Tell-Tale Brass

Who has a one-track mind? I have a one track mind...

It was his eyes that did me in, deep brown shot through with green and gold. A girl could get lost in those eyes. I could too.
First period, U.S. History, I sat behind him hoping he would turn around or that we would be split into discussion groups, and hoping that if he did, if we were, no one else would notice. Mine was a class of less than two hundred, all of them kids that I had grown up with and mostly grown to hate, disrespect, or just grew tired of. That's how it goes in the little towns, the three church towns full of lower middle class white people, part time bigots.
It was a town you've probably been to, don't worry, I wouldn't expect you to remember it, but you stopped for gas once, on your way anywhere else. It's any one of those interchangeable little towns in the upper Midwest, not quite the one you drive through without slowing down, but just one step up. The little shit hole is still self sustaining, though I'm long rid of it now, and I remember it had two whole grocery stores. People were more divided between those two, the Coburns and the Rainbow, than they were over almost anything else. Even the Catholics would talk to you, so long as you shopped on the right side.
We weren't isolated, by the time we hit high school and started changing together in the locker rooms and blacking out together at parties we knew the facts of life. At least, the other kids seemed to, the ones that threw around “fag” like it was going out of style and had an uncle that cooked meth in his trailer. I just did my level best to not get the crap kicked out of me on a daily basis. But hell, maybe that's all they were doing too.
Anyway, we knew about queers, or thought we did. We watched tv at any rate, and laughed at the “old queen” that ran the drama department (he was a lovely man in his mid forties, incredibly talented, started teaching after burning out on life on Broadway and the West End and moved back to the Midwest to take care of his mother, but I didn't know that then). There were a couple of the guys that were commonly considered to be gay, though to my knowledge they were both of them straight, just bad at football and skittish around blood, regardless they were shamed into changing with their eyes to the wall.
I was never one of them, neither was he. Maybe it was because I was too introverted to draw attention to myself, maybe it's because I was a crack shot and rode a motorcycle and that meant I must love women. I know that he was never a suspect because he could kick your ass one handed without blinking, and would too.
He was not a smart guy, not really, but not so dumb that I couldn't make excuses for him (his dad was an alcoholic, his mom had left them for the navy, there weren't two books in his house beyond the Bible...). He wasn't exactly nice either, but there was something alluring in his detachment, his aloofness. That he was built like a Greek god didn't hurt either, but in the end it was his eyes that won me over, his eyes that I saw some nights when I closed my own.
I don't know why I did it, my sophomore year, maybe it was the Spring, which came early and was unusually warm. Maybe it's that I had just been dumped by the girl who had been my cover for two years, hell, maybe it's that I was cast in that years musical (I was one of three guys to try out, encouraged by the “old queen”) so I figured I had nothing to lose.
Whatever the reason I talked myself into making him a Valentine, in the worst tradition imaginable. It was a giant, gaudy, over-decorated and thoroughly camp paper heart. Hell, at least I put a .30-06 round through it at about four hundred yards, and included the deformed bullet. I guess I figured I would tell him Cupid was upgrading and I'd taught him how to shoot.
That day is all a blur for me, I spent it more amped on adrenalin than I ever had been before, but the valentine stayed in my bag. I feel almost guilty, in retrospect, that I didn't give it too him, like I should have taken my first shot for the team there, but every time I tried I found myself cotton mouthed and timid.
All my interactions for those six and a half trudging hours were colored by the contents of my bag. I avoided my friends, and cut out on math class, to avoid having to open it and risk someone noticing my secret, but I couldn't help but think that it was already out somehow. Simple greetings became fraught with terrible meaning and an offer of a cigarette or a shot of whiskey outside during lunch was enough to send me all but running.
When I got home I burned it, first thing. Then I grabbed a six pack of a beer that I'm too ashamed of to put into print, and my rifle, and I lit out for the dead side of the lake. The northeast coast was all government land and so of course, good Republicans that we were, we used it for drinking and fucking and target practice. I wasted two and a half hours there, draining the beer cans and setting them up as targets, or throwing them up and trying to hit them in the air. By the end of it I had even begun to miss and the melting snow had saturated my boots.
It was then that I got the phone call asking why I had missed rehearsal. Mr. Bradshaw (right, the “queen” has a name, and is also, incidentally, straight or at least straight-ish) didn't buy my slurred excuse, he just asked where I was and said that he was coming to get me and that for god's sake I shouldn't try to drive anywhere. I guess it's a testament to how much I respected him, despite myself, even then that I waited despondently with my bike instead of following my instincts and drown myself along with my frustration.
He knew there was something going on, probably had known for longer than I had if it came to that, and in the end he refused to stop the car until I told him. He wrote three names on a post-it note, along with phone numbers and addresses, all with six one two area codes, and told me he had time to get my understudy up to scratch. Somehow that was all I needed.
I left a note at home, packed a few changes of clothes, cashed out my bank account and made Minneapolis not long after nightfall. I learned a lot between then and the end of July, when I finally slunk home, about myself and the world around me and that would have been the end of my story but for two things that have happened to me recently, that provoked me to write this.
One is that Bradshaw died, complications from pneumonia he caught winter camping with a couple of girls he was seeing, and that got me up to the shit hole for the first time since I graduated. The second was that I ran into somebody at the funeral.
She was a big woman, tall and handsome, the type of butch that I catch myself crushing on from time to time. She introduced herself to me formally, but I got the feeling that I knew her somehow, and wondered if I'd seen her while I was living off of Bradshaw's connections. It was only as the wane lights of that town vanished behind me that I realized the brown of her eyes, shot through with green and gold.
Sentimental as I am, I still have that bleeding heart somewhere, if this finds you it's yours, and it's my best shot yet.