Nowhere Man - 6. Chapter 6: Bacon

I woke up to the crackle of bacon and grease spitting into the air and it took me back to a completely different place. I wasn’t in the middle of the most beautiful nowhere in Texas. I was sitting in the living room of my mother’s brick home in East, Texas. The popping of the fatty meat reminded me of her Sunday mornings and her floral apron. Those Sunday mornings ended a million years ago. There were no Sunday mornings in Easton Park.

“He wakes,” Tyler said with a joy I’d never heard in his voice. I turned, still groggy, and saw him bending over the fire.

My first thought was that we weren’t going to wear clothes on this trip. He was as naked as a newborn, smoke billowing around him. A skinny, glorious, sexy site.

“You gonna stay in the bag all morning or are you going to get up and eat?”

I pulled myself out of the warm sleeping bag and walked to the fire. There was still dew on the ground and fog in the air. I was cold until I sat on the log and snuggled close to the flame.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“I’m hungry.” It was more food than had been in his kitchen pantry. Bacon, of course, was crackling in a cast iron skillet. A pot next to the skillet was boiling potatoes and a couple of eggs. A can of baked beans simmered off on the outer edge of the fire. This was a countryman’s feast, I thought.

“Didn’t know you could cook,” I said, trying to warm myself.

“Yeah, well, I’m full of surprises.” That was the understatement of the century. I hoped more of his surprises were as refreshing as this one.

The good mood lasted all through breakfast. The outdoors were a godsend for him, easing him, taking down his guard. He didn’t talk more than usual, but what he was saying wasn’t as short and illusive. Now was my chance to ask some burning questions without getting shot in the face.

“Have you ever been out here with anyone other than your wife?”

“You asking if I ever cheated on Les?” His face was down in his plate.

“No, I—“

“The answer is no,” he replied. It was definitive. “You’re the first person besides her to see this place the way I see it.”

“How do you see it?”

“With these two eyes,” he responded. He looked around. Back to illusive, I thought.

“It’s so calm out here. No stress at all,” he elaborated “Just beautiful plains, a beautiful lake. And when the sun goes down all you’ve got is the stars watching you. She showed me the beauty in things like this.”

I wanted so badly to ask why. Why had he brought me to such a personal place? We’d messed around a couple of times, so why was I here? I couldn’t show him the beauty of anything. The things I could show him sent him reeling in the opposite direction. I chose to drop it and not ruin the entire mood, but I couldn’t help but wonder why.

“We talk about me too much,” he said. Did we, really? A couple of sentences were too much for him?

“There ain’t nothing to talk about me,” I said tossing a hard bean into the fire. I glanced at him.

“There’s gotta be something to you,” he said. “Where are your folks?”

“They’re dead.”

“How’d they die?” Now who had the question quota they were trying to fill. I decided now was my chance to give him a taste of his own evasiveness.

“God took ‘em,” I said.

He squinted at me. He threw his plate down and stood up, facing away from me. I had a full view of his entire body, and instead of being turned on like I should have, I was annoyed. Tyler gets up and runs again… big surprise.

“I’m really trying, here Trav,” he said. “I’m trying and you’re not making it easy.”

“I’m not making it easy on you?”

“You want to sit here and get to know me, then go ahead. All I ask is for the same courtesy.”

“You’re trying to deflect,” I said loudly. “You’re trying to avoid the situation at hand.”

“What situation?”

“You’ve got feelings for me, and you can’t deal with that. You’re wife’s been dead exactly a year and you can’t deal with that either. Please, tell me, is there anything in this world that you can deal with?”

“I killed her.”

The sound of him swallowing hard filled the open space. His hands were on his hip, a casual pose for someone who had just confessed to murder. I thought about running back to the truck, but what would I do there? I couldn’t drive off and leave him. I’d have to ride in a car with a man who’d killed his wife for three hours to get home. The ups and downs I’d felt on this trip were like an emotional rollercoaster and it looked as if the ride was coming to an end.

“You killed your wife?” I asked slowly, standing up and facing him. I didn’t dare walk towards him, but I wanted to be in a running position in the event he went off the rails. I was sure I could outrun him.

“I killed her, Trav,” he repeated.

Why aren’t you in jail? I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask a lot of things. My mind fixated on one word: why?

He turned around, glaring at me with red eyes set to burst any second. I didn’t peg Tyler for a crier and I wasn’t much help in situations like this.

“I’ve never told anyone,” he said. He took a step towards me.

I instinctively jerked back. I was afraid. Did I even want to hear this?

As I stepped away from him, the back of my foot caught the log that we’d sat on. I lurched forward, trying to catch my balance before I fell face first into the fire. I overcorrected, and in a split second, my body was hurling backwards over the log.

I gasped for breath. I felt Tyler’s hands on my chest, but I couldn’t see or hear him. This was the end. I was about to die and he was going to toss me into the lake, just like his dead wife. They would never find my body.

I blinked my eyes to clear the water from them and regain my vision. There was a dull pulsing at the back of my head, but the rest of me felt fine.

“Are you alright?” Tyler asked. He sounded far away and looked like a dream above me. I nodded, lifted my head and dropped it right after. I put my hand behind my head to see what was causing the pulsing. I expected to feel a bump there, but instead my finger touched something warm and wet. This was the end.

I brought my fingers to my face, knowing what I was going to see, but praying it was something else. “Are you alright?” Tyler repeated. I saw the blood on my fingers, took another deep breath and gasped. I closed my eyes and everything went black.

I woke up a second later, lying on my back with a wet cloth wrapped tightly around my head. The first thing I saw was a blinding white light and then everything began to focus. I sat up and looked around. Tyler was gone. The camp was intact and all of our stuff was there, but he was gone and so was the truck.

That bastard had left me for dead.

I stood up, feeling a dull headache pulse inside my brain, but other than that I was fine. I was alive. I was alone.

“Tyler!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. I stumbled about, knocking supplies over. He was gone. I was dead.

What the fuck was I supposed to do? The fire was dwindling and I didn’t have a clue how Tyler had started it. I didn’t remember seeing any other camps or civilizations on our way down here. Was this his plan all along? To rid the world of one more queer by stranding him in the goddamn wilderness to bleed to death? If so, he’d done a good job. I was a few days away from being vulture bait.

I had forgotten how intensely my head was throbbing until I sat down. I started to sweat, and closed my eyes again. I was too tired to worry about where Tyler was. I was too tired to worry about anything.

The second time I woke up, it was much darker and much cooler. It wasn’t quite nighttime yet, but the sun was low in the sky, casting an orange and blue shadow onto the lake. I woke up with a shiver, and although I was sweating, I was still very cold. I vaguely remembered feeling abandoned and wondering where Tyler was. I looked around and noticed the fire was burning brightly again.

“Tyler?” I tried to say, but I couldn’t hear the sound of my own voice. “Tyler?” I croaked again, this time coughing with the word. The third time was the charm.

I turned my head toward the fire and a sharp pain shot from my head all the way down my back. I buckled, laid down again and grabbed the back of my head. Where the wet cloth had been was now a dry shirt, wrapped tightly around my head. I lay there, trying to muster the strength to stand again.

From a far off distance, I heard a hum. It wasn’t a tune I recognized or even a voice I could place. If someone had asked me to identify where the sound was coming from, I wouldn’t have been able to. It sounded a million miles away and right next to my ear at the same time.

“Tyler,” I said, finally hearing my own words. The humming stopped.

“Trav, you awake?” He asked me. He stood up and walked towards me. He stopped right above me, and held out his hand. His hair was framing his face and the glow of the setting sun gave him an angelic look. He was here to save me.

I knew I was hallucinating. The Tyler I knew wasn’t angelic, he was scary. He was a wife killer. He was going to kill me. But if he was going to kill me, why hadn’t he done so?

I grabbed the skinny hand and hoisted myself up, ignoring the stiffness of my neck and the pain of my back. It wasn’t until I felt his cool hand that I noticed how warm and clammy I was. I stumbled backwards, and Tyler caught me, drawing me in close to him. He whispered something softly in my ear that I didn’t understand, but would give a million dollars to know. He held me with his surprisingly strong arms and I leaned my head against his shoulder. He smelled like bacon.

“Are we gonna stand here like little children at a school dance?” he whispered in my ear. No, I thought. My mind willed me a million miles away from him. Even a concussion to the back of the head couldn’t erase the memory of his confession. I was standing with a killer.

Realizing I didn’t have the strength to match my will to move, Tyler swayed us back and forth. At first his movements were jerky, and then he started humming and the movements smoothed out.

“Follow that nowhere man, follow him where he goes, follow him where he leads,” he sang in a low voice directly into my ear.

I was dancing with a killer.

“Follow that nowhere man, he won’t let you go, he’ll take care o’ your needs,” he continued.

If he was going to kill me, he would have done so by now.

“Follow that nowhere man, you’ll be safe with him, he won’t lead you astray. Follow that nowhere man, follow him anywhere, everything’ll be okay.” The song was slow and romantic to match the stars appearing overhead.

The voice singing such a beautiful song couldn’t belong to a killer.

Why couldn’t he be this guy all the time? Why did it have to take me banging my head against a sharp rock to pull this out of him? This man I was dancing with wasn’t a killer. He was a man sharing his soul with me, and for the first time since I’d hit my head, I didn’t have the urge the turn and run away.

I don’t know how long we stood there, swaying back and forth to his rhythm, but I could have counted the seconds with the pulses in my head. I needed to say something, but I couldn’t decide exactly what. Did I tell him that I’d never in my life felt this way before? Did I tell him that I was beginning to see the vulnerability under his thick layer of deflection?

“You scare me, Tyler,” I told him.

“I have to explain about my wife,” he whispered, too afraid to raise his voice. The second he said the word wife, I realized that wasn’t it. The idea of him killing his wife had scared me before. It didn’t scare me now. Not as much as the fact that, swaying in his arms, I wasn’t afraid anymore.

If he was going to kill me, he would have done it already.

“No,” I replied. “I’m scared that I’m feeling something for you.”

I expected him to bolt. To pull away and let me fall into the glowing fire. I expected him to sprint for the water and wash the queer off. I expected him to react like he had last night when I had pushed him too far too fast.

But he didn’t. He kept swaying and I kept following, his manly smell of bacon filling my nostrils. If I thought he was full of surprises before, I hadn’t seen anything yet.

“Well in that case, that makes two of us,” he said, pulling back and staring at me.

He gave me a quick kiss that said so much for so little and pulled my head back down onto his Sunday morning shoulder.