Page 244 - Some Dance to Remember

214 Jack Fritscher

“Gladly.”
“I like fighting. I’m a soldier.”
“Aren’t we all,” Ryan said.
“I want to shoot,” Thom said. He lay on the couch, facing away from
Ryan, staring into the fire, seeing, God knows, some burning in-country
Viet village.
Both brothers sat quiet.
The storm.
The firelight.
The hard day.
The late night.
Ryan lounged in the chair behind Thom’s head, looking down the
length of his brother’s familiar, rugged body. Like a shrink with a patient
on a couch. Both of them stayed put.
I dropped The Naked along with The Dead to the floor. I’d read it
anyway. Mailer, never my favorite author, had, bowing to the censors of
his time, written Fug you throughout his novel. He deserved what he got,
when, at the height of his first celebrity, he was introduced at a cocktail
party to Tallulah Bankhead who said to him, “Ah, yes! You’re the young
man who can’t spell fuck.” Whereupon Miss Bankhead turned her heels
cold on Mr. Mailer.
The Brothers O’Hara remained in a horn-locked de deux without
much pas.
Perhaps it was the unusual clap of thunder, perhaps it was some
explosion Thom visualized in the popping fire, but the static tension
between them broke. Thom unbuttoned his fatigues and yanked out a
strictly government-issue, Army-circumcised, short arm. So it began.
Ryan freed himself, and, more studied than a dinner-theater actor who
has sung “Sunrise, Sunset” twenty thousand times, stroked his rising
shaft. As he did with Kick, so Ryan did with Thom. He began a hypnotic
ritual chant designed for each man’s head. He started slowly, carefully,
feeling his way through Thom’s fantasies, talking of exotic women, and
more exotic sex. He moved into straight sex slang, spieling a scenario of
dominant women dropping their pussies on Thom’s mouth. The more
intense the scene became the more Thom’s dick grew in the firelight.
Ryan was thrilled. Sex would alleviate Thom’s violence the way Solly
calmed down his bad boys. His own cock hardened. His brother had
fallen to his verbal seduction. No matter they were not touching. No
matter Thom could not see him the way he could watch Thom. What
mattered was Thom’s stroking his rod to the rhythms of his brother’s

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