End of the Innocence (27 page)

“He has to go,” Mr. Aimes growled at me. “Don’t you?”

I ignored him and looked at Father Tim. “If it’s okay,” I said, sitting down. “I have a few… doubts.”

“Well, doubts are The Lord’s way of trying to impart wisdom despite our own stubbornness.” He sounded like he was going off a speech from the effortless way the words rolled off his tongue. “I was just explaining our camp to Kelly here. Have you heard of us?”

I nodded. “Some, not a lot,” I admitted.

“Well, as you know, homosexuality is a sin.” He said it the same way I would say the sky is blue or I breathe air. It wasn’t a concept, wasn’t a belief. It was The Way Things Were.

“Leviticus 20:13,” I added.

He nodded. “Chapter and verse.” His smile got larger. “Impressive.”

“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them,” I quoted for him. He nodded again, looking like he was watching a dog dancing on his hind legs for a treat.

“Yes, that is exactly it.” He was almost laughing.

“I read that. Can I ask you some questions, then?” I framed my question as innocently as possible.

“Of course,” he prompted.

“Leviticus is set of rules, right?” He nodded. “And so the rules have to be followed. That’s why the church is anti-gay, not because the church is bigoted or hateful, right?”

“See?” Tim said to the Aimes. “This young man gets it. The church doesn’t hate anyone; it is just following the rules.”

“So because I am gay, I am going to hell unless I change my ways, right?”

His face got serious. “I’m afraid so, Kyle, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Jesus can forgive you for your past sins.”

“I understand that. What I wanted to know was, when you end up in hell too, are you going to be mad?” I made sure I sounded as pure as the driven snow as I asked my question.

Mr. Aimes shot up screaming, “Okay, that’s enough, young man! Get out of my house right now!” He looked to Father Tim. “I am so sorry, Father. He is just….”

Tim waved him off. “Why do you think I am going to hell, Kyle?” He seemed more amused than angry.

“Well, Leviticus 19:28 says ‘Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.’ And I can see your ink from here, so I was curious.”

He looked down at his arm and smiled. “The tattoo it refers to in the Bible is a completely different kind of…,” he began to explain.

“Yes, I know it refers to the marking that people like the Hindus did for religious practices. 20:13 actually says ‘And a man who will lie down with a male in beds of a woman, both of them have made an abomination; dying they will die. Their blood is on them.’ It doesn’t say the act is sinful, only that doing it in a woman’s bed is. In fact, biblical scholars have said this refers to the hiding of one’s sexuality more than the act itself.” I paused and then gave him a puzzled look. “I mean, if we were going for original interpretation.”

His smile seemed to dim slightly. Both of Kelly’s parents looked from me to him. “That is one way of looking at it…,” he began.

“In fact, aren’t all of us in this room going to hell? Leviticus 19:19 says ‘Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.’
Pretty sure we are all guilty of that right now. And there is also Leviticus 19:27, which is ‘Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.’ Your high and tight is kinda sinful, isn’t it?”

Kelly’s mom looked over at her husband. “Is what he is saying true?”

Mr. Aimes looked from her to Father Tim, his anger giving way to confusion. “No, of course not, right Father Tim?”

He gave me a grin that looked more like a threat than an actual smile. “We are told that even the devil can quote scripture for his own good.”

I smiled back at him. “Yes, we are told that by Shakespeare in
The Merchant of Venice
. Not quite the Bible, but close.”

His eyes narrowed, his smile wearing thin now. “Maybe you’re right, Mr. Aimes. Maybe Kyle here should leave.”

“Is what he said right?” Mrs. Aimes asked, her voice now close to panic. “Did he make those up, or are they from the Bible?”

He sighed and looked away from me. “They are, but he is misinterpreting them for his own purposes.”

“Isn’t that the whole business of religion, Father Tim?” I asked dropping the pretense of innocence now. “Interpreting a two-thousand-year-old book for its own uses?” I waited, while Father Tim lost his cool. Spectacularly.

“Listen, you little queer.” Father Tim’s voice had lost whatever congeniality it had held when we started talking and I detected a slight drawl in his words. “I am not going to stand here and get lectured on the Bible by some faggot teenager who doesn’t know a thing about what he’s talking about.” He gave me a snide grin. “No offense.”

“You call me queer and faggot like those words are supposed to hurt me,” I said, unfazed by his outburst. “I can imagine far worse things in the world to be, sir. An intolerant, inbred, hate-spewing hillbilly comes to mind.” His eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head, so I added a curt, “No offense.”

That was when all hell exploded.

B
RAD

I
WAS
through my second cup of coffee when I got a text from Kelly.

Kelly: Your boy is crazy!

That didn’t make any sense to me so I checked it twice before sending a text back.

Brad: Huh?

A few seconds later I got:

Kelly: Dude, he is here laying down the smackdown!

That didn’t sound good at all. Kyle was there?

Brad: To who?

Kelly: Preacher guy, better come quick, might come 2 blows

“I need to go!” I hollered toward Tyler who was in the storeroom, and I raced out the door. I drove as fast as I could with the roads as icy as they were. Luckily it wasn’t like we had a ton of traffic in Foster, so I pretty much had the road to myself. Five minutes later, I pulled onto Kelly’s street and gaped at what I saw. It looked like two people were scuffling on the front lawn; then I saw Kyle crash down on his back.

I almost destroyed my car sliding it in front of the Aimes’s. I grabbed my practice bat from the backseat and jumped out of the car.

It looked like that Russian dude from
Rocky IV
was beating the fuck out of Kyle on Kelly’s lawn. I could see Mrs. Aimes holding Kelly back with both her hands as he tried to charge into the fight. Mr. Aimes stood aside, staring. I didn’t know why what was going on had started, and I didn’t much care. Some stranger-asshole was beating my boyfriend. I set myself and swung with every bit of power I had and hit a good, solid double into the center of his back.

The guy gagged and dropped Kyle in a hurry. Panting and trying to get himself breathing regularly, he slowly turned to face me.

“Oh fuck,” was all I could muster as he looked down at the bat and then back up at me.

“You’re dead,” he hissed. Just as the man-mountain started to jump at me, Kyle kicked his foot into the back of the guy’s knee. He buckled forward in shock, and I used the opportunity to land a foul tip into the guy’s gut. He fell down, his arms wrapped around his belly, groaning. I stood over him, both hands gripped tightly around my bat, and a red curtain of rage slowly descended over my vision.

“I am going to kill you,” he gurgled at me, trying to get up.

“You’re new here, so let me explain it to you,” I said, putting the bat up to his face and fighting off the insane urge to do to him what he’d done to Kyle. “That boy is my everything, and if you have hurt him, I will dedicate the rest of my life to ruining the rest of yours. If you don’t believe me, look into my eyes.”

We locked eyes. The redness held off at the corner of my vision, but I think Bozo had got the gist of things.

He looked away first.

I ignored him and moved over to Kyle, whose face was swelling up. “You okay?” I asked, kneeling down. No answer. “Kyle?” A confused wandering gaze finally focused on my face. “Kyle, are you all right?”

“Depends,” he replied distantly. “Do you have an identical twin you never told me about?”

I chuckled despite the seriousness of the moment. “No.”

“Yeah, then not doing okay.” He closed his eyes.

I heard the guy get up behind me, and I turned around, putting myself between him and Kyle. He didn’t look all that hurt, to be honest. “You think you can put your hands on a United States Marine?”

“I didn’t.” I sneered back at him. “I put my bat on your back and in your gut and in front of your face.”

Everything was about to flare up again. The arrival of a police car saved me from going to prison for homicide.

Jennifer’s dad and his partner exited the squad car. I was actually glad he’d arrived so I could get back to Kyle. The sheriff took in the scene and then looked back to GI Joe. “Step away from the boys,” he ordered. One of his hands rested on his taser.

“He hit me,” the guy shouted.

“You hit that poor boy first!” Mrs. Aimes called out. “Stephen, he’s a monster! Get him off my property!” A little shakily, she pointed at the man in black.

The sheriff looked over at us. “You wanna press charges, Kyle?”

Kyle shook his head. “No thanks, just sugar for me.”

“What if I want to press charges?” the man demanded.

Jennifer’s dad walked right up to him. “Well, I would then have to ask why in the world you were beating up on a high school kid. And if I did that, then I’d need to take you down to the station, and there would be paperwork and a lot of crap.” He gave the man a chilling look, and I prayed he never knew that Jennifer and I had been intimate. “Or I can take off this badge, and you can try that shit with a grown-ass man.”

The big guy in the black shirt took a step back. “I’m done here.” He glowered over at Kelly and his parents. “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” The way he said it made it come off like a quote of some kind.

Kyle, still on the ground with his eyes closed responded with. “If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” He opened his eyes to look at his attacker and added. “Matthew 6:15.”

I had no idea what that meant, but it seemed to piss the man off even more. He hauled his car door open and rammed himself into the driver’s seat. He barreled out of Kelly’s driveway and almost lost control of the car when it hit the icy road. The sedan did a lovely set of fishtailing until he finally slowed down and crept off in low.

I helped Kyle to his feet slowly, taking a mental inventory of every wound on his body in case I ever met the “Reverend” again. “Can we get him inside? Good,” I said to Mr. Aimes as I walked past him. I wasn’t really interested in his answer at the moment. Kelly followed me in and helped me settle Kyle down on the couch.

“Dude, you should have seen him,” Kelly explained to me excitedly. “That guy looked like he could take apart our entire front line by himself, and Kyle here didn’t even blink! It was crazy brave. Mad props.”

“Was any of that good?” Kyle asked me as I knelt beside him.

“In Kelly talk that was a five-star review,” I clarified, touching the side of his face gently. The way he moaned made it pretty clear that he was in pain. To Kelly I said, “Grab me an ice pack.”

Kelly nodded and rushed to the kitchen.

“You know, when I call you my superhero, I don’t mean you should go out and, like, physically fight crime, right?”

He smiled over at me. “Oh.
Now
you tell me that. I had a costume picked out and everything.”

“Is he going to be all right?” Mrs. Aimes asked, touching down in the living room, a tornado of worry. “That man hit him pretty hard.”

“I’m a superhero, ma’am,” Kyle said from the couch. “It’s all part of the service.”

I nudged him to be quiet. Fortunately Kelly’s mom looked at him like he had suffered a concussion. “He seems pretty okay,” I answered for him. “Just a couple of bruises.”

“A man of God hitting a teenager, what is the world coming to?” she asked out loud. “And to think we were considering sending Kelly to his camp.”

“He doesn’t need a camp,” I said to her. “There’s nothing wrong with him.”

She looked like she was going to say something more, but Mr. Aimes walked in, and that killed the whole conversation. “Well, he’s gone, and the sheriff thinks he won’t be back,” he reported gruffly. He looked at Kyle on the couch and me kneeling next to him, and his face blanched a little. “He going to live?”

“No thanks to you,” Kelly answered him, bringing me the ice pack.

“How was I supposed to know…,” Mr. Aimes began to argue and then realized there were strangers listening to them fight. “This is not the time or place, Kelly,” he warned.

Kyle put the ice pack to his face and sat up slightly. “You’re wrong, Mr. Aimes, this
is
the best time.” The older man looked like his head would explode, but Kyle pressed on. “Kelly isn’t broken, and he doesn’t need to be saved. There is nothing wrong with him, and the sooner you realize that, the better it is going to be.”

Mr. Aimes shot back with “This is a family matter, young man.”

“That’s why you called Father Skullbuster in, right?” Kyle snarled back. “Because he’s part of the family?”

Kelly’s dad looked at me and said, “Brad, maybe it’s time for you and your friend to leave.”

I agreed, but I wasn’t giving up without a fight. “Kyle’s right, and you know it, sir. I’ve known Kelly all my life, and I think he is a great guy.” I looked over at Kelly and saw the shock and surprise on his face. “I know I wasn’t the best of friends, but Kyle is right. Kelly isn’t broken, and he isn’t wrong. All you have to do is look past yourself to see that.”

Mr. Aimes didn’t say a word, but you could tell my words had hit home.

“Come on, Batman,” I said, helping Kyle up. “Let’s get you home.”

“Batman? Really?” he asked as he stood up, more than a bit wobbly. “You think I could pull a cape like that off?”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, I had to laugh at that.