Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 01:43:55 0000 From: Ted Turner Subject: "Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale" (m/m) Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale by Cryptococcus Codes: m/m Comments/suggestions: cryptococcus@mailcity.com Warning: This is a work of fiction, and it describes the lifestyles of two gay men. If this is not to your tastes, or you are not of legal age to peruse adult materials in your locale, please leave now. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is a totally amazing coincidence. This story is copyrighted by the author, and the author maintains all rights to it, except that express permission is granted to ASSGM and nifty.org to archive and display one copy as they see fit. Please do not distribute this, or other stories by me, to other newsgroups and/or websites without the author's express permission. Now, here's... Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale So, how do you tell the story of a relationship that lasted for thirty years together? Well, the beginning for me and Billy Dander was in 1959. We was sitting in the personnel office at Fort Leonard Wood, New Jersey, in our new civilian clothes, waiting for some pencil-pushing types to process our discharge papers. Mine would say "Honorably Discharged," and I didn't find out until fifteen years later that Billy's had the additional line, "For the Good of the Army." How that came to pass, I can't rightly say, but Billy sometimes had the problem of thinking with his dick, so it don't surprise me none, now or then. I was bored, and I was watching this skinny type sitting across the room. He was intent on what he was about, whittling on a stick and leaning over a regulation grey-metal trash bin, and the chips was flying. Since I done give up on the out-of-date magazines, I just leaned back to watch him. He worked on the stick for several minutes, and then he looked up. I saw that he was young, as young as me. "What you looking at?" he says. They was the nasal tones of native New Jersey, but I didn't let that throw me. I done met all types in Uncle Sam's service. I nodded at his stick, and said, "What are you making?" Billy looked me over, from the top of my then-fashionable buzz cut to my new penny loafers sans pennies, and then he sniffed. "It's going to be a Hoiku figure for my sister." That told me that this skinny boy had been out of the states, but I could not place the reference. "Hoiku," I said, "is that Japanese, or what?" "Nah," said Billy, looking up and giving me a flash of dark eyes, "It's Cherokee." Now that surprised me, because I was from Dill's Mill, Tennessee, and we got our Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, and I'd never seen or heard tell of such a thing. "Where you been, that you know about Indians?" I asked, thinking that he'd been in Oklahoma or somewhere. "I seen it in a book," he said, and he continued whittling. I looked around the room some more. At length Billy looked up. "Where you been?" "South Korea," I said, thankful for conversation. It was getting hot in the personnel office, and the background noise was dozens of clerk types pecking on their army-issue typewriters. Billy nodded, and looked down at his whittling. After a few minutes, he asked, "Was it cold?" It took me a moment to replay back to where we was, and then I said, "Colder than a witch's tit." He grinned at my little blasphemy, and then he kept on whittling and we got to talking. I guess that somewhere during that time, he must have decided he like me, because when we were outside waiting for the bus, he asked me where I was going, and I answered honestly that I did not know. I had a wallet full of money, and a life awaiting, but I did not know where I intended to start. "Ever been to Erasmus?" he asked. "Where's that?" Erasmus, it turned out, was colder than a witch's tit, too, but there was Billy's sister Rhonda to make things right. She was one of them big gals that we used to call "substantial," and she even sort of resembled Billy's figurine, which earned a place of honor on the mantle of the old fireplace. (It wasn't used. Rhonda's apartment had coal heat). Anyway, she was as caring and good-hearted as they come. She gathered me and Billy under her wing like we was kin, which, of course, Billy was. Lordy, that woman could cook! And talk! She could talk you up a mile and back down two. She could talk up a blue streak. Of course, after two years in Korea, I was hungry for some straight-eyed women to talk to, anyways, so I took to her like a goose to a gander. All except sex, that is. There weren't none of that because she was saving herself for marriage, and I weren't marrying no one, not if I could help it, at least for another year or two. Me and Billy slept on her fold-out sofa. It was hard for me to get used to all the noise of the city, them fire trucks running all hours of the night and the honking of horns and the screech of tires. Sometimes them screeches ended in impacts, and I'd lay on Rhonda's sofa-bed and wonder what was happening outside. I'd get to sleep hours after I went to bed, and I'd conk out flat on my back. Then, in the morning, the smell of Rhonda making coffee would always wake me. Then I'd push Billy's arm or his leg or whatever part he had turned over and put on me away and get up. Billy was a good guy, but a damn sloppy sleeper. Billy had learned electronics in the army, and he dreamed of having his own television and radio repair shop. TV, he said, was the thing of the future, but I had my doubts. Myself, I had no useful skill at all because I had been in artillery. If IBM ever decided to blow the hell out of General Motors, then I'd have a marketable skill. Billy took a job helping a man fix TV's, and I got a job in a warehouse. It involved lots of heavy lifting, and I wasn't getting rich, but I was getting stronger. I was having a good time in Erasmus, but the clock was ticking, and I had to make a decision about what I'd do. The new G. I. Bill had benefits like housing loans and stuff, but I'd have to use it or lose it. I confided my fears to Billy, who thought for a minute and then said, "Well, then build yourself a house. I'll come live with you." I didn't want to hurt him. "I can't make a house up here," I told him, "They's kin folks waiting for me back at home, and I got to go there. Besides, it's too damn cold here." "Is there someone special waiting?" asked Billy. "You mean like a woman?" I said. "Yeah," he said. "Well, no," I says, "but that don't mean I won't never get one." Billy's dark eyes challenged me, and it annoyed me, so I bowed up at him. "I can too get a woman, if I want to!" I insisted. Billy's face showed amusement, but he didn't say anything further. Later, on the sofa-bed, he leaned over and kissed me goodnight, and I let him, thinking about the strange customs of Yankees. I sat up a long time thinking about that, and I thought about it some more the next day while I was moving boxes. The next night, Billy kissed me goodnight, and when I smelled Rhonda's coffee, he was pressed up against me. My entire left side was all hot and sweaty, and it undone the shower I had got before going to bed. I rolled Billy over on his back, and he grunted, and I got up. I wandered into the kitchen. "You look like you slept well," said Rhonda, and I guessed I had. Honest work makes you sleep good. The next night, Billy decided to sleep without his tee shirt. It was too hot, he said. After a while, I did the same. Days, I stacked boxes. Nights, I'd fall asleep into the sleep of the righteous and wake up with Billy rolled on me. This went on for a while, and then I noticed a change in Rhonda. She would kind of lean back against the counter in the kitchen and look at us two, and she'd smile. This went on for a week or two, and one day I went to the V.A. office and applied for a housing loan. The man there told me that I only had ten months left to start using my educational benefits. The housing benefits, the man told me, would always be there, but if I wanted to learn something besides artillery, I'd better get on the ball. That war between IBM and General Motors weren't looking so likely, so I talked it over with Rhonda and Billy that night. "Heating and air conditioning," suggested Billy, "are the thing of the future." I had my doubts, but didn't see why not, and, besides, I could always get a job stacking boxes, and so I signed up for night school. Billy signed up a week later, saying he had to learn about transistors, because he suspected that they were the coming thing. That was one thing about Billy, he was a pretty good predictor of what was coming. I went to school and learned all about H.V.A.C. system panels and D.C. control panels and evaporators and condensers and those new-fangled heat pumps that one of my instructors thought was the future of heating and air conditioning. Billy learned all about silicon- dioxide transistors, which he said might someday replace the vacuum tube, but I had my doubts. It was long about this time that Rhonda announced her engagement. The blessed union was to take place in three months, and I kind of suspected that Rhonda had stopped holding out. (She hadn't. The baby came thirteen months later.) The needy couple was going to need everything, or else live on love, which don't feed you very good, so me and Billy talked it over and got up a list of things that we'd get the newlyweds. One of things that Rhonda wanted to take with her was the sofa, but that was okay because we would inherit Rhonda's bed, which she was leaving. We gave her and the groom, Chuck, a big sendoff and had a bunch of new furniture waiting in their apartment for them when they come back from honeymooning at Niagara Falls. Billy and me just kept on, then one day I took a test and became a heating and air conditioning technician. (Ain't that a mighty fine sounding title for a person who crawls around attics and under houses?) Shortly thereafter, Billy took a test that certified him to work on big radio transmitters, like at television stations, about which he stayed optimistic. He was right in the long run, because then Gilligan's Island and Gunsmoke come on, and everybody started buying televisions. Our incomes went up, and we had some leisure time to go to the movies and bowling and the occasional delicatessen, but I kept thinking about grass that was green and streams you can drink from, and I was homesick. Billy sensed this, and one day he asked me when I was planning to go south and pick out a lot, and I found myself asking him if he still planned to go with me. It had become important to me. He was still a damn sloppy sleeper, and I never knew when he might decide to kiss me, but other than that, he was a pretty good roommate. He said he'd make big money in the south. The south was going to resurge, he said, when all the big companies up north figured out that their taxes were supporting crumbling cities and downtown ghettos and decided to get the hell out. Billy was right about that, too. He was smart that way. I left Erasmus and visited the old folks, but Dill's Mill wasn't home anymore. Sure, there was the old farmstead and my cousins and their young'uns, and the same pretty gals I remembered, but most of them done got hitched anyway, and some of them just flat weren't so pretty anymore. I drove down to Chattanooga to look around, and then on down to Atlanta, where I learned about civilian jobs at Fort McHenry handling ordinance that paid as good as heating and air conditioning. That figured. I also went to look at a very tall television tower that had just been built, thinking that Billy might just be right again. Then I went to Rockdale county and found me and Billy's new home. It was in a piney place called "Granite Point," despite the fact that the nearest point of granite was Stone Mountain fifteen miles away, and the subdivisions hadn't come in yet. Even despite that, new houses was popping up left and right, here and there, and they was expensive - some in the thirties! - but I stood on a patch of red dirt and looked at the country side all around me and knew I had arrived. I called Billy. The V. A. man looked at me kind of funny when I went to do the paperwork, concerned that the acreage and house payments would do me in. I never admitted that two incomes would provide the money, but I did take out loan insurance, of which I made Billy the beneficiary. If something happened to me, the house would be his free and clear. Billy stayed in Erasmus, and I stayed in an small upstairs apartment run by the mother of the V. A. man. Billy had been right about heating and air conditioning. I was hired at the first place I applied. The bulldozers came, and the loggers, and the well driller, and then the house just sort of unfurled from the ground, it seemed, and one day it was there. I went north to get Billy. He was so happy to see me that he threw his arms around me and kissed me. Then he was clinging on me and crying, and I was ashamed for him, and I tried to comfort him but didn't know the words. Billy was crying because he thought I wouldn't come back for him. Where ever he got that damn fool idea I never knew, but I ended up holding him until it passed. Then he let me go, sniffed, and told me that he didn't ever want to lose me. I told him he could count on me to hang around because I was a pretty regular fellow about things like that, and he smiled, and I felt better, without a clue that in another twenty-five years it'd be me losing him. We packed the car up and went to see Rhonda and Chuck. I got to see the newborn, Rhiannon, and I was tickled when she grabbed my finger. Rhonda had decorated her apartment with throw rugs and pillows, and the place looked good. Then she made a big supper of lasagna, and we listened to Chuck brag on her. We bragged on her some, too, and Rhonda took it all in, beaming. Rhonda and Chuck followed us out to the car. Rhonda cried and hugged on Billy, and Chuck shook my hand. Then it was on to Atlanta. I should mention that another element of Billy's personality was impatience, and he was impatient on the trip. "How much longer?" he'd ask. "How far to Charleston?" "How far is it down this mountain and up the other side?" In despair of all the questions, I taught him how to read a map, and then I taught him how to drive my car, and I was amazed that both was skills a city boy never needed. Hadn't the army taught him anything? After that, Billy kept buying maps every time we stopped for gas. As a joke, I gave him an atlas for Christmas that year, and he kept it in his cars for twenty years until it was so dog-eared and wore out that I gave him another one. It was dark when we got to Georgia. Billy stood in the bare red clay yard full of pine stumps and hugged himself, and turned full- circle. I had to grin at him. "Ours!" he said. "Only a hundred-sixty more payments!" I reminded him. "No big deal," Billy said. "I'm going to be the chief engineer at a television station. We'll do real well." This surprised me. Out with the idea of having a repair shop and in with this. I believed it, though. Billy was smart, book smart. If he believed that he could do something, I'd sure not bet against him. I opened the front door, and flicked on the light, and Billy leaned his head inside and looked around. "Smells new," he says. I just waited. Billy did things Billy's way. "Did you pick out that green?" he says. He was in the doorway. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a second key to the house. When he turned around, he was about to cry, and when I handed him the keys, he let go. Billy was a fool about crying when he was happy and when he was sad both. He hugged up on me and kissed me, right there in the doorway with the lights on. I was glad that there weren't no other houses close! "Let's go in," I says, and then Billy toured the house, sniffling as he went and touching things. There wasn't a stick of furniture in the house, but I had five-hundred dollars left, and Billy had done such a good job picking out Rhonda and Chuck's furniture, I figured that I'd just leave that to him. I showed Billy his room, but he could have either one since they were both the same. He said, "Wouldn't this make a great reading room?" That comment took a while to flip over in my head, but then I must of blinked in understanding. Billy assumed that we'd continue to sleep together. He didn't want his own room. "Uh, sure," I said. "Maybe a good place to put the hi-fi, too, so's it don't interfere with the TV." "Great," said Billy, like it was a done deal, and then he was looking up at the trap door to the attic. I showed him where the light switch was, and then I went outside to get our sleeping bags, which I put in the other bedroom. On the way by, I turned on the air conditioner. I heard the unit in the attic click on, and I heard Billy holler, and I laughed. That night, Billy hooked the sleeping bags together and asked me to hold him. I did, thinking about how much I'd missed him. I went to sleep with Billy in my arms, and the morning sun found us that way, too. The next morning I gave Billy my Rich's card and we headed into the city. I had to work, but Billy wanted to explore Atlanta. It weren't like Erasmus or Trenton, I explained, because there wasn't a place you could point at and say here's the center of Atlanta. Atlanta sprawls. When I got home, we had a bed, a sofa, and a dinette set. Billy had convinced the manager of Rich's that we couldn't live in our new house without some furniture, and he had sent the truck straight out. Billy joked that if he ever got mad at me, he could tell me to go sleep on the sofa. He thought it was funnier than I did. We spent the second night in a proper bed. On the third day, Billy surprised me. I left him at the house, and when I got back that evening, there was a '55 Ford in the driveway. It was black, and looked pretty good, even if it was sort of dated. Billy come out and explained that he needed me to check the car over and tell him if he should buy it. I thought it was pretty ambitious for a fellow that just started driving three days before to be buying a car, but I did what he asked, and the old car was sound. Billy made a phone call and an elderly gentleman arrived a little later in a brand new Ford. Some cash changed hands, and then we were a two-car family. Billy soon got a job with the television station that had put up the huge tower, and with him and me both working we were pulling in some change. Billy had worked out a budget for us that he said would save twenty-percent of our house payment money over the period of the loan. Then he figured the power and the gas and the groceries, and came up with a figure that we could easily meet and still have money left over. Billy then made a second list of luxury items, and we agreed that we would purchase them as time and money allowed. The next few years I think of as our building phase. In that time, me and Billy was buying things and doing things around the house, and he was building his career as a top-notch fix-it man at the station. I began to look forward to the day that I could start my own heating and air conditioning company. Me and Billy was a team. He knew how to do what I couldn't, and I could figure out what he couldn't. I finally admitted that he had become more than a friend, or best friend, to me. I valued his opinions and his sense of taste. Even his mood swings and the easy way he cried at something in a book or something on TV I valued, because I guessed that by having more emotions than me he made up for something I lacked. Maybe I was crippled, in a way, and being with Billy made it less noticeable. Ah, hell. That's not what I mean. I mean to say that I loved Billy Dander. I loved him from the moment I laid eyes on him in Fort Leonard Wood, New Jersey, and I just didn't know it. Being with Billy was easy, because I knew that he loved me, too. Sometimes I felt like he was the smarts and I was the sense, but we mostly got along. Eventually, he proposed something that I just wouldn't do, but three days later I let him do it to me, and I found it weren't so bad. A week later, I did it to him, and he was so happy and satisfied that I was afraid he was going to cry, but he held his happiness in that time. And then we included these night-time activities in our bed routine, but we never talked about it, and we never referred to it during the day. The neighborhood was growing, and me and Billy was glad we had bought such a big lot. A real estate agent called and asked didn't we want to subdivide our lot for some more houses. Billy and me sat down at the table and discussed her third offer, but we never seriously considered it. It was our privacy that we'd be losing. Billy's car turned into a recent Mustang, and I bought a brand new Ford Fairlane. The war in Viet Nam had done heated up, and we watched Walter Cronkite every night. Billy was worried that I might be called back in active service, but I never saw that happening. Then, on the last day of January in '68, during the Tet Offensive, Billy clung to me in fear in front of the TV, and we heard General Westmoreland explain that we had won the battle. Billy stayed tense during the war in Viet Nam, and his fears took away some of the pride I felt a year later when we heard on that same TV that "The Eagle has landed." The next decade was our secret time. Our secret stayed home. I never considered us gay men. He was my best friend, and he filled a void in my life. I hoped I did the same for him. Well-meaning friends tried to fix us bachelors up, and we both went out on dates with women, but the real action was always at home after the date. My company was growing, and I had hired an electrician so we could bid on bigger jobs. Billy was made number two man at the station, under the chief engineer. He started taking night classes again, because he became convinced that computers were the future and he wanted to be ready for them. I laughed when he put together a thing called an Altair. It was a box that blinked when he flipped switches, but it was binary, and it was a computer. After a few more years, I finally saw an Apple computer that did something, and I bought one for the company. By that time, Billy was beyond the small Apple. He was programming on a mainframe. His studies took him away more and more, while fixing glitches in my quick-growing company took more of my time. We started seeing less of each other, except on weekends. Then Billy would go over the books, keeping my business straight, and we'd clean house, do the wash, and catch up on yard chores. It was a busy, busy time for us, and so the decade passed. By the mid-eighties, Billy had moved from the station's engineering team to the nearby computer center, where he soon made a name for himself - again - as a fix-it man. He started wearing a pager, and was liable to get up out of the bed in the middle of the night. Even our weekends weren't safe. It never occurred to me that if Billy weren't getting it from me on the many nights that we were apart, he was getting it from someone else. He never let on. Then he began losing weight. We put it down to overwork and stress, but it continued, and by the time I parked the Fairlane to drive my new company truck, Billy was skin and bones. I insisted that he go to the doctor, but he was reluctant, as if he was afraid what the doctor would say. A month later Billy got a cough and complained of a sore throat. When I asked him where it hurt, he took his fingers and pointed at the base of his jaw. I got him some cough medicine, but it didn't seem to help. A couple of weeks later, he developed sores along his lower ribcage, and he complained whenever he was joustled or when I touched him. This scared me, and we argued, but the next day I made him an appointment. On the day of the appointment I called the station to tell them that he would not be in, and I told Billy, who was now too sore to walk easily, that I was going to take him to that appointment if I had to carry him. He gave in when he saw how determined I was. At the doctor's office, I sat in the waiting room, as far as I could from a child in his mother's lap that looked like he had leprosy or something, but then the nurse came out, called me by name, and asked me to come back. My heart almost seized right there, and I had a sudden, black premonition of Billy's death. It was all I could to get up and follow the nurse. The doctor greeted me. "Your friend," says he, "has shingles. It's a viral infection that occurs along nerve paths, particularly the dorsal nerves." Here the doctor indicated on his own body. "Can you cure it?" says I. "I can treat it, and it may resolve itself," said the doctor, "but that's not what I wanted to talk to you two about. You've heard of AIDS?" I nodded, wondering what he was getting at, and I looked at Billy, who would not meet my eyes. "I'm concerned," says the doctor, "because this type of infection, the shingles, is sometimes seen in AIDS patients." I said nothing. "It's associated with the middle stages of AIDS," says the doctor. "The middle stages?" I asked dumbly. "Yes," he said, "no one knows much about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but it is believed that certain symptoms begin to occur two to five years after the initial exposure. There are a host of diseases that take advantage of the depressed immune response caused by AIDS. Among these is herpes zoster, or shingles. He told me that he has been bothered by a cough, too." "And a sore throat," I said. "This might be, and I stress might be, a form of nonexudative, or non-pus producing, pharyngitis that is also associated with AIDS. I consider also that Mr. Dander reports a chronic diarrhea as well as a rapid weight loss. And fatigue." I looked at Billy again. He wasn't much to start with, just skin and bones, but he was looking thinner than I've ever seen him. Then the doctor says, "I understand that you two have been sexually active?" Still Billy had not looked at me. I nodded. "Then I'd like a blood sample from both of you," says the doctor. "And I'd like for you to refrain from sex until the tests come back. With each other, I mean, or anyone else." I must of blinked, and I sat there with my mouth shut, but my world was crashing down all around me. I had been faithful. Sure, I'd heard of AIDS, but that was out in California, and it was something that happened to intravenous drug users and people who went to bath houses. It didn't happen in Conyers, Georgia, and it didn't happen to those I loved, and, God, it didn't happen to me. The doctor was saying not to give up hope. "Maybe this is just a scare," he said, but then he gave us the name of a specialist at Emory University Hospital that Billy should go see. I realized then that the doctor had treated enough AIDS patients that he could recognize the various stages. The doctor called right from the room to make the appointment at Emory, and I should have become even more scared at that, but my brain wasn't working very well. Then he gave me some pamphlets, and a nurse came in to draw our blood. I saw her put on a pair of gloves, and then pull a second pair over them. She seemed nervous, and that did more to unnerve me than the doctor did. After giving our blood to the nurse, I gathered up Billy. He looked shell-shocked. Tears were in his eyes, but he did not speak until we were in the car. He said, "I'm sorry, O.B. I'm so sorry." And then he began to cry bitterly. He slumped toward me, and I took him in my arms, and I cried, too. We sat in the car outside the medical center and cried until we couldn't cry anymore. My nose was all stopped up and my eyes hurt, and I just was cried out. People weren't meant to cry. They were meant to laugh and smile and enjoy their lives. I knew this, and I knew that the doc had left a sliver of hope. Our heads touched, and I comforted my friend the best I knew how, and something in the back of my brain turned over that was angry and accusing, and I refused to hear it or even to admit to its existence. We rode back to the house, and I held him for hours, and talked to him. I got him to eat some chicken soup and take a few bites of a grilled cheese sandwich. Billy said he was tired and wanted to take a nap, so I watched him get into bed, and then I went outside and sat in the truck, turned on the radio, and read the pamphlets. Then I cried some more. A week later we went to Emory. Billy's shingles were better, and he was able to walk unaided. We sat in the waiting room for an hour and then the receptionist called us back. We looked at each other, wondering what this might mean. I saw fear in Billy's face, and thought it was better that I did not see my own face. We were met by an older doctor who had grey hair at his temples. He talked primarily to Billy, telling him that HIV was present in his bloodstream in quantities consistent with the onset of AIDS. Then he looked at me, and told me that my test was negative, but he wanted to repeat it. He talked about false reports and mentioned percentages, but I was looking at Billy. His eyes were full of tears, but by his smile, I could tell that they were for me, not for himself. He was thankful for me, and I was thankful, too, but I'd have to await that second test to be sure. We waited almost a year to call Billy's sister, but when he was hospitalized with an opportunistic form of pneumonia for the second time, I insisted. I didn't say AIDS to Rhonda, though. I called it pneumonia. She'd have to hear that from Billy. Rhonda flew down and was at the hospital the next day. She gasped when she saw how emaciated Billy had become. He had also developed a cancer on his nose. It made his smile look lopsided over the oxygen tube in his nose, but I didn't care. It had been a week since I'd seen Billy's smile. I left the room, leaving brother and sister alone to talk. I sat down in the waiting room, and the nurse called me a minute later. The doctor would like to see me, if I had a moment? I walked into his office, and he invited me to sit. "O.B.," he started, "I need to talk with you about Billy." "Okay," I says, bracing myself for bad news. "These opportunistic infections are coming more frequently now, and we here at this hospital, we doctors, will not always be able to knock them down. You realize that this disease is invariably fatal?" I nodded. "You should make preparations." I sat still as tears flooded my eyes. I had tried to deny it, to present a strong face, to accommodate this damn disease, to fight. Then my throat convulsed, and I was sobbing. I had held it in, every day for a year, presenting a cheerful face and attitude to Billy, but no more. I was like I was in the car outside the clinic in Conyers. Grieving for the friend, the lover, that I had not yet lost. The doctor shifted in his chair, but he let me have my peace without interfering. With his specialty, I guessed, he saw a lot of grief. Eventually, it ran its course. Then the doctor wanted to talk to me about the hospice movement, which I had never heard of. I must have looked horrified, because he quickly changed tacks. Then he talked about the limitations of medicine, and he spoke about doing things to make Billy more comfortable as the end neared. He said he admired me for being strong and for standing beside Billy, and then he stood up and offered me his hand, which I took. I thanked the doctor, and walked out into the corridor, where I met Rhonda. Tears were streaming down her face, and she clutched me close and bawled, and she got me going again. The nurse guided us to the waiting room, and I held this large woman who loved me more than I deserved until she became calm. I felt cried out. A part of me wanted to die. Rhonda dug into her purse and retrieved an entire box of Kleenex, which I had to smile at, as far gone as I was. She looked at me and looked at the box, and she offered me a smile, too. I saw a bit of the Rhonda I remembered. She honked into the tissue, and she looked at me. "You don't have it, do you?" says Rhonda. I shook my head. "And you two never did drugs?" she said. I said, "No." "So he got it from someone else," she says. "Yes." "Oh, my Lord," said Rhonda. "I'm so sorry, O.B., when he first told me, I thought you..." "No," says I. "It's okay." But it was a lie for Rhonda. It was not okay, and I was not okay, and I thought I wouldn't be okay for a very long time. "Can he come home?" she asked. Billy did come home, but I had to lift him from the wheelchair into the car. He grinned at me as I hefted him up, glad to be leaving the hospital. Before I closed the door, Rhonda leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and promised him that she would see him at the house. I had, with the doctor's help, ordered a hospital bed for Billy. It sat in our bedroom beside our bed - the bed Billy had bought when we bought the house. So far, it was little used. I had maintained the strength that I earned stacking boxes, and moving skinny Billy around was no problem for me. He slept in our bed, although I seldom woke to find him curled against me. Sometimes this saddened me more anything, when I woke up in the morning expecting his arm across my face or his leg over mine and instead having only the sound of Billy's soft coughing. Rhonda made lasagna, Billy's favorite dish, and he was strong enough to sit up at the table and pretend to eat it. I was too upset to do it justice, so later on I apologized to Rhonda. Also later on, I'd make him some soup that might be light on his stomach and sort out the pills that he would need before bed. Billy wanted to use his computer. There was a bulletin board system that he corresponded with other AIDS patients on. I had read some of the messages, but the starkness of the gallows humor I saw there made me uncomfortable. He asked for his wheelchair, which I got. Then Rhonda and me sat and watched, and I saw the old Billy, leaning over the keyboard, typing furiously. "I'm telling them I'm still alive," said Billy, and then he typed some more. I sat beside Rhonda, and I was thinking about all the things Billy and me had never done, and would never do. I always had planned to give him a puppy and take him to the Smithsonian, but that was really because I really wanted a dog, not him. We had planned to travel, but we were always so busy. We had never been to the Bahamas. We had never been to Boulder, or L.A., or New Orleans. Now we never would. "How are your brothers and sisters?" Rhonda asked me, and we talked about our kinfolk until Billy reached over and flipped the computer's switch. Then we talked a little longer, and I put Billy to bed, and went to get his pills. He told me he was still full and didn't want any soup, which was a lie and a truth, so I brought him orange juice to wash the pills down. That night I slept with Billy in my arms, for the first time in two weeks. I imagined our lives come to this. Frequent hospital stays and infrequent visits home. "Make your preparations," the doctor had said. What preparations? I wondered. Financially, everything was arranged. Even Billy's final resting place was known, in a church plot beside his parents in Erasmus. Delta Airlines would fly his body home. The elderly pastor that had buried both Billy's parents would see him off, too. Rhonda stayed for a week, and then she kissed Billy full on the lips, which I had never seen her do before, and then she kissed me on the lips, which I had surely never seen her do. She said she loved us both, and told Billy that she'd be praying for him. I drove her to the airport and saw her off. On the way, she expressed her fear that she would never see her brother alive again. There was very little I could say because I doubted it myself. I watched the silver jet arch into the sky, and then I went home to Billy. That summer, he developed oral candidiasis, or thrush, and I couldn't even kiss him goodnight. I had been reading everything the doctors suggested, and I was becoming an expert on the complications of AIDS. Three months later, on October 18, 1988, Billy Dander died. He died in his sleep at Emory University Hospital of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. I was asleep in a chair beside the bed when it happened, and the nurse woke me to tell me. I looked at Billy's emaciated face with the persistent tumor on his nose, and I leaned over and kissed him goodnight for a final time. Then I took his hand and sat silent by his bed until the nurse come to check on me. I rode on the same Delta jet that carried Billy's coffin to Erasmus, and I was met at the airport by a weeping Rhonda and her family. Rhiannon had become a woman in her own right, and there was a dark-haired boy that I had never seen. His name was Will. He shook my hand solemnly and looked at me with dark eyes, and he reminded me of how Billy looked in 1959. The service was held at the Presbyterian church, and the preacher spoke at the grave side about the resurrection and the life and ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Rhonda, as Billy's closest relative, was expected to throw a handful of dirt onto the grave, but she pressed the moist earth into my hand instead, and I stepped forward to let it trickle down onto Billy's final rest. I walked away from Billy's grave with my eyes dry, but something had opened up in me and escaped and I felt the loss of it. I had loved Billy in life, as he had loved me, but it had been our secret, and we had hid it from the world. It had affected our habits and where we went and what we did. It was private, and now I had to keep it private, and I had to grieve for Billy the same way, in private. And I held it, that private grief, close to my chest and away from the world until one day in 1989 when I joined twenty-five thousand other mourners on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Rhonda and Rhiannon were there to meet me, and we searched along the mile-long AIDS quilt to find Billy's patch. When we found it, we stood there, me and the large woman who loved me as she loved her brother and the dark-haired beauty that had reached for my finger as a baby, and we were before the world, and I cried publicly for the friend and lover that had been stolen from me. The patch was simpler than some, but more ornate than others. It was black. In the middle of it was Billy's name in gold. In the upper left hand corner was the symbol of an atom with a circling electron. The upper right corner said, "We love you," and had listed the names of Rhonda, Chuck, Rhiannon, and Will. Below Billy's name was a single line that said, "Life mate and soul mate of Charles Randall O'Brien." Who survives. The end of "Billy Dander, A Fairy Tale" All rights reserved.