Something Like Winter by Jay Bell
“Once.” Eric swiftly changed the subject. “That accent, Travis, are you from Tennessee?”
“Kentucky,” Travis said. “I’m from Bowling Green.”
“Ah, not far from the state line, then. I had a cousin from Clarksville with a similar accent that I could listen to all day.”
Eric and Travis bantered on for a while, giving Tim time to figure out the situation. Eric might have parted with the fraternity on unhappy terms, but Tim still didn’t understand why being sent here was a joke. A waste of time maybe, but Eric seemed like a personable guy with good taste. Unless Tim was missing something. He looked Eric over for clues. No wedding ring, the gentle handshake, the tidy appearance. On their own, these things didn’t really have meaning. There was no surefire way of knowing. But maybe…
“If there’s something I can do for you,” Tim said when conversation died down, “just let me know. I mean, if you were kicked out of the fraternity, that doesn’t mean you can’t be let back in. Time heals all wounds.”
Eric appeared amused. “Time can also create wounds. Some issues are even hotter now than when I was young.”
“Such as?” Tim prompted.
Eric’s tone grew serious. “Who one chooses to love.”
Bingo. Tim played innocent. “You mean going after another brother’s girl?”
“Or after another brother.” Eric’s smile was bitter. “So now you know why your brothers sent you up here. I was caught in a compromising situation, which I’m sure you’ll hear all about when you return. The story has become legendary and no doubt exaggerated. Every year two of you are sent here, and every year that pair leaves empty-handed.”
“Things change,” Tim said.
Eric shook his head. “Not that much, they don’t. Not in that fraternity.”
“I’m gay.”
“Really?” Eric’s disbelief was more than apparent.
Tim let a slow, cocky grin spread over his face. “Yeah. Want me to prove it?” He looked over at Travis, one of the stupidest things he had ever done. Travis was already tense, but when Tim looked at him, he shot up off the couch and headed for the front door.
Tim swore, standing to follow. Eric stood too. Lord only knew what he thought. Probably that Tim was playing him and was willing to do something gay for the money, but that his friend wasn’t. “Sorry,” he said as the front door slammed. “He’s got issues.”
Tim turned to give chase, car keys in hand, and was at the front door when Eric called out.
“Wait!”
“I really have to get after him,” Tim said.
“He won’t get far. Just a moment.”
Tim turned, but Eric had already left the room. He thought about leaving. Staying was pointless, and Travis was getting farther away by the second. “Come on, old man,” Tim muttered under his breath, jumping when Eric appeared one second later, holding out a check.
“What’s this?” Tim asked.
“What you came here for.” Eric waved the check until Tim took it. “I hope things have changed as much as you say they have. Now get after your friend and be patient. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?”
“Yeah, we have. Thanks.”
As appreciative as Tim was, Travis was his only concern right now. He bolted out the door, but needn’t have worried. Travis was sitting in the passenger seat, glaring at the empty space ahead.
“You okay?” Tim said as he climbed in.
“Let’s just get out of here.”
“Yeah, okay.” Tim didn’t start the car. “Nothing happened. He doesn’t know about you. Just me.”
“That’s not it,” Travis said. “Why do you think the brothers sent us up here?”
“Like Eric said, every year—”
“But you and me specifically. They know.”
“That’s it?” Tim felt like laughing. “When Quentin gave me the list, he only noticed Eric’s name at the last minute. Believe me, it was pure chance that we got sent here.”
“You sure?”
“Yes! You’ve seriously got to chill!” Tim looked down at the check. “Besides, we’re going to have the last laugh.”
“How so?”
Tim handed Travis the check and watched his green eyes grow wide at the sight of a one followed by four zeros.
Chapter Thirteen
When they returned to the fraternity house that night, a party was in full swing. He and Travis had collected eight checks total, and while none were nearly as generous as Eric’s, they had managed to scrape together a fair amount of cash. Plus a free meal, since the last alumnus they visited insisted on taking them out to dinner.
Girls crowded the house, the guys being obnoxiously loud to impress them. Tim walked from room to room, hoping to tell Quentin the good news. He lost Travis somewhere along the way, but wasn’t worried. The day had been nice, Eric’s fat check cheering Travis up and returning everything to normal.
Tim failed to find Quentin, who was probably boning some sorority girl. Not in the mood for the noise after such a long day, Tim grabbed a beer and headed to his room. To his surprise, Travis was already in bed.
“Yeah, I’m tired too,” Tim said, finding an old envelope for the checks and stashing them in a drawer. When he turned around, Travis patted the bed. An invitation—even if he appeared scared shitless.
“Oh!” Tim grinned and headed straight for him.
“Is the door locked?”
He made sure it was, stripping off his clothes on the way back. Then he slid between the sheets and wrapped his arms around one hundred and ninety pounds of pure Kentucky muscle.
When they awoke the next morning, neither had the smell of stale alcohol on their breath, nor did Travis jolt upright and give a tired speech of regret. Instead he rolled over to see if Tim was awake, his grin goofy when their eyes met.
“Good morning,” Tim murmured.
“Morning!”
“How do you feel?”
For a moment the grin faltered. They weren’t out of the woods quite yet. “It’s a lot better when I can actually remember what we did.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Ready for round two?”
But the longhorn cut these plans short.
“Another fund-raising day,” Tim said with a sigh. “Hey, maybe Quentin will give us the day off once he sees what we came back with.”
They felt self-assured enough that they took showers—separately to Tim’s dismay—before heading downstairs to the common room. Quentin was already dishing out new assignments or criticizing poor performance. When he noticed Tim standing there he waved him over.
“How did you do?”
“See for yourself.” Tim handed him the envelope. Quentin shifted through the checks one by one, grunting after reading each number. Then he got to Eric’s check, which Tim had intentionally put last in the pile.
“Holy shit!”
Tim grinned. “I know, right? Pretty sweet!”
“And it’s from the faggot! What’d you do, suck his dick?”
Tim’s face fell. “Dude. That’s not cool.”
Quentin shrugged, still beaming at the check. “I’m joking. I know you didn’t go down on the old geezer.”
Tim felt heat rising. “Eric’s a brother. You shouldn’t talk about him like that.”
Quentin reluctantly pulled his eyes away from all those zeros. “He’s not a brother. Do you know what he did?”
“I don’t care,” Tim said.
“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Quentin said loud enough for everyone to hear. “Eric Conroy was a brother once, until he was caught sucking off the pledges. He was taking advantage of his status to blow most of them before he got caught.”
“Bullshit!”
Quentin’s brow came together. “Are you calling me a liar, Wyman?”
“I’m saying the story doesn’t add up. Eric was sucking off a bunch of straight guys against their will? How does that work? If some guy put your dick in his mouth, would you get hard?”
“A mouth is a mouth,” one of the brothers shouted with a cackle.
“Just put a wig on the faggot,” another said. “Or a paper bag with a hole in it.”
Tim ignored them, still holding Quentin’s glare. “Well, would you get hard?”
“Hell no!” Quentin snarled.
“There you go. The story is bullshit, so stop bad-mouthing him.”
Face red, Quentin stared long and hard at Tim before he spoke. “You’re lucky I’m your Big. Now get back out there and finish the list.”
“Fine.”
“Hey,” Quentin called after him.
Tim turned around. “Yeah?”
“Good job getting the queer’s money.”
Tim shook his head and left, the chorus of laughter drowned out by the drumming in his ears. What an asshole! What sucked most is that Quentin could be so cool. He had sponsored Tim during the rush, acting as his Big. This meant he helped Tim, his Little, get through and avoid the early pitfalls new brothers are tricked into. Quentin did it mostly because Tim was a legacy, but he could be a warm and protective guy. Except, apparently, when it came to this. Tim wanted to believe that Quentin was only harping on Eric because he had been kicked out, but the homophobic slurs were impossible to ignore.
Quentin had met Eric once and seen how nice he was, which made Tim even angrier. He couldn’t tolerate ignorance like that. Not since Ben. What if Quentin had been talking about Ben just now? Or Travis, who had overheard everything and was no doubt freaking out.
Tim hurried back to their room, which was empty, then checked out the rest of the house. Only when Tim walked out into the yard did he spot Travis sitting morosely on the curb.
“People talk shit,” Tim said, standing behind him. “It comes with the territory.”
Travis didn’t respond.
Tim’s patience exhausted, he left to get the car. Then he took Travis to breakfast but didn’t try to make conversation. The tables around them were full of parents and kids. Travis fixated on these families like his future was calling to him.
The day went downhill from there. Every house they visited had family photos on the wall. Wives brought in drinks while the husbands chatted with them about the good ol’ days. The background sounds of children playing only drove the point home.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just when Travis was coming around, all this stupid fund-raising had come along and wrecked it. Eric, Quentin, all of it made Tim’s mood grow dark as the day wore on. When they were finally through visiting the alumni, that anger found a target.
Quentin.
He could have accepted Eric’s donation with grace. Here was a guy who, despite being kicked out of the fraternity and treated as a joke, still gave an enormous amount of money to them. And Quentin had stood in front of everyone and talked trash about him like an ungrateful dick. Tim wasn’t going to let him get away with it.
Once they were back at the fraternity house, Travis slunk off somewhere while Tim put in an appearance to show the other brothers that everything was cool. He was even friendly to Quentin, giving him the day’s checks and asking how the others had done. Then Tim made himself a sandwich and ate it in the common room, keeping watch until Quentin took the envelopes upstairs.
That’s all he needed to know. Quentin had the only bedroom on the first floor—a sprawling space on one corner of the building. He wasn’t keeping the checks there. That left the second floor office. Tim sat around, watching a movie and waiting until most of the brothers went out for drinks or on dates. Then he went upstairs.
The office door was locked, but the doorknobs were the cheap kind that could be picked by inserting a paperclip into the hole. The brothers trusted each other; such flimsy precautions were only to keep visitors out. Tim picked the lock and slipped inside the office, locking the door after him. There weren’t many places to look. Aside from a computer and desk, the office was furnished with filing cabinets stuffed with paperwork. Tim searched those first, finding the section with the current year written on it. Soon he had a fistful of checks, but he only sifted through them until he found Eric’s. Then he folded it and put it in his back pocket.
He thought about taking the check to the bathroom and burning it, but he felt Eric was owed more than just his money back. Hopping in his car, Tim headed for the outskirts of Austin.
* * * * *
Tim found himself not in the luxurious front room with its burgundy and gold-threaded couches, but deeper in Eric’s home in what was introduced as the living room. One wall was dominated by bookshelves of different widths, between them equally tall and narrow windows that also varied in breadth. A couch and a number of armchairs filled the rest of the space, with thick carpets cast seemingly at random across the hardwood floors.
“Do you recognize it?” Eric asked, nodding to the shelves. “This room is also inspired by one of my favorite paintings.”
Tim was at a total loss in regard to both the right answer and the situation. He had imagined speaking to Eric at his front door, but the older man had greeted him with enthusiasm, practically dragging him inside when they shook hands.
“I don’t know,” Tim said, grasping for anything. He considered the windows, how lights in the yard lit them from behind like stained glass. “It sort of reminds me of a forest, how trees form dark lines and the empty gaps between them glow.”
“Exactly!” Eric gently turned him by the shoulder so Tim faced the opposite wall. There hung a painting of a woman riding through the woods, except something was amiss, because it wasn’t clear if the woman was in front of the trees or behind them or entirely there at all. “René Magritte’s Le Blanc-Seing. The bookshelves are trees, the windows— Well, you’ve already figured it out. Here, sit down.”
Tim was directed to a couch, its fabric the same color as the horse in the painting. Eric took a seat in one of the comfortable chairs across from him, cheeks warm and red as if he had enjoyed a glass or two of wine.
“You have an artistic eye,” Eric said. “Do you draw? Or paint?”
“Uh, listen,” Tim said. “I really need to get something off my chest.” He stood enough to get the folded check from his jeans pocket and stretched out his arm, handing it to Eric.
“What’s this?”
“Your check. You were right about the fraternity. They are a bunch of homophobic assholes.” Tim sighed. “Well, not all of them, but they don’t deserve your money.”
“I take it you heard the gruesome legend of Eric Conroy?”
Tim nodded.
“Well, go on. No doubt it’s changed since the last time I heard it.”
The idea of repeating the story made Tim uncomfortable, so he tried to present it in the most polite language. “They said that you were taking advantage of pledges, uh, sexually. But it didn’t make sense, because the pledges weren’t the ones pleasing you. Um.”
“I was sucking their dicks?” Eric said candidly.
“Yeah.”
“Thrilling.” Eric rolled his eyes. “Next time I hear the story I’ll probably be sodomizing the entire fraternity against their will.”
Tim shook his head. “It’s stupid because it’s not like there aren’t gay brothers in the fraternity. One night I got up the guts to visit Oilcan Harry’s, the gay bar in the warehouse district.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“Oh. Well, I walked in and almost had a heart attack because one of my fraternity brothers was sitting right there at the bar.”
Eric snorted. “What did you do?”
“Uh.” Tim scratched the back of his head. “Ended up getting it on in his car. He didn’t even recognize me until afterwards.”
Eric laughed so hard he started coughing. “And I take it he’s not the only one? Your friend Travis, for instance.”
“Exactly. The guy at the bar has since graduated, but there’s at least one other besides us, and that’s a story I’m definitely not telling.”
“At least not sober,
“Thanks anyway,” Tim said.
Unfolding the check, Eric studied it. “I take it you’re still in the closet?”
“That’s the other thing,” Tim said. “I acted like Alpha Theta Sigma was all progressive just because I’m gay, but none of them really know. That was misleading of me.”
Eric shrugged. “I’ve never needed any help in leaping to conclusions.” He looked up from the check to consider Tim. “For someone in the closet, you seem very comfortable with your sexuality.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice.” Tim saluted. “Proud closet case since I was seventeen!”
Eric gestured for him to continue.
Tim shook his head. “It’s a long story.”
“Then you have time for that beer after all.”
And when Eric came back with an ice cold bottle, plus a glass of wine for himself, Tim told him everything. Talking about Ben again, even saying his name aloud, opened up so many old wounds. Those old emotions, both good and bad, had never left him completely. Even though he tried to kill them—turn his heart to ice—all he had really done was enter a fragile denial. These days he didn’t suffocate his feelings. Like the dull throb of a toothache never tended to, Tim had slowly learned to live with the pain.
“You know what the worst part is? I still remember that feeling when we first moved to Texas. All the potential I saw, how my life was going to be bigger and better. When I was with Ben, it was. Everything else was Kansas, act two. Darryl was just another Brody, Stacy another Carla. The only new thing was Ben. Once he was gone, the same boring pattern repeated itself. Even now. Quentin might as well be Darryl or whoever.”
“Except now you have Travis.”
Tim didn’t respond to this. There was no comparison to Ben. Instead he took a swig of beer and said, “What’s it say about a person when they know they have a problem but never do anything to fix it?”
Eric smiled. “That they’re human.”
Tim shifted in his seat and stretched, stiff from sitting for so long. “Man, I’ve just been rambling on and on about myself. Sorry.”