But she was an optimist, that Stump. Today just might be the day I had decided to go back to breakfast burritos and cheeseburgers.
I dropped a few cereal flakes and a banana slice in her bowl and carried my own to the table. I turned on the computer, picked all the bananas out of my bowl and ate them while it booted up.
I heard a snorting noise and looked up.
Stump stood over her bowl, glaring at me.
“What?”
She looked at the fiber flakes, then looked back at me and snorted again.
“See? I said you wouldn’t like it.”
She gave a little growl.
“Are you growling at me? Because I gave you healthy food?”
She blinked slowly.
“You are unbelievable. What do you think, that I like this? Believe me, I’d much prefer a big bag of Doritos. But you saw Trisha. She’s winning this race I didn’t even realize we’re having, so this is what we’re eating. And if I can’t have junk food, neither can you.”
Stump continued to stare at me for a second, then gave a huff and stalked to the living room.
I found the articles on CJ Hardin I’d read the other night. I thought if we were looking for local hate groups, the comments section of the online news would be an excellent place to start. Not since the end of public hangings had humanity had such a place to focus its bloodthirstiness.
I also found the article I’d skimmed over, about the vandalism of the City’s brand new prairie dog vacuum truck, the “Dog-Gone-It.” There was even a quote from “Bull” Brannan: “The PDDL is devoted to speaking for these small but vital members of our ecological system, since the City sees fit to sacrifice them in deal after worthless deal.”
I wasn’t sure who I was more annoyed with, Bobby for tricking me, or me, for not realizing that what he was trying to do. I should have known that if I overheard him, it was something he wanted me to overhear. If I had been paying more attention when I was reading Monday night, I would not have stepped into his jerky little trap.
I muttered a few vows of revenge that I already knew were pointless, and went back to the task at hand: identifying CJ Hardin haters.
The comments sections in the first few articles, the ones about Hope for Home’s schedule for the week, were blank. Nothing to see here, just another guy trying to help people. As soon as the Friends of Joshua story broke, all heck broke loose.
There were the usual, “Faggots. Turns my stomach,” and “Get back in the closet, freaks!” remarks. The standard, “I don’t care what you do in your bedroom, but you don’t need to be shoving it in my face. I have rights, too.”
It was depressing to wade through. So much yelling and precious little listening. After a while I stopped reading the comments and concentrated on finding repeat posters.
I picked the raisins out of my cereal while I scrolled through the pages. I got up to get a pad of paper off the bar, ignoring Stump’s pitiful eyebrows raised in my direction.
I wrote down six names, making tick marks by the number of posts for each one.
Four of the tick marks had two posts each, both on the same article. In each of the four cases, the person had posted a comment, then replied to another commenter in that article. Nothing much to see there, so I crossed them out.
The other two, though, had several comments each, on different articles.
There was Sheila Newcomb, the concerned mother of a nine-year-old boy, and home school teacher to same. She turned out to be the same HomeschoolMomofOneGreatBoy that I’d seen online Monday night. Her avatar was a sky blue square with a cross on a grassy hill, the sun shining brilliantly behind it. I figured home schooling one kid must not have taken up a lot of her time, because Sheila Newcomb was a prodigious poster. The main theme of her comments were a) CJ’s parents must be so heartbroken and b) her son had been a patient of Dr. Hardin’s, and if she found her son had been molested, all hell would break loose. She had twelve comments, including a side altercation with another woman who had apparently been on a Bunco team with Sheila two years before and was not impressed with Sheila’s “alleged morals.”
Dewayne Dorr, was a 23-year-old student Turner School of Auto Body Repair. I assumed his avatar was a picture of himself, a gangster wannabe with his baseball hat on sideways, a scowl on his face and his fingers held up in a sideways V. His comments were not drastically different from the typical “you make me sick,” tone, escalated by added detail, i.e. “You make me want to puke my Poptarts right onto the floor,” and intensity. “You should have your dong ripped off and shoved down your own throat since you like that so much,” and sheer number. Dewayne posted seventeen similar comments across the span of five articles.
I wasn’t sure if either of these people had anything to do with the murder of CJ Hardin, but they definitely had their issues.
As I had noticed the other night, there were multiple mentions of Matt Macon.
“I can’t wait to hear what Matt Macon has to say about this one.”
“Somebody get Matt Macon on this.”
“This is exactly what Matt Macon was talking about. If it’s okay, why do they have to be so secretive?”
“Matt Macon is not helpful in any possible way,” I grumbled, unless you counted standing around watching a girl dumpster-dive helpful, which I did not.
I went back to Dewayne and Sheila. They say you can find everything on the internet, but if there was a way to look up the phone numbers or addresses of these two, I didn’t know it. I pulled out the trusty old-school phone book.
Lubbock had its fair share of Newcombs, as it turned out. There were seven listed. None of them were Sheila, but she struck me as the type to have all the utilities in her husband’s name, and I had no real feeling for which of the males listed she would have married.
But there was only one Dorr, which made it the easiest – and therefore the only – place to start. I wrote the phone number and address on a piece of paper, then sat back. I was not going to go out at this time of night, and besides, I already had my pajamas on. Since the next day was my day off, I figured Viv and I (and Dale, because of course Flo had scheduled our days off to be the same day) could start surveillance on him first thing.
I sat there for a while, not quite ready to go to bed but not quite ready to do anything else, in that in-between land of Internet hypnosis. I thought back over the day’s events and tried to find a clue we’d missed, but all I could focus on was Desiree and Marky. I didn’t think my heart had ever hurt so much for two people I didn’t know. It had rarely hurt that much for people I did know.
All the ruckus had started for CJ when the news leaked about Hope for Home’s connection with Friends of Joshua. I decided to learn a little more about that organization before I went to bed.
There was a website – FOJ.com, stating the same statistics CJ had listed in his interview the previous week. Forty percent of homeless youth identified as LGBT. Friends of Joshua had started in Chicago and that office was still considered home base. They were in a fund raising campaign to open six new houses before the end of the year, including one in Lubbock.
I clicked through the pictures of grinning teenagers and articles, feeling both sad that this kind of thing was necessary, and happy that people were stepping in to help. I thought my life had been hard when I was a teenager, but I’d always had a place to go with G-Ma and her motel. I didn’t always want to be there, and she didn’t always want me there, but she never turned me away.
There were links across the top of the page for news, ways to help, and a bulletin board. I clicked on that last link and scrolled through the list of conversation topics:
LGBT Friendly Places in Your City
Call for Help!
Success Stories!
Your Torture Stories.
I clicked that link. I had assumed, I supposed, that since I was straight I wouldn’t have much in common with a kid struggling with sexual orientation and acceptance, but I was wrong.
“I never fit in with my family. Ever. My earliest memory was of looking around at them and waiting for someone else to say what I was thinking – explain what I was doing there. Because it was obvious to me that everyone else belonged and I didn’t.”
That sounded familiar, I thought glumly. I knew exactly how that felt.
“For a long time I couldn’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse that my mom was so accepting of me. From the beginning – from fifth grade and I had my first crush on another girl – she had my back. I always felt safe with her. But then she died and I went to live with my dad, and everything changed. I kept fighting to get that sense of acceptance back. I knew it was my right to be who I was. It was almost like I was spoiled by her. This sounds crazy now to think about it, but for a while I wished she’d been a little harder on me so I could have developed a thicker skin, maybe the ability to just keep my mouth shut. But at my dad’s, I missed her and I missed that feeling of safety so much that I fought back against everything. And I fought myself right out of a home. It was a home where I wasn’t wanted, where I wasn’t accepted. But it was a place to get off the streets.”
This one reminded me more of CJ: “My parents never suspected, and I did everything I could to keep them from finding out. I was the best I could be at everything. Class President, starter on the basketball team, volunteer at church, straight As. I ran on manic energy, frantic to keep them dazzled by everything I did so they wouldn’t be able to see what I was. I knew if they ever found out, I would be dead to them. And it turned out, I was right.”
Except CJ’s family hadn’t disowned him. They’d been surprised, Desiree had said, but they loved him and would have loved him no matter what.
“Beaten up probably three times a week. Every week.”
“Shoved into lockers between every – and I mean every – class. One time I actually bent one of the doors. I got a demerit for that. The school had a ‘no tolerance policy’ for vandalism, they told me.”
“My older brother used to pin me down from behind and scream in my ear that I liked it. But I was the sick one. Nothing wrong with him, living for the chance to jump me. Counting the bruises he’d given me like he was counting gold medals. My dad signed me up for kickboxing because he thought it would make me more manly. It worked. After about four months, I learned how to do a roundhouse kick and knocked two of his teeth out. That’s when I ended up moving out because it was that or counseling for my ‘anger issues.’”
“You mean the daily comments, every time I walked by a group of guys? Fag, queer, perv, all the usual. Every day. For years. No, that’s no big deal.”
“One time after a basketball game I got a note from a guy I had a crush on. We’d been friends since second grade. We used to play Transformers together. Our first year of high school, though, he got too cool for me. Didn’t want to be seen with a fag. Anyway, I got a note to meet him, he wanted to be friends again. I should have known. I mean, a note, telling me he wanted to be friends again? But I was lonely and I really missed him. So I met him behind the bleachers at the track field. He and four of his new popular friends.. I ended up with three broken ribs, a missing tooth, a concussion. One of them found a dead branch on the ground and, while the other one held me down, pulled up my shirt and wrote “PERV” over and over on my stomach until it scratched so deep it left a scar. Completely desecrated my body. The police didn’t lift a finger. I had to finish the school year at home. The next year I transferred to a different school and tried to go back into the closet.”
It was just too sad. I leaned back in my chair and wished I had something chocolate to eat. What I really wanted, of course, was a drink. What I always wanted was a drink. When I drank, everything felt better. Without a drink, I was like that guy who said he’d never fit in. I never fit. The world was a dangerous land of sharp edges and jagged corners, and I was a clunky, oddly-shaped piece that rolled noisily around and didn’t settle anywhere comfortable.
With a drink, well...everything went softer. The world was still a mess, but suddenly we were all a lovable mess. We had the best intentions. With a drink, I felt like everything would be okay.
The eternal – and inevitably fruitless – quest, of course, was to maintain that comfortable buzz – drink just enough to maintain that feeling that all was right with the world. It never happened, of course. Every binge started with a nice warm glow, graduating slowly to a preoccupation with maintaining the glow, escalating inevitably to raging against whatever outside force had screwed up my glow – whether it be someone directly in front of me, or a remembered slight from seventh grade. After I’d been sober a few months I realized with a sense of shame and dread that I’d probably said the words, “Why can’t everybody just chill the freak out?” more times than I’d ever said anything else. Someone was always harshing my mellow, just when I thought I’d gotten things squared away. Everyone else was the problem. All I wanted was to relax and unwind. Was that so much to ask?
I had never fit, just like those kids on the FOJ bulletin board. My father had bailed before I was born. My mother had made no secret of the fact that her life would have been so much better if she’d remained childless. My G-Ma tolerated me most of the time, which was as good as it got in my world. When I took my first drink, it was like the world finally made sense. There was no fitting or not fitting. We all fit. It was a good world, and I was doing just fine in it. All I had to do was get everyone to chill out and let me be.
I could imagine how those kids felt, finding a place like Friends of Joshua after a lifetime of not belonging anywhere. They’d found a place to belong; people who accepted them; a safe place. For so long, alcohol had been my safe place.
I was still addicted to distraction. The trouble was, I didn’t have food or alcohol to distract myself with, and at that moment the internet was letting me down. What I needed was a pick-me-up that wouldn’t make me fat. I thought about that poster of the prairie dog at the PDDL meeting, and decided to search for an image of it. That would make me feel better.
I typed “praying prairie dogs” to the search engine and hit enter just as the front door opened and Frank stepped inside. He gave me basically the same look Stump had when I had walked into the kitchen. Hopeful, but with a growing sense of futility.
“Raisin bran,” I said. I was glad to see him. I didn’t particularly feel like being alone at the moment. “Which you are more than welcome to.”
Frank and I had had an unspoken agreement for quite a while. He babysat Stump, and I fed him –both events happening on an as-needed basis, with no advance notice, and without compensation. I could probably have come out better, financially, by investing in an occasional dog sitter or a good wire crate, but I’d gotten used to having Frank around. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but on the other hand, he rarely said anything to annoy me. He was just there, and sometimes that meant the world to me.
“What about that butt crack broccoli?” he asked.
I stared at him dumbly before I realized what he was talking about. “Just crack,” I clarified. “Not butt crack. Just crack.”
“Oh,” he said, as if I were splitting hairs. “Did you ever make that?”
I shook my head. “No, but I suppose I could.”
I rose and dug through the fridge, pulling the broccoli out of the produce bag. The stems were still green, but the little nubby parts were turning yellow. “Is it okay that it’s turning yellow?” I asked.
Frank shrugged. “Okay by me. Hey, look at the chipmunks.”
I looked over his shoulder. “Oh, those are prairie dogs.” I leaned in and stared at the thumbnail pictures. “I think that’s the one I saw at the bar.”
I clicked the picture and turned to Frank. “I saw this on a poster...what?” I’d never seen him look at me like that.
“You saw this one at a bar?”
“Not the actual prairie dog,” I clarified. Then I realized the part of the statement he was having trouble with. “I wasn’t at a bar. I mea
n, yes, I was at a bar, but I wasn’t really there for, well for being at a bar. We went to a meeting.”
“We?” Frank looked ominous. In all the time I’d known him, I’d seen Frank display three expressions – blank, hungry, and asleep. But just then he looked ominous.
“Viv and Dale and me. We were investigating this CJ Hardin thing.”
His eyebrows remained lowered.
“Anyway, we went to a meeting that I thought was some kind of hate group, but it really turned out to be these guys fighting for protection of prairie dog habitats.”
Frank remained silent.
I wasn’t quite sure how to handle this. Frank was silent plenty of times, but normally it was because he was ignoring me.
In an effort to ease the awkwardness, I turned my attention back to the computer. “Oh, look,” I said, clicking on another thumbnail. “It really does look like it’s praying.”
It was sweet. The little thing stared reverently into the setting (or rising?) sun, little paws pressed together. Another picture showed one standing on his back legs, his tiny front legs stretched as if in supplication. It reminded me of some of the people in groovy church.
“Look at that,” I said to Frank.
“At a bar?” His face was grim.
“It was just a meeting,” I said.
No response.
I turned uneasily back to the computer. “It says here that there were once hundreds of millions – maybe even billions – of prairie dogs between here and South Dakota. They have underground burrows that go on for miles. Hey, listen to this. Different rooms within the burrows are designated for nurseries, for kitchens, even for bathrooms. Isn’t that cute?”
I imagined some superior species seeing my little place at Trailertopia in just the same kind of patronizing way. Look, she had a special place for bathing, for sleeping. But all the places were for eating, apparently.
I scrolled through the article until I came to set of three pictures grouped together. One showed a beaming preteen girl holding a prairie dog on her lap, a second showed a woman walking one down the sidewalk on a thin leash, and the third showed a spacious and green backyard, with a large patch of bare earth to one side, the tell-tale mound rising from the middle.
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