Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 08:43:58 +0000
From: hobby391@att.net
Subject: Boy From The High Country, Chapter 9

BOY FROM THE HIGH COUNTRY Chapter 9

by Hobbyboy

hobby391@att.net

DISCLAIMER: See the warning before Chapter 1.

YELLOWSTONE GEOGRAPHY: For readers unfamiliar with
Yellowstone National Park, there is an good web page at
www.yellowstone.com which includes a road map in Acrobat format.
For readers from other countries, the photos on the web site might
add color to the story. You might be particularly interested in the one
of Old Faithful. A footnote to chapter 8: Old Faithful was so called
because it erupted faithfully every hour, until a major earthquake in the
1980s disrupted underground thermal activity. Old Faithful is now
less dependable, but can still be counted on for a good show most of
the time.

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER: In responding to my e-mail I mentioned
to a few readers that chapter 9 would take a while because I had
gotten into territory that was emotionally difficult for me. The drive to
solve it was stronger than I thought, and I had to forge ahead. This
chapter, now way ahead of schedule, is the result.

CHAPTER 9: WYOMING DREAMING

The blazing sun produced no sensation of heat. I was sitting on a
brick-hard surface, the mud for a dike between rice paddies baked
by the sun. Nick's lips were moving, but I could near no words. The
only sound was an eerie, vibrating whine like a thousand distant
electronic crickets. Tran was on my lap, stroking the hairs on my arm,
as always marveling that my skin was not as bare and smooth as his
own. Ky was astride Nick's hips, smiling as the big blonde American
practiced his limited Vietnamese vocabulary. The war was far away. I
marveled at my friend Nick. From the first he had shown such
compassion and concern for the children  The buzzing whine was
louder now, and my head began to throb in time with its cycles.
Suddenly Tran's head exploded in a grisly spume of blood and bone
and brain tissue, and I felt myself topple backward into the paddy
behind me. As if in slow motion I saw Nick and Ky fling their arms
and legs outward in a paroxysm of death as bullets slammed into their
bodies and propelled them backward from the dike. Then as if
someone had thrown a switch the sound began, the rattle of automatic
weapons fire, the crump of mortar shells exploding.

I sat bolt upright in bed, or tried to, but the roof of the camper was
too low and my head slammed into the aluminum skin and I dropped
back down onto the pillow. My heart was racing, my breath rushing in
and out in frantic gasps. The sheet beneath me was drenched with
sweat. There was a distant roll of thunder. Kelly stirred beside me,
just enough to ask, "S'matter?"

"Go back to sleep, Kel," I said. "I'm going to go to the bathroom."

Kelly rolled over and was immediately asleep again. I pulled on a pair
of sweats, slipped into my sandals, and stepped out into the cool
night. I locked the camper door for Kelly's safety. As I fumbled with
the lock, I found that I was trembling. I thought I had laid those
demons to rest, but now after twenty years, the dream had returned.
Why now? Why here?

I knew I would get too cold just standing, but if I went back to bed I
would be unable to sleep. Perhaps this was the opportunity I had
needed to straighten out my thinking about Kelly, about myself, about
the inevitable day when this idyllic interlude would come to an end.
The parallel loops of roadway through the campground would enable
me to walk a long distance without ever getting far from the camper. I
always thought better on my feet anyway.

I met Nick at Fort Riley in the summer of 1966. He and I were the
only college graduates in the company who were not officers. I had
taught in a boys' boarding school for one disastrous year after college,
and was looking for another job when the draft caught me. I had
learned to type in self-defense in college, so the Army, in its infinite
wisdom, sent me to clerk school where I had to go through the
motions of learning to type all over again. Most of my classmates
came out typing by the Columbus system: discover and land. Nick
was trained as a supply sergeant, a job which required the ability to
read and to count. We were assigned to the same company in a
recently reactivated unit that would travel as a unit to Vietnam.

We took adjoining bunks in the barracks, where we could sit in our
off hours and bitch about how the Army was ruining our lives and
swap stories about imagined exploits as college students, Nick at
DePauw, me at Willamette. Unlike me, Nick was able to see more
than the promise of a free burial plot in our impending assignment to
Southeast Asia. He raided the post library for books on Vietnamese
history and culture, and even brought back in introduction to the
language. Little by little he encouraged me to see this tour of duty as
an opportunity to expand our knowledge of the world. We should see
ourselves as tourists, Nick said, except that people might be shooting
at us. Because of our jobs with the company headquarters staff, it was
unlikely that we would ever have to shoot at anyone, unless there was
a direct attack. We had not been trained for field operations.

Thrown together as we were by the exigencies of war, Nick and I
became good friends. We talked history and philosophy, and once a
week we would try to solve all the world's problems at the enlisted
men's club over mugs of beer. Neither of us was given to nights out on
the town, so soon we were occasionally referred to as the two
homos. But we were brothers, not lovers.

The battalion arrived in Vietnam on Christmas Eve. It was hot, it was
dusty, we were lonely and far from home. No matter what the
calendar said, it was not Christmas. An entire village had been forcibly
moved half a mile down the Mekong River river so that our battalion
could occupy the strategic river bend. Our company headquarters
were located in what had once been the home of the village headman.
Nick and I shared a two-bed room in the native house rather than
sleeping in large tents with the infantrymen. It was an as yet  unfortified
camp, located in what the Army regarded as pacified territory.
Villagers wandered freely through the camp after passing the most
rudimentary of checkpoints, selling trinkets, pornographic photos,
souvenirs, locally bottled Coca-Cola, anything that a G.I. might want.
Well, not anything. Marijuana rolled into cigarettes and sold in
meticulously ironed-out and restored American cigarette packs, and
temporary bed partners, were only marginally harder to find. Nick
and I were not buying either one.

The first of the boys showed up on the second day. Nick and I were
taking a break on the closest rice paddy dike when four boys
appeared, barefoot, shirtless, wearing only the blue shorts that were
part of their uniform for school. Before they were old enough for
school, the village children went naked. The boys were fascinated by
our white skin and by the hair growing on our arms.

Tran and Ky were the two who returned day after day, We
discovered that Ky's father was in the South Vietnamese army, and
Tran's father had been killed. Nick practiced his Vietnamese, and
tried to get me to join in, but I seemed to have no ear for the
language. We showed them how to throw Frisbees, even played some
rudimentary games of catch. It wasn't long before both youngsters
were better than me.

In spite of the minimum of verbal communication, I was becoming
quite attached to the two boys. I had always been a magnet for
children. It was almost embarrassing how toddlers belonging to
complete strangers would hold up their arms to be picked up in
supermarkets and department stores. I was a clean-cut kid, and
parents were not as suspicious of motives as they are now. At church
I could always be found entertaining the young children during the
break between Sunday School and the worship service. I was more
comfortable with them than I was with my peers, because I was
painfully shy and awkward. With the children, I could be myself.

There was something else, too. When I was physically very close to a
child, I could somehow sense his or her mood. I always seemed to be
able to give a smile or a soft word when it was needed. Among my
family's friends, I was well known for my ability to quiet fussing
children.

And so it was with Tran. Unlike American boys his age, he was
completely uninhibited in his expression of emotion. Vietnamese boys
thought nothing of holding hands, walking arm in arm or with arms on
shoulders. If he wanted a hug, which was often, Tran would simply
walk up to me with his arms open. He often wanted to cuddle in my
lap and just look out at the world from a safe location. Because he
and Ky had not been raised without television or manufactured toys,
they were not as restless and easily bored as children back home.

I was surprised as hell the first time Tran kissed me. It was exactly the
kiss a child might give a parent or a close relative, except it was on the
lips. Perhaps this was easier for me to accept because on my father's
side of the family, kisses on the lips were routine from my aunts and
uncles, though only from my father's brothers and sisters, not from
their spouses. Never once did I experience any sexual arousal in the
times I spent with Tran and Ky.

Our hours with these boys ended too soon. We had been in country
only three weeks when a sniper's bullets snuffed out the lives of my
best friend and the two young boys I had come to love like my own
children. In spite of the gunfire that broke out from our side in
response, this had not been a full-scale attack. It was hit and run. Tran
and Ky were simply in the way.

I lay in the rice paddy covered with the blood and flesh of a boy who
had trusted me, and who for his trust had taken a bullet that should
have killed me. I knew that my best friend was dead. My mind
retreated into darkness.

It was a week before I came out of my fog in the psychiatric section
of the field hospital. The Army shrink was like everything else in the
military, by the book and barely competent, but he did help me to see
that Tran's death was not my fault. I would simply have to learn to live
with the emptiness. I think it was about then that I began to turn back
toward teaching. I had not been able to make a difference to Tran and
Ky, but perhaps I could repay the debt I owed them, and in some
way carry on the legacy of Nick's teaching me, by teaching others.

My ability to sense the emotions of others was both a blessing and a
curse in the years that followed. It made me a patient and considerate
lover, able to sense what my wife needed and putting her gratification
ahead of my own. I remembered something my father used to say:
"Love can always wait to give; lust can never wait to get." My
compassion and empathy extended to my students and to total
strangers, but my wife had been raised in an emotionally abusive
household where the dad had made the family a fortress against the
outside world. Eventually she could no longer live with the fact that I
did not devote all of my attention and energy to her, although it took
her twenty years. The lasting legacy of that marriage was my daughter
Heidi. I became a single parent because my wife's way of leaving the
marriage was to sleep with her boss. Heidi hated her so much for that
betrayal that she refused even to stay overnight in her house, and no
court would force a custody arrangement on a young teenager.

I missed being married, and I remarried too soon. To my second wife,
who pursued me to the altar, I was a trophy. She had been through an
abusive marriage and a messy divorce, and I was proof that she could
still attract a man. When that wore thin after less than five years, she
gave me my marching orders: find your own apartment within sixty
days.

When I fell in love, I fell hard. Both divorces were emotionally
wrenching experiences for me. I was devastated. My sense of self-
worth was reduced to nearly zero. It was my relationship with my
students and my daughter that sustained me through both times. The
time I had spent listening to my students, the fact that I treated them in
class as intelligent people who could contribute to each other's
learning,  was paid back to me with interest when I was the one in
distress.

My walk through the chill darkness came to a sudden stop. I smiled
as I remembered a story about the great educator John Dewey at
Columbia. One day he came to class and began rambling on about
something that was not obviously related to the course, and his
bewildered students tried to follow him. When the class time ended,
Dewey looked at his students and said, "Thank you. I understand that
much better now." I had talked myself out, and I understood myself
much better now.

This trip was my declaration of independence. I would never need
anyone again, I would never care again, because caring only led to
heartache. Then I found Kelly asleep on that picnic table. With his thin
frame and olive skin he was a slightly grown up version of my Tran,
my lost and destroyed Tran. And now the tears came. I stood in the
road and sobbed helplessly, crying the tears I had never shed  in that
hospital in Vietnam, weeping at last for Tran and Ky and Nick, for a
loss so devastating that I had never acknowledged it, had never
mourned the loss, even when I was in the depths of despair over the
failures of my marriages.

My legs refused to support me any longer, and I sat down against a
log that marked a parking spot at the end of one of the loops of road.
How long I sat there I do not know. I was groaning aloud, trying
however not to disturb anyone. I cried until no more tears would
come. My abdominal muscles were aching from the heaving sobs that
had wracked my body. When at last my grief had run its course, I
leaned my head back against the bare log and rested.

I knew now why I had moved so easily into a simple and boyish kind
of sex with Kelly. He had stirred my unconscious memories and had
broken my determination to be alone. I had reverted to the age I
knew best, which was not my chronological age but the age of the
people with whom I spent most of my time. I became a teenager,
doing what I had never even thought of in my own sexually repressed
youth: experimenting sexually with a friend. My adult self had been
strong enough only to keep me from allowing him to return the favor.

At the same time, with my gift and curse of empathy, I had felt Kelly's
need and answered it without thinking. I still did not understand how
Kelly, who apparently had been so sexually traumatized by his step
brother, could have felt as he did. It made no sense. He should have
been like a frightened animal, tentative and cautious and suspicious. I
might never know the answer, but I was sure I had not misinterpreted
him.

And in that same moment, there dawned on me with awful certainty
the realization that this time with Kelly could not last. I could revert to
adolescence for a while, but not for long. I really was too old to be his
father, and in any case, even if we could straighten out the mess
created by his running away, I would not be an acceptable guardian
for any child. I was single. I lived in a one-bedroom condominium,
and after the financial devastation of two divorces I could not afford
to buy anything larger, not in the Pacific Northwest's burgeoning
economy. The question was whether I could find a solution that would
not leave Kelly worse off than when I found him.

At length I rose and returned to the camper. The eastern sky was
brightening toward dawn when I unlocked the camper door. When I
crawled back into bed with Kelly, he roused himself and turned to
give me a hug. "Have you been gone a long time?" he asked.

"Yes. I had a bad dream and I had to walk around for a while to think
about it."

"Was the dream about me?"

"No, Kelly. You only give me good dreams."

"I was dreaming about you again."

"Again? Do you dream about me often?"

"I've been dreaming about you for a long time."

"But Kelly, we've only known each other for two days."

He rose up on one elbow and looked down at me. "But you were in
my dreams before I ever met you."

"Kel, how can that be?"

"I don't know, exactly. You remember the boys I told you about, the
ones I made up in my mind to take the pain?" I nodded my assent
without speaking. "There was more. When I... went away like that,
there was someone else there, besides my mother and father. And
then when I met you, I knew it had been you all along."

"Kelly, I just don't understand. When did this start?"

He dropped back down on his pillow. He was wide awake now,
striving to explain to me how I had somehow fitted into his life. "When
I lived at Freddie's house, well I already told you how we used to do
things together, I mean in bed, with each other's bodies. Freddie said
he knew a place on the Internet where we could read about the things
we were doing. He had a computer in his room, and he looked up this
story site called Nifty. That's where I read about Cody and Jeff. Did
you ever see that story?"

"Yes, Kelly, I have read that story."

"Well I liked the Cody's story, and stories by some other boys who
had run away or whose parents kicked them out. And when Jeff took
Cody home, I thought I would like to leave and go with somebody
who would love me. I knew that if those other boys could find
someone, there was somebody who would find me. In those dreams I
had where I was with my mother or my father, and sometimes at night
too, there was this kind man who picked me up and held me and took
me away from Jason and my step dad. He was in my dreams so much
that I knew he had to be real, somewhere. I couldn't quite see him
very well, but when you held me in the shower, you felt just like he did
in my dreams, and I knew that you were my Jeff." Kelly rolled over
and threw his arm across my chest. "I waited for you for so long," he
said. "And you finally came."

My God. Kelly didn't know that the Nifty stories were fiction. He had
heard these other boys tell about being rescued, and had become
convinced that this always happened for the lost boys. I thought back
to the story of Cody and Jeff. I remembered how Cody tried to show
affection in the only way he had ever known true affection, a sexual
way; how Jeff had resisted, and told Cody it was wrong; how Cody
had reacted in frustration and anger and had nearly walked out; how
Jeff realized that Cody needed to love him in this way, and had given
in. In Cody's mind, the conversations I had wanted to have with him
had already taken place. In his dreams and fantasies he had already
expressed his frustration and need to his rescuer, to me. The longings
aroused by his relationship with Freddie, the physical pleasure he had
gotten in spite of the brutal attitude of Jason, he had transferred to his
fantasies, and then I had stepped right into that fantasy. Fantasy and
reality had become one, seamlessly blending together. That night in the
shower with Kelly was not a new event for him. It was a continuation.
Its outcome was already determined in Kelly's imagination.

At that moment I had no idea how I would be able to handle this
situation. But at least I now understood, probably as well as I ever
would, what the situation was.

"I love you, Uncle Art," he said.

I held Kelly tightly in my arms and said, "I love you, Kel. No matter
what, I will always love you."  I held him a moment longer, then finally
relaxed. He was content. "Come on, let's get some breakfast," I said.
"We have a big day ahead of us."

NEXT: Chapter 10, Perfect Love