Page 210 - Some Dance to Remember

180 Jack Fritscher

contracts and cameras that stole souls away. “I don’t want to lose you. I
don’t want to lose what happens at night between us. I don’t want us to
lose track of each other.”
Kick pulled Ryan into the hard mounds of his pecs. “This is me,” he
said. “This is you. No matter what happens.” He repeated Ryan’s own
words back to him. “Remember the home team.”
“That’s you and me, kid,” Ryan said.
“It ain’t nobody else.”
“I want you to have everything,” Ryan said.
“All I want is muscle. Big. Huge. Massive. Muscle,” Kick said. “I want
more guys to learn about muscle. I want guys to hear what you write. That
January? She’s using us. She can’t play a good old southern boy. We’ll turn
her special into a display of male power that’ll blow the old TV tubes
right out.”
“We want to do the right thing,” Ryan said, “for the right reason.”
“I understand,” Kick said, “what we’re doing in the short and long
run.” He was expert at protecting himself in public. “Trust me. I’m your
blond...bodybuilder...musclebeast.”
Later that warm Christmas night, they carried a down-filled sleeping
bag out to the drained bed made by the empty cement saucer of an old
goose pond. The dark sky over the empty valley around Ryan’s ranch
glowed with squadrons of stars never seen in the City. Orion hung low
and steady amid the shower of shooting stars.
“Orion is my constellation,” Ryan said.
“I only know the North Star,” Kick said.
“Then you’ll never be lost,” Ryan said. He pointed at Ursa Major.
“You know that one?” he asked.
“The Big Dipper,” Kick said.
“See. You know more than you thought.”
“Everyone knows it.”
“But not everyone knows it as Ursa Major.” One thing was meaning
two things again. “The Big Dipper is also the Big Bear.” Ryan pointed to
the sky. “See, how if you look at it differently...” He nuzzled his face close
into Kick’s neck. “You are the Bear,” Ryan said. “The Big Bear.”
Kick laughed. “And you’re Ryan-Orion. Tell me about you, Ryan-
Orion. Read me the sky.”
Ryan lay down with his head in Kick’s lap. “I was Orion, a great giant
and hunter. I chased the silly Pleiades.”
“What are the Pleiades?”
“They’re stars now, too. Back then they were the seven daughters of

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