Page 442 - Some Dance to Remember

412 Jack Fritscher

and listened and prescribed Desyrel and lithium to relieve the progress of
Ryan’s stress, anxiety, and depression. No matter how much medication
Ryan took, his pain remained.
He was carrying a torch.
He could not release, any more than he could kill, the ideal he had
always known was possible but thought would never happen.
At least not to him.
In the movie Dirty Harry, he heard the message he had been waiting
for. Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Ryan knew his. He knew he had to let go of what he had promised
to hold on to forever. He knew he would never be free of Kick until he
himself ended his own heartbreak.
Five months later, on the eve of the following Christmas, Ryan took
final matters into his own hand.
Ryan stripped himself naked.
In his room, in his bed, in his video collection of a stupendous lover’s
performances, in the spread of shirts and posing trunks exchanged in full
fetish worship, in all the pictures framed on the walls, in the feel of flan-
nel sheet sworn nubby by the many long nights of lovemaking, with the
plastic bag full of hair clippings, near the closet full yet with his unclaimed
California Highway Patrol uniform, the uniform he had worn the night
they first met, under the dim track light spot, Ryan knelt mid-bed, with
everything Kick had not stolen back, to commit finally the unspeakable
act, the heretical act that would deny all his previous faith.
That morning out on Geary Street, he had Kick’s name tattooed
across the shaved skin between his balls and his butthole. The needle had
felt like a red-hot razor blade. This evening he knelt in what had been their
bed, to make it his bed again. Out of all the acreage he owned, ranch and
City, the only claim he staked was the forty-two square feet of this bed,
this altar of their bonding.
The handgun, the revolver that Solly had given him to hide, was
slipped deep into the holster on Kick’s CHP utility belt at the foot of the
bed. Next to his brass pipe lay a chunk of hash, a marble ashtray, and a
beige pack of matches with black ink spelling out Chuck Arnett’s stylized
logo for the Ambush bar.
Near him, arranged on the wool chessboard of his blanket, like
knights and kings and bishops, and maybe queens, lay his tit clamps and a
can of Crisco. On the bureau opposite, Ryan had set up both his television
sets. A single image was never enough for him. One monitor, a standard
nineteen-inch set, was connected to his video camera set to RECORD

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