The General and the Horse-Lord Read online

  “That’s what you did? You built roads and bridges?”

  “Mostly. Later on my job was tactics and strategy. And leadership. Sometimes the very best strategy is to make friends of your enemies. That doesn’t always work, though.” He thought briefly about Brian Walker, bleeding on his office floor, standing over him with a clenched fist. He flexed his fingers under the table. “Are you thinking about the army?”

  “Not really. The Marines seem pretty cool.”

  John closed his eyes briefly, tried not to picture Gabriel’s face if he heard this.

  “Have you killed a lot of people?” Juan asked.

  “How many is a lot?”

  Juan shrugged. “More than twenty? Kim’s thinking about becoming a Buddhist, though, so he says even killing an ant would do harm that shakes the universe down to its soul.”

  “Really. What do you think about becoming a Buddhist?”

  “That would mean, like, giving up chicken tenders. Forever. That’s burgers and pepperoni and sausage on pizza. I don’t know if cheese would count. I mean, cows aren’t harmed when they make cheese, right?”

  “Not that I know of, but there may be a unique Buddhist perspective on cheese. We’ll check with Kim.”

  Gabriel came back in, joined them, and put his hand on Juan’s shoulder. “I need to take you home, buddy. Mom says we have a parent-teacher conference tonight. A special parent-teacher conference with the math teacher.”

  Juan winced and scooted back his chair, pulling the apron over his head “Okay, Dad.”

  “Anything you need to tell me before I go in? Always helps to have full disclosure before the teacher gets her say.”

  “Um….”

  John stood up. “Gabriel, I’ll get a ride home with Kim. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “I’ll see if I can come up with some options for the next step. And we need to talk to Kim, see what he thinks. I think we need to hear how he would proceed with this before we do anything else.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll see what he has to say. Juan, I’ll see you next time. I like your haircut. Very USMC.”

  “Bye, General Mitchel.”

  Gabriel looked up, then shook his head like his hearing was going bad. “USMC?”

  GABRIEL slept somewhere else. John stared up at the ceiling, noticed the cobwebs in the corner of the bedroom about 0200, and got the broom out of the pantry to deal with them. While he was up there, he ran a damp paper towel over the upper edge of the window frames and the doors. Maybe Martha had asked him to reconsider, to spend the night and try to make things work. Gabriel was emotionally fragile right now. He could be manipulated into almost anything by thinking the kids needed him at home. And of course he still cared for Martha. She was a fine person, strong and resolute in a way that had always appealed to Gabriel.

  Twenty-five years, and John had never before had any expectations. He’d never waited for someone who wasn’t coming. He put the work first, had always assumed he would be alone, and so he was never disappointed. When Gabriel had been able to join him for dinner, share a steak and a couple of hours of his company, it was like an especially beautiful sky on a sunny day. Now the possibility existed for something more. Gabriel had started whispers of longing deep in his chest―why can’t we have this―while he was running his strong hands over John’s skin. John had started wanting something he’d never allowed himself to want before, and here he was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering where Gabriel was spending the night.

  Kim knocked on his closed bedroom door, then stuck his head inside. “I didn’t see the Horse-Lord’s truck outside. You okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay. It’s not like I haven’t been sleeping alone every night for my entire adulthood.” He sounded cranky and tired as a toddler.

  Kim crawled into bed, pushed the pillow under his head. “So you really miss him, huh? Seems like things are changing between you two.”

  “I don’t know. Neither one of us really knows….” John sighed, put his arms behind his head. “It doesn’t seem to me that human relationships ever get easier, no matter your age and experience. So don’t count on that, okay?”

  “Okay.” Kim curled up, stared at the side of John’s head until he rolled over and looked at him.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to talk about what happened at Effex.”

  “Okay. So talk.”

  “It appears, though I find it hard to believe, that you made a sign with an obscene gay joke. And Brian was hurt. He’s walking around on crutches, giving everyone, especially me, dirty looks.”

  “Why are you still in his class? I can’t believe you don’t have another option.”

  “Uncle John, he was hurt.”

  “So what? So were you. And I suspect your hurts are going to run deeper than his. Kim, he doesn’t understand anything except power. You do get that about him, right?”

  Kim nodded. “But why does that have to be our response? Doesn’t that just put us on his level?”

  John shook his head. “The warrior-philosopher brings a number of weapons to the negotiation. We’re still negotiating. And Gabriel made the sign. I’m sure any joke was unintentional.”

  Kim rolled his eyes. “Why exactly are you doing this negotiating for me like I’m still a kid? Why can’t I handle this?”

  “I am the king. You’re the knight sitting at my round table. That’s the nature of our relationship when it comes to war or other conflict resolution in this family.”

  “If you’d said I was the samurai, and you were the shogun, I was going to get up and leave this bed.”

  “If you have classes tomorrow, maybe you better get to sleep. You smell like beer and cigarette smoke and cherry lip gloss.”

  “I went out with my friends after work. Everybody knows what’s going on now, thanks to your Photoshop work, so the guys say they’ll look out for me. You have morning classes, don’t you? I don’t have to get up until eleven.”

  “I have the day off.” John could have bit his tongue when he realized what he’d said.

  Kim was all over it. “A day off? No way. How come?” John didn’t say anything, his tired brain scrambling for a reason that was not exactly a lie. “Uncle John, what did you do?”

  “I gave the president my letter of resignation.” Lying was a weak strategy that always backfired.

  “You’re not happy teaching your classes? But you would never just walk away in the middle of the semester. Does this have something to do with what happened to me?” Kim was keeping his voice very calm, but his fists were clenched on the bedspread.

  “Only in a very tangential sense.”

  “Really.”

  “Kim, do you think I would ever be associated with a university faculty that knowingly harbored a pedophile, shielded him from justice and left kids at risk? Or a murderer?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But it would be okay to be associated with a faculty that looked the other way for other types of violence? Are we going to say this violence is understandable, a minor sort of violence, not that big a deal, the boys were drinking, they were probably asking for it, they aren’t going to make a fuss. They’re just gay boys, after all, and he’s a professor. He’s a powerful man’s son. He has importance that those boys don’t have. Are you under the impression I would look the other way if I knew about this happening to someone else’s son? That’s what I mean about the tangential association.”

  “Hmmm.” Kim sighed. “Actually, I think you would fight for any victim who needed protecting, but you’ll fight extra hard for the victims you happen to love.”

  “Okay, agreed.”

  “The thing is, I don’t want to be a victim. ‘Victim’ is not an idea I’m going to let take root in my head.”

  “So don’t be a victim. Figure out what you need to do. I’m trying to make sure this university does the right thing, which is my responsibility as a member of the faculty. And if they won’t, I will not remain a facult
y member. That’s fairly simple. Your part in this is different. Tell me what I can do to help and I’ll help. But you’ve always been a self-sustaining kid. You’ll figure out how to keep your colors bright.”

  “I do have a few ideas,” Kim admitted. “What are you going to do with this day off tomorrow?”

  “I have an article I need to finish for Foreign Affairs, but I’ve been thinking about building a cold frame in the back yard,” John said. “Growing some spinach and lettuce.”

  “Really.”

  “Maybe some basil. You’ve been experimenting with food and drink a lot lately. Are you thinking about moving on from photography? You want to go to cooking school?”

  Kim shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m just playing around. Though if you want to start growing veggies in the backyard, maybe you can put in some dinosaur kale. I saw a great recipe for bean soup, white beans and dino kale.”

  “Does dinosaur kale need an extra-large cold frame? We better find out before I buy the wood.”

  “Want me to tell you a bedtime story?”

  John rolled over again, looked at him. “What kind of bedtime story?”

  “It’s a romance. I call it ‘The General and the Horse-Lord’. It has a happy ending, of course. All the great love stories have happy endings.”

  John rolled to his back, stared at the ceiling some more, wondered where Gabriel was sleeping.

  “Don’t you want to hear it, Uncle John?”

  “I’m spending more time thinking about the past than I am the future,” he admitted. “I’m not sure if our love story is so tangled up in the past that it can’t grow into the light. Maybe Gabriel is going to have to chop down everything, dig out the roots, and start his life new. That’s what most men do, seems to me. When they get divorced and start on the rest of their lives.”

  “He’s never been like most men. I think he’s going to make his own rules. And your job is to stay calm. Stay the course. Keep the fires burning. Be a place he can come to see himself. He needs to see himself in the reflection in your eyes. He wants to be the man you see when you look at him.” Kim gave a theatrical shudder. “It’s so smoking hot, when the two of you look at each other.”

  “Love stories usually start with a meeting, not a divorce. I don’t know if I believe in love stories or happy endings, Kim, not in this world. Not in the world where I live. What I do believe is we all do the best we can do. We have to adjust our expectations to the reality of the situation.”

  “Uncle John, that’s not good enough, not when you’re talking about love. You’ve spent too many years adjusting your expectations down, down, down. You have to have faith in what’s between you. You have to be able to risk your heart.”

  “You’re just a baby. You’re repeating this nonsense you’ve heard, and you see the real world through the silly gossamer fabric of your desire for happy endings. Would you ask him to choose between the good of his children and the desire in his heart? The desire for peace and companionship, the desire to sleep with someone he loves? How does that compare with the needs of his children, with his wife, a woman who has always been strong and faithful and stood beside him? He’s never been a man to walk the easy path, or put his own needs above the needs of others. Neither have I.”

  “Juan knows perfectly well what’s going on.”

  “You haven’t said anything to him, have you, Kim? You need to stay out of their business.”

  “He’s a nice kid and he needs to talk. He told me they’ve been fighting for a year, and she’s always mad and he’s always finding excuses to leave the house. The Horse-Lord goes out running and he runs for an hour and then he sits on the front porch, exhausted and sweaty, like he doesn’t want to come inside. Juan also said she accused him of having an affair. With you. It took him awhile to figure out what she was talking about.”

  John sighed. “Martha isn’t stupid. And the army is a small community. We’ve been friends for so long. He was my favorite pilot for years. Everybody knew that, but I never heard any talk that went beyond the line. But who knows? Maybe I would have been the last person to hear gossip. He had his own career. He made CW-5 before he retired, but he never wanted to lose his horse and take a desk job.” John pushed the pillows flat, closed his eyes. He was getting weary.

  “What if the university won’t cave in and take you back?”

  John winced. “It’s not caving in. It’s understanding that men of integrity care enough to do the right thing. If they won’t cave, as you say, I won’t even consider going back. And frankly, it hasn’t been what I had hoped for. There is not a community of scholars here, not in my field. I guess that’s what I was planning for when I retired. Hoping for.”

  “You going to write? All those articles and book chapters people keep asking you to write? Why don’t you write some textbooks on leadership? Or go with one of those think tanks up in DC that wanted you?”

  “Maybe I will. But you’ll have to come. I can’t have you racing around Albuquerque with a yellow zigzag painted on your face, and me not here to supervise your every move.”

  “And now Gabriel will have to come too.”

  John closed his eyes. He would never ask Gabriel to leave his family. And it wasn’t up to him, in any case. Maybe he was not even a variable in Gabriel’s equation. And where was he sleeping tonight?

  “So the Horse-Lord moved to Albuquerque because Mrs. Horse-Lord wanted to come, and you moved here because he was here, and I came because of you. Now we’re going to have to go in reverse. I think that means I get to pick the next place. Then you follow me, and he follows you…” Kim sighed. “Man, it is complicated, loving people. Especially when you keep pretending to be old army buds, nothing else. No bedtime story for you. Not until you admit you believe in the power of love.”

  “In that case I’ll just go to sleep. And you need to wash the cigarette smoke out of your hair before you go to bed. Otherwise you’ll have to wash your pillowcases tomorrow. All this secondhand smoke can’t be good for you.”

  “I love you, Uncle John.”

  “Me too, kiddo.” It wasn’t until Kim was back in his little apartment in the garage that John thought about what the woman at Ho Ho’s had said, something about Kim’s art project. Kim still hadn’t told him what was going on.

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS after one before Gabriel called and saved him from his cold frame project. “Hey, John, can I bring my tools over and store them in your tool shed? I have more than I thought I did. They fill up most of the floor space in my new studio apartment.”

  “I really wish you would. And you can help me finish this cold frame.”

  “You’re building a cold frame? How come?”

  “Lettuce,” he said, his voice clipped. “And to be accurate, I am failing to build a cold frame. I am giving up on building a cold frame.”

  “You need a level and a good T square,” Gabriel said. “Both of which I have. I’ll come after work, okay? Do you have any sawhorses? I have two, currently sitting next to my bed. I have a toolbox where your pillow should be.”

  He sounded good, John thought. The parent-teacher conference must not have been too bad. “Okay. We’ll definitely need the sawhorses. And I’ll take a nap like an old man with nothing to do until you get here.”

  “Retirement becomes you, General. Want me to bring some steaks?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Okay, then.”

  GABRIEL’S tools filled most of the back of his pickup. He’d stopped and changed before coming over, was wearing jeans and a tee shirt that said Life is Good. John opened the door to the shed and they unloaded the tools.

  “This is the neatest shed I’ve ever seen.” Gabriel put aside what they needed for the cold frame, studied the cut pieces of plywood on the workbench. “You’re doing pretty good. It’s just hard to put together a project that has right angles with only one person. You need one to hold and one to put the screws in.”

  “Is this everything?
” There was plenty of room. Gabriel’s tools only took up half the shed.

  “I’ve got a bag of charcoal and my ditty bag in the front seat.”

  John reached in the front seat of the truck, felt a little tenderness when he picked up the battered leather bag. Military men always carried ditty bags with their toothbrushes, their razors and personal gear. He’d seen Gabriel’s so many times, sitting next to his own on a bathroom shelf. He carried it into the bathroom off his bedroom, moved his shaving gear over so Gabriel could have his own space on the bathroom counter. He stared down at it, wondered if he would be so lucky to see it in the morning. Maybe even every morning. Wouldn’t that be something. “God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world.”

  Gabriel had brought a suit bag too, and John hung his work clothes up in the closet, then went into the kitchen and started pulling the salad ingredients out of the fridge. Gabriel had turned on the little CD player out on the back porch, was listening to Bruce Springsteen sing “Devils & Dust.” John could hear the sound of a hand drill and the music, and Gabriel singing along. Kim was off to work, and he’d taken his cameras with him for a little night photography at Effex. John thought he’d try to make blue cheese dressing for their salad.

  Gabriel came into the kitchen an hour later. “Done.”

  “What, the whole thing is done?”

  “Yep. We just need potting soil and a place with morning sun. It doesn’t need a bottom. We put a little gravel down and the pots on top.”

  “How did your parent-teacher conference go last night? Juan okay?”

  Gabriel washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “Yeah, he’s okay. The teacher said it wasn’t anything like a character issue. He’s trying, and he’s not acting up in class. She recommended a tutor. Martha was thinking about one of those places like Sylvan Learning Center. But Juan says his teacher moonlights at Sylvan. I don’t know. That has the appearance of a conflict of interest to me.”