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 10
Baxter goes to town; Ed considers what
might have been; Mike gets a visitor; Ty starts a
journey home.
Baxter was up before daybreak, turning on
the propane heater to take the chill off in the trailer. He stood in the
kitchen with a cup of black coffee, already dressed for the day. Lonnie still
lay in bed, always waiting until the very last minute—or past it—to respond to
Baxter’s “Up and at ’em. Get your britches on. The
day’s waitin’.”
He heard the sound of a truck as it drove
up and came to a stop outside, and soon there was a knock on the door. It was
Kirk.
“You got business in
“What’s that?”
“Someone needs a ride down there to catch
a bus.” And Kirk told Baxter to drive over to the doublewide and pick up the
young man Ty who’d showed up at the ranch two days
ago and had been staying with him and Owen. “And while you’re in town, you’ll
want to maybe stop by the nursing home and see your dad,” Kirk said. “How’s he
been doin’?”
“He’s doin’ OK.
But the boss is hell-bent on gettin’ that corral
fence done we been workin’ on.”
“Don’t worry about the old man. I’ll tell
him something,” Kirk said. “Think you can be back by
“I’ll give it all I got.”
“A man can’t ask for more’n
that,” Kirk said and gave him a quick nod before he ducked back through the
door and was gone.
All Baxter knew from Lonnie was that this
young man Ty—hardly much older than Lonnie
himself—had ridden in with a guy who’d taken off again, leaving him behind,
after giving Kirk a good punch in the nose. Lonnie, who’d been the only one to
see it happen, hadn’t been able to tell Baxter any more than that.
Baxter put down his coffee and walked to
the back of the trailer, where he switched on the light and roused Lonnie, who
looked back at him with his face screwed up and
squinted eyes barely open. Baxter could never bring himself to get angry with
the boy. The love between them was utter and bottomless. He touched his hand
now to Lonnie’s shoulder, the muscle firm and like sinew under the skin.
“You’re on your own this morning, pardner,” he said. “I’m takin’
that boy Ty into town to catch a bus. And I’m gonna see my dad while I’m there, too.”
“Can I come along?”
“You got a barn full of horses to look
after. And when the truck comes from the lumberyard, you gotta tell them where
we want them railroad ties.”
“Yessir.” Lonnie curled up against Baxter, who had sat down on
the edge of his bed. “Some day I’d like to meet your pa,” he said.
“You will.” Baxter brushed his rough
knuckles against the boy’s cheek, where he’d been trying to grow long
sideburns. The whiskers there were thin and still patchy, but he wasn’t giving
up, and it amused Baxter how much he wanted to be regarded as a man.
He ached to stay just where he was,
Lonnie pressed against him, but the sooner he changed his clothes and got
going, the more time he’d have with his dad before he had to come back to the
ranch. He leaned down to nuzzle under Lonnie’s ear with his nose, and Lonnie
put both arms around his neck and held him.
Baxter let himself enjoy the warmth of
Lonnie’s body and his young man’s smell. He put one hand on his butt and under
the blanket could feel the muscles flex as he pressed himself tighter to
Baxter. From the strength in his embrace, he was guessing the boy had a fierce
erection—something that came to him so easily and simply with the smallest gesture
of affection.
From the start, Baxter had made a rule
about sex in the morning. It was no different from sleeping late. There was no
room for it in a ranch hand’s schedule.
“Just for once,” Lonnie would beg. “It’ll
be quick.”
“Maybe for you, buster,” Baxter had said,
“and maybe if I was your age.” And he’d tried to explain that “quick” wasn’t
what he liked or wanted or was even capable of, especially when they’d just had
sex the night before. And he wished at those times that he was nineteen again like
Lonnie and so easily fired up.
“I don’t want you my age,” Lonnie had
said once, all serious. “Maybe you wish I was old as you.”
Baxter, in moments of reflection, had let
himself have thoughts like this. He would have felt more sure
about the whole thing if the two of them could look forward to growing old
together. But what was the fairness in being attached to someone who’d be a
doddering old fool while you were still in the prime of life? And while Lonnie
was too young to see that now, wasn’t it wrong that Baxter let him ignore it?
He didn’t know, and all he knew how to do
was ignore it himself and stay with Lonnie until the day came when their lives
took a turn in different directions, or Lonnie finally got old enough to see
that he’d made a mistake. And they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.
Lonnie finally gave him a long kiss on
the cheek and then let go of him. “I know, you gotta get goin’,”
he said and stirred under the blanket, stretching out in the bed and putting
his arms behind his head.
Baxter stood to put on a fresh shirt, and
while he changed he watched as Lonnie got up. There was a big hard-on in his
underwear, and he hurried barefoot to the bathroom to take a morning piss.
A while later, Baxter was following the
headlights of his truck along the sandy road that went past Owen and Kirk’s
place on the way to the hardtop. As he pulled into the lane that led over to
their doublewide, his thoughts still lingered on Lonnie, who’d got dressed with
his usual lightning speed, gulped down a cup of hot coffee, and was walking out
the door right behind Baxter as he left.
Baxter had watched Lonnie and Ty as they’d all spent the afternoon together working on
the corral fence. Since the two of them were nearly the same age, he expected
them to strike up a friendship, and he waited for some sign of interest from
Lonnie. But the boy had hardly spoken to Ty and
rarely even looked at him.
Baxter had seen the confusion and
bewilderment in Ty’s face, and he’d done his best to
put him at ease, hoping Lonnie would do the same. But he realized after a time
that Lonnie’s unwillingness to be friendly was his way of sticking close to
Baxter. It was a show of loyalty. No one was going to come between them. And
Baxter got a sense again of how often in Lonnie’s life his trust in another man
had been betrayed.
“Don’t worry about me, pardner” he’d said that night after Ty
was gone. “I’ll always be right here, as long as you want me.” And Lonnie had
beamed as he put his arms around him.
— § —
When Ed woke up, he was alone in LeRoy’s bed. The first light of day filtered through the
curtains, and his eye fell again on the rows of framed photos on the walls and
the bureau top. It was like a big crowd of friendly faces—black and
white—waiting for him to join them for another day under the sun on this big
old revolving world.
Ed had his share of relatives, like
anyone else, and during his life he’d known plenty of people, but they were
filed away somewhere in his head—no more than vague memories slowly fading. LeRoy with all his photographs seemed to keep himself surrounded with everyone who ever mattered to him
and, though some were dead and gone, never letting go of them.
And among that number was Ed. How
surprised he had been to see himself there among the rest, a smiling face in
the crowd. He got out of bed now, naked, the air warm on his skin—he could hear
a furnace blower running somewhere below him in the basement—and stepped to the
bureau to take the picture of him and LeRoy, to look
at it again.
There he was, a younger version of
himself, on a day long forgotten. Yet he was smiling big as you please, as if
it was a time and place that would always be remembered—if not treasured. How
could he let a memory like that slip away?
But spending the night with LeRoy had been more than it would have been for the man he
was back then. He’d been swept along by feelings he never knew he had.
Somewhere between the first and second times he’d come, arms and legs locked
around LeRoy, he’d realized that every night they’d
spent together like this was a link in a chain that connected them not just to
each other but to the past.
With LeRoy he
could feel as young as he’d been when they first met. More than a decade had
gone by, yes, and he wasn’t the ramrod machine he remembered once being. But
with LeRoy, he was still in some way the young man in
the photograph, maybe a little slower and fatter—he’d never get into those same
wranglers today—but in his heart and soul hardly a day older.
Laughing and discovering again the
pleasure of sucking each other—experiencing the old familiar taste and feel of LeRoy’s cock in his mouth, and recognizing the particular
tug of LeRoy’s tongue on his own—Ed felt the cares
that had been dogging him fade away, while memories rushed back to fill the
present and make passing time stand still. He wanted to hang onto that. And the
only way he knew how to do it was to hang onto LeRoy.
He’d taken the photo back with him to
bed, when the door opened and LeRoy stood there in a
bathrobe holding a coffee mug in one hand.
“Mornin’, pardner,” he said, handing the mug to Ed. “There’s gonna be flapjacks for breakfast soon as you want ’em.”
They sat together side by side on the bed
now, and LeRoy stroked his back in slow motion, from
the nape of his neck down to his butt.
“If you like that picture you can have
it,” he said. “I got another’n somewhere.”
“Naw, it’s
yours. It should stay here with you. Anyway, I’ll know where it’s at if I want
to see it again.”
LeRoy rested his arm across his shoulders now. “You sayin’ I’m gonna see you again?”
Ed thought of how he could have been a
truer friend to LeRoy all these years and felt a kind
of sorrow wash through him. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”
“I’d ride along with you to
Ed set down the coffee and the
photograph, then pulled open the front of LeRoy’s bathrobe, slipping one hand inside against his warm
skin. When he discovered the robe was all LeRoy was
wearing, he turned toward him to push him backward onto the bed.
“One more for the road?” he said,
crawling on top of him.
LeRoy gave a low, gentle laugh. “One
more for the road.”
— § —
Mike stood at the window of Danny’s
apartment and looked out at the parking lot as Danny got into his Camaro, dressed for work and carrying his briefcase. He
backed the car out of his space and looked up at Mike to wave. Then he was
driving away.
It was still overcast, and fog lingered
in the trees along the creek that flowed beyond the parking lot. Willows grew
along the banks, and there was a new scattering of yellow leaves where the wind
had blown them across the green, wet grass. There was a swimming pool with a
fence around it, where young mothers from the complex gathered in the summer,
talking and drinking iced tea and lemonade, with one eye on their children
playing in the water. Now it was empty and closed for the season.
He’d been to Danny’s apartment often
before and sometimes slept over, like last night. The feelings that came with
being here were hard to describe. Mostly he thought of this as Danny’s other
home, with his furniture, his books on the shelf, his dishes in the kitchen
cupboard, and—maybe most of all—Danny’s bed in the bedroom.
Propped against the stereo was one of his
record albums, “American Pie.” On the cover was a picture of the singer,
holding up a stars-and-stripes-painted thumb. There were other LPs—Chicago,
Neil Young, Bill Withers—people he’d hardly heard of. Sometimes he felt a
little like a guest here.
He wondered if Danny had the same
feelings about the farmhouse, where most everything was Mike’s. He wanted Danny
to think of it as their home together, but he could understand if it wasn’t
quite like that. Danny, after all, had another life here in
But watching him drive away this morning,
Mike didn’t have the usual hollow feeling that came with each Monday morning
after they’d spent the weekend together at the farm. On those days, there’d be
a hurried goodbye in the farmhouse kitchen and a quick hug before Danny grabbed
his car keys and was gone.
It had long since become a ritual. Mike
would stand on the porch watching him go, raising one hand to wave, and Danny
would answer with a beep of his horn. Then Mike would wait until the car had
disappeared down the road before stepping back inside, knowing he had the whole
week to himself on the farm, living, working, and waiting for Danny’s return on
Friday night.
Today, when he woke as usual at dawn,
he’d got up to look out the bedroom window as the morning light slowly revealed
the rain-soaked lawn and the wet parking lot, where water pooled at storm drains
blocked with fallen leaves.
And he’d been given an excuse to put off
going home. While there were plenty of odd jobs and chores around the place
waiting for him to take care of, rain or shine—a farmer’s work was never
done—the main thing right now was getting the corn picked, and there was no way
he could do that again until the fields were dry enough to work in.
So instead of getting dressed and going
out to his pickup to head for the interstate and back to the farm, he had made
himself a cup of coffee in Danny’s kitchen and allowed himself the unusual
luxury of doing nothing but returning to the bedroom, where he got dressed and
watched Danny sleeping, the alarm clock quietly ticking on his side of the bed
until it finally went off at 7:30.
When Danny turned off the alarm, he found
Mike sitting there in a rocking chair, leafing through a National Geographic
where there was a story with pictures of wild mustangs in
“How long you been up?” Danny asked.
Mike shrugged. “Coupla
hours maybe.”
“How can you get up so early day after
day?”
“Farmer genes. Either you got ’em or you
don’t.”
When he explained that he was planning to
stay there—all day if the weather didn’t change—Danny had smiled and said, “I’d
like that.”
“What time you go over to the college?”
“Nine.”
“Banker’s hours,” Mike laughed.
“If it only paid like it,” Danny said.
“Get over here.” He sat up and pulled the covers away from Mike’s side of the
bed.
Mike gave him a grin and came back across
the room, pausing for a moment and then hopping in, making the mattress and
springs rock under them.
“You’re more than usually frisky this
morning,” Danny said and rolled over against him.
“Can’t both of us be a
lazy-bones like you.”
“Lazy maybe,” Danny said. “But sane, definitely.”
Mike reached under the covers and felt
between Danny’s legs. His cock sprang to life as Mike gripped him firmly.
“Well, what do you know?” Mike laughed.
“Here’s a part of you up already.”
And they had stayed together in bed,
hugging and holding each other, kissing whiskery faces, Danny’s naked body warm
and smooth in his arms. Danny had finally got Mike’s jeans open and was between
his legs, stroking his hard cock with his tongue, when he happened to notice
the time and said, “Shit, I’m gonna be late.” And he
jumped out of bed to wash up in the bathroom and get dressed.
“I’m expectin’
you to come back and finish what you started,” Mike said, as Danny ran for the
door.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Danny said. “I’ll be
home for lunch.”
“I’ll be here waitin’.”
Mike had got out of bed and pulled up his
jeans, tucking in his shirt tail and then his wet cock. And after Danny had
gone, the smell of his aftershave lingering on the air in the apartment, Mike
went to the kitchen and poured himself some more coffee.
Discovering he was getting hungry, he
found some eggs and a loaf of bread in Danny’s refrigerator. After he’d fried
up both eggs and bread in a skillet, he went back to the bedroom for the story
about the mustangs to have something to read while he ate.
Maybe twenty minutes passed, and he
thought he heard a knock at the apartment door. There was another apartment
across the hall, and he had never gotten used to living in the same building
with other people, the sound of them coming and going, their TV turned up on
the other side of a wall, their voices in the apartment below, their footsteps
overhead.
The knock came again and he was just
about to open the door when he heard a key in the lock. The door swung slowly
open, and there stood a woman who after a moment he realized he knew. It was
the wife of one of Danny’s friends at the college.
“Lucille,” he said.
She was surprised at first, then started
to apologize when she saw it was Mike.
“I was just dropping off some cookies for
Danny,” she said. She had a key to let herself in, she said, to look after
Danny’s plants when he was gone—and to leave him something to eat sometimes.
“He hates cooking for himself, and I think he enjoys being mothered just a
little.”
She set down the plastic container of
cookies in the kitchen and was about to go.
“Stay and have a cup of coffee,” Mike
said. He had never forgotten how Lucille and her husband Barry had accepted him
so warmly, inviting him and Danny to their house.
He explained to her about the weather and
why he was in Danny’s apartment instead of at home—leaving out the prospect of
sex when Danny came back at
He asked about Barry and about their son,
Pogo—who she said were both fine—Pogo was in kindergarten and Barry was busy
all the time at the college, his time taken up with committee meetings, a
search for a new staff person, and counseling a growing number of students who
showed up with emotional problems. And she got to talking about what it was
like being a faculty wife.
“You should be a therapist,” she said
suddenly.
“Me?”
“You’re such a good listener. I’m
blathering away telling you stuff I don’t even tell Barry, and you just sit
there taking it all in.”
“Well, I can stop, if you want,” he
laughed. He was all at once self-conscious, unaware that she was observing him
in some way he wasn’t used to.
“No, it’s wonderful. I can see why Danny
loves you like he does.”
Now Mike was speechless. He had never
talked about himself and Danny with anyone.
“Look, I’m just a farmer. I’m not really
any good at stuff like this.” He had a memory of how awkward he’d felt with
Marty the night before. Other people’s personal lives were really not any of
his business.
“You talk for a while,” she said. “I
don’t know anything about what it’s like being a farmer.”
“There’s not much to say. It’s mostly
work, and not much of anything else.”
“But you must like it.”
“Well, yes, I do.” And he told her a
little of how he liked working outdoors in all the seasons, having his own
place, and watching crops grow each year.
He’d never really talked like this with a
woman. The women he knew were mostly waitresses in cafes or cashiers at the
supermarket, who would sometimes flirt with him or make a little small talk,
but never start an actual conversation. He knew the wives of his neighbors, but
never more than to say hello and be polite if they happened to meet.
Unlike them all, Lucille was educated and
thoughtful, she’d seen something of the world, and she was interested in Mike
as someone who might have thoughts of his own. Most of all, she understood
about him and Danny, and it did not matter to her that they were two single
guys living together—in some odd way it seemed even to please her. He’d never
known there were people like this.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you
something,” she said now. “How did you and Danny meet?”
Mike laughed. “I’d guess you’d say he was
my hired man.” Then he laughed again. “Well, in fact he was. I hired him for a
summer, because I was holding down another job hauling milk for a dairy.”
“And then what?”
Mike glanced away, remembering how Danny
had come to his bedroom that first night.
“I know, I shouldn’t be asking this,” she
said. “When you work in the theatre, you discover that—well,
some men are different than others. Even the good-looking ones a young girl
like me might get a crush on.” She laughed a little at herself and what looked
like her own embarrassment. “And when they’re your best friends, you want them
to be happy.”
“You’re an actress,” Mike said. He’d
forgotten this about her.
“Was. There’s not much opportunity for that in
Mike remembered now that she and her
husband had come here from
“For Barry it was a job,” she said. “I
was in love with him, and I loved our baby boy, and anyway, we wouldn’t be here
forever. So I thought I could live without the theatre for a while.”
“But it didn’t turn out that way?”
“Well, nothing really turns out like we
expect, does it?”
“I suppose not.”
He wasn’t used to this. He could feel the
beginnings of regret in the woman sitting across the table from him.
“I used to think of you and Danny like
you were married,” she said. “But I don’t anymore.”
Mike didn’t know what to say to this. He
wasn’t sure what she meant.
“When two men are together, it’s like
they stay equals.” But it was different, she explained, with a husband and
wife. “The way he looks at it, what he wants comes first, and she’s supposed to
make the adjustment. But that’s not being equal.”
“I never thought of it that way,” Mike
said.
“With you and Danny—and I’ve watched you
together—you both have to give a little.”
“I guess that’s a way of looking at it.”
“Barry, for all his college degrees,
can’t see that.”
Once again, Mike was at a loss for words.
He wondered if she was talking about sex, and he didn’t want to know about what
went on between the two of them.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can see the
concern in your face, and I didn’t come here to burden you with this.”
Mike shook his head. “No, it’s OK.”
He paused for a long moment, letting
himself be touched by the feelings that welled up in him—feelings that were a
lot like a prayer of thanks for what his life had come to mean with Danny in
it.
It didn’t matter how long they’d been
together—almost eight years now?—or how much their lives had changed in all
that time. He continued to have this sense of wonder that Danny was still there
with him, banishing for days, weeks, sometimes months at a time, the loneliness
that was always there ready to envelop him in the cold chill of a solitary
life.
“Besides,” Lucille said, her face
brightening. “I’m not unhappy. I wouldn’t change anything.”
She reached across the table and touched
his hand.
“I wouldn’t either,” Mike said. And there
was nothing he was surer of at that moment.
She smiled at him now. “Like the
philosopher said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“Is that so?” Mike said and laughed.
“Well, it must be true then.”
— § —
It was
The farm was at least five miles outside
of town, maybe farther. Most of that distance was the highway, and he could
hitchhike out to where there was a gravel road that went down toward the river
and right by Mike’s place.
He walked out to the highway, one eye on
the sky and glad it had stopped raining. After what seemed like a half hour,
the passing traffic whipping up a kind of mist from the wet pavement, he got a
ride with a driver in an old Studebaker who was listening to Paul Harvey on a
radio that was turned up so loud he must have been nearly deaf.
“Let me off here!” Ty
had shouted three times before the guy finally slowed down and pulled over. And
he’d had to walk back a ways, because they’d passed the road out to Mike’s.
A little drizzle fell as he went along
the road, the sandy surface wet and muddy in places, soaking through the soles
of his shoes. Not a single car or truck passed him until he was almost all the
way there. Then a pickup came to a stop beside him, and the driver rolled down
the window.
“Need a ride, son?” he said.
“I’m just about there,” Ty said, pointing ahead to the turnoff into Mike’s place.
“You goin’ to Mike’s? I’ll take you. Hop in.”
It was one of the farmers from the
neighborhood—he said his name was Tully—and he took Ty
right to the gate in front of Mike’s house.
“Don’t look like anybody’s home,” Tully
said. Both the pickup and the Camaro were gone. “Just
Rusty,” he laughed, as the dog came from around the barn, woofing and wagging
his tail.
He looked out at the tire tracks in the
sandy soil and offered the opinion that they were at least a day old. They had
been nearly erased by the rain.
Ty thanked him for the ride and went up to the house,
where he found the doors unlocked, and he went inside. The rooms felt strangely
empty, almost abandoned. He couldn’t remember ever being in the house alone
before.
In the back bedroom, he’d pushed his
suitcase with most of his clothes under the bed, and he bent down to pull it
out now. He tried not to look around the room itself, because there was a rush
of memories waiting to wash over him—memories of himself and Rich, who had
slept here together and been swept up in a flood of
feelings for each other.
At least he’d assumed they were for each
other. Now he wasn’t so sure what Rich was feeling. Ever since Rich had
disappeared on his bike down the ranch road, leaving him behind without a word,
Ty had struggled to understand what had happened.
He knew it had something to do with
In that case, the love he’d begun to feel
for Rich would never be enough to bring him any peace. And as the days passed
with no word from him, the more Ty began to feel that
he might never see or hear from Rich again. He was lost to whatever held him
and kept him locked in his sorrows.
He’d sucked down his own dismay that
morning as Baxter had left him at the bus station, and he had been determined
to stay strong as the miles passed outside the rain-streaked window, thinking
always ahead to where he was going and why—getting his car from the garage at
Mike’s farm and then getting on the road back to his family in Iowa. There was
a story about himself he needed to sort out before he walked through the door
and faced his mother and father and all his brothers.
But now, he could not hold back the
tears, and they flowed down his cheeks in the bedroom where he and Rich had
spent so many nights. And he lost track of the time it took to shed them all
before he finally walked from the room, closing the door firmly behind him.
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.
© 2008 Rock Lane Cooper
rocklanecooper@yahoo.com