ready-made labels. I want us to be free of those conventions that tie the rest of the world in knots. We don’t accept the Pope’s idea of morality, or Rush Limbaugh’s, or Barack Obama’s. We make our own.
“All my life my intention has been to free myself, but I don’t want to be alone. I want my family with me. So right here and now, in this room, I’m going to defy convention. I’m going to have sex with Lemur right here in front of you. You think I’m a faggot, Jack?”
“No, I do not.”
“You think I’m a faggot, Nikki?”
“No.”
“Lemur?”
“No. But I’m not either, and I don’t want to have sex with you.”
“You want to be conventional the rest of your life? You want to hide what you might or might not want to do? I don’t think you do. I’m asking you to join me in this little exercise. Exercise makes you stronger. We’re going to break this taboo together, and we’ll both be stronger. You think I don’t feel resistance to it? I do. It’s an iron claw inside my chest, an iron band around my mind. I have no desire to have sex with a man. But I choose to not care.”
Nikki had seen a lot of things during her short career as a hooker, but she had never seen anything that shocked her more than Papa pulling off his sweater and undershirt right then and there in front of the fire. Removing his shoes and socks and taking off everything else right there in front of them.
He had a good body, however old he might be. Really in shape, with the skin still tight and the muscles ropy. His skin glowed before the fire.
“That’s one convention down,” he said. “Are you with me, Lemur?”
“What about modesty? You were saying just the other day how we-”
“Special circumstances. Are you going to take your clothes off, or am I gonna do it for you?”
“I don’t credit this,” Jack said. “This is outright outlandish.”
“Yes,” Papa said, “it is. Stand up, Lemur.”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“I don’t either.” Papa took hold of Lemur’s wrist and pulled him up. “Not sexually. But as an exercise in freedom, I want nothing more. This is important, Lemur. And it takes guts. I think you’ve got the guts. I know you do. And I know you care about our freedoms. Take your sweater off.”
Lemur hesitated, and Papa took hold of the hem of his sweater and pulled it up over his head. Lemur made some noises of protest but didn’t struggle much. Papa started on his belt.
“Tell me this ain’t real,” Jack said.
“You think I’m a faggot?” Papa said.
“No, I don’t, but-”
“I refuse to be a slave. I choose freedom, and I want you people beside me. Take ’em off, Lemur. Don’t make me do all the work.”
Lemur took his jeans off. The two of them were naked, facing each other, about a foot apart.
“Two men do not get naked in front of each other,” Papa said. “That’s the rule in our society, right? Unless they’re on the same sports team, men do not get naked together. That’s the rule. And they certainly don’t touch each other, right? Not unless they’re faggots. Am I a faggot, Lemur?”
“No.”
“No, and you’re not either.” Papa took Lemur’s penis in his right hand. Lemur put his hands up on Papa’s biceps and leaned back. “Whoah, this is…”
“Am I a faggot, Jack?”
“Jesus.”
“Sounding pretty conventional there, Jack.”
Jack shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. Nikki couldn’t take her eyes off them. Papa got Lemur to sit back on the couch, legs stretched out before him. Papa took hold of his ankles and spread them out and then he knelt between Lemur’s legs and went at it. Nikki covered her face and watched between splayed fingers. Papa seemed like the ungayest person she had ever met, and seeing him going down on a guy was-well, she could feel the furniture of her mind trying to rearrange itself.
She had never thought before that two men having sex could be anything other than comic or disgusting, but now she felt her own body reacting to the two burnished males before her.
Papa didn’t ask Lemur to do anything. Lemur just lay back, silent through most of it, moaning toward the end, and gasping when he finally finished in Papa’s mouth. Then Papa held him in his mouth, unmoving, for some time after. Jack was staring straight into the fireplace now, but Nikki had caught him looking lots of times. He was acting all perturbed in how he was sitting and everything, but she could tell he was pretty turned on.
Papa stood up and started pulling on his clothes, taking his time about it. “Let’s agree on something,” he said, tightening his belt. “There are no faggots in this family. And if Lemur wants to have sex with a man, he is free to do so without any loss of respect around here.”
Lemur had curled up in the corner of the couch again. He clutched a wad of his clothes over his lap and Nikki could see he was nervous and ashamed and she felt bad for him. She tried to lighten the atmosphere a little.
“Is it just me,” she said, “or was that, like, major hot?”
22
Lemur and Nikki were out on another trail. They had been walking for about ten minutes in snow that was nearly up to the tops of their boots. At breakfast it had been decided to set this trap farther away from the house. It was a bear trap of the old-fashioned kind, with iron jaws that clamped shut.
“What if an animal steps in it?” Nikki said, puffing with the exertion of slogging through snow. “Won’t it break its leg?”
Lemur smiled, showing the gap in his front teeth. “You worry too much, kid.”
“Omigod, how many times do I have to tell you, you’re not old enough to call me kid.”
“The only animal heavy enough to set this thing off is a bear, and they’re all hibernating this time of year.”
“So what if a human steps in it?”
“The only human coming along this trail to the house is going to be someone we don’t want to see. They’ll get what’s coming to them. Family rules. All right, this looks good. We’ll remember where it is because of that tree.” He pointed to an evergreen with one large branch hanging down at a diagonal.
Nikki put the trap down and started kicking snow out of the way. Lemur leaned his sledgehammer against the tree and started fiddling with the mechanism of the trap.
“Are you going out again tonight?” Nikki said. “You know, like, to work?”
“Probably.”
“How come you have to do these jobs by yourself? Shouldn’t Jack or me be helping you?”
Lemur shrugged. “Jack’s above that kind of stuff now. And you’re not ready for it. We each have to carry our weight, so pulling these things is my job, that’s all.”
“Do you ever wonder about the people you’re robbing? How they feel?”
“A dollar of the enemy’s is worth twenty dollars of our own. That’s what Sun Tzu said.”
“Why are they our enemies?”
“Because they’re not us.” Lemur took up the sledgehammer and held it crossways. “It’s about survival too. It’s about K-OS. Civilization is going down and we’re gonna be the survivors. I don’t need to know every detail. And neither do you. Hold the stake.”
Nikki knelt in the snow and held the stake with both hands. The iron radiated cold through her mittens. If anyone had told her even three months ago that she would be wandering through the forest planting traps in the snow, she would have laughed. But she was beginning to like the outdoors. She was even beginning to like winter. The shafts of sunlight through the trees, the glitter of ice on the branches, the spears of light cast every which way. And the air, so dry and clean it made you feel transparent.
