One Night to Finally Ask

I turned sixty-two on a Tuesday, and I spent it at The Sump with Cade Griffin, same as I'd spent most of my good nights for the last forty-some years. The Sump sits out where the two irrigation canals split the valley, tin roof, plywood floor, a regular crowd of maybe nine people who all nod at each other and nobody talks much. That suited me fine.

Cade had gotten back in June from a water project up near the state line, some survey that had him gone eight months, leaving the previous October. He looked older and thinner and exactly the same, if that makes any sense. We're both past the age where a year leaves much of a mark, or maybe we marked all the way up years ago and leveled off.

He bought the first round, I bought the second, and somewhere in the middle of my second whiskey I realized I'd been staring at the back wall, working up to something.

"Darius," Cade said. "You're grinding that glass like you're trying to turn it back into sand. Say what's on you."

I'm not a man who does this kind of thing well. I'll say that plain. I've run a ranch forty years, fired men, buried a father, told a doctor no to a second surgery, and all of that was easier than the sentence I was holding in my mouth.

"Want to try something tonight," I said. "Something I never tried with anybody."

Cade set his beer down slow. He didn't laugh. I'd have bet money he wouldn't laugh, and I still felt my stomach drop while I waited.

"Like what," he said.

"Like me and you. Like a man and a man. I've thought about it for years. Thought about it with you, mostly, if we're being honest, and I figured tonight I'd say it out loud or quit carrying it."

He looked at his beer for a while. The jukebox was playing some Merle thing, and old Louie behind the bar was doing the crossword, and a moth was banging against the light over the pool table. Normal sounds. My whole life sat there waiting on one answer.

"Years," Cade said.

"Since around the time Jeanie left you and I drove up to help you pack. That was eleven years back and I've thought it since. Never said a word because I figured you'd want it said never."

He turned his glass a quarter turn on the bar. Then he reached into his coat, which was hanging on the hook even though it was August and the door was open, and he set something on the bar between us. A metronome. Old brass one, black case gone gray at the corners, the kind you wind with a key.

"What's that," I said.

"Your birthday present. Been carrying it around two weeks waiting for the nerve." He flicked the weight and the pendulum started up. Tick, tick, tick, steady as a heartbeat. "Bought it six years ago for a project. We needed timing data on some flow gauges and I thought this would do it, and it didn't, cheap thing drifted. But I kept it. I kept it because it reminds me of patience. You set a thing in motion and it just keeps on, no matter what, until you decide to stop it. That's a kind of discipline I never had."

"You had it," I said. "You waited eight months in a motel up at the state line."

"That's not patience, that's just nowhere." He looked at me then, straight on, the way he's looked at me since we were eighteen and sharing a orientation packet neither of us read. "So this thing you never tried. You asking me because I'm handy or because it's me?"

"Because it's you. I wouldn't ask it of anybody else on this earth. And I don't want it to cost us anything. If you say no, we drink our beers and you drive me home and I never mention it again. That's a promise."

He let the metronome run a minute more. Tick, tick, tick. Old Louie glanced over, curious, and went back to his crossword.

"Can I hear it tick somewhere quieter," Cade said. That was what he said. Not yes exactly and not no. "You got somewhere quieter?"

"I got a key to the museum loading dock. Mrs. Prewitt over at the historical society, I did her fence in the spring, she gave me the key so I could check on her water lines anytime. Nobody's out there. Field behind it goes to the canal. Moon's up."

"Then finish your whiskey," Cade said, "and we'll go find out what we're doing."

We drove out in his truck, his, because mine had had a flat since the Fourth of July. The road between the canals is gravel and a man could drive it with his eyes shut, and we didn't say much. Cade had the metronome in his coat pocket again. When we parked, he reached over and squeezed my forearm, just once, just above the wrist, and let go. That little squeeze did more to settle me than the whiskey had.

The museum is a low brick building that used to be a seed warehouse, and it closes every October through April. Behind it there's a loading dock, concrete, about waist high, facing a field of dry grass that the moon had turned silver. I got the padlock open on the second try, hands not as steady as I'd have liked, and we stepped up onto the dock.

Cade set the metronome on a crate somebody had left by the freight door. Wooden crate, stenciled letters, CRATE 4 OF 12. He wound it with the little brass key and set the weight and let it go. Tick, tick, tick. Out here, with no jukebox and no moth, it was the only sound there was.

"There," he said. "Quieter."

We sat down on the edge of the dock, feet hanging over, like a couple of boys on a bridge rail. Except neither of us was a boy and hadn't been for forty years, and what we were there for wasn't bridge-rail talk.

"Cade," I said. "I'm going to say this plain because I don't know any other way and because we're too old for dancing around. What I've thought about, all these years, is being touched. Back there. A man's fingers, slow, with lube, no rush about it. I bought a bottle of the stuff a few weeks ago and it's been sitting in my nightstand making me feel like a fool ever since. I never once worked up the nerve on my own. I want to know what it's like. And I want it to be you that shows me, if you're willing."

The pendulum swung. Tick, tick, tick.

"You bought lube a few weeks ago," Cade said. "Before you even asked."

"Figured if I bought it I'd have to follow through. Didn't work."

That got a laugh out of him, short and low. Then he reached in his coat and came out with a small paper bag from the pharmacy in town, and set it on the concrete between us.

"Then we're two fools," he said. "Bought mine a few days ago. Same logic, opposite direction. I figured if I carried it I'd have to find out what you were going to say."

"I'll be damned."

"I'll be damned too." He nudged the bag against my boot. "Here's my terms, and they're simple. We go slow. You say stop, we stop, no hard feelings either way, and I mean that. We use what's in that bag, plenty of it, I know how these things work even if I never did one. And nobody hears about it from either of us, ever, unless we both decide different someday. Deal?"

"Deal," I said.

"One more thing." He looked out at the moonlit field, not at me. "Afterwards, whatever this turns out to be or not to be, you and me are still you and me come breakfast. I'm here for your birthday, Darius. I'd have come for the pancakes even without the rest."

"There'll be pancakes," I said. "I make them thick and burnt and you always eat three."

"Four, last time."

"Four. I stand corrected."

He stood up then and held out his hand, and I took it, and he pulled me up off the concrete like we were thirty-four again instead of what we were. The metronome ticked on the crate. Down at the far end of the field a night bird called once and quit.

"Walk me to the truck," Cade said. "Or we can do it right here on this dock, but that concrete will eat my knees and I've got a decent mattress in the cab if a man don't mind the view being a windshield instead of a field."

"Truck," I said. "I'm sixty-two years old and I've earned a mattress."

He laughed at that, and we walked, and the pendulum kept time behind us until I reached back and stopped it with one finger and tucked the whole thing in my shirt pocket, against my chest, where I could feel it going.

Cade got to the passenger side and dug around behind the seat, and came out with a folded wool blanket that had probably been in that truck since the Nixon years, faded green, smelling faintly of diesel and old rain. He carried it back to the dock without a word, and I understood. The truck was for sleeping, maybe. The dock was for this, with the field and the moon and the crate. I didn't argue it. I spread the blanket out myself, right in the middle, smooth with my boot.

"Sit," he said. "Center of it."

I sat. He sat across from me, knees nearly touching mine, and the metronome was still there on the crate beside us where I'd set it back down. Tick, tick, tick. The moon had climbed a little. The field went silver all the way to the canal.

"Before we start," Cade said, "I need one thing settled. Plain."

"Ask."

"This is just fingers and lube tonight, right? That's what you asked for. That is the entirety of it. Nothing more, unless you say different, and I'm not expecting different. I want to hear it from you so I'm not guessing at anything with my hands on you."

"That's right. Fingers and lube. Nothing past that unless I come out and say it later, and maybe I never do. That's enough for me tonight. It's more than enough."

"Good." He nodded once, businesslike, the way he used to nod over survey maps in truck cabs twenty years back. Then he picked up the paper bag, worked the bottle out of it, and twisted the cap. It was a small bottle, plain white plastic, nothing fancy. He set it on the crate next to the metronome, right in the little space between the pendulum and the edge, like it belonged there.

"Two fools," I said, looking at it.