The Original Gay Porn Community - Free Gay Movies and Photos, Gay Porn Site Reviews and Adult Gay Forums

  • Welcome To Just Us Boys - The World's Largest Gay Message Board Community

    In order to comply with recent US Supreme Court rulings regarding adult content, we will be making changes in the future to require that you log into your account to view adult content on the site.
    If you do not have an account, please register.
    REGISTER HERE - 100% FREE / We Will Never Sell Your Info

    To register, turn off your VPN; you can re-enable the VPN after registration. You must maintain an active email address on your account: disposable email addresses cannot be used to register.

The Kind Earth

“You guys have an awesome apartment,” Nelson noted. “I’d like to do some of this for my place, downstairs.”
“You can take some stuff,” Michael said. “We’re not using it all.”
Jay frowned at him.
“You’ve hardly been living in this place two month. You don’t know what’s being used and what’s not.”
“Yeah,” Nelson said, to Michael, “and its still not quite your place yet.”
“Of course it is,” Jay protested loudly. Then, sipping his coffee he said, ‘No, Nelson’s right. You gotta live here a little more than two months before you start trying to give my shit away.”

Jay had heard of Rulon Nelson long before he met him. He knew that Michael had struck up a friendship with a Mormon missionary, and jay thought that was kind of interesting because he thought all religion were interesting and would have loved to pick a Mormon’s brains. Often he would send questions through Michael for Elder Nelson to answer. There was another Elder, but Michael had decided he wasn’t as bright and never said his name.
“He want me to get baptized,” Michael told Jay.
“Of course he does,” Jay said “that’s what they’re around for. They’re making more…more Mormons.”
Jay had given a half smile over his half joke.
Because James Strickland never thought for a moment that Michael would get baptized or join another church, when one Sunday he said that he was going to hang at the Mormon church—that’s how he described it—Jay said, sensing a grand field trip more than a conversion, “Mike, if you love me you’ll take me too.”
Now the effect of being called Mike by Jay was the same that most people would feel if you used the long form of their name, because Jay had never ever called Michael anything buy Michael.
“Well, I’m sure they’ll let you come. Actually, I’m sure they’ll want you to come.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m excited to do this.”
“I think we have to gert dressed up,” Michael said.
“We can be dressed up, but I’m not wearing a fucking tie. I’m done with that.”
Since they had left Saint Ignatius, Jay was very serious about never wearing a tie.
“I’m going to do a little research. I don’t want to look ridiculous.” Jay decided.
“It’s nothing like Big Love,” Michael threw in.
“No,” Jay sighed. “I don’t suppose it is.”

Michael picked up Jay Sunday morning around ten and started to explain how things worked, but Jay knew most of it already. Of course, Jay had told a fair amount of it to Michael. Mormons lived in wards. Where you lived determined which meeting house you could go to.
“Did you know technically Catholics are like that,” Jay threw in. “We just kind of ignore it now.”
Because there weren’t many Mormons in Lassador, the meeting house was divided among two wards and one ward met at a certain time and the next ward met at another.
“And never the twain shall meet?”
“I get the idea,” Michael said as they whizzed down Door Road, passing even the mall and entering into the land of sparse subdivisions and office complexes, “that if you woke up later, or had to do shit early and came to the other meeting it would be frowned upon. They seem pretty fucking regulated.”
The Elder Nelson Jay had met was an almost grim looking, tall, narrow figure in a dark suit. He stood beside a stockier, handsome boy in a fawn colored jacket and, despite the fact that he looked more fun, more light and All American, there was something mischievous behind Nelson’s eyes so that Jay understood why Michael liked him. No, Jay thought, the lanky fellow didn’t really belong here. Or at least, he belonged here as much as Jay and Michael did.
From a distance, the meeting house looked a bit like a funeral home, and the top of it had a long white spike rather than a cross. The place was very modern with a carpeted all that led to a coat room, and everyone was dressed up. The main sanctuary was a room with a bare stage and potium. Jay thought it looked like an unfinished church, and they sang a song he didn’t think was very good and then almost immediately had communion, which is to say the congregants had communion. He and Michael passed it down and Jay, who never went to church anyway, frowned to see Wonder bread and little cups of water passed down the rows.
It looks like they do everything just to be a contrary to other Christians as possible. It’s the damnedest.
Jay tries to assess things with an open eye, as if he isn’t a Catholic, like am anthropologist who’s never seen any religion before. But the best he can get to is being a Catholic who doesn’t believe there’s something wrong with being something else. He can’t quite get to this being an equal even if it is an opposite thing to what he was raised in. Mormonism looks too cheap for one thing, and paradoxically costs too much. And there’s a lot of crying. This is Fast and Testimony Sunday and a lot of people are getting up in their Sunday best and telling stories that end in, “And I know the Church is True.”
There is a woman in a gingham that looks half Little House on the Prairie half Dress Barn, and she is talking about her children and her medical bills and her one son with the club foot and while she is weeping it winds to how good God is and she finishes saying, “I know that the Church is Restored in its Latter Days and Joseph Smith is a Prophet and I know the Church is True.”
A short man in a checkered shirt stands up and talks about raising his kids and how much he loves them and how people don’t understand what it means to be a father or care for children and how he’s so glad he’s in a church that cares about families and, he says as he cries into his hands, he knows Joseph Smith is a prophet and that the Church is True.

And then they sing another hymn. The first one was pretty bad and it is out of Jay’s mind. This one he has heard before, and he does not sing it at first, but reads the words.

“O my Father, thou that dwellest
In the high and glorious place,
When shall I regain thy presence
And again behold thy face?
In thy holy habitation,
Did my spirit once reside?
In my first primeval childhood
Was I nurtured near thy side?”

The whole time, by him, Nelson had been singing in a sonorous but Jay thinks, difficult to achieve, bass. Now, knowing the tune and able to sing, Jay sings in his tenor and feels Nelson switching, his voice becoming broader and more relaxed in a higher key.


“For a wise and glorious purpose
Thou hast placed me here on earth
And withheld the recollection
Of my former friends and birth;
Yet ofttimes a secret something
Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,”
And I felt that I had wandered
From a more exalted sphere.”

After that there were two different classes and they could go to one or the other. Then after that class, the men met for something and the women met for something else. The class was good, but Jay doesn’t remember what they discussed. He felt like the root material they studied was not important or true, but everyone was talking about their prayer life, their fasting and their devotion, and Jay felt, “These are wonderful people. This is much better than being in any church I went to before. If only we could come every once in a while and then not have to sign onto their beliefs!”
The last meeting, Jay thought was called a priesthood meeting, and then it was time to go home, and they had spent about three hours in this church, which was a bit much.
“Are you coming back for Fireside?” Tristan, a cheerful, redhead asked.
Michael opened his mouth in surprise, but Jay said, “There’s more?”
“Oh,” Tristan said with a touch of sarcasm, “there’s always more.”
There was a gym with a divider that was pulled to make two rooms for the priesthood and sisterhood meetings and as the rooms were reopened and kids came out to play. Jay climbed onto the stage and sat beside Nelson, who was swinging his legs and they looked out on everything.
“You think it’s stupid, don’t you?”
“What?”
“All the people crying. The music, the way that the church isn’t impressive looking like yours. You think it’s stupid.”
“Now, all of those things are the things you just said,” Jay said. “I didn’t say anything, and I doubt Michael did either.”
“Yeah,” Nelson said, looking around doubtfully at the gym rafters. “but I can’t get Michael to get baptized and I doubt I could get you baptized either. Smart people never really join. We never get people who think. And I’ve never made a convert.”
“I think,” Jay tried to find a word that was true, that did not condescend, that got to the heart of what he’d seen, “that this is a place that all of these people need, full of all of this human hope… and sorrow. I think there’s something real here.”
“But you don’t think the Church is True?”
“I don’t even know what that means. I doubt you do either.”
“That there are churches, and that’s fine,” Nelson said, “but that this is the One Church, established by God by which the world can be saved. That this is the True Church.”
“Well, that’s patently untrue,” Jay said without a thought.
He did not even look to see the expression on Nelson’s face.
But of course, Nelson was right. To be un nuanced was to get it right. Even in Catholicism it was the most un nuanced positions that were the officials ones. To stray into euphemism and metaphor or believe that the prayer before the Virgin Mary was no better and no worse than the worship before Kali’s image at the ashram down the road was to walk into heresy. The Mormons didn’t just have golden Bibles, they had a god who was a physical man living on a planet called Kolob. They had pre existing spirit families in heaven that all migrated down to earth to be born as your real family and marriages that could turn into multiple marriages and would last in an eternity where a man might become God himself. They had a lot.
Jay had grown up with wafers that became saviors and wine that was blood. He had been raised in a most unbiblical assurance that the Virgin Mary was not only always a virgin, but had been taken to heaven body and soul and wore a crown on her head and not only this, also walked to Purgatory every Saturday to bring back suffering souls. No, Orthodoxy was not the absence of imagination, but the overabundance of it, the confusing of poetry with fact and fascism while condemning people to believe in someone else’s fantasies
“No,” Jay said to Rulon Nelson, “Your church isn’t true, but neither is anyone else’s. Not the way you’re thinking. That idea of truth is just going to kill you.
“Maybe,” he suggested, “you should try looking for a better definition of truth.”

MORE TOMORROW
 
That was a great portion! I especially liked the last line. Rulon Nelson seems like an interesting character. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow! I hope you are having a nice night!
 
I am having a very nice night, thank you. I'm actually just got off the phone with the inspiration for Rulon Nelson who is every bit as interesting.I dunno. I think we should all look for a better definition of truth.
 
TONIGHT....


4.


The thought that always went through Michael’s Cleveland’s head when he was in North Dakota was, “So this is America.” He had heard of America. He had seen the movies about the actual West, not the industrial Midwest, and he thought, “So this is it. He could not get used to the broad open spaces. In fact, he was a little terrified of them at first. Winter did not seem to end in that part of the country, but it was alright. Even winter was not as big as the sky stretching over head.
And he was mildly terrified of it. When he left the monastery to do chores or simply to walk on the flat land and see all the space about him, he was overwhelmed by the great size of the sky and the space that stretched out all around him.
This wasn’t always space, or not space in the same way. Call it empty if you will, people lived here, and people were swept away, and what remained was this silence, and the neighbors who were so far from each other you could set up whole towns between them. There was something about the terror of the sky and fear of the cold that washed over him and cleansed him from the dark things he had known before.
In those days he wished he could have taken Jay with him, but every time he wished it he new he had to be here alone. He knew a lot of things in that day. A voice spoke very clearly to him and he knew the voice was inside of him and he knew it was himself, but it was other. He wondered, is that what God is? And is that what people mean by the Kingdom of God is within you? And is that why you can’t really spite God without spiting yourself? But the voice didn’t answer those questions, and he would drive south, drive long enough to realize it wasn’t all flat lands, but there were great hills and lakes that looked black as obsidian, still as glass. He drove into South Dakota and saw a silvery statue, fifty feet tall, of an Indian woman with a cloak spread out and set in jewels. He stood outside of his car, his breath white, full of awe and tried to comprehend her. She was enormous. She would have had to be to take up her piece of the sky.
“This is the kind of land Nelson comes from. Not exactly. He came from Oklahoma. But this is like it. This is the land I always wanted to go to.”
He thinks of Nelson a great deal. Christmas has ended. Lent is on its way. Old things clung to must be put away for the new ones. The things which have clung to you like gum in the eyes from the night before must be wiped away.
When he got ready to call Rulon and talk about very heavy things, the most he managed was, “This land looks amazing,” and then he said, “Look after Jay. Look after him totally, as if you were me.”
“Okay,” Rulon said, seriously. “I can do that.”
Then Rulon asked, “What are things… between you two?”
“We are always friends. Sometimes something beside that. We cannot be more than that. There is nothing more than that. We are never less.”
When Rulon Nelson left Ohio, Michael didn’t hear from him for a long time, and then, ten months later, there was an invitation to his wedding. Michael was surprised that Jay had gotten one too, but then it turned out Jay sent a letter to him once a week. It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise, after all, Nelson had taken a liking to Jay and Jay always had the sharp intellectual questions Nelson liked and frustrated him by refusing to give easy answers.
Back then they had driven two days into Utah for Nelson’s wedding. They knew Nelson and his wife would be married inside the Temple in a ceremony only Mormons could attend, but there would be a reception afterwards and Jay and Michael would show up to this. Michael thought the sort of rituals Mormons went through he wasn’t interested in seeing anyway.
“Oh, I think it would be interesting,” Jay differed.
“You said interesting,” Michael said. “But you didn’t say lovely.”

The reception was lovely though. Michael wasn’t sure he really liked Nelson’s family, and he didn’t really care much about his wife. He felt sorry for her, the way one feels sorry for women married to gay men. Michael said nothing to Jay about any of his encounters with Nelson, and Jay spent a lot of his time looking at the land that looked like it had been carved out by a giant hand.
“It’s like the skin is all gone, and all that’s left is the bones of the earth,” he marveled.

***

At the Monastery of the Clouds, Michael remembered this wedding in Utah and the country to the far west. It was nearly time to return to Ohio, and he had thought he was going back home on his own, but was surprised when Jay came for him then gladdened when the monks not only remembered Jay, but rejoiced over him.
“We can stay for Ash Wednesday,” Jay decided more than suggested. “We’ll head back on Thursday.”
There was something about this place, maybe because its one of the only other places he had ever been, but Rulon Nelson kept coming back to Lassador. In the middle of his year long marriage to Courtney, they came back to Lassador and she left him there. He had gone back to Utah, partially after her, but came back alone. He worked at the plant near the expressway, and then began at the university. When Jay said, “The apartment under us is empty,” Nelson came to live there.
When Jay brought Michael back in from the Clouds at the beginning of Lent, he and Nelson sat on the much too cold porch and Michael said, “I feel as if so much is my fault. I’ve thought and thought about what I did that day. About you and Redmond.”
Nelson said nothing and Michael said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up. I never could. But I regret it. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“I don’t regret it.”
Rulon Nelson always carried his cigarette rolling machine and he smoked fat cigarettes that gushed out grey smoke.
“If it hadn’t of happened I would have wound my way through four bad marriages instead of one. I’d still be trying to be a good Mormon and confused as fuck. I’d be like poor Redmond.”
“How is he?”
“Half crazy last time I checked.”
“Oh.”
“But you didn’t do that,” Nelson said. “You didn’t create anything. You just…. How would Jay say…? made it manifest.
“No, no,” Rulon Nelson said, tapping his foot, “I don’t regret it at all.”



“Is Fort Atkins a real fort?” Jay asked Dalton when he learned he was going there.
“Yes, it’s a real fort,” Dalton said, looking somewhere between exasperated and amused. his wide grayish eyes rolling in his head.
“It’s a town, but it’s a fort. It started out as a fort, and they’ve got an army base.”
“What was it a fort for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Probably it was a fort back in the French and Indian days,” Jay said. “It might have been to guard against Canadians.”
“Canadians? Who gives a fuck about Canadians?”
“No one now, but a long time ago, when Canada belonged to Great Britain, when it was Great Britain and we were their enemy people did. Yeah, that’s probably why Fort Atkins was there.”
“I really don’t know,” Dalton said, shaking his head.
It was February. Michael had been gone a month, and Jay thought, “if I was discussing this with Nelson, this conversation would go on for two hours. He would look this business up.”
That was why he could never live with Dalton and never be his true lover. He cared for Dalton and Dalton was a simple person, but maybe simplicity wasn’t what Jay needed.
“The thing about you, “Jay said, “is all the light in the room fills your eyes. They glow.”
“My cousins used to say I was like a cat. I could probably see in the dark.”
“Can you?”
“Nope.”
Jay had given Dalton a very abbreviated version of pursuing Michael, and told him that Michael was gone until Lent, and Dalton hadn’t asked if they would be together again, Maybe he already knew. The truth was, Jay hadn’t known until Dalton was sitting across from him and he knew he would always love Dalton, but he would never be in love with Dalton, and though he was not always sure of being in love with Michael, much more important, they were two sides of the same thing, inseparable.
Still Dalton would stay here in Lassador tonight, half way between Pennsylvania where he’d come from, and Fort Atkins, Michigan where he was headed. They’d gone to dinner and then taken a walk.
Over dinner, Dalton said, “Those riots are still going on. The protests, and then the riots. They were going to call the National Guard in here.”
He looked rawboned, his hair quickly cut and unstyled.
“Sometimes it seems like things are getting worse and worse. Does it ever scare you? Just a little?”
“I feel used to it,” Jay said. “I feel like it’s all been going on a long time.”
Dalton still looked spaced out and pale. Jay touched his hand, and suddenly Dalton looked at him, his grey eyes going green and warm, the red coming back into his skin.
“Can we go back to your place?” Dalton said. “Things always seem better when I’m at your place.”

When they returned to the apartment, Jay went to the bathroom to lay out soap and towels and then into the kitchen to set up the coffee and when he came back into the living room, Dalton was sitting in a ladder back chair, his pants open, his underwear down, his thick cock jutting in the air. He lifted the glowing eyes in his bony face to Jay, and then looked down again.
Dalton’s cock was swollen to an oval like a blimp before it tapered down to the head. His planed cheekbones, his honest eyes looked up again to Jay. In that honest moment Jay loved him more than he felt any kind of lust.
The heat rose in in Jay’s body. A shudder, a lump in his throat that was a lump in his groin. Whatever he had wondered would take place, there was no wondering anymore. Jay quickly undressed, standing naked before him. He came to Dalton, went on his knees, took the fullness of his cock in his mouth. Dalton swooned, and in the silence of the apartment Jay sucked him until they went to his room to make love.

MORE TOMORROW
 
That was a very interesting portion! I am glad Michael took that time for himself at the monastery. Dalton seems like a cool character. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
 
I'm glad you could be here to read tonight. I remember that this is usually one of your late days. Dalton is what I would call a good man. I love that character and its a little tragic that he's doomed to be an almost boyfriend. When you say an interesting portion, do you mean a weird portion?
 
That;s the best kind of weird. Dalton is definitely weird. The whole situation. And yet.... good.
 
TONIGHT WE BEGIN TO WRAP UP OUR STORY....

“Can you imagine,” Nelson spread his hand before them as they were driving north two weeks before Jay was to take the train out west to bring Michael back, “that this was all French and Indian country? Can you imagine the forts, the fur trappers, the frontier people just having a good time, wearing beaver furs, being wild and free?
“Before the fucking British came,” Nelson added.
They had gone to Fort Atkins.
Jay wanted Dalton to know that he mattered, that he was worth traveling north for. It was a strange visit because Nelson had come which meant there would be absolutely no romance. There was no alone time, no sex. Oddly enough, Dalton and Nelson liked each other and Nelson said, “He reminds me of my brother.”
“You all are kind of alike,” Jay said. “So that makes sense.”
“We are a little bit alike,” Nelson discovered. “Not totally, but almost like how you and Michael are alike.”
They drove on quietly. Now and again a farm field with an old red barn passed by. The fields were bare and the trees still naked. The sky had that grayish color as if tt had not yet awakened and wasn’t ready to bring the spring.
“It’s harder to be homeless out west,” Nelson said. “Those months where it was just me in thar car with Harley—” the dog. “Somehow the sky is too big and the ground is too…unmerciful. In the Midwest the earth feels kinder.”
For a while, after his wife had left, before Nelson had come back here, he wandered around Utah and Arizona being weird. Jay was going to be poetic and say he wandered lonely as a cloud, but clouds and poetry seemed to resist being homeless in Utah.
“Its not my business,” Nelson said, and they were in the middle of nowhere, speeding along a grey asphalt road, “and I’m new to this whole thing, but Dalton was like your boyfriend?”
“He was like it. Or a close candidate. But now he’s like a friend.”
Nelson nodded.
“This is a strange limbo place,” Jay said. “Waiting for Michael, so some life can begin, that sort of has begun. Letting Dalton go, because I should. But still being a person. I never intended to be a nun. And some people say they never intended to be a slut, but I would be a slut any day over a nun. Dalton came two weeks after Michael left, and for a month and a half I’ve slept alone. That is not much by some people’s standards. But it’s a lot by mine.”
Nelson said, “Back in church they would tell you to wait till you were married because sex was holy and it was for bringing souls into the world, and everyone got married, me included, just so we could get laid I think. It was really stupid, and sometimes it was really bad. And people tell you that if you want it then it’s because you’re bad and it’s dirty, and it’s deadly. But that’s not true. The opposite is true.”
Nelson suddenly cackled and put his foot down on the gas as the car whizzed through the trees.
“Sex makes you feel alive!”


That night it seems as if it was always supposed to happen and a great spring has burst while they were on the road. Jay closes his eyes and opens his thighs and closes them gently around Rulon Nelson, running his fingers gently up and down his back, caressing his ass as they both shuddered, stroking the head buried in his shoulders. In the utter darkness they move gently and then, when Rulon puts his strength in his knees and presses them both forward, they hold fast together as the bedstead gently knocks the wall. Jay frantically massages his dark hair, strokes his strong neck. Jay’s arms are strong and firmly he holds Rulon to him. They fuck in a silent power. In the end, in rapid groans it happens and after the first time they come Jay’s, thighs are sore from the weight of a six foot man four with long hands and long feet so like Michael’s and so unlike them, with the narrow body that, unlike Michael’s, has never known fat, and he understands, even though Michael has never told him, that Rulon, who is gasping, whose mouth is on his throat, has been with Michael too.
As they drift into sleep Jay’s heart is full in a way it never was with Dalton. No he never felt this tenderness toward him. He never loved him like this. Rulon Nelson is the only man after Michael he could have ever loved, and though he knows this sounds like bullshit and he would not repeat it to anyone, it’s almost as if being with Rulon is being with Michael.
Rulon kisses him gently on the shoulders, and holding him tight, half asleep, he murmurs:
“He knew I wanted this. He knew you wanted it too. He blessed it. He told me to look after you, Jay. He told me to look after you totally, as if I was him.”



Listlessly, not at all the person who had strode into their apartment this morning, glad at their return, Rulon Nelson handed over a folded newsletter to Jay.
“What is this?”
“Just read it.”
James Strickland began to peruse it, but Nelson said, “Out loud.”
“Alright?” Jay said, sensing an irritation in his usually upbeat friend.
He cleared his throat.
“A mural painted nearly seventy years ago at the University of Rhode Island is set to be taken down.This, after staff said students complained about a lack of diversity in the picture. The Memorial Union was dedicated in 1954 at the University of Rhode Island.When veterans returned from World War II and enrolled at URI, they and other URI community members raised money in memory of those who lost their lives in the war. Money raised was for a modern student union, which gave it the name, Memorial Union…”
Jay looked over the other article title.
“‘University to Remove WW-II Murals Because They Show Too Many White People’. Hum.”
He looked over the rest of the paper.
“‘Political Power for European Americans!’”
“What?” Michael murmured.
Jay read out, merrily, “ ‘European peoples should organize and advance our own interests just like every other group. Join our fight for Heritage and Identity! The American Freedom Party (AFP) supports the right to keep and bear arms. Emancipate yourself from the dinosaur Democrat and Republican parties. Join a Nationalist Party that puts America first, The American Freedom Party!
“Poor, poor white people,” he shook his head in mock sympathy. “They just can’t get a break.”
“Doesn’t that piss you off?” Rulon almost snarled.
“I’m well past being pissed off,” Jay said, handing the paper back. “Or surprised. I’ve moved toward being cautious and smart, and having a little determination to not be a statistic or live in a world evil people are trying to make. The only thing I am confused by, Rulon my friend, is why you have it?”
Nelson looked embarrassed, almost surly.
“My dad sent it to me.”
And then he said, “He always has. I… I think there are a lot of dumb people. When you grow up feeling poor and like you’re missing out, and you don’t know other people than you… Look, I’m not saying growing up a Mormon out in the West is the same as being a white supremacist but… it makes you a little sympathetic and you don’t even realize it. A year ago, two years ago…. I wouldn’t have known,” he shook his head. “I’m so stupid.”
Jay looked to Michael and Michael said, “It’s just white stupidity. I have it too. Sometimes.”
“You don’t,” Jay said, truthfully, “and it’s called blindness, and everyone has it. You accept the things you’ve been told without understanding the implications. You hold a mirror to the oppressed and choose to see yourself as oppressed. You blame the weak and suffering for your own weakness. You make devils out of people you’ve never known. So you can feel like an angel.”
“Can we leave?” Nelson said, looking sad and miserable.
“We can,” Jay says. “But where?”
“I was at this new club downtown,” Nelson said and without looking away from the window Michael said, “I don’t go to clubs,” at the same time Jay, on the couch, said, “I’m too old.”
“It wasn’t the club I was thinking about,” Nelson said. “It’s by the riverwalk, I had never seen the riverwalk until I went there. It’s below the street line, on the lower part—”
“The shady part where people get raped?” Jay raised an eyebrow.
“No one’s been raped on the riverwalk,” Nelson said. Then he said, “Was anyone raped on that riverwalk?”
“Are we supposed to be going to the riverwalk?” Jay asked. “Is that your idea?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, then I doubt three grown men will be raped togerher. You wanna go?” he asked Michael.
Michael nodded.
“Let me go slip some clothes on,” Jay said, by which he meant trousers instead of shorts, It’s a leisurely drive into the city and the night is sort of beautiful really.”
“We should go out into the country,” Michael said “No matter what the city looks like the country’s always the country.”
“We could pass through town and keep going south, see where the road takes us.”


TOMORROW NIGHT, THE CONCLUSION OF THE KIND EARTH
 
That was an excellent portion! I like how this story is finishing but will miss these characters. Great writing and I look forward to the conclusion tomorrow!
 
I'm glad you'll miss them. I'm just grateful you liked them. I have enjoyed this Jay and Michael story. It was the hardest to write and the hardest to end. Out of curiosity, did anything surprise you?
 
THE CONCLUSION OF THE KIND EARTH

Nelson is asleep in the back of the car, his legs wide apart. Now that he’s offered the suggestion, it’s as if he’s done his part.
They pass Saint Ignatius and about ten minutes later they’re coming toward downtown.
“The night is brighter,” Jay says.
“That’s what it is,” Michael realizes.
As they cross the Dorr Street bridge and come into downtown, looking for a place to park, it is Nelson who murmurs, “What the hell is going on?”
They stop the car on Chase Avenue where the street makes a bend alongside the twisting river and the descending stair that leads to the riverbank. They park on the grass getting out to look west.
“It looks like…sunrise.”
But even as Jay has said this, they hear the sirens. A fire truck is roaring down Chase, heading west along the driver drive.
In his usual calm voice, Jay says, “If we drive to the parking lot across the street we can park our car at the top, and then cross over into the Addison Hotel and see everything from the roof.”
It takes less than ten minutes, and even before they arrive on the twenty story roof of the Addison it is plain to Jay as it is plain to the ten other people gathered looking at the orange western sky Lassador is burning,
Old West End, Summit, LaGrange, Stickney. The fire moves from the first and radiates to the other three. By the time they are on the hotel roof watching red flames swallow a town, the blaze moves to Glendale and Collingwood. These are the places where, between the occupied houses are the vacant ones, filled with debris and the kerosene cans of the homeless. In the West neighborhoods are all the kindling a strong fire will need. While they watch from a distance, four miles west of downtown the city burns. Beside them a man about forty five in an Hawaiian shirt says, “We should have a TV. We should have a radio or some news.”
But nobody leaves. They all remain, leaning over the parapet, watching fire engines zoom down Chase into the darkness only to be found, presumably, in the light of the blazing west fire.
Michael turns to Jay and is surprised that the fire light does not really shine on his face, that, though it seems so close, it is not.
“It looks like the world is burning,” Jay says. “but I feel like it’s been burning for a long time.”

On their way back, Nelson drove. Jay was about to say something when he missed turn onto the Dorr Street bridge and kept driving down Chase, his path hugging the river. Nelson drove them west until the sky was orange, until they coming toward the chaos. Jay did not say, “Don’t drive onto Stickney,” or “be careful where you go.” Nelson was not stupid. He knew how to skirt around, and Jay had wanted to see this. He had wanted to gaze on hell, for hell had been threatening to show its face. Now Michael saw on Jay’s glasses the reflected fires of burning houses. They saw the looted shops, the people clubbing one another, the derelict on the streets, wrapped in blankets, faces covered in grime, mouths agape at having lost their vacant homes to kerosene explosions. The rioters did not stop rioting. The looters did not stop looting. Guns began to fire and did not stop firing, and quickly, with precision, Rulon Nelson drove them through hell and into the blackness beyond.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck all of it. But we had to go into it. Because its us. You know? It’s us.”
Neither Jay nor Michael replied. They didn’t have to. They drove down a darker, fireless Chase, hearing the wail of sirens. They drove till there were no sirens, and then till there were crowded street blocks and they drove, at last until there was no noise, and there were no houses. They drove onto till what had been Chase was only a road level with a wide river and, at last, Rulon stopped.
They got out of the car and, as if he had run from Lassador to here, Rulon Nelson squatted, hands on knees, breathing heavily, and then, at last, he began to vomit. The night was filled with the violent sound of his vomiting, and when he was done, business like, he reached into the car, took up his water bottles, took a swig, swished it around in his mouth, and spat in onto the grass.
Jay said, “All fires stop. Eventually. The fight, the rage, the flame. It is in their nature to go out. The city runs out of itself in the end, and so does all the madness. We just have to stand a little bit firm.”

The crickets were loud in the night, and so was the rush of the wide river as the waves caught the stars and reflected them back. Against the car, Michael Cleveland wrapped his arm about James Strickland’s waist. Rulon Nelson hands folded before him like a choir boy, sat on the hood. The crickets did not sang and did not stop their pulsating singing, and the river roared and did not stop roaring. The stars shone brightly, and did not cease their shining and here in this place they were blessed to be on the kind earth.

THE END
 
THE CONCLUSION OF THE KIND EARTH

Nelson is asleep in the back of the car, his legs wide apart. Now that he’s offered the suggestion, it’s as if he’s done his part.
They pass Saint Ignatius and about ten minutes later they’re coming toward downtown.
“The night is brighter,” Jay says.
“That’s what it is,” Michael realizes.
As they cross the Dorr Street bridge and come into downtown, looking for a place to park, it is Nelson who murmurs, “What the hell is going on?”
They stop the car on Chase Avenue where the street makes a bend alongside the twisting river and the descending stair that leads to the riverbank. They park on the grass getting out to look west.
“It looks like…sunrise.”
But even as Jay has said this, they hear the sirens. A fire truck is roaring down Chase, heading west along the driver drive.
In his usual calm voice, Jay says, “If we drive to the parking lot across the street we can park our car at the top, and then cross over into the Addison Hotel and see everything from the roof.”
It takes less than ten minutes, and even before they arrive on the twenty story roof of the Addison it is plain to Jay as it is plain to the ten other people gathered looking at the orange western sky Lassador is burning,
Old West End, Summit, LaGrange, Stickney. The fire moves from the first and radiates to the other three. By the time they are on the hotel roof watching red flames swallow a town, the blaze moves to Glendale and Collingwood. These are the places where, between the occupied houses are the vacant ones, filled with debris and the kerosene cans of the homeless. In the West neighborhoods are all the kindling a strong fire will need. While they watch from a distance, four miles west of downtown the city burns. Beside them a man about forty five in an Hawaiian shirt says, “We should have a TV. We should have a radio or some news.”
But nobody leaves. They all remain, leaning over the parapet, watching fire engines zoom down Chase into the darkness only to be found, presumably, in the light of the blazing west fire.
Michael turns to Jay and is surprised that the fire light does not really shine on his face, that, though it seems so close, it is not.
“It looks like the world is burning,” Jay says. “but I feel like it’s been burning for a long time.”

On their way back, Nelson drove. Jay was about to say something when he missed turn onto the Dorr Street bridge and kept driving down Chase, his path hugging the river. Nelson drove them west until the sky was orange, until they coming toward the chaos. Jay did not say, “Don’t drive onto Stickney,” or “be careful where you go.” Nelson was not stupid. He knew how to skirt around, and Jay had wanted to see this. He had wanted to gaze on hell, for hell had been threatening to show its face. Now Michael saw on Jay’s glasses the reflected fires of burning houses. They saw the looted shops, the people clubbing one another, the derelict on the streets, wrapped in blankets, faces covered in grime, mouths agape at having lost their vacant homes to kerosene explosions. The rioters did not stop rioting. The looters did not stop looting. Guns began to fire and did not stop firing, and quickly, with precision, Rulon Nelson drove them through hell and into the blackness beyond.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck all of it. But we had to go into it. Because its us. You know? It’s us.”
Neither Jay nor Michael replied. They didn’t have to. They drove down a darker, fireless Chase, hearing the wail of sirens. They drove till there were no sirens, and then till there were crowded street blocks and they drove, at last until there was no noise, and there were no houses. They drove onto till what had been Chase was only a road level with a wide river and, at last, Rulon stopped.
They got out of the car and, as if he had run from Lassador to here, Rulon Nelson squatted, hands on knees, breathing heavily, and then, at last, he began to vomit. The night was filled with the violent sound of his vomiting, and when he was done, business like, he reached into the car, took up his water bottles, took a swig, swished it around in his mouth, and spat in onto the grass.
Jay said, “All fires stop. Eventually. The fight, the rage, the flame. It is in their nature to go out. The city runs out of itself in the end, and so does all the madness. We just have to stand a little bit firm.”

The crickets were loud in the night, and so was the rush of the wide river as the waves caught the stars and reflected them back. Against the car, Michael Cleveland wrapped his arm about James Strickland’s waist. Rulon Nelson hands folded before him like a choir boy, sat on the hood. The crickets did not sang and did not stop their pulsating singing, and the river roared and did not stop roaring. The stars shone brightly, and did not cease their shining and here in this place they were blessed to be on the kind earth.

THE END
 
I think that's a good lesson. Jay and Michael battled their own inner world for three stories, and now they are ready to face the madness of the world outside. If Rulon is, who can say?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top