Harlan's Race Read Free Page A

10,000-meter run. His T-shirt was draped over a chair with kid forgetfulness — I could still see him pulling it off, eager to make love, baring his lean torso that rippled with life, like water. The double bed, so disordered after we finally lay quiet, was neat now, under its worn chenille spread. Just an hour ago, I had seen that torso inert under glaring lights in the city morgue. They’d verified a gunshot wound as cause of death. His dad had identified him and authorized shipment of the body home. I was jostled aside. Officially, I did not exist.
    Now, barely looking at myself in the mirror, a 41-year-old man who’d lost the only lover he ever had, I noticed something. The bloodstained suit. It was still on me.
    From the adjoining room came a TV newscaster’s voice. Moving in a numb quest to understand what had happened, I opened the connecting door.
    The room was Harry’s and Chino’s. But right now, Vince, Steve, Marian and Bruce Cayton were in there, hunched amid blue layers of cigarette smoke, watching the screen. Bruce was an old-school, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing journalist I’d known for years, who by some miracle of sympathy had become one of our staunchest media supporters. Mike Stella was there too, a teammate of Billy’s.
    “... of Richard Mech’s confession to the shooting,” said the newscaster somberly.
    News-clips slid before our eyes. A pan-shot of the stands beside the straightaway, as Billy was pulling ahead of Finnish runner Armas Sepponan. The killer had taken advantage of the uproar — people standing up and screaming wildly for or against the queer. A slow-motion zoom showed the dark puff in the air by Billy’s head.
    Cut to police escorting Richard Mech. It was my first look at my lover’s murderer. Mech was about my age, clean-cut. By tonight, police and media already knew from his confession that Mech was an Idaho country boy and an Army sniper in Vietnam.
    A guy like me, I thought, did this to us.
    Steve, sitting beside me, wordlessly put his arm across my shoulders.
    . . U.S. authorities demanding that Mech be extradited back to the U. S. to stand trial,” the newscaster went on. “Meanwhile, there are reactions from Canadian and American church leaders, who ...”
    Mike Stella wordlessly squeezed my arm and left. I trudged back to my room. Vince followed, and shut the door. His eyes were bleary, and his handsome face tear-stained. He leaned against the faded wallpaper with Billy’s shoe still stuffed in one pocket of his black leather jacket. His silver peace symbol, on its leather thong, was askew.
    This tall, rangy youth had exchanged a look or two with me, before Billy and I fell in love. At that time, I still had a rule about not sleeping with my runners, so I had stiff-armed Vince. After I finally let myself love Billy, Vince had hidden his feelings out of respect for Billy, who was his best friend. Officially, Vince was in Montreal as my assistant. Unofficially, he was the other gay, world-class runner I’d trained — the one who hadn’t made the team. The ruined miler whose stride still gave him the look of a wolf on the hunt. Now he felt like he wanted to cry on my shoulder.
    My shoulders ached with weariness — I hitched them. Vince hesitated, then came over and rubbed them gently.
    “You should ... like, get out of those clothes,” he said hoarsely.
    I knew he wanted to show caring. But touch was something I shunned right then, so I walked away to the closet. Billy’s brown velvet suit was hanging in there. Just last night it had clothed his living frame, at an uproarious celebration dinner. My fingers ran down the sleeve. So soft. But not warm. A deep wrenching racked my guts. But no tears came.
    Just then, Harry Saidak and Chino Cabrera came in.
    “Oooh, it’s the baby killers,” Vince said with an edged voice. “Lock up the napalm, Mary.”
    Vince was 24, and as a college student he’d evolved from the peace movement into the gay lib movement. But my