Rick was able, almost immediately, to find an assistant oil monkey position at a small body shop, which led, by way of a Mexican supervisor who saw that Rick knew more about what he was doing than most wanting work there, thanks to his auto mechanics classes in Baltimoreāto Rick being recommended to the guy's cousin who worked in the service department of Miller's, a large GMC dealership on the east side of Albuquerque.
That cousin, Luis, a large-framed Mexican with a quick humor, a gift for teaching and for patience, and an encyclopedia knowledge of Chevrolets, Buicks, and Cadillacs, took Rick under his wing, and Rick began to blossom under the tutelage of the first man in his life who had no apparent sexual interestsāin him or anyone else, it seemed. Luis's mistresses were all vintage automobiles, and the longer Rick worked with him, the more Rick was thusly inclined as well. The other mechanics were mostly Hispanics and mostly related to each other, but they were friendly to Rickāanyone all right with Luis being all right with them too. Although they mostly kept to themselves and rattled Spanish off to each other throughout the working day, Rick didn't feel like he was being frozen out of anything.
Rick was making good money and found a small studio apartment near the car dealership, within walking distance. Here too all he heard around him was Spanish from large Hispanic families crawling all over the neighborhood, jovially chattering to each other incessantly, hanging wash out on every available hook, and celebrating each sunset out in the courtyards with large family gatherings, guitar music, and laughter and food.
They were friendly to Rick but they more or less left him alone, and he liked it that way. He came home in the evening with service manuals under his arm and whatever else he could find on auto mechanics, and he spent his evenings poring over those. He didn't so much forget what had brought him this far from Baltimore as that he was replacing sex with the entirely different arousal of figuring out the mysteries under the hoods of automobiles.
His weekends were spent discovering Albuquerque on foot. He had been held prisoner for so long indoors, it felt good to be able to walk out into the open air, free, and able to make his own decisions and do things on whim and eat what he wanted when he wanted. He joined a gym and worked his body hard, using that to release tension. As chance would have it, the gym was on the fringes of the Central Avenue gay district, which he had also found early in his strolls and had had a little trouble resisting exploring further. At the gym he saw hookups that invariably gave him pause and twitched his butt in memory, but he was determined to take on a new life, revolving around cars that needed help, and he resisted. He was frequently hit on when he first started at the gym, but soon the regulars got the message and left him to himself.
The dealershipāin addition to two othersāwas owned by three brothers. Rick almost never saw the oldest brother, Ted, who was running the Ford dealership. Roy, who managed this one, was the epitome of a used car salesmanāat the door with a hand out and a big smile on his face whenever a potential customer was walking along the street. Behind the scenes he was a demanding boss who Luis and the other older guys in the service department continually warned would be a good one to stay the hell away from. That didn't pose a problem. Roy never came into the service department, and, the men joked, probably didn't know where the hood latch was on any of the cars he sold.
The younger brother, Jess, seemed to just float around from dealership to dealership, although Luis had told Rick that he managed the car empire's smaller, exclusively foreign sports car resales dealership on the better side of the town.
Jess was the "golden touch" brother from, Luis told Rick, a younger wife than the other two brothers. He was a lot better looking and much trimmer and significantly younger than the other two. He wore cowboy shirts and a ten-gallon hat much more convincingly than either of his two brothers did, and his smile was more convincing too. When he shook your hand he was looking into your eyes with pale blue ones of his own that made you happy and tingly all at once. He irritated Roy noticeably when he came around the GMC dealership in his vintage baby-blue Cadillac convertible, because he could glide through the showroom in those tooled cowboy boots of his and sell five cars effortlessly.
Everyone wanted to be his friend. He was a poster child for success, and he was always being asked when he was going to run for city council. He often brought his model-perfect blonde wife in with him, his three perfect tow-headed children following along like ducks in a row, and everyone in the dealershipāexcept Royāsnapped to and brightened up in his wake. Every family visit was like a video commercial for him running for office.
And, unlike Roy, Jess didn't stint on the service department. Whenever he showed up, he'd end up in the service department, he and Luis peering under the hood of Jess's beloved Cadillac convertible and worshiping this and that in the engine compartment. He had time to talk to each of the guys in the service area, to ask about their families and to shake their hands. He was especially attentive to Rick and was happy discussing auto parts with him, careful not to rub it in that he knew more than Rick did, and each time leaving Rick knowing more about the automotive industry than he had before Jess had walked through. Once even, Luis had come into work early, as he always did, to find both Rick and Jess already there. Luis spied four legs under the chassis of a car, and both young men came out from underneath it with grease on their hands and their faces and flush from the celebration of, together, having located the source of an oil leak and stopping it up.
Everything was going just fine until Rick saw the quarter-page ad in the Sunday paper. It was for a film series showing at a local club. Sponsored by the local gay community, through an organization called Closet Cinema, the top-rated films of the year's Mirage gay film festival were going to be shown, with short film runs of each, over a two-week period. Without thinking, Rick looked at the list of films being shown.
Journey to Mirage
wasn't hard to find. As the festival grand winner, it was at the top of the list. There were more than a dozen showings he could catch at a local club called the Albuquerque Mining Company. Rick knew where it wasāin the middle of the Central Avenue gay district. He hadn't gone inside ever, but he'd been tempted to.
He told himself he wasn't tempted to go see the film that had taken so much out of him and yet fulfilled so many fantasies of his. But even then he knew he would.
He picked a Thursday afternoon, taking off from workāthe first day he'd ever asked for, so Luis saw no reason not to give it to him. Rick reasoned that there would be fewer patrons at the club then. He could slip in, see the film, and slip out again.
The film was mesmerizing. He relived every moment, every fantasy, every fuck. He was both exhausted and drained and, at the same time, keyed up and his balls aching from buildup, the need for release, as he came out of the movie and into the blinding light. His eyes were having trouble adjusting to the glare and he almost stumbled into someone standing firmly in his line of exit.
"Um, sorry," he muttered as he moved to the left to get around the figure. But the figure moved with him, and Rick looked down and saw cowboy boots he recognized and his new world collapsed around his now-leaden feet.
"It was you. That really was you. You're Randy Lane."
Rick looked up into those pale-blue eyes of Jess Miller, and he felt like dissolving into the baking sidewalk.
"Uh. No, not me . . . notā"
"Come with me, please." Jess had him firmly in a hold on his arm and was marching him toward a nearby parking garage. Rick followed along in shock, imaging all sorts of bad outcomes from this. Exposure. Worse, being hauled back to stand before Luis and Roy for the accusation and the very public dress down and firing.
Rick saw the bull horn ornament grinning at him from the front of the Cadillac convertible as he was hustled up the ramp. Jess opened the passenger side of the door and pushed Rick in and went around to the other side and drove at high speed down to the ticket booth and then at higher speed through the city.
It didn't take Rick long, though, to see that they weren't driving toward the GMC dealership. Maybe the auto group had some sort of corporate offices? Or was the police department in this direction? But Rick couldn't figure out what the police would have to do with anything. He hadn't broken any laws or anything. And he hadn't misrepresented himself to get the job. He hadn't even applied for a job at the GMC dealership; he'd been recommended and taken on faith. Taken on faith, Rick thought, and then he gave a nervous little laugh. Would Luis have taken him on if he had known about Rick's past? And there was probably an outstanding warrant on him back in Maryland. But he hadn't misrepresented himself. His name wasn't Randy Lane; it was Rick Hernandez. And he was a damn good auto mechanic now. He was doing the job he was being paid for.
"Mr. Miller," he said in a low voice, trying to break the frosty silence that had hung over them from the beginning. Maybe trying to come up with an explanation that would make it all go away.
"Shut up and be quiet, Rickāor Randy, or whoever you are. Just shut up. I had no idea. I . . ." But then he shut up himself.
They were out of the city now, driving out onto the ranges, where the ranches were starting to get spaced farther apart. He turned onto a dirt road and they were riding between two spreads with cattle on either side and back into the scrub a couple of miles farther. The road ended at a small compound with an adobe house and a few outbuildings. The house didn't look derelict, but it didn't exactly look like anyone lived there now, either. The outbuildings were in a bit worse shape, except for a garage that looked fairly new.
Jess drove around to the back of the house, to where the Cadillac couldn't be seen from the front, and he turned off the motor and sat there for a moment, tremblingāRick assumed from rageāfor a moment and looking down at the hands in his lap, which were also trembling slightly.
