an air mattress from home.”
“I still dunno.
I’d have to ask my roommate.”
“Why would he mind?”
You don’t have a clue, do you, Virgil
wanted to say, but he let it go.
“Virgil, I want us to be friends again,”
Brian said and gave him a sorrowful look. “We used to have fun together. I’ve
been missin’ that.”
“I thought you didn’t like me talking to
that guy over in the counseling center.”
“You still doing that?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see a problem,” Brian said,
taking a drink of his beer, while he seemed to reconsider what he’d just said.
“Anyway, I don’t care about that anymore. You can talk to anybody you want.”
Virgil just sat there for a while looking
at Brian, curious whether he could get back any of the old feelings for him,
but only remembering how miserable Brian had made him feel when he walked out.
“You cut me cold, you sonofabitch,”
he said.
“I told you I was sorry.”
Now Virgil said it. “You don’t have a
clue, do you.”
Brian just got this hang-dog look, like
it was the last thing he expected, to be betrayed by an old friend now that he
was down on his luck with no place to go.
“So I hung out with him all night,”
Virgil explained to Marty the next morning. “He was practically suicidal—well,
that’s not true. I know what that feels like—but he wouldn’t let me leave him
there by himself.”
So after the bar closed, Brian had driven
them around town in his car, still talking, finally winding up at Mr. Donut,
drinking coffee to keep awake.
“If I’d come back to the apartment, he
would have followed me, but for him that would have just been a foot in the
door,” Virgil said. “And I don’t want him here.”
“You sure?” Marty said, like he wasn’t.
“You said he was your best friend.”
“You’re worth ten of him,” Virgil said.
“Hell, a hundred. I ain’t gonna
let anything or anyone come between you and me.”
Marty grinned at him, like he had no idea
what to say.
“You got that?” Virgil said.
Marty just kept on grinning.
Continued . . .
More
stories. There are links to all the
Mike and Danny stories, plus a conversation with the author, pictures of the
characters, and some cowboy poetry at the Rock Lane Cooper home page. Click here.
© 2007 Rock Lane Cooper
rocklanecooper@yahoo.com