“That’s what your dad says.”
“If they made you replace your chip with one that would track your every move, would you keep it in?”
“I’d rip it out and go to jail.”
“Okay, so imagine if all five hundred million citizens of the NRO did that. The government wouldn’t have enough jail space, and they’d lose the fight.”
“Not if they just killed everyone,” Dex says, then takes a hit off his cigarette, which he doesn’t even like. He is floating now, flying, keenly aware that he believes the New Rainbow Order could someday sink that low. “Give it time,” he says. “Humanity is fucked.”
Bobby, always hopeful, scoffs. Again, he says, “Nobody would stand for it.”
The track team, heading out for a run on the trails behind school, shuffles past them. Every single boy stares at them as they run by, and some laugh. One boy, Casey Simonson, even mimes a cunnilingus action by spreading his hands and diving between them with a wagging tongue. At this, the entire team erupts in laughter.
“Failsafe fucks!” Casey yells.
Dex gives him the finger.
Casey yells back, “I’d love to, baby. You just let me know when you’re ready!”
Will it always be this way? Is there hope at all for his life to mean something? Already Dex feels as if his one chance to make something of himself has come and gone, simply because of who he is, and it isn’t worth dreaming about a second. Chances come on the shoulders of goodness, which seems impossible to come by.
CHAPTER 40 (HIM)
“MARY IN HEAVEN, he’s probably starving!”
“Desperate is more like it, if he’s curled up on our front porch.”
“Do you think he’s related to that train derailing? His head is all blistered! If those queens on WorldCom would just give us a hint about what that was about, maybe I could make an honest assessment!”
Dex opened his eyes to the sound of gay male chatter. Two men, one with hair graying from black and the other with hair graying from strawberry blonde, were staring down at him. Both had leathery skin and about fifty years apiece on their faces. The brawnier one was standing tall with hands on his hips, shaking his head and making a snapping sound with his tongue over a gritty expression. His darker hair was matted, and he was dressed in a bathrobe, shivering. The lanky one with a more vibrant flare in his eyes was on his haunches, closer to Dex, holding a mug of steaming coffee and dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. His lighter hair was still sporting yesterday’s style, only slightly mussed from his night’s sleep. Both men’s breath was visible in the frosty morning air.
Suddenly remembering he had curled up on the front porch of a farmhouse, Dex turned his face to see the yard, only to get a face full of the squatting man’s wrinkled penis. He was perfectly positioned so that the slit in his boxer shorts was exposing it. Dex could not help but chuckle.
“Rainbow and stripes, he’s alive,” the man attached to the penis said. “Moses, honey, go add a few more eggs to the pan. Wait, bring out a banana so he can have something right away!”
Dex looked back up, saw the standing one, Moses, give his husband a skeptical shake of the head, then step back into the house.
The more excitable one stood up but continued to look down at Dex. “Honey, you’re not going to kill us, are you?” he asked.
“No, I’m not.” Dex realized he was shivering when the words quivered on their way out. He took the remaining man’s hand and stood up, letting the rug fall to the porch. It was freezing outside, far colder than it had been on any of the previous four days. Dex glanced at the driveway, where he saw the hydro utility truck from which yesterday’s banana peel had been thrown. Its license plate was bent, rusted, and covered with mud.
Country fags, Dex thought. They’re either going to lynch me or save me.
Then the yard sign he had nearly stumbled over the night before winked in his memory. ”Support Unity!” it had read.
“Look at you!” the man in the boxer shorts exclaimed. “You’re thin as a rail! When’s the last time you had anything to eat?” He ushered Dex into the house and slammed the door shut behind them. “Heavens, I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Sam Archer. There in the kitchen is my husband Moses. Don’t mind his attitude. He’s always a bitch in the morning.”
The farmhouse was indeed antiquated, cluttered with the accumulated stuff of years shared by two people: shabby jackets, muddy shoes and boots, holopanels lining the walls (a few of which seemed to have lost power), unmatched furniture, and random knickknacks that seemed as out of place as they did perfectly agreeable. Sitting along the hallway’s left baseboard was a family of ceramic lawn gnomes grinning at the opposite wall. On that wall was a printed painting of an old Hollywood actress whose face Dex recognized but whose name he did not know. At the far corner of the room into which the hallway opened (a living room, by the look of it) stood an antique clock even taller than Dex, the type he had only seen pictures of. The hardwood floors were dull and worn with use, and the hallway creaked under his feet.
From the kitchen wafted the heavenly smell of breakfast. Never before had Dex so appreciated the possibility of food. The warm aroma of sizzling onions, peppers, fresh fruit, and biscuits enveloped him as the hallway broke on the left to reveal Moses Archer cracking eggs over a sizzling skillet.
“Here, take this,” Sam said, shoving a banana in Dex’s face. Dex accepted it, ripping it open with such desperate speed that Sam shrank backward and let out a relieved gasp. “When did you last eat?”
“Yesterday. A banana peel one of you two threw out of that truck out front.”
Sam turned to scowl at his husband. “Moses, I told you to stop littering.”
“Well, it gave this boy a snack, so stop making such a deal of it,” Moses growled. He turned back to the skillet, then spoke with words obviously directed at Dex. “Now look, we’ve got knives and clubs and a million other things to hurt you with, should you decide to attack us. Lucky for you, my queen of a husband there is such a softy that—”
“Moses! We already made sure he didn’t have any weapons on him.”
“Well, look at his clothes.”
“What about them?”
“Come on, Sam. He’s not from around here.”
“Really, Moses, sometimes you just aren’t even human.” Sam swung back to Dex and approached him with open arms. He ran his hands down the stubble on Dex’s cheek. “Look at this face. Could it be any more attractive?” The man settled a hand conspicuously on Dex’s left pectoral muscle. “Honey, tell my husband here that you’re not going to kill us.”
Dex swallowed the lump of banana in his throat, then turned to Moses, humored at the hand still holding his chest. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Moses did not look convinced. “Well, then, tell us who you are.”
As Sam ushered him to a bar stool at the kitchen counter, Dex began his story backward, from seeing the yard sign, to the train, to the raid at Sterile Me Susan’s, and finally to his being the natural father of an unborn child. He was too dazed by his good fortune in this kitchen to lie. Within five minutes, the two men knew more about him than his own mothers did. Dex was risking his life by telling the truth, but he was too hungry and thankful to be apprehensive. He disclosed his plan to get back to Minneapolis and track down Grace and their baby.
Moses stood listening with a fist on his hip, and Sam’s eyes glistened with tears. The former finally looked convinced. He dished up a steaming plate of food and thrust it under Dex’s nose.
“We’re officially friends,” Moses said. Sam gave his husband an “I told you so” look, and a minute later, they were all digging into breakfast.
Sam and Moses were the type of aging couple to finish each other’s sentences without second thoughts, snapping at each other one minute, then reverting to gentle acknowledgment and mutual respect the next. Their devotion to each other comprised what Dex thought any couple’s should: patience, caring, and selfless
ness—the elements of love. The way Moses automatically refilled Sam’s coffee complemented the way Sam waited without interruption for Moses to form his thoughts before speaking.
Their discussion lasted well into the morning, and Sam made a point to congratulate his husband on being able to set work aside for the sake of their new visitor. Moses scoffed, but as he turned around to fix another pot of coffee, a grin colored his face. They owned and operated a ten-thousand-acre spread of corn, beets, and tropical fruit, including the bananas Sam had so readily shoved at Dex. The corn and beets were seasonal, outdoor crops, and the bananas, pineapples, papayas, and mangos grew in four solar greenhouses that stretched north, a half-mile apiece, from the farmhouse’s back yard. Sam and Moses’s crops supplied grocery stores, restaurants, and food manufacturers as far west as Omaha and as far north as Chicago. It seemed reasonable to assume they had far more money than their creaky, drafty house might suggest. They had been married for thirty-three years, since Sam was eighteen and Moses was twenty.
“Fell in love just like that,” Sam told Dex, snapping his fingers. “I don’t know why in God’s name Moses appealed to me, because all he ever did was gripe, but that’s how the carrot crunches, I guess.”
“And Sam is still into the drag revival scene,” Moses said, showing Dex his second smile. “He’s begging me to join him at the Queens of the Midwest convention in Kansas City next weekend, but he won’t ever live to see me in a dress.”
“Don’t ask why we ever survived this long together,” Sam said. “Just go with it!”
Dex did. Like many people in the agriculture and food business, which relied on a sustained population, Sam and Moses Archer were sexually liberal. But there were deeper reasons for their animosity toward the government’s stringent laws, about which Dex soon learned.
Sam and Moses had engineered a son, Efron, who was a failsafe.
“Yes, was,” Sam reiterated. “He was on a call in Kansas City one day, and he stopped in a breeder bar for a drink. From what witnesses said, he left with three lipstick dykes who were flirting with him, pretending to be heterosteriles. I guess they were known around Missouri for messing with failsafes. We found Efron tied to our barbed-wire fence out front the next morning.”
“Beaten to death, then strung up like a pig,” Moses added. “Those cunts drove all the way back here just so we’d be the ones to find him.”
And the rest was history. The murderers got off with seven month’s rainbow probation, three months of tolerance education, and not even a day of prison time after one of the women’s fathers posted their combined bail totaling six hundred dollars. Sam claimed the police had tampered with evidence in favor of the three lesbians, and the municipal judge in charge of hearing the case had an intense prejudice against heterosexuals. His sentence on the women was a slap on the wrist, and to this day, it enraged the two farmers. As far as they were concerned, Efron, whose digital life-cycle portrait hung above a dusty piano in the living room, had been a casualty of the New Rainbow Order’s disintegrating ethics.
“Didn’t matter to the judge that Efron’s orientation was dictated by the government to begin with,” Moses said. “Still thought of him as disposable. And now those dykes walk free.”
Efron had a striking resemblance to both his fathers in different ways. Dex watched the small boy mature into a young man as the holopanel completed, then repeated, its cycle. A wave of sadness crushed his heart as he imagined Sam and Moses subjecting themselves to this portrait every day, each time suffering the memory of their son’s life coming to a grinding halt. They did not deserve such grief. “He was a beautiful kid,” Dex said, at a loss for better words.
“That he was,” Moses responded.
Sam sent Dex to a large upstairs bathroom to shower. They would figure out what to do later, he said, and first, a good cleanup was in order. Sam sized Dex up after throwing a set of fluffy white towels into his arms. “You’re almost a good foot shorter than both of us, but I’ll find you something to wear. You don’t mind drag, do you?” Sam’s grin fluttered into the realm of suggestiveness before he spun away, down the hall. Smiling, Dex stepped into the bathroom and shut the door, sure since hearing about their son Efron that neither of these two men would try to jump him while he showered. Even so, after his experience at the detention center in Minneapolis, Dex wanted security. He pushed the lock.
When he looked in the bathroom mirror, he was shocked to see bright red scars on his forehead where his skin had begun to swelter inside the baking train car. Miraculously, his eyes were not red, as Fletch’s and Exander’s had been. His left shoulder was bruised purple, however, and his legs had shallow gashes where the chopped corn stalks had punctured them. The pain had been so constant during the last five days that it had slipped out of his consciousness.
The shower stung everything at first. Dex cooled the water to wash his head, then turned it hot again for the rest of his body, which had not been close enough to the train car’s oven vents to burn. The constant stream of pressure tingled on his skin, washing the scarring remnants of the week off him. The horror dripped away, and in the glass chamber of water and steam, Dex prayed to the voice he had heard in the train car.
Whoever you are, I’m getting the message. I promise I’ll make the best out of this second chance.
No voice answered, but the new sense of peace continued to comfort him just the same. For the time being, he would trust it.
AN HOUR LATER, he was in the kitchen, eating a second breakfast, when Moses rumbled through in a pair of dirty overalls, off to start his day’s work. He stepped out the back door, muttering vague words about the military and the inevitability of their being found out and questioned. When the door slammed, Dex turned to Sam with a confused look.
“Why would the military have anything to do with this?”
The bubblier farmer frowned, then asked, “How much do you know about what happened?” Dex just shrugged, looking perplexed. “Stars in heaven, he has no idea,” Sam said to himself. He brought Dex to the living room couch and sat him down, in front of the wall com. He switched it on, then glanced back at Dex. “I didn’t even think about the fact that you wouldn’t be aware of any of this. Take a look. It’s been all over the news for days.”
The devastation in the eleven attacked cities left Dex dumbstruck. The world had just changed forever, and he had been too busy riding on a death train and escaping to know it. His thoughts jumped first to his mothers, who so rarely left their distant suburb that it was doubtful they would have been caught in the attack. Even so, his first inclination was to call them and make sure they were alive. He was about to ask Sam for the nearest com when the heartbreaking truth made him hesitate. He was now a fugitive of the Bio Police, which meant anybody related to him would be under surveillance. Not only would calling them now put himself and the Archers in danger, but it could also frame his mothers as resistors, which would lead to their arrest—possibly even their detainment and execution, if his recent experience on the train was anything to judge by. He had already said goodbye to them once. Was it worth putting them at risk to do it again, before setting out to find Grace?
Grace. Dex wondered if she had made it to Frederik Carnevale’s Cliff House, the one Sheila Willy had mentioned. It was maddening to know nothing and almost impossible to accept that his last glimpse of her had been at the Opposition facility under Sterile Me Susan’s, where he had left her alone before their survival strategy went up in flames. Watching the piles of rubble still sending billows of smoke into the air, Dex relayed to Sam the other bit that Sheila Willy had shared with them: the Queen had been planning a staged attack, followed by a period of martial law. But the farmer seemed apprehensive.
“I don’t know. He’s saying this was a resurgence of God’s Army.”
“It’s the NRO,” Dex insisted. “I’m sure of it.”
And then he saw his own face on the WorldCom report. He froze. It was the photo the Bio Police had taken upon his in
carceration after the raid on Sterile Me Susan’s; Dex recognized the wounds on the side of his forehead. Aghast, he turned to Sam. “Did you just see that?”
“Ugh, same faces they’ve been flashing all week. Escaped prisoners, or something.”
“I was on there!” Dex exclaimed, gawking at the screen. “Could you turn up the volume?”
Sam did, but not before Dex saw him tense slightly. The man’s breathing quickened, and after turning the sound up, he began drumming the surface of the couch with his fingers.
A flighty reporter was standing in downtown Minneapolis. “. . . insurgents were caught in a massive raid on a rebel facility in Minneapolis three weeks ago. Bio Police authorities say these men escaped during transfer to a more secure facility and that they may have had help from the inside. Questions abound now as Bio Police squads are calling all failsafes, carriers, heterosteriles, and known heterosexual supporters in for questioning, as part of the Mandate 43 social assessments. All the prisoners were associated with the aforementioned social groups, but some protestors fear such questioning will soon filter down into the general population itself. The Queen insists that security—sometimes at the price of freedom—is the only way society will survive in peace. Citizens with any information regarding the men shown on this screen are encouraged to call 82.70.100.100 and report it. Under the NRO’s new martial law, suspicion of one’s failure to do so may now result in his or her immediate incarceration.”
The footage cut back to images of Chicago, where military vehicles bearing the dictatorship’s rainbow insignia patrolled the streets. Armed soldiers were holding back a crowd of rioters demonstrating in front of North America’s Rainbow Headquarters. The reporter continued. “We bring you live to Chicago now, where protestors have gathered to demonstrate against the newly instigated martial law, which effectively prohibits the very right of citizens to hold such demonstrations. . . .”
Sam switched the com off. They sat in silence for almost two minutes. Finally, the farmer spoke. “I’m one of those people who likes to believe the best about others, even though it’s completely silly in this day and age. I do believe your story, even though I have little reason to.”
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