Chapter 2: Jamie
I saw that photograph. I saw it that first evening, when I went in to turn the bed down because Charlene was busy out in reception. I had already figured he had been doing my dad all these years, and it's something that had come between me and my dad. Not that Dad knew what I knew—or at least strongly suspected. But our connection just couldn't be the same anymore because of it. But seeing that famous author guy, Kincaid, in that old photograph he'd put on his dresser—that just set me off. I could have killed him then and there. Putting that photograph there was like he was flaunting it, flaunting his control and his power.
The photograph showed that big elk he'd bagged up in the mountains here. But that's not all it showed. In the photograph, he had his arm possessively around the waist of my grandfather, who had taken the famous author on that hunt when he was staying at our family's dude ranch, Wolf Creek. And it showed to anyone who might have half suspected it that the elk hadn't been the only animal Kincaid had bagged up in the mountains.
I tried to be angry at my dad for also putting up with Kincaid's attentions all of these years, but I knew he'd done it to keep the family business going. It's what paid for my college down in Boulder; it's what was setting me and the rest of the family up for our lives. And J. Harvey Kincaid, the famous author of those men's novels on male bonding and "man against the elements," was the main patron and pull for our celebrity dude ranch—and had been for decades.
Dad had left me to manage the ranch for a couple of weeks this summer while I was home for college. He'd gone up to a rodeo in Laramie specifically so that he wouldn't be around to bail me out of tough decisions at the ranch. And Kincaid's showing up at the ranch was the toughest decision I was faced with.
He came three or four times a year. But he always came when my dad was going to be there and could take him up into the mountains, up near Medicine Bow National Forrest, to hunt elk—or so they said. Kincaid had called ahead this summer and I told him on the phone that my dad would be gone then. But here he was anyway. And he wanted to go up into the mountains to hunt elk. And he was the patron of the family business.
So I took him on up. I couldn't be in two places at one time. So, I left Charlene in charge at the ranch and picked out the most steady of the ranch hands and paid them extra to do what they could to help her out and keep a protective eye on things while I was gone. And Kincaid and I saddled up two horses and headed up into the hills, toward the still-snowcapped reaches of Hahn's Peak.
I went with the intention of staying my distance, of being polite but standoffish. I didn't want Kincaid for a friend, and I was afraid that if I could get within striking distance, I'd kill the man for what he'd done to our family. Not just what he did to my grandfather and father but how dependent we'd become on his patronage. I couldn't see the point of his fame. I'd read the books and seen the movies done from them, and, yes, he was an engaging, persuasive writer. But that macho male friendship and combining strengths and resolves to take on all comers, whether the scenario was the American West or the battlefields of Iraq, got old pretty fast, I thought.
But the longer I was riding around with him up in those deserted hills of magnificent wild beauty, just the two us, with him weaving stories for me in a rich baritone voice that lulled and stroked me to the very quick, the more I could see how he worked on a person. He must have been over sixty by now, but he was still quite a man, the virile, solid, handsome man of power and decisiveness that he wrote about, and for which he had received international accolades for four decades.
The third day we had struck camp in a cottonwood grove next to a racing stream running down an isolated, sheltering ravine and then we'd ridden on up toward the snow line in search of elk.
We found a mud slide instead. Neither one of us got hurt—and the horses weren't any worse the wear for the slide either. But we were filthy. With a hearty laugh, Kincaid challenged me to a horse race down to the crystal clear little lake the stream in our ravine fed into, and off he roared with another laugh.
It wasn't his horse, so he flew with reckless abandon and was already off his steed and in the lake before I got there. When I arrived I somewhat dumbly said I couldn't come right in because I hadn't brought a swim suit and wasn't wearing anything under my jeans for that matter, and he just rose out of the water and threw wide his arms and said there was no need for such modesty out here in the wilderness. He was buck naked and showed off exceptionally well for a man his age. He tossed out a "Real men don't need swim suits" at me in that macho voice of his and, challenged to the quick, I stripped down and dove into the cold, clear water.
We paddled around a good ten or fifteen feet away from each other, cleaning the mud off ourselves, as he wove another one of his male bonding stories for me—a story of young men starting off in life and those with experience of the world doing so much better than those of limited horizons and narrow views. He told of the story of a young architect, taken under the wing of an older, established one. And how their lives merged and how much their bonding developed the lives and works of both in enriching ways that could never have happened if they'd lived in isolation. I couldn't help but listen to his story in fascination. I aspired to being a writer—I'd shyly told him that several summers ago—and I could see parallels. And I fancied I was drawing those parallels on my own.
He suggested a race, a race across the lake. I didn't think that quite fair, an author in his sixties and a nineteen-year-old athlete who had been ranch handing for the last two months. But this was his hunting trip. He was calling the shots. So, I laughed and asked him what we were wagering on. He said if I won he'd both clean and cook the fish for dinner and if he won I'd have to give him a shoulder rub right there in the lake and listen to another story he was trying to work out before he wrote it. He said all of the riding had made his body sore.
He, of course, won. I surely didn't like either cleaning or cooking fish, but Kincaid had much more at stake than I did. Or did from his perspective, at least.
So, there I was, that ten or fifteen feet no longer between us. I was standing behind him in water up to our nipples and massaging his back and shoulder muscles deeply. The water was rippling around us and moving us in waves, moving his butt from time to time back against my groin. And I have to admit this was having its effect on me.
Meanwhile, he was unfolding his idea for a story. About a young man who wanted to write about life but who hadn't really experienced life deeply and fully enough for anyone to take notice of what he put in writing. But then he was taken under the wing of an older, more experienced, far more successful writer. The young man won a scholarship to study with the older man for a year, and the two went off to a tropical island country to work on developing the young man's writing in private, without distractions. But for months he could think of nothing to write. There was no experience to draw from, no passion from which to write. The tropical island went into chaos. A revolution was erupting around them, and they had to hide out in interior rooms of the house they had let. They went through travails of protecting each other from the threats around them, and they became closer and closer. And they bonded, becoming one. And the young man was writing now. Writing from a wellspring of experience and passion. And after the revolution, when they emerged from hiding, he wrote a Pulitzer-winning novel. A novel enriched by deep experience and passion.
Sometime during the weaving of this mesmerizing tale, the waves were no longer moving us together. Kincaid had his butt plastered into my groin now and had my now half-hard cock encased between his thighs. And I hadn't even noticed this was happening until he took one of my hands in his strong fingers and wrapped it around his very hard cock, his hand on top of mine.
