Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 12:19:25 -0400 From: Sean Williams Subject: Ben Leaves Bareacres Ranch Chapter 4 Ben Leaves Bareacres Ranch Chapter 4 "I'm alright," I said, turning to look out of the rear window of the car again. There wasn't anything to see back there; nothing to hear. The only sounds came from the car radio that Russ had turned on. "You want a cigarette?" asked Russ. "Come up front. Come up here." "No," I said. I sighed. "Just... no. Never mind." "What is it, Ben? What's wrong?" "What did we just do?" "I don't know," said Russ. "Nothing. Why do we have to talk about it?" "We don't," I replied. "We don't have to talk about it." "Ben, whatever it is, you can to talk to me. I'm not your enemy. I know that first day I came back... things got a little heavy. I came on really strong and I don't really know why. I mean, I do... I couldn't pull myself away from you just then, but I don't know it went down like that. All those feeling were... new. You know?" I did not reply, because it did not seem like a much of a question to me. The car radio was tuned into a country music station: I could not hear the words sung out to us from the black box, but I could guess at what they were: "Just getting out of work at one in the morning and I'm looking for you. Driving down an old dirt road thinking about you. I know I promised I wouldn't call, but I can't stop myself. I need my baby." Something like that. "I'm not here to screw you over, Ben," said Russ. "I know you don't trust me, but you should. I'm your..." "If you say 'I'm your friend', Russ, I don't know what I'm gonna do. You're my brother-in-law." "Oh, is that how it is, Ben? I got it now." "I didn't mean it like that." "Let's just get outta here. Yeah? Let's drive to town. I mean to Billings." Russ was looking behind him, back at me in the back seat of the Mercedes. His look was expectant and it was desperate. Probably not as desperate as I must have looked in the weeks since I had come back to Bareacres, but looking at him gave me a hint of what people must think when they look at me. Sure some of them must have wanted to help, but they probably did not know how to do it. A one-way ticket to the town farthest away from Montana would have been a start. "Let's go, Ben," said Russ. "C'mon, let's go to Billings." "That far?" I asked. "Why not? "Alright, man. Just, make sure you have me back before dark or my Dad will have my hide for sure." "You reckon?" "You makin' fun of me?" I asked, turning forward in the car; my eyes met Russ's. "Jerk." "Let's go," said Russ, and we left. I sat on the floor of the motel room with my back against the bed and Russ lay on the bed, his 6'6 form making a huge dent in the bed. The bed creaked loudly every time Russ turned or lifted a leg. His head rested at the foot of the bed, close to mine. "Want more pizza?" asked Russ, nudging the half empty pizza box toward me. "No," I said, reaching for the remote control. I did not understand what I was doing here, in Billings. The sounds were different here. When I ignored the creaks of Russ's moving in bed, and the footsteps from the motel room above us, or the curses from the suites below, I heard the sound of concrete. Rubber against concrete roads. People driving in cars through town; out of the corner of my eye, I could see the flashing lights of store fronts and street signs. The colors of the billboards leapt out at me; the twirling McDonalds double arches stood out in my mind. These images almost became like sounds and I had to deliberately purge them from my brain in order to recall that the only true sounds were Russ, footsteps, curses, rubber, and concrete. "This is cool," said Russ, out of the blue. I was looking forward and could not see his face, but I guess that he was smiling. "What is?" "Nothin'." "Let's see what's on TV," I suggested, looking down at the remote. "Porn." "One track mind." "Maybe." Russ sat up and came down to the floor beside me. He placed his arm around me and, against my better judgment, it felt really good and I had no yearning for him to let me go. "We're not watching porn, Russ," I said, begin to flip through the channel. "Nothing like that. We're just gettin' away from the ranch for a little bit." "I don't want to watch porn, Ben. I just... let's talk." Russ watched me, looking intermittently at the hand that held the remote and my face, as I flipped through the limited channels on the television. Russ wanted to watch the news because there was a story coming up about a woman that allegedly accidentally married her grandfather, but I did not want to see that so I vetoed that idea. In the end, I turned the television off. Russ shrugged and tossed me a newspaper. "I haven't felt like this in along time," said Russ, as I perused the headlines on the front page of the paper. "Haven't felt like what?" I asked. "Comfortable," Russ replied. "It just feels right." "It ain't right," I said. "It ain't right at all. We both know that." "I don't care if it's wrong," said Russ. I felt so small sitting next to him, but I felt safe. Even though I told him it was wrong, it did not really feel wrong to me, whatever it was that we were doing. "What right does anybody have to tell me it's wrong?" Russ continued. "Nobody has to know, besides. They don't have to know anything at all." "I don't want to talk about it." "Why did you leave your boots on?" asked Russ, and he bent down and untied my boots for me. He pulled them off an threw them to the other side of the room. "Socks on or off?" he asked. "Off," and Russ began to pull of my white socks. When they were off, he threw these also to the side of the room where my boots had landed. "This is all familiar," Russ said. "What is?" "There's so much you don't know about me, Ben." "What's to know?" I asked. "You're a dumb jock." "I'm not dumb," said Russ. "You don't think I'm dumb. I know you don't. I'm just... I'm more than just what you think I am. You don't really know me that well. Honestly, nobody in your family really does. I just sorta sprang up outta nowhere. I wish you all could get to know me. Especially you. You don't know everything about me. Not yet." Russ and I sat like that, reading the paper, for a good hour. Occasionally, I nodded off and Russ would pinch me to wake me up. I felt warm with his arm around me. Part of me felt guilty about the whole situation: he was my sister's husband after all. I would love to take a trip to the parallel universe where sleeping with your sister's husband was alright. But here I was, on Earth. Yet even though it had to be wrong, it did not seem that way to me, judging solely by what I felt inside. It felt right. It felt really right and I couldn't predict the future. All I could think about was right now and at this point, things did not feel wrong at all. "When I was seventeen, I fell in love with a guy," said Russ, out of the blue. I had to look over at Russ to make sure that I did not just hallucinate the words. But he said them. They were his. Russ smiled when I looked over at him, but he continued looking forward, at the turned-off television. "It was strange," he continued. "It was really strange. Before my Dad died, my parents use to keep up a house on a lake in Northern Minnesota and we would go there every summer: me, my parents, and my brothers. I wasn't close with my Dad, but all of us boys would go fishing together, and it was awesome." "How come you weren't close with your Dad?" I asked. "I don't know," said Russ. "I always felt like he didn't give a shit about me. I was the son that he never thought would amount to anything. Same old story. I guess he was right." I nodded, but I didn't say anything. "One summer, the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, my older brother brought home one of his friends from college, this guy named Cooper. He was kind of like my brother, at least he looked like him: a big guy, kind of on the chubby side. Not fat, but just... meaty. Big blue eyes. Facial hair. That's sort of how my brother looks, too, but Cooper was completely different. He would laugh at my brother's stupid jokes, but there was more to him than that. He had this way of looking at you like he knew what was going on. Something sort of deep. I don't know. That's how it looked to me when I was a seventeen year-old kid. Just a stupid kid. "So Cooper came to stay with us for the summer, instead of working at his Dad's construction company, and we spent the whole summer just sort of hanging out. It was weird because we all treated Cooper like he was one of the family, but he kind of stood out because you could tell that he didn't really feel comfortable around us, not yet. He didn't really know us, ya know?" "Yeah." "So, one day, my brothers were helping my Dad on the grill: bringing over the meat and stuff, and I saw that Cooper was sitting over by the pier. He was sitting with his sandals off and his feet in the water. Just dangling and kicking in the water. I figured maybe he was missing home so I took off my sandals, too, and I sat next to him and put my feet in the water. 'You, okay?' I asked him. 'Yeah,' said Cooper. 'Missing home, huh?' I asked. 'We're not bad people.' I figured maybe he didn't know what to make of us. I know that I sometimes felt weird staying with relatives that I hadn't seen in a long time. 'I know,' Cooper said, and then he cocked his head to the side and smiled at me. I got hard instantly and I just looked down. I was thinking: 'What the hell is going on?' and I wanted to run away, but I thought he might see my hard-on, so I stayed sitting there. 'You like coming out here, to the lake house?' Cooper asked me. He splashed the water up at me by kicking it with his feet. 'It's alright,' I said. 'Same thing every year though.' I don't remember what Cooper said after that. We just sort of sat there talking about stupid things, like pranks my brother pulled on campus, and what it was like being in a fraternity, that sort of thing, but I do remember the last thing that he said. I'll never forget it because it was the most important thing anyone had ever said to me up to that point in my life." "What did he say?" I asked. I looked up into Russ's strong, masculine face, because I wanted to see his expression as he spoke the words. Russ looked down and then up again. He shook his head and I thought I heard something like a sigh roll out of his mouth. "You're beautiful," he said, and then he turned and looked at me, but only for a moment. "That's a weird thing to say to another guy, but what can I say? That's what he said. He told me I was beautiful and, I don't know if he meant it and I remember thinking 'why did he say that?' but that was all it took. I fell in love right then and there. Hard. Real hard." There was more silence after that. Russ turned the TV on and then off when he decided that he did not want to watch the news either and so we sat there, on the floor of the motel room facing a television that was turned off, with our heads down looking at the floor. We looked like too alcoholics recovering from a hard night of boozing it up, and I cannot explain why we did not say anything to one another. I thought Russ was reliving a painful memory and I did not want to intrude on that by saying something stupid. Now, looking back, I am sure that Russ was waiting for me to say something, only I did not realize that was what he wanted. But finally Russ said: "I didn't know it was possible for two men to fall in love. I thought I must have misunderstood what was happening. But I didn't. I know I didn't. At least now I do. It was real, Ben. I know I was only seventeen, but I loved Cooper. I didn't even know you could fall in love with a guy. I mean, I heard about fags in my town and I know that they got picked on and called names, but I never thought that I could fall in love with a guy." Russ stood up and began pacing the room. "And I fell hard. I never felt that way about anyone, ever. Not even about... Julie. I hate to admit that, Ben, but... I don't know, maybe it was a first love thing. Cooper was my first love, even if he just told me crap because he wanted to fuck." "Why even tell me this, Russ?" Russ sighed. "You're the first person I have ever told," he said. "It's so hard to talk about. It's like admitting something about yourself that you don't want anyone to know. I don't even know what it means. All I know is that when I showed up at your Dad's ranch and I saw you, and I talked to you, it took me back to that summer with Cooper. Not literally, just the same feelings. Do you know what I mean?" "No," I said. "I'm sorry." "Raw," said Russ, eyes full of passion. "Just raw. A pure feeling, no thoughts. It's just like: 'I want to be with this person right now'. It's not really passion, but it's like this desire to be close to someone. Feeling desperate for it. I don't feel that way with Julie. Don't be sorry if you don't get it." "No, I think I do," I said. Russ stopped walking and stood with his back against a wall. He said: "You're probably wondering what happened to Cooper." I told him that it was not none of my business and that I knew that he would tell me more if he wanted to. It was his story, not mine. "Do you wanna just lay here, in bed?" asked Russ, leaning forward a bit. Looking at me. "No funny business, I promise." "I can't," I said. "We need to be getting back soon. It's already 6, which means we wouldn't get back home until after 7." "I know," said Russ, "but just for twenty minutes. Maybe just fifteen? C'mon, Ben. Just lay here with me. I need it. Please, Ben." I stood up from the floor and got into the bed. Slowly I crawled in; I removed the two pillows from underneath the bed spread and set them next to each other, on top. One for each of us. The pillows were flat and probably filled with something polyester from Malaysia. Suddenly, I missed my pillows from my room back home. They were flat too, yet at least they were down, but I immediately ushered those thoughts away from my mind. I laid down on one side of the bed, with my head atop one of the pillows. Russ got into the bed as well and he put his arms around me, with my chest against his back. I could feel the flannel of his shirt against my neck. "Don't fall asleep," he said. "Just fifteen minutes." I could feel his hard-on pressing against me, but, true to his word, he did not try anything. [TO BE CONTINUED] [COPYRIGHT 2011]