Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:18:39 -0700
From: Hobbyboy <hobby391@att.net>
Subject: Boy From The High Country, Chapter 12

BOY FROM THE HIGH COUNTRY Chapter 12

by Hobbyboy

hobby391@att.net

DISCLAIMER: See the warning before Chapter 1.

CHAPTER 12: JELLYSTONE PARK

It took us twenty minutes to unhook the camper, dump (and wash!) the drain
bucket, and get everything stowed for our hurried getaway from Wyoming.
Twenty minutes of manual labor gave me time to still my panic and think.
After Mrs. Watson told us they had called the Casper police, I came to an
even more frightening realization. It wasn't Foster to whom I had given my
phone number. It was the Wyoming state police. How could I have been so
stupid?

As I calmed down, however, the conversation began to come back to me, I
remembered that I had given them a false name -- a playwright, wasn't it?
Yes, August Wilson. And the phone number was to an anonymous
answering service. I had first used them during the difficult months of my first
divorce. The divorce settlement had forced me to sell our house. Heidi's
mom had developed an irritating habit of calling or dropping by to nag her
into visiting, and it made Heidi so angry that she wanted to keep our new
address a secret as long as possible. The answering service could not be
traced back to me. Well, not without a search warrant, at least.

Things were looking a bit better. It would take the Casper police a day or
two to decide whether to treat this as an actual missing person case. They
would want to take a crack at solving the case themselves before asking for
help from the state police. That gave us maybe a week before they would
even think of trying to sniff out the identity of the mysterious caller. And we
had done nothing suspicious to invite attention from the authorities. In every
way Kelly appeared to be a normal, healthy boy willingly traveling with his
father or perhaps grandfather.  Without a name, the police could not follow
the paper trail of campground registrations and credit card purchases. The
only wild card was Mrs. Watson.  If she were going to get concerned and
give the police my name, she probably would have done so by now. Still, it
would be a good idea to reassure her.

I ran the trip through the route planning software on my laptop to get a map
and driving directions. This was not the route I had planned to take. My aim
had been maximum contact with nature, not with freeways. Now my
priorities had abruptly changed. The new route was pretty straightforward.
North into Montana to connect with I-90, then eight hundred miles west to
Seattle. Driving time was estimated at sixteen hours. It was already close to
noon. We could probably make it to Missoula today, then push on to Seattle
early the next morning. By Saturday night or Sunday morning we should be
sitting down with the Watsons, and perhaps we would be able to make some
plans for Kelly's future.

As soon as we were on the road, I apologized to Kelly for my momentary
panic, and explained to him why we did not have that much to worry about. I
instructed him in setting up the cell phone for speaker phone operation -- I
had already learned by experience how dangerous it could be to drive with a
cell phone in one hand -- and we placed our second call in an hour to
Seattle. Amazingly, we were in range of someone's analog service tower. I
thanked God that I had gotten a dual-mode phone and full national no-
roaming-charge coverage before I left Portland on this trip.

"Mrs. Watson, this is Arthur Lowell again. Kelly is here with me and we're
driving down the highway using the speaker phone."

"Hi, Mom!" Kelly piped up.

"Kelly, are you really OK? When he -- Mr. Lowell, I mean -- when he hung
up so fast, I didn't know what to think. Can he hear me?"

"Yes, Mom, we can both hear you, this is a speaker phone. It's OK, he's
really cool. I was in a rest area in --"

"Kelly, let me interrupt just a second. Mrs. Watson, I just want to let you
know that we're on a cell phone and we're on the road, so we could drive
out of cell phone range any time. If we get cut off, it won't be because I hung
up. If that happens, I'll call you just as soon as we get cell service again.
Okay, Kelly, go ahead."

"Okay, Mom, I was hitchhiking, and this really mean trucker dumped me in
this rest area outside of -- where was that, Uncle Art?"

"Outside of Sheridan."

"Okay, Sheridan, and --"

"Wait, Kelly," Mrs. Watson interrupted. "Did you just say Uncle Art?"

"Yeah."

"Are you with your uncle? I didn't know you had an uncle."

"No, Mom, I just call him Uncle Art because -- I mean, he's older than you
are, and I had to call him something, and besides, if I had a real uncle I'd like
him to be just like Art is. Anyway," Kelly went on, forging ahead like an old
locomotive with a full head of steam, "Uncle Art stopped and picked me up
and he has this really cool camper on his pickup and we went to Yellowstone
Park and we saw all kinds of neat stuff and we --"

"Kelly, slow down, please! You're with a strange man in a camper? Where
do you sleep?"

This woman had her priorities right, worrying first about Kelly's safety. Still, I
wondered how Kelly would handle this. He glanced at me and made a face
that said, 'This could be trouble.' Then he said, "There's this table that we eat
off of and at night it makes down into a bed that's just big enough for me."
Good boy. Nothing but the truth, and at the same time nothing close to the
truth.

"Kelly, why were you hitchhiking in the first place?"

"Uncle Art already told you. My step dad threw me out."

"Threw you out? I mean, I know he never treated you very well, but he really
threw you out? Why?"

There was a pause. "I... I don't want to talk about that right now," he said.
He sounded and looked very distressed, and the change in his tone of voice
made it obvious that his earlier excitement and happiness were genuine. Mrs.
Watson would have no cause to fear for Kelly's safety now. "I didn't know
where to go," he said, and the memory brought tears to his eyes and a catch
into his voice. "I wanted to come to you but you had left already, and I didn't
have your phone number, and so I just went to the highway and started
hitchhiking. I didn't care where I went. And Mom, it was really awful until
Uncle Art picked me up. But I'm okay now, honest. Uncle Art is really nice
to me." Kelly unsnapped his seat belt and lay down with his head on my
upper thigh and began to cry in earnest. I quickly looked for a place to pull
over, and tried to keep the conversation going.

"But Kelly, you --"

"Mrs. Watson," I interrupted, "I can imagine some of the things you must be
thinking. But please, ask yourself this. If Kelly weren't okay, if he weren't
safe, would I be bringing him to you?"

There was a long silence. For a moment I thought we were losing the call.
"Mrs. Watson, are you still there?"

"I'm here. I'm sorry, it's just that I... I mean I had this picture of... I guess I
should thank you for taking care of Kelly. But why didn't you say all this
earlier? Why did you hang up?"

I took a deep breath, then blew it out through pursed lips. "Mrs. Watson, I
can explain more about this when we get to Seattle. But please understand
that legally, Kelly is still a runaway. If this Reverend Foster is as mean a
bastard as I think he is -- pardon my language, but Kelly has told me a few
things about him -- anyway, a man like him could easily make me out to be a
kidnapper. So when you said you had called the police, I suddenly had this
vision of Kelly being sent back to that house, or to a foster home, and,
frankly, of me going to jail, and I guess Kelly and I both just sort of freaked.
So I asked the one most important question, and we got ready and got on
the road. So here we are."

"The one most important question?"

"Yes. Whether Kelly would be welcome with you."

"Mom?" Kelly had recovered himself enough to talk again by the time I had
brought the pickup to a stop in a graveled pullout. "Can I really come there?"

"Of course, Kelly. You know that. We told you before that you could come
to us anytime you needed to. We just didn't think it would be all the way to
Seattle." The reception was starting to break up, and I knew we were getting
to the limit of cell phone service. "When do you think you will be here?" But
there was no time for me to answer, because with three warning beeps, the
call ended.

After the excitement and intimacy of the previous three days, our trip to
Missoula was surprisingly subdued. Neither of us knew exactly what would
await us in Seattle. We could have talked the possibilities to death, but
apparently Kelly and I shared a tendency to grow quiet and somewhat
withdrawn when we were full of uncertainty. We listened to some quiet jazz,
some Brubeck and some Stan Kenton, and then I introduced Kelly to a
long-lived pop group with jazz roots, my favorite group of all time, Chicago.
Kelly turned up his nose at some of the early songs, such as "Color My
World," but came alive with songs of the middle period with Peter Cetera.
He loved the cello riff near the end of "Hard Habit to Break," which
happened to be one of my favorite moments in all of Chicago's recordings. I
loved this group partly because I appreciated their fine musicianship. I loved
hearing real musicians playing actual instruments, a group that could produce
the same sound in live performance as in studio sessions, without lip-syncing
or using pre-recorded segments.

The cell phone was now useless, so at our first stop for gas I used my
prepaid calling card to call ahead to Jellystone Park and make a reservation
for the night. Since it was now Friday, I felt lucky that a space was still
available. Kelly could use some relief from the tension of the afternoon. I
took advantage of Montana's liberal speed limit law and pushed the S10 to
the maximum, ignoring the fact that my gas mileage dropped to about
fourteen with the high speed and the weight of the camper. By six in the
evening, we were pulling through the entrance to Jellystone, one of a chain of
delightfully tacky campgrounds. At twenty-six dollars for the night it was the
most expensive place I had stayed on the whole trip, but after the stress of
the day, I thought we were due for a little recreation -- well, a little
conventional recreation.

We still had no cell phone service. Apparently my company had no
arrangement with a cell service provider in Missoula. This was one of the
frustrating things about having a cellular phone. There were so many
companies, but they were not interconnected except where specific
agreements had been reached. Consequently, I had service where I least
expected it, in and around Yellowstone, but not in Montana's version of a
metropolitan area. I again used my prepaid card to place a brief call to Mrs.
Watson, assuring her that we were fine and telling her our location, and
letting her know that we would call when we got closer to Seattle. Freddie
was still not home, but Kelly did spend a couple of minutes on the line with
'Mom.'

The last thing I wanted to do this night was cook, so we ate at the
campground's weekend open-pit barbecue -- ribs this time, not burgers.
Kelly delighted in the messiness of eating ribs dripping with sauce. He
mopped up the extra sauce with greasy jumbo French fries and grinned at
me. Twice he caught my eye and licked his lips slowly, lazily, seductively.
Then he raised his eyebrows twice, almost like Groucho Marx, and giggled.
There was no doubt what was on his mind. An employee came walking by
dressed in a Yogi Bear suit, so of course we had to take Kelly's picture with
his arm around the bear.

The miniature golf course was the real article, not the campy variety with
windmills and clown's faces as obstacles. Kelly had never played before, and
had a tendency to whack the ball out of the fairway entirely. It took two
warnings from the course attendant before he settled down. He lost, of
course, or would have if we had been keeping score. In fact, he was having
so much fun on the course that he would have been happy to take a dozen or
fifteen strokes on every hole, if only he could keep batting that ball around.

We headed next for the pool. I had a swim suit, Kelly did not, but we
decided that his shorts would do With today's styles, who could tell the
difference? We took all our bath gear with us so that we could take our
evening showers at the pool. The communal changing area was empty when
we arrived, and Kelly was full of devilment. He sat down long enough to take
off his shoes and socks, then stood up, turned away from me, bent over and
dropped his pants, leaving me staring at the full moon. Before he could move
I stepped forward and gave him a swat on his bare rear that produced more
sound than pain. He shrieked with glee, jumped up straight and turned
around, his shorts dropping to his knees. He pointed at me and yelled, "Child
molester in the bath house! Child molester in the bath house!"

I pointed at his dangling member and shouted back, "Flasher! Flasher! Arrest
this man for indecent exposure!" At that moment Kelly stopped yelling and
stood stock still. I turned around and saw a young boy, probably twelve
years old, shirtless, swim suit and towel folded over one arm, staring at us
with an expression somewhere between bemusement and shock. Kelly and I
burst into gales of laughter. The surprise of being caught in our little game
came out as uncontrollable laughter. The boy finally grinned, shrugged his
shoulders, and sat down on one of the benches.

While he was laughing, Kelly had let his shorts and underwear fall to the
floor. What he did next shocked the hell out of me. Wearing nothing but a
shirt that hid nothing important, he walked over to the other boy and held out
his hand. "My name's Kelly," he said. "What's yours?"

I noticed that the youngster had a hard time deciding where to look. He
looked up at Kelly's face and he blushed, but his eyes immediately dropped
back to Kelly's crotch, which was exactly at his eye level. I wondered if he
had ever been in a communal shower before. Kelly's boldness astonished
me. Perhaps he was just by nature a gregarious kid who had never before
had the chance to be himself. I hoped it was the love and acceptance I had
given him that had given him the freedom to open up. But then I remembered
Jason, who had kept Kelly naked every night for the last four or five years.
No wonder he had no shame about his nudity.

The slim, blonde twelve-year-old finally took Kelly's hand. "I'm Bryan," he
said. "Bryan Swenson."

Still shaking Bryan's hand, my boy replied, "I'm Kelly Grayson. This is my
Uncle Art. Are you alone?"

"Yeah, my dad didn't want to come swimming," Bryan said, still blushing, still
intermittently staring at Kelly's young cock, apparently fascinated by the little
bush of pubic hair.

"You want to swim with us? Maybe you could help me. I don't know how to
swim very well."

"O.. okay, I guess."

"Good, we'll meet you outside." As Kelly walked past me to finish changing,
he grinned at me and winked. Now, what the hell did that mean? I quickly
changed into my suit, but I did not give Bryan another show. If he wanted to
look at anything, it would have to be my butt.

There were no lockers. I had discovered on my trip that RVers were a pretty
honest lot. They were accustomed to leaving gear around their camping
spots, and it was very rarely that anything disappeared. Of course, bringing a
wallet or an expensive watch to the changing room would be leading people
into temptation, but it would be safe to leave Kelly's pack and my gym bag
there and just take our towels.

"Bryan's cute," Kelly said as we walked toward the pool.

I stopped and turned toward him. "Better not tell him that," I said seriously.
"He might not like it. Boys don't usually call other boys 'cute.' He might
think--" and then I stopped, not sure that I should have started down this
road.

"He might think what, think I'm gay?"

I let out the rest of that breath all at once. "Yeah."

Kelly just shrugged his shoulders. "So what? I am gay."

A very public swimming pool was hardly the place to have this conversation,
I simply said, "We can talk about that later. Come on, let's get in the water."
Just as I was trying to decide whether to take it slow or get the entry over
with in a hurry, a blonde whirlwind wearing royal blue Speedos hurtled past
us, jumped from the edge, tucked into a ball and came down with a splash,
effectively taking care of the problem of how Kelly and I were going to get
wet. The lifeguard's whistle blew a warning blast just as Bryan popped up
out of the water, pointing and laughing at us. The lifeguard was watching so
we couldn't pay him back, but we both jumped in feet first and joined him.

Kelly, characteristically, got straight to the point. "Where'd you get the cool
swim suit?"

"It's a team suit. I'm on a swim team at the 'Y' back home. I forgot
everybody else wears those baggy ones. These can be kind of
embarrassing."

"Well, I think they're cu--," Kelly began, stopping himself just in time. "I think
they look good on you." If truth be told, I would have liked to get a better
look at Bryan in Speedos myself.

"Thanks," Bryan said, and his cheeks seemed to flush a bit. "That's a really
cool necklace," he said, pointing at the jade and silver souvenir from
Yellowstone.

"Thanks. Uncle Art bought it for me."

For more than an hour the three of us splashed around in the pool, not really
swimming much. We stayed toward the shallow end because Kelly was not a
confident swimmer. The boys wanted to play water tag, which went pretty
quickly with only three of us. But trying to tag another when you were "it"
often involved leaping forward and grabbing, and more than once I found
myself with my arms full of squirming boy. Then Kelly announced a new rule,
as boys will often do, this one being that instead of just touching, the one who
was "it" had to hold on for at least five seconds. Water tag quickly turned
into water wrestling, and there was something vaguely erotic, but not
specifically sexual, about all that slippery skin. For a while two more boys,
Peter and Tom, both of them of that indeterminate age associated with early
puberty, joined us in that way boys have of just fitting into an activity without
formal request or permission. Since Bryan and Kelly accepted me as part of
the game, Peter and Tom seemed to have no hesitation abut the close
contact and the holding that resulted from Kelly's rule. One of them, Tom I
think, I could have sworn deliberately ran his hand up over my crotch as he
tried to wriggle out of my 5-second hold. I wonder if he was disappointed
that there was not much of interest there, since I was not at all physically
aroused by the game.

When Peter and Tom's father called them away for a late dinner, the game of
tag faltered. The number of people in the pool was dwindling. We lay on our
backs, one boy on either side of me, our necks bent backward over the lip
of the pool, looking up at the stars. The lighting in the campground was
indirect and shielded. There were none of those glaring mercury or sodium
vapor lamps, so there was less light pollution in the sky than there would be
near a major city. The Milky Way spread across the sky liked the sequined
train of a goddess' gown. The sight inspired awe, not articulate speech. Quite
by accident I think, Kelly chose exactly the right word.

"Awesome!" he breathed.

"Wow!" came Bryan's response.

It was getting late, and I was sure Bryan's parents would come looking for
him soon. We pulled ourselves out of the pool, and without appearing to
stare I was able to get a good look at Bryan in his racing suit. I could see
what he meant about the suit being a little embarrassing. Every contour of his
genitals was visible through the thin fabric. There was a small protrusion, as if
his penis were half hard, a reaction I often had as a boy when cool air began
to chill my body after swimming. As I have said earlier, I always did have a
fascination with boys' bodies, but had never gone beyond the point of
looking, except with Kelly.

Without thinking of the implications, Kelly and I walked into the
handicapped-access section of the tiled shower area. It had two shower
heads, one at each end, controlled by a single handle. The spray from the
two heads overlapped in the center at about wheelchair height. Bryan
followed us, and when we stripped down, so did he, after a moment's
hesitation. But when Kelly and I began to soap down, Bryan simply stood
there, unable to stop himself from watching. I could not help but look back, if
a bit more discreetly. He already had a swimmer's body. He was one of
those boys who had been born with some muscular definition, rather than
with the stick-boy figure so common at his age. He was clearly on the edge
of puberty, because his penis was no longer the tiny finger of young
boyhood.

As he stood and gaped, Bryan seemed unaware of the fact that his member
was beginning to lengthen and thicken, until he stood in all his boyish glory
with a three-inch erection that stuck straight out from his body like a flag
pole. Kelly stepped forward and whispered something in his ear. Bryan
looked down, blushed and covered his groin with his hands. Kelly whispered
in his ear again, then stepped back into the shower spray and began to soap
his genitals, then to lightly stroke himself until he, too, was standing tall. Kelly
dropped his hands to his sides, and so did Bryan, and they just grinned silly
grins each other. The sight of the two boyish erections was doing things to
my own body, and after making one attempt at turning my back, I decided to
hell with it and made no attempt either to flaunt or to hide my own arousal. I
certainly was not going to join in this little game, and I did not want to
interfere unless it clearly began to go down a dangerous road.

Once more Kelly stepped forward and  whispered in Bryan's ear, and this
time the boy stepped forward into the spray. Kelly handed him his bottle of
shampoo, and we all turned to the normal business of taking a shower. It
appeared that the game was over. By the time we had toweled down and
were getting dressed, all evidence of the briefly erotic experience had
vanished.

We said very conventional good-byes to Bryan, unless you count the giggles
that seemed to strike both boys as we parted, and we made our way back to
the camper. I wondered if I should bring up the subject of Bryan, but it did
not seem to me that Kelly was trying to exploit the boy. It was more like a
childish experimentation, a game about what boys' bodies would do. What
was unusual was the fact that Kelly was uninhibited by my presence.

"Have a seat, Kelly, we need to talk," I said as I closed the door behind us
Kelly sat at one side of the eating area, and I sat on the other. He was
looking down at his hands. "Kelly, you aren't in trouble. I just wanted to talk
with you about what you said earlier, about being gay. We really haven't
used that word before, we've only talked about your experimenting with
Freddie."

He looked up at me, and his eyes were hot. "We weren't experimenting! I
love Freddie!"

"I'm not saying you don't. But I know a few things about you, Kel. I know
you were never allowed to have friends. I know you two slept in the same
bed when you had run away from your step father. You were lonely and
desperate and afraid. He's the first person you were ever really close to, I
mean emotionally close, since your father died. If I had been you, I would
have held on to him for dear life. Maybe you'll love him for ever. Maybe
what that means is that you'll always be friends. But if you are able to start to
have a normal life, there will be other friends as well. Who knows, you may
even start to find girls attractive."

"Never! I'm gay, I know I am."

"Kelly, I hope you trust me enough to at least listen to me and think about
what I say. In my years as a teacher I have met quite a few students who
were gay. Every one of them knew they were different already when they
were in grade school, even if they didn't have a name for it. But Kel, you
weren't allowed to grow up normally. Everyone you loved was taken away
from you. You were forced into sex with Jason, and you were way too
young for that kind of sex, and you learned that it could bring you pleasure.
You were trained to like it, Kelly. You were trained the way some people
would train an animal. Now that you're free of that, it's going to take some
time for you to figure out what you really feel, and who you really are. Just
take things easy, and give it some time, okay?"

"Okay," Kelly said, but it was a very tentative and uncertain agreement.

"And, by the way, if you really are gay, or if you only just think you are, I'd
suggest that it doesn't pay to advertise."

"What do you mean?"

"Tonight when I said to you that Bryan might think you're gay, you said, 'So
what? I am.' I think you need to remember that people can be pretty cruel.
I'm sure you've read enough stories on Nifty to make that pretty clear. Just
be careful, okay? I don't want to see you hurt."

Kelly got up and crossed to me and threw his arms around me. "Thank you,
Uncle Art," he said. The position was awkward. I stood up so I could return
his hug.

"Thank me for what?"

"For caring about me. For rescuing me. For being my Jeff." He looked up
and kissed me then, a son's kiss for a father, then lay his against my chest. "Is
this going to be our last time together?" he finally asked.

"I don't know, Kelly. It might be."

He looked up at me again, and this time tears were running down his cheeks.
"I don't want this to end," he said.

"Neither do I. But you know it has to end some time, don't you."  He
nodded, then hugged me even more tightly. "There's one thing that will not
end, Kelly. I will always love you."

"I love you, too." He kissed me again, and this kiss had nothing to do with a
son's love. This was a lover's kiss, warm and deep and tender and
passionate. "Let's go to bed," he said. "And grab a towel."

We made love that night, and this time it was face to face, Kelly on his back
with his legs hooked over my shoulders. This was the way he wanted it, and
I was not going to deny him any request. We gazed into each other's eyes the
whole time, until the moment when I came in a shuddering orgasm that
caused my eyes to squeeze shut involuntarily.

It was too soon for Kelly. His grunting sounds were just beginning to mount in
intensity when my climax overtook me. As soon as I had recovered I
withdrew, cleaned up a little, and shifted my body downward so I could
engulf his teenage erection in my mouth. As I bobbed up and down, his hips
came up to meet me, and this time I was prepared when I felt his warm
stickiness flooding my tongue. I swallowed as he groaned in ecstasy. Once
more, at the moment of his greatest pleasure, he cried out, "I love you!" and
then all the muscles of his body relaxed at once and he dropped limply to the
mattress. I continued to nurse gently on his softening member, prolonging his
afterglow.

We slept in each other's arms, clinging to each other in the knowledge that
this might be our last night together.