The Battle for Jericho (24 page)

The emotion was gone an instant later. “Traffic wasn’t so bad today,” he said awkwardly. “I’ll be down in a bit to get dinner started. Your mom’s going to be late getting in as usual.”

Not knowing what else to do, I said, “Okay,” and I slid past him and went running down the stairs.

Chapter 20

I
TRIED
to be quiet about it. I don’t think there was the slightest sound when I opened the door.

“Where the hell are you going?”

I didn’t have to turn. I could feel Dad behind me, standing in the dining room just outside the door to the kitchen. The house was filled with the aroma of baked fish. “I have to get a book from the library.”

“Get a book from the library?” The way he voiced the question made it sound as if I’d said I was going to get a warhead from the defense depot outside town.

“Uh, this is for my history class, a book on the Civil War. I have to read it for class Monday. It’s a big book. I want to get started on it tonight.”

“Dinner will be on the table in half an hour.”

“I’m not hungry, Dad. I ate already.”

“You ate already? What the—”

“Dad, I don’t want any dinner, okay? I really need to get this book.”

Dad paused. “Your curfew’s at eight tonight, boy.”

“I know.” I zipped up my jacket and made my escape.

D
YLAN
stopped at the bottom step and sighed. “You know, if you keep parking yourself on my porch like this, I’m going to turn you into a planter and stick ferns in your ears.”

“Hey, Dylan. I need to talk to you.”

“So what else is new? By the way, I got your message, and just for the record, I did call you back. The call went to your voice mail, but I didn’t feel like a game of tag, so I didn’t leave you a return message.”

I rolled my eyes at myself. “Oh yeah. That was dumb of me, leaving you my number, but I was sort of on autopilot. My dad’s been holding my cell phone hostage.”

The protestors were nowhere around when I arrived. Maybe they’d decided to pack it in early today. Dylan climbed the steps, moving past me to unlock his front door. “Well, I had a long day and I’m beat. If you want to talk, come in and make it quick. I plan to have a bath, make a sandwich for dinner, and be in bed in an hour.”

I followed him into the house. He put down his briefcase and pulled off his coat, tie, and shirt the second the door was closed. “Sit,” he said, gesturing at the sofa as he dropped into the easy chair. “Now, what’s up?”

“Well, how would I know if I’m in love? You know… with a guy.”

“Well, you know… the same way anybody knows they’re in love.” Dylan ducked his head, mimicking my anxious moves and the uneasy tone of my voice. It wasn’t a good impression, in my opinion. “You get crazy when you’re around this guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Does it feel like your heart’s getting all gooey when you think about him?”

“Yeah.”

“You have the urge to go out and buy him cars and furs and houses and make life sweet for him and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you’re probably in love with him.”

I moaned. “Oh, don’t say that!” I whined.

“You asked, Jericho. I answered. What did you expect?”

“I don’t want to be in love with a guy. I don’t want to be a—” I stopped myself just in time.

Dylan narrowed his eyes at me.

I took a deep breath, figuring it was time to man up and face reality. “Okay. So that means I’m gay, then. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Guys who want to romance other guys generally fit that definition, yes.”

“But I still have feelings like that for my girlfriend too. How can I like girls and boys both? Is that even possible? If I like girls
and
boys, how do I know if I’m straight or gay?”

“Maybe you’re bisexual.”

“But… there’s straight and there’s gay. I have to be one or the other—”

Dylan threw up his hands in this big motion of despair. “Jericho, what is this? First you make that ridiculous claim you’re signing up to be gay, just to give yourself an excuse to try something with a guy you’ve wanted to try all along. Now you keep coming around here asking the same questions again and again, questions to which you already know the answers. You’re just afraid of those answers, and you keep hoping you’re going to hear something different that’s more comfortable for you. How old are you? Fifteen?”

“I’m sixteen.”

“There’s no reason that you have to pin a label on yourself now. I told you before, you have plenty of time to get to know yourself and come to terms with who you are. Just don’t be afraid or ashamed of who you are, whether that’s straight, gay, or somewhere in between. You have to accept the things you can’t change. Otherwise, you’ll be setting yourself up for a pretty miserable life. Make up your mind that you’re not living for your parents, your friends, or your church. You’re living for yourself. Got it?”

I moaned again, and then I nodded. What he’d said made sense, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I wasn’t ready to face myself. I wasn’t ready to go home and face what I figured was coming there, either. I wanted to hide out somewhere. “Dylan, is it okay if I hang out here for a while—”

“Sorry, the answer’s no, kid. I told you, I’m beat.” He got up and opened the door, holding it for me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but get out.”

I
T
TOOK
an hour and a half to walk the seven miles to Grenada Lake. By the time I got there, it was well after nightfall, and there was no way I could make curfew, even if I immediately turned around and started walking home.

Grenada Lake is huge. It’s outside the town in some kind of wildlife preserve, and there isn’t a building of any kind in sight of its shores. Its southern half borders on the edge of a forest, but the land on its northern side is open, flat fields that sprouted rainbow acres of wildflowers in the spring and summer. Tonight, they were flat gray in the autumn darkness, shrouded in the ghostly tendrils of a low-lying fog. White mist covered the surface of the water too. It was quiet, the silence broken only by the distant, eerie calls of owls. With no city lights, darkness was absolute here.

It was as if everyone else on the planet had vanished. I walked along the wooden fishing deck that stretched out into the lake, and I sat down on the edge, my feet dangling above the water. Mac’s grampy used to bring us out here to fish when we were little. The lake was chock full of colorfully named species—black crappies, blue catfish, brown bullheads, rainbow trout, redbreast sunfish, white bass, emerald shiners. As a kid, I’d pictured the fish swarming below Grampy Travis’s boat in a beautiful, shifting kaleidoscope. When you hauled them out of the water, they turned out to be slimy, frantic, wriggling things with ugly mouths and even uglier insides. (I hated cleaning fish, which always took my appetite away.) But being at the lake was calming even then.

Out there, sitting on that deck under the clear, cold night sky, my good and bad angels finally stopped harassing me. Something about the glittering sprinkle of stars overhead took me out of myself and far away, to a place where doubt and fear could no longer touch me.

I sat there for a long time, my soul still for the first time in days, and watched the moon come up.

I
UNLOCKED
the door and let myself into the living room. They were waiting for me there.

Mom stood up as I came in. Dad kept sitting on the sofa, his head down, arms folded across his chest, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. Hutch sat on the floor like a little kid. The television was on, but you could tell nobody had been watching it.

Mom’s face glowed with fury. I stopped before her glare as if walking into a wall, my body jerking to a halt. Guilt lowered my gaze to my feet.

“Barry,” Mom said. “Would you excuse us, please?”

Hutch got up. I threw a glance at him. He gave me this look of worry and relief, and then he disappeared upstairs.

“It is three hours past your curfew,” Mom said tightly, her voice coming from somewhere deep in her throat. “Three hours. And you didn’t even call.”

“Dad’s got my phone,” I protested.

That seemed to offend Mom. She put her hands on her hips, the anger getting brighter in her eyes. “You know that’s no excuse for not calling us. Nearly every person you see on the street is a walking communications network. You could have borrowed a phone for thirty seconds. We’ve all been worried sick, wondering where you were, if something had happened to you. And you did this deliberately. I could understand you getting sidetracked and coming home fifteen minutes or even half an hour past curfew. But
three hours
? That’s deliberate disobedience.”

I was full of anger and remorse and fed up with it all to the point of recklessness. Shoving my hands roughly into the pockets of my jacket, I said, “Yeah, okay, Mom. Just ground me already and get it over with.”

Mom’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. She recovered her indignation in an instant. “Your wish is my command. You’re grounded for a week. And for not being humble enough to apologize and explain yourself, you get to spend your Saturday washing the cars. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go to your room!”

I plodded down the hall, tugging off my jacket. Once in my room, I threw my jacket into the closet and myself onto the bed. Being sent to my room was fine with me. Right now, I really needed to be alone. My mood was so low I’d barely noticed that Dad hadn’t jumped in when Mom was yelling at me. He usually took the lead in such things.

That didn’t mean he had nothing to say. About twenty minutes later, he appeared in my door as quietly as a spirit. I didn’t even know he was there until he said, “Hey.”

I looked up at him, surprised. He didn’t seem angry, just worried. “Hey,” I replied.

He stepped into the room and closed the door. Grabbing the chair from my desk, he pulled it close to the bed and sat down. His face, as he leaned toward me with his elbows braced on his knees, was grim. “I have to ask you some things. And I didn’t want to say them in front of your mother. Sit up and look me in the eye.”

I did as he asked. “What is it, Dad?”

He held up a finger in a silent warning. “Do not lie to me,” he said. “Okay?”

I had a sudden, sinking feeling, a very concrete sense of doom. “Okay.”

Satisfied that I had agreed to his terms, he nodded. Then: “Has Barry made any kind of… sexual advance toward you?”

I had known the question would be coming from him at some point, after he saw me come out of Hutch’s room this afternoon. Hell, it was the major reason I stayed out so late, hoping to avoid this very conversation. Still, it was a shock to hear the words. “What?”

“Answer me.”

“Dad… no. No, Hutch didn’t come on to me.” That was true, in a way. I was the one who started this by coming on to Hutch, but that wasn’t the question Dad asked, and I wasn’t volunteering any information tonight.

Dad wasn’t satisfied with my answer. He took my left wrist in his hand, and his grip tightened so that it hurt. I flinched but did not pull away. “I’ve noticed things, certain looks he gives you,” Dad said. “It seemed like a little hero worship to me, and I thought it was just that he was grateful for the way you’ve been sticking up for him. Now I realize it’s probably something else entirely. I need to know what’s happening here. Is Barry trying to recruit you?”

“Recruit me? Dad, you don’t get recruited into being gay. You either are or you aren’t.”

“Are you?”

Damn it!
The question froze me. The truthful answer was that I didn’t know, but just the fact that I had doubts about who I was would be enough, in Dad’s eyes, to condemn me before God. I wanted to say no, of course I’m not gay, but something kept me from saying it. I sat there staring at Dad in a panic, which was an answer of its own.

Fear and pain spread slowly over his face. He suddenly clasped my hands in his fists, clutching desperately as if trying to pull me from some raging river. “Jericho. You’re my only surviving son. I need for you to be a man. Do you hear me? I can’t lose you too. I need for you to be a man.”

“Dad—”

Maybe he knew what I was going to say, and he didn’t want to hear it. He grabbed me before I could finish, and he crushed me to his chest, holding onto me now as if he was the one in danger of drowning.

“Okay, Dad,” I whispered to him, hugging him back. “I hear you.”

T
HERE
was something else I feared would come up during that god-awful conversation with Dad. He didn’t actually mention it, but I could tell from how hard and how long he held onto me there in my room that the idea was in his head, and he intended to act on it.

Dad was going to get Hutch out of our house.

Chapter 21