Fire In The Pines by Steven Franssen

Author:Steven Franssen [Franssen, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-27T05:00:00+00:00

In the morning the travelers decided to stay one more night with Harry. Dinner had been decent enough and they were curious to hear more of his stories. Sutton commented that he felt as if he were getting an education in the things his parents were reluctant or neglectful to say. Inwardly, Greg was relieved to be spending time with a man who was against homosexuality. The lifestyle had been pressed onto him anytime he left the “pod” for breeders in Portland. Advertisements for coffee shops would feature enlarged penises piercing through donuts. Several of the professional women’s soccer teams had homosexual men as their mascots. In Western Oregon, homosexuality had been promoted but also treated as a lesser sexual orientation than lesbianism. Remembering the lucrative pay of his contract as a breeder, Greg had continually swallowed down the disgust he felt at the cacophony of lewd sexual acts performed in public that he’d been exposed to on errands as simple as buying snacks that weren’t available in the breeding center cafeteria. Homosexuality was not only not allowed back home in the Reformed United States, but it also wasn’t legally enshrined as a preferable orientation, as was the case in most of the rest of the continent aside from Deseret and the Federation, within whose borders he now found himself. Harry’s frank and open intolerance for homosexuality, his coarse questioning in suspicion of potential homosexuality when the two travelers had first greeted him and asked to pass through his property, and his casual use of vulgar, derogatory terms for the orientation put Greg at ease with his feelings of disgust. This was a man he would not have to hide his true feelings from. The experience, for him, was relatively novel. In the past he had only felt at ease with those who were similar to him in age and vocation. Sutton’s familiarity to him rarely ranged outside of the habitual and into the ideological. Sutton wasn’t ideological. Nor was Liam, nor had Pietro been. Pietro came the closest to idealism but was driven out of boredom. Greg had touches of it, here and there. His father had told him only a thing or two.

Harry put the pair to work digging holes for fence posts and when that was done, they helped him cart a load of firewood to an elderly neighbor couple that was past the age of doing such work for themselves. In exchange, the old woman fixed them up a jar of mint lemonade and two smaller jars of sauerkraut she swore would set them right. They graciously accepted her gifts before riding back to Harry’s place on the trailer he’d turned into a makeshift horse-drawn cart. Semi-automatic rifle fire could be heard in the distance, but Harry waved off the concern he saw in the young men.

He turned his eyes back to the road and said, “That’s the Bridger Outfit. They have a compound up there. Don’t worry, we got things a lot more sorted out here in Idaho than where you’ve been.

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