the snare

jody shotwell

Don hesitated a few seconds in the hotel lobby before going into the bar. Pitted against all of the reasons he should not go in, there was only one argument; he wanted to. He couldn't afford it. Even beer cost twice as much. here as it did at the Town Tavern. He would stay out later than he should, and he had to get up early. These were the practical reasons. They were not the most important. The most important reason he should not go in was, damnably enough, the very reason he felt compelled to . . . Ken was behind the bar.

When Don moved back here, three years ago, to this small town of his birth, he came with a feeling of renunciation. He was getting on toward the sad side of middle-age. He was tired of the city, of the bars, the one-nightstand conquests. He was bored with the new crop of upstarts in the places he had frequented for years.

"I don't know," he found himself echoing endlessly, "there just don't seem to be any interesting people around any more. Was a time you could walk the length of this bar and there wouldn't be one who didn't at least have some. thing to recommend him: Either he was a writer, or a painter, you know. Now they're machines. Nothing but machines."

So, he had given up his job, his apartment, and that phase of his life, and had come home. He boiled when old friends accused him of "taking the veil" but it was true. He rented a little gate-house which was part of an estate that had once belonged to his great-grandfather. He had a garden and he tended it passionately. He got a job in the local stationery store and made just enough to pay the small rent, keep him fed, clothed, and occasionally wined. Once in awhile he was called upon to paint a mural in one of the stores, or a portrait of someone's child. This provided him with oils, canvasses, records and books. And he "played it straight." In a province like this, where everybody knew everybody else's business, ne would have had to, even if he hadn't planned to. There were still people here who had known him as a child. He had relatives scattered about the countryside. All of them, friends and relations alike, had long ago accepted him as an eccentric. He painted, played the piano, and when he was eighteen he had run off to New York and "play-acted." But he was Judge Kimball's grandson, so he had been condoned.

And he had been happy and complacent in this new life. He felt he had escaped the fate that hung over the heads of all aging homosexuals. . . no one would ever call him an "old auntie." But now he had met Ken, and he was no longer complacent, and no longer sure.

He had seen Ken on the streets in town, but had turned his eyes and his thoughts away as he did from all young men now. It was the night his old friend Clyde came out to visit him for the first time since he moved, that he actually met the youth. Clyde had money and insisted upon going to the best bar available. They went to the hotel. They sat at the bar, and when Ken took their order and went up-bar to fill it, Clyde raised his eyebrows and said, "What's that doing buried out here in Siberia?"

"Take it easy," Don pleaded. "I'm not noticing any more. This is home base for me now, remember?"

The young bartender brought the drinks and picked up Clyde's money with a friendly smile.

"What're you drinking?" Clyde asked, invitingly.

"The same as you... if we were allowed." Ken's face took on the rueful look of a child denied his third ice-cream cone. Then he spread his arms in mock despair, said "C'est la rules!" and executed a few dance steps down the bar to another customer.

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