Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/330

 "No … I don't see any," Gaylord said, taking it and after a close examination took a bite.

Rogers did the same … said, "Good, isn't it?"

"Sure is …" Gaylord answered … looking into Rogers' face, between the developed legs for a split second, then back again into the dimpled face.

"I'm hungry," grinned Rogers. "I always get hungry out here … I could eat a horse." He pulled on his shorts. "I feel like I've got ants in my pants."

"So do I," Gaylord grinned … "Stop scratching, Glenn …" Suddenly he wasn't hungry for food. He was hungry for affection … and wanting what he remembered. He had once said, I hate the world of men. They have hurt and killed something in me. I don't care for them … that much. But now it wasn't that way. Rogers was a man … Fully developed and very desirable. He sat there in the lurid evening, nibbling on his sandwich, thinking of Rogers' naked body … also thinking of Robert Blake, who had not called. And he thought of other men, Paul Boudreaux, Gene Limbeaux, Claude. What was Claude's last name?

And as he sat there, he wound and unwound in his mind the skein of his life that was lived in New Orleans. A life that seemed rooted in the shadows of a club, flowered in a room void of sunshine, living a brief while on the crammed sidewalks of a city, and returning suddenly into darkness, the same web of darkness and blind hunger from which it had arisen.

Gaylord's thought then dwelt on what Paul Boudreaux had told him. That possibly through shots, doctors, men and women sexually attracted by their own sex might be rendered normal.

But now looking at Glenn Rogers, Gaylord knew that he had no wish to conform to a standard alien to his nature. He thought of Robert Blake again. Blake was a wonderful person, a person so broadminded in his way of life that trivial matters, and they were trivial, meant nothing to him. He understood and accepted them. He was a real man too, tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong handclasp … a man you could love and trust. He made you feel as though you had filled your lungs with a wind that had blown to you direct from the sea, or from the heavens … 320