The Battle for Jericho (18 page)

Hutch never moved except when I moved him. He never made a sound. By the time I was done with his hair, his skin was rosy all over his body. I got him out of the tub and dried him off with a thick bath towel. Then I walked him into my room. I got him into one of my T-shirts and a pair of pajama bottoms and sat him down on my bed. He didn’t appear to be in any pain, but every time I looked at that huge, dark and angry bruise on his face, it made my own eye hurt. I went upstairs, got a couple of pills from the Excedrin bottle in my parents’ medicine cabinet, and fetched a glass of water from the kitchen. When I got back to my room, I held out the pills to Hutch. He didn’t ask what they were or even look at them. He just put them in his mouth and washed them down with the water.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Hutch probably had a concussion. He probably should have seen a doctor. But some instinct told me not to leave him alone. I lay him down on my bed, and now, when he was warm and dry, he began to shiver. I pulled the covers over him. After turning off the light, I lay down beside him, wrapping an arm around him and drawing him close.

“Hutch?” I whispered. “I’m gonna call your mom and dad.”

“D-don’t…,” he stuttered through chattering teeth, “don’t d-do that.” As if to emphasize the point, his hand tightened on my forearm, fingernails digging into my skin.

“Ow. Okay, I won’t call.” I pried his fingers loose from my arm. “What happened, man? Who hit you?”

He didn’t answer. He took my hand and pulled my arm tighter around him.

We both slept fitfully. Every now and again, his body would jerk without warning, as if he was trying to run or fight invisible enemies. Sometimes he whimpered or moaned. I held onto him through it all, through the night.

Chapter 15

I
WOKE
up with an urgent need to pee. Something felt wrong. The room was dark, but the first dim light of day was beginning to filter through the window. Raising my head, I realized that I was alone in bed. I looked over and saw Hutch sitting on the floor across from the bed, his back against the wall, head down, arms draped across his knees.

“Hutch?” I said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“No.”

My bladder was screaming for relief. “Hang on….” I scooted off the bed and dashed into the bathroom. The tub was filled with dirty bath water, and there was a pile of dirty, wet clothes and towels in the corner. I’d have to deal with that later. After flushing the toilet, I gave my hands a quick wash and rushed back into my room.

Hutch was still sitting on the floor with his head down.

I flipped on the light. “Hutch?”

“My head hurts.”

“You want some more Excedrin?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’ll get ’em.” I knelt beside him. “Let me take a look at your face first.”

He didn’t move. I took his head in my hands and gently lifted it. A flinch shot from my neck up to the top of my head, but I tried not to let it show. The swelling on the left side of his face had gone down a little, but it was still bad, and the bruise seemed to be darker than it was last night. His right eye squinted against the light.

“Can you open your other eye?” I asked, afraid it might have been punched out, a distinct possibility what with all the damage to the surrounding area.

The puffed lid of his left eye fluttered, barely opening. From what little I could see, the eye was horribly bloodshot, but it was there. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

I picked up the ice pack we’d left in the bathroom. It had completely thawed. I went upstairs, got the bottle of Excedrin, came back downstairs and went to the kitchen. I tossed the thawed ice pack back into the freezer and grabbed a frozen one. When I got back to my room, I sat down on the floor beside Hutch and shook out two pills for him that he swallowed dry. I wrapped the ice pack in a fresh towel and held it out to him. “Here. Put this on your face.”

Wordlessly, he put the ice pack to his black eye. His face had a sort of blank, defeated look to it.

“Your mom and dad have gotta be crazy worried about you by now,” I said.

“They’re not.”

“Why wouldn’t they be? You’ve been out all night, man. Do they know where you are?”

Hutch closed his right eye and sighed, a tired, empty sound.

“You gonna tell me what happened to you?”

“My dad….”

“Your dad what?”

He answered without opening his eyes, as if not looking at me made it easier to get the words out. “I think my dad got suspicious when I came home late from school on Monday and Wednesday. I told him I had meetings at school, and I thought he bought that, but… he didn’t. He came up to the school Friday. I didn’t see him, but he came up to the school Friday, and he followed me when I left with Neal. He followed us to the gay community center in Benton where the MLGBT committee meeting was going on. After the meeting was over, I went home. I was in my room, doing my homework, when I heard Dad’s car in the driveway. He called me into the kitchen, and he told me that he saw me go into the community center. And then he hit me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and grimaced, shaking my body as if feeling that awful blow myself.

“He hit me so hard, it knocked me out,” Hutch said, picking up his story after a pause. He let the ice pack slip from his hand to the floor. “I don’t know how long I was unconscious—maybe a few minutes. When I woke up, I was lying on the back porch, and Mom was standing there screaming as she threw my stuff out into the yard. She was screaming, get out of her house, get out of her house. I started to get up, and I saw Dad in the doorway. I reached out and grabbed the edge of the door to pull myself up, and he slapped my hand away like he thought I was trying to come back into the house. And Mom kept screaming at me to go.” He opened his eyes then, and he looked at me. “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do.” And then his face twisted into a knot of pain, and a sob burst from him.

“Hutch, don’t….” To this day, I have no clue as to what I was trying to tell him when I said that. Don’t feel bad because your father tried to punch your head into the next county? Don’t get upset just because your life’s been turned inside out? He cried in near silence, silvery tears streaking his face, his body trembling. I felt ashamed again, not for his crying but because I didn’t know what to do for him. He leaned against me, putting his head on my shoulder. I slipped an arm around him as my shame turned into rage. How could his parents do this to him? How could they hurt him this way? What the hell was he supposed to do now? Where could he go? He didn’t even have any clothes except what he had on last night.
Damn it
! “Hutch, stop it. Stop it, okay, man? We’ll figure something out. It will be all right.”

I heard him sniffle a few times, and about a minute later, he stopped shaking. “I’m tired,” he muttered.

“Come on.” I helped him to his feet and guided him to the bed. He lay down, turning his face to the wall. I drew the covers over him. He was asleep within minutes.

I pulled on a shirt, shoved my feet into my sneakers, and put on my jacket. It was still sort of dark when I went quietly outside, but the sun would be coming up soon, and I knew I had to hurry. I rushed along the wet streets to Hutch’s house. When I saw the red brick bungalow with its green shutters, I shuddered. It was hard to believe that I’d actually had fun in that house, that it was even possible for anything like fun to exist in a place where parents so hated their kid.

I climbed over the fence into the backyard. There were clothes strewn everywhere, wet from the rain, along with video game cartridges, the football Hutch and I used to toss around, the trophies Hutch won when he played baseball at Holy Madonna, and his backpack. I gathered up the backpack and as many of the clothes as I could carry and tossed them over the fence. I looked back at the house, and for a second I was tempted to knock on the door and ask Mr. and Mrs. Hutchison if they were proud of themselves for ganging up on a kid. Mr. Hutchison is a big man, weighing in at two hundred and fifty pounds, if not more. I knew if I knocked on that door, the only thing I was likely to come away with was a black eye to match the one on Hutch’s face.

Feeling helpless and angry, I turned away and climbed back over the fence.

H
E
SLEPT
until almost one o’clock.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, finishing up my homework, when I heard Hutch’s footsteps behind me. The rain had moved out, and the room was bright with afternoon sunlight. “Hey,” he said softly.

“Hey, man.” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful. I suck at sounding cheerful when I’m miserable. Turning to him, I smiled. “How’re you feeling?”

The smile and the question were stupid. Hutch stood in the doorway looking exactly the way you’d expect a person to look after getting punched in the face and thrown out of his home. His black eye didn’t seem any better than it had the last time I saw it. His face was tired and drawn, and he looked weak and unsteady on his feet. “I’ll live, I guess,” he mumbled. He stretched gingerly, flinching at some ache that announced itself suddenly. “Where’re your mom and dad?”

“In Louisville. They’re spending the weekend up there. I’ve got the house all to myself.” I stood up. “You want something to eat?”

He hesitated, as if he had to think about the question. “Yeah.”

“I made some chicken noodle soup for lunch.” Okay, it came straight from a can, but I’d added some frozen mixed vegetables, so technically I did make soup. “Is that okay with you?”

“Yeah.” He moved to the table and sat down.

I got a bowl from the cabinet and filled it from the pot on the stove. “You want some peanut butter and crackers to go with it?”

“That sounds good.”

I put the bowl of soup before him, followed by a pack of saltines, a jar of peanut butter, a spoon, butter knife, a napkin, and a can of peach soda. Hutch immediately picked up the cold can of soda and put it to his black eye.

“Does it still hurt?”

He nodded. “A little.” He picked up his spoon and began eating the soup.

“I got some stuff for you.” I went into the laundry room, coming back with the neat, folded stack of freshly laundered clothes and the backpack I had recovered from the Hutchison’s backyard.

Hutch looked surprised. “You went to my house?”

“Yeah. I didn’t talk to your parents or anything. I just went into the backyard and grabbed what I could. I washed the clothes and dried ’em for you. The stuff you had on last night too.” I put the clothes and the backpack on the table. “Your school books are all there. The backpack kept them dry. That’s a… sort of a good thing… uh….”

He didn’t smile or anything, which was to be expected. What did he have to smile about? “Thanks, Jerry.” He kept eating. “You’ve been kind of busy, huh?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t know the half of it. In addition to doing his laundry and making lunch, I had cleaned my bathroom and mopped the kitchen floor clear of the muddy footprints we tracked in last night.

“You’re not having any lunch?”

“I’m just about to join you.” I got another bowl from the cabinet and filled it with soup. Then, after pushing my homework to one side and grabbing another can of peach soda from the fridge, I sat down across from Hutch.

We ate in silence for a few minutes. There were questions I needed to ask Hutch, but I didn’t know whether they would upset him again, and I was trying to figure out how to ease my way into them when the doorbell rang.

The sound startled Hutch. “Who—?”

“Just stay here,” I said, getting up.

I went through the living room to the door and peeked through the peephole. There was Mac, waiting outside on the porch. I opened the door.

“What’s up, Jer?” he greeted me with a smile. “I know I’m not supposed to come in. Mom sent me over to check on you.”

“Hey, Mac.” I tried to act casual. “Everything’s okay. You can tell your mom I’m cool.”

He huffed out a laugh. “I’ll tell her you’re okay. You haven’t been cool a day in your life.”

“Ha freakin’ ha.”

He waited a moment, an expectant look on his face. “Well?”

His expression irked me. I shrugged impatiently. “What?”

“Don’t you want to know how my first game as a Gordon Browning Red Devil went?”

“Oh yeah, the game. I forgot all about that. Did we win?”

“You know it,” he replied, pumping his fists as if to a roaring crowd. “We spanked Benton 27 to 13. In my first play, I knocked their quarterback on his ass, he fumbled, and I ran it in for a touchdown.”

“Hey. Not bad, man. Glad you had a good game.” I shook my body in an exaggerated shiver, hoping he’d take the hint and let me get back inside.

“Mom just made tacos,” he said, missing the hint entirely. “You can come over and eat if you want to, hang out for a little while.”

“No, thanks. I made some soup. I think I’m just gonna stay in for now.”

Mac looked disappointed, or maybe a bit hurt. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I think I may be coming down with something.”

“You’re always coming down with something lately.” He eyed me suspiciously. “Take some vitamins or something. Build up that punk immune system of yours.”