The Gold Diggers by Paul Monette

chair whose seat had rotted out. The chair sat back on its haunches. They’d gone off on foot the other day, charged with fantasies—over the next rise, what if they came upon men in chaps, branding and cutting calves. Or a wild horse in a corral, a rodeo rider breaking him bareback. Even as they laughed, imagining the dirty things they’d do, Nick had thought: The man we are after is still external to us both, even now. If asked to pin down who that man could be if not Sam, Nick would have said two or three things without thinking: He regularly wrestles some actual creature of the earth, and he’s glad to be alone, whenever he can, and one day is so much like another that he doesn’t hear them going by. It was another way of saying he had to be careless. Oddly enough, the cowboy lover in Nick’s head didn’t need sex and hadn’t had a lot. He was pretty shy. And if he wasn’t Sam, then Sam could not obsess him like a dream any longer. That meant that here they were at last, merely a man and a man, and Nick had the same power to be careless as Sam. He knew how much he preferred the dream.
    â€œI never know what I want until it’s time,” Sam said. “You know what I thought about doing when I was driving up here? Going to your house.”
    â€œIn Bel-Air?”
    â€œI figured I ought to see how the other half’s living these days. But then when I saw you at the door, I remembered I wanted to get laid.”
    Nick was standing at ease, halfway across the room, his hands in his back pockets. They both looked surly, as if it were a duel coming up. They were just out of range of each other’s weapons and they went through their footwork to loosen up. Sam was already hard as he slipped his Levi’s down around his thighs. No underwear, of course. Sam followed the fashion in these matters to the letter.
    â€œAnd after that?” Nick asked with mock weariness, as if Sam was going to have his own way no matter what. “Then would it amuse you to tour Bel-Air?”
    â€œI won’t know until it’s time. I don’t think ahead if I can help it.”
    Rita’s right, Nick thought as he moved to the bed and knelt between Sam’s legs. The flash of Rita brought back, like a second in a dream, the whole halting theory of Rita and the world. “Instead of growing up,” she had said last week at dinner, “I read a thousand books. In books, the people start their letters, ‘Dear So-and-so, I think of you so often.’After a while it made me mad. I wanted to say, ‘But people don’t think that often. About anything.”And Nick protested. He never forgot a face himself, and it would have been the truth if he’d said it in his letters, because everyone he knew went through his mind from time to time, as if on cue. But Sam was the sort of person Rita must have meant. Meanwhile, the thought of Rita passed in a moment, but it was odd enough for anything to intrude among the cowboys and surfers that crowded Nick’s heated brain when he went to bed. As to letters, he didn’t know what he was talking about. His only commerce with the mails had to do with paying bills.
    He held Sam’s hips in his hands and sucked him up and down. It was as good a place to start as any, and it held him off from too much tight embracing, which made Sam nervous and shook him off. Also, he could be fairly certain for the time being that he wouldn’t say the wrong thing, and now, at the first touch, he always fell into his most unguarded moment. If it had gone another way and he’d sucked Sam’s ear, something he delighted in, he might have whispered, while Sam squirmed, the very antidote to his detachment. He knew Sam so well already that his cock seemed to have a taste all its own, which it didn’t, but as it was in his mouth that Nick made the connection, taste was a way of thinking about it. Actually the texture and the