The Battle for Jericho Read online

  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.”

  IT 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.”

  THERE 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

  “NEED some help?”

  I looked up. Sweat trickled into my eyes, stinging like acid and making me squint. It was a cold afternoon, but I’d been hard at work since early that morning, and although I had stripped down to just a sweatshirt and jeans, my body was still overheating from the exertion. My sleeves were shoved up, and my arms were covered in suds up to the elbows. I hefted a shoulder and rubbed the burning sweat from my eyes.

  Hutch smiled at me over the hood of my mom’s car. He was wearing one of the old sweat suits Dad had given him after he moved upstairs to my old room.

  I immediately glanced at the house to see if Dad was watching. With the way the sunlight reflected off the windows, I couldn’t tell if anyone was looking at Hutch and me. “Nah, man,” I said quickly. “I’m handling this. It’s Saturday. You don’t want to be out here washing cars. Go on back in the house and relax.”

  “It’s boring in there.” Hutch was sporting a new haircut. He’d taken the twenty bucks I’d given him and walked over to the barbershop after breakfast. He’d come back with a Butch cut, sort of faded on the sides and back, and trimmed down to less than a half inch on top. Long hair had given his face a certain softness, but now he seemed to have a harder edge to him, like a boxer or something. He had thanked me again when he got back, but he looked even hotter now, and that would have been enough thanks for me if it didn’t also make him even harder to resist. He reached down and grabbed the extra sponge from the bucket of sudsy water. “How about I start on your dad’s car while you finish up your mom’s?”

  “Hutch, you don’t have to do that. This is my punishment, not yours. Go play a video game or something. Have some fun.”

  “I don’t mind. I want to help.” He dunked the sponge back into the water, and then turned around to begin scrubbing the top of Dad’s car.

  I hurried around Mom’s car and plucked the dripping sponge from Hutch’s hand. “Seriously, man. Don’t do this. If you help me, it’ll just get me into more trouble. My mom and dad will say I’m trying to get out of my punishment by getting you to wash one of the cars—”

  “But you’re not making me do it. I offered to help.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said, shaking my head. “Mom and Dad will think I’m trying to skip out on part of my punishment. And for that, they’ll dump something even worse on me, like cleaning out the garage. So don’t do me any favors, man.”

  Hutch seemed to get it. He nodded and stepped back, wiping his wet hand on his pants. “I’m sorry you got into trouble, dude. But why’d you miss your curfew like that? Were you upset about something?”

  “It’s nothing you need to worry about, man.” I dropped the extra sponge into the bucket and went back to work on Dad’s car.

  “Okay. Well, maybe we can catch up with Mac later and go over to the park or something, shoot a few hoops.”

  I turned to him and smiled. He was such a cute little goof. “I can’t, Hutch. I’m grounded, remember?”

  He grimaced, making a motion as if he wanted to kick himself. “Oh. Right. Well, maybe we can play cards or Monopoly later.”

  “If my parents will let me even do that.”

  “Maybe they will. They’re not so bad.” He rubbed his hands together to warm them. “Your dad had a talk with me yesterday after you left.”

  Oh Jesus. “What about?”

  “He’s been making calls. You know, to see what he could find out to help me now that my parents have kicked me out. He came across something called the emancipated minor law.”

  “Emancipated minor? What’s that?”

  “He said it’s something where I go to court and ask a judge to sort of declare me an adult so that I’m free from my parents, and I can do stuff like rent an apartment and take care of myself.”

  “Don’t you have to have a job for that?”

  Hutch smiled. “I’ll find one. I can work part time and still keep up in school. I know I can.”

  “I think that’s a dumb idea, man. You’re a kid. It takes a lot of money to pay rent and buy groceries and stuff. How are you gonna do all that and stay in school? It’s crazy.”

  “Well, your dad seems to think I can do it.”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t think you should do anything like that.”

  Hutch shrugged. “Your dad says he’s gonna get more information about this emancipation thing and how it works. He said we’ll talk some more. Maybe then I’ll have a better idea about what to do. See you later.” He started turning back toward the house. Abruptly he stopped, his attention drawn toward the street.

  I looked over my shoulder, following his gaze. The street behind us was empty. I turned back to Hutch. He had that somebody-stepped-on-my-grave look. “What’s wrong?”

  “I… I thought I saw….”

  “You thought you saw what?”

  “Nothing.” He gave me an uneasy smile. “Guess my mind’s playing tricks on me.”

  A joke about senility popped into my head. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been funny, and the joke stayed in my head. Hutch turned and ran back into the house.

/>   MAC was sitting on the hood of my dad’s car, watching as I waxed Mom’s car. He had a big, smug smile on his face.

  He was getting on my nerves. Which was exactly what he wanted. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” I asked, irritated, without looking at him.

  “Nope.”

  “Go home, Mac. I’ve got work to do here.”

  “There ain’t nothing to do at home,” he replied. “Besides, I like watching your folks crack the whip on you. Hee hee.”

  Big jackass. “Well, could you at least not leave butt prints on my dad’s car? I just finished waxing that thing.”

  He responded by scooting his butt back and forth over the hood.

  I growled and kept working on Mom’s car. She didn’t have to work tonight, so she and Dad were going out to dinner and then to the shooting range. Such sweet romance. Can’t wait to have dates like that of my own. They were planning to leave at six this evening. That still left almost three hours for me to finish, but I wanted to make sure I was done in plenty of time, so I doubled down and worked even faster.

  “So what did they get you for this time?” Mac asked.

  “Curfew violation.”

  “Ouch. Your folks are serious as a heart attack about curfew.”

  “They’re serious about everything.” The guilt had been eating away at me for hours now. It was hard to keep holding it in. “That’s not all I did, man.”

  “I figured there had to be something else. Your folks don’t usually take free labor out of you for nothing.”

  “They don’t know about this other thing I did. Not for sure. It’s sort of a… sex thing.”

  Mac’s grin turned goofy, and his voice got hushed. “You’ve been doing Lissandra, huh?”

  “It’s not Lissandra.”

  Now his eyes got wide, and his grin went into pure raunchiness. “Dang. Who is she, man? Who’d you do?”