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Rio:I’m not used to anyone caring for me.

Oren:You’ll get used to it.

Rio:I have to go. I have to take my car in to get the damage appraised. Love you…

Oren:K. Later.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Rio: Hey! I just got my car back, so I’m gonna drive down to Locust Hollow tonight.

Oren:OK. Travel safe.

Rio: I’ll see you at the reunion still, right?

Oren:I’ll be there. But only because of you.

Rio:

Saturday, June 17, 2017, Locust Hollow—There it was: the exit ramp to Locust Hollow. My jaw had been clenched for the last hour, and now my stomach was clenching, too. Only Rio could have gotten me to return here. Only my life falling apart could have brought me back here where it all began in such ugliness.

The first thing I noticed once I exited was the oily smoothness of the road. Farther on towards town, where fields of wheat and corn had once lain, were now neat houses swollen with square footage and self-importance, fronted by sweeping preternaturally green lawns and flanked by columns andporticos, upper stories boasting Juliet balconies and capped by cupolas and widow’s walks.

The hollowed-out shell of downtown where Jackson and I had roamed so freely has been sketched in as if with a gentrifying Etch-A-Sketch: there is a Starbucks, a Whole Foods, a W hotel. At the end of the horseshoe-shaped Main Street, the old slaughterhouse still stands, though it’s been converted into an event space. Rio told me Mr. Fabricant was a half-owner, which perhaps explained its name:Abattoir. But everyone still called it “The Bucket of Blood.”

I turned into the small parking lot and immediately felt self-conscious as I guided my Range Rover into a spot between an old Honda sedan that was mostly rust and an ancient Subaru Baja, battered but still bright, yellow with a red-and-black pinstripe, vivid as a scar, that wrapped around it.

Twilight was settling as I mounted the stairs; my attention was snagged by the circling buzzards, who had apparently been lured by the folklore of the plentiful slaughterhouse offal that had been daily swept into the river at high tide back in the day. Drawing a breath, I opened the door. Inside, it was hot and crowded. With each reluctant step I took, sawdust, which covered the floor, rose to mix with cigarette smoke and the cloying smell of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume. Paper streamers—purple and white—our school colors—hanging from the low ceiling tickled my shoulders.

In the middle of the vestibule stood a table with neatly printed name badges in plastic shields laid on it in alphabetical order. Behind the table was Lidell Holloway, paunchy and middle-aged. I looked at him, this cliché: the teen athlete gone to seed. A bully on and off the field, he’d prayed the loudest over Jackson and me and laid his hands on us the heaviest.

“Is that you? O Strange One?” Lidell asked loudly, familiarity in his tone, as if we’d been pals, the nickname itself, which he’d thought such a clever play on my name, anathema to my ears.

I ignored the hand he extended to me and, pretending to look for my name badge, asked, “I’m sorry, do I know you?” He stormed off muttering as I picked up my name tag. I stepped away from the table and smack into the Lidell’s mother, Lurene.

“Oren! Why Oren Strange! We never expected to see you ’round these parts ever again. You left so abruptly, and then, well, you know, we heard about so many young men like you…lost …we thought…” She trailed off.

“You thought what?” I asked, not giving her an inch. I knew what she’d—what they’d allprobably thought. A few years after we’d left University City, the country had been caught up in the pandemic that no one seemed to understand. Its name kept changing—gay cancer, GRID, AIDS—as if not only did no one understand it or know how to stop or at least slow the disease’s rampant spread, they couldn’t even decide what to call it. Perhaps because it was only affecting gay men, they didn’t care. And while the pandemic had touched us early on, it had been at a distance, for Jackson and I were too poor, too dark, too attached to each other to be pulled into the maelstrom.

At first, we’d remained apart, touched, aggrieved, and unseen. By dint of unpopularity—or maybe it was something else—we remained safe, just out of reach of the disease. But we saw them,the touched, everywhere—men in their twenties and thirties tattooed with blue circles of doom, skinny and desperate as heroin addicts, moving unsteadily and with great effort as if weighed down by four score and seven years of pain. We saw the way others looked at us, avoided shaking our hands, assuming we too were afflicted. Jackson and I had clung to eachother more tightly. We were terrified. We were all we had; if something happened to one of us, the other would have been lost.

Later on, we’d started to lose the gay men in our lives, men who we saw at our monthly dinner parties, men who’d sat across the table from us sharing food and conversation. They’d begun dying here and there one by one, then more frequently and in greater numbers until our dining room was empty and we felt as if we’d moved to a foreign land where we knew no one.

“Well, never mind all that,” Lurene said with renewed vigor. “Oh! Look, here comes Fontella Bass—you remember her. She worked at the bank.”

I turned to see Fontella barreling towards me. Having evidently traded the glamour of bank telling and prophecy making for waitressing, she rushed at me, a tray of canapés in front of her; she wielded the tray like a shield.

“You’re back. Iknewyou’d be back!” she announced triumphantly. Nothing like a prophecy fulfilled, I suppose. “Bet you wish you’d kept that bank account open like I told you to!”

“This is my first time back in forty years—”

“Yeah, but you back, ain’t you?” she asked and withdrew with her tray of canapés before I could snap, “I’m not staying.”

I regretted coming already. Had my life not recently fallen, unexpectedly, apart, I wouldn’t have come to this reunion. And Rio had asked me to. I’d come wanting to see him, needing toseehim after all these years. Now that he was across the room from me, I was frozen.What had I been thinking?

Then, a rumble of laughter. Like echoes of thunder up at the quarry, it went on and on; it was the most absurd and welcomesound in the world, for it told me Rio had already arrived. I looked for him but could not see him, but his laugh had erupted from a gaggle of women gathered in a circle. I assumed he was their center.

Fontella suddenly reappeared with her tray of canapés. “We saw your old ‘friend’ a few months back—”