by Brian Meehl
The word made my insides tighten up. “We were praying.”
“Bullshit, faggot.”
I lost it. I slammed my hand in his face. He came back at me. After that, all I remember were fists and milk flying. We rolled on the ground punching fast and hard. The next thing I felt was something hitting my back, lifting me in the air.
It was Ruah. “Enough!” he shouted.
The guy jumped up and started after me again. Ruah raised one of his huge hands. “No!”
The guy heel-planted. He knew he’d have to get past Ruah to get at me again. He pointed. “He’s fuckin’ mental!”
Ruah lowered his hand without taking his eyes off the kid. “I’ve never seen him throw a punch. It had to come from somewhere.”
The kid jerked his jaw at the folding chairs on the ground behind us. “You’re not supposed to camp here!”
I noticed the sheet, now folded, on one of the chairs. Ruah must’ve found it where I left it on the rock.
“It’s the only place we could find,” Ruah said as he pulled out his wallet. He took out two twenties and handed them to the kid. “Maybe this’ll make it right.”
The kid wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve and grabbed the money.
“Have a blessed day,” Ruah said before pushing me toward the camper.
Less than a minute later we were winding down the road below Stonehenge. “I know you don’t wanna talk,” he said, “but that was before you started whaling on the locals. What the hell was that about?”
“He saw us by the fire,” I told him. “He didn’t believe we were praying.”
“He thought we were something else.”
“Yeah.”
“So you decided to hit him?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that what Jesus would do?”
“You told me not to walk around in a WWJD shirt. You told me to be a rebel.”
He laughed. “That’s true. And you’re a rebel, no doubt about it.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about more than the fight. I didn’t ask. Like I said, I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t even want to think. I took a vow of not thinking.
7
Drugstore
We didn’t get far before he messed up my vow. Crossing over the river into Oregon, he said, “Say goodbye to the SayWA State.”
I looked to see if the Oregon welcome sign was the same as the old, shot-up one we’d seen the day before. At the end of the bridge the sign said WELCOME TO OREGON—WE LOVE DREAMERS. If I hadn’t been so miserable I would’ve laughed my guts out.
Ruah passed the entrance to the interstate and drove toward a town.
“Where we going?”
“To the thing I wanna show you.”
We parked in front of a drugstore. I followed him inside, and he stopped in an aisle. “See the magazines?”
At the end of the aisle was a wall of magazines. “Yeah.”
“I want you to do a little experiment.” He took a can of Old Spice shaving cream off the shelf. “Go find the magazine covers with half-naked people on ’em. They’ll be girls and guys. Open one of each, look at the pictures, and see which ones throw your switch.”
I felt my cheeks turn red as the Old Spice can. “You’re kidding.”
“That’s the deal.” He kept studying the can. “You wanna ride to Portland, you gotta see what throws your switch.”
I went over to the magazine rack, found a girlie magazine, and opened it. The naked woman staring back at me threw my switch right away. I turned a few more pages. The women made Victoria’s Secret models look like nuns in skimpy habits. Then I took down a magazine with an oily muscleman on the cover and flipped it open. What stared back at me gave me a major case of chung. I shut the magazine and turned around. Ruah was gone.
I went outside. He was in the camper.
Driving to the interstate, he said, “Did your body tell you something?”
“Yeah.”
“For sure, for sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
There was a long pause. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t asking me what. “You don’t wanna know?”
He lowered his shades over his eyes with a slight smile. “I’m all ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ remember? Besides, I thought you didn’t wanna talk.”
But I did. I wanted to do more than talk. I wanted to shout out the window. Hey, everybody, I passed the crotch test! I like girls! I’m not queer! I didn’t, of course. It would’ve been rude, considering Ruah. I also didn’t because I still didn’t get why I’d trampolined off the gay cliff. I just said, “I’m straight.”
He nodded. “Congratulations. That’s gotta be a demon off your back.”
A laugh jumped out of me.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” I said.
“Yes and no what?”
“Yeah, it’s a demon off my back, and no, it’s not, because last night I was sure it was God’s will for me to be gay. I’m a little confused about God right now.”
His forehead wrinkled. “I was wondering about that. I mean, it’s one thing to be horny and do something crazy. It’s another thing to think T.L.’s the one pulling your strings.” There was a long pause, then he asked, “Ever heard of walking back the cat?”
“No.”
“It’s from the spy business. When something bad goes down—like a cat killing a mouse—you walk the cat backward to figure out how it happened.” He looked over. “Someday, not necessarily today, you should walk back the cat on last night.”
I thought about it and realized today was as good as any. I mean, who else was I going to walk back the cat with? Mom? Case and the R-boys? Yeah, right. So I started telling him about the signs God had thrown me that made me think I was gay.
I told him about kissing Spring, and not liking her glow-in-the-dark boobs. He said anyone might be turned off by that. “When you kiss a girl, wanna make love to her, and her tits turn out to be bright enough to read by, that’s usually a deal breaker.” After I stopped laughing, he said, “Don’t tell me you thought you were gay because of one encounter with Martian boobs.”
“No.” I wanted to tell him about the dream, but I couldn’t. I skipped that and cut to the chase. “The Bible made me do it.”
“The Bible made you do it?”
I told him about my providence check, and how God guided my finger to the verse in Job about me being born to trouble.
He shook his head in disbelief. “I’m not sure poking your finger in the Bible to see if you’re straight or gay is a good idea. It’s the Good Book, but it’s not that good.”
I was debating whether to tell him about the dream or not, when he started chuckling. “I mean, if everyone decided sexual orientation by the finger-in-a-book test, imagine what would happen if someone didn’t have a Bible around for their moment of truth. What if some kid who only had The Polar Express, poked his finger in it and discovered God wanted him to be a Santa-sexual? Or if someone stuck their finger in Moby-Dick and decided they were a whale-sexual? And what if, God forbid, someone opened their favorite cookbook? There’d be some miserable guy out there convinced he was an eggbeater-sexual.”
I knew he was having fun and trying to make me laugh—and I did a little—but it made me realize that the only way he was going to understand why I did what I did was to tell him about the dream. If I was going to walk back the cat, I couldn’t lift the cat over that one.
After I told him, he thought about it for a while. “I’m no shrink or dreamworker,” he said, “but it sounds to me like your dream confirms it.”
“Confirms what?”
“That you’re no different than any other teenage boy: you think everything is about sex. But maybe your dream wasn’t about sex at all. Maybe you’re confusing sex with intimacy.”
“I don’t get it.”
“In your dream, you said it felt natural to put your arm around me, and I said, ‘This feels nice.’ Ma
ybe that’s all it was. Maybe your dream was asking, ‘What do you want your relationship with Ruah Branch to be?’ And the answer was simply, ‘Close buddies.’ ”
“But we were in a motel in the same bed.”
“We’ve been in the same camper for a week, sleeping five feet away from each other. That doesn’t make anyone lovers.” He shook his head. “I hate to disappoint you, Billy, but I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure you’re straight. If you doubt it just give yourself another test. Next time you walk down the street, ask yourself who you imagine naked, the women or the men.”
“It’s that simple?”
He laughed. “For guys, pretty much. We’re pretty dumb that way. Of course, I’m talking about sex, not love. Love’s a whole different ball game. And for God’s sake, don’t spend the rest of your life beating yourself up over last night. People get loopy and do crazy things. When you’re young, experimentation with the big three—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—sometimes just gets down to the company you keep. Hell, if you’d traveled two thousand miles with a whale-sexual, you might’ve gotten to Portland, forgotten your father’s treasure, and headed straight to the water for some whale watching.”
“You keep talking about whale-sexuals,” I said with a smirk. “Are you saying you’re one of those, too?”
He laughed. “No, I’m not bi. But I do believe every man and woman walking the earth has it in ’em to be a zigzag-sexual.”
“A zigzag-sexual? Is that something you learn in health class?”
Ruah grinned. “You’ll only hear it from me. It’s one of my dumb theories.”
“And I suppose it comes with the all-the-way-to-Portland travel package?”
“No, this one’s an extra. You see, hard-core straights say God makes everyone straight, and that gays are sick and need to be cured. Hard-core gays say we’re all hardwired to be straight or gay and being either is our ‘sexual orientation.’ What if they’re both wrong? What if the sexual urge is like any other human appetite: it can change over a lifetime? I mean, if a little kid who despises eating his vegetables grows up to be a full-on vegan, then you have to say his ‘vegetable orientation’ has changed. When it comes to the appetite for sex and intimacy, I don’t think it’s much different. Appetites change. So if we’re made in God’s image, and He is a zigzag God, then we’re capable of zigging and zagging right along with Him.”
I heard what he was saying, but I had zigzagged to other things. My eyes were seeing the morning sun bouncing off the Columbia River. My head was filled with a parade of pretty dresses moving along a street. And my imagination was doing whoop-de-doos on the mounds and curves underneath them.
8
Boot Heel Collectibles
Before driving into Portland, we took an exit for gas. I did the usual and went in to pay. Next to the counter was a newspaper rack. One of the papers had a box in the corner that read CINCINNATI LAVENDER? I opened the paper to the story. It was about a rumor that Ruah Branch wasn’t rehabbing with a Triple-A team in Louisville, but had “gone AWOL to the YMCA.”
I bought the paper and showed it to Ruah. “What’s it mean?”
“It means Joe is tired of losing seven grand a game.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Get to Seattle ASAP.” He threw the paper in the garbage. “Grab our change and buy a Portland map.”
We drove to the old part of downtown between the office towers up the hill and the docks by the river. The closer we got to the river, the more run-down things got. There was a big Salvation Army cross sticking out from one building. A grungy park was jammed with trailers selling ethnic food. Farther down, among Chinese shops and hippie stores, we turned onto Couch Street. The camper rattled and squeaked on the potholed street.
“There it is!” I shouted. I didn’t need to see the address to know it was Boot Heel Collectibles. Sticking out from the store was a boot-shaped sign. I kept thinking how my father’s footsteps had sounded on this street hundreds if not thousands of times. My heart thudded against my ribs like his ghost was running down the street to meet me.
Ruah pulled past the store toward a parking space. BOOT HEEL COLLECTIBLES arched in gold letters on the plate-glass window. A Closed sign hung in the door. The lights were out. The sun lit a dusty layer of junk in the window. Beyond that was darkness.
We parked past an alley. Ruah pointed to a pay phone up the street. “I’m gonna make a call, then I’ll see you at the store.”
I jumped out and ran down the sidewalk, yanking the shoelace-key over my head. In the door, a handwritten sign under the Closed sign read DUE TO A DEATH IN THE FAMILY. I’d never thought of it. Maybe he had a family. A wife, kids, my half brothers and sisters.
I slid the key in the doorknob. The door swung open. A bell dinged over my head, making me jump. I stepped inside and hit a light switch on the wall. Nothing came on. There were light sockets hanging from the ceiling, but the lightbulbs were missing. Why would anyone take out the lightbulbs?
I waited for my eyes to adjust to the semidarkness. Some light spilled through the window. Between the narrow aisles, glass cases and counters were cluttered with stuff. A lot of it was printed with the same black silhouette and MARK TWAIN. There was everything from ash trays and dusty Mark Twain bourbon bottles to wooden swords with TOM SAWYER and HUCK FINN painted on the blades. His store was almost completely dedicated to the spirit of Mark Twain. But there was another spirit roaming there: Richard Allbright. I studied everything. Even the smallest item might give me the last clue to where my father had stashed the bad book.
When I circled back to the big window, I saw a thickset man hurry by, out on the sidewalk. There was something weird about him. His jacket collar was turned up and his head was down like he was walking into a cold wind, but it was August and windless. I moved into the doorway so I could see him go up the street. He pulled open the camper’s passenger door and got in. I couldn’t see where Ruah was, at the pay phone or in the camper.
I started to go outside but realized the man might see me in the camper’s outside mirror. I moved through the shop to a back door. It was ajar and banged up. Someone had broken in.
I scooted through the door, down a narrow alley to the bigger alley, which led to where the camper was parked. I stayed close to the wall so the man couldn’t see me. When I got to the end of the alley, I snuck a peek. The man was sitting in the camper like he owned it. Ruah was getting back in the driver’s side. He wasn’t afraid of the guy. It was like he knew him. I flattened against the wall so Ruah couldn’t see me.
“How’s it goin’, Rue?” the man said. I recognized the gruff voice. It was the guy from Coors Field, Joe Douglas.
I could just hear Ruah. He didn’t sound happy. “How did you find me?”
“Been doing some detective work.” Whatever he said next was drowned out by a passing car. Then I heard, “… a boy named Billy Allbright. It seems you’ve been traveling with him.”
“How did you find me here?” Ruah asked again.
“By doing what I do best, negotiation.”
“I bet that set you back a few bucks.”
“Chicken feed compared with what we lose every day you miss. By the way, is that real or part of your new look?”
“It’s real. It’s broken.”
“Why are you such a fuckup?”
“Why are you such an asshole?”
I heard Joe’s yippy laugh. “If it turns you on to think of me as an asshole, it doesn’t bother me.”
“What do you want, Joe?”
“The same I always want. You in the closet so you can keep rakin’ in the max.” He chuckled. “You rub my Brokeback Mountain, I’ll rub yours.”
“Then why did you plant the bit about me rehabbing at the Y instead of down in Louisville?”
“To smother the truth: you traipsing around the country with fuckin’ jailbait. The way I see it, we call a press conference, you deny the gay rumors, and everything goes back to normal.”
“ ‘I’m not gay, I never have been gay,’ that kind of thing?”
“I like the sound of it.”
There was a pause and then Ruah said, “Will you give me twenty-four hours?”
“Between friends, sure.”
I heard a door open. I scooted back down the alley. I didn’t know how Joe Douglas knew my name, found us here, or knew about Boot Heel Collectibles. I still had my father’s card. The knot in my stomach told me it had something to do with Dumb—me keeping Ruah’s cell phone—and Dumber—using it.
I went back in the store through the back. I checked the cash register. It had money in it. It was getting wonkier by the minute. Whoever had broken in had taken the lightbulbs but not the money. I thought about the bad book. Maybe someone else knew about it. Maybe they’d gotten there first and found it. Then a death-cookie thought popped up. What if Joe Douglas knew about it? What if he was the one who’d broken in?
My eye caught a tiny glow of light in the back corner of the store. I moved to it. It came from a small desk crammed behind a display case. The desk was cluttered with paperwork and a phone. Its red message light was on.
I pressed the message button. A voice announced, “Two old messages.” I replayed them. “Alright, treasure hunter,” a raspy voice said—it was my father’s—“listen up, and listen good. Actually,” he said with a dry chuckle, “don’t listen to me, listen to Walt Whitman. If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
I hit the pause button, and repeated the line out loud. “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” I wondered if the store had a basement.
I played the second message. My father’s voice but rushed, urgent. “There’s a group, Billy, they want to destroy the bad book. I’ve hidden it well, but I fear they’ve learned of your treasure hunt. They may be on to you. Keep a sharp lookout. And please, Billy, hurry.” The machine beeped.
My mind ripped. I tried to keep thinking and not get sucked into the panic I heard in his voice. Then I remembered that the machine had said they were old messages. Someone had listened to them already. That’s who might’ve broken into the store: the people who wanted to destroy the bad book. If it was them, and they were ahead of me in the hunt, they might’ve beat me to it. I stomped my foot. “Shit!”