Harlan's Race

said. He grinned past his broken nose. “Thanks, though.”
    During mid-term break, Betsy and the baby made their quiet escape to northern California. She was now the athletic director at Ricelands Community College in the Sacramento Valley.
    In the driveway of the emptied house, Betsy and Marian secured the baby’s travel seat in the car. The moving van had gone ahead. The two women were driving west together, and Marian would help her settle in. All bundled up, Falcon churned over the snowy lawn, like a tiny blizzard in a red snowsuit. He came running to give me a handful of snow. “Da,” he screeched with delight.
    It was the first time he’d called me dad. Feeling a lump in my throat, I picked him up and held him close. He shoved a bit of snow against my face. Even the slight smell of wet diaper seemed wonderful. I prayed that LEV. wasn’t watching. “Don’t forget your da,” I told him. “Okay?”
    His mother scooped him out of my arms. She was desperately eager to be on the road.
    “Have a safe trip,” I said. “See you when this is... over.” “I’ll send you snapshots.” Betsy gave me a quick hug. “And a studio portrait every Christmas.”
    “Don’t put anything dangerous in your letters,” I reminded her, “just in case the wrong people read my mail.”
    As I got ready to leave Prescott, things of Billy’s surfaced from closet and drawers. His suede jacket. His track clothes and the one shoe (Vince still had the other one). Clippings and photos. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy them, so they went into a banker’s box. The LaFonts were leaving too. Funding had come unexpectedly, so they were moving to Maui, where Jacques would start his wildlife work.
    On my last day, as snow fell and I was gloomily clearing my office in the athletic building, Mike Stella came to say a sad goodbye. A few minutes after he left, Jacques wandered in, unzipping his jacket. He looked as gloomy as me.
    “Hi.” He hung out the COACH IN CONFERENCE sign and closed the door.
    “Hi,” I said. “You and Eileen all packed?”
    “Pretty much,” Jacques said, looking around. “I’m trying to come up with a one-liner for the end of an era.”
    Eyes anxious, he hovered—like a pheasant about to duck into a cornfield. His wound had nearly healed, and he had apparently put the whole thing out of his mind. So the anxiety came from something else.
    “I first saw you in this room,” I said. “Almost exactly three years ago. You sat in that oak chair. Billy sat there, and Vince sat over there.” I pointed.
    “God, I was so in love,” he murmured, looking at team photos on the wall. One was a 1975 pic of himself, Vince and Billy, grinning like the kids they were.
    I said nothing, packing my old Marine track-team photo. “I couldn’t handle Vince,” he added. “Now I try handling it other ways.”
    “Trade, huh? Bathhouses in town?”
    “I thought marriage would change me. And I love Eileen. But guess what... I still like sex with guys better.”
    “Does Eileen know?”
    “I’ve been trying to get up courage to tell her.”
    I shook my head. “It’s not smart to lie to your wife.”
    He shrugged. ‘Yeah, it doesn’t make sense.”
    “When did you start?”
    “When Eileen was pregnant the first time,” he said. “Jesus... bathhouses are getting to be unhealthy places. What if you give herpes to Eileen? Herpes can’t be cured, you know.”
    He scowled. “I should have known I can’t talk to you.” “This is not about me. It’s about you .. . whether people can trust you.”
    Jacques turned on his heel, and walked out.
    As the slam of the door echoed through that cold building, the awful thought crossed my mind that LEV. may have surveilled him too, seen him veer back into gay sex. Maybe that was why LEV. shot at him.
    By that evening, at Steve’s urging, I had moved into his Village apartment.
    My new address was a quiet street off Washington Square. After years upstate, with real woods to run in, I was back in a ghetto with potted ghinko trees on the balcony. In a changing Manhattan — new glass towers, new thresholds of poverty, new parameters of violence and filth and ethnic mixing — the gay community was ever more truculent, marching toward power under our slanting lavender banners, in a city that traditionally denied power to all but machine politicians.
    Steve’s comfortable 3-bedroom apartment was furnished with his wild mixture — Spanish colonial heirlooms from ranching