markwildyr.com,
Post #143
Today, I’d like to return to storytelling. There follows a short (two part) short story that I hope you’ll like.
* * * * *
DUMBER’N A DEAD TREE STUMP
I was on the hunt for
Flatnose Kelly. Usually the town queer wasn’t hard to find, unless he was hid
off somewhere with one of his tricks. His real name was Eugene, but everyone
called him Flatnose because he usually had it tight up against someone’s belly
when he did his thing. Dunno what he got outa doing things like that for guys,
but I guessed he liked it or else he wouldn’t a done it.
Today, I was kinda hard
up because me’n my buddy Darcel had hung around all afternoon, and the sight of
him laying flat of his back in the grass at the park wouldn’t get outa my mind.
His shirt and pants—shorts actually—had just laid right close to his body
outlining things so it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what was beneath
them. Course, we’d gone skinny dipping lotsa times, so I knew what everything
looked like for real, but every once in a while a sight like that just stirred
me up. And that’s why I was looking for Flatnose.
I found
him down by the creek holding a fishing line over the water. Don’t think it
even mattered to him if he got a bite, much less caught a fish. Flatnose was
one strange dude. He was a couple of years older’n me and Darcel, and he was
all right in the looks department, but no one claimed him as a buddy because of
what he done. To be fair about it, I don’t really know who he did it for. I
mean, you heard talk around the high school, but sometimes talk’s just that,
talk. I didn’t believe half the guys when the claimed to get to home base with
this girl or that gal. Far’s I know, it could be that way with Flatnose too.
All I can tell you for sure was that three or four times, he’d sent me to the
moon. He always claimed I had a good one, but that was probably just talk. I’d
seen just about every guy in school necked as a jaybird in gym class at one
time or another, and they all looked about the same. Some longer, some fatter,
but let’s face it, a prick is a prick.
“Hullo,
Frankie,” he said when I plopped down beside him on the bank. “Where’s Darcel?”
I
shrugged. “Off somewhere doing his own thing, I guess. We’re not joined at the
hip, you know.”
He
looked at me through pale gray eyes and gave a half-smile. “Might as well be.
Probably like to be joined a different way, truth be told.”
“Now
why’d you say that?”
He
shrugged back at me. His cork bobbed in the water, but he paid it no mind. You
see Darcel, you know Frankie’s not far behind.”
I poked
out my lower lip and nodded. “Yeah, we’re good friends. Buddies.”
“Just
not the way you’d like.”
“Why
you always talk to me like that?” I demanded, my blood rising.
“See
one, you see the other. What else can I think?”
“No
wonder you don’t have any friends.”
“Sure I
got friends. Got one sitting here right beside me.”
“Crap,”
I said and flopped on my back.
Like I
hoped he would, he laid a warm hand over me.
“And my
friend’s got a friend. A big friend.”
I just
kept my mouth shut and let him do what I knew he was gonna do. I kinda jumped
when he pulled me out of my stretch pants, but lordy, did my eyes fly open when
he put his mouth on me. Wasn’t anything felt much better’n that. Not even
bagging a six-point buck during deer season. I just sucked air and let him have
at it.
When it
was over—all too soon for me—he pulled my stretch pants back in place, but I
just lay there, my bones gone soft and my muscles syrupy. After a while, I
stretched like I was just getting up in the morning and yawned.
“Thought
the Sandman got’cha for a minute,” Flatnose said.
“Nah.
But it felt like I was waking up.” I kinda shook my head. Every other time
Flatnose had pinged my pong, I couldn’t wait t get outa there. Now I was
talking to him. “What do you get outa that?” I asked.
He shrugged—something
else he was good at—and thought for a minute before answering. “I dunno. Making
you feel good makes me feel good.” He swiped his face with a freckled hand.
“You know, for a few minutes there, nobody matters more to you than me. What
I’m doing for you, you know. It’s kinda special. And that makes me special.”
He
pulled in his line, and I saw there wasn’t a worm on it. That nibbling fish had
gotten the whole worm without getting hooked. I thought about that for a
minute.
Was
I getting the worm, or was I getting hooked?
Frankie seems to
have maneuvered the first part of the story okay. He gets excited by his friend
and gets his ashes hauled by someone else. What gives?
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