Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2022 03:57:15 +0000
From: Arthur Kent <Hobbyboy391@outlook.com>
Subject: Boy from the High Country, Chapter 10

BOY FROM THE HIGH COUNTRY

Chapter 10

by Hobbyboy

See the disclaimer at Chapter 1

YELLOWSTONE GEOGRAPHY: For readers unfamiliar with Yellowstone National
Park, there is a good web page at www.yellowstone.com which includes a road
map in Acrobat format. For readers from other countries, the photos on the
web site might add color to the story. You might be particularly interested
in the picture of Old Faithful. Old Faithful was so called because it
erupted faithfully every hour, until a major earthquake in the 1980s
disrupted underground thermal activity. Old Faithful is now less
dependable, but can still be counted on for a good show most of the time.

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER: Giving credit where credit is due, this chapter
references a story titled "Caring for Cody" that was posted in 1997 in the
Adult-Youth section of Nifty. Because the Nifty Archives go back many
years, the story was still available in 2023. It was credited only to a
source called Teentales, of which I can no longer find any record.

CHAPTER 10: WYOMING DREAMING

The blazing sun produced no sensation of heat. I was sitting on a
brick-hard surface, a dike between rice paddies created from the mud and
baked by the sun. Nick's lips were moving, but I could near no words. The
only sound was an eerie, vibrating whine like a thousand distant electronic
crickets. Tran was on my lap, stroking the hairs on my arm, as always
marveling that my skin was not as bare and smooth as his own. Ky was
astride Nick's hips, smiling as the big blonde American practiced his
limited Vietnamese vocabulary. The war seemed far away. I marveled at my
friend Nick. From the first he had shown such compassion and concern for
the children. The buzzing whine was louder now, and my head began to throb
in time with its cycles. Suddenly Tran's head exploded in a grisly spume of
blood and bone and brain tissue, and I felt myself toppling backward into
the paddy behind me. As if in slow motion I saw Nick and Ky fling their
arms and legs outward in a paroxysm of death as bullets slammed into their
bodies and propelled them backward from the dike. Then as if someone had
thrown a switch the sound began, the rattle of automatic weapons fire, the
crump of mortar shells exploding.

I sat bolt upright in bed, or tried to, but the cabinets above me were too
low. My head slammed into them, and I dropped back down onto the pillow. My
heart was racing, my breath rushing in and out in frantic gasps. The sheet
beneath me was drenched with sweat. There was a distant roll of
thunder. Kelly stirred beside me, just enough to ask, "S'matter?"

"Go back to sleep, Kel," I said. "I'm going to go to the bathroom."

Kelly rolled over and was immediately asleep again. I pulled on a pair of
sweats, slipped into my sandals, and stepped out into the cool night. I
locked the camper door for Kelly's safety. As I fumbled with the lock, I
found that I was trembling. I thought I had laid those demons to rest, but
now after thirty years, the dream had returned. Why now? Why here?

I knew I would get too cold just standing there, but if I went back to bed,
I would be unable to sleep. Perhaps this was the opportunity I had needed
to straighten out my thinking about Kelly, about myself, about the
inevitable day when this idyllic interlude would come to an end. The
parallel loops of roadway through the campground would enable me to walk a
long distance without ever getting far from the camper. I always thought
better on my feet anyway.

I met Nick at Fort Riley in the summer of 1967. He and I were the only
college graduates in the company who were not officers. I had taught in a
boys' boarding school for one disastrous year after college, and was
looking for another job when the draft caught me. In college I couldn't
afford to hire others to type my term papers, so in self defense I had
learned to type. Hence the Army, in its infinite wisdom, sent me to clerk
school, where I had to go through the motions of learning to type all over
again. Most of the others in that class came out typing by the Columbus
system: discover and land. Nick was trained as a supply sergeant, a job
which required the ability to read and to count -- the perfect place for a
college graduate, in a typical military misuse of resources. We were part
of a recently reactivated unit that would travel en masse by troop ship to
Vietnam.

Thrown together as we were by the exigencies of war, Nick and I became good
friends. We talked history and philosophy, and once a week we would try to
solve all the world's problems at the enlisted men's club over mugs of
beer. Neither of us was given to nights out on the town, so soon we were
occasionally referred to as the two homos. No one meant that seriously; it
was clear to all in the company that we had become brothers, not lovers.

Once aboard the USNS Geiger, Nick and I volunteered to publish the ship's
newspaper, which we printed each morning on a mimeograph machine and hand
delivered to the officers' quarterrs. We dragged the mattresses from our
bunks into the tiny newspaper office and slept there, thus sparing us from
from being doused in projectile vomiting from seasick soldiers in higher
bunks.

The battalion arrived in Vietnam on Christmas Eve. It was hot, it was
dusty, we were lonely and far from home. No matter what the calendar said,
it was not Christmas. An entire village had been forcibly moved half a mile
down the Mekong River so that our battalion could occupy a strategic river
bend. Our company headquarters was located in what had once been the home
of the village headman.  Every evening a dozen or more infantrymen would
sit in the largest room watching televsion -- yes, we had packed a TV set
and a large chest freezer aboard the troop ship, and there was television
programming in English broadcast from Saigon -- and we could also watch
small lizards as they lurked up high in the ceiling beams, gorging
themselves on the bugs that clustered around the light bulbs.

It was an as yet unfortified camp, located in what the Army regarded as
pacified territory. Villagers wandered freely through the camp after
passing the most rudimentary of checkpoints, selling trinkets, pornographic
photos, souvenirs, locally bottled Coca-Cola, almost anything that a
G.I. might want. I will never forget the biazarre experience of squatting
over the hastily-dug trench latrine while a Vietnamese woman tried to sell
me a Coke. How did she think I would be able to reach for a wallet?
Marijuana rolled into cigarettes and sold in meticulously ironed-out and
restored American cigarette packs, and temporary bed partners, were
marginally harder to find. Nick and I were not buying either one.

Nick and I shared a two-bed small room in the house rather than sleeping in
one of the large tents with the men who would do the real fighting. There
we could sit in our off hours and bitch about how the Army was ruining our
lives, and swap stories about our imagined exploits as college students,
Nick at DePauw, me at Willamette. Unlike me, Nick was able to see more than
the promise of a free burial plot in our impending assignment to Southeast
Asia. Back in Kansas he had raided the post library for books on Vietnamese
history and culture, and even brought back an introduction to the
language. Little by little he encouraged me to see this tour of duty as an
opportunity to expand our knowledge of the world. We should see ourselves
as tourists, Nick said, except that people might be shooting at us. Because
of our jobs with the company headquarters staff, it was unlikely that we
would ever have to shoot at anyone, unless there was a direct attack. We
had not been trained for field operations.

The first of the boys showed up on the second day. Nick and I were taking a
break on the nearest rice paddy dike when four boys appeared, barefoot,
shirtless, wearing only the blue shorts that were part of their uniform for
school. Before they were old enough for school, the village children went
naked. The boys were fascinated by our white skin and by the hair growing
on our arms.

Tran and Ky were the two who returned day after day. We discovered that
Ky's father was in the South Vietnamese army, and Tran's father had been
killed. Nick practiced his Vietnamese, and tried to get me to join in, but
I seemed to have no ear for the language. We showed them how to throw
Frisbees, even played some rudimentary games of catch. It wasn't long
before both youngsters were better at these sports than I was.

In spite of the minimum of verbal communication, I was becoming quite
attached to the two boys. I had always been a magnet for children. It was
almost embarrassing how toddlers belonging to complete strangers would hold
up their arms to be picked up in supermarkets and department stores. I was
a clean-cut kid, and parents were not as suspicious of motives as they are
now. At church I could always be found entertaining the young children
during the break between Sunday School and the worship service. I was more
comfortable with them than I was with my peers, because I was painfully shy
and awkward. With the children, I could be myself.

There was something else, too. When I was physically very close to a child,
I could somehow sense his or her mood. I always seemed to be able to give a
smile or a soft word when it was needed. Among my family's friends, I was
well known for my ability to quiet fussing children.

And so it was with Tran. Unlike American boys his age, he was completely
uninhibited in his expression of emotion. Vietnamese boys thought nothing
of holding hands, walking arm in arm or with arms on shoulders. If he
wanted a hug, which was often, Tran would simply walk up to me with his
arms open. He often wanted to cuddle in my lap and just look out at the
world from a safe location. Because he and Ky had been raised without
television or manufactured toys, they were not as restless and easily bored
as children back home.

I was surprised as hell the first time Tran kissed me. It was exactly the
kiss a child might give a parent or a close relative, except it was on the
lips. Perhaps this was easier for me to accept because on my father's side
of the family, kisses on the lips were routine from my aunts and uncles,
though only from my father's brothers and sisters, not from their
spouses. There was never anything even vaguely sexual about the times we
spent with Tran and Ky.

My time with Nick and the Vietnamese boys ended too soon, and horribly. We
had been in country only three weeks when a sniper's bullets snuffed out
the lives of my best friend and the two young boys I had come to love like
my own children. In spite of the gunfire that broke out from our side in
response, this had not been a full-scale attack. It was hit and run. Tran
and Ky were simply in the way. I lay in the rice paddy covered with the
blood and flesh of a boy who had trusted me, and who for his trust had
taken a bullet that should have killed me. I knew that my best friend was
dead. My mind retreated into darkness.

It was a week before I came out of my fog in the psychiatric section of the
field hospital. The Army shrink was like everything else in the military,
by the book and barely competent, but he did help me to see that Tran's
death was not my fault. I would simply have to learn to live with the
emptiness. I think it was about then that I began to turn my thoughts back
toward teaching. I had not been able to make a difference to Tran and Ky,
but perhaps I could repay the debt I owed them, and in some way carry on
the legacy of Nick's teaching me, by teaching others. It was not easy to
apply for teaching positions by mail from the Mekong delta, but with the
help of my alma mater's teacher placement service I was offered a position
at Oswego Academy near Portland, where I have been teaching ever since.

My ability to sense the emotions of others was both a blessing and a curse
in the years that followed. It made me a patient and considerate lover,
able to sense what my wife needed and putting her gratification ahead of my
own. I remembered something my father used to say: "Love can always wait to
give; lust can never wait to get." My compassion and empathy extended to my
students and to total strangers, but my wife had been raised in an
emotionally abusive household where the dad had made the family a fortress
against the outside world. Eventually she could no longer live with the
fact that I did not devote all of my attention and energy to her, although
it took her twenty years to make up her mind to leave me. The lasting
legacy of that marriage was my daughter Heidi. I became a single parent
because my wife's way of leaving the marriage was to sleep with her
boss. Heidi hated her so much for that betrayal that she refused even to
stay overnight in her house, and no court would force a custody arrangement
on a young teenager.

I missed being married, and I remarried too soon. To my second wife, who
pursued me to the altar, I was a trophy. She had been through an abusive
marriage and a messy divorce, and I was proof that she could still attract
a man. When that wore thin after less than five years, she gave me my
marching orders: find your own apartment within sixty days.

When I fell in love, I fell hard. Both divorces were emotionally wrenching
experiences for me. I was devastated. My sense of self-worth was reduced to
nearly zero. It was my relationship with my students and colleagues and my
daughter that sustained me through both times. The time I spent listening
to my students, the fact that I treated them in class as intelligent people
who could contribute to each other's learning, was paid back to me with
interest when I was the one in distress. But I vowed that I would never
again fall in love. I had had enough of that kind of pain.

My walk through the chill morning darkness finally came to an end. I smiled
as I remembered a story about the great educator John Dewey at
Columbia. One day he came to class and began rambling on about something
that was not obviously related to the course, and his bewildered students
tried to follow him. When the class time ended, Dewey looked at his
students and said, "Thank you. I understand that much better now." I had
talked myself out, so to speak, and I understood myself much better now.

This trip was my declaration of independence. When I started out I was
determined that I would never need anyone again, I would never care again,
because caring only led to heartache. Then I found Kelly asleep on that
picnic table. With his thin frame and olive skin he was a slightly grown up
version of my Tran, my lost and destroyed Tran. And now the tears came. I
stood in the road and sobbed helplessly, crying the tears I had never shed
in that hospital in Vietnam, weeping at last for Tran and Ky and Nick, for
a loss so devastating that I had never acknowledged it, had never mourned
the loss, even when I was in the depths of despair over the failures of my
marriages.

My legs refused to support me any longer, and I sat down against a log that
marked a parking spot at the end of one of the loops of road. How long I
sat there I do not know. I was groaning aloud, trying however not to
disturb anyone. I cried until no more tears would come. My abdominal
muscles were aching from the heaving sobs that had wracked my body. When at
last my grief had run its course, I leaned my head back against the bare
log and rested.

I knew now why I had moved so easily into a simple and boyish kind of sex
with Kelly. He had stirred my unconscious memories and had broken my
determination to be alone. I had reverted to the age I knew best, which was
not my chronological age but the age of the people with whom I spent most
of my time. I became a teenager, doing what I had never even thought of in
my own sexually repressed youth: experimenting sexually with a friend. My
adult self had been strong enough only to keep me from allowing him to
return the favor.

At the same time, with my gift and curse of empathy, I had felt Kelly's
need and answered it without thinking. I still did not understand how
Kelly, who apparently had been so sexually traumatized by his stepbrother,
could have felt as he did about me. It made no sense. He should have been
like a frightened animal, tentative and cautious and suspicious. I might
never know the answer, but I was sure I had not misinterpreted him.

In that same moment, there dawned on me with awful certainty the
realization that this time with Kelly could not last. I could revert to
adolescence for a while, but not for long. I really was too old to be his
father, and in any case, even if we could straighten out the mess created
by his running away, I would not be an acceptable guardian for any child. I
was single. I lived in a one-bedroom condominium, and after the financial
devastation of two divorces I could not afford to buy anything larger, not
in Portland's burgeoning economy. The question was whether I could find a
solution that would not leave Kelly worse off than when I found him.

At length I rose and returned to the camper. The eastern sky was
brightening toward dawn when I unlocked the camper door. When I crawled
back into bed with Kelly, he roused himself and turned to give me a
hug. "Have you been gone a long time?" he asked.

"Yes. I had a bad dream and I had to walk around for a while to think about
it."

"Was the dream about me?"

"No, Kelly. You only give me good dreams."

"I was dreaming about you again."

"Again? Do you dream about me often?"

"I've been dreaming about you for a long time."

"But Kelly, we've only known each other for two days."

He rose up on one elbow and looked down at me. "But you were in my dreams
before I ever met you."

"Kel, how can that be?"

"I don't know, exactly. You remember the boys I told you about, the ones I
made up in my mind to take the pain?" I nodded my assent without
speaking. "There was more. When I... went away like that, there was someone
else there, besides my mother and father. And then when I met you, I knew
it had been you all along."

"Kelly, I just don't understand. When did this start?"

He dropped back down on his pillow. He was wide awake now, striving to
explain to me how I had somehow fitted into his life. "When I lived at
Freddie's house, well I already told you how we used to do things together,
I mean in bed, with each other's bodies. Freddie said he knew a place on
the Internet where we could read about the things we were doing. He had a
computer in his room, and he looked up this story site called Nifty. That's
where I read about Cody and Jeff. Did you ever see that story?"

"Yes, Kelly, I have read that story."

"Well I liked Cody's story. There were some other stories by boys who had
run away or whose parents kicked them out. And when I read about Jeff
taking Cody home, I wished I could leave and go with somebody who would
love me. I knew that if those other boys could find someone, there was
somebody who would find me. In those dreams I had where I was with my
mother or my father, and sometimes at night too, there was this kind man
who picked me up and held me and took me away from Jason and my stepdad. He
was in my dreams so much that I knew he had to be real, somewhere. I
couldn't quite see him very well, but when you held me in the shower, you
felt just like he did in my dreams, and I knew that you were my Jeff."
Kelly rolled over and threw his arm across my chest. "I waited for you for
so long," he said. "And you finally came."

My God. Kelly didn't seem to realize that the Nifty stories were
fiction. He had heard these other boys tell about being rescued, and had
become convinced that this always happened for the lost boys. I thought
back to the story of Cody and Jeff. I remembered how Cody tried to show
affection in the only way he had ever known true affection, a sexual way;
how Jeff had resisted, and told Cody it was wrong; how Cody had reacted in
frustration and anger and had nearly walked out; how Jeff realized that
Cody needed to love him in this way, and had given in. In Kelly's mind, the
conversations I had wanted to have with him had already taken place. In his
dreams and fantasies he had already expressed his frustration and need to
his rescuer, to me. The longings aroused by his relationship with Freddie,
the physical pleasure he had gotten in spite of the brutal attitude of
Jason, he had transferred to his fantasies, and then I had stepped right
into that fantasy. Fantasy and reality had become one, seamlessly blending
together. That night in the shower with Kelly was not a new event for
him. It was a continuation. Its outcome was already determined in Kelly's
imagination.

At that moment I had no idea how I would be able to handle this
situation. But at least I now understood, probably as well as I ever would,
what the situation was.

"I love you, Uncle Art," he said.

I held Kelly tightly in my arms and said, "I love you, Kel. No matter what,
I will always love you."  I held him a moment longer, then finally
relaxed. He was content. "Come on, let's get some breakfast," I said. "We
have a big day ahead of us."

NEXT: Chapter 11, Perfect Love

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