DUST

We left that dilapidated house with me thinking about what Briar had said.  He’d said, just try.  He didn’t know how many times I’d done that before, of course, and how I’d never been successful.  I’d eventually got into the habit of not trying anything new because it just led to further failures and further proof that I was useless, confirming my father’s opinion of me.  Briar seemed unaware of looming failure.  Perhaps he hadn’t had much experience with it himself.

I was afraid he was expecting more of me than I’d be able to deliver.  But I did know, instinctively, that when he asked, I would try.  Briar had a charismatic personality.  I didn’t want to disappoint him and instinctively knew that my not trying would be the thing he’d hate more than my ultimate failing.

He didn’t tell me where we were going next, just smiled when I asked.  He seemed to have something in mind, so I just went with the flow.

We drove through better and better areas and eventually came to the house he was looking for.  It wasn’t a farmhouse, but it was out in the country.  It was a big place, and I couldn’t help but see the comparison with the house I’d grown up in.  It was three stories high, had a high wall around it, and there were spacious grounds inside the wall.  It was located in what I guess you’d call an elite area of the county.  There were mansions and large estates in the area, and between the properties there were woods and streams and low hedges and slate and flagstone knee-high walls which probably were boundary demarcations.  It kind of felt like someone should have done a financial security check on us before allowing us into this area.

The house he drove up to seemed deserted, too, but Briar had a key.

“Got it from the agency listing this property.  Said the people didn’t like to be home when potential buyers went through and that they wouldn't be here while we are.  Let’s look around.”

We did.  It was as well-furnished and equipped much like my own house had been.  It had large rooms and a friendly layout, modern appliances, just what you’d expect.  It reeked of upmarket, well-spent money.

We checked out the grounds.  They didn’t have a pool, just manicured lawns, with a few ornamental trees breaking up the landscape.

“What do you think?” Briar asked when we’d relocked the place and were standing by his car.

“Can you afford it?”

He laughed.  “Nice try,” he said, still chuckling.  “You’re going to give me an assessment this time, tell me what you think, and I’m not saying another word until you do!”

“But what difference does it make if I like it or not if you can’t afford it?”

He smiled, then started to study the clouds above, and made eye contact with a squirrel which was hanging on the side of a tree and watching us, his head poking up a bit with his neck stretched out as squirrels do.

“Did you like it?”

He studied his fingernails.

“Grrrrr,” I said.  That didn’t work, either.

“OK.  You win.  But I hate this.  It feels like I’m stepping off the high board into a pool and can’t swim very well.”

I looked at him.  He returned my stare, blankly and without speaking.

I sighed.  “It’s a very nice house.  Seems solid and well-built.  No sign of roof leaks or termites.  Convenient and accessible floor plan.  Good-sized rooms, no leaks around the windows.”

I stopped, and he kept watching me.  I fidgeted, then took a deep breath.

“I wouldn't want to live here, though.”  There, I’d said it.  I hoped I wasn’t disappointing him.  I hoped he hadn’t had his heart set on living here.  What if he bought it anyway and then knew when I was living here that I didn’t really like it?  Would he resent that?  Resent me?

“So you don’t want us to buy this one?”

Wow!  That ‘us’!  He included me as though my likes and dislikes mattered.  I’d never been part of ‘us’ before in anything remotely like this.

“If you want my vote, my vote would be no.  But there are three of us.  You obviously like it, so Pat should have a say.”

He nodded, then clapped me on the back and said, “You’re a very good kid, Dustin.  People might not have told you that much before, but you’d better get used to hearing it, now.  I hate this place.  Way too big, too ostentatious, too much upkeep, and you have to walk a half mile just to sneak down from your bedroom to the kitchen for a late-night piece of cheesecake.  Have to hire either a young boy or a couple of stray sheep to keep the lawn short, too.  Oh,” he said, stopping to smile at me, “I can see you liking the idea of stray boy or some young sheep around—wait, did I say that right—but I wouldn't like to see you distracted like that till we’re done with your training.”

My eyes opened wide, and I don’t know what my face did.  But my stomach started to feel like it was going to be doing funny things pretty quick when Briar saw my expression and said, “Dustin!  Stop!  Don’t panic!  I made a joke.  You’re gay, and I made a joke about being gay, and it might not have been in the best taste, but I don’t know, it sounded pretty funny to me.  I don’t make many gay jokes; maybe this wasn’t appropriate.  I wasn’t meaning to be offensive, though, just funny, and maybe showing that I really don’t care about that at all.”

I was still a little in shock.  No one had ever said anything to me about being gay other than how awful I was for being that way.  I didn’t know how to react at all to this. 

He put his arm around me, pulled me to him briefly, then turned me so we were looking at each other, and he had one hand on each of my shoulders.  I had to look way up to see his face.

“We have to be able to laugh at ourselves.  It makes us human, Dustin.  We will have young boys around us wherever we find to live.  I hope we do.  I’ll try to make it happen if you don’t.  You need to have friends, and I hope some of them will be gay and you get to experience what it’s like to have a boyfriend, both mentally and physically.  I’ll tease you about it when it happens, and you have to toughen up a bit so you can tease me back.  You’ll almost certainly experiment with sex.  We’ll talk about that when the time comes, but you’ll do that, and doing it is what you should do.  I hope that any teasing I do will in fact show you how normal I think what you’re doing is.  I wouldn’t tease about it otherwise.  You’ll be able to tell by then that I never mean anything by it when I tease, and so, if I’m teasing you about sex, I’m really very OK about you doing it.”

I didn’t say anything, somewhat taken aback by how serious he was.  His eyes softened and he continued. 

“If you ever feel that any of my teasing is mean, you need to tell me, so I’ll know I made a mistake.  I never want to hurt you, and you have to trust me about that.”

“So I can tease you about sex with Pat?”

“Hrumph,” he said, and then laughed.  “Sure, if you keep it like I just said, sort of appropriate, funny, and celebrating the fact we’re all close—we’re family.  If you can do that, it’ll actually bring us closer together, because only family can do that kind of teasing.  See what I mean?”

“Yeah, I think I do.  I might make a mistake, though.”

“Me, too!  But I’ll know you didn’t mean it that way, and when I goof up, I hope you’ll see that I didn’t, either.  So, are we OK?”

Instead of answering him, I just leaned forward and hugged him, and then, as I realized what had just happened—we’d talked about something so it wouldn't be a problem, and so I’d learn something I needed to know—I hugged him even harder.  This sort of talking to someone who cared about me and this relationship I was just starting with Briar were what I’d been missing all my life.

There were some hills farther outside of town, and that’s where we seemed to be headed next.  We were away from the enclave where the rich people all lived close to each other.  I saw houses scattered here and there.  I couldn’t tell where the properties started and ended because there were no fences and walls.  These didn’t seem like farmhouses, at least not with acres and acres of flat land surrounding them.  Here, you couldn’t see very far in any direction because the road wound through the bottom of a valley, and as the road curved around and among the hills, it wasn’t possible to see very far in any direction.

Eventually, Briar turned off onto a dirt road, and we started driving uphill.  We passed a house here and there with yards either well-tended or not tended at all.  I saw some people outside, mostly just a few kids.  I guess adults aren’t outside much unless they’re working.  It was a warm summer day, early summer, and I think all the kids I saw had shorts on.  I wore jeans.  As usual, I would be different from anyone else.

While I was fretting to myself and not paying much attention, Briar slowed down, then pulled into a driveway.  I looked around but could only see trees and bushes.  We kept going, and then the landscape opened up a little in front of us and a house appeared.  It was white, or once had been.  The horizontal wood siding was badly in need of paint.  The yard was mowed, and though there weren’t any old washing machines or spare tires lying around,  from the looks of the house I might have expected that.  This seemed like hillbilly country to me.  The house looked old and deserted.  Not really crummy like the first one we’d seen, but not very attractive, either.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” said Briar.

“Hey!” I said.  “What are you doing, trying to influence my opinion?”

Briar looked at me in shock, then roared.  He put a hand on my knee and between guffaws, said, “You made a joke, Dustin?  You really did!”

I blushed.  It had really taken a lot of nerve to say that, and if I’d had time to think about it, I never would have risked it.

We got out and walked around the house.  It badly needed a coat of paint, maybe two, and the bushes needed trimming.  There were flowerbeds under most of the windows, but they only had last year’s dead plants in them.  From the back yard I could see up the shallow hill rising away from  behind the house, and from the front I could see downward and just make out the roof of another, lower house.  There were trees around the property.  I didn’t think these were genuine woods, though, just trees left over when they’d put in the road and cleared land for houses.  Those trees gave the house some privacy from the road and maybe from neighbors if there were any close.

“Let’s go inside,” Briar said, and again using a key, we did.  No one was there, and it had the feel of a house where no one had been for a while.  We tramped through the place.  Briar tried the lights, and they didn’t work.  He tried the sinks, bathtub and toilets.  Water came out as it should, but it was brown.

In some of the rooms the old yellowed wallpaper was peeling, and what rugs there were looked thin, worn and threadbare.  Briar lifted a couple and nodded.  There were scuffed hardwood floors beneath them.

The kitchen was laid out like an old kitchen you’d see in movies from the 1930s or ‘40s.  There were no modern appliances, but there was a good deal of room with plenty of counter space.  A table and chairs sat in a nook at the end of the room.

I knew what was coming this time and had looked at the house closely so I’d be prepared.  I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

“So, what’d you think?” he asked casually when we were back outside, standing on the porch which ran along the entire length of the front side of the house.

I paused and looked around.  “It’s not that bad, surprisingly.  It badly needs painting and looks dismal and sad, which makes it easy to see the flaws.  But trying to ignore those, the house itself has a strange sort of homey feel to it.  I like how the rooms are laid out and their size.  I like the privacy of the property without using a wall like my father had which shows everyone you’re unfriendly and don’t want neighbors dropping in.  The negatives are, you’d have to hire a lot of people out here to make it livable.  The whole inside needs redoing, and it needs paint and new plants and flowers put in.  All that would be expensive, and take a long time to do.  I think Pat wants to move right away.  So, this isn’t the place.”

I looked at him, and it was my turn to smile.  He looked shocked.

“Man, you’re a fast learner, aren’t you?  You go from no opinion to a professional assessor’s opinion in about two minutes flat.”

I wasn’t to be outdone.  “And, sir, just what is your opinion.”  Then I did a Groucho Marx eyebrow wiggle at him and giggled.  I’d seen old movies of Groucho on TV.  But I was trying to be funny.  Me.  For me, that was living on the edge.

Briar looked around him and saw a couple of old somewhat rickety-looking chairs at the end of the porch.  He led the way over to them, set them upright and said, “Try one of these.  See if it’s safe.  I’m a lot heavier than you, and we should start out slowly here.”

They looked OK to me, so I sat down.  The chair didn’t complain at all, and so Briar eased himself down on the other.

“I guess it’s time to tell you my plan, Dustin.  I liked this house, too, but for different reasons than you did.  Well, they aren’t all different.  I agree with everything you said.  But, I think it’s ready to move into immediately.”

“But the wallpaper and the rugs and—”

He held up his hand.  “I wasn’t done.  Yes, you’re right, all that stuff needs to be replaced.  There’s a lot of work to do here.  But I like what I see, it’s perfect for what I want.  The price it’s listed at is well below what I can pay, which gives us extra money for repairs.  Assuming they’ll accept my offer—the Realtor said the owners were eager to move the place and wanted a quick, no-hassle sale—we’ll come back tomorrow and bring some air mattresses and sleeping bags and some supplies, and we’ll get started deciding what we have to do and planning the work.  Maybe we can even begin working if we hear the offer’s been accepted.”

“We?  Get started?  Working?  I can’t do any of the stuff that has to be done.  I don’t know how.  Maybe you can, but I’d just slow you down.  I’d be no good at all at helping with this.”

He leaned back and the chair gave a mild protest, but that was all.  He didn’t say anything for a moment or two, just looked around.  Then he turned to me.  “You’re going to do your share of this, and by the end of the summer, you’ll have forgotten how to say, ‘I can’t,’ and ‘I don’t know how,’ and ‘I’ve never done that before.’  By the end of the summer, you won’t recognize yourself.  You’ll probably hate me after a week and really hate me after a month.  But by the end of the summer, I’m hoping you’ll be so proud of yourself, you’ll have forgotten how much you hated me earlier.  It’s a risk I’m taking, but a good one—one I’m willing to take because you’re worth it.”

I lay in bed—well, on the couch—that night, reviewing the day.  It had been pretty close to perfect.  I really, really liked Briar.  He was a big, strong, hard man; he hadn’t shown an ounce of remorse when Jim had driven off into the river and we’d both thought he was dead.  That was hard.  But as tough-minded as Briar was, there was a lot more inside him.  As intimidating, heck, as scary as some people would find him, I wasn’t scared of him at all.  He liked me, a person no one really liked, and he made that clear by the way he treated me.  This was something new I had to get used to, and I was really liking getting used to it. 

As I was falling asleep, I ran through everything he’d said to me that day.  Just as I drifted off, the one thing he’d said that hadn’t really registered at the time came back.  I was too far gone to really think about it, but it did hit me.  He’d said something about when we were done with my training.  Huh?