by Gene Gant
“I will when you tell me where to find Barry.”
“I’m not telling you where Hutch is.”
“‘Hutch’? My son’s name is Barry. Why do you kids call him by that stupid name?”
“Because he prefers to be called Hutch!” I snapped at him. “You don’t even know your own son. You don’t want to know him.”
Mr. Hutchison’s face hardened, anger finally twisting into his features. “Where the fuck do you get off telling me what I know about my kid? I raised that boy. I taught him how to ride a bike. I taught him how to play soccer and how to fight. I picked him up when he fell, held him when he cried, gave him everything he ever said he wanted, made sure he understands how that crazy world out there works. I taught him how to be a man. He’s my kid, and you don’t tell me what I know about him.”
“Do you know he doesn’t want to go back home with you? Ever?”
Mr. Hutchison flinched at that, the anger replaced by pain. “He didn’t say that….”
“Yeah, he did.” His reaction made me feel as if I’d stabbed a knife in him, and I cruelly wanted to twist it. “He told me that. He told me he’d rather stay in the street than go back to your house. And where do I get off telling you what you know about your son? How about this? Your son’s gay, Mr. Hutchison. He was gay when you kicked him out the first time. He was gay when you kicked him out the second time. He’ll still be gay if you take him back home now, so you’ll just wind up kicking him out a third time. Only maybe the next time, instead of giving him a concussion, maybe you’ll send him off with some broken bones. Maybe you’ll paralyze him so he can’t walk or something. And he’ll deserve that, won’t he? That’s what he gets for being a fag—”
“Shut up.”
“Mr. Hutchison, can’t you just leave him alone? Hutch is who he is. He’s not going to change. If you and Mrs. Hutchison don’t want a gay kid in your house, leave him alone, because he is not going to stop being gay just because you tell him to.”
It was as if my words bounced off him now. You could see the resistance in his face, blocking out what he didn’t want to accept. “Everything will be fine once Barry’s back home where he belongs. Tell me where he is.”
“Mr. Hutchison, please listen to me. One thing I’ve learned is that there are some things about life that we just have to accept. Hutch has accepted who he is. If you really want him to come back home, if you and Mrs. Hutchison ever want to have a real relationship with him, then you have to accept who he is too—”
In a flash, Mr. Hutchison drew back his left fist and slammed it into the door with a resounding thud, so close to my head that it left my right ear ringing. I gawked at him, stunned with fear.
“You talk too much, Jericho,” Mr. Hutchison said quietly, but rage was burning in his face. “And with all that talk, you’re still not telling me what I want to know. All I want to hear from you is one thing. Where’s my son?”
My mouth worked for few seconds, but nothing came out.
“Speak up, Jericho. I can’t hear you. Let’s try this again. Where is Barry?”
I knew my answer would get me hurt, and I was terrified to give it. Somehow, I managed to say the words. “I-I won’t t-tell you.”
It happened in a blur. Mr. Hutchison drew me forward until my forehead touched his nose, and then he slammed me back against the door, making it rattle in its frame. I watched in horror as his left fist drew back again. Turning my head, I got my right fist up, deflecting the blow from my face. His fist hit the side of my neck. Pain went down into my chest in a hot spasm.
I coughed, gagging. “Mr. Hutchison,” I gasped, polite even in the face of certain death, “stop….”
Grabbing the front of my jacket in both fists, Mr. Hutchison slammed me against the door again. “Tell me where my son is,” he growled, “or I will snap your little neck like a twig.”
He ground his fists into either side of my neck, choking me. It was hard to get a breath in, and I knew from the cold anger in his eyes that if I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, he was going to throttle me until I passed out. Or worse. I tried everything I could to get away from him—yanking at his arms, twisting my body, kicking at his legs, punching at his face—but none of it budged him so much as a bit. Every inch of my body lit up with panic. Heat flared down the front of both my legs. “Mom!” I yelled hoarsely in desperation. “Dad!”
“Get the fuck off him!”
Mr. Hutchison turned his head slowly, peering over his shoulder. I looked over his shoulder too. Mac stood on the edge of the porch. Despite his size, I doubted even Mac could take on Mr. Hutchison. The baseball bat he had cocked and ready to swing would make the difference, however.
“I said let him go!” Mac snarled, scowling.
Mr. Hutchison released me, and I slid down to the floor of the porch. His eyes on Mac, he moved carefully toward the steps. Mac edged to one side, giving him room to leave, keeping the bat at the ready. Mr. Hutchinson went down the steps, across the yard, and down the street. He had parked at the curb in front of Mrs. Ohlemacher’s gray sedan, which is why I didn’t see his car earlier. He drove off, disappearing around the corner at the end of the street.
Mac didn’t lower the bat until Mr. Hutchison was gone, holding his weapon in one hand. “Come on, man.” He reached down, hooking his free hand under my right arm.
As he helped me to my feet, I looked down at myself. “Damn it,” I groaned. “I peed my pants.”
My wet pants seemed to be the least of Mac’s worries. “Are you okay, Jerry? Did he hurt you?”
“I peed my pants,” I wailed again, unaware that I was in shock. “Mom and Dad are gonna kill me.”
“Why was he here?” Mac asked. “Why’d he do that to you, man?”
“He’s looking for Hutch, wants him to come back home. But Hutch doesn’t want to go back home. I wouldn’t tell Mr. Hutchison where to find him. Hutch is never going back there again.”
Mac looked at me as if he couldn’t make sense of my rambling. “You’re shaking, man.” He slid an arm around my shoulders. “Come on. Let’s get you in the house.”
Chapter 24
MAC hung around just long enough to make sure I was okay. He asked me if I wanted to report Mr. Hutchison to the sheriff. I said no, and Mac said that was good. Apparently, he wanted to avoid the sheriff as much as I did.
After Mac went home, I threw my soiled clothes in the washer and took a shower. When I finished the shower, I tossed my clothes in the dryer and stood there naked in the laundry room until the cycle finished. Then I got dressed. I didn’t want Mom and Dad to know what had happened. The only marks on me from my encounter with Mr. Hutchison were bruises on my neck and a lump on the back of my head. I buttoned my collar to cover up the bruises, and my shaggy hair hid the lump. Looking back on it, I realize now that I should have told my parents. If Mr. Hutchison had come back and caught me alone again, anything could have happened. As determined as he seemed to be to get Hutch back, the possibility that he would return was very real. But if Mom and Dad sicced the sheriff on Mr. Hutchison for attacking me, I was certain that would only make the man even angrier with me. It was fine with me if I never saw the man again.
I got dinner started. Hutch called me from Uncle Vic’s to say that he missed me. We talked for almost an hour. It was good to be able to say little things about our feelings for each other without having to worry about being overheard and judged.
I never told him that his father had come back looking for him.
THE week passed at a slow but steady pace. Every day when I got home from school, I checked around for Mr. Hutchison’s car, and Mac stood on the steps until I got the door unlocked and let myself inside.
Mom and Dad were frosty the whole week, barely speaking to me. It made me miserable. I knew what they wanted from me. They believed in redemption. I could have gotten back in their good graces by going to them and promising that I was done with homosexuality, asking them to pray with me for God’s forg
iveness, and then getting back together with Lissandra. But if I did that, I’d be lying all around.
The truth was that my feelings for Hutch were getting stronger every day. I wanted to hold his hand. I wanted to kiss him. He was special to me. I made my friends laugh every day. When something I said or did made Hutch laugh, it sent my spirit soaring. I couldn’t be ashamed of those feelings or deny them any longer. By the end of the week, I was certain of one thing, if nothing else.
I wanted to be with Hutch.
Feelings can be so scary.
FRIDAY afternoon, Mac and I talked Jesse Stone, one of the guys from the football team, into giving us a ride. First, we got Jesse to drive us by the Hutchison Hardware Store. There were signs in the window announcing that the store was under new management and that everything must go. Apparently, Mr. Hutchison had sold out to some kind of liquidator. Then Jesse drove us to Hutch’s house. The house was obviously empty. The curtains and shades were gone from the windows, and there was a “For Sale” sign in the front yard.
Sitting in the backseat of Jesse’s car, it felt as if I could breathe again for the first time in days.
JESSE dropped us off in front of Mac’s house. We thanked him and told him to have a good weekend.
“As of tomorrow morning, I am officially ungrounded, man,” I said to Mac as Jesse drove off. “Wanna hang out?”
“Yeah,” Mac answered. “Why don’t we hook up with Hutch and Denny and some of the other guys and shoot some hoops at the park.”
“Sounds cool. See ya in the morning.”
I felt good as I walked across the yard to my house. I should have known something was up the minute I saw Mom’s car parked in the driveway behind Dad’s. It was barely four. Dad wasn’t due home for another hour, and Mom was scheduled to work a double shift today and wasn’t supposed to leave the hospital until eleven tonight. I was glad to see their cars there in the warm glow of the sunlight. Despite the fact that they were still treating me as if I’d stolen something from them, it would be nice for the whole family to actually sit down and have dinner together, something that rarely happened during the typical week with my parents’ crazy work schedules.
I bounced up the steps, happier than I’d been in quite a while. After dinner, I was going to sneak in a call to Hutch. Hopefully, we’d be able to arrange some time alone tomorrow for some private one-on-one. I hadn’t held him in my arms since he moved in with Uncle Vic. I was especially anxious to be with him again because he’d told me that he had a job lined up at the Burger King. He would be starting next Monday after school, a necessary step on his road to being declared an emancipated minor. He even had his own lawyer lined up to oversee the process, so it wasn’t going to cost Dad a dime. But between the job and school, Hutch wasn’t going to have much time for anything else, including me. So I figured I’d better make the most of this weekend with him.
I let myself in through the front door. There was no homey smell of dinner wafting through the house. Mom and Dad were both sitting on the sofa, waiting for me. They were not smiling.
The sight of them took the air out of my happy bubble. “Uh. Hey.” I closed the door behind me and stood there. From the looks in their eyes, it seemed wise for me to be near an exit.
“Come in here, Jericho,” Mom said. “Sit down.”
I slipped the backpack off my shoulder, put it on the floor, and took off my jacket, draping it over the backpack. I sat down across from them on the loveseat. “What’s up?”
Dad folded his arms across his chest. “That’s what we want you to tell us.”
Clearly, they’d gotten wind of some wrongdoing on my part, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I’d done that would get Mom off the job and united with Dad to face me down. It couldn’t have anything to do with Hutch. They were already pissed with me about that. And it couldn’t have anything to do with Mr. Hutchison attacking me. Mr. Hutchison was gone, and Mac was the only other person who knew about the attack, and there was no way Mac would have said anything to Mom or Dad without talking it over with me first. “Uh. Well, as strange as it may sound, I got a ninety-five on my geometry test today. I’m not doing so hot in English, though. I’m having trouble getting into Moby—”
“This is not about your schoolwork, boy!” Dad snapped.
Mom raised her hand, cutting Dad off in that way only she could manage. “London, just tell him what you found out.”
Dad dug into his pocket. He came up with my cell phone. “I was holding on to this to teach you to be more responsible with your things. When you got into that fight with Barry and came home in that police car, I figured something was going on with you that you weren’t telling me, so I started checking the calls and messages that came to your phone. There was nothing out of the ordinary, so I stopped checking. With you coming off punishment, I decided to give the phone back to you tomorrow. I charged it while I was at the office today, and when I turned it on, I saw that you had a message from a law firm, Stabler and Benson. I called the firm to find out who placed the call, and the receptionist put me through to an attorney named Dylan Cussler. I asked him why the hell he called my underage son. That lawyer wouldn’t tell me a thing. He said I should talk to you.”
Dad paused, giving me a chance to confess. And my brain, as it usually does under such circumstances, tied itself into a tight knot. I just sat there, eyes goggling.
“Jericho,” Mom said. “Why did that attorney call you?”
At the moment, I couldn’t have told them my name. That’s how blank my head had become. “Uh….”
Dad shot angrily to his feet and crossed the room to stand over me, his hands on his hips. “I’ve had enough of this crap. I want you to tell us what this is about.”
I shot a terrified look at Mom, but she didn’t come to my rescue this time. She was worried and just as determined as Dad to have answers.
All of the guilt came back. I couldn’t lie to them. With no other choice, I told them about Mac and me breaking and entering Dylan’s house, vandalizing the place, and how I’d scuffled with the man, leaving him unconscious with a gash in his head. Their mouths dropped open, their eyes filling with horror and disbelief, and I quickly added that I went back to turn myself in, but Dylan refused to press charges.
Dad became livid. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to my feet. “Why the hell would you do something like that, boy?”
Mac and I had set out to teach a gay man the error of his ways, but that no longer made sense to me, now that I had come to understand myself better. “I don’t know. It was supposed to be, like, a joke—”
“Breaking into a man’s house is no joke!” Dad’s grip tightened painfully on my bicep. I yelped and tried to pull away.
“Don’t you move,” Dad said, yanking me back to him. I could see in his eyes there was more fear in him than anger. “How the hell could you do something like this? How? We didn’t bring you up this way. What’s happened to you?”
Mom, finally, was up and moving between us. “London,” she said firmly. “Let him go.” She pried his hand off my arm and I backed away from them, my head down. I suddenly couldn’t look them in the eye. “Jericho, wait for us in your room. Your father and I will be there in a few minutes.”
It was actually thirty-seven minutes. The longest thirty-seven minutes of my life.
THEY walked into my room together. I got up from the bed at once and stood before them. The condemned, facing the executioners.
“I talked to Mr. Cussler again,” Dad said, his voice amazingly calm. “He confirmed everything you told us. I thanked him for not pressing charges against you. But you must understand, Jericho, that you committed a very serious crime. You broke into a man’s home. You hurt him.”
I still couldn’t look at them. “I know—” I began, my head down.
“Don’t talk, listen,” Mom said, cutting me off. “Our job is to protect you and do our best to bring you up into a responsible adult. You won’t have to go to cour
t or to jail for what you did, but you will be punished. Your father and I wanted to turn you over to the sheriff, to make sure you understood how serious this is, but Mr. Cussler made it clear he would have nothing to do with that, and without his cooperation, there isn’t much the sheriff can really do. So this is what your father and I have decided. You are grounded indefinitely. There will be no extracurricular activities for you at school, which means you are off the basketball team. There will be no allowance, no movies, no bowling with your friends, no electronics in your room, no dates with your girlfriend….” Her mouth twisted with distaste. “Or with whomever you’re dating these days. Your Christmas trip to California with Maclin and his family is cancelled. And you’re on kitchen clean-up duty for all meals. You are grounded until your father and I are convinced that you understand how wrong you were to commit this crime.”
“You’re going to get a part-time job,” said Dad. “Mr. Cussler estimates that you cost him $700 in damages and out-of-pocket medical expenses. He told me you didn’t have to repay him, but I insisted. You will be allowed out of the house only for school, work, and church. We can’t be here to watch you every minute, so you’ll be expected to police yourself when we’re away. If you violate any conditions of your punishment, we’ll put you in the church’s juvenile boot camp where there’ll be good strong men to help you control yourself. Do you understand?”
I understood, and I knew I deserved every bit of it. I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good,” said Mom. “You have any questions?”
“No, ma’am.”
Mom sighed. “Now, is there anything you want to say to us?”
“I’m sorry, Mom, Dad. It was stupid of me to break into that man’s house, and I know how much I disappointed you. I am so sorry.”
“And we’re sure as hell going to make certain of that,” Dad said.