Nebraska Close

By R.W. Clinger

After retiring from his career in construction and trying to cope with the death of his wife, Isaac York experiences an infatuation for a lifelong male friend and discovers his world fills with sunflowers and a risqué transition. Isaac moves to Lake Samoy in search of a new life, to abandon his past, and to start a fresh relationship with a famous and sexy man named Nebraska Close, whom he falls head over heals for.

Nebraska Close, a professional photographer who is drawn to summer nights and a younger man’s skin, finds pleasure for a second time in his life. Unconditionally he falls for Isaac and mixes together his lust, photography of sunflowers, and homosexual longing.

Isaac's son, Nicholas, lives at Lake Samoy and doesn't understand his father's lack of interest in his mother's fatal illness. With the help of Nebraska Close, Nicholas confronts his father’s sexuality, and Isaac learns to love his son again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611524628

R.W. Clinger

R.W. Clinger is a resident of Pittsburgh. He has a degree in English from Point Park University of Pittsburgh. His writing entails gay human studies, and includes the novels Just a Boy, Skin Tour, Skin Artist, Soft on the Eyes, Pool Boy, and The Last Pile of Leaves. He has published many stories with Starbooks Press as well as The Weekender, a novella with Dreamspinner Press. His gay mystery, Cutie Pie Must Die, is published with Bold Stroke Books. For three years he has held the position of managing editor for the literary magazine, The Writer’s Post Journal. For more information, please visit rwclinger.com.

Book preview

Part 1: His Walden

Chapter 1

The life of my father was changed, absolutely. A forty-eight-year-old man who enjoyed black coffee at dawn, crossword puzzles, and the sight of flying squirrels gliding from treetop to treetop. An honest man who betrayed no one, believed in God but never preached, and regarded the land as holy, filled with a necessary spirit. Of German blood and he had the thought of being reincarnated, having the understanding that he was once a Holocaust victim in Auschwitz, dying at the young age of twenty-three. A drinker since my mother’s death in 1999, finding pleasure in Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, or Absolut. Someone I’ve always trusted with my secrets, a mirror image of my grandfather, Paul Charles West. A collector of National Geographic, connoisseur of Whitman, and inspired by the sounds of the wind, squawking chickadees, or the way the sun melted over the Pennsylvania skyline into a spray of burnt reds and composed blues. The only carpenter in our family who specialized in window repairs. My father: Isaac Robert West.

I was like him. A clone of sorts, except twenty years younger. Ink-black hair, flickering topaz-blue eyes, clean-shaven at all times, five-eleven, bow-legged, with the tiniest mole on our left cheeks. I created interior rooms using complex graphic computer software at Schmid & Taylor Design. I had a wife (Carla Benning) of my own, a son (Lock Christopher) that I spoiled, and lived in my parents’ house, the place where I grew up, happy and content, while writing this.

* * * *

Reflection: When I was a child my father would kneel next to me at the edge of my twin-sized bed, instruct me to bend my elbows and press my palms together. It was a position I found incredibly uncomfortable, but unselfishly carried out. Next to me, almost too close, my father whispered, Shut your eyes, Nicholas, which I did. And softly we prayed together, wishing hope, peace, and love throughout our family, passion in our lives, apologized to God for our sins, thanked Him for our daily bread, and said Amen together, in unison—as close as I ever felt to my father.

His smell was of a thick sweat and Marlboro cigarettes, a habit he knocked when he turned thirty-two. My father called me his joy, the pride of his life, his little hero. He said he was the happiest with me, a fulfilled father who could ask for nothing more. I was his strength and eyes of the world—his only son. And when he tucked me in bed before I became a teenager, he pulled the sheets up to my neck, kissed me on my forehead, and whispered his goodnight to me, I love you, Nicholas. We are one. You’ll always be safe with me. I will never hurt you—forever. I promise.

* * * *

Chapter 2

My father married Anne Harrington when he was nineteen. She was a soft-looking brunette who always smiled, a woman of twenty-three who worked at the Milton Glove Factory, stuffing work gloves into boxes and shipping them out to a variety of states. She was a Catholic, watercolorist, easy on the eyes, and found joy in reading mystery novels, watching dramas on TV, and baking. Happily?…they lived at 349 Murray Street in Pittsburgh. After three miscarriages I was born, their only child, Nicholas Lock West, a blessing in their marriage, perhaps something to tie them together—always.

He never kissed her or held my mother. He never whispered, I love you, Anne. We are one. You’ll always be safe with me. I will never hurt you—forever. I promise. I didn’t see anniversary gifts, birthday presents for mother, a vacation to Cancun, Mexico, or the mountains of Wyoming. My father seemed cold to her, withdrawn, perhaps trapped like a rabbit; behavior I didn’t understand; a way of life I grew to accept but always questioned. Did my father love my mother fully? And why did he not glow inside the realm of love, happiness, and tenderness she shared with him?

The bedrooms upstairs. Three in all. One for my mother. One for me. A third one for my father. I never saw them sleep together. I never heard doors opening and closing at night. I never woke to lovers’ footsteps in the dim hallway. Such a mystery during my years growing up. An unexplained anonymity. Confusion. Sex was unheard through the walls of my childhood home. The topic was never discussed or shared. Not once did my father mention the term the birds and the bees to me. And conventionally, I learned the act of sex through magazines: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler.

The cancer came when I was nineteen while attending Ausbreck College. It happened in her right lung, spreading throughout her body and contaminating her entire torso. My father said it was the cigarettes she smoked throughout the years. The Marlboro Lights. The Virginia Slims. The Salem Lights. She didn’t know it was inside her; none of us did. The silent killer. A mockery to human life. Insanity. How quickly it had eaten away at my mother’s organs. How absurd