Harlan's Race

bed, ya dumb shit,” murmured Vince.
    We lay there for a few minutes, both of us ridiculously awake and jittery now. Finally he rolled half onto me, and hugged me, arms trembling. I wanted to run my hands down him, to feel the wonder of that highly conditioned body at its first peak of a comeback, but I didn’t, because of a horrible fear of remembering how Billy’s body had felt.
    “So,” he said, “are you falling for me yet?”
    “Maybe.”
    His weight on me, he let his warm lips travel over my face for a while. “I warned you that would happen. Remember?”
    “I remember.”
    “So I’ll do something for you that I never did for any other man.”
    His eyes sparkled, hinting at some unimaginable sex thing.
    “What?” I asked.
    “I’ll... fix you some hot milk.”
    We both laughed. He was gone a few minutes, clinking things quietly in the kitchen, then came back with that magic potion that he knew always knocked me into sleep. We shared it, then lay down again. The next kiss tasted like milk, and we wound up making love a little bit anyway. Then, still close with me in the hot and the wet, he said in a barely audible voice, “In fact, I never get tired of you ... you know that? Nobody ever made me feel like you do.”
    I, the writer, was always short on words after love.
    He kept talking dreamily in my arms. “All of a sudden I don’t understand the age thing. I wouldn’t take a day away from you ... you know that?”
    “I wouldn’t take a day away from you either,” I murmured. “Now go to sleep.”
    But we tossed and turned, with the sounds of the Montreal stadium in our heads. Knees and elbows jostling, sheet tangled around us. Through the screams and cheers, my life was running.
    Then I was in a car, driving in Pennsylvania, where I’d grown up. It was late afternoon. Red autumn light slanted across the mountain ridges, and crumbling outcrops of unmined coal. Trees cast long shadows across stubble-fields of corn. Every hue of color, every smell was so familiar that it hurt.
    Passing a farm, I knew it was my Uncle Nat’s farm, where I’d spent every summer through high school. Beyond the toppling barn, there was a thicket in the woods — my private boyhood place. There, while my dog Jess pointed at birds, I hid and dreamed my secret daydreams of Chris. Glimpses of his body when grownups weren’t looking. Remembered grazes of touching. Gay fantasies ripened untaught in my imagination as naturally as the red berries on the dogwood. My boy erections flung seed like milkweed pods. The daydreams were never long, because I had too much energy. Eager and afire, I was up and off, buttoning my fly, shouting at Jess, racing like the wind along the stubble-fields in my corduroy jacket and tennis shoes.
    Voices and pictures rose from the land like mist. Voices of Sunday School children singing:
    Jesus loves me, this I know For the Bible tells me so ...
    My father strode out of the print shop, his voice roaring, strong ink-stained fingers hurting my arm as he yanked me out of the tub where he had caught me taking a bath with another 8-year-old boy. His shaving-strap cracked on my wet body, raising deep welts.
    My mother’s eerily soft voice hissed in my ear: “The lake of fire is where you’ll go, if you touch other boys.”
    Fire spread around her, over the land. Into it, she threw my little trove of battered books. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Catcher in the Rye. The writings of Jack Kerouac. “These evil books have taught you that you have some kind of right to put yourself first,” she said. But the fire drained away, taking her with it, and that secret sunlit thicket survived, as plants always do, coming up from the charred roots, thriving on the ashes.
    Now the highway led me along a wooded slope. Up ahead, a faded blue ’50s Chevy pickup was parked on the shoulder.
    Two high-school boys in flannel shirts and caps were walking down the slope, away from me. They were carrying old-model .22s. They paused, and plinked a few shots at a nearby road sign. The sign already had a few rusted bullet holes in it. The boys were laughing, competing, arguing about who hit closer to the mark.
    Then the boys slid their guns into scabbards, and climbed in the cab. They were laughing, shoving in horseplay. One boy got his arms around the other, and kissed him playfully. Right away the kiss went deep and serious, their hands squeezing on each other’s shoulders, before one boy jerked away with a sharp