Nate’s heart began to pound again. “You can’t bust them. If they find out I told you—”
“Do you know where they got it?”
“Brian said he stole it from his dad’s drawer. But listen to me, if they find out it was me who told—”
“Don’t worry. If I have to trust you, the least you can do is trust me.”
It seemed turnabout was fair play, but it didn’t make Nate feel any better.
School started again after New Year’s, and Nate and Cody fell into an easy routine. Nate drove Cody to school every morning, and nearly every moment that wasn’t taken by school, the Tomahawk, or sleep, they spent together. They went to Nate’s if his dad was working, although even then, they were very careful about what they did there. Nate was too paranoid about his father catching them. If Cody’s mother was gone, they went to Cody’s. Sometimes, if the weather wasn’t bad, they found a back road and Nate let Cody drive his Mustang. Cody had a license, even though he never drove his mother’s car, but he’d never driven a stick, and teaching him how to operate the clutch kept them occupied for a few weeks.
But like any teenagers, they lived for the weekends. Friday and Saturday nights, Cyndi was always gone, and they had several hours after Cody’s shift ended but before Nate had to be home for curfew, and they spent most of those hours sequestered in Cody’s room.
Nate finally understood all the hype about sex.
They never engaged in actual, penetrative sex. Neither of them seemed inclined to venture there just yet. Besides, there were plenty of ways to make each other feel good using only their hands and their mouths.
Nate thought he’d become used to Warren, but being so close to Cody brought some of the uglier parts of small-town life home. The train schedule seemed sporadic, but when it came through Warren, it shook Cody’s entire trailer. Police showed up at Kathy and Pete’s place so often that Nate realized it was a miracle he’d managed to keep his friendship with Cody hidden from his dad for as long as he had. It was only a matter of time before his dad responded to a domestic disturbance call and saw Nate’s truck parked out front. Toward the end of January, Vera knocked on Cody’s door and asked if he’d seen Ted.
“I usually see him go past the gas station on the way to the liquor store,” she said. “But I ain’t seen him for three days, and I can hear that dog of his barking to go out from my bedroom.”
Cody’s cheeks paled, his eyes sliding to the most distant trailer in the lot. “I haven’t seen him.”
Twenty minutes later, Nate’s dad and another police officer arrived and pounded on the front door of Ted’s trailer. Eventually, they busted in, and then the ambulance arrived, but without lights or a siren. The dog was loaded into the back of a police car. A bit of careful questioning with his dad at dinnertime confirmed that the occupant had been found dead inside, apparently having drunk himself to death sometime earlier that week, and the dog had been taken to the shelter in Rock Springs. Nate stupidly hoped the poor thing didn’t get put down, but he had no way of knowing its fate. Meanwhile, two pregnant girls at Walter Warren High School—one senior and one sophomore—dropped out, more families moved away, and Nate heard Brian bragging in English about the coke he’d managed to score from a friend of his father.
The sooner he and Cody got out of Warren, the better. It was something they talked about often. Whether sequestered in Cody’s room because his mom was home, or cuddling on the couch while she was away, Nate and Cody spent hours talking about what might happen after graduation. Nate knew Cody was studiously saving every penny he could, but Nate also knew that wasn’t adding up nearly as fast as Cody would have liked. Although they never talked about it, Nate suspected Cody was paying a fair share of the bills. He’d cut down to only two or three cigarettes a day, simply because he could no longer stand to part with several dollars a week to support his habit.
They were in agreement that there must be places in the world where homosexuality didn’t seem like such a crime. They’d both heard jokes about San Francisco their whole lives, but huddled together on Cody’s couch, with the lights low and the curtains all drawn tight so nobody could see them from outside, they talked in hushed tones about where else they might go.
They talked about AIDS.
It was impossible not to. It was mentioned every night in the news. It was on multiple magazine covers. Nate bought each one, not only because he wanted to make sure they knew as much as possible about the disease, but because he hoped he’d find little nuggets of info buried in the articles. In places that weren’t Warren, Wyoming, whole communities of men and women in same-sex relationships lived their lives as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and Nate longed to know where those places were.