They say every girl has her price...even if she's a boy?
by Erin Halfelven
They say every girl has her price...even if she's a boy?
Thirty
Million
Reasons
by Erin Halfelven
<>
He staggered into my mom's deli looking as if someone had shot him. I hadn't heard anything but I came around the counter quickly, "Mr. Hardiman! What's wrong?" One of the old hardscrabble ranchers of the area, Mr. Hardiman was pushing seventy and I thought he might be having a heart attack.
He straightened up a bit and grinned at me, like the pitcher does when he's caught a line drive that just bounced off his ribcage. "I'm okay. Kit, I'm fine!" He laughed strangely. "In fact, I'm just fucking marvelous!"
That stopped me for a moment and I looked around to be sure Mom was in the back. "Mr. Hardiman, you shouldn't cuss; Mom might ask you to leave."
He shook his head, still grinning. "Sorry, kiddo. But it's a situation that calls for a bit of cussing. I just...I'm rich, Kit, I won the lottery!" He held out a ticket. I stared at it but I didn't try to touch it. If it were really a winner that would be rude and if it turned out not to be, I still didn't want to touch it.
"Are you sure?" I asked, trying to read the numbers and remember what the winning combination last night had been. Then something else caught my eye; the ticket end said, "Highway 60 Deli & SuperMiniMart - Whitewater Canyon, CA." Our store had sold him the ticket, in fact it was probably the one I had sold him two days ago.
I shrieked.
*****
Things got crazy for awhile, everybody running around and hollering and jumping up and down and crying, too. Deputy Clay Wilson came in and sort of rode herd on everything. "Some excitement, huh, Kitten?" he said to me. He helped coach baseball part time at the high school, so we knew each other and he could use that version of my nickname without making me mad. "Nothing like this ever happens in Whitewater Canyon."
"Guess not, Coach." I grinned at him. "You want a big drink?"
"Nah. I' d better not get too distracted." He laughed. "This could turn into a riot at any moment."
A real crowd had appeared for sure, but it wasn't hardly any riot. Mostly, everybody wanted to see the ticket and talk to the winner and tell him how lucky he'd been. Mr. Hardiman pushed his rancher's hat back on his head, making his long face look even longer. He grinned a lot and denied any sort of system in how he picked his numbers. "Kit done that," he said. "I just gave him five dollars and took the slip he gave me." He winked at me.
Everyone looked at me. I'm fair-skinned, which is a problem for someone who lives in the desert and likes to play baseball but even worse, it makes it easy to see when I'm blushing. "The machine just gives random numbers, Mr. Hardiman," I said. "I didn't do any picking."
"Even so, Kit," he said. "I've a mind to celebrate right here. All these nice folks, filling up your store to talk to me ain't hardly buying anything." He grinned and a lot of them had the grace to look sheepish. "So, I'm buying! Kit, fix a lunch special for everyone that wants one!"
A Lunch Special is a regular sandwich, soda and chips, $5.95, a good deal. Karen and Alison, my two oldest sisters, took over the cash registers while Mom and I made sandwiches for everyone. It got real busy, so busy I didn't have much time to pay attention to what else went on. The rush lasted all afternoon, when we added it up later, it came to over $1300 dollars. I didn't think there were that many people in town on a Thursday afternoon. People must have been getting off the freeway to come in and celebrate Ed Hardiman's good luck.
Bobbette Domingues from the "Whitewater Rose-Gazette" newspaper came in and interviewed everyone. Then people from the TV stations in Palm Springs and Los Angeles came in. Bobbette is a tiny, round little woman, not five feet tall but she got in a squabble with the tall blonde reporter from Channel 46 over who was interviewing who first. Marcia Deever, the TV reporter, had pushed her microphone right in front of Ed's face, reaching over the top of Bobbette head. Bobbette used to wear the Donald Duck costume and deal with crowds at Disneyland, so she's usually a pleasant person but not shy.
Deputy Wilson called for backup.
Jay Clemmons came in to buy comics right in the middle of things. Jay was about my only close friend from high school, he would be going away to college in a few weeks. We'd been trying to spend some time together whenever Mom could spare me but it was just too busy with all the excitement. He hung around for a bit and even refilled the ice dispenser for us before finally heading out. "Give me a call tomorrow, maybe we can do something next week?" he said as he left. I promised I would.
Finally, about ten that evening after Mr. Hardiman left, it all got sorted out and Mom and I sat down to rest a bit while the twins, Stevie and Curtis, started cleaning up. Alison had taken the little ones home to put them in bed and Karen was counting out the registers in the back and putting the numbers into the computer.
"Two hundred thousand dollars, Kit," Mom said. I nodded, that was our share after the company that owned the SuperMiniMart chain took their cut; I'd looked up our agreement with them earlier in the day. The big winner was Mr. Hardiman but the retailer who sold a winning ticket got a prize from the lottery commission, too.
"We'll have money to pay down the bank loan, fix the cars, get a new couch, maybe braces for the girls." She sighed.
"There'll be paperwork, a lot of it, and it may be months before we get the money," I pointed out.
She grinned. "My little worry wart," she said and patted my hand.
Well, I'm not so little anymore but ever since Dad's accident I had been the man of the house, even if Alison was oldest. So I worried.
Everyone said Mom had too many kids, too close together; Alison would be twenty in six more weeks and I had just turned eighteen, two months ago on June 5. Karen was sixteen, the twins fourteen, Dougie eleven, Winnie nine and Sue Beth had just turned six the day after my birthday. Another brother had been killed at the same time Dad was crippled by the drunk driver that broadsided our van almost four years ago. Little Davy hadn't even been born yet and we almost lost Mom, who'd been seven months pregnant with him.
We were all fair-skinned. Curtis had red hair and blue eyes like Karen and Mom, the rest of us varied from Sue Beth's ash blonde to Stevie's dark chestnut, all with grey or hazel eyes. I was about in the middle of that range. Dad's hair was dark wavy brown and his eyes were even darker but with green and gold flecks in them. He had been almost movie-star handsome before the accident.
Mom smiled at me. "Mr. Hardiman winning the lottery on one of our tickets is the first piece of luck we've had in a long time," said Mom. "Don't worry all the pleasure out of it, Kit." My real name is Keith but Alison couldn't say that when I was a baby and I've been Kit ever since except to the teachers at school.
"Okay, Mom," I agreed. "We'll just savor the luck for a little while, huh?" I sipped on coffee and watched the front door while Mom talked about things we might do with the money. We locked up at eleven on weeknights and I intended to close right on time in case anyone else came by wanting to celebrate. I kind of hoped that Jay would stop in again but he didn't show.
Just as I went out to help Curtis drag the chain guard across the front, Mr. Hardiman drove up in a brand new pickup truck, one of the big four-door Ford crewcabs with flared fenders and a grill like a shark's mouth. It even had chrome running boards. Curtis got excited and soon he and his twin, Stevie, were all over Mr. Hardiman and the truck, asking questions and being nuisances. Curtis wanted him to open the hood and, of course, Stevie helped him ask about forty times.
"Kit, can I talk to you?" Mr. Hardiman said when Mom had called the twins off of him.
"Sure," I said. "Just let me get locked up. What's it about, sir?"
He hemmed and hawed a bit but didn't really say. Mom and the girls finished up closing and I double checked all the locks, while he just waited patiently. Finally he said to Mom, "Mrs. Prentiss, can I borrow Kit for awhile? I'll give him a ride home later, I promise."
Mom allowed as that was okay with her if it was all right with me and I nodded. Curtis practically howled his envy, "There's enough seats for everybody!" He couldn't stand it that I would get a ride in the new truck before he could. Stevie teased him about it and of course that really set him off and Mom had to order them twice to get them into the van for the ride home.
Mom gave me a quick hug and climbed into the van herself. I sat in the cab of the new truck and waved to Alison as she wheeled the clan out of our parking lot and headed for home.
"You and Alison going to junior college this fall?" Mr. Hardiman asked, climbing in on the driver's side.
I shook my head, "Just her this semester, she'll graduate in the spring and then it will be my turn."
He nodded and didn't say anything else for a bit. I began to wonder what it was he had to say that was this much trouble for him to get out. "Kit," he finally said. "I'm a rich man now, the Ford dealer practically insisted I take this new truck on credit. And he gave me a ridiculous amount in trade-in for my old heap."
We both grinned. "You sound like the money is a problem to you, Mr. Hardiman?"
"Well, not the money itself, but having money can cause problems; people treat you entirely differently."
I nodded, it made sense.
He went on, "I want to do some good with my money, Kit. And I want you to help me."
"Huh? Me? Mr. Hardiman, I'm just a kid, what you need is a CPA and maybe a lawyer."
He nodded, "And I'll get them, but Kit, I need you, too."
Now he wasn't making sense, what could he possibly need me for? I tried to protest but he wasn't letting me get a word in.
"I need you because you are sensible and good-hearted, responsible and willing to work. I need someone like that and I want it to be you. For at least a year? I'll pay you a salary, and I'll give your Mom some money, too. Enough that your mother can hire someone to do your chores in the store so you won't feel guilty leaving your family."
"I'll still feel guilty," I said but now he had me thinking. "How much of a salary?" I asked.
"How much would it cost your Mom to hire someone to do your job?"
Shoot. Well, I generally put in a seventy hour week, now that I wasn't going to school, how much would that be worth? Figure Mom would have to pay at least half again minimum wage to get someone decent, then double that for the other expenses of hiring someone, taxes and benefits and training. Holy crud, that came to more than $40,000 dollars! I told him.
He didn't bat an eye. "I'll give your Mom $50,000 to buy you out of your contract." We grinned again, though mine was a little shaky. We frequently talked baseball in the store and the metaphor made the offer seem somehow unreal. "And I'll pay you the same for the year. Plus, give you a place to live and all expenses like food and travel and clothing. Medical insurance, the works. At least one year, maybe more."
I stared at him.
He kept grinning, his leathery face all laugh-wrinkles and teeth. "Kit, I'm sixty-seven, I asked for my winnings in a lumpsum; after paying federal taxes on it, I'm still going to collect a check for thirty million dollars in a week or two. I doubt I'm going to live long enough to spend all of it."
"What--what would you want me to do? Mr. Hardiman, that's a lot of money! I mean, you're talking about giving my family $100,000 dollars; you know we get a share of what you won, don't you?"
He nodded. "Yeah, but with eight kids and a husband in a coma at the VA hospital, I'm sure your mom can find things to do with another hundred grand."
Well, yeah, of course. I could think of a thousand things without even trying. Mom would probably put the money aside to help us kids with going to college, though.
"But as to what you would be doing--well, travel with me--I want to travel. Make arrangements for transportation and hotels, take messages, run errands, read and write letters for me. I'm sure I will get a ton of letters, most asking me for money."
I nodded as if I understood; it didn't really sound like a job for an eighteen-year-old kid, nor one that was worth $100,000.
He went on, "Sort of a personal assistant. We'll make up the duties as we go along but I don't have anyone in my family that could do this and I need someone I can trust."
"You? Why? You would trust me?"
He nodded. "You'll be writing checks for me, I'll get you a credit card in your own name that you can use for me. I do trust you, Kit. I've watched you grow up, you and your sisters and the little ones." He looked serious. "Your family deserves something good to happen, I'd give your Mom a million dollars but she probably wouldn't take it. This way I can give her something and she can see I'm getting something back. You."
He looked off toward the darkness of the desert hills. "I'm not a poor man to begin with. The ranch and other property and investments, I'm probably worth a couple million or so already, maybe more. I know I didn't live like I had money, cause, well, I didn't have cash but I own stuff and I've got income."
He looked at me again, "I'd already been thinking of doing something like this, sell everything and retire. I think I'll go ahead and do that, too. But we can talk about that later. What about it, Kit? Want to go to work for me and be my 'Gal Friday'?"
I blinked. "You mean 'Man Friday,' I'm a boy."
"Right."
I tried to think about it but it didn't seem real. I just sat there and looked at him for a long time. The security light from the store made for odd blue-tinged shadows and his craggy, weather-beaten face looked dramatic, like it had been carved out of a piece of old steel from some vintage battleship. His big hands were folded together on his lap and his hat was pushed back so I could see his eyes under the grizzled brows.
The 'Gal Friday' remark bothered me a little bit. I'm not tall but at five-eight, I'm not completely short either. The only sport I've ever really enjoyed is baseball; and I didn't always have time for one that. I had a tendency toward pudginess, working around food all the time didn't help that, either. I didn't have a girlfriend--again, who had the time? I hadn't started shaving regularly yet and my voice had never really broke properly but sort of just drifted downward to a high tenor.
Briefly explained, I got called fag and queer and worse things by a lot of the guys at school and not a few of the girls. I thought I'd better say something, "I'm not gay, Mr. Hardiman."
He laughed. "Neither am I, Kit. I've been married three times and I'd still be married if the last one hadn't run away from me. No, this is about...friendship and trust. Not...nothing else."
"Okay," I said.
"You'll do it?"
"Yeah, I guess so," I still didn't completely believe it, like the $30 million lottery prize, it just wasn't something that felt real right away. "We'll have to ask my Mom, though."
"Sure," he said. "Let's go do that." And he started up the truck.
*****
Chapter 2
Mom wanted to think about it, of course. We'd managed to get some privacy by going outside where no one but the two big yellow hounds we called turkey dogs could hear us.
"Why pick Kit?" Mom asked.
Mr. Hardiman shrugged. "Alison is going to go to college, Karen is too young and I wanted it to be someone from your family, Maggie."
I noticed that; Mr. Hardiman never called her anything but Mrs. Prentiss in the store but they had known each other a long time. Mom's first name was Margaret and lots of people called her Maggie. She had once dated one of Mr. Hardiman's sons, Gordon, the one who got killed in the rodeo. "Gordo" Hardiman had been a rodeo bum and a local celebrity since he'd got old enough to ride the bulls until he broke his neck up in Salinas less than two years back.
Mom tried to talk about alternatives. "What about your own family, your other kids, Mr. Hardiman? Gordo's wife and kids..." Gordo had married a girl from Reno the year after Mom married Dad; they had two kids, one about my age. I remembered vaguely that Mr. Hardiman had another son, much younger than Gordo and a daughter even younger than that, a girl named Helen who had graduated high school when I was in junior high. I thought there might be another daughter, too, one between the two sons but I had never met her.
"I wouldn't trust any of them the way I can trust Kit," he said simply.
"But they're your family?" Mom was really baffled thinking that someone couldn't trust his own family. I almost understood, would I give Curtis $30 million dollars to keep for me? No, I wouldn't and neither would anyone else sensible; Curtis wasn't dishonest but he lacked the kind of self-control someone needed to handle a lot of money. Maybe he'd get better as he got older and the medicine he took for his ADHD was helping, but my brother was the wild one in the family, a lovable goof that made you want to strangle him while you were laughing.
Mr. Hardiman tried to explain about his family. "Don't think Kit is going to be getting money they would get, they'll get their share," he made a face. "And that's part of it too. If I picked one of them, the others would think I was playing favorites. This way, Kit is just a hired hand to them."
"Well, I just don't know?"
He took her small hand, roughened by years of work in the house and the store; it looked lost and dainty between his big sunbrowned ones. "If Gordo had had any sense, he'd have married you instead of joining the rodeo. Then you'd be my daughter-in-law and Kit here would be my grandchild. You're almost family, let me do this for you. I promise to make the boy work hard for the money." He grinned after the last part.
Mom chuckled and looked at me. "Do you want to do this, Kit?"
I nodded and that settled that. When Mom gave one of us our own choice, she never took it back.
*****
I didn't think I slept at all that night but I must have because the phone ringing in the morning woke me up. I glanced at the clock and sat up quickly, it was almost eight which meant Mom and Karen had gone to open the store without me. I felt guilty.
Alison would be feeding and riding herd on the others and there I lay in bed, sleeping in. Since I was the only kid with my own room, the smallest of the bedrooms in the mobile home we lived in, no one had to wake me while getting up themselves. Karen and Alison shared the biggest bedroom in the mobile, Mom had the second largest and I took the third. The other kids slept in two bunkrooms built as an addition onto the side of the mobile.
I heard Stevie answer the phone and Curtis, of course, ask her who it was before she could possibly have found out.
One of the little ones ran to my door and yelled the message, "Mr. Haffaway says meet'im out f'unt in twenny minutes." Sue Beth could talk plain enough when she took the time but she had a little of Curtis's impatience about her.
"Okay, Chibi-Sue," I said. "Thanks." Her nickname came from a cartoon character who wore her blond hair in the same sort of double ponytail Mom kept the younger girls in. I got up and didn't dawdle, twenty minutes was just enough time to get dressed and comb my hair and drink a glass of milk at the kitchen table.
Alison sort of glared at me but I ignored her. She'd finished with the kids and didn't want me messing up the kitchen again. Plus, she had the Macintosh laptop out on the other end of the table with the modem hooked up and didn't like anyone else in the room while she chatted with her online friends. The Mac she had bought for herself with a student discount; besides the company computer at the deli, our only other machine was an old Sony that still had Windows 95 loaded on it.
I vaguely wondered what kind of computer we could buy with just a little corner of the money we were going to be getting. It felt almost sinful to be thinking about something like that but I'd wanted a computer of my own for a long time. I'd probably need one for whatever work I'd be doing for Mr. Hardiman.
About the time I'd finished my milk and rinsed the glass, Mr. Hardiman drove up in a small blue sports car, a Miata. He had a big grin and he wasn't wearing his rancher's hat, because of course, it would have blown off. I usually saw him wearing his hat and it always surprised me when I saw him without it because he had a lot of curly, dark brown hair, a lot like my dad's but curlier and shot through with gray.
I ran out to meet him and Curtis and Stevie were right there with me; Curtis moves fast when there's something that interests him and Stevie won't let her twin leave her behind. "It's a convertible," screamed Curtis unnecessarily.
Mr. Hardiman laughed and got his long, bony body out of the little car and retreived his hat from the little shelf where a back seat would be in a regular car. He winked at me which confused me.
"Can we have a ride in it, Mr. Hardiman?" Curtis asked. Stevie whacked him in the back of the head and added, "Please?" for the both of them.
"I don't think so, not today, kids," said Mr. Hardiman. "Kit and I have stuff to do and besides, only one of you could ride at a time."
"Did they give you this one, too?" I asked.
Curtis had been about to protest not getting a ride but instead screamed, "They gave it to you!"
"Well, they expect me to pay for it later, but come on, Kit, we do need to get going. You want to drive this over to the Ford dealer for me so I can get my new truck back?"
My license to drive was so new I sometimes forgot I had one. The idea of driving a brand new car made me nervous but I stepped up and smiled like a rookie called on to start the Series. "Okay, Mr. Hardiman," I said, "but I hope it's an automatic."
It was. I got behind the wheel and checked things out a bit while Mr. Hardiman folded his length into the passenger seat. "I'll just hold my hat," he said, putting it into his lap.
"Good idea." I laughed. I turned the key and the little engine purred like a happy cat. With Curtis and Stevie screaming their envy and excitement, I wheeled out of the drive and back onto Lambert Road.
"I didn't actually buy this one," Mr. Hardiman mentioned. "I signed a three year lease. But this will be your car to drive, Kit."
"My car?" I squeaked. I'd dreamed of getting a computer as part of my new job but not a car.
He laughed. "Yup. As my personal assistant, you should have a car of your own to drive. I'm looking at a nice sedan for driving around the city with other folks too. A Lincoln or maybe a Jaguar, of course." Mr. Hardiman, like a lot of people his age was loyal to his brand of car and it would probably be Ford products all the way. It still seemed a little odd that Mazda and Jaguar were both Ford brands now, and carried in the local dealership.
Mr. Ron Shipley himself was there to meet us when I pulled into Shipley Ford. He seemed surprised when I got out of the car. I tried to hand the keys back to Mr. Lambert but he said, "Those are your set, Kit."
"How'd you like the way it handles?" asked Mr. Shipley. I murmured something and Mr. Shipley grinned. "When you said you wanted a car for a young friend, Ed, I thought you had something else in mind."
I know my face turned red but Mr. Hardiman just laughed. "Kit is going to be my personal assistant and gofer. He'll need a car and I do like the way the Miata handles. And looks." Ed, that was Mr. Hardiman's name to people his own age but it wasn't short for Edward. Something else. I knew that when he'd been with the rodeo, years before I was born, he'd been called Whitewater Ed Hardiman.
"Maybe you'd like one of the new Thunderbirds for yourself," suggested Mr. Shipley.
"Maybe I would." Mr. Hardiman laughed. "But not today, Skip. We've got business out to the ranch and maybe in Palm Springs. Kit, you know the way out to my ranch?" He went to the big pickup he had bought only yesterday, the day of his big winnings.
"Yes, but maybe I should follow you? Some of those dirt roads all lookalike." I said nervously. I didn't feel any better when both of them burst into laughter.
Mr. Hardiman explained, "You don't want to be behind me in a convertible on a dirt road, Kit."
"Maybe I should put the top up? See how it's done while Mr. Shipley is here to help?"
"Good idea," he agreed.
Mr. Shipley called over one of the men who worked for him, Bill Short. "Shortbill" had been a junior in high school when I started ninth grade, so we sort of knew each other. He towered over me, six-foot-plus. He'd played football at school, mostly left end of the bench, but I remembered him better as the homerun-hitting firstbaseman on the team where I spent most of my time on the bench and sometimes at second base if we were winning or losing by a big margin.
He hadn't been good enough to get scouted by the pros or to get offered one of the rare college baseball scholarships and with his grades at the local junior college, I think he'd just called a halt to his education and gone to work. Black hair and dark eyes, but he didn't look Hispanic and I knew for a fact that he wasn't one of the local Indians. His folks had moved out from Oklahoma before he was born so maybe he was Cherokee or something. He wore dungarees and a blue work shirt and he'd put on maybe fifty pounds since graduation.
He showed me how to raise and lower the built-in soft top and made rude comments. "So, found you a sugar daddy, Kitten?" he grinned. He knew I didn't like that version of my nickname but at least he hadn't called me 'Kitty' like some people. Or the other nickname that had sometimes caused fights.
I didn't answer the suggestive remarks but just ignored them and asked questions about the car. "Does it have a hardtop?"
"Oh, I know you like it hard," he said almost like he thought it was in the script. "But no, we're out of the good hardtops, Skip ordered one for you." He glanced at where the two older men were talking in front of the big deep red Lincoln, about fifty feet away. "Did old Ed really win thirty million dollars in the lottery?"
"You can read about it in the papers; I won't say anything else about money, Short; so don't ask."
"Okay," he agreed. "Skip doesn't like us greasemonkeys talking money either." He grinned at me, friendly despite his insults. "But I never figured grizzled, old goat-pokers to be your type, Kit. You and Jay Clemmons being so tight and all."
He laughed because he saw me turn red. "Let me put the top up by myself, this time," I said. "You watch, that's what you're good at."
He grinned and winced as if my weak return had actually pained him. I got the top up without his help and he grinned again. "You've stepped in it, you know," he said.
"Huh?" I checked my work to see if it was all okay and I couldn't see anything wrong.
He just laughed. "The top is okay, Kit. I meant you'd stepped into something good."
"You're not good at being mysterious, Short. What are you talking about?"
He glanced at where Mr. Hardiman was still talking to Skip Shipley. "I'm talking about thirty million dollars and a lonely old man, Kit," he said.
This from a jock going to fat before his time? "It isn't like that, I'm just his assistiant."
"Uh, huh. Mr. Shipley!" he called out. "We're done here."
Shipley waved a hand and Shortbill started back toward the shop, "If all he wanted was an assistant..." He let the sentence trail off, grinning at me. "I knew I should have tried you back in high school," he added before turning away.
I felt my face burning. I tried to get my mind around what had just happened and it wouldn't fit with any comfort at all.
*****
Chapter 3
Mr. Hardiman gave me instructions on how to get to the ranch, just in case, then he followed me out in his big red truck. The little Miata handled wonderfully, but what did I know? My only real driving experience had been with a van full of kids.
The Hardiman ranch had one of those big wooden arches over the road, like you see in movies. In the center of the arch was a representation of the Hardiman brand: a capital H with wide, wavy horns growing from the top, The Longhorn H. On the sign, the horns were real longhorns. Ed's grandad had founded the first Longhorn H in Montana back in the eighteen-nineties. Longhorn Henry Hardiman had been a lawman and bounty hunter, too; you could read about him in some histories of the West and in copies of fragile and faded old dime novels. I knew all this because it had been mentioned in Gordo's obituary in the local weekly paper, The Whitewater Rose-Gazette.
Behind the arch, desert grassland stretched away to the foothills and up the slopes of the mountain. It looked lonely and forbidding and a fit setting for the old melodrama about the Mexican road agent and his sweetheart, "The Tragic Love of the Whitewater Rose". Besides the newspaper, there was a Whitewater Rose Cafe in town and Rose's Rest, a touristy sort of general store near the lookout where Rose is supposed to have died of a broken heart while waiting for her lover who had already been hanged for killing her.Yeah, it's that kind of story. The weekend before Valentine's Day, a local group always performs the melodrama in the open air theater next to Rose's Rest.
But this was some of the last open range in California and fifteen ranchers leased parts of it from the federal Bureau of Land Management. Ed Hardiman didn't have the most cattle running on the range but he had enough.
Through the arch, the road split; one way turned uphill toward the ranchhouse and the other downhill toward the corrals, barns and equipment sheds of a working ranch. A big modern windmill pumped water from the local aquifer and further downhill, I could see more buildings and corrals. A few cowboys and mechanics were working at various tasks but Mr. Hardiman had said I should drive on up to the house and wait for him, so I turned that way and parked in front of the wide, one story building and turned the engine off.
The silence of a desert mountain is too big to be broken by the sounds of people working within a hundred yards or even the faraway, almost subliminal, hum of the Interstate freeway ten miles away and hidden by a low ridge. I could hear a jay scolding a squirrel and the lowing of cattle and a pot of something savory simmering.
I knocked on the door and called out before I went in. No one in the desert locks a door if they are to home, "Mrs. Lopez?" Mr. Hardiman had told me the name of his housekeeper and cook.
The wide front door had longhorns mounted over it, inside and out. The main room of the ranchhouse was about thirty feet long and half that wide; two long tables took up most of the space with a few smaller tables and assorted chairs. The walls were pine and the furniture oak and the wood floor covered with braided rugs from Mexico. A big TV in one corner and a very new computer in another looked almost out of place, but I smelled peppers, beef, tomatoes, beans and tortillas cooking and that certainly fit.
Mrs. Lopez came out of the kitchen and smiled at me, "Ed told me you are called Kit?" she said. "I'm not called Mrs. Lopez, I'm Juanita." She had dark hair with just a touch of gray and looked to be a bit older than my mother but might even be as old as Mr. Hardiman. She had that plumpness that good cooks tend toward, comfortable looking, not fat.
It would be very difficult to call her by her first name but I gave it a try, "Pleased to meet you, uh, Juanita." I probably blushed and she laughed.
"Are you hungry?" she asked.
"Not really, are you cooking lunch already?"
She nodded. "Oh, yes, I feed the hands, too. There are going to be fifteen of them eating here today."
"Do you need any help in the kitchen?" I asked.
She seemed surprised. "Sure, always something to do, come on in and we can talk."
I followed her into the large ranch kitchen, making note of the oversize, fairly modern appliances. Two younger women were working in there already, "These are my daughters-in-law, Julie and Rosie. Their husbands, my sons, have cattle on the ranch and work here, too," Juanita explained. They both nodded and smiled at me. Rosie seemed likely to be Hispanic like Juanita but I took Julie for one of the local Indians. "This is Kit, Ed Hardiman's boy friend."
I blushed at the description and the women all giggled. Rosie hid her mouth when she did so but Julie laughed right out loud. "What you said, Mama Juana!"
"What did I say?" Juanita asked but her eyes twinkled.
"She's just having fun, Kit," Julie told me.
"Um, what did you need me to do, uh, Juanita?" I asked.
Rosie was making tortillas on the griddle so fast it looked like a high speed film of a surreal checker game. Julie had been stirring a pot of something. Juanita went to one of the ovens, "I got to get the roasts out, you can check in the cooler for some green things to cut up?" she told me, gesturing toward a walk-in almost as large as the one at our deli.
"Okay," I agreed. I found some lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, radishes and cucumbers and got busy. The women talked cheerfully and shot me amused glances as I cut up the vegetables and arranged them on three large platters.
"Wow, Kit," Julie commented, "you making us look bad. The boys are going to be afraid to eat it, it's so pretty!"
Juanita laughed, while she carved two roasts into thick slices. Julie took some biscuits out of another oven. "Some of the gringos won't eat tortillas," she told me.
More laughter. Shyly, Rosie handed me a fresh tortilla hot off the grill. I rolled it up and ate it quickly. "Thanks. Nothing like it, they don't know what they are missing. This is delicious." Rosie smiled at me.
Julie went to finish setting the table and Juanita asked me, "You going to be living out here, Kit?"
"I don't know? Mr. Hardiman hasn't really said. I had the impression that he wanted to...travel?"
She nodded. "He's going to sell the ranch to my boys, I guess. Half the cattle are theirs anyway, but they can't pay him cash." She shrugged. "Eddie--my son Eduardo--was born out here; Ed, Old Ed, says it belongs to my family as much as to his." She beamed.
Mr. Hardiman would probably think of something so the ranch could continue. Certainly, none of his kids really wanted to work the place. Gordo had loved the ranch, I had heard, but only as a place to live in the off-season. The rodeo had called him away and eventually caused his death. Ranch life didn't have enough excitement.
The house seemed suddenly full of dusty men in boots and wide hats. I didn't get many of their names and remembered even fewer of them later. A handful I had seen around once in a while, in town or even in the Deli and those, of course, knew my name. "Kit!" called one of them. "Can you make me one of those beef sandwiches with the little Italian peppers?" I treated it as a joke and handed him the bowl of jalapenos, which got a lot of laughs.
Ed Hardiman came in flanked by two large Hispanic young men. They looked alike and had something of Juanita in their wide, brown faces. Neither was as tall as Mr. Hardiman but either would have outweighed him by twenty pounds or more.
"Kit!" he called to me. "Come, sit down and eat. Juanita put you to work, huh?" he grinned and motioned to some empty chairs at the head end of the table.
I sat down on his left side and Juanita's two sons, for that's who they certainly were, sat down on the other side. "These fellows are Eddie and Johnny Lopez." They nodded at me, their eyes twinkling with hints of their mother's humor. "I'm gonna sell them the ranch," he added.
We ate for awhile and conversation moved in fits and starts as men came and went at the long tables. I learned that Mr. Hardiman intended to give "the boys" half of the ranch and sell them the other half, financed over twenty years. The land leases were in his name for another seven years, which should give them enough time to work something out with the BLM, assuming the environmentalists didn't end up shutting down ranching entirely in this part of the state. Some of the non-BLM land was already in their names, gifts at various times over the years.
Conversation at the table took place at high volume with lots of enthusiasm. Everyone must have known what was going on between the bosses but no one spoke of it directly. I listened to everything and tried not to feel to out of place.
The cowhand on the other side of me was named, "Dooley", apparently. "You taking the boss away from us, Kit?" he asked me.
"Uh, no?" I said.
He grinned, tobacco-stained teeth in a tobacco-colored face. "Ed's a good guy, but he ain't hardly been pulling his weight these last few years!" he said loudly. "Getting old, I reckon!"
Several people laughed and Mr. Hardiman turned to regard Dooley with a smile. "You're talking to the laziest man on the Longhorn-H, Kit. Dooley Grainger ain't afeared of work, 'cause he's never done any of it."
"Duly noted," the cowboy said. "But the boss kept me on all these years 'cause I'm the only one that'll listen to him complain." More laughter. I had the feeling that a deep relationship existed among the hands at the Longhorn-H, one of friendship, deprecating humor, and respect. Dooley had hands ridged with calluses and rope scars and in the several years Ed Hardiman had been coming into the Hiway 60 Deli, I'd never heard him complain about anything.
I got a lot of looks, mostly smiling, and even got kidded about being so skinny, which I wasn't really. Some of the looks had an odd quality, speculative. It made me uncomfortable.
Big Ed and Mexican Ed, as the hands sometimes called Mr. Hardiman and Eddie Lopez (even though Eddie was the bigger person, weight-wise), were deep in conversation about cattle prices and bank loans. Eddie bounced up a few times to go print something out on the computer to bring back for discussion. "Save a lot of time if you'd look at the screen, Ed," he grumbled at one point.
"I've yet to be bitten by one of those things," said Big Ed, "and I aim to keep it that way. The paper means a lot more to me."
"Yeah, yeah," Eddie Lopez waved his hand and laughed.
Something in my expression must have attracted Johnny Lopez's attention. He grinned at me from across the table, "Kinda whiff, ain't we?" he said.
"I-i'm sorry?" I stammered.
"The smell, sweat and leather, and stuff we've stepped in." He grinned, "Sorry we didn't take time to get cleaned up a bit, but this is how it is."
I smiled nervously, unsure of how I was supposed to react. Mr. Hardiman turned and grinned at me, "What do you think, Kit? You like the smell of cowboys?"
I know my face lit up like a stoplight and several of the cowhands laughed at his joke. "I don't know, Mr. Hardiman," I said seriously. "I guess the improtant thing is do cows like the smell of cowboys?"
And they really roared at that. Their boss and mine just chuckled and looked pleased. I grinned at him, pleased myself that I had made a comeback.
"You're going to 'Mr. Hardiman' me to death, Kit. If we're around bankers or something, it's okay but otherwise just call me Ed."
I never called adults by their first names unless they told me to, but no one else here called him Mr. Hardiman and I could see how it might make him uncomfortable for me to do so. "Okay, Ed," I said, trying it out.
He laughed and put one of his big gnarly hands over mine and squeezed it. If he had squeezed as hard as he probably could, it would have broken all the bones in my hand but this was a light squeeze. Maybe like one a grandfather would give a grandson, maybe not.
The hands came and went over a period of about an hour and a half; some of them napped in the big padded chairs in the corners of the wide room, some watched TV or grumbled that Eddie had the computer tied up with business. Maybe others did other things but I stayed with Ed and the Lopez brothers while they talked business. I listened; it seemed to me to consist mostly of Eddie and Johnny trying to talk my boss out of basically giving them the ranch.
"You stubborn old fart," Johnny said at one point, then he looked at me and murmured, "Sorry, Kit." Like I hadn't heard the word 'fart' before?
The women came in and began cleaning things up. That made me restless, I wasn't used to sitting while someone else did such work.
Julie took the opportunity to rub her thigh against Eddie's shoulder when she reached past him to retrieve his plate. He grinned and swatted her lightly but kept on talking. "That's it?" she complained. "No wonder we only have the one kid!"
Rosie got the giggles and Juanita scowled and laughed at the same time. A few of the hands still in the room made semi-lewd remarks and Ed announced, "Palaver's over. Kit and I are going into the city to find a place to live that isn't overrun with cowboys."
"Just one, huh?" Julie asked which confused me for a moment.
Ed stood and shook hands with the brothers, "I'll have Buzzard Mendoza draw it all up and make it legal. Kit, we have to be going, it's near to two o'clock." I stood also and the Lopez brothers shook hands with me, too, while Julie gave Ed a big hug. By 'Buzzard Mendoza', Ed probably meant Art Mendoza, a lawyer and C.P.A. in town who did most of the legal work for the ranchers in the area. I'd never heard him called Buzzard before but it kind of fit; he was tall and stooped with the lugubrious expression of a cartoon undertaker.
There was a lot of handshaking and backslapping and some of the big old cowhands looked kind of sad but Ed smiled and joked as he said goodbye to his former employees. Before we left, Juanita gave me a hug, then Julie and then Rosie hugged me. It kind of felt right; we were always hugging in my family too.
As we walked out the door, Ed did a little hop and hung his rancher's hat on the longhorns over the door. "And there let it stay," he said, still smiling. The Lopez boys nodded and I knew it would still be there as long as they lived if Ed didn't come back to claim it.
*****
Chapter 4
I rode into Palm Springs with Ed driving the convertible. "We don't want to live in the Springs," he said. "Too damn hot in the summer time, but it's the closest place to get nice clothes."
"Clothes?" I said, watching the desert stream by and listening to the little air leaks that, I found out, even a new convertible has.
"Yup. I'm not a cowboy anymore, Kit. I shook hands with the Lopez boys and they own my ranch now. I don't think it's right to dress like a cowboy if you're not one." He grinned to show that was some kind of joke and ran his free hand through his nearly black, curly hair.
I'd have to get used to seeing him without his rancher's hat, I realized. "So what kind of clothes are you going to get?"
"I'm not sure," he said. "What kind of comfortable clothes does a rich old man wear?"
I mulled that over for a minute but anyway I looked at it, it made me smile. I couldn't imagine what Ed would look like without his rancher's hat and blue jeans and wide leather belt.
He saw me smiling and grinned again. "We'll get you some new clothes, too."
That thought embarrassed me and I kept smiling to hide it. "I don't need new clothes, Mr. Hardiman."
"Ed," he reminded me. "Sure you do, Kit. You're not just a kid working in a deli anymore, you're a rich old man's favorite assistant."
I didn't say anything for a bit, still letting things settle into place in my mind. The whole situation kept looking different from different angles, first one thing then another then something else.
"I'm still not sure about what I'm supposed to be doing for you, uh, Ed," I ventured after a bit.
"You'll figure it out as you go along, Kit," he said, still smiling.
*****
There are a lot of expensive places to buy clothes in Palm Springs. It rather surprised me when Ed drove directly to one and didn't cruise past several before finding the one he wanted. This place was called Mr. K's and the sign wasn't that large. We parked in the lot and walked toward the side door of the stucco and glass building.
"Don't let me make myself look foolish, Kit," Ed asked before we went in.
"Yes, sir," I said, having no other idea how to reply to that.
Inside, there were displays of clothing on slim, manly mannequins and there were several slim, manly sales people waiting on customers. One of the salesmen gave us a look, that look, but before he started toward us another man, older and wiser looking somehow nudged him aside and approached us. "Mr. Hardiman?" he asked.
Ed looked pleased and I realized he must have called ahead. "Yes, I'm Ed and this is my assistant, Kit."
"I'm Cooper," said the salesman with a nod toward me, "Mr. Kreuzlieber asked me to help you find what you needed. A couple of good business suits and some casual clothes? Is that correct?"
"Yeah," Ed drawled. He seemed amused by the attention. "And some clothes for Kit here, too."
Cooper, first name or last I never found out, glanced at me and said in a slightly louder voice, "Temple, would you help young Kit find some clothing?"
Temple turned out to be a taller, blonder, slimmer version of Cooper who stepped up and introuduced himself. "Shall I take your measurements, Kit?" I nodded and he used his tape to quickly measure me, "Are you going to be needing shoes?" he asked at one point.
"I guess so," I said looking down at my slightly ratty sneakers.
"Have a seat," he said, indicating a plush chair.
I sat and looked around again. There were two other customers, or perhaps in a place like this, clients. Both were getting the same level of personal attention that Ed and I were receiving. Thinking about how much this would cost made me nervous but I tried not to show it.
Temple got out one of those foot-measuring caliper things and pulled a stool over. He saw me looking toward where Ed was being shown suit fabrics. "Let me take off your shoes," he said and did so. There was something about Temple that made me nervous, too. The way he spoke, the way he moved, the way he wore his clothes.
He grinned at me from under brows I felt sure he had plucked to achieve such a perfect arch. "Where did you meet--him?" he asked.
"At the deli where I work--worked," I said, keeping it simple. He took off my shoes and even my socks, then slipped a pair of silky, blue socks on in their place before measuring my feet.
"Ah, hah," said Temple through his nose. "You take a 6-1/2B, probably a 7 in some styles, is that right?"
I nodded, my small feet and hands had been rather embarrassing at times but this whole situation had begun to overload those circuits. Ed waved at me from behind one of the racks of suit coats.
I waved back. Temple glanced up, saw Ed and chuckled. "Oh, he's a hunk, isn't he?" he whispered.
I felt my face get hot, okay, the embarrassment circuits hadn't completely burned out. "It's--" I began but gave it up. No simple way of denying Temple's inferences came to mind; at least, none that weren't just as embarrassing as letting him think whatever he wanted to think.
He slipped some leather sandals on my feet and stood up. "Let's look at some fabric, shall we?" I followed him toward some racks of cloth. "You're a spring," he commented. That left me blank for a moment until it made sense in context. "Harder to find good business suit colors for you. Perhaps a pearl-gray with a narrow royal stripe?" He showed me what he meant and put a length of the cloth in my hand.
I'd never felt cloth like that, soft, smooth--"It's silk!" I said.
"Well, yes," he nodded. "It's crazy to wear wool in Southern California?"
The fabric was a soft, warm, pale gray with a stripe of blue in it so faint as to be almost imaginary. It was a beautiful piece of cloth and I guess my face showed what I thought of it because Temple laughed softly and said, "Yes, this will do nicely."
We picked another similar fabric in an off-black color for a more formal suit, and then we began choosing shirts. Royal blue seemed a natural choice but I balked a little when Temple picked a couple of shirts in a sort of peachy-pink. "I don't think I could wear those," I said.
"Trust me," said Temple. "You'll look fabulous in these colors." He grinned. "You're young, you've got a rich 'friend', you might as well dress the part." I could hear the quote marks in the way he said 'friend'.
I didn't argue because I couldn't think of how to begin and Temple threw me off stride with his next question. I had to ask him to repeat it, not because I didn't hear it but because I didn't believe he had asked.
"How're your legs? I bet you have nice legs," he added the second time and he giggled.
"I don't really know," I said honestly. "I've never thought about it."
He looked at me oddly. "You're pretty new at this?"
I nodded. New at everything but I didn't want to think too hard about just what he meant by 'this'.
"Okay, well, everyone in the Springs wears shorts; we'll get you a few pair." He picked up a set in an unlikely shade of--I can't think what to call the color--hot burgundy? He handed me the shorts and a knit polo in blue-green. "Try these," he urged. "We'll see how you look." He inclined his head toward the dressing area.
Reluctantly, I went behind the partition and pulled a curtain across the opening. I took off my good Levi's and the white shirt I had been wearing and tried on the shorts. They fit, a bit snug in the back and more than a bit shorter than any shorts I'd ever worn before. The shirt fit well too and did a lot to conceal the fact that I carried a bit too much softness around my middle.
The mirror didn't lie, I did look good in those colors but the cut of the shorts bothered me. "If they didn't have a fly, they'd be hot pants," I muttered to myself.
The curtain flew aside and Temple regarded me. "Oh, yes!" he enthused. "And you have fabulous legs!"
Startled, all I could think to say was, "I do?"
*****
We finally left Mr. K's with a few parcels, and more to be sent to our hotel. I didn't say anything about that until we were in the car. "Our hotel? When did we get a hotel room?"
Ed laughed. "I called in reservations early this morning, and it's not a room, it's a suite. I think you'll like it."
I mulled that over. Something about the easy way Ed moved through this environment was bothering me. I'd been talked into wearing the burgundy shorts and blue polo shirt out and I had on a pair of shoes brought over from the cobbler next door to Mr. K's--sneaks that probably cost more than my sister's books and fees at the local junior college. I had no way of reckoning up how much the shopping excursion might have cost since there were no prices anywhere visible in Mr. K's shop.
We drove on down the boulevard and turned in at one of the more expensive hotels in town. And Palm Springs has some expensive hotels; even in the summer off-season this would not be a cheap place to stay. "Ed, have you done this sort of thing before?" I finally managed to ask.
A parking valet opening my door, just as Ed stopped the car, startled me and saved Ed from replying just then. We got out of the car, Ed took the chit offered by the attendant and we went inside, into the cool of the lobby. For August in Palm Springs, it was actually quite pleasant outside, not above 95 degrees F. In my shorts and thin shirt, I suddenly felt a little chilly.
Ed dealt with the desk while I just looked around. Marble floors, statuary, fountains, tall colonnaded windows, long marble-topped desks and tables, four couches and several over-stuffed chairs decorated in some Renaisance-themed print, the furnishings of the lobby were probably worth more than the city hall of the town where I grew up.
I noticed two men standing near the entrance of the restaurant were looking at me. They were both tall, with moustaches and sleek haircuts and they wore--well, they were wearing what were basically versions of what I wore--shorts, sneaks and a polo shirt. But their chests and arms were heavily muscled and their legs were hairy. I knew I must look like a little kid next to them. One smiled at me and raised his eyebrows.
I turned away quickly and looked for Ed. He motioned me toward him and I went and stood next to him while he finished with the desk. "We're expecting some packages to arrive, just send them up to the suite, please," he told the deskman.
"Very good, Mr. Hardiman," agreed the clerk. "Alfredo, would you please take our guests and their luggage up to their room."
A smiling Hispanic bellman pushed a cart holding the purchases we had brought with us and my one small bag from home and Ed's two larger ones toward the elevators. "These way, senors," he said in a soft, buzzing, Central American accent. He told us about the amenities the hotel offered; a gym, two pools, restaurants, bars, a night club on the roof, dry cleaners, shoe repair, etc. Why would a hotel in Palm Springs need a tanning salon?
Ed laughed and joked with the man in border Spanglish but the bellman stuck to English until I had murmured something in my high school Spanish to indicate that I understood the language, "As long as no one speaks too fast."
Alfredo laughed, "You have the accent of Madrid! It is charming." I blushed and Ed winked at me.
Alfredo showed us the room, the bar, the phone and the air-conditioning and window blind controls--electric window blinds--and Ed gave him a five and he left. The suite had a wide main room with couches, a computer desk (but no computer), a big screen TV, the bar, and a tiny kitchenette. A balcony gave a view of the mountain and the hotel swimming pools and a large bedroom opened off each side with a magnificent bathroom apiece. I wanted to ask Ed how much this was costing but I realized it really didn't matter. Somehow that didn't make me feel better about it.
"Something bothering you, Kit?" Ed drawled, tossing his new hat on the polished bar.
"Yes, sir?" I said. "I guess so, I mean? Have you been here before?"
He nodded. "Not in this room, I have to admit I splurged a bit this time, but yes, I've spent a few weekends in the Springs over the years--and this is a real nice place, isn't it?"
I squinted through the blinds at the desert brightness and debated with myself how to phrase the next question. "Ed," I finally asked, "I'm just supposed to be your assistant and--uh, gopher?"
Ed looked at me directly, "If that's all you want to be, Kit," he said. His eyes were calm and kind. He smiled slightly.
"I told you--I'm not gay?" I said, feeling small hairs all over my body rising up in a reaction to...what?
"And I said that I'm not either," he agreed. "Gay men are not interested in women; I am." He kept smiling, keeping his arms and hands at his side. He looked powerful and confident, but not threatening. Waiting.
His statement should have gone a long way to relieving my anxiety but it didn't, not really. I swallowed hard. Things were happening that I didn't understand. Not just the way Ed was acting but the way I was reacting. I didn't feel sure about anything. "You left something out," I said.
His smile widened a bit, "Perhaps you did, too?"
I turned away. "Which room is mine?" I asked.
"Take your pick," said Ed.
I walked to the room on the side opposite the kitchen and took a look again. The enormous bed had a rust-colored covering and the furnishings were dark and rich looking. The walls were warm tan with chestnut trim. The bathroom fixtures were coppery, the porcelain a pale butterscotch.
I backed out and looked toward Ed, puttering around the bar. "I'm going to fix myself a drink," he said. "What would you like?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Have you ever had Kahlua?" he asked.
I moved toward the other bedroom. "That's a liquor?"
"A liqueur, coffee liqueur."
I shook my head, "No, I've never. I don't drink." I stopped in the doorway of the other bedroom. It looked just like I remembered from the short 'tour'. The bedcover here was sea-green, the walls pale aqua. The wood furnishings were dark but not heavy and the bathroom fixtures were bright pale brass with seafoam porcelain. I turned back toward Ed, "I'll take this room."
He nodded as if there hadn't really been any doubt. He held out a glass full of something golden with ice; I could smell spicy, citrusy, coffee-flavored bubbles. "It's 'A Cold Day in the Yucatan'," he said, grinning. "Drinks always have such foolish names."
I took the glass, "Is that what this is called?" It did smell wonderful and the first taste was even better. "Wow?" I commented.
He laughed, delighted at my reaction. "You like it?"
"Yeah? I guess so," I said, taking another sip. "This is like--coffee-and-orange-flavored soda pop?"
He nodded. "It's pretty mild; when they make them in a real bar, they add a jolt of white rum or tequila." He held his glass up as if toasting and made a question with his bushy eyebrows.
I held my glass up, too, unfamiliar with such rituals.
"To discoveries," said Ed and we both took a drink.
*****
Chapter 5
Later we went to dinner in a restaurant nearby. There were tables set under awnings around a pool and fountain. It wasn't busy but there were a few other people there, most of them casually dressed as were we. Five other pairs and a trio. Only one of the pairs seemed to be a man and a woman of about the same age. Two of the other 'couples' and the trio were made up of older men and young women. Two men who might have been in their thirties sat nearest us and across the pool sat a man about Ed's age and--a boy.
At least, I felt sure it must be a boy for the lack of hips and breasts, but whoever it was wore a bit of makeup and jewelry. He must have been about my age but he looked younger.
I felt very odd.
Ed ordered for us after asking me if I wanted steak or seafood or both. "Steak," I said without thinking too much about it. If I had said seafood he might have offered me the choice of more than one kind and I had very little experience with such dishes. Shrimp cocktail that comes in little jelly jars doesn't count.
The waiter thanked Ed, smiled at me and nanced away. I cringed a little.
Ed laughed. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable, Kit. Maybe we should go somewhere else to eat?"
"It's okay," I told him. I'd known Palm Springs reputation for such things but I'd never experienced it first hand. "I guess I'm getting an education."
He nodded, still smiling. "Yeah, I guess so. Speaking of which, you've planned to get an education, I know. What had you thought of doing after that?"
I thought hard for a moment and realized I hadn't made any real plans. "I guess, I'd thought I'd go back to help Mom with the store while the other kids grew up?"
"That's not much of an ambition for such a bright young person as yourself," he said.
"Well, Alison would like to make a doctor if she can, she's the smart one in the family. I thought a two-year degree in business stuff...for me." I trailed off, realizing slowly that a lot more opportunities had opened up for my whole family.
Ed rested his chin on his knobby knuckles, looking at me without saying anything for a long time. "What do you really want out of life, Kit?" he asked softly.
I couldn't answer. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I had no idea what I might have said if I could have spoken but all the mental gears seemed jammed.
*****
During the dinner, Ed avoided putting me on the spot again with such a direct question. He asked me about school and which classes I enjoyed most and who my friends were.
He told me about growing up in a much emptier land, about riding his horse once for three days without seeing another human being. "I'm comfortable being alone," he said. "But I've given up on feeling lonely."
For some reason that comment made my ears burn.
The waiter brought the dessert tray but neither of us had any room. Ed signed the chit and we headed back to our suite.
In the elevator, Ed smiled at me.
I noticed that he was still smiling at me. "What?" I asked, suddenly nervous again.
He shook his head, "Never mind." Neither of us said anything more until Ed had used the electronic key to unlock the door of our room. He held it open and closed it behind us. Something seemed odd about that and I turned back to look at him.
He turned that same smile on me again. "You're a wonder, Kit," he said.
"Me?" I hoped my voice didn't squeak.
"Yes," he said. "You're kind and thoughtful, smart and as wise as someone your age has any hope of being--and you're a good-looking kid, too."
"I'm not," I protested.
"But you are," he insisted.
I looked away from him, something about his expression made me very uncomfortable. "If you aren't gay..." I said so softly I thought he might not hear me, "...why do I keep...why do you...?" I couldn't make a sensible question of it. I felt my neck and face burning with embarrassment.
"And if you're not gay?" he asked only a little bit louder.
I made a noise.
"There's a foolishness in the world, Kit," he said. "Fools believe that there are only two kinds of people; gay or straight, liberal or conservative, righteous or sinful, male or female." He paused and it seemed that a roar inside my head filled the silence but when he spoke again I could hear him just as plain. "The truth is, none of us are all one thing, Kit."
I found something to sit on and hid my face in my hands. "What do you mean?" I asked.
"You might be surprised how many people look at you, Kit, and think--what a beautiful girl you could have been." He looked confidently at me. "Has the thought ever occurred to you?"
The room seemed to have expanded and contracted quickly, invisibly. Noises I hadn't noticed before suddenly got so loud that I couldn't get my mind around what Ed had said. I swallowed and looked up at him. "This whole assistant thing, what's this about, Mr. Hardiman? You don't really need an assistant, do you?"
Ed sat down on the couch facing me, "Sure, I do, Kit." His big face with all its friendly wrinkles smiled at me. "But if you're willing, you could be more than that. And it's 'Ed', remember?"
I shook my head, afraid of what I thought he meant. What did he mean? Did I want to know? How in the world could I ask?
We sat silent for a bit, I couldn't seem to put my thoughts together and Ed had the patience to wait me out. I worked on the idea of Ed, and other people, thinking I might have been beautiful as a girl. I wasn't comfortable with the thought. Besides it just being ridiculous, was the fact that Ed had come right out and said it. I finally said, "I can't imagine this working out, between us, uh, Ed? I mean...."
I couldn't think of how to say what I meant. The relationship between Ed and me seemed about to change radically. Or had it ever been what I thought it was?
"I told you I'm not gay," Ed repeated when I didn't finish my protest. "And you're not either, you said." He shook his head. " I'm not interested in men or boys in my bed, Kit. And this doesn't have to go that way." What way? That little addition so derailed my thinking that I almost missed hearing the next sentence. "I do want to see you as you could be, though."
I didn't say anything; nothing seemed to make sense, so he went on. "Kit, there's no shame in this, or there doesn't have to be. I'm a rich old man and I want to do a little good in this world before I get planted. And I'd like to see you the way I've been imagining you for the last few years." He sighed. "There's no gentle way to say this. Kit, I think I'm in love with the woman you could be."
That revelation shocked me so that I jerked as if someone had yanked on my invisible strings. All this time, with Ed coming in once or twice a week to the deli -- this is what he'd been thinking about? "You want me to dress as a girl? You want to see what I'd look like as a girl?" I stammered. "Have you looked at Alison?" I tried to make a joke of it.
"Alison isn't you, Kit," he said simply. "She's a pretty girl and she'll probably make a fine doctor some day. But she doesn't have your--aliveness, your spark, I don't know what to call it. Personality? Charisma? It's not just looks."
I shook my head again. "Mr. Hardiman..." I began.
"Ed," he interrupted, correcting me again. "Kit, you listen to people, you look them in the eye and you care about them. Alison has a little of that and that's good, she'll make a better doctor for it. But she's...I don't want to say anything bad about your sister." He grinned. "But she's selfish; she's got an ego and a temper--she does the right thing because it matters to her, to what she thinks of herself. Kit, you just do the right thing without thinking about it. Because it is the right thing."
The look in his eyes made me uncomfortable so I looked away and tried to think about what he had said. He sort of had Alison nailed with that description. I often wondered if maybe she should go into politics like Dad had been thinking of, and maybe she would eventually. Sometimes I thought that Alison wanting to be a doctor might have been her way of making sending her to college matter enough to Mom so that it would happen.
But his description of me--how could he think that? "I can't believe you're saying these things," I managed.
"I can't either," he admitted. He leaned forward a little and his big, weather-beaten face crinkled into a grin. "I feel like a fool, but I'm a rich fool now. I can afford to be foolish. And like I said, I want to do some good in the world--what would you think about an education trust fund to send all of your brothers and sisters to college when and if they want to go?"
"You...? I'm not sure what you mean?" I didn't want to say what I thought he meant. My throat almost closed off with the effort of not thinking too hard about it. I felt scared and I wasn't sure of what.
He looked off, at the mountain visible outside our hotel room. Beyond it lay his ranch and the Hiway 60 Deli where my Mom and sisters and Curtis would be beginning the clean-up soon. "I'll set up such a fund, Kit, for you and all of your mom's kids, send all of you to college. We'll figure out how much it will take, not more than a million or three, I'd guess," he said. "I'll do that if you'll do something for me, Kit." His voice was gentle but his words were hitting me like dirt clods.
I squinched my eyes tight shut. "But, Ed, we're neither of us gay, we both already said that?" I started crying; that really surprised me. Soft hot tears ran down my cheeks and into the corners of my mouth, salty and fearful. Ed stood up, stepped close and put a hand on my shoulder. I trembled, I thought he might be about to hug me which would have been what happened at home if anyone of the family had started crying. 'Hug first, ask questions later.' Mom had that on a pillow her mother had given her.
But Ed just stood there next to the chair, resting his hard, rancher's hand on my shoulder. "That's not what I'm asking, Kit," he said softly. "I don't know if you've actually tried it but I'm an old man and I know I'm not gay because I have tried it."
That was another shocker. I just shook my head and wiped my eyes with a tissue. The idea of Ed Hardiman with another man just seemed wrong. My hands were shaking and before I knew it, I had completely shredded the tissue.
"What are you afraid of, Kit?" Ed asked quietly.
"I don't know," I murmured. And I didn't, not really. I wasn't afraid of Ed but what he wanted me to do--whatever it was--did scare me. It was the unknown, the wondering what might happen next that had me scared I decided.
"I'm not asking you to go to bed with me, Kit. I just want to--see the you that I've been imagining now for several years." He laughed softly. "Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Maybe it is, it's kept me awake nights wondering about it. But I swear I'm harmless." He held up both hands, showing me his palms and grinning.
I smiled, it was hard not to smile when Ed grinned like that, all goofy cowboy charm. I thought about the trust fund he was offering. "I don't know, I mean...no one else knows about this...no one else would have to know?" I asked. My heart seemed to have fallen into my stomach as I realized what I had just said. How could I be thinking of doing this?
"I won't tell them," he promised. "If you do this for me, we won't go where anyone will be likely to know you."
"Wh-what exactly do you want me to do?" I asked swallowing back a big lump of fear and embarrassment. Why in the world was I even discussing it, I wondered.
He just looked at me for a moment, then he moved away and turned toward the windows. It was his turn to sigh. "I don't want you to do this if you aren't going to be happy, Kit." he said.
"Well, I don't even know for sure what you want me to do?" I protested.
He nodded and turned back to look at me; his bushy dark eyebrows in silhouette for a moment against the window looked like bushes clinging to a rugged mountainside. "Look, how about I just go ahead and set up that education fund, anyway? I don't want to twist your arm. I wouldn't hurt you or make you unhappy for the world, Kit."
That sounded good but was scary in its own way. "I still don't know what you want exactly?" I said.
"First, the trust fund is yours and your family's, I promise, Kit. And I'm going to set one up for the Lopez kids, too. And my grandkids, I suppose." He grinned again. "Thirty million doesn't go near as far as it used to."
I smiled and said, "Thank you, Ed."
He rubbed a hand through his curly, dark hair. "I...this is so hard to ask. I'm just an old man with a crazy idea, I guess."
"That...that you're...in love with me?" I stammered. It was definitely a crazy idea; it made my insides feel like hot jelly.
He nodded, looking a bit embarrassed. "With the girl...you could have been? It's like a fantasy I've had, since about the time you started high school?"
The hair on the back of my neck got all creepy feeling. None of us ever knows what anyone else thinks about us, but this went beyond strange.
"I don't know how or why it happened, but I kind of have an idea. I lost a granddaughter about that time," he said. "Gordo's oldest girl was killed by a hit-and-run driver; she was just a month older than you. Her name was Kathleen and she was called Kitten, too. Her mother, Marcy, had divorced Gordo years before; she and the kids lived up in Oregon. Kitten was on her way to school, on her bike."
He looked out toward the mountain again as if he could see Oregon out there. Then he went on. "I got the news in a letter, not even a phone call. I was reading it in your Mom's deli and I had to sit down. You asked me what was wrong; I looked at you and thought, if Gordo had married your mom, you could have been my granddaughter and you'd still be here and alive."
"But I'm a boy!" I said, startled again.
He turned back to face me again. "I know. Fantasies don't need any excuses, Kit. They don't listen to reason."
I gulped. "You...I--I'm not your granddaughter, Ed. I don't want to be your granddaughter..." That was true but somehow it came out sounding as if I'd meant to say something else. I felt confused and afraid again.
He didn't say anything for a while, just sat back down in the fancy chair and looked at me. It was my turn to get up and walk around for a bit. I didn't seem to have anything else to say.
Finally, Ed started talking again. "Marcy hated the desert, she wouldn't bring the kids down for a visit. I went up there a few times a year, just so I could see them. Marcy didn't like that either." He grinned. "The two younger kids took more after their father, actually. Kathleen looked like her mom, slender, dark blond hair, gray eyes. I guess she was my favorite, even if grampas aren't supposed to play favorites."
I remembered Gordo vaguely and there were pictures around town of him, our local minor celebrity. Ed's curly black hair and blue eyes, but a face that was less long and more conventionally handsome. The Indian nose from his mother's Cherokee ancestors and a wide, white grin had made him look a bit like one of the old cowboy movie stars. I didn't remember if I had ever met Gordo's wife or kids. But Ed's description of Kathleen sounded like someone from my own family.
Outside, the desert night came quickly. Lights on the mountain marked the tramway up to where people skied in the winter. We sat and watched the night fall and didn't say anything for quite a while. "I don't really understand what you want, Ed," I finally said.
"Humor me, Kit. I'm a rich old man who's suddenly much, much richer. When you're rich enough, you're not crazy, you're eccentric." He grinned and I laughed a little. "I've been watching you grow up and I've been getting more and more--eccentric for the last few years. Waiting for you to turn eighteen--and then what? I wasn't sure."
He grinned at me ruefully, it was getting dark in the room and his teeth flashed in the shadows of his face. "Then I won the lottery and I realized I could afford to be--very, very eccentric. I suddenly had thirty million reasons to do everything I'd ever wanted to do." He paused. "And there you were in the Deli.... I won't try to bribe you again but I'm asking you as a favor to me..." He trailed off both sentences.
"What is it you want me to do?" I felt like crying again but managed to keep my voice from cracking or whining.
"It sounds crazy," Ed said after a moment of silence.
"It does," I agreed.
"I just want to see what you'd be like, Kit," he said. "I think you would be very good-looking as a girl."
I sighed. "Well, I'm not very good-looking as a guy, why would I look better?"
"It's just a crazy idea," he said.
"No one has to know?" I asked.
"No one back home, no one who knows you now. Unless you decide to tell them," said Ed.
"No, no," I said. "I don't want anyone to know..."
"Then you will do it?" He grinned.
"I--I guess so, Ed," I admitted. "I mean, it's a little crazy, like you said. But it sounds harmless?"
He nodded, still smiling. "I've got some people lined up to help you, but no one you know from back home."
"Help me," I said. I felt I needed help but not necessarily the kind Ed was offering.
"Hair, makeup, clothing," Ed said. "That kind of stuff.. I'll pay for everything, of course."
I felt like I'd been tossed into a lake of boiling ice. "When?"
"Starting tomorrow." He stood again, "And you can change your mind at anytime. Okay, Kit?"
I nodded, afraid to use my voice for fear of sounding as scared as I felt.
"Think of it as an adventure," Ed said on his way toward the bar. "Can I make you a fresh drink?"
I didn't want another drink so I just shook my head, I hadn't really wanted the first one. He made one for himself with lots of ice, a splash of amber liquid and some water. I just sat and watched him, afraid to get up and leave and afraid to stay. He came back and sat in the print-upholstered chair again.
"Are you happy, Kit?" he asked. He took a sip of the drink.
"Right now?" I said. "Uh, I don't think so. Mostly I'm scared out of my mind, almost."
He smiled. "Being afraid when you're about to do something new is only sensible. But are you generally happy, Kit. Most days, most times?"
I thought about it. "I'm happy some of the time," I said. "No one's happy all of the time."
He nodded. "No one I've ever known," he agreed. "But do you feel happy about being you, doing what you do and planning to do the things you've got planned for yourself?"
I frowned. That was a harder question. "I'm not even sure what you mean, Ed?" But suddenly, I felt the tears coming.
"I'm sorry, Kit," he said quietly. "I do want to make you happy if I can."
I stood and headed for my room. "Good night, Ed," I managed. I really couldn't figure out why I was about to cry but I wanted to get away before it became obvious.
"Good night, Kitten." The nickname startled me though people had been calling me that for years. "I'm going to make some phone calls and we can sleep in, in the morning," Ed said. I made a noise to show that I had heard him and closed my bedroom door behind me.
Desert nights...
Thirty Million
Reasons
I threw myself across the big, blue-green bed and tried to sort out my feelings. Fear, dread, gratitude, suspicion, shame, guilt--they all made a kind of emotional stew inside me, bubbling away and overcooking my brain. I felt sick and for a moment wondered if I were going to lose the dinner I'd eaten, but the nausea passed as I lay there.
There was something else, though. A curiousity, an excitement--it was like getting picked out of high school to join the Dodgers' farm team even though you'd only ever been third string. It was like being told you have a terminal disease that will make all your doctors famous. It was like winning the lottery but thinking that somehow you'd cheated and might be found out. It was a twisty, convouluted feeling too complicated to describe in any sensible terms.
Ed had won the lottery. That was where this all started; would he have ever done this--asked me to dress up like a girl--if he hadn't won thirty million dollars? His motives seemed murky, mysterious, but I didn't want to believe anything bad about him.
I sat up and wiped my eyes, looking at myself in the mirror. How could he have ever gotten such a fantasy about me into his head? I'm not tall and I suppose I have small bones. I didn't think I looked particularly girlish but Ed really wasn't the only one to say something like that. Even back in grade school, I got teased and sometimes bullied for being a "sissy".
I never understood that. I didn't play with the girls, unless forced out of whatever the boys were doing. The only sport I was ever any good at was baseball or softball. And I wasn't very good at that. I couldn't hit or throw very well and the only reason I ever got picked for a team was my ability to be in the way when the ball was hit. I didn't always catch it but any grounder hit near me was very unlikely to get past me.
Okay, I'd been accused of throwing like a girl many times when I failed to turn the double play. But I'd hit a lot of sacrifice bunts, too. Once we won a big game because I batted the runner on second over to third and a throwing error allowed him to come home. Coach Lowell had actually put me in as a pinch hitter that time, tie score, one out, bottom of the eighth.
"If you had any real speed, Kitten," he had said--he called me that, too, "I'd use you more often. But at least you're not afraid to stand in against a fastball and bunt it. And you don't mind playing for the sacrifice."
I'd felt really good about that, and Coach had let me play second base in the ninth inning; I just missed turning a line drive into a double play. My throw hit the runner in the back, diving back to first. Coach Lowell had congratulated me on that play, too. "Good effort, Kitten," he'd said. I'd caught the line drive as much with my body as with my glove and the force of it had knocked the wind out of me. I barely remembered making the throw at all.
We got eliminated in the first round of the Sectional Tournament the next week and Coach told the team we'd all done well. But he singled me out among the bench players and said, "We could have done better, I suppose. If we all played as hard as Kitten Prentiss does when he gets the chance, maybe we could have been State Champs."
Jay Clemmons had winked at me about then and one of the other players scowled. I got razzed a bit later, but even that felt good. I wasn't able to go out for baseball my senior year because of how busy things got at the deli and Alison was taking some classes at the junior college, so that junior year run at the Divisional Championship was the glory of my athletic career. The senior team made it just as far without me, but no farther.
And now. Now what?
A rich old man had fallen in love with the idea of me as a girl? No more working in the deli, I could go to college if I wanted to...but would I have to wear a dress to do it? I shook my head; Ed was my knight in shining armor come to take me away to the ball. I stifled my laughter with a pillow at that image.
The whole situation made me tingle like I'd always imagined the Star Trek transporter effect must feel like. It couldn't be real. I lay on the bed for a long time, trying to think, trying to imagine what my life was going to be like now.
It was still early for me, not yet ten, though Palm Springs had been deeply shaded from the late summer sun by Mt. San Jacinto for hours already. I must have dozed off because I woke up scared and confused. It was completely dark in the room and I didn't know where I was.
I figured it out pretty quickly though; the view of Mt. San Jacinto from the east side is considerably different from the one I was used to; the lights of the tramway against the black mountain made a distinct reminder. I figured out that I was still in the hotel room and the previous weird day had not been a dream. The a/c had made the room actually chilly and I rolled myself up in the bedspread while I thought about things.
Another set of lights, a digital clock built into the TV, told me that it was just after midnight. I hadn't been asleep that long.
The Palm Springs hotel room was about twice as big as my room back home and the queen-size bed very different from my narrow twin bed. I considered getting up and dressing for bed but I just lay there awhile longer. I'd probably had some weird dreams but I didn't remember them.
It was my first night spent away from home since Jay Clemmons and I went out to his uncle's in 29 Palms last April to look after the place while Uncle Pete Clemmons went to Florida to bury his wife's mother. It was Spring Break and Uncle Pete hadn't wanted the house to be empty while bands of drunken college students roamed the desert.
We spent three days there and mostly had fun. Kind of like when we were younger and I used to go over to Jay's to spend the night reading comic books under the covers. Only, at Uncle Pete's we had spent the first evening looking over his collection of girly magazines and watching a few of his porno videos. I'd never told anyone about that time and I sincerely hoped Jay hadn't either.
But it was how I knew that I wasn't gay.
* * *
It started with just horsing around. We'd been swimming in the morning after watching the XXX videos and Jay had teased me about keeping my T-shirt on while in the pool. I burn easily, everybody in my family does and sunblock washes off if you stay in the pool long enough. Jay claimed that the wet shirt made it look like I actually had titties.
I'd got annoyed about the teasing and had gone into the house to make us something to eat for lunch. Jay came in behind me and grabbed me and started tickling.
I'm horribly ticklish. I tried to retaliate but Jay is six inches taller than me and forty pounds heavier. We ended up falling on the floor laughing and Jay landed on top of me. And I felt his hard-on against my stomach, right through his swim trunks.
"What the heck, Jay?" I yelped. "Get off me!"
"It's okay, Kit," he said. "No harm done, we're just having fun. You aren't hurt, are you?"
"No." I pushed at him. "Get off, get off!"
He took his time but he looked almost as confused as I felt. "Sorry, Kit," he mumbled. But he stared again at my chest as we got up.
I knew that something had happened that shouldn't have. I felt uncomfortable and my chest itched and there was a tight feeling in my groin I didn't want to think about. "Do you want anything for lunch?" I snapped.
"Yeah," he said slowly. "Can you make some of those ham sandwiches with the creamy mustard pickle spread you make in the deli?"
"I dunno," I said. "That's Mom's secret recipe, Uncle Pete may not have the stuff to make it."
"Well, that's what I'd like. Look around the kitchen and see what you'd need, I can take a bike down to the store?"
Maybe he suddenly wanted to get away from me as much as I wanted to get away from him. I nodded and went to the kitchen to check things out. Pete's wife, Aunt Shellie, had a well-stocked kitchen and I could have made the sauce with what she had there, but I wanted to get rid of Jay for a bit.
He watched me from the door; I ignored him till I had a list. "Here," I said, thrusting it at him. "And try to get the brands I wrote down, it makes a difference."
"Sure, Kit." He grinned, wide blue eyes crinkling in amusement. It always amused him when I got annoyed at him, for some reason. His blond hair was all mussed up, standing out every which way; I remember wanting to smooth it down. Either that or hit him with a skillet.
While he was gone, I went to rinse the chlorine off and change clothes. It took me a long time to decide what to wear. I had wanted pants and a long sleeved shirt to cover up with but it seemed silly in such heat--even in April, 29 Palms can be in the low hundreds.
I suddenly remembered that I had ended up wearing something very like the polo shirt and bright shorts Ed had bought for me earlier today. The whole thing was disturbing.
When Jay got back we didn't say anything about what had happened. Jay suggested that we have beer with out lunches but I vetoed that. My Mom would ask and I knew I couldn't lie to her. I made the sandwiches and we ate and drank milk; Jay finishing three glasses almost as quick as I could pour them. Then we took naps in our own rooms, the two extra bedrooms in Uncle Pete's huge hacienda.
Later that night, we had been watching more XXX videos. I felt restless and uncomfortable but Jay really seemed to be enjoying them. The women all had fantastic bodies, most of them obviously with breast implants. The men, for the most part, were less remarkable but a couple of them were built like the guys on the covers of the muscle and fitness magazines we had in the deli.
I found myself comparing them to Jay. Jay had a few pimples and he didn't really need to shave much yet. When he wore his glasses, he looked studious and trustworthy. But when he took them off, you sort of noticed his blocky chin and high cheekbones. And the spark of mischief in his eyes that had often gotten us in trouble when we were younger.
I wasn't as easy to talk into adventures like playing Batman and Robin on the roof as I had been when we were ten. Jay still had the scar on his leg from another escapade in the junkyard; he'd made such a scary Terminator robot that I had hit him with a piece of wood, but I hadn't noticed the nail in one end. I remembered him lying back on the fender of an old pickup and laughing his head off about it while the blood ran down into his shoe and I ran off crying to get some help.
Watching the videos had become simultaneously boring and uncomfortable. I didn't feel the least turned on by them and that worried me a bit. Weird idea. Jay seemed to have decided that they were boring, too. "I think you're only supposed to watch one of these at a time, more than that and they start to look pretty stupid," he commented.
"Wanna see what's on the satellite?" I suggested.
"Nah," said Jay. "All television is boring. Unless you want to?"
I used the remote to turn off the TV and player by way of answer. "Wanna snack?"
He just grinned and shook his head.
"Well, what do you want to do?" I asked.
"I'm not sure," he said. And I swear he gave me a very odd look. "Wanna go swimming again?"
"It's dark," I pointed out.
"There are pool lights but...they'll attract bugs. It's practically a full moon outside, it isn't that dark."
"Huh," I said. "I dunno..."
"C'mon," said Jay. "With the sun down you won't have to wear a shirt to swim. Heck, if we don't turn on the pool lights, we can skinny dip. There aren't any neighbors close enough to see." He grinned.
He was right, one of the odd things about some of the desert towns is how far apart people build. Uncle Pete's nearest neighbor was as far away as what would have been a city block in any normal town...and nothing in between but scrub and cactus. And the funny trees they have in 29 Palms, not palm trees but Joshua trees that look like something from an alien planet.
After considering it, I agreed to part of the suggestion. "Okay, but I'm still going to wear trunks."
"Suit yourself," he said. "I'm not going to bother." And he stood up right there and began taking off his clothes.
"Don't leave those in the living room," I warned him, retreating to the room where I had put my stuff. The whole thing was beginning to seem unreal.
"Yes, mother," he said very sarcastically.
I closed the door and tried to think about skinny dipping. It wasn't as if we hadn't been naked together before. We often stripped and showered together in gym and during the summer playing Legion ball. We'd even been skinny dipping before in one of those mountain pools in a campground near Cuyemaca Falls. I mostly remembered freezing-cold water that time, and we had been only ten.
Somehow this would be different. Maybe it was because of all the porno videos we had been watching. The night seemed charged with sex and thoughts of sex. For most people, nakedness equals sex and I felt confused and fearful. I undressed slowly and laid my clothes in a careful pile on the bed; when you live in a house with nine other people, being neat really pays off.
Jay called from outside, "The water is perfect, Kit!" I could hear him splashing around, sound carries forever on the desert and the only competing noises were most of a mile away.
I stood there naked only a second, then grabbed a towel from the bathroom and headed for the pool.
*****
Skinny dipping in the moonlight, what could be more romantic?
Thirty Million
Reasons
Outside, Jay splashed and swam in the moonlit water of Uncle Pete's backyard pool. Yellow buglights on the patio and even yellower streetlamps a hundred yards away didn't do much to change the eerie half-light of the three-quarter moon. The lights of neighboring houses didn't give enough light to matter, none of them even as close as the streetlamps. Far away and down at the bottom of the slight rise Uncle Pete had built on, the highway muttered and hummed sleepily. Overhead, a few moving lights flickered, helicopters probably, reminders that a reasonably busy Marine base was not far away.
I padded across the cement barefoot, hugging my chest against a slight chill from the wind off the mountains. The seven-foot redwood fence kept out all neighboring eyes but I wondered foolishly if the men in the helicopters could see me. "This is a stupid idea, Jay."
"You're nekkid," he chortled, his pronounciation deliberately vulgar.
In the dimness, even through the water, I could see the tan of his arms and legs and the lesser tan of his chest and back. And the white strip across his middle with the darkness of his pubic hair in the center. I shivered. "How can it be cold after being so hot in the afternnoon," I complained.
"The water is warm," he said. "C'mon in, Kit. You know there's still melting snow on the mountains, the wind is going to be cold."
I walked into the shallow end, conscious that the only slight tan I had was on face, neck and arms. The rest of me looked about as pale as mixed European ancestry, mostly Irish, could make one. I realy didn't want to do this, so why was I doing it? When I was in up to my waist, Jay submarined and grabbed me by the ankles, pulling me in further. I'm not that great a swimmer and he knew that would terrorize me in the dark.
I screamed; I know I must have but the water cut off my yell and I got a mouthful of chlorinated yuck. I grabbed for something to hold onto, but Jay had pulled me into the middle of the pool and the only thing I could grab onto was him.
I cursed at him when I had the breath but he just laughed, easily holding me up while he treaded water. "That wasn't funny," I told him angrily.
"Yes, it was," he said but added, "I shouldn't have done it, though. I'm sorry, Kit." That's the way he'd always been, quick to apologize but always ready to offend the rules again if it suited him.
I tried to swim away. He'd been right about the water, it was deliciously warm but the wind seemed to bite twice as sharply where it touched the wet skin of my arms and face. In the heated water I could feel his skin against me the whole length of my body and became very aware that neither of us wore trunks.
He let me go. "To your left, Kit," he warned. "You're headed into the deep end right now. Find the edge and catch your breath."
I did that and hung there for several minutes while Jay thrashed mightily back and forth in the pool, as if trying to work off some excess energy. I kept ducking my head under to warm up, the wind was making my ears and nose hurt with the cold. Then it got very quiet.
"Jay?" I asked. The moon and patio lights illuminated the surface of the pool quite well but with my head at water level, I couldn't see anything submerged. I ducked my head again and kept my eyes open this time. Jay hung motionless in the water a few feet above the murky bottom; just a dark man-shaped blob in the dimness. His head, arms and legs dangled as if he had been knocked out in an unexpected collision with the pool edge.
I knew I was being tricked. I knew he could sham unconsciousness, holding his breath, for far longer than I could bear to hang there on the edge of the pool doing nothing. I couldn't wait to find out; even though I knew it must be a fake, I had to act as if he had really been hurt. I decided that the next glass of milk I poured for him would have horseradish in it.
I took three deep breaths and immediately swam down to where Jay floated about four feet below the surface. The pool really wasn't all that deep, just nine feet in the very middle of the wide end. I grabbed Jay's arm and tried to tug him toward the surface, putting my feet on the bottom and shoving both of us upward.
The water resisted our movement but my head broke the surface and I took a deep gasping breath of the cold air--just as Jay grabbed me from behind around the middle and rolled us over. He must have took a breath as he turned over because he immediately pulled us downward again. The noise I made probably sounded like one of those antelopes the lions kill at the waterhole on the Animal Planet.
It wasn't terror, though; it was fury. It didn't occur to me for an instant that he might be panicking; Jay never panicked. I was so mad I forgot to be scared. I struggled to get free, trying to put an elbow in his eye or a heel in his groin. I even tried to bite him. Whenever both of our heads were above water, I could hear him laughing. I felt like a little kid struggling against his size and strength and greater ability in the water.
Jay isn't a complete idiot though. All during our wrestling match, he had guided us toward the shallower end, I had gotten completely turned around and felt surprised when my feet touched bottom. This was actually worse; with something to brace against, Jay could use even more of his strength.
And now he was tickling me!
I gasped and whooped and got lots of water up my nose but managed not to get any down my windpipe. Finally, I went limp, knowing I couldn't win against his strength. That's when I felt the hardness of his penis against my leg. I didn't know what was happening for sure; I was exhausted, but my surprise almost caused me to take that breath of chlorine pool water I had so far avoided.
Jay lifted me easily, turning me so we were facing each other. His feet were on the bottom and our upper bodies were exposed to the cold mountain wind. Before my teeth could begin chattering, he kissed me. My arms felt like lead but I lifted them up and put them around his neck.
I think I intended to strangle him but it wasn't working out that way. His dick felt hot against my thigh and I kissed him back. I'm not sure why, maybe it just seemed like the thing to do. We stood there kissing until my teeth really did begin to chatter. "I'm f-freezing, Jay," I told him between kisses.
I tried to pull away and get all of my body under the water again but he just picked me up and carried me through the patio doors. I felt as if I weighed a ton, like you do when you've just got out of the pool, and I marveled at how strong he was to accomplish this. His dick rubbed against my bottom.
I thought I knew what was going to happen next and it scared me worse than thinking Jay might be drowning. We dripped pool water across Uncle Pete's kitchen tiles and down the hallway. Jay set me down while he grabbed towels from the big bathroom--but he kept one arm around my waist; I don't know why I didn't try to get away.
I wanted to see his cock. Worse, I wanted to touch it, to see how someone else's cock felt when it was hard and swollen. I felt an ache and a heat in my own groin but I knew I hadn't got really hard yet. I wondered about that vaguely. Jay draped a towel around my shoulders and led me toward the shabby couch of the uncarpeted family room.
"I'm not sure..." I said.
"We can find out," said Jay. "No one will have to know."
We dried each other off and I actually got to touch his dick. It felt rubbery or maybe more like soft leather wrapped around wood, like the handle of a baseball bat. It fit my hand in a very odd way and I heard him take a deep ragged breath when I squeezed.
The lights in the house were on a dimmer switch and Jay must have turned it as we passed because the room wasn't much brighter than the moonlit pool outside. We kissed again, tasting each other's mouths with our tongues, then he sat on the couch and pulled me down with my legs across his lap.
"Kit," he said. His voice sounded as if he had forced the air out around some obstructing muscle. I didn't think I could speak at all. I'd never felt like that before, not even when masturbating. He pinched one of my nipples and I moaned. "Kit's got titties," he laughed.
"No. I don't. I'm just fat." I gasped out in three separate breaths.
He lowered his mouth and sucked on my nipple. It felt electric, like the shock you get from a carpet in the winter, but it didn't hurt and I couldn't pull away..
"You're fat like a girl, Kit," he moaned. "Tits and ass, you're soft all over."
"I'm not," I said.
"Not?"
I could feel the little bit of beard stubble he had against my chest, then my neck, then my cheek. He nibbled gently on my earlobe. "Not a girl," I moaned. "I'm not a girl."
"God, Kit," he groaned. "God, but I wish you were."
I pulled away from him then; he tried to catch me but I fell ass first onto the floor with my heels still in his lap. He grabbed one of my ankles, much too late and too little to stop my tumble. "Let me go, Jay!" I yelped and kicked at him.
He let me go and stood up, dumping the rest of me onto the floor. I looked up at him and couldn't avoid looking past his cock, still standing stiffly out from his body. The situation had turned from scary to ridiculous in an instant and I laughed, maybe a little spastically but it was definitely a laugh. We were both naked, Jay had a hard-on and I was lying in the middle of the floor--a situation too stupid for words.
His dick drooped suddenly, I never saw anything like it. One moment it looked like wood and the next, like a soggy breadstick. I laughed even harder--okay, I got the giggles.
I didn't point but I suppose I might as well have. Jay's expression never changed as he stepped over me and stalked--stalked is the right word--back out to the pool. I scrambled to my feet and called after him. "I'm sorry!" He didn't answer.
I stopped laughing and wondered if I'd somehow offended him so badly we couldn't be friends anymore. I heard him splash into the pool. I knew I shouldn't have laughed but I couldn't help it and now I felt bad about it. I realized I was still standing there naked.
I touched my lips, my ear, my nipple; the places where Jay had kissed me. More than half my life, Jay and I had been best friends but this had turned very weird, very suddenly.
I decided I'd better get dressed before he came back in. I know I intended to go to my room where my clothes still lay neatly across the guest bed but I turned the knob on the door of the one room in the house we weren't supposed to enter--Uncle Pete and Aunt Shellie's bedroom.
I opened the closet and found one end of it fairly empty with a few heavy winter looking clothes covered in plastic and Pete's jeans and shirt collection, the clothes he had left behind. The other end held Aunt Shellie's things, a larger collection though presumably she had taken things with her.
She's not really my aunt, of course, but I called her that just as I called Jay's mom 'Aunt Deanna' and he called mine 'Aunt Peggy'. Another thing Shellie isn't, she's not a small woman. Taller than me and heavier even than Jay, she wasn't exactly fat but a lot of people would probably have described her that way. None of her clothes were likely to fit me and I couldn't think of why the thought might have occurred to me.
I closed the closet door and left the bedroom, closing that door behind me too. I went back to my own room, got dressed for bed and sat there for a long time trying to figure it all out.
I knew Jay wasn't gay because he had lots of girlfriends; in fact, we didn't spend nearly as much time palling around as we used to because he was always off on some date. And apparently, I wasn't gay either or I wouldn't have been so scared and I wouldn't have laughed at his dick. I put a pillow over my face when I felt the giggles threatening to return.
I heard Jay come back inside and listened to him going around locking doors and turning off lights. I felt like I had disappointed him and maybe hurt his feelings. I wanted him to come into my room and say he was sorry so I could apologize again, but I was also afraid that he might do more than that.
I think he booted up the computer and played some sort of shooter game then. I fell asleep listening to the muted bangs and screams. In the morning, he acted as if nothing had happened and neither of us ever mentioned it.
Been awhile since I got back to this but the story seems to want to move now. :)
Ed talks about foxhole confessions and the answer to a question. But does anyone ever know their own mind? Kit isn't too sure.
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 8
Lying there, thinking about things, of course I fell asleep again. When I woke the second time, dawn had painted the mountaintop pink and the digital clock read 6:15. I'd slept all night in my clothes, wrapped in the bedspread. I had to get up and take care of things so I stripped off and took a shower too.
A huge shower stall and no worries about running out of hot water were real luxuries to me. I did as little thinking about what Ed and I had talked about as I could.
I dried my hair with the blowdryer in the bathroom; a big clunky one supplied by the hotel. Too ugly for anyone to want to steal it, I figured, but the wiring went right into the wall and not into a regular plug.
I got dressed in another version of the shorts and polo shirt I'd worn yesterday, this set both in shades of blue. For a moment, I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to see what Ed--and even Jay--had apparently seen but I just looked like myself, a perfectly ordinary 18-year-old boy. A boy with somewhat shaggy light brown hair, and grey eyes that sometimes looked blue but not some imaginary girl who didn't really exist.
Okay, so I wasn't super-masculine looking. I hadn't started shaving regularly yet so I looked a bit younger than my real age. At five-foot-eight, I stood only four inches taller than Alison, Mom or Karen. A bit shorter than most guys but tall for a girl. I didn't have a big nose or a square chin, no prominent Adam's apple or eyebrow ridges. Those might happen to me later, though; at eighteen, I wasn't really done growing.
It made me feel weird to consider what I might look like dressed the way Ed wanted to see me. I couldn't really imagine it except sort of Alison with lighter hair... Weird is not the right word but I can't think of a better one.
When I opened the door of the bedroom I saw Ed sitting at the wide, low table in front of the couch. He had the TV on and he had apparently ordered coffee and breakfast from room service. "There's eggs, cinnamon rolls, ham, OJ, coffee?" he said, smiling at me and motioning toward a covered tray. "Did you sleep well?"
"I slept all right, I guess," I said. Breakfast smelled good so I sat beside him on the couch and uncovered my tray.
"Good. I never sleep that well the first night in a new bed." He smiled at me and so many wild things went through my mind that I almost forgot about the breakfast.
We ate quietly after that, watching the TV. The local weather girl told us that it would be another scorcher, not exactly news in the Springs on an August morning.
Ed picked up the remote and clicked the TV off after we had eaten as much as we wanted. The trays still held more food, it sort of bothered me to see it go to waste.
"I asked you something last night," Ed said.
I tensed.
"Have you thought about it?"
"Yeah. I still...I'm not sure, Ed."
He nodded and sipped more coffee.
"You said no one has to know?" I asked after we had both been quiet for an unreasonable length of time.
"No one back home, no one you don't tell."
"Well, I still don't know," I said.
"You can't think any of your family would love you any less if they knew?" he asked.
"No," I admitted. "But I sure wouldn't want my Dad to hear about it."
"Your father may never come out of that coma, you know that, Kit." He gave my shoulder a reassurring squeeze with one of his big, rope-scarred hands. "But do you think either of your parents would want you to be unhappy?"
I shook my head. "Unhappy?"
"I asked you that last night, too," he said. "Are you happy, Kit?"
I had a lot of reasons to be happy, I thought--my family, friends, Mom, Jay, even Ed. I think I made a face.
"You are unhappy, Kit, aren't you? Unhappy that your life isn't going the way you want it to but you don't know exactly what it is you want to happen?"
"Uh, something like that, I guess," I admitted. "Isn't that just part of being a teenager?"
He grinned. "Part of it. But there's more, isn't there?" He let his hand drop to his side and looked at me calmly.
"I don't know. If there is, I'm not sure what it might be?"
He shook his head, "I thought I recognized that unhappiness, Kit. You smiled and you laughed, you were kind and considerate but you were always unhappy even when you had every reason to be happy. I saw it in your eyes when you thought no one was looking."
I thought about the other things he had told me, like imagining me as a girl. This didn't sound crazy in the same way but how much time had he been spending watching me? Ed the stalker.
"People could have lots of reasons for a secret unhappiness, but I thought I had seen your particular variety before. I thought I recognized it."
I made a noise. This wasn't going anywhere I could predict. I got up and moved the breakfast trays onto the cart room service had left by the door.
He stood and went to the window, apparently examining the mountain. He spoke without turning around at first. "Back in the early fifties, I was in the service. The Army, in Korea. We had a guy, not much like you at all, most ways...." He paused. "His name was Roy, big strapping kid with red hair, always ready to get drunk or into a fight or something. Really macho, though I'd never heard that word then, we called it gung-ho. Or John Wayne. He was really John Wayne. Except he always looked unhappy."
I sat down again, on the wide couch with the colorful stripes of red and green and blue. Some part of my mind noted that my clothes did not clash with the colors of the upholstery. Noticing that I had noticed bothered me. I tried to focus on Ed so as not to think too much about thinking.
He sat on the edge of one of the chairs and continued his story. "Our unit got overrun, cutoff and we were separated into little groups; Roy and I were together, hiding in a foxhole that we dug inside a bomb crater. We both thought we were goners, scared shitless, literally in my case." He grinned and I looked embarrassed when I realized what he meant.
"I told him about the girl I intended to marry if I got out of there, I was just eighteen and you know, she was already married and moved away when I got home; never saw her again." Another grin, rueful this time. "Then Roy did the bravest thing I ever saw, he told me the truth about himself."
"What?" I asked when Ed didn't immediately continue.
"He told that he would have done anything--made a deal with the devil--to be a woman."
I don't know what I did then, probably just blinked.
"This was a year or two before anyone ever heard of Christine Jorgenson, no one thought there was anyway to change your sex. So Roy had no hope. He was a big, raw-built country boy, anyway, would have made a powerful ugly woman. But that was what he wanted."
I swallowed, feeling the pain of saying such a thing, knowing how much it must have hurt.
"I thought I was sharing a foxhole with a crazy man, or at the very least a queer," Ed continued. "That's what we called gay back then, queer, it was an insult and meant to be one. I asked him, why was he telling me this? Roy said he had to tell someone before he died and that he thought the odds of us both getting out of that foxhole alive were pretty piss-damn poor."
The vulgarity startled me, I realized Ed was probably quoting.
He went on. "I had to admit that I thought he might be right. I asked him, wasn't he afraid I might tell, if we did both get out? Or even if only I did? He said, it didn't matter, he had to tell someone and this looked like the last chance he was going to get." Ed stopped talking, looking at someone or something I couldn't see.
I fidgeted while Ed stared at nothing for what seemed like a long time. "You got out," I said finally. "What happened to Roy?"
Ed sighed. "We both got out, 'copters came and chased the...North Koreans away. But we never mentioned what we had talked about again. Six weeks later, Roy was killed by a sniper while we were shifting the unit. He took a lot of silly chances and one of them finally soured on him. He wasn't the only friend I lost over there." He looked at me and grinned a sad grin that looked like it must hurt.
"I--I don't think I'm like your friend Roy, Ed?" I said.
He laughed. "Maybe not. But, Kit, I'm a rich old man, now a very rich old man, and I want to help you be what you want to be. How can I help you, Kit?"
"I--I don't know?"
He nodded. "Okay, while we're trying to find that out, would you be willing to humor an old man?"
"Okay," I said, surprising myself more than I did him.
His bushy eyebrows went up.
"Okay, Ed. I'll do it. But--I really don't know how? I just know I'd end up looking...." I hadn't really known that I had decided to go along with Ed's fantasy. And now, the problems looked pretty bad. "I don't want to look ridiculous," I finished.
Ed grinned. "You won't. Believe me, you won't. I've got a friend who can give you a hand with this."
"Someone else who will know?"
"Well, yes. But she can keep a secret--and she doesn't live in Whitewater Canyon."
"Where?"
"San Jacinto," he said. "Not that far but there's the little matter of a mountain in the way. Anna Maria can help you, she owns a beauty salon. She knows a lot about this sort of thing." He grinned at me.
"What do you mean? She knows..."
"I'll let her tell you," he said. "But she's married to a cousin of Juanita's. Hell, Juanita has enough cousins around here, she's related to nearly all the chicanos and half the gringos in two counties." He laughed.
I closed my eyes. This was going to happen. Ed was going to have someone, this Anna Maria, dress me as a girl, probably do my hair and nails and makeup. My bones seemed to have turned to melting ice and my flesh to half-set gelatin. I could still back out, I could change my mind. I think I went into a kind of mental lockup, trying to figure out why I had agreed to this and why the idea of backing out made me feel cold and alone.
"Kit? Kit?" Ed called to me.
"Yes?" I answered, opening my eyes.
"Maybe we'd better stop talking about this right now? You looked like you were going to faint." He looked concerned and sympathetic.
"I'm okay," I said, not really fooling either of us. "But maybe, maybe I need to just think about this for a while?" I fidgeted, partly just to be moving. Some of my muscles felt sore and that seemed very strange.
Ed watched me calmly for a moment and his eyes seemed very soft. That bothered me so I looked away. "We could talk about something else?" he suggested. "We should probably decide where we're going to live for the next year. Though, I do want to do some traveling."
"Uh. That's got to be your decision, Ed," I said.
"Sure," he agreed. "But I do want your input. When we travel, we can stay in places like this but I'd like to have a homebase, some place to come back to."
"This is a nice place, almost like an apartment," I said. I looked around, admiring the decor again, trying to distract myself.
Ed grinned. "This is actually a corporate timeshare suite for one of the big ranching outfits, I'm just borrowing it. Luck it was empty when I called and I've got friends even richer than me. Even with thirty millions, I'm still jes' a small green frog in some puddles." He held his fingers an inch or so apart.
We both laughed and for a moment I forgot what we had been talking about. Ed could lay on the cowboy charm deep enough you'd need a shovel to get past it.
He went on, describing what he wanted in a more permanent place. "Not too far from the ranch and your family, so we can visit easily if we want to. But nowhere so hot and dusty, I think I'd like to live near the ocean for a while."
We talked about that for a bit, neither of us wanted to live in the smog of L.A. but being close to a city would have advantages. "Del Mar, San Clemente, somewhere along the coast there," Ed said.
"It sounds great." I couldn't imagine it; I'd grown up in the Canyon where water was something that came out of a tap and filled your glass. I'd seen the ocean of course but it had never really been real for me like the mountains and deserts were.
"We'll look for apartments or condos down there later in the week, Kit. I'd like to be right on the beach if we can find a nice place."
I started to mention how expensive that would be but stopped myself. Ed would have enough money that no beachside apartment was likely to be so much as to really matter. So, I just smiled and said, "That could be a lot of fun."
He gave me another cowboy grin. "Feeling better?"
I nodded.
"Maybe we could go for a little drive?" he suggested.
"All right." I took a deep breath and the room did not explode.
Kit has agreed to the plan but can he go through with it?
Thirty Million Reasons
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 9
We had the top up on the convertible to make conversation possible but neither of us said much at first. I kept mulling over the decision I'd made to go along with Ed in his crazy idea. I couldn't figure out why I'd done it. I had all kinds of questions to ask Ed but none of them sounded sane.
When I noticed that we were heading out of Palm Springs I asked Ed where we were going.
"We're gonna see a woman named Anna Maria," Ed said. "If you're still willing to give my plan a try, she'll be able to help you out."
That sent a chill down my spine. I smiled and said, "Okay."
We used the Palms to Pines Highway over the mountain and down to San Jacinto in the last of the early morning, the car climbing and twisting on the steep road. I tried to think of something else to talk about, anything but my mind kept turning over the same thoughts. Why had I agreed to dress as a girl for Ed and what would this Anna Maria woman do to help me?
Ed wouldn't answer many questions about Anna Maria, just, "You'll have to tell me what you think when you meet her." Which really made me curious, and maybe that was the idea because I couldn't worry so much about why we were going to see this woman if I kept wondering what she was like.
The scenery distracted me, too. Living on the desert floor, a person tends to forget the beauty and majesty of the nearby mountain forests. Mt. San Jacinto is one of the tallest peaks in Southern California and the west side is lush with pine and cedar, green even in the middle of summer. We climbed from the palm-lined lanes and golf courses of the Springs' suburbs, through desert scrub and chaparral, then a mixed forest of live oak and evergreens, and finally the tall timber of Ponderosa pine at around 5000 feet with the mountain still towering over us. The road twisted through canyons and switchbacks with glimpses now and then of the Coachella or De Anza Valleys; one full of the cities that had sprung up around Palm Springs and the other still a dusty, rural land of cattle ranches and emptiness.
San Jacinto lay in a rocky canyon further down on the western slope of the big mountain, on a different road that actually led back toward Highway 60, Ed's ranch, Whitewater Canyon and Mom's deli. A lot of retired people lived here in the year-round warmth but there was also a small college and some farmland. The streets had the cock-eyed logic of all mountain towns; the business district took a couple of right angle turns in the middle of downtown to go around an inconvenient big spur of rock. On a shady side street, Ed stopped the Miata in front of a bungalow with a small sign identifying it as "Anna Maria's Hair and Nails".
"We're here, Kit," he said.
I closed my eyes and tried not to hyperventilate. A beauty salon, I should have guessed. Ed actually had to get out, come around the car and open my door for me before I could get out. He laughed. "Testing to see if I'm really a gentleman?" he asked.
I blushed when I realized what he meant. "I'm just scared," I confessed.
"Don't be, Anna Maria is spicy but sweet."
That remark confused me so much that we were in the door of the little shop attached to the bungalow before I realized it. The little house had been remodeled as a small shop. Mirrors covered one wall of the wide room that must have once been a porch on the front of the house. Salon chairs, three of them, sat in front of the mirrors. A nook in the corner had couches and armchairs around a big glass coffeetable. An arch led into another room where I could see sinks and those sci-fi-like chairs that have a hairdryer built in.
A short, slender, Hispanic woman in her early thirties had been reading a newspaper in the nook as we entered. She wore the smock of her profession, in a pale cerulean blue, and her henna-streaked, brunette hair was pulled back in a practical bun. She looked up and grinned. "Mister Ed!" she crowed delightedly.
Ed brayed like a donkey and then laughed. I felt even more confused. "Anna Maria Torres, this is Kit Prentiss," he indicated me with one hand while giving Anna Maria a hug with the other. "Kit, Anna Maria."
"What a beautiful child," she said, taking my hand. "I'm sorry, Kit, did that embarrass you?" she asked, seeing me blush again.
"I don't think it added any," I said. "I'm embarrassed just to be here. No offense meant?" My voice squeaked horribly and I continued blushing. If I could stop, I would; it had been a major source of embarrassment most of my life. And of course, being embarrassed about blushing easily doesn't help at all.
Anna Maria laughed and winked at me. "Kit," she said, "you delight me already." She turned toward Ed, "And you, you old cowpoker, you should go find some other old coots and reminisce about Waterloo or something. Kit and I have work to do and things to talk about."
Ed laughed and winked at both of us. "I'll be down at the Western Star, when you want me," he said, moving toward the door. I wondered vaguely if that might be a bar, probably not--it was barely nine in the morning.
"If we want you, we'll rattle your oat bucket, horseman," said Anna Maria.
"Bye, Kit," said Ed.
"Bye, Ed," I said. He winked as he went out the door but whether at me or Anna Maria, I couldn't tell.
After Ed left, Anna Maria turned her open sign in the window around so it read closed. "So we don't get interrupted," she said. "And now, tell me all about it, would you, Kit?" She took a seat on one of the couches and motioned me to sit on the other.
"I don't know what to tell you," I admitted.
She looked thoughtful then said, "Maybe I should tell you? Hmm." She seemed deep in thought for a moment. I shifted nervously on my seat, wondering what she meant.
"When I was about three," she began, "it might have been earlier but I know I could talk, my next younger sister was born. She was a beautiful little baby and I couldn't get enough of being with her and mama. I wanted to help and mama let me, as much as I was able."
I smiled to show I was listening but actually I was remembering something very similar when Karen was born.
"One day while mama was changing the baby's diaper, I noticed something. 'What happened to the baby's thing?' I asked mama. It took a while to get across what I was asking because I didn't have the words then mama laughed and laughed. 'She doesn't have one,' mama told me. 'She's a little girl and little girls don't have that.'"
I stared at her. This was turning out to be oddly like the story Ed had told earlier. She was small boned and delicate and very feminine in looks and behavior.
"I told mama that I had a thing there; she said she knew that and it was because I was a little boy." Anna-Maria laughed. "I tried to argue with her that no, I was a little girl, too." She smiled, "It took me almost ten years to convince her, but when we moved here from El Centro, she started letting me dress and live as a girl."
I tried to say something but I didn't even know for sure what I meant to say. Anna handed me a tissue and I wiped my eyes. Something about her story made me want to cry.
"So," she continued, "I grew up, went to high school, got an operation, got married... Got two kids," she grinned. "Adopted, of course."
I nodded. It seemed to be the thing to do, nodding that is. Anna's story didn't sound impossible, just--unlikely. How often did things like this happen? How many people like this did Ed run into? Did he really think...Anna's story had something to do with me?
"Any questions you want to ask me?" she prompted.
I shook my head. "I...not right now."
"Do you want to see what you might look like as a girl?" she asked. "Or is this just some cockamamie story Big Ed has come up with?"
"Well, it is his idea?" I said.
She nodded. "He's been telling me about you--" my ears started burning, "--nothing bad!" she finished laughing.
"How long?" I asked. "How long has he been telling you about me?"
"Mostly last night," she said. "He wanted to know could I clear my Friday morning for a special client? He offered me a good price but I'd probably do it for Ed anyway."
"He thinks he's in love with the g-girl, uh, I might have been?" I stammered out. "
"Something like that," she agreed. "And you think he's some crazy old coot who's got way too much money now?" She nodded even more vigorously, rolling her eyes and communicating that she agreed with that opinion.
I laughed and nodded. She was easy to like, and somehow just talking to her made me feel, well, not okay but at least better about things. She wasn't making a big deal out of this, and that meant something though I wasn't sure what.
She stood up and took my hand to pull me to my feet. "Well, you're lucky. You're still young, you're small boned and not so broad-shouldered as some boys your age? Let's see what we can do?" She grinned suddenly. "I think you're going be very pretty, actually."
It didn't seem likely to me. I sat in the salon chair she motioned me towards. My head felt as if it were full of helium and my heartbeat seemed as loud as a low-rider's stereo. "What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I suppose we could call it a makeover," she grinned. "Have you ever dressed-up or played with makeup?"
I shook my head. "Not really." I didn't tell her about the time in 29 Palms, besides, I hadn't really even touched any of Aunt Shellie's stuff.
She nodded. "Not everyone is as fearless as me." Then she laughed, "It's no shame to be afraid, you probably had better sense than I did. Do you think anyone in your family ever suspected?"
"No," I said after thinking about it. "Suspected what?"
She grinned. "Later. Today, you're here for me to help you find out how you'd look as a girl. Right?"
I couldn't speak. I nodded. This was a favor for Ed, a man who was doing a lot for me and my family. It wasn't my idea but I had agreed to do it. As Anna said, Ed had too much money and too little sense but I couldn't believe he wanted to get me hurt.
"Okay, there are lots of things I could do, chica, but do you want to be able to go back to looking like a boy easy?"
"Yes. I don't think I'd want to have to tell my mom what's been going on? This is just for today, anyway."
She gave me a funny look. "Okay, I can give you a hairstyle can go either way, nail polish is easy to remove, show you how to do some easy makeup. But no perm or dye this time, no nail extensions, hah?"
"No." This time?
"I cancelled all my Friday morning but we don't want someone coming to the door and knocking." She went around the room, closing window blinds at this point. "No one expects me to be here until about 12:30. Three hours, we got plenty of time. You want your ears pierced? Lots of guys get pierced ears."
"No?" I squeaked and put my hands over my earlobes.
She laughed. "You're funny," she said. "It wouldn't hurt so much but we can do that later, hah?"
I nodded again, ignoring the later.
She went to work, first she washed my hair, which I had just washed but she said this was how a hairstylist gave such a better haircut than a barber; wet hair is easier to style if you know what you're doing. Most of the time, I had no idea what she was doing. It didn't occur to me to ask if I couldn't just wear a wig for what I was still expecting to be a few hours of masquerade.
It felt wonderful to have someone wash my hair though, Mom had done it for me when I'd been little, of course, but the last person who had washed my hair for me had to have been Alison, back when I was six and she was almost nine. I'd forgotten all about that until Anna-Maria had lathered up my scalp and began massaging the pleasant smelling suds.
"You got nice hair," she remarked. "Thick, it's a little wavy, not quite straight." I nodded. "Be still. It's gonna take a perm really good but we'll do that next time, maybe. I bet if you got some sun, it would be a pretty blond color or we could dye it? Later," she added before I could answer.
She kept saying later. It worried me. Somehow, I had thought this was going to be a one day experiment. What had Ed told her?
After using towels to soak up most of the wet, she began cutting. "When I'm done, you can brush your hair one way, it looks like a girl's hair; comb another way it looks like a boy's. I'll show you. Also, if you use a curling iron, you can make it look even prettier. You know how to use a curling iron?"
"No." I'd examined my sisters' once or twice, sheer curiousity, but I didn't know how to use one.
"I show you that, too. So tell me, chica; you got any boyfriends?"
I blushed and almost shook my head, again, before I remembered what she was doing. "No," I whispered.
"Girlfriends?" she asked.
"No. I've had a few dates."
"Doesn't feel right?" she probed.
"Huh? No, I'm just too scared, I guess."
"How about when you dream? You dream of being a girl?"
Chills ran down my arms. I started to say no but then I remembered. After Jay and the pool, I had actually dreamed that somehow the moon had turned me into a girl. I'd forgotten about that until just then. I felt my face turn brilliant red.
She laughed. "In these dreams, are there boys?"
"Just one," I squeaked meaning just one dream. She thought I meant just one boy.
"Ah ha!" she chortled. "Does Ed know he has competition?"
I shook my head, unwilling to risk further misunderstanding.
"Ah, ah! Be still!" she scolded. "I don't like getting blood on my scissors!"
"Sorry."
"How do the other boys treat you, mija? They mean to you?"
I thought about that. I guess I made a face.
"Assholes," supplied Anna-Maria. "You can say assholes when it's just us girls." She chuckled. "So you like boys but you're afraid of that."
"I-I'm not gay," I protested softly.
"No, honey," she said. "If you were gay, you'd be a lesbian." And she chuckled again.
"I can show you what you'd look like as a girl," Anna promised.
Million
Reasons
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 10
Undo the pony tail, brush the hair forward from the nape of my neck, then shake my head to get it off my face and it looked like one of the shag cuts lots of girls were wearing. Except it had my face under it. Anna had me practice that a few times; pointless I thought but I did it because she asked me to.
She gave me more instructions. "You want to wash it at least twice a week, Kit." She didn't say Keet, like a lot of Hispanics; she had no more accent than I did unless she wanted to. "You can use the curling irons to make it look more full; spritz to hold and you're beautiful."
"Uh. I'll probably just..." I was going to say that I would just get a regular boy haircut tomorrow but she started putting things out for me and describing them. "Herbal shampoo, not too much scent if you want to go home and see your family. Creme rinse, use it every time. Spritz hold, use just a little." She sat them on the counter. "This is good expensive stuff like I use here in my shop, but Hey! Ed is paying for it, ah?"
"I don't really need that stuff," I said.
"Sure you do!" she said emphatically. "I give you more stuff before you leave. Come." She motioned toward another chair in front of the mirrors.
I sat and she worked on my nails. "You know, I'd show you how to do this too," she meant the manicure, I suppose, "but you've got a rich boyfriend, you can just go to the salon once a week." She laughed as I blushed.
"He's not my boyfriend," I protested.
"He's your sugar daddy," she suggested with another grin.
"I don't think so," I said, weakly.
"People are going to think that," she pointed out. "Pretty young thing like you, living and traveling with an old Methuseleh like Ed."
"I'm not pretty...and...and it's not like that."
"Yet," she said with an evil chuckle.
"Anna," I said, "I know you're teasing but you're scaring the...poop, out of me."
"Scaring the shit out of you, you mean. You can say shit, there's nobody here but us girls."
I laughed finally. Anna walked around the edges of being outrageous and offensive, laughing and making fun of both the conventional and the weird at the same time. Her obvious good nature made her teasing easier to take. If she'd just stop calling me chica, girl, and mija, daughter. But she did make me laugh.
She looked up at me and grinned. "You've got a cute giggle, I bet it drives old Ed nuts."
"I don't giggle!"
"Sure you do. That little snigger that's like a laugh that's too shy and girly to be impolite? That's a giggle." She laughed out loud again. "And now you're pouting! How in the world did you ever make anyone think you were a boy?"
I almost stood up to run. "You're mixing me all up?"
She shook her head. "I know the names they must have called you in school; someone looks like you and doesn't talk dirty or all macho or nothing. It probably hurt worse coming from the girls, didn't it?" I didn't say anything to that and she kept working.
But she was right. The boys had been cruel sometimes. It had been terrible to be laughed at and almost worse to have to be rescued back in grade school by my big sister, Alison, two years older than me. Or Jay. Sometimes there was Jay, standing there, defending me. I'd known Jay since the third grade. I tried to sort through the memories but I only got more confused.
"You gonna learn how to do this so you can take my job?" Anna teased. But she did give me a short lesson in what she was doing with my nails. "This is an orange stick, we use it to push the cuticle back so your nails look nice and neat. And sometimes we use these tiny scissors, cuticle scissors, to cut the cuticle back when it's just too ragged and long. It's just dead skin, so if you're careful it won't hurt at all. But it's almost impossible to do this part for yourself."
I nodded, trying to picture how I would ever be able to hold the scissors in the wrong hand and cut anything on the other hand without stabbing myself. Not that I intended to even try. But she had succeeded in distracting me from the glooms.
Anna kept talking, "Then we got to make the nail all smooth, after clipping and shaping it and pushing the cuticles back, which we got to do again after using the emery board to get things smooth. Notice when I clipped it, I made almost square corners that I'm going to round them off a little with the board? That keeps the nail strong and helps prevent splitting and breaking. If I were in a hurry with all this, I'd use the little electric wheel thingie, but you're getting the deluxe personal stuff. We can't talk with that noise anyway. This is alll stuff you would probably know if you'd been smart like me and started living as a chick back in junior high."
I shook my head. "That must have been hard to do..." I began.
She interrupted, "Harder than what you did? I don't think so. I didn't mean for you to think I'm better than you because I did something you didn't do. We're all different and things were different for all of us. You're next to eldest in a big family and the eldest boy, I'm next to youngest in a family almost as big. My brothers are six and eight years older than me with two sisters almost my age. Made it easy for me."
I nodded. We had talked about our families, but she still had completely the wrong idea about me. It embarrassed me too much, trying to think of how to tell her I didn't want to be a girl.
She grinned. "Best would be to pick out the right wriggler from your dad so you got born with the right equipment to begin with, huh? But then, you wouldn't be you, you'd be someone else and who knows what kind of mess the bitch would make of her life?" She did the eye-rolling and face-making to indicate just how messed up things could have gotten.
Okay, that I had to laugh at, again.
"I'm going to put a little color on your nails, see? This is called 'Coral Blush', it's almost the color of your skin, a little lighter and pinker. Then I'll put two coats of clear over it and you're done with your nails. Probably no one will notice the color if you're trying to pass as a boy or you can just use polish remover and take it off."
"Um," I managed to say. She was wrong that no one would notice the nail color. It looked decidedly odd on my hands. I made some sort of noise. Whatever noise I made, Anna broke up and I laughed, too, even though I must have been blushing with embarrassment at the same time.
She finished my nails, still giggling. "You're a trip, Kitten. Now, don't touch nothng till those dry," she told me.
I held my fingers out stiffly and stared at them. I sighed. "I can't help it. I can't believe this is happening?"
"It's happening all right. Have you thought of a name to use? I just called you Kitten and that's sort of obvious from your name--Kit Prentiss?"
"Uh, it's actually Keith," I explained about my sister's problem with pronouncing my real name. "I've been called Kit all my life. Um, tho, you aren't the first to call me Kitten. How long do these take to dry?"
She laughed again. "Well it sort of fits, though you are kind of tall for a person called Kitten? About ten more minutes, you can wave your hands around to speed things up. It doesn't work but lots of ladies do it." She sniggered when I stopped myself from waving.
"Kitten," I said. "Until just lately, um, only people who were trying to tease me or make me mad called me that. Or Kitty or--worse things?" She cleaned up her work table while I sat there and thought about names. Why would I tell her something like that? I guess I somehow felt I had to ante up a confession or two since she had told me so much about herself.
"Kids can be cruel. I bet I know what they called you when they really wanted it to hurt," she observed.
I nodded. There was one whole summer that I was called Pussy Prentiss by the older boys in our neighborhood and then by almost all the kids. It mostly stopped when my Dad found out about it, looked up the fathers of the two worst offenders and laughingly promised to call them Douchebag and Cumwad in public. They got the message without getting mad; Dad was like that.
Thinking and talking about Dad in the past tense made me feel gloomy, too. He wasn't dead, and the doctors keep saying there is no real reason they can find for why he hasn't woke up. I sure missed him, though, for lots of reasons. The nasty nickname incident wasn't the only time he had rescued me.
Why did such things keep happening to me, though? Was it some sort of vibe I gave off? For a while, in high school and when I played baseball, it seemed to be getting better. But starting with Jay last spring and now Ed Hardiman.... I surprised myself by suddenly bursting into tears. More accurate to say I shocked myself.
Anna came around the table and held me while I tried not to sob. "It's okay to cry, chica. It's okay, we going to make you all pretty and no one will laugh at you. Don't smoosh up your nails." She gave me a kiss on the forehead and held my hands without touching my fingertips.
I tried to explain things. To myself as much as to Anna. I wasn't making much sense, even to me and my nails kept distracting me. Anna used a tissue to wipe my eyes again. I wanted to blow my nose too but I couldn't figure out how without messing up my nails. I felt ridiculous.
But Anna had been a mom. Gently, she held the tissue against my nose and told me to blow then carefully wiped my face with a clean tissue. I still felt ridiculous but whatever emotional storm had caused the tears seemed to have passed and I smiled at her.
I finally asked Anna something I had been wondering. "What did Ed tell you about me?"
She sat still for a moment then made a face. "He said you were a boy who probably wished that you were a girl." I began shaking my head. "But that maybe you didn't even know it yourself?"
"He got it wrong." My voice had a catch in it.
She didn't say anything.
I waved at my hands and my hair. "Anna, I didn't want to do this. Ed talked me into it. Like you said, he's-he's got lots of money...and...." I didn't want to make Ed sound like some sort of molester so I couldn't finish what I had intended to say.
"You want a Coke?" she asked. I nodded and she fetched two cans of Diet Coke from a small refrigerator. She used a key to pry up the pop-tops and passed mine over. I usually drank regular Coke but accepted the drink without comment. I did feel very dry.
"When I was about ten," she began, "I decided I would try to be like the other boys." I'd almost forgotten her earlier story. "I played baseball and football, soccer, with the boys. I learned how to spit." She grinned at me. "I got beat up a few times but I kept trying for most of a year."
"It's not the same thing," I protested. "Look at you, I can't imagine you as a boy." She had a very womanly figure and not a trace of any masculine mannerisms.
"Hormones, surgery, cosmetics," she said. "but you're right. I wasn't a boy; I was a girl in a boy's body and I didn't know what I was or what I wanted. Sometimes I wanted to be a boy, sometimes I wanted to be a girl. I was pretty damned unhappy that whole year."
"I'm a boy," I said firmly.
"Coulda fooled me," she said with a grin.
I looked over at the mirror and saw my reflection with a girl's haircut and painted nails. I looked alarmingly like one of my sisters. "Okay," I admitted. "Right at the moment things are a bit...mixed up. But this is all Ed's idea."
"He paying you to dress as a girl?" she asked. "I wondered about that?"
"Uh, no. He offered at first but then, uh, he said he'd pay me--and put up money to send my sisters and brothers to college--whether I did it or not?"
She nodded. "So...you don't really have to do this if you don't want to?"
I thought about it. "I guess not?"
She shrugged and rolled her eyes.
I sighed. "Okay. So, I am a bit curious. People have been telling me...not just Ed and you...uh. So maybe I want to see how I would look as a girl too?" I squirmed a bit. Was that even the truth? I couldn't be sure anymore.
She smiled. "Show you what you'd look like as a girl? That I can do for you."
I'd really like to see some discussion of this. - Erin
...Anna Maria began laying out the clothes she'd picked for me to wear.
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 11
In a large, pretty bathroom, all glass and pink tile, Anna Maria began laying out the clothes she'd picked for me to wear.
"First thing, you gonna wear girl's clothes you need to wear something like this," she held out a rather feminine pair of underpants made of some shiny material. They seemed to have padding at the hips and ass. "You tuck the male parts, um, backwards?" She grinned as I winced. "So nothing shows and gives you away."
"That's going to be uncomfortable," I said.
She shrugged. "You get used to it, and it's not so bad as it sounds." She held up another item, "A padded bra will give you some shape up top. This is just padded to about a B-cup. You know how to put one of these on?" She put it on the counter in the little bathroom/dressing room.
"I'll manage," I muttered, wondering if my face looked as red as it felt.
"This is a front closing bra, it's easy," she said. She laid a pair of khaki pants beside the other items. "I got some much prettier things for you but this will look nice. We ought to shave your legs so you could wear shorts or a skirt; you don't have much hair there but more than most girls would allow."
"I'm not going to wear a skirt and I'm not going to shave my legs," I told her. I had doubts about this whole project but not on those two items. The pants, or slacks, had an elastic waist band and no pockets or fly.
A silky, pale green top with the sleeves cut very, very short joined the other items. "Ed called me and told me your measurements, so I figured out your sizes. I think I got this a bit big. Where did he get those numbers?"
"Uh, probably from the tailor in Palm Springs?"
She grinned. "He's a sneaky ol' coyote, isn't he?"
I didn't laugh, at the moment things were just too scary to laugh about them. My senses seemed a bit confused; for a moment, I could taste the lime sherbert of the silky green tank top and feel the desert heat absorbed in some other universe by the khaki slacks. The effect made me dizzy and I shook my head to bring myself back to reality.
A reality in which I stood in a rosy bathroom, my nails painted peachy-pink and my hair cut in a girl's shag--about to dress myself in girl's clothing.
"I could get you something to make your waist smaller, a waist cincher?"
I turned that down, too.
Anna took a pair of pink-and-white Vans from a box. "Your feet really this small? Six-and-a-half in men's sizes is only eight in women's."
I took the tennis shoes in one hand and pushed her shoulder gently with the other. "Yes, I've got little feet. Now, get out of here so--I can change?"
She snickered. "No one here but us girls, chica?" But she left.
I closed the door behind her and ticked the latch. My heart seemed to be beating too fast and the air felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out. I got mostly undressed with my eyes closed, it seemed easier that way. I had to open them to start putting on the clothes Anna had supplied, though.
The underpants fit very tightly after I pulled my male parts down and between my legs. It wasn't terrifically comfortable but it didn't actually hurt after a few adjustments. I felt my testicles slip up inside the hollow of my abdomen and that felt very odd. I hadn't known they would, or could, do that and it scared me a little. I investigated, they could slip in and out of wherever they were going without pain. It only added to the oddness of everything else.
The underpants must have been actually control panties or something like that because I noticed that they also held my pudgy belly in somewhat. The padding on the butt and thighs felt odd, too. I wondered that so little of it would make any real difference. I turned to look over my shoulder at my ass and decided, that yes, it did. In front, nothing of my male parts showed at all. Disturbing.
The bra was as easy to put on as a one-button jacket, though the closure worked differently than a button would. The straps needed a bit of adjustment. I tried not to look at the effect this addition had in the mirror and quickly pulled the green shirt on over the bra. Then the elastic-waisted khaki slacks. The top hung down to my hips, mostly concealing my chubby middle.
I put the toilet lid down and sat to put the tennies on. Good old Vans--except for the color, they looked pretty much like shoes I had been wearing most of my life. Not quite though, the cut did seem different somehow, more delicate, more feminine. Anna had included a pair of plain white socks with the shoes and I gratefully put them on first. I tied the laces in a firm bow and stood up.
I stared at the mirror. I did look like a girl, dressed in these clothes. Specifically, I looked like my sister, Allison. Our coloring almost matched, her hair a shade darker, my eyes a bit more green, my face a bit longer and my chin not so pointy. She even wore her hair in a shag, though longer than mine was now. The feminine shape created by the underclothes helped the illusion along.
"You decent?" Anna asked from outside the door. "I didn't hear any bodies hitting the floor in a faint."
I snorted and turned away from the mirror. I didn't know if I could actually fool anyone yet but I could see now that it could be done. "I'll be right out," I said. First I folded my boy clothes neatly and put them in a plastic bag Anna had provided.
When I opened the door, Anna nodded approvingly. "Very nice. You look good, Kit."
"I feel like an idiot," I complained.
"Everything fits?" she asked.
"Yeah. I guess." I looked at my reflection in the plentiful mirrors of the main room of the salon. It seemed so unreal.
"You have to work on your voice a little bit," she said holding her fingers up an inch apart.
I didn't want to think about it. Besides, people still mistook me for mom on the phone occasionally.
Anna seemed enthusiastic suddenly, not like she hadn't been pretty animated before. "Come sit over here," she said, almost bouncing toward the salon chair. "I got to do your face." She grinned at me; I suppose I had a peculiar expression.
I sat down and she got started, talking as she worked. "I'm going to pluck a few stray hairs around your eyebrows," I started to protest, "nothing major, not shaping the brow, just getting rid of some mavericks." She giggled. "It's going to hurt a little, that's why I warned you."
"Okay," I said.
It didn't hurt that much. Next she cleansed my face with something that smelled of apricots and another application of something that tingled and made my skin feel--tighter. No wonder it took so long for my sisters to get ready to go anywhere if they went through this everytime. Anna hadn't even put any real make-up on me yet.
And that was a weird thought. I'd been in a school play once and had worn make-up for that. And for Halloween a few times. Nothing girly, though. This was different.
"You got nice skin," she said. "Soft and clear, and we're not going to use much makeup. A little foundation to even out the skin tones." She told me what each item was and I promptly forgot half the names. She took the most time on my eyes and I worried about that. It's a cultural thing where I grew up, the Hispanic girls seem to wear lots of eye make-up. "Look up," she ordered and she put on the mascara.
"Can I see?" I asked.
"Not yet, mija," she said and kept working. She painted a thin line around my lips and then filled it in using a brush instead of a lipstick.
Her giggling and grinning began to make me more and more nervous about things. I thought about all the bad drag comedians I'd ever seen.
Before she let me get a good look in the mirror, Anna added a pair of plastic clip-on earrings, the same color as the blouse. The clips pinched a little, a feeling I'd never experienced. I wondered briefly what having pierced ears would feel like. "Get your ears pierced and you can wear some really pretty ones," she told me.
"Not likely," I said.
Anna laughed and turned me in the chair so I could see. I gasped. The girl looking back at me from the mirror had big, gorgeous green eyes and beautiful coral lips. She didn't seem to be wearing that much make-up and I began to appreciate Anna's artistry. "That's me?" I whispered.
"That's you, chica," she agreed. She added a thin gold chain necklace with a peach and ivory locket and a matching bracelet that had one gold charm, a kitten with green gem eyes. "You gotta ask your Sugar Ed to get you some nice jewelry, but I bought these at Robinson's so they're pretty nice."
I ignored that comment and stood carefully to move closer to the mirrors. I had to admit, I looked pretty good. As good as Alison might look going out on a casual date. Better maybe, Alison didn't have Anna-Maria's professional level abilities.
Everything coordinated; the locket, nails and shoes matched in some way. The blouse, the earrings, my eyes and the kitten's eyes in some other way. I don't really have green eyes, they're hazel with bits of grey and green in them but Anna had made them look greener with subtle choices of eye make-up.
The slacks no longer seemed to be simply khaki-colored but had a richer, softer, more subtle color. I couldn't explain it but I certainly didn't look like a boy named Kit. For one irrational second, I wanted Jay to see me looking like this. I turned away from the mirror quickly.
"Such a pretty smile," said Anna proudly.
"You're a miracle worker," I said. "This ought to satisfy Ed that he knows what I would look like as a girl, huh?"
She grinned. "That old man got a surprise coming, I think?"
I laughed, nerves more than humor. "Yeah, I think he does."
"Don't laugh so big, Kit. It's okay with just friends and girls laugh a lot but not too loudly out in public."
"Huh." I looked back at the mirror and tried a few gestures, touching my hair, the locket, looking at my fingernails. It seemed easy to move and look feminine doing it. "Okay?" I said. "Are you going to call Ed to come over now?"
I saw her reflection in the mirror get an impish look. "First let's work on how you walk and talk a bit? Then we give the cowboy a bigger surprise?"
I felt a little giddy. This was something entirely new. It was like being on stage or dressed for Halloween. I didn't have to be myself, I could be this pretty girl in the mirror. And maybe Ed deserved a surprise or two.
I turned and started walking across the room. "Tell me what I'm doing wrong." I crossed the room and back again.
"Nothing so far," said Anna. "You not real swishy but you're not walking like a boy either?"
"I'm not?" Maybe I had altered my stride subconsciously already. I stopped and sat in a chair, taking a little care to keep my knees together as I had seen my sisters do.
Anna laughed. "So modest." I winked and she laughed harder. "Do that at Ed and he'll buy you a condo in Maui!"
"Anna!" I know I blushed but I think I must have giggled too. Something glimmered in my mind, an image of the power a woman could wield over a man. "What about my voice?" I asked.
"Not bad," she admitted. "But you're not even trying, are you?"
"Uh?" I stammered. "No, I wasn't." Maybe I was a bit too good at this?
Anna came and sat beside me. "Women talk more in the front of their mouths," she said. "You can often see the tip of a girl's tongue when she says a th-sound or an l. If you can lisp just slightly--move the s and t sounds farther forward--without sounding like a cartoon? And try to be more musical, men talk all in monotones."
That was too much information all at once. "What about the pitch? Is my voice too low?"
She shook her head. "Not really, you don't have a deep voice, Kit. In fact, if you got the other things right, you could even pitch your voice down a bit." She grinned, "Sexier that way."
I didn't think I wanted to sound sexy but we practiced with some things for awhile. I did try to pitch my voice upwards a bit and added a bit of a lisp. I spoke Spanish in the Madrid accent I had learned in school to get the effect just right, then switched to English. Anna thought this was hilarious.
"I'm not overdoing it, am I?" I asked, a little nervous.
"No, no, it's just that accent makes me laugh," she grinned. "Like an upper class British accent sounds in English? I want to hear you order a beer. Por favor thenyor, una thervetha." She exaggerated the lisp and accent, like Daffy Duck doing Peter Lorre.
We laughed together. "I'm not old enough to order beer," I pointed out. "I'm only eighteen."
"Old enough in Mexico," she said.
I shook my head which reminded me of the clip-on earrings she had attached. They had begun to pinch a little and I wondered how long I could stand to wear them. Would an afternoon of this masquerade be enough to satisfy Ed?
Anna handed me a magazine, Cosmopolitan. I blushed a little when I noticed the titles of some of the articles. "Just open it somewhere and start reading," she said. "I'll give hand signals for how you are doing."
"Huh?"
She demonstrated, "Finger up for raise the pitch, wavy hand for more melody, crossed fingers for remember to lisp." She grinned. "An okay sign for you're doing fine."
I flipped the magazine open and read for a bit, some article on choosing an apartment. Anna gave me signals like a mad, transvestite version of a third base coach. She added one without saying anything, grinning widely to show that I should smile more when I spoke. After five minutes of reading and several okay signs in a row, I stopped.
"Anna," I said, "why are you doing this?"
"You wanna just talk for a while?"
I nodded. I'd finished the first article and the next one was on how to know when to take the initiative with your date and I didn't really think I wanted to know Cosmo's take on that subject.
"Why am I helping you? Or why have I done what I did with my own life?" she asked.
"Why...why everything I guess?"
She shrugged. "Ed asked me to help someone, I've helped other girls find themselves. Why not you?"
I sighed. "Anna, I'm not like you? I never wanted anything like this? I'm just doing a favor for Ed? 'Cause he has this crazy idea about me?"
"Uh huh?" she said, but not as if she believed me. "You're good at this, Kit. Maybe you never knew what you wanted?"
"I ought to know what I want."
"People ought to," she agreed. "It's surprising how few do, though."
I stood up and went to look in the big mirrors again. My image seemed just as strange as ever--or did it? I felt irrational about the whole project, I wanted to go put on my own clothes and call my mom to come get me; Whitewater Canyon was less than 30 miles away across the spur of the mountain, it wouldn't take her long to get here.
Or I could call Jay. It'd be easier for him to get away, to come and get me. I would have plenty of time to change back. But--the idea of Jay seeing me dressed this way struck me again. There beside the pool, less than six months ago, he had wished that I were a girl. Now I looked like one.
I touched my hair, an earring, my lips, the padding on my chest. "It's all so crazy." I didn't want to think about Jay.
"Life is crazy, chiquita," said Anna. "Would it be so bad to find out you would rather be a girl? You've got Ed to help you, it's not like a lot of other kids who find out such a thing and don't know what to do about it or can't afford it or...."
"I don't know what to do," I said. "I don't want to believe what you're saying." I didn't want to think about Ed and his plans, either.
She came over to stand beside me. She gave me a hug and I hugged her back. "Life is crazy," she repeated.
"I don't want to believe what you're saying," I said again. "What Ed seems to believe, it would mean...I'm someone else, not the person I've always thought I was?"
"You don't have to believe," she suggested. "An agnostic can still pray to God and maybe God listens?"
I smiled a little shakily. "Go call Ed to come over," I told her. "Before I panic and take all this stuff off."