Harlan's Race

was an unpaved service road, the only one to be found on eastern Fire Island. Now their headlights were jouncing toward us. Our clothes were strewn on the beach, in plain view. The authorities weren’t too hard-line here. They winked at heterosexual skinny-dipping if it happened far from crowded family beaches. But we were gay men, far from the sanctuary of Cherry Grove.
    “They probably can’t see us... but let’s get farther out,” I said, with heart hammering.
    Beyond the breakers, we swam quietly with many yards between us. It felt like Greenwich Village of the ’60s, with vice cops kicking in the door. Right in front of us, the Jeep stopped. It wasn’t clear what they were doing — maybe talking on the radio. But our jock straps lay 50 feet away, like a flashing red light.
    Then ... a miracle. The police Jeep jounced on east, toward Davis Park.
    Watching them go, Vince and I swam toward each other.
    “God, I peed when I saw them,” said Vince, his voice shaky.
    The terror had sobered us. Catching the next wave, we body-surfed into chest-deep water. There, we stood embraced. The moonlight bathed our heads and shoulders, while our cold bodies pressed together underwater, getting aroused. His face in my neck, he drew a deep sigh, trying to relax the tension.
    “So you’re patient, huh,” I said.
    He laughed, his stomach moving against mine. “I’ll tell you when I fell for you. Wanna hear my confession?”
    “I’ll listen to any lie once.”
    “The three of us had just been kicked off the Oregon team. We went to San Francisco to talk to Billy’s dad. We were all in fuckin’ tears, man. John gave us this folder and said, Well, boys, there’s this one gay coach. See... John’d been... like, tracking you... ever since he heard why you were fired from Penn State. There was this old interview in Sports Illustrated, maybe you remember the one... the photo of your face. It was ... like, something in your eyes, that got to me. Billy looked at the same goddam picture, and he... well, he just shrugged. Billy didn’t fall for you till later.”
    I moved my gaze along the beach, watching for more intruders.
    “After you blew me off last winter,” Vince went on, “I put out lots of good juju, into the universe.”
    “You prayed, huh?”
    ‘You call it prayer... I call it magic. When you said you were coming out here, I didn’t have a fuckin’ dime for any Fire Island summer. So I... okay, I spent my film money to meet Mario and get into his house. When I was dancing at the Ice Palace that night, I was... like, really thinking about you, dancing to you. You know? And there you were.”
    After three years of a student-teacher friendship, I’d assumed that I knew this young man. But the story made me look at him with new respect. On the flip side of the young impulsive Vince, lived a mature Vincent C. Matti who was capable of grand strategies. One for our side. One to equal their best, whoever he was.
    “So juju works?” I said.
    Vince narrowed his eyes, looking at me through the moonlit beads of water in his eyelashes. He knew his eyes were beautiful, damn him. Vince’s real juju was being lovable, and knowing the effect he had on people, both at once. His eyes weren’t just “brown”. Shadowed by his black eyelashes, those irises looked dark now, but in sunlight they were clear as amber. The intelligent, restless eyes of a young wolf who had roamed far from the den, without an old wolf to guide him.
    “Juju always works,” he said throatily.
    I caught him around the thighs with one arm, and lifted him up. The water’s buoyancy made it easy. Towering into the stars above me, he let his body ride against me, buttocks resting on my arm. With my free hand, I caressed those twinned muscles, hard as rounded rocks washed by the sea. Between them, they guarded that orifice, sensitive and mysterious as a sea anemone. As I kissed his wet belly, it seemed like nothing could go wrong. Love, and being with me, would mellow him out and make him forget about revenge. We would have our grand passion, survive the sniper bullets. Maybe even live to be old curmudgeons. Could I be serially monogamous with this polygamous spirit?
    “Don’t tell me when you fell for me,” he said quietly, pressing my face into his navel. “Because you haven’t—yet. But you will, Harlan.”
    “Let’s go home,” I said.
    So many times, I’d fantasized what loving Vince would be like. That first time was passionate, yes