CHAPTER 38
Thomas stared at the notes on his desk, rubbed his temples, and sighed. His sermon wasn’t going well at all. He picked up the piece of paper and reread the first line. “On this last day of the year, as we look forward to the next, I want to talk about new beginnings.”
He let the paper drop to the desk and groaned. It was awful. But so were the dozen or so other opening lines he’d written and rejected. He pawed through the discarded scraps of paper, hoping maybe one of them would contain a gem he could reconsider, or at least something that didn’t sound like a greeting card.
It almost seemed providential, the fact that December 31 fell on a Sunday. His last sermon of the year would also be his opportunity to tell his congregation about himself. He would start the next year as a new man. He hadn’t thought beyond that. Several things could happen. Although there was nothing in the church laws that necessitated his stepping down from his position, if his parishioners were uncomfortable attending Saint Peter’s under his leadership, he would have to consider removing himself from the pulpit. At the moment, simply thinking about living his life openly was difficult enough; he had no interest in forcing change upon a small-town parish.
And then there was Mike. Thinking about him, Thomas couldn’t help but smile. Their meeting had completely altered the course of his life. It was hard for him even to remember what things had been like six weeks earlier, before the snowstorm, before his car trouble, before he’d first sat in the cab of Mike’s truck. Since then, his world had been turned on its head. But rather than feeling disoriented, he saw more clearly than ever before in his life.
Sitting back in his chair, he looked at the photo of him and Joseph. How would his life have been different, he wondered, if he’d allowed himself to love Joseph? Where would he be now? What would he be doing? Would he have been able to fill the need Joseph sought to fill in his encounters with other men, the couplings that had resulted in his sickness and, eventually, his death? Would Thomas’s love have been enough to save the bright, kind, and funny man who had first stirred his heart?
Joseph’s face looked back at him, revealing nothing. Thomas studied it, pondering the questions. He knew he would never have the answers. Wondering what might have been was a game without end. He could go around and around, and still he would be no closer to knowing.
“How’s it going, preacher man?”
Mike, entering the study, put his hands on Thomas’s shoulders and squeezed. Feeling the strong pressure of his fingers, Thomas relaxed. Mike leaned down and kissed him on the top of the head.
“Not so well,” Thomas told him. “This sermon just isn’t coming together.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Write it for me?” Thomas suggested.
“Sorry,” Mike answered. “I was never very good at writing. But if you want me to get up there and demonstrate how to make the perfect cocktail, I’ll have them eating out of my hand.”
“That might work,” said Thomas. “They’re Episcopalians. They love cocktails.”
Mike took a seat in the room’s other chair. “Seriously, are you really going to come out to them?”
Thomas nodded. “I have to,” he said. “Not just for them, but for me. How can I claim to be their spiritual leader and not be honest with them?”
“It seems to work for the guys on TV,” said Mike. “They just ask everyone to forgive them when they get caught.”
“Exactly my point. I don’t want anyone saying I’m hiding who I am.”
“Suppose they don’t like who you are. Then what?”
“Then we open a B and B and I learn how to make waffles,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. This is all I’ve ever been.”
“Then you’d better make sure that sermon is damn good,” Mike suggested. “Because I’ve tasted your waffles, and they suck.”
“While we’re on the subject of the future, have you given any more thought to yours?” Thomas inquired. Mike hadn’t returned to the Engine Room since walking out earlier in the week.
“I was thinking it might be fun to be a porn star.”
“Too old,” said Thomas.
“Ouch.”
“You qualify in every other way, if it’s any consolation.”
“I’d take that as a compliment, but I know you don’t have anything to compare me to,” Mike said. “No, I’ve actually been thinking that maybe it’s time I finished my degree.”
“You never told me you started one.”
“It’s one of the many dark secrets of my past,” Mike teased. “Actually, I did one year of a teaching program when I was working in Syracuse. I was going to teach high school English.”
“Why didn’t you finish?”
Mike sighed. “Oh, you know,” he said. “There was this guy.”
“Jim.”
Mike nodded. “It was kind of hard to work, go to class, and clean up after him. Then I left and just never got around to getting back to it.”
Thomas looked at Mike for a moment, tilting his head to the side.
“What?” said Mike.
“I’m just trying to picture you holding a copy of The Great Gatsby and discussing the symbolism of the color yellow.”
“I’ll have you know my lesson plan for The Scarlet Letter had them on their feet,” said Mike. “Smart ass.”
“Could you really see yourself in front of a class every day?”
Mike nodded. “I think I could. I mean, it can’t be any harder than standing behind a bar for eight hours a night listening to a bunch of drunks.”
“High school students don’t tip you because they think you’re cute, though,” Thomas remarked.
“I hear some of them do,” said Mike, grinning.
Thomas wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at him. He looked out the window at the snow, which had begun to fall again, then back at Mike. “What do you think you’d be doing right now if you hadn’t stopped that night?”
Mike looked at his watch. “It’s eight forty-five. I’d be pouring drinks and listening to Miss Minnie Skirts and Miss Fellatio Hornblower work their way through ‘Any Man of Mine.’ ”
“And you’d rather be here with me?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“You’ve really changed my life,” said Thomas.
“No more than you’ve changed mine.”
“I guess the person we really have to thank is Margaret Sorenson.”
“Who?”
“Margaret Sorenson,” Thomas repeated. “The old woman I was visiting the night I ran out of gas.”
Mike nodded. He’d forgotten about the errand that had called Thomas out in the middle of a winter night. “We’ll send her flowers,” he suggested.
“It wouldn’t do much good,” Thomas said. “She died a couple of days later. Stomach cancer.”
“Thank God she held on long enough to get you out of the house.”
“Speaking of getting out of the house, I’m sending you home,” Thomas said. “I’ve got to get this sermon written, and I’ll never do it if you keep distracting me.”
“Who’s distracting you?” Mike said innocently as he got up and went over to Thomas’s chair. Kneeling, he looked up with wide eyes. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Out,” Thomas said, stifling a laugh. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
“Behind you?” said Mike. “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”
“Out!” Thomas said again.
Mike stood up. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going. But call me later. You can read me your sermon.”
“Deal,” Thomas said, accepting the kiss Mike gave him. “Now get out.”
Mike left Thomas with his notes, heading downstairs to grab his coat before going out to his truck. The falling snow was light and dry. There wouldn’t be much accumulation, and what did hang around wouldn’t interfere with driving. It was the perfect winter night, pretty without being inconvenient, and it made him happy.
He got into the truck and turned on the radio. The Dixie Chicks started singing “Landslide” to him as he drove out to the road. “ ‘I took my love, I took it down,’ ” he sang along softly along with Natalie Maines. “‘I climbed a mountain and I turned around.’ ”
The truck hummed along as he made his way down the road. He wasn’t quite ready to go home, and decided to take a drive around town. When he came to the place where he had almost crashed into Thomas and ended their relationship before it had even begun, he slowed down to take a look. It was just a stretch of road, a dip at the bottom of a hill with nothing at all remarkable about it. Yet passing through it in the still of one cold, snowy night had completely altered the course of his life.
He was past the spot and halfway up the hill even before he completed the thought in his head. Just a few seconds was all it took. Just a few seconds, and the whole universe could shift to one side or another, throwing you off your feet and send you tumbling in a new direction. It was amazing.
The truck crested the hill and kept going. The Dixie Chicks were replaced by Tim McGraw. Mike tapped his fingers on the wheel, thinking about what was in the refrigerator at home and wondering if he should stop at the store before calling it a night. He was mentally running through the contents of his freezer when he passed the Engine Room.
Out of habit, he glanced at the parking lot. It was half full. Not bad for a Thursday night. The bar would be busy, especially since Dale was on his own. Mike felt a twinge of guilt when he thought about how he’d just walked out. But it happened all the time in bars. People quit. Usually you never heard from them again. Dale would find someone else.
On an impulse, he swung the wheel and turned into the lot, taking the first spot he came to. Leaving the engine running, he sat and looked at the bar. The sign over the door blinked in red and white, the “M” in Room dimmer than the rest of the letters, so that the name resembled some offbeat children’s show about trains. The building itself was nondescript, cinder blocks painted black. Why were so many gay bars painted black? Maybe because it made them blend in with the night, helped them disappear, like so many of the men who walked through their doors.
It was only four walls and a roof with a sign over the door. Before it had become the Engine Room, it had been a VFW. Before that, an Agway farm supply store (and before that, nothing but a rough set of plans drawn by Roy Dimpler on the back of a piece of paper taken from his desk at Dimpler & Sons Construction). The building itself had no identity; it was what went on within it that gave it a purpose.
For six years the building had given Mike a purpose as well. It had been his home, his refuge. The men who came in and out of its front door had been his family; a dysfunctional one, perhaps, but a family nonetheless. He had met Russell, John, and Simon there. He had rebuilt his life, one night at a time, until finally the memories of Jim had become pale ghosts that haunted him only when he awoke in the middle of the night, forgetting that he was alone.
If he felt guilty for abandoning Dale, he felt guiltier about abandoning the bar itself. Now, looking at it, he felt almost as if he were looking at the face of an ex-lover. The Engine Room, more than any other place in Cold Falls, had welcomed him in, allowed him to escape inside its doors and heal, safe from the world outside. Within it was a world in which he, and men like him, were able to live as they wanted to.
But like an ex-lover, he and the bar had outgrown one another. He no longer needed it. Staying together would only keep him in one place, endlessly treading water. It was time to let go and move on. He wished it well, wished its other lovers—the ones who still came to find comfort in its arms—well.
He wondered how many of the men who came to the bar truly understood their relationship with the place, knew why it was, apart from the obvious reasons of alcohol and the possibility of sex, they returned again and again. Probably not. Probably they wouldn’t know unless it was taken from them. He imagined a giant, invisible hand reaching down and picking the building up, lifting the roof and walls up into the sky so that the people within were left standing amid the drifts of snow. He pictured the surprised faces of the patrons as they looked around, drinks in hand, trying to figure out what had happened. He saw the drag queens, wigs catching the snowflakes in their blue and purple curls, fluttering their impossibly long lashes as they stared up at the heavens.
Hopefully they would never have to experience such a thing. Hopefully their little world would continue to exist and they would continue to visit it as often as necessary. But for him the journey was ended. There were other worlds to explore, and while someday he might pay this one a return visit, it would be only as someone passing through.
Saluting the bar, he pulled out of the lot and drove toward home, leaving the other travelers to keep searching after whatever it was they were looking for. He hoped they found it.