FINBAR AND ROSCOE

Finbar was a ginger man with the near-leprechaun features of an Irishman and everyone thought he might be a brawler, but he wasn't.  All his lovers were dark men, ever since he was a boy -- black, Mexican, indigenous.  Roscoe was a man so black he was nearly blue but with the fine sharp features of an American indigenous.  He wasn't a brawler either.  The men had met in college.

It wasn't a special or fine place, just one generous about admission policies and too far out in the unknown to not hear about gay men in pairs.  They saw gay men only in the surging celebrations of San Francisco, or in movies with comedians flirting feather boas and saying silly things.  Two men loving each other was not seen for lack of a pattern.

But they didn't stick there in that place of lawn and monuments and libraries.  The institution was over.  The keeping of intelligence had ended, because now intelligence was different, about sensing and accepting change.  Finbar had studied geology and imagined walking through the West with a geologist's hammer, collecting rocks, licking them to see what they really were, drawing diagrams of the layers when they were sedimentary and the landscapes when they were igneous.  He kept a small notebook in his hip pocket, a record of the world.

Roscoe was a reader but he read on his cell phone a few sentences at a time, sometimes poetry but not always -- maybe a few sentences and not necessarily written by some master of the novel.  He memorized them.  He loved the phrase and how words fit together like architecture.  He didn't really care where the two were so long as he could find a place to recharge his gizmo.  But he never wrote.  He was a receiver.

They were floaters, picking up what they found as they moved around the country.  At night the men slept against each other, whether or not they had found some small job that let them buy a cheap motel room created when the Interstate by-passed what had been a prosperous money-maker.  Fifties broken lamps and leaking plumbing so that the toilet jingled all night until Finbar got up and fixed it.  The curtains were always askew and hung with gaps between them.  Sometimes there was damage in doors where previous men had punched holes with their fists because things weren't working out for them.

Many times they lovers slept rough.  Both had grown up along rivers, but not the same ones -- far apart and yet much the same.  Leafy places where they could swim and catch fish.  Each had learned to carry a bowie knife and a roll of fish line, but neither was a fly-tie guy.  Found bait worked for them, but they carried the hooks folded in tinfoil, tucked into what some called the "watch pocket" of their jeans.  They taught each other about what fish do, where they go, what they just can't resist.

Women were attracted to them but both men avoided women, esp. when they were together, because the women always wanted to join the pair.  If the women somehow offered food, the two men would sometimes repay with fast intense sex.  An even exchange and then they were gone.  The women who offered food usually understood this, but sometimes did not and were left weeping.  They lived in hopes of it happening again and were restless in their marriages.  But they didn't know what love was.

The men had heard each other's stories again and again.  Now that they were no longer lonely but understood and valued, it all poured out and then was done, finished.  No more.  Never again.  Now life was skin, the muscle moving under it, the insides of joints where the skin was protected instead of bumping against the world, because that's where the nerves could feel the lightest touch.  

Each saw the other's throat, how it rose from shoulders in a curve strung with tendons, throbbing with pulse and swallowing.  They watched carefully the arteries at temples or the muscles in jaw over cheekbones and when they saw a rhythm going too fast, felt their own going way too fast, they found a way to call the two of them away from a situation getting out of control.

But the best times were like the old days along the river, lying side-by-side in the long grass scented with clover, mint and beebalm.  Roscoe had a harmonica, which was a cliché but that's just the way it was.  And Finbar knew an endless number of songs because he was Irish and that's the way it is with them.  Sometimes they wrestled until they were panting.  Other times they looked for the right sort of sticks to cast for fish, then to build a fire and roast the catch.  People rarely knew they had been there until they found the little pile of ash and the sticks laid aside.

When they found work it was usually something dirty and obscene because no one else wanted to do it.  Afterwards they found water where they could swim nude and scrub each other with sand.  Once in a while they stole better clothes off the lines where they had been left to dry, but they were not as good as the clothes stolen in a laundromat.  One made a distraction while the other checked the sizes and made a choice.  They never stole from a store because the consequences would be jail and the point was to remain unconfined.  They were never tempted by guns or cars, because they were part of the industrial revolution.

Part of their alliance was a hatred of the industrial revolution, though the science of that beginning was what created the ability to read rocks and it was geology that destroyed the tight-assed rigid world of Victoria's reputation.  (Unbuttoned, she was the same as us all.)  Roscoe's technology was likewise the current peak of the rich literature of printing, another industrial revolution that captured words.

The story cannot be sustained, of course.  It's a story for a computer screen, endlessly changing.  They came to grief this way or that way, hopefully together and painlessly, but probably not.  What remains is the small ashen story of the possibility, a memory of something that might happen but didn't, and the writhing passion of fish, symbolic of so much.