Ridge Road, Chapter 5 · Tuesday

Sam drove the first hour out of Salina under Rule One, which meant nobody talked, and for sixty-one miles nobody did.

The dark came down flat over the Kansas line. The Pete ran south on the interstate with her lights picking out the white dashes one at a time, and Hank sat in the passenger seat with his arms folded and his boots up on the dash, not asleep. Sam could tell by the breathing. A sleeping Hank sounded like a man dragging a chair across a floor. This one was quiet and even, and aimed at the side of Sam’s face.

His body had its own opinion about the whole trip. Every bump in the road found the place where Hank had been, a low warm ache that had settled in an hour after the sleeper and refused to leave. He kept shifting his weight on the seat. Past McPherson he caught himself smiling at the windshield like an idiot.

At the sixty-second mile Hank unfolded his arms.

“Hour’s up.”

“I know. I’ve been counting.”

“You’re sore.”

“I’m a little sore.” Sam kept his eyes on the road. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“You’ve shifted in that seat eleven times since Salina.” Hank’s boots came down off the dash. In the glow of the gauges his beard looked silver. “I’m not sorry about it. I’d say I’m sorry if I was, and I’m not. I just wanted you to know I know.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Sam didn’t trust his voice, so he drove. A big hand came across the cab and settled on his thigh, warm and heavy, and it stayed there through Wichita and every toll booth on the turnpike.

---

The yard gate at Tulsa was locked, and Hank leaned across him and out the driver’s window and keyed the code with two thick fingers. It was twenty to two. The depot office was black, the window where Walt stood every morning just a square of dark glass with the moon in it. Sam backed the Pete into the second row, where she lived, and cut the engine, and the cab ticked and went still.

“You’ve got a car here,” Hank said.

“The Camry. Over by the fence.”

“Where do you want to sleep?”

Sam looked at him. There was a bunk ten feet behind them with the curtain open, and every night so far he’d slept in it with Hank a canvas wall away, or on the other side of a mattress. He’d have said he was used to it. He heard himself say, “I’ve got an apartment.”

“I know you do.”

“It’s off Harvard. It has a shower with real pressure.” He swallowed. “And a mattress. It isn’t much. Come home with me.”

Hank studied the dashboard for a while. “Rule five,” he said, but it came out gentle. “The curtain stays shut off shift.”

“Rule five is about the curtain. There isn’t one.” Sam’s heart was going. “Come see where I live, Hank.”

---

The Camry had never carried anyone Hank’s size. He folded himself into the passenger seat with his knees against the glove box and his head bent under the headliner, and the car sank on its springs. He didn’t say anything about it. He turned his face to the window so Sam wouldn’t see his mouth.

“Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“Your shoulders are going.”

“That’s the road,” Hank said.

The apartment was on the second floor of a yellow-brick fourplex, two doors from a laundromat that was lit all night. Sam hadn’t been home since the morning he left for Denver. The air was close and smelled like dust and old coffee. He flipped the lamp on and watched Hank take it in: no couch and no rug, just a card table with one folding chair, and in the bedroom a mattress on the floor with a grey sheet pulled tight and a dent in the pillow from the last night he’d slept there.

“I sold the bed,” Sam said. “In the divorce. She got the couch. I got the card table, and I never bought anything else because I kept thinking I’d move.”

“Your truck has more furniture than this.”

“Your truck has a curtain.”

Hank laughed. It rolled up from his belly and shook his shoulders, and he shut his eyes and kept laughing until he had to put a hand on the wall. Then he straightened up, wiped his face, and went into the little bathroom and turned on the water. Sam stood in the hall hearing it drum against the stall floor. It was still going when Hank came back to the door with his shirt hanging open and his chest hair dark and damp at the throat.

“Show me this pressure.”

They showered together in a stall made for one person, which meant a lot of elbows and nobody complaining. Hank washed Sam’s back with a bar of hotel soap, slow circles with a palm the size of a dinner plate, and then his hand went lower and Sam leaned his forehead on the tile and let him. Neither of them hurried. By the time they stumbled to the mattress, wet and half dried, Sam was hard and shaking, sure of exactly one thing.

“I want to be on top,” he said.

Hank lay back on the grey sheet with his hands behind his head. In the light from the hall his belly rose and fell. “Say why.”

“I want to see your face when it goes in. Last time you made me keep my eyes on you, and I couldn’t see anything else, and I want to watch it happen to you.” Sam knelt over him. “I’m sore. I know I’m sore. If it’s too much I’ll tell you.”

“You’ll tell me the second.”

“The second.”

“Then I’m all yours.” Hank reached to the floor for his jeans, felt in the pocket, and came back with the tube of lube from Limon and two foil squares. “Rubber, same as before. Water-based. Sit on my belly and let me do the work first.”

Sam sat on that broad warm belly, and Hank got the lube onto two fingers and reached behind him. The first touch made Sam suck in a breath. The ache was real, a bruised tenderness, but under it his body was already opening, wanting, rocking back onto that thick finger like it had been taught.

“There,” Hank said. “That’s it. You went soft for me already.”

“God, yes.”

“Two now.” The second finger slid in beside the first and Sam’s head dropped. “You’re hot as a skillet in there. You keep clenching and letting go, and every time you let go I can feel how much you want it.”

“I want it.” Sam’s voice shook. “I’ve been thinking about it since Salina. Since before Salina, since Limon. I sat in a truck for two days with this in my head.”

“What was in your head?”

“You, under me. Like this.”

“Go on. All of it.”

“Your cock.” His face burned and he said it anyway. “I want your cock in me and I want to ride it until I can’t see.”

Hank made a sound deep in his chest. He took his fingers away, rolled the condom on one-handed, and held himself steady for Sam, thick and flushed against his belly. Sam lifted, steadied the head against himself, and sank.

It stung. It stung and filled him and he stopped halfway, breathing through his teeth, and Hank’s hands came up and gripped his hips without pulling.

“Stop?”

“No. Just let me.”

“Take your time, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”

Sam took it an inch at a time. The ache melted into something he had no word for, a full and stretched sweetness that went all the way up his spine. When he finally sat down on Hank’s thighs with all of it inside him, he put both hands flat on that wide grey-furred chest and found he was shaking.

“All the way down,” Hank said hoarsely. “Easy, now. How does it feel?”

“Like I’m sitting on a fire hydrant.” A laugh broke out of Sam, then a gasp, because laughing had squeezed him around it. “Oh, fuck. Don’t make me laugh.”

“I’ll make you do a lot of things.”

Sam began to move. He rose slowly and came down slowly, finding the angle, and the first time that thick head dragged across the place inside him that Hank’s fingers had found, his whole body lit and he cried out. The sound rang off the bare walls. Nobody was there to hear it. He did it again, and again, rolling his hips, and Hank’s hands slid from his hips to his thighs and held on.

“Louder,” Hank said. “Nobody’s listening. Let me hear what I’m doing to you.”

“It’s so good. It’s so fucking good, Hank, you’re right there, right there, I can feel my own pulse around you.” Sam’s cock bounced against his stomach and dripped on Hank’s belly. “Your cock’s so thick. Every time I come down it opens me up a little more, I can feel every inch of you stretching me.”

“I know it does. I can feel it too. You’re gripping me like a vise.” Hank’s hips rose to meet him on the next stroke, small and deep. “Ride me harder. Use it. Take whatever you want off me. You’re my man now.”

“Your man,” Sam panted.

“Mine,” Hank said, and the word came out raw. “I said it in a lot, in the daylight, in front of a bus. I’m saying it again in your bed.”

Sam rode him harder. The mattress slid on the floor and thumped the baseboard, and the lamp threw their shadows huge across the ceiling, the big one under, the small one working above him. Hank’s belly shone with sweat. Sam’s thighs burned. He leaned down, planted a hand beside Hank’s head, and kissed him, open-mouthed and messy, and Hank’s tongue answered and Hank’s big hand came around and closed on Sam’s cock.

“I’m going to come,” Sam said into his mouth. “I’m going to come on you.”

“Do it. On my chest, right here. I want to feel it.” The hand tightened and twisted. “Ride through it. Don’t stop.”

He came with a shout that cracked in the middle. His cock jumped in Hank’s fist and spilled hot across the grey hair of Hank’s chest, long pulses, and his body clamped down around the cock inside him until Hank gasped and swore and lost his rhythm. Hank gripped his hips hard and drove up into him three, four times, and went rigid with a groan that rattled in his chest, and Sam felt him pulse, again and again, until the last shudder passed.

For a while Sam lay slumped on his chest with his face in that beard. A neighbor’s television came muffled through the wall. A siren went by on Harvard and faded.

“I’m going to fall asleep,” Sam mumbled.

“Do that.”

“I’m on top of you.”

“I know where you are.” One big hand moved slow up and down Sam’s back. “Go to sleep, sweetheart. I’m not moving.”

---

They stayed in Tulsa through Monday and didn’t leave the apartment except for groceries. Hank came back from the store with a bag of food and a cheap blue bedsheet set, folded and still in the package, and put it on the card table without a word. He made eggs in the one pan Sam owned. On Monday afternoon he fixed the bathroom faucet that had dripped for a year, using a butter knife and a lot of cursing. In the evening they took the Camry to the laundromat two doors down, and Hank sat on a plastic chair reading a three-year-old magazine with his reading glasses on his nose, and Sam watched him over the dryer and thought, with a kind of dizzy calm, this is what it’s like to want somebody around the house.

Neither of them said anything about Tuesday, and it sat on the card table anyway, next to the folded bedsheets.

At five in the morning, in the grey before the alarm, Sam woke up with his heart pounding. He lay still and listened to Hank breathe. Then he turned over, pressed himself against that broad warm back, and slid a hand around to his belly.

“I’m awake,” Hank said, not moving.

“I can’t stop thinking about what Walt’s got.”

“I know.”

“Can you do something about it?” Sam heard his own voice and almost couldn’t believe it. “Can you help me think about something else?”

Hank rolled over. His face in the half-light was creased from the pillow, and his eyes were very steady. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you in me. Slow. I want to get on my knees and not talk.”

“That’s a lot of wanting before breakfast.” But Hank’s mouth was already against his neck, and his hand slid down Sam’s ribs. “On your knees, then. Use the pillow.”

Sam got onto his hands and knees on the mattress, head down, forearms on the pillow. The air was cold on his skin and Hank’s body was a warm wall at his back. Hank’s lips came down the length of his spine, one slow kiss after another, and Sam shivered. The lube was cool, and the first finger easy now, the second easy, the stretch familiar. He pushed back into it.

“You’re open already. Your body knows me.” Hank’s voice was low, close, his chest hair brushing Sam’s back. “You were thinking about this all night, weren’t you? Lying there with your ass wanting it.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me how much.”

“So much I couldn’t sleep.” Sam’s fingers dug into the pillow. “Please. Put it in.”

Hank sat back, tore the second foil square, sheathed himself, and set the head against the place he’d just opened. He didn’t rush. He pressed in slow and steady until Sam’s breath left him in a long groan, and then he held there, buried all the way, one big hand flat on the small of Sam’s back.

“Still sore?”

“A little. It’s good. Move.”

Hank moved. Long slow strokes, drawing out almost to the tip and gliding back in, each one dragging across that place inside him. It was nothing like the first time. Nobody hurried, nobody was afraid, and the rhythm was deep and heavy, like the road itself. Hank’s thighs slapped quietly against the backs of Sam’s. His breath came harder. His hand slid down Sam’s ribs and rested on his hip, and every thrust rocked Sam forward onto the pillow.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Hank said against his shoulder. “Whatever he’s got in that office. Whatever he says.”

“I’m not.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” The words came out of Sam in pieces, between the thrusts. “I’m here. I’m yours. Fuck me, Hank, I’m right here.”

“That’s it.” Hank’s pace stayed slow and got heavier, his grip tightening on Sam’s hip. “Your ass is swallowing me whole. That’s the sound I want. That’s the one I’m going to remember when I’m on the road in January with nobody in the seat.”

“You won’t have nobody.”

“No.” A long breath, almost a laugh. “I won’t.”

Hank wrapped an arm across his chest and drew him upright, until Sam knelt with his back against that broad furred chest and Hank’s mouth at his ear. The angle changed. The next stroke went deeper than any yet, and Sam’s head fell back on Hank’s shoulder and his mouth fell open.

“There?”

“There. Don’t move. Please don’t move. Just stay.”

“My arm’s the only thing holding you up. I could let go and you’d stay right where you are, you’re that full of me.” Hank rocked up into him, slow and short, and Sam felt it low in his belly and all the way down to the soles of his feet. “I’m going to do this every morning I’m allowed. Wake up with my cock in you before the coffee’s on, and listen to you beg for it.”

“Every morning,” Sam whispered. “God. Yes. Every one. Fuck me till I can’t kneel up.”

“You’d let me?”

“I’d ask you to.” His voice broke on it. “I’m asking.”

Hank’s breath stuttered against his ear and his arm tightened. For a few strokes he said nothing, only breathed and moved, and when he did speak it was almost a laugh. “That’s twice in a week somebody’s asked me for something and I didn’t have to guess.”

He eased Sam back down onto the pillow and took up the long slow stroke again, and this time he reached underneath and closed a fist around Sam’s cock.

The orgasm built in Sam from the base of his spine, slow and enormous, climbing one vertebra at a time. He pushed back onto Hank’s cock, begging without words, and Hank gave it to him, deep and slow and unhurried, and the fist around him began to move in time. He came with his face in the pillow and a long broken cry, pulsing into Hank’s palm, shaking from his thighs to his scalp. Hank followed a few strokes later, his whole body bearing down against Sam’s back, and then they were lying on their sides in the grey light with Hank’s arm across Sam’s chest and the alarm still not ringing.

“Eight o’clock,” Hank said into his hair. “He’ll be in the window.”

“I know.”

“Come on. Get dressed. I’m not going to be late for a thing like this.”

---

Walt was in the window at seven fifty-two.

Sam saw him from the Camry’s open door, a lean bald man behind the glass with a white mustache and a coffee cup, and the cup came up in greeting the way it had on the first morning. Hank lifted two fingers. Then Walt set the cup down, picked up a cane from somewhere out of sight, and came out the office door in the cold, leaning on it and walking with the stiff, careful hitch of a man who had planned to do this more gracefully.

“Hank,” he said. His voice was the one from the phone, dry and slow. He gave Hank one long look from his boots to his beard. “You look terrible.”

“I slept on a mattress.”

“Tell me you slept somewhere with a floor under you.”

“Walt.”

“I’m only asking.” Walt turned. “Ortega.”

“Mr. Brennick.”

“Walt. If I’m Mr. Brennick I’ll feel a hundred.” He put out a hand, and when Sam took it Walt covered it with his other one and held it a moment. His palm was papery and warm. “I’ve wanted to shake that hand since the phone call. Come inside before we freeze. It’s a terrible office and the coffee is worse.”

The depot office was one room with a metal desk, a wall map full of colored pins, and a window that looked straight down the second row of the yard to the place where a green Peterbilt had been parked every morning for nine years. Sam saw it from the angle Walt must have seen it, the long hood, the white letters on the door. A chair stood pulled up to the window. A coffee ring on the sill had been rubbed deep into the paint.

“Sit,” Walt said. “Both of you.”

“Sit down, sweetheart,” Hank said to Sam, and then heard himself.

Walt’s eyebrows went up and stayed up. Hank turned a dark, slow red from the collar of his Carhartt to the roots of his hair.

“Sweetheart,” Walt repeated, lowering himself carefully into the desk chair. “Eleven years in the same bunk and I got ‘Brennick.’ You got a whole other vocabulary out of him in a month.”

“Walt.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m delighted.” He said it plainly, and Sam saw he meant it, and saw what it cost him to say it that lightly. “Let a man enjoy it.”

Walt leaned over and opened the bottom drawer of the desk. It stuck. He worked it with his good knee and finally got it open, took out a small brown coin envelope gone soft at the corners, and set it on the blotter between the three of them. Then he sat back and folded his hands on his cane.

Sam looked at Hank. “You told me to ask you Tuesday,” he said. “In the yard, with him standing here.” His voice came out thinner than he wanted. “So I’m asking. What’s in the envelope?”

Hank’s eyes went to Walt and stayed there. “I think he’d rather tell it.”

“I would.” Walt kept his hands folded. “Nine years ago, at the Sunflower, you carried my bag to the door and kissed me and walked back to the truck without a word. I got on the bus. You’d had that bag open in the sleeper all morning, and I thought you were hunting for a lighter. Somewhere around Wichita I went into it for my other socks, and that was in the toe of one of them.”

Hank didn’t move. Sam saw the muscle in his jaw.

“I thought about getting off in Wichita,” Walt said. “I had my hand on the cord. Then I thought, he didn’t ask. He put a key in my sock and drove away, and he never said one word that I could have said yes to. So I stayed on the bus.”

“I never changed the lock,” Hank said.

It came out hoarse and low, and nobody spoke.

“I know you didn’t. I drove past in the spring and the porch light was still that same yellow bulb.” Walt almost smiled. “A key doesn’t ask anybody anything, Hank. It never did. I kept it because I thought one day you’d say it out loud, to me, and I’d hand it back. Nine years in a drawer, I’ve been waiting for a sentence.”

“Walt,” Hank said. His voice cracked on it. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Walt held up a hand. “Let me finish, because I practiced it. If you’d said ‘stay’ that day, I’d have said no. My knee was gone and my pride was worse. I’d have taken the gate job and hated you for it by Christmas. I know that now. I’d have said no to your face, and that would’ve been a better thing than a key, and maybe the next nine years would have been different, and maybe not.” He took a breath. “And then Ortega texts me from a parking lot that you said it to him. ‘Stay. On the truck. With me.’ I sat here and read it eleven times. And the damnedest thing, I wasn’t sore. I was glad.”

Sam’s throat had closed up completely. He kept his eyes on the envelope.

“So I’m done waiting. Take it back.” Walt pushed the envelope an inch across the blotter. “Give it to somebody who’ll use it. Or keep it on your ring and tell the lock it’s been missed. I don’t care which. I’d just like it out of my drawer.”

For a long moment Hank didn’t touch it. Then he picked up the envelope and tipped the key into his palm, a brass house key on a bit of red string with a faded Doyle Transport tag, and closed his hand around it so hard his knuckles went white. His eyes were wet. He didn’t wipe them.

“It’s a lousy house,” he said, to Sam, and not to Walt. “Two bedrooms off Lewis. I haven’t slept in the back one since he left. The roof leaks over the kitchen. There’s a bed in there nobody’s been in for nine years.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like you to see it.”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“You don’t know what you’re saying yes to.”

“I know it’s your house.” His own eyes were stinging. “I’d like to see where you live.”

Hank’s big hand came across the desk, took Sam’s, and held it. Walt looked at the two hands on the blotter for a while, and then at the cold window, and cleared his throat in a way that didn’t fool anyone.

“Right,” he said. “Now the business. There’s no load for you two until Thursday. Take Wednesday and fix that roof.” He reached for his cane and got up, slowly, and stood looking down at them both. “And Ortega. A week from Sunday, come to supper at my place. I make a terrible chili. It’s the only dish I’ve got, so the whole yard’s eaten it.”

“I’d like that,” Sam said.

“Bring him,” Walt told Hank. “He talks a lot. It’s good for you.” He went to the window and stood with his back to them, looking down the long row of gravel at the green truck, and lifted his coffee cup to it out of habit, and stopped, and set the cup down on the sill. “Go on. Get out of my office. The pair of you are going to make me cry on company time.”