How Long Has This Been Going On (25 page)

Luke was awake, sitting cross-legged, blinking at Chris. Tom always awoke instantly, eager to be Tom again; Luke came to slowly, as if thinking over his choices. He said, "I don't want summer to end because I don't know what happens, next thing."

Chris put her book down. "That's easy. I'm going to Bennington to major in drama, you're going to Dartmouth, major as yet unknown, and Tom'll get his scholarship to Rutgers or State."

Luke grinned, smoothing out his disorderly hair. "Is that an official Chris Predicts?"

Chris shrugged. She occasionally prophesied, but only when she was sure of her materials—and she doesn't know what happens, next thing, either.

"The idea is," Luke went on, "this is the first kind of major experience that's ever come upon us. College. The three of us splitting up."

Chris nodded.

"There are kids all over the country just like us," Luke went on. "Most of them don't even go to college. Or they do a year or two at State and come back home." Luke thought of that. "Home," he repeated.
Home,
knowing what it means: the safe place. "But we're spreading out. Dispersing."

"We've been Guinevere and the two Lancelots all our lives," Chris observed. "Every show closes sooner or later."

"Yeah. It's just..." Luke looked over at Tom.

"Is this something Tom shouldn't hear?" Chris asked.

"Chris, I have to say something. I mean, something happened. Between Tom and me."

Luke paused. Chris waited. "Shoot," she said.

"Yeah. Well." Luke looked at Tom again.

"He's sawing a log," Chris assured him.

"Last week," Luke began, "we were up and at 'em nonstop. Remember? Because first it was the touch-football play-offs and then the swim meet and the dance that night. We were both pretty tightened up, Tom and me. And you know how we might give each other a rub, to ease off the tightness? We've always been doing that. Some jockological thing. And... well, Tom was stretched out on his bed and I was tending to him there..." He looked at Chris, as if to ask, Can you bear to listen to more? She nodded as if she'd heard him speak.

"Well, I... I guess I went... a little far. Because while I was working on his shoulders I just... I dropped my head and rubbed my cheek against his. Because he is such an incredible friend of mine. It looks like I was trying to tell him that. Chris?"

She nodded.

"You hear me, don't you?" he said.

"I hear you."

"Okay. Well, Tom didn't like it. He shook me off and got into the shower, and when he came out it was as if nothing... Chris, do you know what I am saying?"

"Yes."

Luke watched her for a bit. "Golly, you're not even shocked?"

"Say!"
came a voice from below. "Is my cousin up there?"

Chris went to the window. "Yes, Walt, he's up here."

"Well, I'm coming up, too. Dexter, you wait here."

Walt was Tom's eleven-year-old cousin, and Dexter was Walt's dog, a rowdy Irish setter. From his dearest youth, Walt had been enchanted with Tom. Somehow, their being cousins made Tom wildly exotic and Walt's personal property at the same time. Walt had plenty of cousins—Gotburg was loaded with Uhlissons, all of them related—but Tom was old enough to be inspiring, and imposing enough to be necessary. Walt lived just across the street from Tom, and when Walt had a nightmare he would run over to Tom's house, Dexter in relatively hot pursuit, and climb into Tom's bed. Walt simply adopted Tom, and, extending the logic, Chris and Luke as well.

Tom was sitting up when Walt gained the tree-house interior. "Hey, chief," Tom said, rubbing his eyes, then shaking his head to throw the hair back.

"Oh, Cousin Tom," said Walt. "I just hate that summer's over now."

"But what do you mean by that?" Tom cried, fake-angry, reaching up for the kid and pulling him into his lap. "Aren't you looking forward to getting on in school? What sports are you planning to go out for, anyway?"

"I'm going out for the Hershey squad."

"Well, I never heard of that team."

"It's when you break up into the plain Hershey side and the side with almonds. That's the two sides. Then you face each other across the net and eat, like, eight Hershey bars each. Then you run around all over and the fans go crazy."

Luke and Chris, thus gentled back from the abyss they had both been looking into moments before, laughed. Tom nodded sardonically and released Walt, who leaped up and danced around the tree house like Elvis at a prom.

"Hey," said Luke. "Fancy footwork."

"It's the Hershey bar shuffle," Walt announced, still moving. "We do that to warm up, and also to win over the little people up there in the stands."

"Their hearts and minds?" asked Chris.

"Yet it is a totally passionate game," said Walt, suddenly still, "and so it has no mind at all." He grinned at them, the adolescent drank on attention from big kids. He's going to go for it now.

"Imagine the scene," says Walt. "It is the eighth round, and the Hershey bars are brought in. There is no tie in this sport, so only
one team can leave the field in victory!
Which will it be? The crowd is mumbly and unsure as the candy is passed out. The wrappings are torn off.
Yes!
And then—"

Ferocious barking from below drew them all to the window in time to see Dexter take off after a rabbit.

"Yikes!"
said Walt, jumping onto the rope ladder. "Say, Dexter, wait for me!"

The others left the tree house soon after, to finish off the afternoon at Tom's with a typical Scandihoovian teenager's tea: refrigerator-raid sandwiches and (as the adults were nowhere about) beer at the kitchen table. The boys pulled out the meat and cheese and fish, the bread and condiments, as Chris settled down with the local paper, a weekly made mainly of shopping coupons and editorials. A town as small and incestuously derived as Gotburg gets its news more directly than by gazette. Still, everybody took the
Press,
perhaps out of tribal solidarity. Chris liked to read aloud from it. She was fascinated by how much the paper found to be reportable in a repressed little place like Gotburg.

"Oh!" she cried, settling in with the movie column.
"Blowup!
At last!"

"The biggest sandwich in the world," said Luke, dumping the sweet mustard, the tomato chutney, and the horseradish sauce onto the table while fighting off Tom's headlock, "is called a Dagwood."

"No, let's consider foreign film," said Chris. "It's daring, it's worldly, and it's naked."

"I'm in favor of that," said Tom, battling Luke into a corner of the room, twisting his arm, holding him close. "There should be Naked Days for seniors. Fridays, say."

"Listen to this dolt," Chris went, engrossed in the review. "Golly: 'The pseudo-sophisticate tone is underscored in a tennis game
played without balls!'
" She turned to the scuffling Twins. "But that's the whole point!"

"I'll say," said Luke, getting the better of Tom with a half nelson. "Where would we be without balls?"

"I knew I'd find you here," said Walt, coming in briskly, masterfully. "Now for a cheese sandwich with stuffed olives, ever so finely sliced."

"Well, I'm getting sliced," said Tom, wrestling with Luke.

"Now, here's something odd," said Chris, caught by a story.

"Takedown!" cried Luke, as he and Tom crashed to the floor.

"Ow!"

"
'
G
OTBURG MAN ARRESTED IN
T
WIN
C
ITIES PERVERT BAR RAID
,'" Chris read. "Listen—"

"I appeal to you," said Luke, holding Tom in a scissor-lock, "as a gentleman and a jock." Then he spoke for Tom, in Yogi Bear's voice: "'You don't appeal to me.'" As himself, Luke replied, "Oh, yeah?"

"All right," said Tom, panting. "All right, I'm bushed, all right."

"'Richard Engquist, 34 years old, of 82 Salmon Lane, was one of twenty-eight patrons of the Green Thursday Bar in Minneapolis who were taken into custody by the police shortly before midnight on August 18. According to authorities, the bar was known to be a den of deviant activity and had been under surveillance for some months before the raid. All twenty-eight men were charged with public drunkenness and lewd and lascivious conduct, misdemeanors carrying maximum jail terms of six months and three years and a day, respectively.'"

The Twins were resting it off on their backs on the linoleum; Walt was searching the fridge. It was his habit to supply the voices for the variousfoods he was interested in, the milk as a ho-hoing Santa and the cake as Julie Andrews but the cheese as rebellious, a subversive in the food chain.

"'That greedy boy is back again. Quick, I'll pretend I'm cauliflower!'"

"'Mr. Engquist was relieved of his position at the Hancock law firm of Edeson and Engquist, and local police were called to remove him from the Salmon Lane house at the request of his wife, Sheila Engquist, to protect their sons, Stephen, 6, and Harvey, 4.'"

"Oh, yes, I
will
eat you, you silly cheese," said Walt, clutching the long yellow Velveeta box.

"The police were called to remove him?" Chris asked the Twins. "As if he were trespassing in his own house?"

Tom shrugged. "Well, what do you expect, anyhow? Some faggot."

Chris looked at Luke; but he was deaf and grinning.

"You want another round?" Tom asked him. "Or do you give up?"

"Give up?
I had you tooth to nail!"

"Huh," said Chris, closing the paper. "Life is a cabaret."

"'Will you cut that Broadway stuff out?'" said Luke, in Tom's voice.

"I wouldn't say that," Tom objected.

"Yes, you would, you anti-intellectual ape-man."

"That's fighting words!"

"En garde!"

Chris made a face as the Twins rejoined the battle and Walt bit into his sandwich. "Velveeta tastes so nice in August," he observed.

Happy days. But Chris had chores to do and Walt had to find Dexter, so the party broke up. Luke was last to leave, and seeing him to the door, Tom grabbed his arm and looked at him.

Luke said, "What?"

"Well, it's this one thing, pal. You say too much."

"What do you mean?" Luke asked.

"You should be more smooth, not telling the world what's in you."

Luke dreaded this yet had to get close to it. "You heard me when I—"

"Don't share your secrets," Tom urged him. "Just be cool."

"I told Chris. I couldn't—"

"Well, Chris is solid, anyhow." Tom made a "Come on and join the team, boy" face. "But you really ought to keep it wrapped, buddy. Okay?"

Tom's arm barred the doorway, meaning, You better.

"Okay, Tom."

Up goes the arm.

"That's my fella. If I were a girl, I'd kiss you."

* * *

All his life, it seemed, Luke had been dreaming of Tom. Yet
what
had he dreamed, beyond the two of them flying in each other's arms or floating in mystical green seas? A homosexual teenager in America in the 1960s could not know what his dreams were because there was no reality to tether them to. Luke Van Bruenninger had always known that he Liked Men, and he had no problem with this. But he did presume that it was his unique secret, that he belonged to a company of one. His subterfuges were the momentous swindles of a ghost, terribly important to him but invisible to all others: pretending to tighten the laces of his sneakers in the gym while eyeing Danny Vorisek's torso, affecting the most casual interest in
Surfside 6
and
Cheyenne
and the other television private-eye and western shows that habitually unshirted their heroes, assuming a precocious interest in
Esquire
magazine only to comb its back pages for the Parr of Arizona bathing-suit ads of big lean blond boys who smiled as if they had an angle on something. There were times when Luke believed that at least some of this was not fortuitous—that certain people in charge of television shows and bathing-suit ads were aware of Luke, and his life, and his secrets. Perhaps they were aware of Tom as well.

Sharing everything with Tom to the point of being virtually a part of him was Luke's paradise; but then, such sagas were occurring in every town in the nation. There were many thousands of Lukes and Toms, with their secret that had the power to draw them close or sunder them absolutely. But this pair is especially intriguing, I think, because the two pals were so intent on each other, and because they were the Twins, and because Luke had reason to suspect that Tom was... well, how do you describe it when you scarcely know what to call it?... that Tom was like Luke.

One can become too close, of course. "Stop thinking so hard!" Tom would tell Luke, for instance during a ball game when Luke went into a reverie. Then Luke (catcher) would rush up to Tom (pitcher) to confer on a protocol, and Tom would grab Luke in some crazy, swaggering way, as if nothing mattered but that Tom got his hands on Luke in front of everyone.

Yet no one thought of them as homosexuals. What, two stalwart young athletes? Football team co-captains, no less? Besides, they were always dating, sometimes even spotted at parties making out in some dark corner, or even Getting to Second Base (that's a kissy-face and feelies, topless but with skirt and pants on) with notable girls of the class or one class below. Anyway, this was 1967, when there were no homosexuals in America except Liberace, and no homosexuals in Minnesota whatsoever.

Both boys were virgins, because of the time and the place. A small town like Gotburg, with its magnificent social and religious controls, did not give teenagers the scope for much sexual experiment, certainly nothing like what their counterparts in the freewheeling urban environments enjoyed. Oh, there were cracks in the system even in Gotburg—impromptu circle jerks in the showers, say, or a very determined young couple who would take advantage of her baby-sitting gig and tear off a quickie on the couch. And there was that legendary night in June of 1965, when Connie Dawson gave the first pool party of the season and right in the middle of it word came that Connie's little brother Ben had been hurt on his bike in a collision with a car. So Mr. and Mrs. Dawson rushed to the hospital, leaving the party without parental supervision, and within three minutes, in the pool house, behind the pool house, on top of the pool house (and even in Connie's bedroom, though Connie not only fiercely denied it but is planning to go to her deathbed with her view of the story), a goodly fraction of the party were graduated from boys and girls to men and women.