Skin of the Wolf by Sam Cabot Page B

but took a deep breath and calmed himself. Spencer understood: pain, exhaustion, and worry had brought Michael to the edge. Spencer wanted to put an arm around his shoulders, to squeeze his hand, to do something to let him know he wasn’t alone. He did not. Spencer had lived nearly five centuries as a homosexual. In some times and some societies, that identity was accepted, even celebrated. He’d spent some marvelous years in Shogun-era Japan, for example, and a few lovely decades in Constantinople around the time this new America was shrugging off British rule. Ah, the perfumed flowers, ah, the water flowing in the secluded gardens! In other places at other times, though—most of them, if truth be told—his desires had been as necessarily hidden as his Noantri identity, each revealed only when he sensed he was among his own.
    In the cab on the way uptown, Spencer had asked Michael, “I felt this too delicate a question to bring up in the presence of theothers—as much for Father Kelly’s sake as yours—but I shall ask it now: Is your choice of romantic partners among your brother’s complaints against you?”
    “It never has been, but he hasn’t met you yet. Seriously, no. Edward’s straight himself, but he’s radically old-school. Pre-contact good, post-contact bad, no discussion. Pre-contact, a man like me would’ve had a place in the tribe. Two, actually—among the warriors, and among the women. Though when they found out I can’t cook they’d have chased me back to the battlefield.”
    “I’d have taught you.”
    “Thanks. No, my being gay has never been a problem for Edward, but my being with white men has. It’s just more proof that I’m throwing away my heritage. Accepting the identity the white world forced on us.”
    “Have you ever felt that you are? Accepting that false identity?”
    Michael gave Spencer a searching look. “Boy, is that a question for a long evening by the fire.”
    He fell silent, and Spencer did the same, watching the city streets roll by, people wrapped in scarves and hunched into coats hurrying through the dark.
    “Spencer.” A new tone rang in Michael’s voice.
    “Yes?”
    Michael threw a glance at the cabdriver, who was absorbed in the upbeat music from the radio. “You said you’d have taught me to cook. You could have, couldn’t you? Pre-contact. You could have been there. You could’ve come with Champlain, with the Jesuits. When our nations and our cultures were whole. You’d have seen us, known us. Spencer, my God, were you—?”
    Spencer shook his head. “I’m sorry. No. First: my affection for Father Kelly notwithstanding, I’d have gone nowhere with the Jesuits.Second, though it’s true I’ve traveled extensively, the appeal of a continent as rife with physical privation as this one was reported to have been was lost on me. It’s said there were Noantri among the earliest Europeans to arrive, but I was not one. I’d never touched toe to American soil until last October, a few weeks before you and I met.”
    The taxi slowed and rolled tentatively to the curb at a desolate Washington Heights corner. The driver turned to announce, “GPS says we’re here. You sure this is where you want to be?” Spencer, peering out at the closed auto body shops, the shuttered check-cashing storefront, and the one open bodega, thought the question entirely reasonable and the answer “No.” Michael, however, paid the fare without a word and got out. Spencer sighed and followed. A few steps along the side street brought them to a steel door beside a window lit with Budweiser neon. Without hesitation Michael pulled the door open and stepped inside.
    Now that door swung shut behind them, cutting off the icy air and replacing it with warmth and the aroma of beer, whiskey, and something that smelled distressingly like the lavatory in the rear, where a good many drunks probably missed their target. And sweat, as many discrete strands as there were people in the