I ride in from the desert. 

Creosote sticks to my boots, the oil-slick smell of the last gas station still lingering on my hair. Hungry, tired, resentfully aching for the sound of small talk thanks to a broken radio in the old truck. The road stretches out behind and ahead, the same each way so far you could get turned around easy enough. 

I try not to think about that, and take the exit ramp. 

The town blinks, unremarkable in the middle distance, indistinguishable under the dust from any other New Mexico town. I pull off the highway and cruise slowly down main street, taking in every sight I’ve seen now a dozen times before. 

Wilderness, New Mexico, the sign tells me; without a shred of irony. 

A bar. A motel. A gas station. A blinking “No Vacancy” sign, which serves neither to prove the existence of a room nor the absence. Schrodinger’s vacancy. All watched over by billboard advertising both a triple-X store and warning, on the opposite side, that “HELL IS REAL.” 

Perhaps it is. Perhaps I’m here. 

I pull into the gas station, dusty and forsaken. Me, it, hard to tell. Still, it’s a place to stop for fuel and a Gatorade. Peanuts, too. Maybe. 

Throw the thing in park by the pump, pull down the mirror and stare at my overgrown fade and combover, doing the same absurd calculus I always do in these places. 

As always, I don’t have an answer. 

I open the truck door and slide to the ground. 

#

A man with lank hair and a sawdust smile looks up at me from the chips aisle when I slide inside the gas station. He doesn’t blink under his broad-brimmed hat. His smile slices through his face like an old jackknife, dull now and cheap to begin with.

Watch out for men like that, my Pa used to say. Never once warned me about becoming one of them. 

Drifters, he’d say, with his hands buried up to the elbows in the guts of some old car. I’d hand him the wrench, careful not to smear the oil on my clothes. Ma’d know where I’d been if I came back with so much as a single smear. 

The vagrant in question leaned back against the wall of the garage and pulled out a cigarette. His long white fingers shook, dirty and translucent. 

“You can’t do that here,” Pa said, without looking. “Fumes.”

The man frowned, weak goatee flipping a little in the wind, but he slouched out into the blinding sunshine, jeans slipping down, ripped t-shirt whipping across his chest. I watched, hungrily, how his jeans didn’t cling to his hips, how his chest curved in, skinny and lean. Not rounded like mine, like all of me’d stared to burst out of everything, all the time. I traced every line of him, taking it all in like gospel.

“Watch and learn,” Pa said. “You can’t give a man like that an inch, or he’ll take a mile.”

He frowned, and went back to fishing in the hood. 

Watch and learn, he’d said, and I did.

#

Here and now, I slide down the aisle, keeping close to the refrigerator section, eyes down and shoulders shrugged forward to hide my chest. Past all the cheap beers hung up in their fluorescent lights, like so many bargain-bin strippers. 

The man at the cash register is a boots-and-poncho combination that wouldn’t look out of place in a Clint Eastwood film. I hope he’s cosplaying—just missing the 25-gallon white hat and a whiskey.  

I pick up my Gatorades and choose an appropriate number of snack-sized goldfish before leaking up to the register. 

“Just this?” he says, a thick Spanish accent.

“Yeah.”

I feel him lean forward, hear the scratch of serape on the sticky glass top as he rings me up with an agonizing slowness. 

“And where might you be in from?”

These small towns are all the same. I’ve had this conversation a half-dozen times. You’d think I wanted to pry the coordinates of a gold mine out of the far-off hills. 

“Everywhere,” I shrug. “Nowhere. Everything in between.”

It’s not an answer, but it’s the truth.

I came out here after my sister Jeanie left the family, packed it all up and headed to Nashville, too good for the likes of us. Same story you’ve heard over and over again. Took her Jesus and her new husband and burnt bridges to the rest. Mom took it hard. 

I try not to talk about it.  

She was there, and the next she wasn’t, left us an angry note and a string of voicemails, each shriller and more accusatory than the last. Eventually she stopped, then stopped taking Mom’s calls. The house got quiet, and I never was too good with that. 

So, I came out here. Running cows some, coding for the big corporations that live in all our phones, mostly. Pays better, but you don’t always get internet out here in God’s ass-crack. And frankly, I prefer the cows. The point is to keep moving. 

And the longer I stay away from home, the longer I can prolong the moment when my mother asks me when she had a son instead of a second daughter. 

Not my fault. I’m not Jeanie, and I won’t ever be. 

“That’s twenty-six even,” says the Clint Eastwood impersonator. “Cash or card?”

But all that’s a bit much to drop on a stranger, who’s as likely to steal your boots as buy you a drink. And being what I am, one’s about as bad as the other. 

I grunt, and hand him my card.

“You been next door yet?” he says, conversationally, swiping.

“No,” I say, in what I hope is a very non-conversational tone. 

“You should hit up The Stockpile. If you’re staying a while.”

I make a noise that could be considered an expletive in some parts of the lower 48. He holds up his hands, my receipt fluttering in one of them. 

“No offense, just not much else around is all.”

“Much appreciated,” I say, in a tone that conveys the opposite. 

He smiles, brown-toothed, and I take the receipt from his outstretched hand the moment it comes within reach. 

#

Of course, the moment I step outside, the sky’s gone green as my ex-girlfriend’s ugliest Christmas sweater. Wind’s picked up too, and the truck shakes with it. 

I’ve been through the panhandle enough to know you don’t fuck with green skies. 

Looping around the block to the motel takes longer than it should, since both stoplights are broken, and even the empty lots seem to stare accusingly at me. Scrub brush and sage ruffle judgmentally as I pass. All right, mom. 

There’s only two other cars in the parking lot, and I pick a spot as far away from the doors as possible. If this is their regular clientele, my arrival is well on it’s way to becoming a local holiday.  

Behind the motel, the bar and the billboard wink at me with equal ominous energy. “Hell is real,” one reminds me. “Drink to forget,” echoes the other. I’m glad to see our coping mechanisms haven’t evolved in the last millennia. 

Neither are likely for me, anyway—real or not, hell can suck a dick. 

I squirrel inside the motel, taking only a backpack, and leave the truck to the mercies of the weather. 

#

The woman at the counter is deadass bald. 

Not polite. Her name tag reads confidently, NANCY, in big bright pink block letters. They’re just uneven enough that I think she wrote it herself, very carefully. 

She smiles at me, as if this is a totally normal occurrence which happens to her several times a day, and not like I’m the only customer she’s had all week. I don’t know, maybe it is normal. The Saturday-afternoon slump. Her smile isn’t warm—it has that intangibly menacing quality that says she’s running over slurs in her mind. 

Behind me, the sky outside has shifted from an ominous green to a truly nauseous chartreuse. 

“Hello, darling, what can I get for you sweetheart?”

Ah, the old double-endearment, inextricably female-coded. 

I smile back with teeth. Like an ape. 

“Single room for the night.” 

“No problem, darlin.”

She rustles around in the mysterious empty space below her computer, finally producing a clipboard and pen that appear to be artifacts from the Mesopotamian era. The pen swings by a chain heavy enough to keep a small dog under lock and key.

“Just sign here, please, and we’ll get you all settled!”

Who the ‘we’ in this sentence is, I pray to any god who will listen I don’t find out. All I want is to be left alone in my room and stream some god-awful TV show that will let me forget where I am for 25-minute increments. Or maybe some porn, with much the same end goal. 

“Visited with us before?”

“No.”

“Well that’s all right too. Make sure you check out The Stockpile before you head out. Tonight’s as good a night as any for a good time.”

She winks, as though we’re in a conspiracy together.

The Stockpile. A haven for emergency preppers? A bar made out of a shed that caters exclusively to small pests? A really big stack of firewood?

She slides a smudged plastic card at me with an unsettlingly wide, pink smile. As if there’s not a storm outside threatening to send us all to kingdom come and make us work foodservice in god’s cafeteria. 

“Room 68. Enjoy your stay, bar’s right across the street. Don’t hesitate to phone up if you need anything.”

I hope to god’s blessed bloody tits I don’t need anything. 

#

It’s 6 PM, no way in fuck I’m going to bed. The WiFi doesn’t work. The TV  either.

Not connected, reads my laptop screen, bitterly blue and bright. The phone rings and rings, but apparently Nancy is occupied with another customer, since finally goes to voicemail.  

 I wander around the landlord white hotel room and look for signs of marketers or Jehovah’s Witnesses.  On the desk, there’s a few pamphlets and colored magazines, each one  advertising what to do in this glittering tourist location.  

A Chinese restaurant, a gift shop, a real estate ad advertising cheap land by a river somewhere. That’d be an interesting proposition—if the nearest civilization weren’t a million miles away from these appealing little slices of grass. 

At the bottom of the stack, there is, predictably, a flier for a place called The Stockpile. The glossy ink is seven hells of pink and purple, with giant white letters spelling out the name of the place in front, and a few bands that’ve headlined recently on the back.

Turns out the place is the bar, go figure. Not a hideout for ants, then. Maybe still full of preppers though. 

I’m about to toss the flier aside and just take a really long bath, when I flip the thing over. 

My breath genuinely, honest-to-god catches in my throat. 

On the back of the flier—although I realize now it’s probably the front and I had it upside down—is a man in a cowboy hat. 

Okay, big deal, you might think, it’s the middle of bumfuck nowhere, there’s going to be cowboys. 

But I can’t stress this enough: This man is gay. He’s fully clothed, but his hips cant at an angle only achievable by the most closeted of fruits. His hair is long and dark, curls cast over his shoulders in a perfect wave. A big belt buckle flashes ostentatiously at his waist, and matching golden earrings dangle above his shoulders. 

I squint. 

He’s wearing eyeliner. 

“Come on down to the Stockpile,” reads the ad copy, placed right over the V of his hips. “Come see what we’ve got in store.”

This is either the gayest advertisement for a straight bar I’ve ever seen in my life, or a really confusing campaign for a strip club. 

I sigh, roll over, and stare at the ceiling. If someone wanted to ax murder me in the middle of nowhere, this would be fantastic bait. Like, just absolutely lab-grown.

I reach for my jacket. Guess I’m going down to The Stockpile.

#

It’s a quick turn around the block—with gusting wind and a sky that looks like it’s about to crack eggs over my head at any minute. Which is plenty of time to consider all the reasons going to this bar is a bad idea.

First, I’m not a drinker. Second, this the best honeypot scheme for queers and the queer-adjacent ever devised. Third, well. I’m me. 

Black denim on blue denim with a plaid button-up underneath, and a T-shirt that doesn’t conceal tits literally anyone else in the world would have been happy to have. A grown-out buzz cut that doesn’t flatter my lack of a chin, big stomper boots, and a bad attitude, according to my Sunday school teacher in fourth grade. And pretty much everyone ever since. 

Pa knows, I think. He understands that I am not anything like my sister, at least. He wouldn’t appreciate words like butch or trans or lesbian, if I cared to use any of those—but he gets it. 

He never tried to force me into any role I didn’t want to be in. Easy enough to teach a girl about changing spark plugs as a boy, and grease refuses to come off all kinds of hands in a distinctly non-discriminatory manner. And all kids like to climb trees and fish in the creek—except Jeanie, apparently. And get sent home from school for starting fights when boys picked on the girl I liked. (Again, except Jeanie.)

The signs were always there, despite my mother’s best efforts at powder blue coats and pink bikes and princess costumes for Halloween. 

When I came home from college after cutting my hair, Pa just hugged me, same as ever and asked if I’d seen the last football match. Easy. Simple. Same conversations we’d always had, just with me looking every day more like his son.  

Ma, well. Her lips folded over.  She couldn’t look at me for more than a few seconds without looking away and shaking her head.  

Joke’s on you mom, you still got one kid. 

I trudge across the windswept parking lot as the storm rolls in. Across the lot, a big neon sign flashes overhead, nearly as purple as the clouds above. 

The Stockpile. 

What in the hell are they stockpiling? Dick? Alcoholism?

Too late to turn around now.

#

I tug open the big wooden doors. Inside, the lighting is shockingly nice, it’s dim and comfortable while still being well-lit, like you’d expect in a fine dining establishment like a TGI Fridays. The sound of the wind roaring shutters out completely as soon as the door swings shut behind me.

I blink in the dim light, and glance around.

Place is nice. Crowded booths, smoke hanging over the tables, loud chatter from male and female voices rising and falling. At one of the tables closest to the door, a bored-looking woman in a high-cut blue blouse sips a martini, and runs her eyes over me with a calculated disinterest. Beside her, two small men who look like brothers play checkers and eat thick French fries like it’s a competition. 

There’s food. A little of the fist of fear in my throat unclenches, my shoulders dropping a hair of an inch. I can hide in a booth—there’s plenty empty—shove my face, and leave. The tables don’t boast any of those scannable menus though. Sonuvabitch. 

The bar’s a classic thing, all wood paneling with endless yardage of taps behind. The man behind the bar is, shockingly, the man from the advertisement. Long dark curls pulled over his shoulders in a loose ponytail, a single earring, a button-down shirt covered in full-bloom roses and tucked in within an inch of its life. 

“Welcome on in,” he calls over his shoulder, cleaning a glass as I approach reluctantly. 

In any other gin joint, I’d lurk in the shadow of the table, order from an aggressively masculine dick-dangler and slide away into obscurity before they can raise an eyebrow at me. It’s the way of things, when you don’t fit on either side of the fence. 

But this advertisement poster-boy’s got me curious. 

I step up, rest my forearms on the rubber covering the top of the bar, and evaluate the creases on this waif’s pants. Long black seams, pressed to perfection with an artisan’s careful hands. Does he iron those? More importantly, does he iron them himself? 

He sets the glass down and turns around just as I start trying to remember the last time I saw a dry cleaner’s out here. I jerk my gaze up from below the belt and try not to look guilty, for a moment before I really register what’s in front of me and my mouth goes dry. 

The slender man in front of me is beautiful. Not just in a gods-gift-to-man way, but in a “I got up this morning and chose violence” kind of way. High dark cheekbones dusted with golden blush. White-gold eyeshadow that just accentuates wide, dusky doe eyes—an open gaze you could get lost in for ages. Somehow, the makeup and the paint only bring out what’s already there, without overwhelming him.

In the bar’s shadows, he’s like the sun, remote and glorious.

I know these things only because they are what I could never be. They’re tests I’ve failed at. But here, on this luminous creature, I understand suddenly why you might want to decorate yourself like that. If that’s an option. 

“Welcome to The Stockpile,” says the man automatically, smiling in a customer-service way. “I’m Trey.”

Then his eyes lock, and he really sees me. 

He looks at me for a long, long moment. I look at him. The seeing, and being seen, stretches out in a silence so tender you could strain cheese through it. He just nods when he feels my eyes on him, real slow. 

“What can I get for you?” he says, finally, in that same customer-service voice. 

I don’t know how to answer that. I want to ask him a dozen things, but they all get tangled up behind my teeth. 

“What’s good?” I say, instead of anything that matters.  

“I can’t tell you,” he says, with a secret smile. “But I do know people sometimes come here to find out.”

That’s a terrible answer for a bartender, and I almost say that. 

But he gestures at the room around us, and I turn, obediently, to follow his hand. This time, I look at the crowd more closely—really look. On inspection, under the dark, it’s like a glorious backstage menagerie in here, as if a soprano’s closet threw up into a drag queen’s purse. Mixed colors, fabrics, glitter on more than faces. I can see a half-dozen genders out of the corner of one eye, and as many sweater-vests. 

In the corner, a man in blue kitten heels coaxes what looks like a coyote pup out of his handbag, and feeds it a nibble of French fry. 

It’s a scene all right, as Pa’d say. But I’m not the strangest thing in here by far, under the smoke and the smell of old gasoline, the cheap lights and cheaper booth paneling. And that’s—well, that’s something. 

My shoulders drop a denim inch. And no one’s watching close enough to care. 

“What is this place?” I ask, still not ordering.  

His eyes go a little soft, a little sad. He knows why I’m asking. What’s implied—which is that he shouldn’t be able to be that, here. And neither should I. 

I wait for the explanation; but there’s none forthcoming. Trey grins, a golden enigma.  

“Just the wilderness. Little washed-up place in the middle of nowhere.”

“But—” I start, not convinced that no one will spirit me away to a circle of white stones and try to perform a summoning ceremony. Or at least a tarot reading. 

“We do what we can,” he says firmly, with a little shrug. One shoulder up, one shoulder down. 

I think about mentioning that there are other states to do this in, where you won’t get shot on sight. I hear Oregon is nice this time of year. 

But I’m here, not there. And so is everyone here. 

I sigh. It’s a giving-in. 

“Just a Diet Coke, please.”

He smiles real big, as if that’s not an unusual request at all. 

“Coming right up.”

He turns back to the refrigerator under the bar, rummages around. I stand there for a moment, shifting weight from one foot to the other. 

I glance around while he flips the can top, pours. Watch an enthusiastic butch at the table behind me try to start a game of poker with anyone in the vicinity, utilizing a set of miniature horseshoes as chips. 

Trey puts the glass in front of me, bubbles rising over and around the ice. 

Outside, the storm is well and truly howling, and somewhere a car alarm is going off. But inside, it’s warm, and dry, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say welcoming.  

That’s a strange feeling, and I’m suspicious of it. 

“Take a seat,” says Trey, like you’d gentle a spooked horse. “Make yourself at home.”

I pull out a barstool, and for once in my life: I do.