Harlan's Race

for quitting school. He chewed me out for not writing the book about Billy. I helped him improve his English and writing skills. He forced me to start learning Spanish by talking it at me. At first this pissed me off. But I got to love the rich bilingual mix that he called Spanglish. Drinking seltzers instead of Singapore slings, we forced favorite authors on each other. I made him read The Fountainhead. He made me read Singing From the Well, by Reinaldo Arenas. It was a battered second-hand copy that he’d found in Miami. The great gay writer was rotting in a Cuban prison, just seven hours by boat from where we sat. I ditch-dug through it with a little Spanish dictionary that I got in Miami.
    We worked our way through the last racial edginess.
    He said, “Get hip, gringo Marine with eyes of green. Latino gays, black gays, Asian gays ... we live in a world that’s different from yours.”
    A sad closeness grew around us — a liking of being together, even when it was for hours in silence. It got so we could exchange thoughts, and grin about some stupid little thing without trading words. But underneath the camaraderie, we were both disintegrating slowly, like Steve and Angel had done — not physically, but spiritually. For me, it was some unuttered cry of Billy’s name, my inability to get back into the race — even to feel that two words side by side on the page made any sense. For him, it was surely the lover he’d lost in Vietnam. I didn’t press Chino to talk about it. He’d probably talk when he was ready.
    Days, Chino went for long, long runs with me, both of us getting fitter than we’d ever been in our lives. Nights, he slept with me, shared my bed, .38 handy. He slept with his back to me, silent, never snoring or talking in his sleep. Now and then, like any man, he felt that minimal need. The first time it happened, he unceremoniously put his dark dick in my hand, and made sure I understood that I was the first pinchi cabron white man who’d ever touched it. Sometimes, when I eased him, he was shivering with malaria. The memory of that month is hot with his smell of quinine, his foreskin in my fingers, and mine in his. Always with his back to me. Never face to face, no real intimacy. The war had maimed his power to be emotionally intimate.
    For me, those easings put distance between me and Vince.
    I got used to waking up when he jumped out of sleep like a deer, to listen to the tiniest noise.
    “Don’t take risks,” I told him. “My life isn’t worth yours.”
    “If we get LEV., it is.”
    From Key West, we made rapid and unannounced displacements to other places, and always after we’d mentioned to several people that we were going to somewhere different.
    In early November, when things had died down, we made a rapid displacement back to New York, by way of Newark Airport and a long taxi ride.
    Back home, Chino tested my learning by having me do the sweep through the apartment, before he let me and Michael move back in. I passed the test. Everything seemed okay — except Striper, who was pissed off that I’d been gone.
    On the assumption that the sniper was surveilling from an apartment across the street, Chino drifted around over there, making lists of tenants and other things. Julius had access to some new databases now, he said. Of course, a smart surveillant would use a fictitious name. Meanwhile, Chino and I parked ourselves on our own roof for several 24-hour periods, with field glasses and a thermos of hot coffee, to see if we could see anything suspicious — curtains drawn, glint of optics, movements on the roof. Nada.
    “And,” he said, “make me a list of everybody in your past who might have a grudge.”
    It was a long list, starting with Denny Falks, the runner whose lie that I molested him got me dismissed from Penn State. It went from my ex-wife, to a few dissatisfied clients from hustler days. Off went the list, along with Chino’s lists, to be cranked through Julius’ database.
    “Do I get to meet Julius someday?”
    ‘You have to earn meeting Juliusito. He is very weird ... very hard to please.”
    I pictured Julius as an old military queen living in a basement somewhere, hard to find in his labyrinth of file cabinets and endless stacks of computer cards, with beautiful young men bringing him coffee, and a direct line to a few other queens in the Pentagon.
    Chino went back to L.A. before Thanksgiving. But I missed him.
    More and more, thoughts of Chris