04

Chapter Three: Charleston to Mobile

"Where is it you're headed?" asked the man who sat down next to Gordy before the bus pulled out from Charleston, headed west.

"Uh, L.A., I guess," Gordy said, still facing the window. Why had the man sat down next to him, he wondered. There were empty rows all over the bus.

"Long way by bus. You going the whole way by bus?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Gordy answered, taking a sideways glance at the man. Some sort of small businessman, Gordy guessed—although not one producing much profit. Thin and wiry, his suit a bit shiny and frayed from wear. Face weather-beaten. He looked like he'd had a hard life but had managed to bear it by being stubborn. His hands were large—thinnish, though, the fingers long, the nails bitten down to the quick. He'd probably been quite good looking in the face once. A little hard looking now, except the light-blue eyes against the darkly tanned and wrinkled skin were arresting. He seemed to use his eyes a lot to capture and hold attention.

He looked pretty harmless other than that he had a hard on. Gordy could easily see the tenting in his lap. He wondered whether that was why the man had chosen to sit next to him. Did he really look that easy? Was it written all over him that he was on this bus to get away from taking the cocks of several men a day on payday?

"Going back to family?"

"What? Excuse me?" There had been a pause where it looked like the conversation had mercifully petered out. Gordy had looked back out the window, watching the bus slide out of Charleston. The morning was early and commuters were just starting to emerge. It had rained in the night and the streets were slick and shimmering. People were just starting to come out of their row houses to pick up their morning papers. Charleston was a lot bigger than Beaufort. Maybe he should just have come as far as Charleston to see if he could make a change.

Gordy wondered how long he could go with just twenty dollars left in his pocket. He knew he'd have to stop along the way here and there en route to California to do some pickup work to replenish his funds. He'd only managed to get a ticket for as far as Mobile, Alabama. But that was on the coast too—the Gulf of Mexico coast. All he'd done so far was working in a bar, too young to do any of the real bar work, and deckhanding on sailboats. They must have sailboats in Mobile.

"I asked if you're headed to California to see family."

"No, not really. I don't have any family."

"Oh, I'm sorry. All deceased?"

"Beats me. I was dropped off on the steps of a church as a baby. I don't know if I have real family dead or alive. And the families I wound up with are more dead to me than alive."

"Ah, a church. You were fortunate then. Churches help people. I can say a little prayer for your biological family, if you'd like."

"Say a prayer for my family?" Gordy had only half listened to him and wasn't sure he heard right. "You a minister or something?"

"A lay minister, yes. I was in Charleston for a conference. I have a small flock near Mobile to care for. Are you going straight through to California?"

"Uh, maybe, I don't know. Haven't really made up my mind."

"That ticket there says Mobile," the man said. He was pointing to the ticket stub Gordy still held in his hand. "So that's as far as you're going now?"

"Ah, yes, I guess."

"That's where I'm going to too."

That pretty much used up their conversation, although the man had left an obvious opening. He seemed to know he had a hard on too—and wasn't exactly hiding it. He brushed it occasionally with his hand. Was Gordy supposed to follow that with his eyes and get the idea—the reason the guy had sat down here? Was having sex with a minister supposed to be a turn on for him? Gordy had heard about sex on the bus, about the bus moving in the dark, with everyone zoned out except for the two guys in a seat in the back, one of them with his face in the other's lap. The first one working hard to suppress his moans.

When did the bus get into Mobile, he wondered. Maybe before dark. He hoped it got there before dark.

Gordy tried to make it obvious that he didn't want to talk much, and the man didn't press him all the way through South Carolina. He sat there humming and sometimes muttering under his breath—sometimes brushing fingers across his lap. He also did some tenting of his hands over the bulge—not a round bulge; sort of a pointy one.

Gordy wondered if the man was praying or something—hoped the man wasn't talking to himself. He couldn't help noticing, though, that the man's pants remained tented through the morning—and that there weren't so many people riding the bus that the man couldn't have had a whole row of seats for himself if that was what he'd wanted.

The bus stopped at a travel plaza just short of Macon, Georgia, to give the passengers a lunch break on solid ground. Gordy, until now trapped in the window seat by the self-proclaimed minister, stayed seated when the man sitting on the aisle, who had told him his name was Fred, was halfway down the aisle before he noticed Gordy wasn't following him. He came back and leaned over the seat in front of Gordy's.

"Aren't you getting out for lunch?"

"I'll get out in a while to use the john. Not really hungry."

"Not hungry or you don't have money for lunch? I've heard your stomach growling. I can cover your lunch. I would be happy to do it for the company at the table."

"I don't really—"

"It's just lunch. This isn't the Ritz."

"Well, OK . . . thanks." He realized he would owe Fred something now. But he was hungry and he was too tired to fight it.

When they got back on the bus, he had intended on finding someplace else to sit—maybe to wait until Fred had settled and then move away from him. But Fred stood outside the bus with him, talking to him and waiting him out. And Gordy knew it wouldn't be polite to sit someplace else now. Fred had paid for his lunch. He owed politeness to Fred.

"You know that all churches don't condemn it. Mine doesn't."

"What?" Gordy asked. He was jolted out of a malaise, his mind mesmerized by watching the center stripes of the road click by. Those on the other side of the bus had a better view. The bus was traveling down the back of the Alabama River, having cleared Montgomery and now on the final stretch down toward the Gulf Coast, to Mobile. The shadows were growing long. It would be dark when they got to Mobile. Late for the dinner hour—but maybe not enough time for people in the bus to want to get some shuteye.

"Sodomy. What it says in the Bible. Sodomy figures elsewhere in the Bible as something that propels the story, that helps it all be possible. I could cite the passages. Why chances are good that the Apostle Paul . . ."

"Excuse me?" Gordy turned and gave Fred a sharp look.

"That man you kissed back in Charleston, before getting on the bus. The black man. He wasn't a relation, was he?"

So that was it, Gordy thought. The man who had picked him up in his truck off the side of the road when Gordy was hitchhiking to Charleston from Beaufort to catch a bus. The one with the big, muscular body who had parked off the road and had Gordy suck him off and then fucked Gordy. The black guy with the nice, slow fuck, who had, after having ridden him good, given him a ride all the way to the bus station. They had thought they had parted in the shadows. But obviously they had been seen. The guy had suggested that Gordy stay in Charleston—that the guy knew of a good house Gordy could work in as long as he didn't mind that most of the johns would be black. Gordy had sort of regretted he hadn't given it more consideration when he thought back on it as the wheels of the bus took them farther and farther away from Charleston. He certainly hadn't minded that the guy with the truck had been black; he'd handled Gordy really good with a big cock.

But the issue was that he was running away from working in a house like that, if he could.

"When we get to Mobile, you don't have any place to stay, do you? Don't even know how you're going to get supper tonight." It was Fred again, talking. Not showing the slightest embarrassment about what he had assumed out loud about Gordy.

But then Gordy hadn't gotten all indignant on him and denied anything. Gordy was just too damn tired of it all to fight it.

"I'll manage," Gordy said.

"You'll need money to get on with your journey. I'm sure it would be a great help to you to have someplace to stay and food provided. You mentioned at lunch that you could work on boats. I have some connections down at the yacht basin where sailboats take tourists out."

"What would I have to do for the help?"

"I think you know what you'd have to do."

Sometime while they were fucking on Fred's bed in his bungalow that night, Fred stumbled upon Gordy's tattoo and the sweet sex spot. Thereafter he lay there, bug-eyed and moaning happily, as Gordy straddled his pelvis and rode his cock hard, all sense of Gordy "just putting up with it" floating off on the wind.

Later, lying on the studio couch in the other second-floor bedroom, where Fred had told him he could stay after Gordy made clear he didn't want to sleep with Fred, Gordy wondered how far he'd have to travel west to get beyond his reputation in Beaufort. Obviously, it had to be farther than Mobile, Alabama.

Chapter Four: Abilene

It was in Abilene, Texas, that Gordy became resigned to the life he decided he was destined to lead. It was a dead ended one, he knew. It couldn't last all that long and nothing pleasant could follow it. But for some time Gordy had given up on the thought of a life beyond the next decade anyway. To mark his acceptance of the life, he even changed his name. As a foundling he never thought of the name he had gone by as being anything permanent anyway. In Abilene, he became simply Glade.

Mobile wasn't Abilene, of course, but he'd overheard a conversation about where one could lead an honest life in obscurity, and the name Abilene stuck in his mind. He had to get to Abilene before he could accept the inevitability of life there.

Life with Fred wasn't too bad, but it wasn't much of a life either. The man had come through in helping Gordy land a job in a yacht basin down on the Gulf, and there was that roof over his head, such as it was—a roof that got raised three times a week by Fred preaching a rousing fire and damnation sermon down in his living room while he had a piece of tail lying in his bed upstairs. Gordy insisted on only fucking in Fred's bed, keeping his own for sleep.

Fred was thin and wiry, but that characteristic didn't extend to his cock, and he certainly knew how to fuck. The food wasn't bad either, although Gordy had to learn how to cook it—and to clean up afterward. Fred had the best of two worlds—a firecracker in bed, once he'd found the secret of Gordy's rose tattoo, and an uncomplaining domestic slave.

Life wasn't that good from Gordy's perspective, though. Within three months, he'd accepted a one-way deckhand job on a sailboat headed for Galveston, Texas. The owner of the sailboat, a young, wealthy businessman, was strikingly good-looking and in great form.

Gordy had assumed that fucking privileges went along with the journey—he was being paid quite well—but when the young businessman came on board, he brought two young women with him, and it quickly became clear that this was the direction in which the man's interests lay. Gordy became concerned that he rather regretted that he wouldn't be getting it on with sailboat owner. He only now realized that that possibility had figured in his decision to take on the job.

They sailed for a week, the businessman being happy for his sailboat to meander slowly around in the Gulf, where he was untouchable and unseen by his life on land and could play with his playmates at leisure. It was time for Gordy to begin to recenter on the possibility that there was a world out there not filled by men who just wanted to get in his pants.

It was a false awareness for Gordy, though, because at the end of the sail, there was Galveston. And Galveston definitely had its gay district scene centered around 24th Street. The West Coast was still a long way away, and as generous as the sailboat owner had been, what Gordy had earned from that job lasted only so long. Gordy's problem was that he didn't really know where he was headed—not in terms of geography. He had some sense of heading for the West Coast—but in terms of why he was going there, what he expected to be doing once he got there, he had formed no idea. He just sort of existed in Galveston, vegetated there, giving only half thoughts to what his journey really was all about.

And so, nearly penniless, he found himself in rough bars. Gay bars. Thinking back on the Marine drill sergeant and realizing he liked it a little rough, Gordy gravitated toward the inland bars and the truck stops on the highways up toward Houston.

* * * *

"Haven't seen you in here before," the guy in jeans and the red-plaid shirt open over a black T-shirt said. As they were in Texas, he was wearing the obligatory cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat as well. Also, since they were in Texas and in a rough bar, he was a big bruiser of a man. He wasn't perched on a bar stool but was more leaning into it with his butt against the stool and one boot up on the railing, elbows on the edge of the bar top, and a frosty beer bottle moving in time from touching the bar top with an edge and moving to his mouth. The beer would be gone before the frost on the bottle was—to be replaced by another beer.

He turned his back to the bar, giving Gordy a full-frontal view. The jeans were worn at the bulge at the crotch, almost as on purpose to show that it was quite a bulge.

"Haven't been here before," Gordy answered. "Came over from Mobile on a sailboat a couple of weeks ago and am on my way west. Just stopped over in Galveston until . . . well, just stopped a while in Galveston."

"Stayed there in Galveston 'till your money ran out, did you?"

"Something give me away on that?"

"Well, you accepted a beer from a real toad an hour ago and then disappeared with him for fifteen minutes, and you don't look like a toad type of guy. And you're nursing that one along far too long. Can I buy you another one?"

"If you like," Gordy answered. He was way beyond holding onto pride.

"It might cost you somethin'," the guy said, giving Gordy a sly look.

"I figured it would," Gordy answered.

"So, how were you planning on getting west from here?" the man asked, keeping his full-frontal pose to Gordy at the bar and moving a hand to where his thumb was hooked on his wide leather belt, the index finger pointing down to his crotch. Gordy could see that the man was making sure that Gordy noticed not only the bulge but also the dark-blue bandana hanging out of his left rear pocket. By now Gordy had learned the basics of gay male flagging. The dude was advertising that he was a top and interested in anal sex, not just a quick blowjob.

"Any way I can," Gordy answered. He made sure the other guy could see that he'd seen and taken note of the dark-blue bandana.

"You may be in luck then. I'm a trucker and am taking a semi load up to Dallas. My rig's out in the parking lot. Maybe you'd like to get as far as Dallas in my rig?"

"Sounds good to me," Gordy answered.

"If I give rides I like to be ridden."

"Sounds fine to me."

The sleeper cell behind the cab in the trucker's semi was cramped and the trucker was a tall, big dude, but they managed. The trucker wanted a sample before he left the parking lot of the bar and Gordy gave the cowboy a good ride—a great ride when, with Gordy sitting on the cock and facing toward the front of the semi, he began bucking like a rodeo horse as the trucker's hand strayed to covering the rose tattoo.

Knelt between the trucker's spread thighs, Gordy had worked the man's cock with his mouth in almost a lethargic manner. As far as either of them seemed to be concerned, there would be nothing special for either one of them in this fuck. It would be mechanical rather than one of passion, just a release and payment for services rendered. They both understood that. They both had been here before in an arrangement like this.

Breathing heavily, the trucker reached down and raised Gordy's smaller body up. The trucker was still a cowboy. Gone was the ten-gallon hat in this limited space and gone also were the trucker's jeans and the black T-shirt. But the red-plaid shirt was still on his back, open at his chest to reveal a muscular torso, heavy with veining, and he'd pulled his boots after he'd shucked his jeans. He was still a Texas cowboy as long as he kept his boots on.

Gordy, naked, groaned, giving full control of his body to the trucker, as his ass channel swallowed the thick, throbbing cock. When he had fully sheathed the staff, Gordy leaned his shoulder blades back against the front wall of the narrow cabin, planted his feet against the back wall behind the sitting Texan, and raised his pelvis to give the trucker space to pump him. He turned his head to the side and closed his eyes, emitting little moans at the depth and throbbing of the cock inside him, but otherwise lethargic.

The Texan started to move his hips back and forth, slow pumping Gordy's channel. He wanted more leverage though and grasped the younger man's waist between his hands to start pulling him more forcefully on and off the cock. The thumb of one hand rubbed across the rose tattoo to the lower left of Gordy's navel.

Gordy came alive with a gasp. He raised his torso; encircled the trucker's neck with his arms, locking his fists; threw his head back, growling deep in his throat; and began riding the cowboy's dick hard. The cowboy laughed.

"Now

that's

what I like," the trucker cried out.

Half way through the fuck, he managed to turn Gordy around on the cock so that Gordy's arms were spread against the forward wall of the cabin and his cheek pressed to the surface. He was moaning deeply as he bounced his passage up and down on cock. The trucker unwittingly was maintaining Gordy's high interest by palming his hips and, in the process, fingering the rose tattoo.

The semi stopped three times between Houston and Dallas at rest stops for a private rodeo show, and the trucker was so pleased with Gordy's performance that he looked up a similarly interested truck driver taking a load from Dallas to Abilene, and Gordy earned a ride for that segment of the trip by giving the second trucker as good a ride as he'd given the first one.

* * * *

Gordy tried to make a go of it in Abilene without the sex. He really did. But it was Abilene that defeated him in that. And not only in that, but also in his quest west. But the latter was more the result of an awakening to purpose than anything else.

He stayed away from the tenderloin district of South and North 1st streets, where Business 20 cut through the center of town, and, instead, kept to the southern part of the city, finding pickup work here and there in construction. On the job, he'd made friends with a man named Clem, in his thirties, who seemed to know what was what and was willing to help Gordy not only figure out useful construction techniques and to stay off the scope of work site supervisors until he'd learned them but also to cope with living in a small Texas city with little income.

He helped Gordy with the living part by taking him to the homeless site on the banks of the Kirby Lake reservoir south of the city, where a good many of the part-time day workers had established a little tent city of their own. Clem had a motorcycle and ferried Gordy back and forth between the lake and job sites when Gordy was able to find work.

Clem also was safe, Gordy thought. He had a woman, Kate, who waited for him at the lake site and cooked and washed clothes for several of the men, including Gordy, when he was added to the mix. Kate was a year or two older than Gordy and maybe eight years younger than Clem. She worshipped Clem to the extent that Gordy assumed Clem must take real good care of her in the tent they shared. She got pretty wild if another woman in the camp came near him. And he was a real looker.