1988
Continued from Through The Years, 1978.
© Z.A. Maxfield, All Rights Reserved
1988
Ethan and Sarah walked around the duck pond at El Dorado Park. Samantha, at three, jumped while holding on to each of their hands. This was her favorite activity, and one that could go on for hours; she raised her little feet and soared through the air, suspended between two people who loved her, blissfully. Ethan’s arm was getting tired.
“So, tallying up,” Ethan smiled down at Sarah Emerson, now Holmes. “Only seventy nine billable hours of family counseling later and you and Jim are still the only members of the family who will talk to me.”
“And Sammie,” Sarah reminded him.
“And Sammie,” Ethan bent down and lifted the little girl. “Miss Sammie Smarty-pants, niece extraordinaire!” He whirled her into the air, watching her face against the early summer sky.
“Higher, Uncle Ethan,” Sammy squealed and he obliged. He dropped her down, catching her just before her feet hit the ground, and watched as her mother handed her a bag of crusts to feed to the ducks.
“Although I still don’t really know why you talk to me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” She looked genuinely baffled.
“Well.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I should think going to the ten year reunion would remind you.”
“Oh, that?” She rolled her eyes. “I will admit that you and Barry getting hauled out of the bathroom at prom because you were performing a lewd act-” she held up her hands when he was about to protest. “Their words, not mine! That was a bit of a shock.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I got over it.” She took his hand. “And have you forgotten who came to get us from the prom authorities that night?”
“It is etched indelibly on my memory. Jim. Super Jim. The amazing Jim, WonderMan Holmes. Straight as a fucking arrow, able to leap to conclusions at a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet and just as insightful-”
“And my husband, the only member of your family currently giving you the time of day,” she warned him. As if he didn’t remember. As if he weren’t grateful.
“You just don’t get it about brothers, Sarah. It’s against the laws of man and God for me to talk about him warmly behind his back.”
“I get that.” Sarah looked to where Sammie held crusts out to ducks and then ran from them in terror. She checked on Sammie, with motherly concern, an average of 15.6 times each minute.
“Where’s Barry?” she finally asked. He knew she’d worked her way up to it. Taken her time. Ethan could see she didn’t want to ask, but between her and Jim, she was probably the family information gatherer. What he secretly thought of as the family’s private dick, even though he didn’t know how private she kept the information she gleaned.
He blew out a lungful of nervous air. “I fucked up.”
“No.” She sighed.
“Yes.” He reiterated. “Last straw. Fuck me. Never darken the door again. For real.”
“This time. Did he kick you out again? Have you got someplace to stay?”
Ethan rubbed his dry hands over his face. He missed the fog from the San Francisco Bay when he was down here visiting. His skin always felt dry and tight. “He moved out.”
“What?” That Barry would relinquish even one square inch of their renovated San Francisco home was the worst possible sign. Ethan knew that, if nothing else, Sarah would recognize the seriousness of his infraction.
“Jeez.”
“He’s in Thailand right now.”
“Thailand?”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “He’s with a group of men and women who are observing human rights violations in Burma.”
“Burma?” Sammie came running back to her mother, empty plastic sack in her hand, and together the three of them began the walk to the play equipment.
“Apparently, if you can believe this, the leader of Burma has eliminated certain denominations of currency because they’re not divisible by nine.”
“You have got to be joking!” She stared at him over Sammie’s head, aghast.
“Nope. People are protesting and asking for democracy. Even I don’t get it, although it’s all Barry talked about for months, before…”
“So. He’s in Thailand.”
“Which is right next door to Burma. Whatever.” He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one with an unrepentant grin.
“I don’t smoke,” Sarah said primly. She’d quit before she’d married his brother and developed tobacco-related amnesia. Ethan smiled at her, seeing again how fine, how lovely she was.
“My brother’s a lucky man.” He sighed.
“Mama! Push me!” her daughter called to her, and she went over to the swings to comply.
“Back in a minute,” she told him. Her majesty requires service.” He sat down, grinning around a cloud of smoke, until he thought about the night Barry left.
Ethan hadn’t heard, hadn’t expected Barry to come home. Which was no excuse, really. Except that Ethan had begun to see it as a reason, of sorts, for why he was draped over the dinner table getting his ass pounded by a gym bunny named Lars when Barry arrived home that night.
Barry hardly ever came home. Besides being Castro’s own Saint Barry of the Perpetual Volunteers, he was the only man Ethan knew who had never turned down an opportunity to donate money or goods or even his winter coats right off his back. On top of that Barry traveled. A lot. And by the time it sank in that many of the people Ethan knew, even his fuckwad, tightass brother Jim, were enjoying a little springtime romance and/or raising families at his age, it started to look like a damned good reason.
Barry had not seen it that way. In a move so shocking that even now it caused a frisson of something like fear to flood Ethan’s whole body leaving shame in its wake, Barry had thrown Lars out of their home and brutally shoved Ethan into the shower, tearing his own clothing off and joining him, scrubbing him down. Screaming at him. It was like nothing Ethan had ever experienced. Angry. Violent. Barry had tried to wash away Ethan’s betrayal, and then tried to fuck it away, but in the morning, he’d packed and gone.
Barry said he couldn’t ignore what he’d seen with his own eyes. He’d said that this time, because he’d seen it, he could never, ever forgive it.
Ethan released a thin cloud of blue smoke. He was making a show of visiting home, returning to Long Beach under the pretext of seeing family and attending a cousin’s wedding. But Ethan understood implicitly that Barry was home, and Long Beach was just another place he’d lived.
***
“Wake up, Ethan, listen to me. This is important!” said the voice on the phone. Ethan shook his heavy head and tried to make sense of the conversations, which he could tell by the way the agitated man talked, had been going on for a while. He sat up and pulled a cigarette from a pack next to the bed, lighting it, and grabbing the ashtray.
“I’m here,” he sighed. “Who is this?”
“My name is Andrew Frye. It’s not important who I am, but I’m a friend of Barry’s. What’s important is whether you’ve turned on the news in the last couple of weeks? Read the newspapers? Burma is having a meltdown.” Later, Ethan would remember how the hot pain of hearing about Barry from another man eclipsed the man’s words for a few minutes until he got his brain working. It didn’t help that he’d been drinking heavily the night before.
“What’s happened?” he asked. He was still half asleep, trying to remember the name of the trick who was lying naked beside him.
“The chaos started about three weeks ago. It was the date, you know? August eighth, year eighty- eight? It was thought to be an auspicious date? At 8:08 a.m. the Rangoon dockworkers started a general strike, throwing down their work and marching into the capital. Half a million people marched on Yangon. It’s been crazy. The Burmese fucking government totally overreacted, trying to crush the strike, firing into the crowds. Activists are being killed outright or disappearing and thousands are being rounded up and sent to prison.”
“Shit.” Ethan tried to remember where Thailand was in relation to Burma. “Thailand is close to Burma, right?”
“Yeah, Ethan. It’s right next door,” Andrew ground out. “Would you like me to mail you a map?”
“All right, so I don’t fucking know everything.” Ethan stubbed out his butt in the ashtray. “Does Barry need money or anything to get home?” he asked. He heard the weakness in his voice. The little catch in his breath, and hated himself for it. Saint Barry left Castro, and the Volunteers, and him for fuck’s sake. What was he supposed to do? “Whatever it is, I’ll see that he gets it.”
“That may be harder than you think, Ethan.” Andrew told him angrily. “I can’t find him. And he’s not in Thailand; he’s in Yangon. Or was. The last I heard from him he was about to march on Yangon with a group of Monks. No one has seen or heard from him since.”
“Monks.” Ethan said, even as he felt the blood drain from his face. Everything but the phone seemed a million miles away. “What are you saying? Where the fuck is he?”
“I don’t know, Ethan. I called you because…I thought maybe…” Andrew paused, and then laughed weakly. “He didn’t get in touch with you? You won’t believe me but I hoped he’d gone back home…even if it was to you. Don’t fuck with me man, he didn’t call?”
“No,” Ethan whispered around the lump in his throat. He cleared it and tried again. “No, he hasn’t called here.”
“Oh, Fuck.” Andrew hung up.
Ethan sat and smoked, filling the ashtray before the man sleeping beside him, whose name still escaped him, woke up.
“E.” A hand slithered under the sheet to try for his balls, but he knocked it away. “Big E. Want some more ‘e’, E?”
“What are you, a fucking moron?” Ethan hadn’t intended to snap, but snap he did. Once he did snap, though, he knew it was only the barest beginning.
“What?” There was that pretty pout that had seemed so intriguing the night before.
“I’m sorry. I just got bad news, get the fuck out.” Ethan wouldn’t look at the man again. Whoever he was, he got up and dressed. He didn’t bother leaving his card. Ethan heard the door slam. Good riddance.
As soon as he was completely alone, though, Ethan froze.
***
When the pounding on the door grew to absurd levels of loudness, or people called to him through the closed windows, Ethan sometimes looked to see who was out there. Otherwise he left the drapes closed and the door locked and the phone off the hook on the off chance, the statistically improbable possibility that he could avoid the bad news when it came. People trying to deliver hugs, or support, or casseroles were met with silence and left angry and bewildered.
Failure to go to work that first week, and his refusal to answer the phone cost him his job. Failure to eat was making him skeletal. Failure to come to the door for his family, such as it was, was going to get him a psychiatric evaluation. At least that’s what his brother Jim shouted at him through the window when it was called to the family’s attention, sometime during the second week, that he was behaving oddly.
By the time the middle of September rolled around he knew his friends believed, when they saw his silhouette pacing behind the closed blinds at night, that he was suffering a complete nervous breakdown.
They were right.
Ethan was currently working on pacing back and forth across the living room exactly 888 times, because if eight were an auspicious number, then he’d use it. He’d have exactly eight cups of coffee per day. He would find eight rational reasons to believe that Barry was out there, perfectly well. He would make paper cranes, in multiples of eight, threading them on strings and hanging them all over the house, with a goal of eight thousand, to start, in mind.
It was irrational, desperate, and insane. But then, Ethan figured, so was he.
Once or twice he caught sight of himself in the mirror, and worried a little that his plan of action was unsound. His jeans hung on him. Even his slimmest tailored dress shirts looked baggy now. His hair seemed long. He wondered briefly if he’d become so pitiful his parents might feel bad enough to invite him back home.
He was on pacing: lap number 764, when the lock turned in the front door, and for the life of him, for his peace of mind, or his sanity, he could not make himself go to the door to see who was there.
In the silence the sound of heavy bags hitting the tiled vestibule floor was earsplitting. For a brief moment, Ethan relaxed. Then, terrified that he was going to fuck something up badly because he hadn’t done all 888 turns across the living room floor he began to walk again, faster. In his head, in his heart, he was perfectly certain that if he stopped, if he didn’t keep on until he reached his goal, whatever made that noise, whatever it indicated would disintegrate and disappear. He was equally certain that if he turned and looked, that if he allowed himself to believe that Barry had come home and it wasn’t true, he would die on the spot. He heard a sound behind him as he made trip number 793. He closed his eyes and kept going.
***
Barry dropped his jacket and bags in the foyer and walked to where he could hear the sound of footsteps. He hoped it was Ethan, because if anyone else were in this house, their house, rational or not he’d probably lose control completely and kill something. His body wanted him to go to the kitchen for a bottled water, but it also wanted to lean against a wall and just watch Ethan, slogging back and forth across the living room floor. The wall won. Ethan continued to move, his eyes closed, his feet hardly lifting off the ground. He was thinner. He looked tired. In fact, Barry thought, Ethan looked crazy. But it didn’t stop him from continuing to lean against the familiar wall where he could look his fill.
Finally, Barry cleared his throat because his voice hadn’t been used in so long he couldn’t make it work. He’d spent whole days flying home, hours on the flight, hours in airports, in customs, where he said little or nothing at all.
“I brought you a snow globe.”
Ethan stopped. Then he started walking again.
“I know that snow globes are corny. But when I was a kid I liked to shake them up, especially the kind that have glitter in them.” Barry stayed with his back glued to that wall, watching Ethan moving back and forth. “Guess that explains a lot.”
Silence flooded back into the room for a while, until Barry broke it again.
“I always wondered why the water didn’t evaporate, or grow mould, or whatever, but then I learned that they have oil inside them, instead of water. I made one in school once, using mineral oil and a baby food jar. With reindeer in it or something.”
Barry bit his lip when he heard some sort of keening sound coming from Ethan, but he kept his back to the wall.
About fifteen minutes later, Ethan came to a halt in the center of the room. Barry sensed that he’d completed whatever task he’d been performing, but he was damned if could figure out what it was.
Barry worried that whatever he did now was too important to be left to chance, and yet, he had no clue how to proceed. He pushed away from the wall and stood before Ethan, who looked so tired and ill that Barry had a moment of real concern. He reached slowly for Ethan’s hands, which were currently covering his face. When he pulled them down their eyes met. Ethan’s rich brown ones were filled with pain, remorse, and longing.
Barry stepped into Ethan’s embrace. “Eth-”
“Shh.” Ethan hissed, his large, square hands framing Barry’s face with a touch, so gentle and so tender it barely felt like touch at all.
It felt like a sigh.
Ethan traced the contours of Barry’s face with his thumbs, and Barry could feel, with every stroke, every brush of touch as Ethan’s hands ghosted over his face that Ethan loved him. “I never thought I’d have this chance again,” Ethan whispered, his voice thick with pain and disuse.
Soon Ethan’s hands were moving, sliding under Barry’s clothing, slipping around on bare skin that trembled and muscles that contracted and shivered at his touch. He pulled Barry’s shirt over his head, that last yank forcing it to pop through the smallish neck hole, leaving Barry feeling surprised and disheveled.
Barry opened his mouth to speak, but Ethan’s hand came out to smooth the words away. He moved into Ethan’s arms, then, an occurrence as inevitable as, only days before, it had seemed impossible. His hands automatically went to the tie on Ethan’s drawstring pants, and for a second, Ethan’s hand held his still. Their eyes met again, and suddenly Ethan exploded into action, raining hungry kisses on Barry’s face and neck and fighting his hands for possession of drawstrings and zippers.
Ethan reached out and yanked Barry’s belt buckle, pulling so hard it nearly knocked him backward, off his feet, but Barry clung to Ethan’s shoulders and buried his lips in the thick hump of flesh where Ethan’s neck rose from a meaty muscle, trying to make some kind of mark there. Ethan’s head dropped back and he groaned, his hands still reaching, one hand slipping inside Barry’s jeans to protect him while the other yanked his zipper down.
Barry felt his cock drop, heavy and full, into Ethan’s hands as he slid both his own hands down to cup Ethan’s ass. Before he thought about it at all he wrapped one of his legs around Ethan’s hips and Ethan picked him up and carried him to where he’d been standing before, slamming his body back against the wall with a force that made the air leave his lungs.
“Hah,” he tried to speak, “Hah, hahah.” When Ethan found his balls Barry smiled against the man’s skin, rubbing his cheek against the stubble he found, burying his face and allowing himself to be used.
Ethan was lifting him, pushing into him, and Barry felt Ethan’s cock nudging against his ass. Both Barry’s hands came up and caught Ethan’s face, almost slapping it and holding it firm.
“Condom, you cheating motherfucker,” Barry said through the lump in his throat. Ethan sagged against him, raising his head to plant a punishing kiss on Barry’s lips, and then, still more, far gentler, on his closed eyelids.
Barry slipped down as Ethan pulled gently away. His feet dropped to the floor. He held his breath, wondering for a moment, if he’d ruined everything, but Ethan merely dug a battered condom from his wallet and, tearing the plastic package open, placed it on the head of his dick. Once he rolled it down, he picked Barry back up again.
Tentatively Barry put his hands in Ethan’s dark hair. It had grown longer, and it was soft. Not a little dirty. Barry dug both hands in and stroked Ethan’s head, caressing and loving the man around whose hips he once again wrapped his legs. He hung on like a limpet, his feet sliding a little, and he opened up, presenting himself more fully to Ethan, allowing access to his balls, the delicate skin behind them, and the puckered hole Ethan’s questing finger was exploring.
Ethan’s hands and lips moved on Barry, demanding a response, rocketing him into some kind of electric space where all that existed was pleasure and not a little pain, the good kind, the kind that filled and stretched him. Pain that pushed him until he had to remove his hands from Ethan’s hair to hide his burning face. Barry came around Ethan’s cock and all over his belly. Once released, his knees buckled and he slid down the wall. Ethan responded first by pulling Barry to his feet, then by pulling him to the bedroom. They stayed there, except for answering the door for food deliveries, for six days.
