Harlan's Race

had metastasized in the American body politic. People who’d screamed that their own daughters should be shot for not wearing bras, were now screaming that church and state should be one. Among the dying innocents were the 30 percent of teen suicides who are gay boys and lesbian girls.
    Moi — I still carried the loaded .45 in my loincloth. If I ever had to use it to protect my own, I would.
    Pulling out my wallet, I flipped it open to the school photo of Falcon. All those years, Betsy hadn’t failed to send the picture, though the envelope never carried a return address. My boy was 12 now, and looked 16, in his first flush of handsome, with his first spots of acne. He had slanted hazel eyes, flooded with embattled innocence and teen edginess. They were his mom’s eyes, with her Elizabeth Taylor eyelashes, and on him they looked just as good.
    As I’d always known, he didn’t look anything like Billy. He looked more like his mother, like his Granddad Sive.
    Grabbing the phone, I punched the number that Marian had given me, of a house in The Pines.
    Betsy’s voice answered.
    “Hi, it’s us,” I said. ‘We’re in a boat outside the marina.”
    Her voice was tense.
    “I’ll meet you on the ferry dock in 15 minutes,” she said.
    Tying up in the marina, we watched Betsy and Marian walking down the boardwalk. Betsy was 37 now, silver showing in her cap of dark curls. Solemn, proud, apprehensive, she stopped and stared back at me: She was more muscular than I remembered, dressed simply—jeans creased from the heat, a silk-print shirt that was sticking to her, a straw boater to keep off the sun. In her eyes was
    Marla’s sudden death, and all the loneliness of her self-willed exile.
    Marian was wearing her typical L. L. Bean seersucker slacks, that she’d never given up. She, too, had joined the AIDS war, as Malibu councilwoman and tireless fundraiser. The two women friends had gotten back in touch again by meeting at the Gay Games. There, they’d met some lesbians who had a house in The Pines.
    Alone, I climbed up on the dock, and waited for Betsy and Marian. The muggy autumn air was alive with the sounds of a resort — radios blasting on boats, women shouting from house to house.
    Betsy and I didn’t hug. But we did cautiously shake hands.
    “Why didn’t you bring my boy?” I demanded.
    “He’s staying with neighbor friends in Costa Mesa,” she said brusquely.
    “Why didn’t you bring him?”
    “I won’t answer to you, dammit, Harlan. He’s only 12. He doesn’t understand yet.”
    “Isn’t that our job... to help him understand?” I barked.
    The old rancor in me was boiling.
    “Look... have some patience,” she burst out. “You’ll see him when the time is right. He’s still alive... and he might have died if I hung around you guys.”
    “Let’s not argue,” Marian said. “Life is too short.”
    Always the peacemaker, my sis put her hand on my arm. I choked down the rancor.
    Now Betsy was looking down in the boat, at the three men. Vince, sitting on a cushion because his butt was so thin, wordlessly held up his arms. She climbed down into the boat, and went into his arms. It was Vince who cried, sobbing silently, holding her tight. Betsy, who had the same kind of problem I did with tears, just held his graying head against her shoulder. A single tear squeezed out between her long eyelashes.
    Then she hugged old John Sive, amid wiggling spaniels, and shook hands cooly with Chino.
    In another moment, our full boat was putt-putting out of the marina. We passed hundreds of gulls resting on the water, the biggest flock I’d seen all day — wings folded, bobbing gently up and down. The birds even looked reasonably healthy.
    Way out, Chino cut the engine, and we drifted. Betsy and I sat apart on the seats. In the shade of her straw brim, Betsy’s eyes pondered as she looked back at the Island. Chino’s strong hand rubbed my shoulder absently. I put my hand over his. More gulls flew in from somewhere, till we were surrounded by floating birds, eyeing us.
    Marian cleared her throat.
    ‘We walked on the beach,” she said. “Look what we found.”
    Her hand came out of a pocket, and showered some bits of beach glass into my palm. A hurricane of feeling swept over us all. Memories of those who were gone, threats to those still alive, challenges to the young among us — their fates written in the wavering ripples all around us, as if the bay were a beryl wall of names.
    I gently