Free Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin Page A

mistook ironic observation for criticism. “She’s no lemon, I can tell you that.”
    “No…I didn’t mean…That color must look great on the water.”
    “And lemme tell you, that baby turns on a dime. She’s a Cobalt 240 with all the extras…reversed chines and everything.”
    I had no idea what a reversed chine was and had no intention of asking, since Irwin was obviously testing me. All he’s ever required to be boring is the frank admission of anyone else’s ignorance. “Irwin really knows his boats,” I told Ben pointedly.
    Ben was a gentleman and led us elsewhere. “Did you guys have boats when you were little?”
    “Darn straight we did!” Irwin said, and I realized then exactly how low he had sunk in his recent effort to Christianize his cussing. Darn straight? Who the fuck says that?
    “It was really Irwin’s boat,” I told Ben. “I was just crew.”
    “Hey, remember the night we snuck down to Lake Tibet?”
    The name of that lake, I explained to Ben, was spelled like the Himalayan country but around these parts usually pronounced “Tibbit.”
    My brother confirmed this oddity. “Our granddaddy called it that, too. I had this dinky little rowboat hidden down there in the reeds. The folks didn’t even know about it. They thought we were at the movies. Remember, Mikey?”
    How could I have forgotten? I had waited all goddamn year to see Mary Poppins, starring my favorite person in the world, when Irwin, newly licensed and hormonally imbalanced, had hijacked me to the swamps. “I remember,” I told him.
    “Boy,” he murmured, “we hunted us some gators that night.”
    Ben gave me one of his looks. “ You hunted gators?”
    “Is that so hard to fathom?”
    “Well, yeah,” he said, smirking.
    “We didn’t really hunt ’em,” my brother admitted. “It was more like…harass ’em.” He chuckled, warming to the memory. “We’d shine our flashlights around until we could see their eyes…sometimes there were hundreds of ’em shining out there in the dark…but we were lookin’ for the eyes that were closest together.”
    Ben was obviously confused.
    “That meant they were little,” I explained, “and couldn’t hurt us.”
    “Ah.”
    “Then,” said Irwin, “we’d stun ’em with an oar and toss ’em in a bucket.”
    Ben turned to me with furrowed brow. “Why would you do that?”
    “To play with them,” I said. “They were…you know…more docile when they were stunned.”
    “Well, I guess so.” My beloved’s jaw was slack with horror. He looked like he was on the verge of reporting me to PETA.
    “We didn’t hit them that hard,” I told him, “and we always put them back.”
    That did nothing to fix his expression.
    “It wasn’t my idea,” I said.
    They both laughed, but it was the truth. Nothing had been my idea back then. Irwin had been the architect of every folly, the guy who taught me how guys become guys and beat the shit out of me in the process. The tide didn’t begin to turn until I was admitted to the university that had rejected Irwin two years earlier. Though he later enrolled in a business college in Tallahassee, he was expelled after a string of drunken misdemeanors, causing a major parental hissy fit at home. When, at twenty-six, I finally told my folks I was gay, Irwin received the news so unhysterically that it took me a while to realize that what he felt, more than anything, was relief. To him, my coming-out meant he was no longer the disgrace of the family; he could go about breeding kids and selling houses, being the man again.
    That was decades ago, of course, and Irwin, like George W. Bush, has long since proven that even serious fuckups can make a go of it. But sitting there in that bland suburban hacienda, I tallied the score of our ancient rivalry and realized that I envied nothing about my brother’s life. Not the boat or the four thousand plus square feet or the wife or the grandkid, either—none of the things I once worried I