Harlan's Race

shut tight in the limo. Faces friendly and unfriendly pressed against the windows. A dead cat bounced off the hood. Trying to even the score, a little band of French Canadian activists threw flowers at us. Then we pulled away, leaving the uproar behind.
    We drove through the city streets in silence.
    Finally Chino passed his pack of Tiparillos around and tried to lighten things up. “Not very nice, were they? They didn’t even offer us a drink.”
    Everybody lit up, even Vince and John. I, the long-suffering non-smoker, opened the window beside me. The vets had carefully checked the limo for bugging devices, so it was safe to talk.
    “Well?” Harry asked John. “Are you guys going after the second shooter? Get a conspiracy investigation going at home?”
    John opened his briefcase, and took out a fat file of hate letters. There were three from a correspondent who had cut out words and letters from newspapers and magazines, and laboriously glued them to a sheet. His style was now familiar. The newest one read:
    YOU WILL REGRET THE DAY MECH GOES TO
    JAIL. YOU WILL LEARN TO FEAR MY NAME.
    LOVE,
    A SECRET ADMIRER
    “Did you show this to the FBI?” Chino asked, reading it.
    ‘Yeah,” John said. ‘They flipped through the file. Standard celebrity stuff, they said. Harlan’s paying his dues, they said. They’ve got bigger fish to fry. Watergate. The Mafia.”
    John shut the file, and put it away.
    Now we could scream and yell, picket the FBI and the New York attorney general’s office. But compassion, like blood, is hard to squeeze out of a stone. At that moment I made the decision that so many gay men and lesbians make when they can’t get justice — I’d tough it through on my own. And who knows — maybe a miracle would happen. Hadn’t the peace movement gotten us out of Vietnam? Weren’t civil rights moving ahead on other fronts? Maybe things would get better. Maybe Billy’s death, and all the more anonymous deaths, and all the misery of centuries, wouldn’t be for nothing.
    ‘Well, Harlan, if there is an extremist group behind Mech,” said Chino, “the boss and I can sneak and peek for you.”
    I stared out the window, letting the fragrant spring breeze buffet me. A terrible lump swelled in my throat, but wouldn’t come up and be tears.
    ‘Well?” John prodded me.
    “Look,” I said in a stifled voice. “Nobody has proved there was a second shooter. I’m sick and tired of living behind a cyclone fence —”
    Hauling off the armored vest, I flung it on the seat next to the vets.
    “You’re crazy,” John barked, in his best cross-examination voice. “And when things go bad for you, it’ll be me cleaning up the mess!”
    “— Prescott hired an associate coach,” I barked back, as if I hadn’t heard, “because I’ve been away so much. My psych is shot —■”
    ‘You don’t need a psych, Harlan,” Vince interrupted me, lounging on the opposite seat. His lean thighs were spread insolently apart. ‘You need —■” He let the rest go unsaid.
    Vince and I glared at each other. Lately, the old attraction between us was stirring again. Vince was volatile, impulsive, with a reputation for being passionate. I’d always had a weakness for passion. A few weeks ago, Vince blurted that he loved me. He’d tried to kiss me. But part of me was still choosing duty over desire. So, I’d held the young hellion off. He had slammed away in frustrated rage.
    Now his eyes said, Coach Brown, you don’t have the guts to love me.
    “I have to get out of the public eye. Make a living,” I said softly. “Get my life together.”
    As the limousine headed toward the Montreal airport, I stared at that city skyline of church spires, and brooded about my life.
    Athletes need a “psych” — a picture in the mind that
    gives them a mental edge. For me, it went further. The psych was my armor against all loss.
    Ever since I was young, I’d go clipping through life at my planned pace, thinking that a level track lay ahead. All of a sudden I’d stub my toe. Before I knew it, the hard earth would slam me. It was the kind of good hurt that reminds a runner he’s alive. It was also the kind of hurt that cracks your psych like a mirror. For the 16 months that I’d had Billy, he’d been my psych. Running through my mind with his feathery stride, he was a symbol for me. So his death was the worst fall ever. If I’d been suicidal, or suffering from some disease, it would have been easy to let go of