Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2002 04:42:32 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: m/m historical "The Boy in the Stagecoach"

			"The Boy in the Stagecoach"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman

(for Pike Bishop's friend, and my mentor, thank you--all the
mistakes in this story are mine)

 There was the--sheerness of everything. And the
immensity in the sky that was flinging morning over the
whole--Earth. Manny was ten the year of the stage coach.
There in the tumble of it. The fortuity of it. Away out West.
Where the sky and the earth met in a distance that was
never quite to be reached. Manny of the poor breeches and
the heart song that sang silent in his bird sick chest, his
pasty skin that barely reached round him, his lank dark hair,
his eyes that were lusterless and somehow indecent for a
boy that age. As he scrunched himself tightly into himself, as
though he had little right to take up the space that he did,
and the smell of the heat of the day coming on already in the
mid summer, as his legs trembled and his hands spread
spans of equidistant between the string puzzle he was
playing with and which helped him think things through,
gave him a starting and stopping point in a land, in a time,
that seemed to have neither.

 The other passengers--a conglomeration of
weeds--one, an ineffectual seeming little man of
indeterminate age who rocked himself to sleep, mumbling, a
bit of spittle every so often blowing in the wind of the left
side of his thin mouth, eyes half closed, watching the boy or
not watching the boy across from him--one, a woman, next
to the boy, who kept her prim lips to herself and her eyes to
Zane Gray in her hands of rings and things and a thimble on
one thumb-- and the last, an elderly man who was nearly
bald, hatted, and soaked in whatever smell comes with a
certain livery of fine clothes, sharp duds, with a  shiny long
rifle propped in front of him, a straightness of body, a visage
of form that said he had made it, had successfully climbed
over everything and everyone to the top, a pipe in his
mouth, smoke belling up from it, a man who kept his own
countenance and needed acknowledge no one else,
especially not a little peashooter like Manny.

 The stage pulled and hauled and rocked and hurt
Manny. It jostled on its wood carriage, the horses hooves
clomped on ahead, an occasional curry whip from the
driver, desultory talk between the driver and his partner, the
creaking of time and the creaking of maneuvers of horses
hooves and the sun stealing in and stealing the soap smell
from Manny from his early dark silent morning ablutions, as
he quietly had gotten out of his bed, and had begun to make
his way from the rickety board home of his mother while
she slept, beginning the first steps of his journey. Manny
was going far away, had saved and bartered and done
chores for neighbors, had dwelled on this trip because he
had had to get away, from the school, from his mother,
from the house they lived in, from himself. He had to get
away from the way broadcloth made him sweat, even as he
wore a broadcloth shirt now, the way his boots hurt, cheap,
second hand, the way his life was cheap, second hand, and
he was perspiring and apologizing silently for it. The creases
in his neck were dirty even though he had used the lye soap
till his skin tingled and reddened.

 He was going on an unfinished dream, to Pawnee
country, if he could find it, to live with them if he could find
them, for he had read in his school learning book, and he
had dreamed of clouds formed of mountains and mountains
of clouds, he had seen the shimmer of the need for
communion, for becoming a man, for staying a boy, for
riding naked out to buffalo hunts, for being with other
braves, for wearing a feather in his hair and nothing at all on
his body. He felt the need of rawhide teepees. The need to
dance in the shadow of his sun that was wolf and bear and
antelope spirits. To get away from the men and the women
who ran his life, and his mother's, the small village, the dot
of nowhere in the greater nowhere from which he had come.
He was a tightly drawn boy who did not want the success of
the bald man with the Stetson new and fresh and store
bought. He did not want the dreams lackluster of the young
or middle age man who dreamed and slobbered as he
dreamed. He did not want to be the prim woman in black
with a crepe neck and eyes that fastened clasp like to that
book in front of those eyes that dreamed of her not being a
toad, which she was and always would be, the hump of her,
the mold of flab of her in the black dress and the heavy
cameo broach at her neck.

 Manny was an Indian in his mind even now, as he
looked out the open window, as he put his arm on the ledge
of the door, and felt the minute sparkles of heat fry it there,
as he dreamed himself a Pawnee and needing of counting
white scalps, needing of rites of passage, needing of boys
like himself who would ride painted ponies, who would don
breechcloths for the morning ride, and then discard them for
the afternoon swims. How he longed to swim naked with
other boys, free and wild and laughing and boisterous. How
he longed not to be pale face and thin and gawky. The day
stamped Indian boys on his mind, the lay of the land, the lay
of the freedom that gained purchase with dark raven colored
hair, with arms and legs and stomachs and thighs that were
full of sinew and strength, that knew how to beaded
moccasin walk and not to make a sound, that would take
him into their fold, as though they were a wolf pack and he
the new cub, to be cuddled in the noon day sun, to feel the
warm good earth beneath his flanks, to tussle and wrestle
with the boys of the dark faces and the bodies that were like
church color glass in the day and what they made out of it.

 Manny closed his legs tighter because he was now
sporting an erection. It had been giving him trouble every
day increasingly so, and he watched the mountains blue in
the distance, he remembered the drawing he had seen of an
Indian boy diving into a blue lake, a boy who was naked,
the drawing from the back side, the spine straight and
strong, the hips loving like tear drops turned to human flesh,
the arms extended proudly serenely hurriedly, the drawing
that Manny had made himself on his paper when the class
drowsed in the noon day heat and he sat in his little wooden
chair with the small table in front of him, as he drew his
dreams in his restless brain and then tore them up. Daring
only to commit them to memory. But the heat of it was his
own teepee. The imagination of a tent that was filled with
summer day sun and caught the sickness of the world and
turned it outside the flaps, the drawings, the enumerations
of stick figures of animals on the tent walls, the comforting
Indian chants, the way the sun yellowed and made golden
what was inside and that included Manny and his golden
flesh and the close tight overwhelming heat prairie grass
floor smell of it all. Sun gods for Manny. Sun gods and no
more sourdough biscuits. Sun gods who rode tall in the
shadows that were like miniature cold winters all round the
braves as they picked him up from this every day world, as
the boys hurled him round in good fun, and prodded him
with their long dirty fingers, and played mumblety peg and
hide and seek. As they stalked deer and rabbit. And all of it
so deliciously free. All of it so deliciously seductive and
tender. Committing spirit to selves and to the great gods of
the Pawnee and the animals in thanks for the banquet.

 Manny wanted to bring himself off. His left hand
rested near his cock. His left hand--feverish, like a spider
dancing on a hot stove, with the fingers for its legs. He
pulled his head back inside the stagecoach. He looked
surreptitiously around himself for anyone noticing him, but
saw he was safe, always blessedly damnably safe, for no one
knew he was there. Manny leaning back, gulping, throat
dry, needing water from that cool sloshing canteen the man
of indeterminate age had over there next to him in his
cobweb dreams. Manny afraid to ask for water. Afraid to
make a sound, for sad Manny and quiet Manny and never
makes a bit of trouble Mrs. Driscoll, he's the sweetest most
darling, (oh god, the guys didn't hear that, did they?) most
attentive pupil I ever had. And Manny needing to find his
Pawnee heritage though he had none, but he needed it just
the same. He needed to stalk behind other naked boys. He
needed to see their dark sun flanks. He wanted to see the
curves of their hips as they bent partly over, their knives in
their hands at the ready, to take what was theirs, to take the
land back that was rightfully their own, for Manny was well
schooled in the library the school possessed, all 20 books in
a dark airless little woodshed tacked onto the one room
school house, as he took his dreams there after and before
school and manufactured the words of them. And the need
to see the crossbows. The headdresses. The arrows flying
straight to the heart of the men who stole everything out
from under his people.

 He looked out at the world bobbing drifting
slamming tumbling around him and he wanted to shout out
come and take me, come and make me pay for what has
been done to you. Teach me how to survive the sweat tent.
Get your medicine men to doctor me and take the whiteness
away from me, the blandness, the baldness inside me. His
mouth hung open though he was unawares. His penis made
a little indentation in his slack breeches. He was a boy of
shadows and he needed to lie on a rock of silver underneath
a sun of gold, with a waterfall cascading nearby, he needed
to be there with his breechcloth pulled up, his balls and
penis exposed, his hairless little body for anyone to see. For
anyone to see from their own quietness, their own stealth,
as the other Indian boys came to him, on wings of silence.
As he knew they were around him and circling him, this
curious crude odd white boy who had somehow been flung
into their midst. Their eyes of dark night. Their hands that
held their knives dangerous deep sharp water blades of
death, the kind a boy dreams about abed alone, in secret.
When there are shining currents in his eyes that are more
than tears and named something he has no nomenclature
for.

 To be on that rock, to be wiggling his hips, feeling
the luxuriousness of it, to be rubbing his penis with an
unfrightened, sure, beckoning hand, to be blinded by the
sun, to put his hands where the boys would see him
caressing himself, to need them and to want them, and to
make them need and want him, the sweat of him, the
newness of him, the blind illusions that he could push from
himself, and to close his eyes and wait for that humid boy
hand touch that did not belong to him, to have another boy
hand on his thigh, on his chest, to feel the machinery inside
himself. The delicate tickling fingers of the hand on his
bareness, as Manny sighed silent "ah."

 To feel the clocks broken and tossed aside. Bought
and bolden and golden and away from the white man race
forevermore. To look into eyes that were somehow
preternatural beyond-animal and human eyes, that were not
his in his bedroom looking glass. To look into eyes that
were eyes of the forests and the glades, to have that
sensuous sinuous face close to his, there in the heat and the
bugs and the day and the waterfall near by, cascading little
multi color elbows of water hitting them from time to time.
To feel the stab of desire. The feel of his penis being
observed and considered, so much smaller than that of the
older braves whose own breechcloths were poking out with
their own erections. Steeples, he thought, we are steeples of
a new land, a religion that prays across deserts and sand and
oceans and other worlds where our ancestors go and chase
the sun buffalo up there in the clouds where we stand for
depth and for noble and for a purpose. And the boys would
take him and would teach him how to grow sun kissed, how
to be something that counted, how to be finally seen by
humans in the world that deserved seeing him and who he
deserved being seen by. No isinglass curtains on buckboard
lanes there in the moonlight. No other boys and their girls
giggling brainlessly and smooching in the school house yard
before and after school. No moony eyes and swelled heads
and goofy looks and words. There would be dignity with
the Pawnee. There would be the smoldering rightness of
boys at play in the fields and the approval of parents and the
tough men and the aged men and the tough women and the
aged women, and there would be no girls. There would be
no latches to open and no doors to keep an eye on for
getting out of at a moment's notice.

 Just the immense openness of everything. Just the
joy of sleeping in a Pawnee made bedroll by a fire of a
winter night. The flames red and brown and gold and the
coals that would spark and dance with the wood of his
dreams, that would break the wooden dreams open and find
gold dust dancing in there, as some Pawnee boy leaned over
him and asked with his beseeching eyes if he could share
Manny's bedroll, and Manny inviting him in that cold night,
the boy the heat of a thousand summers of all the ancestors
the boy would know about, would know the intimate details
about, the lineage, the history fixed firmly in his mind, the
continuity giving a straight line, not the hit and miss of
white culture, as Manny would push his little boy fingers
through the brave's long heavy black hair and the boy
would lay heavily on Manny (who would have to change his
name, or then again, perhaps not, it might fit finally, where
he was going) and their cocks would rub their hardness
against each other. They would kiss deeply. The brave
would put his tongue in Manny's mouth and Manny would
drink of the sweet wood nectar that was there being
inserted. As their legs tangled. Manny's thin but
strengthening against the brave's strong firm legs. As they
would giggle quietly there in the midst of all that strong
eventual peace.

 As the brave would hold his oak arms round the boy
who would nuzzle into them, and feel the strong fire heat of
the brave, the cold of the night, the roar of the campfire, the
presence of the distant and right now boys of dreams who
would be here and soon, these boys, the night before the
day of a wild antelope hunt, all round the early morning
campfire, their ponies stirring close by, whinnying at times,
and the smell of boy would be everywhere, as Manny and
his lover--think of it, his lover--would take their winter
clothing off completely, and they would feel each inch of the
other's body. Their fingers would trace forest shaped
delicacies on their skins and they would be enraptured and
they would be making sex as the other boys around the
campfire woke piecemeal and watched and approved. The
same boys who had watched Manny naked on the slender
blue rock in the burgeoning summer hot sun day. The same
boys who had let Manny stalk naked with them through the
brush, who had observed him closely at a distance,
cautiously, ready to bolt at a moment's notice, as he had
observed them. Feinting. Shyly. Dancing a bit closer. Pulling
back. Avoiding eyes. Meeting then finally eyes that did not
turn away.

 But that was then. This was now. And the day sun
seeming to suck the flesh from the inside out. And the
plodding horses and the rattling creaking stagecoach pulled
them all along interminably and the sun heated and the sun
overpoured their sweat, the carriage reeked of it, the
carriage of human bodies with their white bones and their
white flesh and their white thoughts and their white
dullness. And the elderly man pulled his wide tall Stetson off
his head and he pulled out a huge blindingly white
handkerchief from his coat pocket, and mopped the sweat
off his baldness, and then he put the handkerchief back in
the pocket of his charcoal gray suit and with such an
important flourish, pulled out a large costly (mother and I
could live a year on what he spent for that one item) golden
pocket watch that glinted in the sun.

 And as the man flipped the face of it open to check
the time (and what difference the time for any of them?)
Manny imagined the light flickering signal of the sun on the
gold watch case tripping the sensitive keen watchful ever
patient eyes of Indians on a close by hill who were on
horses that were palominos, horses taken for this advent of
the stage coach, to race to it, war whoops like long soap
bubbles made of grease paint following them in the thick
cloying air, as they galloped to the dusty road along which
this broken down contrivance of man made its desultory
way. And the flick of the whip of the drivers, the calls and
the curses at the horses.

 The stagecoach lurching forward. The black little
kidney shaped hat of the old woman next to the boy falling
off, the book knocked asunder, her little black cotton
stocking spindly legs sticking up as the suddenly silly
cawing woman was pummeled this way and that, and the
well to do gentleman biting his pipe stem in half, the pipe
dropping in pieces, the smoldering tobacco on the wooden
floor seething, and the slobbering dreaming young old man
awoken with a shout of his own, from his reverie, his half
opened eyes now wide open and all their ears battered with
the war whoops descending on them, as the world was filled
with horses hooves, as the Pawnee raiding party was
coming for Manny who was shouting himself and
gesticulating his arms at the Indians--"Here! Over here!"

 As the very earth rumbled with the tension of it all,
as Manny looked for his saviors coming closer and closer as
the world bent down and pried open the top of the
stagecoach and Manny was pulled out on feather arrows
and deposited on a riderless palomino next to the other men
and boys, and he rode with them, and rode to the stage
coach like an open can and the people inside screamed, and
the old man pulled up his rifle, and tried to cock it, when he
got presence of mind, while that fear curdled in him all that
correct carriage, all that who needs people? bearing,
making thrown about Manny laugh aloud.

 As the sheer horripulating terror,  and the jounce,
the bounce of the coach knocked rifle and man asunder as
well, as it also did the pipe cleaner legs and arms of the no
longer drowsing spittle man who would pull a Bible from
his saddlebag next to him, a Bible that a flaming arrow
would strike right in the center of, in partial payback for all
the things that book had been used as an excuse to destroy a
proud people for reasons that had nothing to do with a God
or a man on a cross dying for our sins amen. And there was
much fear, and Manny inside the stagecoach and outside
with his new family, Manny in war paint, Indian clothing,
hand to mouth whooping, bow and arrows on his back, on
his horse that was all thunder and muscle and strength and
godhood beneath him and around him and Manny counting
the sheer magnificence of being allowed to ride the beast,
and Manny inside the coach, on the torn muslin covered seat
board, and Manny on the horse, doppleganger after himself,
both of him, cheering them on, take me, take me, and
thinking this, his throat hurt like he had a fever and the
whooping cough again, and he coughed loud and hard and
leaned over and spat up a drop or two of coppery tasting
blood.

 Copper like the taste of Indian breeches. Copper like
the copperhead he would arrow shoot with such skill and
precision right in the back of the neck deom his big
crossbow. Copper like the taste of pennies of water that his
young lovers would toss like magic coins to him as he lay
on his rock of slender sliver, as the boy above him shadow
in the hot tiger sun had taken off Manny's breechcloth and
bent to kiss Manny down there where he had so ached to be
kissed by a boy especially. And copper his eyes and sun
blind copper and he bent over and he pulled back. There
were no Indians coming for him.

 There was no runaway stagecoach. There was no
rifle pulled by the driver to be knocked out of his hands and
flung away from him as an arrow took him off the seat and
turned him into a parenthesis mark diving him to the hard
earth below. There was only a pasty runt boy with
something of a rat face bending over and then pulling back.
The other passengers finally seeing him, staring at him, as
the boy coughed, self-consciously wiped his chin with the
back of his left hand, and vaingloriously pulled his head out
the carriage again and as he begged please someone please.

 The dust and grit and horse smell and waste and the
rocks and gravel and the little pummels of the white world
that somehow did not mingle, did not smell, did not taste,
did not have the resonance they would in the Pawnee world
though the objects, the results were the same, for there was
the white barrier for all of them, for Manny too, who had
lost his erection, who was flushing with shame at having
become the center of attention in just the wrong way, and
the wind blew a hot bitter steel taste of wing of noon time
on him, and he longed for his butt to stop hurting from this
ride and more of the ride to come, the wooden wheels and
the shakes and the wooden legs that were made his own
instead of flesh and bone legs he once had, and he just knew
when the stage stopped if it ever did he would on getting
out, fall flat on his face, and everyone would laugh at him
for sure then.  Now his bladder full. The woman beside him
mumbling to the proper man across from her. The smug
smiles all three adults had trained on the boy even though
the boy did not look at them to see he was right, for he was.
So what Manny did was (so shockingly un-Manny like) to
raise his sore tail off the torn muslin covered seat and cut
the fart he had been holding in for at least three miles now,
that he had been unaware of till this moment when it felt like
a huge box had been pressed sideways into his abdomen.
The fart smelled something awful and made an almighty
rude as could be sound. It felt so good. Why had he not
done this before when with others? The kids would love him
for this. He couldn't wait to tell them. Though he knew they
would not believe them. So one day in school, he would
have to prove it to them--teacher, too--teacher, most
especially, so from that day forward, Manny would no
longer be the sweetest, nicest boy the teacher had ever had.

 The two men harumpped. The old man smoked his
pipe, harder, then choked on all that tobacco smoke in his
lungs. The woman moved her bustle self as far away from
Manny as she could.  She coughed deeply, said "I never..."
in a grating little simpy voice, and rustled the pages before
her of a Western while she was in the Western which made
no sense at all, and Manny laughed, he looked out the open
window and he laughed as hard as he could, he guffawed,
he cackled, he heehawed, he bellowed, he peed a little bit in
his pants, making a most unsightly stain, he roared, he was
his own waterfall of laughter cascading, and the little elbows
of his giggles, his hilarity, his mirth, hit the passengers in the
stagecoach with him, where the smell of the fart mixed with
all that sweat of bodies and clothing and pipe tobacco made
the air pretty rank indeed. The man of indeterminate age
settled himself down as best he could to go back to a half
sleep again, mumbling the words, "little savage" as the boy
looked over at him, and the man looked at the boy.  They
locked eyes for a long moment. Manny found himself oddly
unfrightened. Found himself oddly angry and showing it,
regardless of the consequences.

 The man almost smiled at him but Manny  (so
un-Manny like, those weak eyes that needed glasses, and
all) looked at him coldly and calculatingly, until the man
stopped smiling, sniffed a bit, broke eye contact, jostled his
arms and elbows about his chest, as he pretended to calmly
drop off one more time, though keeping a defensive eye out
for that boy was a real wrong 'un for sure.

 And Manny, looked out the window, and the dirt
and dust creased him and the sun wilted him, and he sighed,
as he waited for the stagecoach to get to its first stop, so he
could turn around and go home again. He could be a
Pawnee some other day. He was still very young. There was
time. He decided there were some things he wanted to teach
the pale faces first. Looked to him like it would be fun.  The
string puzzle had hung limp and  unnoticed by the boy for
some time, from his left hand, then the string tumbled out
into the dust, unneeded.

 The horses plodded on and the wooden wheels
turned in great ceaseless circles as the sun burned down
hard hot and relentless on the interminable spaceless endless
blue sky and green land below and the world continued to
revolve, infinitely Pawnee- patient.

				  the end