I was sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea when I noticed a truck coming up from the road. I expected a neighbor or two to check in while Mom was away, but she had only left that morning. It was late afternoon, and the sun was low in the sky, but when I squinted, the aqua blue stood out, and I half hoped and half dreaded it was Jim Halsey. By the time the truck pulled up by the house, I knew for sure it was Jim in his ’57 Chevy. I set the glass down and walked over to greet him. There was no escape now.
“Hey, Freddy,” he said like we were old friends when he got out. “How you doing?”
Maybe he was a little more filled out, but he was still the rangy young grunt that I remembered. Light brown curls were sticking out from under his dirty Mail Pouch cap.
“Fine, just fine.” I couldn’t help but smile. I liked Jim. “It’s been a while.”
“Three years, I think. You were just a little thing when I was here last.”
He was digging at me, but he was only kidding.
“Now, you know I wasn’t that little.”
“I guess,” he readily conceded. “How old are you now?”
“Eighteen. I graduated last month.”
Jim walked around the truck, stood in front of me and shook my hand. “Is your father around?” he asked earnestly.
“I’m sorry to say he isn’t. He passed last November. It was sudden. Heart attack.”
Jim removed his cap and said, “My condolences, Freddy. …or is it Fred now?”
“Freddy is fine.”
“Did you and your mother hire a manager?”
“No, I’m working the farm myself.”
“But I thought you had your heart set on going to the university and becoming a teacher like your mother.”
“That was the plan, but then Dad died. All of that’s been put on hold.”
“So, you’re the man to talk to.”
“Yes, for better or worse.” It still felt strange that I was the one in charge. Strange and burdensome.
“Well, you can probably guess that I’m here looking for work.”
“I figured, but you know it’s too early.” Corn was our cash crop, and we wouldn’t need farmhands until later in the summer. “Besides, you know, Dad wouldn’t hire you again. Not after the way you left.”
“I apologize for that, Freddy. I sincerely do. And I’d apologize to Mr. Johnson if he were here. I wasn’t much older than you are now when I run off. I still had some growing to do. I’m more responsible now.”
“I appreciate it, Jim, and I’m sure Dad would. But, like I said, I don’t really need the help. It would be an unnecessary expense.”
Jim hung his head, and it looked like he was on the verge of begging. “You wouldn’t have to pay me much. I just need a place to sleep and eat.”
I sighed, shook my head as if to say I should know better before I gave in. “Okay.” Right from the start, I wanted him to stay, but I didn’t want him to know it. “Go get settled in at the bunkhouse and come back for supper.”
Mom had made me some of her sauce, so I was preparing spaghetti and a garden salad when the phone rang. It was Mom’s best friend, Lucy Redfield. She wanted to know if Jim Halsey had shown up yet. She explained that he had dropped by their farm earlier in the day, asking about us.
“Freddy, I told him, your dad had passed on, and your mom was out of town. I said that there probably wasn’t much work out there and that you were more than capable of taking care of the place all by yourself for the time being.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Redfield. But it looks like all he expects is a cot and some grub, and he can keep me company if nothing else.”
“Well, I think he has a lot of nerve showing up here after what he did the last time, leaving your dad shorthanded.”
“I know, but he says he’s sorry about that.”
“You have a generous nature, Freddy, like your father.”
When I got off the phone, the news sunk in fast. Jim knew I was by myself before he showed up, and my first thought was that he wanted to rob me. But that was foolish. Dad always had to drive to town to make a withdraw from the bank before he paid his hands, so Jim knew we didn’t keep a lot of cash around. So once again, I half hoped and half dreaded that Jim came for me, to pick up where we left off.
The night before Jim left, he gave me my first beer. We were sitting out in front of the bunkhouse, and I was feeling it. But I think I was more drunk on being Jim’s friend than the alcohol. I was giggling and acting silly, but then I noticed Jim was looking at me in a funny way. It was like he could see right inside my head and read my thoughts. I grew quiet, and I began to blush. That’s when he grabbed me and hugged me hard. My face was smashed in the crook of his neck, and his cheek was against my burning ear. Then he pushed me down a little and pressed his face against the top of my head, kind of kissing my hair. When he let go, he said, “You’re one of the good ones, Freddy.” Then he got up and headed inside.
“Jim?” I asked, not understanding his sudden departure.
He didn’t turn. He merely gave me a little backward wave and said, “Goodnight, buddy.”
He was gone the next morning, and I was pretty sure he left because something had passed between us. But I didn’t understand it, and I never told Dad or Mom about my suspicions. I wouldn’t have known how to explain it. I had often thought about that look Jim gave me. For three years, I almost always thought about Jim and his eyes drilling into me when I did my secret thing in the night.
After I rang the bell, Jim showed up in a fresh shirt, and he stood on the other side of the screen door, waiting for an invitation. “Come on in,” I said. When he did, I added, “Have a seat.”
At first, Jim was polite like a guest who wasn’t sure he had earned his welcome yet, and I was a little tight, too. But we dug into the food and began to talk. He asked about Mom, and I explained that a couple of times every summer, she drives up to Des Moines to my Aunt Carol’s house. Then they go on to Chicago to take in a couple of shows and shop for new dresses.
When we finished eating, I put the dishes in the sink and got a couple of beers from the Frigidaire. I handed him one, and he said, “I guess I corrupted you.”
The comment helped me to relax. Jim was the first one to bring up that night. That meant he didn’t want to pretend it didn’t happen.
“I have a few now and then. When Mom wants to imbibe, she has sherry. She says school teachers drink sherry. Maybe I’ll make the switch when I become a teacher. …if I become a teacher.”
As we sipped our beer, Jim told me about his life. He’d been all over Iowa and all the other states surrounding us. He’d picked oranges in Florida and apples in Maine. He got beat up outside a blues bar in Memphis and held up at a five and dime in Cleveland. His travels and adventures made me feel green. Just like three years before, I was a mere boy beside him. By default, I might have been the boss there on the farm the summer of ‘65, but I hadn’t been anywhere or done anything.
“Don’t you want to settle down? Get married, have kids?”
“I’m not that kind of man, Freddy. Is that your dream? Do you have a special girl?”
People had been asking me that a lot lately. It made me squirm. “I’ve taken a couple of girls out, but nothing happened. Maybe one day I’ll meet the right girl, and I’ll finally get it, the love bug or whatever it is.”
“Or maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Freddy,” Jim said with a hint of an older brother’s snobbery, “some men prefer the company of other men.”
I didn’t dare say anything to that. I wasn’t expecting him to put it out there like that, raw and blunt.
When the silence began to get hairy, Jim said, “Can I be honest with you, Freddy.”
“Sure.”
“I mean really honest. What I’m about to say might shake you up. You might want me to leave in the morning. Maybe even right now.”
“Unless you’re about to confess to murder, I doubt it, Jim.”
“Well, here it is. Five years ago, two years before I came here the first time, my father—we had a farm a lot like this one—caught me with one of his hands. I was seventeen, and he gave me three twenties and the keys to his truck. He said he wanted me to leave, and he never wanted to see me again.”
“Caught you? What were you doing?”
Jim sighed. “Freddy, you know. We were one flesh that night, Frank and me. I can walk you through it with all the nitty-gritty if you want to hear it.”
“It’s okay,” I managed to say in a low voice. I couldn’t look at him. But the truth was I did want to hear the nitty-gritty. I wanted to hear those words spoken out loud.
Jim sat his bottle down, stood up and said, “Thanks for the hospitality, Freddy. I’ll head on out to the bunkhouse. I’ll come back in the morning for either my work orders or my walking papers. It’s up to you.”
I knew it was safe to lift my gaze when I heard the squeak and whack of the screen door. After I turned out the lights, I went to my room, shed my clothes and touched myself. But I didn’t just picture Jim as had been my custom for so long. I imagined Jim with Frank. I wondered what Frank looked like. Did he have a mustache like Omar Sharif or a smile like Tab Hunter?
Breakfast was awkward, and I sent Jim to the far west corner of the property to shore up the fence line while I did some painting on the barn, which was close to the house. I sent him out with a lunch bucket, so he wouldn’t come back at noon. But eventually, the sun dropped, and Jim came looking for me. I was still up on the ladder when I heard him ask, “Are we still friends?”
“Of course.”
“Well, damn it, talk to me.”
I stopped painting, but I didn’t come down just yet. “You and this Frank fella, were you in love like Mom and Dad?”
“I don’t know, Freddy. I don’t think it was that serious. We just liked each other.”
“But how did it happen? It’s not like a man can walk up to another man and say, ‘Hey, buddy, want to…be one flesh with me?’”
That made Freddy laugh. “It’s a little more subtle than that.”
“Well, how?”
“I guess it’s a lot like the way men and women do it. You look at each other. You notice he’s looking at you a little longer, a little different from the way other men look at you. You drop hints. Pay him compliments. After a while, it just happens. You find the nerve. You feel safe with him, and you make your move.”
I climbed down and looked him in the eye. “How often have you made your move on another man?” If we were going to talk about these things that usually went unsaid, I wanted to hear it all.
Jim hesitated before admitting, “A few times.”
“How often is a few?”
“I don’t know. A few.”
“Three?”
“More than that.”
“Twenty?”
He sighed.
“A hundred.”
That made him mad. “No, not a hundred, damn it.”
“Stop swearing. I want to know.”
“Let’s just say somewhere between twenty and a hundred.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do that. I wouldn’t know how to do it with even one man.”
“Freddy, I think you’d learn if you were around more men. You were kind of doing it with me three summers ago without even knowing it.”
That shocked me. “How?” I managed to ask.
“It was the way you looked at me, Freddy. With your eyes, you were telling me you needed me, someone, a man.”
I hadn’t realized I was that transparent, but I couldn’t argue with him. I knew there was a hunger in me when I looked at some men. I had known it for a while. But I didn’t know other men might recognize it.
“So why did you leave?”
“I’m here now, Freddy. I want to give you what you need now.” He got closer and put his arms around me. “Come over to the bunkhouse and take a shower with me.”
The bunkhouse was a lean-to addition on the other side of the barn. It was one long and narrow space with a few cots on one end and a toilet, a sink and a shower on the other. There were no internal walls, so the shower was out in the open. Jim led me there by the hand, and then he told me he liked boys in bibbed overalls. When I asked why, he unhooked the bibs, and the overalls fell around my ankles. I was standing there exposed. That made me giggle like I did three years before. Jim had me. I would have done anything he asked.
After removing his own clothes, Jim knelt down and pulled off my work boots. I almost tripped due to the overalls being bunched up around my feet, but he wrapped his arms around my legs and steadied me as he freed me from the tangle of denim.
We got wet under the cold water, and then Jim ran a bar of soap over my chest and arms. When he gave me the soap, I understood that he wanted me to do the same to him. We were both hard, and when my hand was at the bottom of his stomach, he took hold of it and pushed it directly to his engorged cock. We ended up leaning against each other, nose to nose, and forehead to forehead. We stared into each other’s eyes as we pulled on each other. Soon we were shuttering, and grunting and shooting. Three years’ worth came out in thick ropes.
After we were finished, we went outside and sat on our bench without bothering to put on our clothes. We sat there with our shoulders touching for fifteen or twenty minutes. I think I might have even dozed off for a while.
Finally, I asked, “Are we queer?”
“If you want to call it that.”
“Aunt Carol knows this man in Chicago who runs an antique store. She and Mom always visit him when they go up there. Mom says he has a poodle and a parrot, and she says he sometimes dresses in women’s clothes. Dad said he was queer.”
Jim took my hand and kissed it. “That’s one way to be queer, one of many. You can be yourself, Freddy. There aren’t any rules.”
“Why didn’t we do this three years ago?”
Jim kissed me on the mouth. Our first kiss. “Freddy, I wanted to. Believe me, I wanted to. But you were so young. You didn’t even know you wanted this yet. And you lived in this world where you’re the good boy. You had never done anything to shake your parents’ trust in you, and you trusted them in turn. I didn’t want to take that away from you.”
“But it’s not like we would have done it in front of them.”
“Freddy, I took that chance when I was still living at home, and I lost my family. I’ve not seen my father, my mother, my baby sisters, my aunts and uncles or any of my cousins since 1960. I couldn’t risk that happening to you, not without you walking into it with your eyes open.” He kissed my hand again and said, “Forgive me, Freddy.”
There was a pond surrounded by trees behind the barn. My friends from Boy Scouts and I used to camp by it in pup tents. We’d go there in the late afternoon on hot sunny days and skinny-dip. Then we’d build a campfire and fix franks and beans for supper. After that, we’d talk and tell stories until the need for sleep overtook us. Finally, we’d climb into our sleeping bags and drifted off side by side. Remembering those times stung a little. We’d accepted each other, body and mind. We had nothing to hide from one another. But when we got older, those boys began to pull back. I didn’t have a falling out with any of them. There was no specific day when they stopped being my friends. It was gradual, like the changing of the seasons. Then in high school, I was, more or less, a loner. But I still went out to the pond by myself when it was warm. After lunch the next day, I asked Jim to go out there with me.
We swam, horsed around and splashed each other for about an hour before we settled down. When we were standing face to face with the water up to our chests, I asked, “What we did yesterday, is that all there is?”
“What? You didn’t like it?”
“I liked it fine. But there has to be more. What else do men do with each other.”
“I guess they do the same things men and women do with each other.”
“They have intercourse?”
Jim laughed. “Intercourse? Having you been reading books about it?”
I splashed him and said defensively, “How else am I supposed to learn?”
Jim got closer, and he ran his thumb around my lips. “Women have three holes, Freddy. Men are missing one, but they still have the other two.” Then he suddenly stuck his thumb into my mouth.
I closed my eyes and instinctively sucked on him. That’s when he put his free arm behind me and ran his other hand between my cheeks. My eyes sprang open to find him grinning at me like a maniac.
He laughed at my reaction, but then he held me close. “Don’t be so scared. You’ll like it. I’ll make sure you like it.” He put his lips close to my ear and whisper, “I would never hurt you.”
I could feel his hardness pressing against me, and I was sure he could feel mine. “Show me,” I said.
We got out of the water, spread out our towels, and Jim pushed me to my knees. He said the most important thing was not to scrape him with my teeth. He encouraged me to use my tongue, bob up and down and to take as much of him into my mouth as I could.
After a few minutes of that, he had me lie on my back, and he took me into his mouth. Then he kissed me…back there. I never expected anyone to kiss me there. But just as I was getting used to it, he was suddenly over top of me, and my legs were over his shoulders. He had me pinned good. If we had been wrestling, I would have lost the match. His hands were petting my hair and face, and he asked, “You ready?”
I bit my lip. No, I wasn’t ready. How could anybody be ready for that? But I shook my head yes. Then I felt him push himself inside of me. I yelped like a pup that had been slapped with a newspaper.
“Breathe, Freddy, and relax. Relax.”
His voice was soothing, and I focused on his face, which was framed by the tree branches and green leaves above. I breeze cooled my damp skin, and somehow, I let it happen. After a minute, the pain went away. Jim must have read that in my face because right then, he began moving back and forth slow and gentle. It was like we were on the swing together on the front porch. We were like that for ten minutes, at least.
Eventually, he asked, “You okay?”
“Yes,” I answered. This was my first time, but I knew what was going to happen next. He was about to shoot inside of me, so his movements became rougher and fast. But I was open to him. I wanted him to let go inside of me, and then he did.
Jim came down from my room early in the morning. He wore his jeans and was ready for breakfast and work. But he found me still in my Jockeys sitting in the living room.
“How long have you been in here?”
“A couple of hours.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I was thinking about what’s going to happen to me now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you leave, what’s going to happen to me?”
“I didn’t say anything about leaving.”
I grunted derisively. “You didn’t have to. This comes easy to you. You’ve been with somewhere between twenty and a hundred men, remember? Now that you’ve been with me, you’ll soon want someone new.”
Jim put his hands on his hips and said, “Freddy, I’m not going to apologize for being the way I am.”
“I didn’t ask you to. I was just wondering what was going to happen to me when you left, that’s all.”
He sat beside me and asked, “What do you want, Freddy?”
I fell over, put my head in his lap and began to sob. I couldn’t help it. “I don’t want you to go.” I put my arms around his waist and held him tight. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone again.”
Jim petted my hair and said, “Stop carrying on like this, Freddy.”
I sat up and admitted, “I’ve been so lonely. I didn’t even know how lonely until yesterday. I can’t go back to that, not now that I know what it’s like being with you.”
“You don’t have to go back to being alone.”
“Like I told you, I don’t know how to do what you do. It’s easy for you to find men like us, but I wouldn’t know how to do it. And I’m not even sure I want to.”
“Freddy, I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that you were just another fuck. I’ve been thinking about you for three years. I’ve been biding my time. It was always my plan to come back for you.”
“But I can’t go anywhere. I can’t leave Mom, at least not yet. And I couldn’t ask you to stay here. You’ve been all over, done so much. I know you wouldn’t be satisfied here. I know you wouldn’t be satisfied with me.”
“Don’t tell me what will and won’t satisfy me,” Jim said with anger in his voice. “When two people come together, no one knows how long it’ll last. And you know the world isn’t going to do anything to help two men. But as long as we’re good for each other, I want to stay. Do you hear me, Freddy? I want to stay. And not because I pity you, or because I think you’re some poor dumb farm kid who needs me to bust him open for other men. I want you, Freddy. I wanted you the first time I saw you.”
Jim did stay. Officially, he became the manager of our farm. Mom was a little leery of Jim at first, but once she realized that his presence would allow me to go to school in the fall, she liked the idea of him being around. The following summer, Mom surprised both Jim and me when she announced one evening while we were eating supper that she knew the two of us did more than drink beer and play cards out in the bunkhouse. She told us that it wouldn’t offend her if Jim moved into my room.
I became an English teacher in 1970. Mom retired in 1975. Jim sometimes teased me by saying, “What kind of queer do you think you are? You don’t even have a parrot.” But on my thirtieth birthday, he got me a parrot. By the late seventies, small, family farms like ours began to disappear. The profits just weren’t there anymore. So we sold the fields and paid off our debts, but we kept the house, barn and pond. The corporation that bought us out didn’t want those things anyway. Jim could work on cars, so he hired himself out as a mechanic. He used the barn as a shop. He also did some house painting. By then, Jim had become part of our family. I’m sure people talked, and Jim and I were on the receiving end of a few remarks, but most minded their own business. We were lucky. In ’83, Jim’s sister showed up unexpectedly. She said she wanted her brother back in her life. He met with his other sister soon after. Mom passed in ’92. I retired in 2012. Jim and I got married in 2015. Cancer took him in 2018. He was cremated, and I scattered his ashes by the pond. Friends know that’s where I want my ashes scattered when the time comes.
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