Travelin' Man by Tom Mendicino

You’re gonna be dead on your ass by last call. We can get a six-pack and watch The Notebook when we get home. Love me some Ryan Gosling!”
    Cole laughs at KC’s confused reaction.
    â€œYou backing out on me?” I knew you were bullshitting last night when you said you wanted to dance. Too much weed and too much beer. I knew you wouldn’t have the balls to do it! But just give me a little time. I’m gonna get you up there dancing on the bar flashing those buns of steel soon enough.”
    KC’s beginning to recall the wee hours of the morning, but it’s an incomplete jigsaw. Bits and pieces of the puzzle are still missing. He remembers music. Loud music. Stripping down to his underwear and dancing in the tiny living room. Auditioning for an appreciative audience of one. Tripping over his feet and falling on his ass. Cole rolling on the living room floor, laughing hysterically. A hit on the bong. Another bottle of Coors. Another hit on the bong. Cole slipping a disc into the DVD player. He remembers sitting spread-eagled, staring slack-jawed, too stunned to react as Cole fast-forwarded to a scene featuring a lean, sinewy Asian, with well-defined muscles and a round ass, heavily inked with Chinese characters along his calves and down his forearms, Celtic circles on each of his biceps, and a finely rendered Pyramid Eye etched on his back. An actor named “Cole Lee” was energetically fucking a smaller Asian boy in high definition television before enthusiastically giving up his own sweet ass to a brute who was a dead ringer for Vin Diesel.
    â€œYou want to wash your clothes, Kevin? They don’t smell so good. There’s a robe on the hook on the bedroom door. Fuck. Where is my fucking sister? She was supposed to be home an hour ago. Just keep your eye on these two ‘til she gets here, okay? They won’t give you any trouble. I can’t be late for five o’clock Mass. I’m doing the readings.”
    Â 
    He’d never expected to stay in Eugene for more than two or three days. He’s been here nearly three weeks now. Cole and his sister have come to depend on him. He says room and board is all he needs for taking care of their grandparents, but they insist on paying him cash, two hundred a week at first, increasing it to three hundred when he talked about going south to Texas. Ba has grown attached to him—Cole calls it a crush—and fusses whenever anyone other than KC tries to feed her. Cole’s amazed at KC’s patience with her, how he can sit with her for hours, holding her hand, speaking to her in a low soothing voice, just like he did with Pop-Pop whenever he visited the nursing home. Ong, which Cole says means grandfather, and KC have become good buddies. They play endless games of checkers and dominoes and cards with the television volume cranked loud so the old man doesn’t miss anything on the Vietnamese cable channel.
    He and Cole share the same bed as chastely as brothers. Cole swears they got so horny watching his video that they sucked each other’s dicks the night they met, but KC doesn’t remember it and the suggestion of anything sexual has never come up again. Cole says it would only fuck things up. KC’s the best thing that’s happened to him in a long time. His cunty sister isn’t much help with their grandparents. She’s in the Nguyen family business and works the same odd hours as her brother. A headliner at the city’s swankiest gentleman’s club, she’s a legend in every frat house on the campus of the University of Oregon. Since KC’s arrival, Cole’s finally got the freedom to book his “appearances” without needing to coordinate schedules with her.
    KC is never in need of cash. Nancy’s not such a terror once you get to know her. She was almost maternal when she handed him his duffel bag, lecturing him that he needs to be more responsible, that he’s damn