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"Well," began Bledsoe...

"Well look, I need a partner for the sack race and my dad's busy with the horseshoe contest and..."

"Sack race?" said Bledsoe. "I'd _kill_ to be in a sack race! What must we do?"

"Well..." said Ricky, "I guess I ain't supposed to be going around with no strangers but..."

"Hey," said Bledsoe, "I'm no stranger!"

Bledsoe, never renowned for his aptitude at the sack race, did rather well with the young Ricky. Second place, a ribbon of sorts, and a Virginia-smoked canned ham.

"What's ham, anyway?" posed Bledsoe to Ricky.

"Heck, I dunno," said Ricky. "It's just the name of the stuff. It's pigs, I think."

Bledsoe gave him a blank look: "Pigs? Pigs in a can?

"Yeah sure — pigs in cans. Fruit in cans, too. Everything comes in cans nowadays."

"How..." mused Bledsoe, "How do they get big ol' pigs into l'il teeny cans like this?"

"They cut 'em up!" snarled Ricky, "They cut 'em up with giant chainsaws!"

"Yikes!" said Bledsoe.

"Yikes!" said Ricky.

Leaving Bledsoe, Ricky cruised over to the beer and pop tent. Bledsoe looked up at the sun and figured four o'clock. He thought of his motorcycle. The Dixieland Band was winding down their set, the various booths were being taken down, and the line at the porta-potty was long. Bledsoe was about to get on his motorcycle and ride off when the sleeveless chili fellow approached him with the chili oar.

"Uh," said chili dude, "Herb says you can have this here oar if you want it."

"Gee," said Bledsoe. "Really, for me?"

Chili dude became more relaxed. "Hell, what the hell," he said. "It's just an old oar. We thought you might like it. I cleaned all the chili off of it."

"Well," said Bledsoe, taking the oar, "I'm mighty obliged, I am. Thank you very much."

"Don't mention it," said the chili guy.

"This is a good thing," said Bledsoe.

And they sort of stood there for a second, Bledsoe shuffling his boots in the dirt and looking around him and chili dude with his hands in his pockets, finally looking at Bledsoe and saying, "Uh, say fella, you seem like a decent enough fella. How about coming up to my place. We're having a little party and everyone will be there."

Bledsoe said thanks but no thanks, carefully memorized the directions to the party anyway, and went into the Biltmore Diner. After having a cup of coffee, he rode his motorcycle up the road to chili dude's house.

The kid met him at the door: "Hey mister, where have you been? I'll whup your butt in chess, I got a table all set-up over here!"'

It was like Ricky was expecting him.

Ricky had a card table set up with a sign that said "Chess Korner" over it, the spelling of which Bledsoe chided him about. Bledsoe took Ricky's queen but lost anyway.

"NEXT!" shrieked Ricky, as the defeated Bledsoe ambled over to the food table. There were people all around. Talking people. A hardware store owner, the county clerk, a guy who restored antique furniture and also repaired vacuums, a woman who sold real estate. A teenager who was in the army. A guy who plowed snow in the winter and mowed lawns in the summer and what did he do in the fall and spring Bledsoe wanted to know?

"Rake leaves an' plant bulbs an' seed. I'll leave you to figure which one I do when." Bledsoe discovered that the chili dude had a name.

"I'm Kurt," said the man. "I didn't think you were coming."

"Well..." began Bledsoe.

"Say," said Kurt, "Where's the oar?"

"In a safe place," said Bledsoe.

And it was, too.

###

### Big Iron

It was my older brother Tommy who informed me of the gun bequeathed me by my father.

"I can't fucking believe you got the ACP," he said, his voice a low snarl in lobby of the airport in Atlanta. "The Big Iron. Shit."

"What?" I said. He may as well have been speaking in Serbo-Croatian.

I was used to communication problems with Tommy, as well as with my father (whose funeral I was here to attend) and pretty much the rest of my immediate and extended family. To summarize: I'm a gay man living in San Francisco; my entire family lives in rural Georgia. To say I don't come back to visit very often would be an understatement; I seriously considered not coming at all. But that would be bad form, not to attend your own father's funeral.

I did, however, ask Anthony to stay behind.

"But I should be there with you during this... difficult time," he'd said, albeit without much conviction. I can pass for pretty straight, but Anthony would look like Ru Paul to my family. It didn't take much to convince him that it'd be best for all concerned if he stayed in the city. But, of course, his willingness to go was noted, logged and appreciated.

So it was just me, if not a stranger in a strange land then at least someone rather familiar with the land but one who sensed it as hostile territory. And it only took five minutes in the car with Tommy after he picked me up at the airport to remind me, as if I didn't know, just what an alternate universe this was.

Tommy, cigarette dangling and Big Gulp at the ready, turned to me and said:

No, wait, I'll spare you the awful comment about my gay partner masked as teasing, as well as the racist comments about the current inhabitant of the White House, the diatribe about the immigrants destroying our country and the extended encomium regarding our nephew Argus, who had recently enlisted in the Marines. Or the Navy, I can't remember which. ("Helluva fuckin' kid.") There was absolutely no topic I could think of that might be safe from setting Tommy off on another rant about... something awful. Even the cause of my visit — my father's timely, logical and highly anticipated death of lung cancer after smoking Pall Malls like a burning haystack for 70 of his 85 years — was no simple conversational turf.

"So," I'd offered, with blatant hesitancy, "Was it hard on dad, the last months?" I didn't really give a shit, but you have to say these things when relatives die.

"Fuck if I know," said Tommy, already on his second cigarette since he'd picked me up (and if you think I was going to make any comment about his chain-smoking ways and our father's demise, you'd be wrong). "Son of a bitch was in some home where they looked after him past two years. I went once, but it was too fucking depressing for me. Anyways, we were all just waiting for the son of a bitch to shit the bed so we can get on with our own lives. Sick of hearing about the old man all the time, dyin' this and dyin' that, chemo this and nausea whatever hair loss shit so'sn you couldn't keep up with it all, that hospital talk. Jeannie (our youngest sister) would go sit with him even though it probably made her gag (Daddy was not a fan of women in general and barely tolerated his daughters; Jeannie was the only one who would even talk to him) and she'd sent out some e-mail every once in a while, let us know what all's up. Fucker shoulda died years ago – can't believe he made it to 85, smoking like a goddamn Freightliner the whole time."

He turned to me, gesturing with his smoldering cigarette: "An' don't you say shit to me about this, OK? I know, I know. Don't think I don't hear it every fucking single goddamned day from Janet (Tommy's wife) and the girls. Least I smoke filtered cigarettes like a white man, not those goddamned coffin nails the old man smoked three fucking packs a day of them anyways. Here's our exit."

The funeral was mercifully brief, sparsely attended and largely devoid of emotion. The real action was to be at the after-party at the big house. When we pulled up in front of my father's house, Tommy turned to me as he killed the engine.

"So, Thearn, still gay, huh?"

"Yes Tommy, still gay."

Tossing caution in Tommy's capacious ashtray, I tried for levity.

"Always gay. Gay forever. Mmmm... I love the cock."

He sighed and shook his head.

"Man, I don't know how you go through life without no pussy never; just some asshole's asshole. Blowin' each other an' shit..."

I couldn't resist.

"How much action do _you_ get nowadays Tommy?"

Tommy was a good 300 pounds, and Janet was, if the last Christmas card photo was accurate, even bigger. I had no idea if a man and a woman that size could still copulate, but my guess was it wasn't going to be easy — or a nightly occurrence. Maybe a once-a-year kind of thing, using some kind of system of winches and pulleys.

He laughed and punched me — hard — in the arm.

"You got me dead to rights there, brother. Shit, you probably get more pussy than I do, if you can call some guy's asshole pussy. You know what's even worse? I don't even care anymore. 'Bout sex. I don't even bother jerking off hardly ever. All these years back against the wall, dead fuckin' broke all the fuckin' time, that takes it's toll on a man. An' his dick, I guess. Sex — s'for younger guys mostly, I reckon. An' old horndogs like Bill Clinton. Plus, course, I'm fatter'n fuckin' Jabba the Hutt."

We sat in silence for a moment until he opened the door.

"Well shit, let's go see what the damage is."

My father owned several hundred acres of land there in Georgia. That may sound impressive, but it wasn't, really. It's not like the acres were worth much, filled as they were with scrub oak, snake-filled swamps and god knows what else. Most everything was concentrated on the family compound — five acres or so along a small lake where daddy's house formed the nucleus of a dozen or so different double-wide mobile homes occupied by Tommy and my three sisters — plus various in-laws, boyfriends and girlfriends, cousins, nieces, nephews and assorted hangers-on.

Tommy, as the oldest, had his eye on the big house Daddy had built back in the 1950s, and he'd already arranged to sell his own mobile home ("I ain't lettin' any of these other fuckers get it; I need the money.") Our mother had died nearly 10 years earlier, and though Daddy wasn't rich, he most certainly had more socked away than any of his kids. Tommy worked in a machine shop and maybe pulled down 30 a year. Jeannie was a nurse in a rest home and did OK, I guess. The rest of them in the compound had a checkered employment picture. I'd ask Tommy about cousin Billy's occupation or what Jeannie's husband did and he'd shrug.

"Last I heard he was doing something part-time at the hospital or some shit. Jeannie's husband don't do fuck-all. Ties ties all day, although I ain't never seen him fish. Drinks PBR by the suitcase. But he don't whomp on Jeannie — leastways far's I know — which is good. Otherwise I'd have to shoot him."

Now, getting out of the car, I was about to go into the belly of the beast: My family, gathered together for the first time, Tommy told me, in many years. Despite their proximity to one another in the compound, he'd told me they rarely paid much attention to one another.

"Best that way," he said. "Once in a while, someone'll ask me for help pullin' the engine out of a truck or something or to bail him outta jail on some DUI or domestic. But mostly we keep to ourselves."

Eyeing the front of my father's house and hearing the noise from inside made by a large number of people quickly getting drunk, I reckoned the odds of all this going well at roughly 10 billion to 1. I figured the best course of action for me would be to say as little as humanly possible while still being somewhat polite. That, it would turn out, was like saying you were going to lead a purple unicorn into a schoolyard and hope the kids wouldn't get too excited.

Gathered there in my father's house for the after-funeral party were a good 20 or 30 people, most of whom were relatives. (Son of a bitch like our old man didn't keep many friends, Tommy had reminded me.) Only a handful had actually been at the funeral service. There was a keg in the living room sitting on ice inside an old utility sink that had been dragged in for the event. Handles of cheap Bourbon, vodka and rum were on the breakfront I remember watching my mother polish lovingly as a kid. Bags of chips littered the dining room table, and the kitchen counter overflowed with boxes of various snack foods of the Frito-Lay and Li'l Debbie variety. (Poking through them as a means of delaying social interaction, I discovered many were already expired — some by as much as three weeks. Off my amazed face, Tommy told me funeral parties were always a good place to get rid of shit like this — "Stuff you'd be too embarrassed to leave off at the food bank for the niggers. But the drunk relatives don't notice.")

When Anthony's mother died a few years back, I endured a similar circumstance at his family's home in South Hadley, Mass. Sure, the food was a lot better, the people dressed nicer and the racial epithets were missing entirely. But the vibe was the same: Here's the gay couple, just in from San Francisco, how very interesting!

In South Hadley, the torment was what Anthony's family _didn't_ say. No one will ask a gay man how his relationship is with his partner the way you might a hetero couple. They certainly won't ask about whether we have any kids or about the schools in our area. Mostly, they just want to know about our careers, and you can see them mentally calculating if whatever job you've told them about fits in with what they might imagine is a "queer" occupation. As a graphic designer, I got the knowing nod every time. At that point, the conversation would sag like an old couch, the relative and me desperate for salvation from another passerby — or someone with a tray of appetizers.

But in Thomaston, Georgie, the direction they all had apparently agreed upon before I arrived was to be as forward as possible. And when I say "apparently agreed upon," I'm joking, because I know they didn't get together for some big family conference on how to deal with the Thearn issue. It was more like a collective consciousness — a school of fish that knew exactly when they were going to jog right.

"Shit!" said one teenaged nephew in a Caterpillar cap after I'd identified myself: "You the fag, right? I ain't never seen a fag before."

To highlight this, he screwed up his face and squinted his eyes at me, as if to discern the homo-erotic aura that must surely surround me.

His mother fetched him a sharp smack on the back of the head, but she didn't extend any apologies or attempt to discipline him further.

"He's just a little fuckin' hick," she told me as the teen slumped toward the chips table. "Don't know no better; ain't never been out of Georgia." She offered a snaggle-toothed smile: "I'm Trudy, one of your cousins somehow, I think, although I'm not quite sure how."

She set down her overflowing plastic cup of beer and shook my hand like a man. Sizing me up, I figured, to see if my fruity grip would cave underneath her country woman's strength.

"Sorry, I got beer all over my hand," she said as I reached for a napkin. "So, you're Thearn?"

"I am," I said.

"Named after your great uncle Thearn."

"So I've heard."

"I reckon you don't get down here much at all nowadays, do you?"

"Not since I left when I was 17."

"Well," she said, matter-of-factly in a slightly raised voice, like she was making a comment about seasonal weather, "God hates gays, an' I s'pose the folks around here aren't too much different."

There are times in life when you're confronted by something you knew was out there, but were somewhat unprepared for when the real thing suddenly appeared before you. I remember a few years ago when Anthony and I went to the zoo and I saw a lion up close for the first time (we didn't go for much zoos and museums and that kind of thing when I was a kid in Georgia). Sure, I'd seen lions on TV and in books, but seeing it there in the flesh was another matter entirely. I gawked at it for 20 minutes before Anthony finally pulled me away to see the otters ("The gay guy's favorite zoo animal," he'd said — "They self-fellate.")

Living among the gay and highly tolerant residents of The Castro the past 20 years had inured me somewhat to the reality of people like Trudy. Sure, we knew she was out there, but more in abstract — a quote in a Newsweek article, a wire photo of her holding an anti-gay marriage placard at some rally. Like the lion in the zoo, I supposed she'd stay put and not ever bother me.

But, of course, here I was, in her neck of the woods — in her cage. After delivering her little bomb, she primly took a sip of her beer and looked at me expectantly with a crooked half smile. A couple of other relatives who'd overheard her were waiting as well, to see how I, the gay man and object of God's hate, would respond to this assertion of how things were seen in Thomaston, Georgia.

I opened my mouth, but I had no idea what was going to come out. I thought about simply fleeing, but the house was so packed with people there was no chance I could move anywhere with the alacrity I'd really need. Fortunately, Tommy suddenly appeared, elbowing his way through the crowd with two cups of beer expertly held aloft.

"S'cuse me, comin' through. Hey, Thearn, follow me!"

Gladly, I did. Tommy blazed a path through the crowd with ease, his 300-pound frame opening up a channel before him like a turbaned Muslim passing through a Baptist pot-luck. We passed through the kitchen and into the hallway between the garage and the house. Tommy pushed the cup of beer into my hand.

"Figured an ass pirate wouldn't know how to work a keg, so I got you some," he said.

"Thanks," I said, taking a sip of the weak, fizzy beer. In all honesty, I can't be sure I'd ever had the opportunity to dispense a beer from a keg, but I wasn't going to tell Tommy that.

We were stopped in front of what we'd always known as Dad's Closet. Tommy pulled the string on the light to reveal what was to us a very familiar assortment of shit ranging from dog leashes and shelves full of canned nuts and bolts to hooks holding welding strikers and little packages of flints to go in the strikers. Dad was a welder, and a tinkerer, and the closet was just the tip of his tool iceberg; out in the enormous barn that functioned as garage and workshop, there were many more tools and machines — many of which, Tommy told me, were so rusted and/or obsolete as to be nearly useless.

"C'mon," Tommy said, leading me to the back of the wide closet. I knew where he was headed: Daddy's safe. It was an enormous Victor Dad had picked up for next to nothing before he'd even built the house; before any of us were born. One day when I was about 12, Daddy had one of those moments where he seemed to remember he should pay some attention to me, and he took me back here to tell me about it.

"This here is a vintage 1882 safe made by Victor Safe & Lock Company. I bought it over in Lincoln Park from some nigger who had it in his backyard for years. Paid him 50 bucks."

The younger me asked why it was so inexpensive. At about 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, the massive black safe was a substantial and impressive thing, and even though $50 to me at the time was a fortune, I knew the safe had to be worth more than that.

"It was locked!" Daddy laughed. "Nigger didn't know how to open it, 'course. So I had Whitney Poulson come over with his crane truck and haul it over to my property, right here. An' I build the house _around_ it."

He put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me.

"Thearn, ain't no one could ever get this safe outta this house, less'n they knocked the house down first. It's _part_ of the place."

"So how'd you get it open, Daddy?"

"I cut it," he said simply, describing a rectangle with his index finger just to the right of the combination dial. "Right here. Cut a hole with my torch, got in there and re-did the tumblers to a combination I could remember, then welded it back up, painted it over an' you'd never know it, would you?"