Free The True Detective by Theodore Weesner Page B

compelling force, but he feels nothing of its call himself. Not now. He wonders, not at all for the first time: Is he really what he seems to be? Does he know what he is?
    He sips, widens his gaze. No one bothers him or seems to notice that he is standing there alone, sipping modest swallows of white wine from a large glass. Do they know that he is here to offer himself?
    Feeling he is standing on air, a thought runs through his mind of driving home to see his mother. It’s a thought he seldom has anymore. Might they reconcile at last? Might he drop out of school and go back home and do everything over again? Start over again? Be a child again and make himself over?
    All around there is smoke, movement, laughter, and music. And talk. Red, orange, and blue strobe lights flash from the doorway, exclaiming, it seems to Vernon: You! You are here! This is life! This! There is no turning back! Sipping, he remembers a remark he read somewhere, attributed to a woman: “Going to a gay bar informed me for the first time that I was not alone.”
    He shifts a couple steps, glances. There is an occasional woman in the crowd, and there are signs of intimacy, a hand on a shoulder or on a forearm, a person standing within the invisible shadow-embrace of another. Do we lose fear in pairing up? he wonders. He recalls a boy in grade school whose father, every time he saw him, had his hand around the boy’s shoulder or on his neck. Did the absence of that affection then, he wonders, have anything to do with its presence now? Close to his ear, almost into his thoughts, a voice says, “Some crowd.”
    Turning, Vernon sees a man in a suit, tie, and vest, looking nothing other than conversational. “Yes,” Vernon says. “It is.”
    It could be an exchange in a bank line. The man wears glasses, has thinning hair, looks to be in his thirties. His face looks lightly tanned.
    Through the noise, the man says, “First time here?”
    “Yes,” Vernon says and nods.
    The man smiles some. There is something friendly and genuine about him, and Vernon wonders if he knows what kind of bar he has wondered into. Then the man leans closer, to beheard, and calls, “You look like a frightened rabbit, you know that?”
    He smiles; Vernon smiles in turn this time. “That’s how I feel,” Vernon calls back. What he feels in fact is an amount of relief.
    “Haven’t been to a place like this in a few years,” the man calls. “It’s a meat market.”
    “Is it?” Vernon says.
    Nodding, the man says, “It must be the weather. I just felt like talking to someone new, someone I didn’t know. I enjoy that at times.”
    Vernon nods; it’s a fair reason, he thinks.
    “Are you in trouble?” the man calls.
    “What did you say?” Vernon says.
    The smile continues on the man’s face. “You heard me,” he says, in his pleasant manner.
    Vernon cannot resist smiling again, almost laughing. It seems the closest laughter has come to his face all day.
    “Well?” the man says.
    “Yes,” Vernon says. “Yes.”
    “Personal problems?” the man says.
    “Yes.”
    His head turned to listen, the man nods almost professionally. “What’s your name?” he calls.
    “What?”
    The man almost glances. “I said, ‘what’s your name’?”
    “Tony,” Vernon calls back, believing the man sees through this lie as readily as he saw through his evasion.
    “Wes,” the man says, offering his hand.
    “I beg your pardon,” Vernon says.
    “Wes.”
    Vernon nods, without eye contact. The man sips his drink, and Vernon follows suit, glancing at the man now as he does so. He is not good-looking, at least as Vernon has ever calculated good looks. He is friendly, though, Vernon thinks, and he seems quite intelligent. If he looked at him now, Vernon would smile, he knows, cooperatively.
    The man doesn’t look at him, though; as if to the floor, shifting his head near Vernon’s face, he calls, “There’s another room there. Let’s sit in there where we don’t have