“You be happy you ain’t got none of them hang-ups.”
Like one of Mike’s repeating stories, the exchange occurred on every drive of any length. Eric said, “I am.”
Forty seconds later, they turned into Turpens Truck Stop. (A GEORGIA INSTITUTION SINCE 1937! in antique gold, green, and red on gray planks chained to a horizontal post.) Mike parked his car among some dozen pickups. Further down stood the big rigs.
To the right was the window for Turpens Parts & Notions, filled with boards of gaskets, towers of batteries, racks of calipers, rows of ratchets, wrenches, sparkplug testers, CBs, pressure gauges, and radar “cheaters,” along with bandanas, coffee mugs, snap-button shirts, flags — American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish, Hells Angels, Mexican, Confederate, Union, Marine, Navy, one flag with horizontal white, brown, black, and tan stripes and a paw print in the upper left (Eric recognized it and Mike did not: in a gay bookstore window, derisively Scott had pointed one out to Eric that Saturday back in Atlanta: That’s for old, fat, hairy guys…Uhhh! Eric had thought about saying, So what’s wrong with that? But not to Scott), and one that said only Turpens — dashboard raccoons, fuzzy dice, and grass-skirted hula dolls, black, brown, and pink — and caps: “Turpens,” with an eagle flying off above the visor. Left of the recessed entrance, another long window looked in on the blue booths, wooden walls, and slowly turning fan blades of Turpens Homestyle Eatery.
Around the car, mica glittered in concrete.
“Now don’t get all caught up checkin’ out junk in the store.”
“Don’t worry!” Eric spoke with the adolescent impatience Mike had learned to ignore — as Eric now ignored Mike’s repetitions. “I’ll be back in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.” Eric opened the car to climb out. As he turned, hot air exchanged with the air inside. “And I gotta go into the store when I’m finished. I need a cap.” Holding the door’s rim, he grinned at Mike, then slammed it.
Christ, Mike thought, looking at his bronzed step son in his blue tanktop, the wide body-builder shoulders and full, rounded arms, sheened already from seconds in the sun. That’s one good lookin’ kid. Remembering their Bowflex workouts, he thought: Yeah, he keeps me young.
Kelly-Ann (five months legal, as Mike thought of her) was only a year-and-a-half older.
[A] HEAT LIKE STONES on his shoulders, against his temples, Eric walked toward the double layer of glass doors across Turpens’ entrance.
Between the pickups, wearing beige slacks and fingering a cell phone into a yellow shirt pocket, from which stuck a handkerchief’s purple points, a thin man ambled over. To Eric, the handkerchief — and a slight sway, kind of like Bill’s that morning — said “faggot.”
At the same time, behind layered glass, Eric saw a second man walking forward, about to leave. This guy was a head-and-a-half taller than Eric (who was five-nine), stocky and in his late thirties. Six-five? Six-six…? Through the glare, Eric caught his dull blond hair, his orange cap, his brazen beard.
Well, if I follow the gay one, I’ll find the right john fast. Eric paused, stood straighter, and rubbed his hands up his sweating face to let the slender man reach the doors, so that, once he was inside, Eric could follow, steps behind.
The gay guy pulled open the outer door and went in — which is when Eric saw that inside the bearded man had stopped.
Eric followed the thin guy through one glass door, through a second —
Turpens’ lobby was frigid with air conditioning. In moments the cold was painful along the sweat trickling behind his ear, beneath his jaw. When Eric lifted a bare arm, someone slid a cold slab beneath it.
He did not look directly at the bearded man — though from the corner of Eric’s eye, it seemed the guy wore a red plaid jacket. (In this heat…?) With darkly gleaming sleeves, it hung open. Under it — as with Bill earlier — he wore no shirt. Between the jacket’s edges, over belly and chest, hempen hair swirled up to obliterate his navel’s sink.
Then, because Eric was walking, the bearded man — standing still — was behind him.
On the wall to the right, another indoor plate glass window glared before automotive parts, case knives, more cowboy shirts, and oversized belt buckles with rhinestone letters: “World’s Greatest Dad,” “World’s Greatest Lover,” “World’s Greatest Stud,” “World’s Greatest Trucker…” The inside door to Turpens Parts & Notions stood off to the left.
On the right, the indoor entrance to Turpens Eatery was beyond the motel-style counter. Keys with white tags hung before a rack of pigeonholes.
No one was behind the desk.
Eric watched the gay guy cross the lobby’s plank flooring. In an alcove, silhouetted on the right was a small man and, on the left, a small woman. The gay guy — if he was gay — walked up and turned right.
Eric took two steps after him.
And slowed.
Then he turned — and risked looking at the bearded blond, full on.
The guy still stood, looking away from Eric. His cap said Turpens. The visor slanted down over the curly hair bunched above his left ear. Then he looked back — maybe at Eric…or the one who’d gone into the men’s room.
Nor was he wearing a jacket:
A red-and-black plaid shirt hung, unbuttoned and wide, back from belly and chest. (His first glance, Eric had misread it…) The sleeves had been torn away — there were none at all. Thigh-thick arms — probably why Eric had thought they’d been enlarged by jacket sleeves — were gouged into muscle groups. Both bore full-sleeves of ink, shoulder to wrist. (Not many men that hairy had tattoos.) Thick as a D-cell, a thumb hooked his jeans pocket. On the back of that furry hand, in blue and green a serpent’s head flicked a red tongue between yolk-yellow fangs. Green-scales coiled into heavier hair to drape the muscle. On his upper arm, barbed wire ran through the sockets of the skulls circling the biggest bulge. With blue fins, dolphins breached a blue-gray wave breaking along his lower. His triceps spilled stylized blood where a knife stabbed through. Spiraling his biceps, dragons dove from his shoulders among clouds and flashing zags and zigs. Even under the florescent lights hair hazed the smaller pictures. As were chest and gut, hands and arms were so furry that, despite the images, they looked like hempen bales.
As the tattooed and bearded man started, not toward the john but toward the hall running off beside Turpens Parts & Notions, Eric moved his glance away. . .
He let it return.
As the man was about to disappear, he looked at Eric — and smiled. Within his beard — shiny under the ceiling lights — his upper gum was all gap, teeth either side, like Frack’s. The man reached down and gave his jeans not a scratch, but a…thick-fingered squeeze! Then, glancing down at himself, he lifted his crotch, pushing his hips forward.
Eric swallowed.
And started after him. His heart was beating hard enough to feel.
As Eric fell in beside him, big-armed, bare-bellied — no tattoos on stomach or chest — the man smiled again. “Where you runnin’ off to, li’l feller?” In broad-toed work shoes, once orange, now scuffed to gray-brown, the man swaggered, thick, tall, and relaxed. “You’re pretty pumped up there for a li’l guy.” (Grinning, embarrassed, but pleased, Eric, though not six feet, didn’t think of himself as short.) “Damn — ” the bronze Goliath went on — “I gotta take me a wicked piss. It’s backed up so far I can taste it.” (But this guy was tall.) “See, the old head’s in the rear.” He nodded along the hall, the grip on his worn crotch become perfunctory scratching. “The one all the guys use who been comin’ to Turpens since ’fore they built the single-room motel and peepshow stalls. Once this was the last place on the highway with dormitory-style sleepin’. Used to be down at the end, here. They closed that up twenty-five, thirty-five years ago, in seventy or eighty.” He shook his head, chuckling. “It’s still the last place you’ll get a real key to your room, though, ’stead of them plastic rectangle do-hickeys. Guys used to bring me in here when I was a kid tom-cattin’ around — a puppy like you — eighteen, nineteen.” The smile widened into a grin. “Didn’t have no front teeth then, neither. When I was twelve, eleven maybe, my Uncle Shad caught me suckin’ off the neighbors’ damned dog under my porch and punched the fuckers out on me — ol’ bastard! Then he laughed and said since I was a cocksucker anyway, what the fuck did I need ’em for? Three years later, when I was fifteen and a head-and-half taller, I punched his lights out — at least I cracked his damned dentures. And told him I’d do a lot worse if I ever heard about him beatin’ on no more kids — gay or straight!” He grunted. “Gay liberation, Georgia coastal style.”