Page 291 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 261

The boys knocked Abe to the ground and pantsed him again. Bea
stabbed at them. They kicked at her and tried to feel her up. She fought
and clawed and bit back at them. All the while, Sie stood on the deck,
waving her beer can, cheering everybody on, keeping the action hot, while
her pans of water on the electric stove reached the boiling point.
Bea kicked one of the boys in the crotch. Then she turned on Abe and
tried to stab his leg. “You’re no help fighting these bastards,” she screamed.
Sie threw a skillet of boiling water off the deck. Hot spray splashed
through the air. The iron pan skidded hissing across the dry grass. The
boys retreated into their car.
Abe jumped in with them to escape both his sisters wielding the
screwdriver and the pan of boiling water.
“Crazy bitches!” The boys drove off, screeching down the road, stop-
ping at the corner, and throwing Abe out into the ditch.
“That’s where we came in,” Ryan said. “I’m certainly glad Kick didn’t
come up this weekend. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt me. If he ever
saw this, he’d never let me have his baby.”
Thom marched the triplets into the house. “I’m calling your mother,”
he said.
He called her, but she would not come.

7

Ryan wrote on napkins. He sat on the garden deck behind the Patio
Cafe near 18th and Castro waiting for Kick. The ambience was as perfect
as a television soap-opera set. T-a-d-z-i-o. He wrote the name in large let-
ters. He was Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice. Kweenie might have said
he was playing Citizen Kane writing “Rosebud.” The napkin blotted the
red ink of his felt-tip pen: “No one has ever written about Tadzio’s point
of view.” He hadn’t seen Kick in a week. Twice a day they were on the
phone. “I’m glad,” Ryan had said, “that we’re apart these days as much as
we’re together.” Being apart kept them from letting things get ordinary.
Ryan had asked Kick the night of their first contest to promise that they’d
never become ordinary to each other.
“Ordinary?” Kick had said. “How could we be? We’re extraordinary
people.”
Geography quaked between them.
Kick was on the move, relaxing, hanging out, alternating Castro with
the ranch now that the Mr. San Francisco contest was over. Ryan called
Kick at the studio up at Bar Nada. Kick called him from the gym or from

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