Page 67 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 37

Vietnam. Anything to get away from this family. But two tours, my
dears, count them, two! I think that exposed him to twice as much Agent
Orange.”
Ryan and Kweenie, and even Teddy, ran snide commentary on
the family’s battering ways, as if they were a TV sitcom, hoping they’d
respond to the barbed humor. They poured water on ducks’ backs. They
insulted Sandy and the triplets to their faces, and mother and kids laughed
perversely whether they got the joke or not. They thrived on any atten-
tion. Nothing really bothered them because, no matter what was said,
their critics were all gay or at least bisexual like Kweenie, and the fam-
ily’s self-inflated trump card was that no matter what the fags and lesbos
said, they’d always be queers and dykes, and the family was absolutely,
triumphantly straight. “And that,” Thom once pronounced, “is where it’s
at!” What style they had was loud, vulgar, and destructive. I knew Ryan
must be dying with mixed emotions out in the pasture. The last thing he
would want the perfect Kick to see would be his brother’s raucous family,
especially Thom’s wife Sandy who slouched out to the deck in her house-
coat and pink scuffles.
“She’s the only woman I know,” Kweenie said, “who can violate the
dress code at the Kmart.”
For almost fifteen minutes, Ryan and Kick talked. Ryan’s posture told
me all I needed to know. He was dumbfounded. Always he had been the
pursuer not the pursued, the lover not the beloved. Well, if God, as Ryan
once thought, had called him at the age of fourteen to be a priest, then
why couldn’t this outrageous blond muscle god descending out of the sky
on a golden whirlwind, call him to be his lover?
Teddy, awakened from a nap by the noise, stumbled out to the deck.
“I don’t think,” Kweenie put her arm around Teddy, “that you’re going
to like this high-tech pastoral scene.”
Sleepily Teddy surveyed the situation. “Oh, shit! He can fly!”
“With no visible means of support,” Kweenie said.
“Ry says he’s independently well off,” I said.
“From what? His home-wrecking business?” Teddy said. “What else
has he got that I don’t have?” From all Ryan had told him about that night
in El Lay, he figured the broad-shouldered blond meant trouble. “What
kind of high-wire stunt is this helicopter bit?”
Actually, Kick was more comfortable than well off. His father had
given him a stake and he had earned a bundle building spec houses back
in Birmingham. He told Ryan he had a degree in architecture. He himself
had built most of what he had designed. He preferred to be known as a

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