ABOUT TEN miles down from the junction of 60 and 5 was the tiny town of Ava. Sitting at a red light, Wyatt—on some crazy impulse—almost headed to Cactus Canyon. It had always struck him as ironic that a gay men’s nudist camp was only an hour from where he’d grown up. If he’d only known. But they probably wouldn’t have let him in. And he wasn’t even sure it was around before he was exiled from Damview.
Wyatt often wondered if his father knew about the camp. There had been protests through the years. Someone had even bought a pig farm and put it just upstream so the pig shit—only the vilest farm animal shit on the face of the earth—would come down and foul out the camp, driving the heathens and sodomites out. Except it went to court, and miracle of miracles, the good guys—and for once that meant the gay guys—won. Since then there hadn’t been much trouble.
Wyatt had never understood why the town had gotten its panties in a bunch anyway. All those gay men spent a lot of money in the town by purchasing everything from gas to tons of stuff from the weird, almost alternate dimension, version of a Walmart. That was revenue. Why would they complain about that? He would have thought they’d be thrilled. The town was tiny! Three thousand people. And it wasn’t like the men were parading around naked, dicks swinging, in town. They were sodomites, not dumb shits.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if his father had not only known about Cactus Canyon, but had been one of the protestors. Of course, Wyatt had no way of knowing. The one trip he and Howard had taken where they actually saw people with signs, he’d ducked. He didn’t want the first time he saw his old man in years to be on their way to just the kind of place his father probably envisioned him in—some modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
But today was January the third. Cactus Canyon was closed. There was the smell of snow biting the air, although none had fallen yet. Thank the gods. He was making remarkably good time. The last thing he wanted to do was drive in the snow.
He listened to a Stephen King novella on audio, and that killed lots of time. The Body, the one that the movie Stand By Me was based on, and when it got near the end and Chris, the narrator’s best friend, scared the bad kids off with the gun, he suddenly couldn’t remember if that was the way the movie had ended or not. Hadn’t it been Gordie, played by the kid who went on to be Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who threatened the bullies with the gun in the movie? Or had he only said, “Bite my big one”? Not for the life of him could Wyatt remember.
And right at the end there was a line that froze Wyatt and made him gasp.
“Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words can close those love bites.”
A shiver of anticipatory dread passed over Wyatt in a wave.
It was a feeling he had to ignore.
Or he would turn around right then and head home.
HIGHWAY 5 took him south to Midway, and then he knew… knew he was close. Very close. Close to Damview, the tiny town—population 706—where he was raised.
And what a fucking name for a town! Damview! It really, truly was the name of the town. Because it looked out over the dam, the old codgers would say, nodding and smiling in their sunken-cheeked way. Isn’t it a lovely name?
“Well,” Wyatt had wanted to say. “What’s wrong with Lakeview? Right there across the dam?”
Of course, it was already taken!
Also, there were the jokes. Just like the ones in that National Lampoon movie.
“Hey,” the kids would say. “We’re the damned kids who live in the damned town of Damview! There’s not a damned thing to do here except go to Bull Shoals Lake and swim.”
And there really wasn’t a damned thing for them to do either, except as residents of the local town they had stickers on their cars and didn’t have to pay the prices the tourists had to pay. They knew the places to sneak to as well. To smoke pot and skinny dip. It’s where Wyatt saw a naked boy for the first time—as well as he had been able to see with nothing but the light of a quarter moon. It was also where he gave his first blow job. Which had been wonderful until the next day when said boy made fun of him at school and called him a faggot.
Faggot.
How many years had that word followed him until it became what Howard called him—
Silly little faggot!
—and then was scratched on his beloved Mini Coop.
Gods, that had hurt.
He’d never found out who did it either. Figured it was one of his customers. He’d even had the horrid suspicion that it was someone from work, but who? Sometimes he would look around the store, look at the coworkers he thought of as friends, and wonder: Was it him? Or her? Was it Melrose? Or Kitty? Surely it couldn’t have been Kitty. Kitty likes me…. Or did she? He had gotten the manager position over her, and she had certainly wanted the job pretty badly when Buddy, the previous manager, left. Left because he wanted a job with benefits and a future. Except what the shit had Buddy done since leaving Treasures of Terra? Not shit.
But speculating about who at work might have scratched up his car was dangerous thinking. Thinking that Wyatt couldn’t let himself do. He had to work with those people.
He had to believe it was someone else.
Oh, and hadn’t Howard been furious? Howard—who hadn’t helped him pay one dime on his car. Who hadn’t helped him fix it. That had been Cedar, who had all kinds of talents. And the door hadn’t looked the same—not showroom—but it looked better than FAGGOT.
Wyatt had kept to himself how much that word—faggot—had hurt him. Hadn’t told his best friends. He’d even blown it off when Scott saw it. “Kind of fun, isn’t it?” he’d said. “Kind of like what happened to Brian’s Jeep on Queer as Fuck….”
Except he hadn’t thought it was the least bit fun.
Faggot!
Scratched into the paint.
He had paid for that car. Had worked his ass off at a part-time job as well as his manager job at Treasures of Terra to be able to make the down payment. If it hadn’t been for Men’s Festival, he wasn’t sure he would ever have told anyone what it had done to him.
But again.
Dangerous thinking.
Then quite suddenly he was passing the sign.
Damview—Pop. 706
More kids went to his high school these days (which was in Mountain Home; Damview was too small to have its own high school) than people lived in the entire town where he grew up.
Minutes.
He was just minutes away.
His mother was expecting him. He’d called home from Midway.
Wyatt almost drove right past the turnoff, but that would have been stupid. Where would he go? Back to Terra’s Gate? Another seven hours?
Wyatt turned his car in and passed the little itty-bitty police station and then took another left, which curved to the right, and there it was.
Home.
Or what used to be home.
It had barely changed. It even had those tacky tree-trunk pillars he had loved as a little kid—the sawed-off branches had been great for his GI Joes—and then come to loathe as a teenager. The driveway was full. Three cars—none of which he recognized—so he parked on the street. There was a sidewalk now, lo and behold, and he wondered when that had happened.
Wyatt was just climbing out of the car when the front door of the house flew open and his mother rushed out onto the front porch. He froze.
Mom.
He hadn’t seen her in nearly eleven years. From here she looked like she hadn’t changed one bit.
He tried to move. Tried to say something. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move.
And so she did.
She was a big woman, and she came across the lawn like some cruise ship plowing through the ocean, arms outstretched and crying out his name. “Wyatt! Baby!”
He broke.
Wyatt tore around the car to meet her halfway and was almost knocked from his feet when they met in a great crash of flesh. She threw her arms around him, crushed him to her ample bosom, and burst into tears.
There was a yapping sound, like a small dog, but Wyatt was so encased in her big arms that he couldn’t see anything but her dark blue blouse.
And he didn’t want to move. This from his mother—it had been the last thing he’d expected. He wanted to start crying again, and suddenly realized he was crying.
Then it was his sister: “Mom! You’re going to smother him. Let me have my turn.”
The grip relaxed and his mother started to let go, but then she surged forward and crushed him tight again. Thank goodness he’d gotten a chance to take a breath.
Finally, with his sister’s apparent help, she let go of him enough to hold him at arm’s length. She shook her head, and gods, she didn’t look the same after all. Her face… it seemed… bloated. There were lines around her eyes and mouth that he didn’t remember, and gray in her shoulder-length blonde hair that he certainly hadn’t seen before.
Of course, it had been a long time….
“You look wonderful, baby,” she said, voice cracking.
“You too, Mom.” And really it wasn’t a total lie. Just a little white one.
His sister cleared her voice, and he turned and she was the one that really shocked him. The last time he’d seen her, she was fifteen. The Wendy who stood before him today was a woman.
She was bigger. Nearly as heavy as their mother. Her cheeks pudgy and her breasts startlingly large. But the weight suited her. And her dark eyes twinkled, and she had let her beautiful dark brown hair grow, and damn, she was lovely. She took his breath away.
Her nose crinkled and she laughed and said, “Well?” and held out her arms.
Wyatt went to her then, amazed that this was happening.
What had he expected?
Certainly not this.
It was nearly impossible to believe.
At last the hugs were done, and when they got inside, he was hit by the smell of cooking food. “It’s your favorite,” his mother was saying.
His mouth was watering. “You mean…?”
She grinned and quite suddenly looked ten (or eleven) years younger. “Chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and fried green tomatoes.”
“Oh my….” He stopped. Had almost said “gods” and didn’t even try to abbreviate it. “God” would have been just as bad as far as the Dolans were concerned. Even that was considered taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“Wait until you see what she made for dessert,” Wendy said.
“Shouldn’t we be going to see Daddy?” he asked. “You made it sound like I needed to rush. Do we have time to eat?”
His mother nodded. “He has this procedure they’re doing, and then he’ll be eating and the nurse told us we didn’t need to show up until after six. That will give us a few hours. Visiting hours are over at nine.”
They sat down at the kitchen table. The same table. With its gray faux-marble top and chrome sides. The salt and pepper shakers were different. But the little wooden lazy Susan in the middle was the same one he could remember from as far back as he’d been on this earth.
“Where are your kids, Wendy?” Wyatt asked while his mother got things out of frying pans and the oven. He’d never met Mary and Norman Jr. The idea of seeing them was very exciting.
His mother placed a platter of gorgeous chicken-fried steaks on the table, and Wendy got a funny look on her face, but it vanished in a second. Had he imagined it? “They’re with their father,” she said. “He thought it would be best if we had time to catch up, you know?” But she didn’t look him in the eye with that last part. Somehow he thought maybe she wasn’t being entirely truthful.
It was then that, out of nowhere, he heard the high-pitched barking again. He’d forgotten about that, almost thought he’d imagined it. He looked under the table to see that a little Chihuahua had grabbed the cuff of his jeans and begun to shake its head.
“Joseph!” his mother shouted and scooped the tiny dog up in her arms. “Sorry, Wyatt. His bark really is worse than his bite—”
“She says that,” Wendy broke in, “because he’s never bit her!”
Joseph snarled, eyes nearly popping out of his head. Wyatt laughed anyway, despite the fact that it looked as if at any second the dog could launch itself out of her arms and into his face. But he knew just the way to a dog’s heart.
He picked up his fork and cut off a piece of meat (because his mother’s chicken-fried steak had always been tender enough to cut with a fork) and then pierced it and held it out to the snarling dog. Joseph sniffed it for all of 1/100th of a second and then scarfed it down.
And Joseph and Wyatt were friends for life.