Good Bones (12 page)

D
YLAN
noted that for some unfathomable reason, Chris was in a foul mood. He wouldn’t accept a cup of coffee, and he barely spoke as they unloaded the tile and supplies from the Chevy and carried them into the kitchen. When Dylan tried to begin conversations—when would the renter be plowing the fields? Did Chris ever trespass onto Dylan’s land to fish down at the pond?—Chris’s only response was an unintelligible grunt.

“See you Monday?” Dylan asked as Chris climbed into the cab.

Chris only glared at him, gunned the engine, and nearly ran over Dylan’s foot as he pulled away. Judging by the sound of the truck, he didn’t stop at his own place. Dylan wondered where he was going, then reminded himself it was none of his business.

He wandered back inside, where his laptop was waiting for him on his old drafting table in the living room. There was a big window that looked out at the field across the road, and he hoped that an eyeful of nature would prove inspiring as he designed the Beaverton house. But when his fingers started moving on the keyboard, he discovered that he was surfing online instead. Specifically, he was over on craigslist, looking at trucks for sale.

He found a few possibilities, and he made notes on them, wondering if Chris would be willing to tag along and check them out. Dylan knew nothing about cars except how to drive them. But perhaps he’d be wise to wait and ask when his neighbor was in a better mood.

He ambled into the kitchen, refilled his coffee mug, and grabbed a handful of sliced Diestel Ranch turkey from the fridge. He wolfed it down, wishing he could look forward to another of Chris’s good meals later that day. Not to mention Chris himself.

Dylan sat back at his desk and spent twenty-five minutes rearranging his songs in iTunes and updating Adobe Reader and playing a game of solitaire.

“Okay,” he said out loud when the cards did their rainbow dance across the screen. “Time to get to work.”

So of course his phone rang.

“Farmer Dyldo!”

Dylan turned down the volume. His brother always seemed to think he had to bellow when he called. “Hey, Dickhead.”

“How’s it going?”

“Good. Busy. I have a new project—”

“It’s Saturday. You’re not supposed to work on Saturdays. It’s un-American.”

“The costs of working from home.”

Something crashed in the background, and someone yelped. “What was that?” asked Dylan.

“Kay. She’s rearranging the living room furniture. Again.”

Dylan snickered. “Shouldn’t you be helping her? Or at least checking to see if she’s bleeding.”

“The scream wasn’t loud enough for a mortal injury, and I am helping her. She wanted me to call and tell you to come for dinner next time you’re in town.”

“Won’t be for another two weeks.”

“Aren’t you—” There was another noise, this one even louder, and Dylan heard Kay swear. “Aren’t you going nuts out there all by yourself?”

“Told you, I’m busy. I have that new project, and my kitchen’s in ruins.”

“Did you find someone to help out with the work?”

Dylan paused before replying. “Um… yeah.”

“And why are you sounding hesitant?”

“It’s my next-door neighbor, actually. He does good work but—”

“Wait! Is this the guy you saw pissing that time?”

Rolling your eyes was useless when you were on the phone, but Dylan did it anyway. “How many neighbors do I have, Dickhead?”

“So he does good work but… he doesn’t know you’re gay.”

This time Dylan nearly choked. “No, he’s well aware of my sexual orientation, thanks. I told you—it’s been weeks since anyone was tarred and feathered out here for being queer.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Same as always.” Dylan glared out at the field. “I’m worried about when I’m a wolf. What if I hurt him?” Saying it out loud like that made his stomach clench.

Rick thought for a while before he sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you, little brother. If he’s working for you, maybe you can send him away that night? Tell him… I dunno. Tell him you need him to get you something from Ashland that has to be transported overnight.”

“He’s not an idiot. He’d figure out something was up after a couple months. Besides, what the hell needs to be transported at night? Vampires?”

“Are there vampires too?” Rick sounded appalled.

“I don’t know.”

There was silence between them. Finally, Rick sighed again. “Sorry, kid. No easy solutions for you.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“So… dinner in two weeks, right?”

“Sure, Dickhead.”

Dylan ended the call and stared at his screensaver. He’d managed to put aside his fears about Chris’s safety for a few days, and now here they were again, front and center. “Well, cheer up,” he told himself. “You’ll probably have to move back to town anyway.” And with that depressing thought he began work on the project.

H
E
SMELLED
Chris before he heard him. At first he thought it was just wishful thinking, but then a familiar face appeared in the doorway. “Yo, dude. You should really lock your doors. Bad neighborhood, you know?”

Dylan pushed his chair back from the drafting table and stretched his arms. “Disreputable neighbors.”

Chris entered the living room and looked over Dylan’s shoulder. “What’s that?”

“A laptop,” Dylan answered with a grin, then ducked the playful blow that followed. “It’s this new project I got handed the other day. Design a dream house for suburban hippie lesbian futon magnates.”

“Oh.” Chris blinked a few times. “So you really did have somethin’ to do this weekend.”

“Did you think I was lying?”

Chris shrugged and then stepped away to look out the window. “He’s probably gonna plow next week. You’ll know it when he gets here—crack of dawn.”

“Okay.” Dylan stood and stared at Chris’s back, wishing he could reach out and put his hand on a flannel-clad shoulder.

“And yeah, I used to go fishin’ down there. Caught tadpoles, too, and sometimes I even went swimmin’. I wasn’t supposed to, but I figured the old man wasn’t gonna care. He didn’t leave the house that often.” He set his hands on the windowsill. “Sometimes if I sat real still, deer would come by for a drink.”

If Dylan’s ears had been capable of pricking at that minute, they would have. His stomach rumbled. “Deer?”

“Sure. I saw otters a couple times too.”

Dylan wondered what otters tasted like.

Chris spun around quickly and pointed at the laptop. “Can you leave it for a while?”

“Yeah. I was planning to shut down pretty soon anyway. Why? Are you making us dinner?” Dylan was aware that he sounded foolishly hopeful.

Sure enough, Chris laughed. “Not exactly. We’re goin’ out for a night on the town, dude.”

T
HE
“town” wasn’t much of one: a gas station with a few mechanics’ bays in the back and a little general store next door; a feed store; a place that sold pizza, burgers, and ice cream; a little building that housed a real estate office and a lawyer. But at the end of what amounted to downtown was a big gray structure with several cars and motorcycles parked in the adjacent gravel lot. Chris pulled the Chevy in between a beat-up Harley and a rusted Ford truck with a gun rack.

“What’s this?” Dylan asked, not sure whether he was pleased.

But Chris flashed him a grin. “Saturday night.”

Before they left the house, Dylan had put on a shirt that didn’t say anything ironic. Now he was kind of wishing he’d shaved off the soul patch too. The patrons of Buck’s Café and Tavern wore denim skirts and tight blouses if they were female, jeans and T-shirts and John Deere hats if they were male. Men had mullets or brush cuts, and women wore their hair… puffy. Activity in the tavern didn’t exactly screech to a halt as he and Chris entered, but Dylan could sense everyone eyeing him, sizing him up.

“I’m not sure this is such a great idea,” Dylan said. But Chris apparently didn’t hear him over the sound of the jukebox. Instead, he led the way to a booth near the back. The wooden tabletop was sticky. He pushed at Dylan’s shoulder until Dylan was sitting.

“I’m gonna go get us beer and grub,” Chris almost shouted. “Burger okay?”

“Yeah.”

As Chris made his way to the bar, Dylan looked around. The tavern was crowded enough that he wondered if the entire town showed up on Saturday nights. The décor was minimal—mostly rough-planked walls and neon signs advertising beer. A space to one side was free of tables and had a small stage, but there was no sign of a band. The air was heavy with the smells of frying food, stale beer, cheap perfume, and sweat. Dylan realized he was wrinkling his nose and forced himself to relax.

It didn’t take long for Chris to reappear with two glass tankards. A little foam sloshed over the edges when he set them down. “Food’ll be up soon,” he said, taking a seat opposite Dylan. “It ain’t all that great, but it’s the only game in town.”

“Do you come here a lot?”

Chris lifted an eyebrow. “You tryin’ to pick me up, dude?”

“This doesn’t exactly look like a good place for picking up guys.”

“Mostly it ain’t.” Chris took a long swallow of beer. “But you’d be surprised what some of these good old boys get up to in the john, when they get enough alcohol in ’em and the gals ain’t willin’.”

Dylan was not the kind of guy who entertained fantasies about straight men. Even the thought of trying to do anything with one of the bikers or other burly men in the room made him feel slightly queasy. He wondered if his sarcastic comments to Rick about people around here no longer gay bashing for sport were going to come back to haunt him.

His thoughts were interrupted when a man with a dark beard and mustache, head wrapped in a blue bandanna, approached the table carrying two plates. The man plopped them on the table, then added the ketchup and mustard bottles he had tucked under one arm. Without having said a word, he turned and went back to the bar.

“Least that dude ain’t tryin’ to jump your bones,” Chris muttered.

The burger wasn’t that great: the meat was gristly and overcooked, the lettuce wilted, and the bun tasted like a sponge. The fries were pretty good, though, and Dylan managed to keep Chris from stealing any of his.

“I practically grew up in places like this,” Chris said, waving his hand around. “When I was really little—after Dad left—Mom would sit me down at a table with a hamburger, maybe a coloring book and some crayons, and tell me to sit tight. Some nights I’d fall asleep in a booth like this one. If I was lucky I’d wake up in my own bed.”

Dylan didn’t know how to respond. Surely Chris didn’t want trite sympathy. “That sucks,” he finally said.

“How ’bout you? No horrible childhood in the ’burbs?”

“No, sorry. It was boring. I spent a lot of time in my room, reading. My parents kind of freaked when they found out I was gay, but that wasn’t until I was older.”

“What, did they disown you or something? Were they religious freaks?”

Dylan glanced at a petite redhead making out with a guy with a graying ponytail. “No. They were just pretty conservative. They were… disappointed. I was still living with them, but after they found out, we hardly saw each other, hardly ever talked. Maybe they would have thawed if they’d had more time to adjust.”

“They didn’t kick you out?” Chris asked, puzzled.

“No. I was in college, working at a coffee place to pay for tuition and books. I couldn’t have afforded a place of my own.”

“So they loved you, even though you were a homo.”

“Yeah. I guess they did.” Dylan had never really thought about it, and the realization that his parents really did love him eased an ache he hadn’t known he had.

Chris gave Dylan his half grin and slammed his empty glass on the table. “Want another?”

“No, but you go ahead.” As Chris walked back to the bar, Dylan formulated a plan to confiscate the keys to the truck before they left. There weren’t a lot of other cars to run into between here and home, but there were a lot of trees.

A crowd had formed around the bar, so Chris had to wait a while. Dylan finished off his dinner, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table, and looked around. That’s when he noticed two men sitting at a table in the middle of the room. They were only a few years older than he and Chris but looked as if they had lived a lot in those years. One of them was fat, with a shaved head and a vivid scar across his cheek, and the other was jittery, bouncing up and down nervously in his seat. They both had their eyes on Chris, who either hadn’t noticed them or didn’t care. Although he didn’t even glance at them as he made his way back to their booth, they tracked him the entire way.

“I got you a Coke,” Chris said as he sat. “Diet, so you can keep your girlish figure.”

“I’m pretty sure you know there isn’t much girlish about my figure, Chris.”

Chris waggled his eyebrows. “You got a point.”

They sat there for a while, talking a little but mostly just watching the action. Dylan had to admit that it was kind of nice being out of the house. But he was also worried about the way those men kept eyeing Chris.

Suddenly Chris stood and slammed his palm on the table. “Be right back.” He walked to the dimly lit back of the tavern and turned down a hallway that Dylan assumed led to the bathrooms. That reminded Dylan of Chris’s earlier comment about good old boys and johns, which worried him. That concern increased several notches when the pair got up from their table and sauntered down the hall as well. Their timing could be a coincidence, he told himself, but he didn’t really figure these guys for the type who went to the bathroom in packs, like girls, or the momentary lovers who visited the bathroom at Bleachers.

“Shit,” he said out loud. And he headed for the hallway too.

He heard the raised voices while he was still several yards from the men’s room, but the relentless twang and boom of the jukebox kept him from being able to distinguish the words. One of the voices was Chris’s, though—of that he was certain—and his heart raced in distress even as he ran the last few steps.

The door was locked. Dylan pounded on it a few times but got no response. The voices inside sounded angry, and he heard a loud thump. He briefly considered running back to the main room for help, but he didn’t know whether anyone would be willing. And in any case, who knew what could happen in the few minutes he was gone. He could call the police, but that would take even longer—the nearest police station was many miles away.