Billy has aged out on a Kansas orphanage farm in the late nineteenth century with enough sexual experience with the farm’s owner to prompt the farmer’s wife to sell him to two pimps supplying a male brothel in a Colorado mining town. Billy’s goal is to reach California, and he willingly goes to Colorado with the thought that California is just over the mountain from there. After some rough sexual encounters in the mining town, an aging Utah rancher entices him to move to his ranch to nurse the ranchers sexual health. The rancher’s son has other ideas, though, for Billy, who winds up shared out to the ranch hands and a few Indian braves and finds himself headed back to Kansas. Will he ever make it to California alive?
“Is Colorado near California?”
McCoy winked at Givens and replied, “Almost spitting distance.”
Billy was inside a coach traveling west from the Kansas orphan farm. They’d barely started on the journey before McCoy, the man in a black suit sitting across from Billy, started telling Billy where they were going and what the deal was.
Nothing had been said about this back at the farmhouse when the men had arrived and Mary had called Billy in to tell him that he was going with the men. Jeremiah was off on his supplies buying spree. Billy had spied Jeremiah fucking Clyde in the hayloft the afternoon before Jeremiah left on his trip, so Billy didn’t really care where Jeremiah was. And once he’d heard one of the men in the black suits tell Mary that they were headed West, Billy didn’t have to hear any more to be good about going with them.
“We’re going to a mining town in the Colorado Rockies called Cedar Hill,” McCoy told Billy. He was leaning in toward Billy in the compartment of the couch, which meant that he almost was in Billy’s lap. The distance between the two facing seats was so narrow that the man’s knees were nearly in Billy’s crotch. Billy’s legs were spread around the man’s. The other man, Givens, who was pretty silent and who was shorter, beefier, and somewhat younger than McCoy in appearance—but also wearing a black suit—was sitting beside Billy in the forward-facing seat.
A black man was up top, driving. Billy hadn’t seen many black men in Kansas, but he knew that there were some who had drifted there away from the Civil War fought some ten years earlier. If this black man had been in the Civil War, he would have had to be very young when he did it, Billy thought. He appeared to be a strapping, large-framed, very muscular young man.
“You’ll be working in a saloon,” McCoy continued. “They need fresh, young men coming in to work the saloons in those mining towns. You’ll do quite well from the look of you.”
“Thank you.” Billy couldn’t think of much else to say. As long as it was getting him close to California, he didn’t particularly care what his job would be. It would be his first job as a man—leaving the orphanage.
“Mrs. Atwell says you have no relatives.”
“Not that I know of—none that have shown up for the last ten years,” Billy said.
“It’s hard to believe you are nineteen,” McCoy said. “Or even eighteen for that matter. But I have a birth certificate here that Mrs. Atwell gave me that says you are.”
He looked at Billy as if he expected Billy to explain the difference between what was in print and what the man observed, but Billy had nothing to offer.
“We lose track of the passing years in the orphanage,” was the best he could offer.
McCoy put his hands on Billy’s knees and pushed the young man’s legs apart a bit more. At the same time Givens put an arm around Billy’s neck and palmed Billy’s bicep.
“Mrs. Atwell assured me that you lay under men. Was she telling the truth?” He was giving Billy an intense look.
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