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“When I said I heard JT talking to me.”
He smiled. “Wait … you’re telling me you’re crazy? You? Dez Fox? You shock me, woman. Shock me, I say.”
“Fuck you.”
“I believe that is what we’ve been discussing.”
She kissed him again.
When she was done he did not feel a single one of his injuries. He was gasping for air when she pushed him back. He was also hard as a rock and he believed that there was never a less sensible or convenient time for an erection in the entire history of sexual congress.
Dez, quick as always, saw the bulge and her smile came right back.
Before she could hit him with a joke, he said, “No, it’s not a gun in my pocket. I’m just very damn glad to be here with you.”
She reached down and cupped his hardness through the stained cloth of his jeans.
“Careful now,” she said, “or you’ll make a girl blush.”
She gave him a squeeze, then released him and turned quickly away as the gymnasium door opened and people began filing in.
Billy Trout genuinely hoped he had enough time either for a cold shower or to spend five useful minutes banging his head on a brick wall.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
ON THE ROAD
PITTSBURGH SUBURBS
“Why are we going to Pittsburgh?” asked Goat, though he thought he knew the answer.
Homer shot him a sly look. “See a few old friends.”
Goat knew that he should just keep his mouth shut, but despite all of his fear, the pain in his body, and the absolute strangeness of this experience, there was a part of him that was a still a newsman. Or maybe it was the other aspect, a somewhat older and more precisely defining aspect of who he was—the filmmaker. This was all good drama. It would be great cinema. Cinema verité in real point of fact, because this was the truth. This was real.
It only felt like a nightmare.
He said, “You’re going to find your foster parents, aren’t you?”
It was the first time Goat saw Homer lose control. It was brief, but it was there. The car swayed and for a moment the look of Homer’s face wasn’t that of a killer or a monster; it was the lost and desperate look of a child.
Goat knew the story. He’d been in the courtroom during testimony by prison psychiatrists and social workers. After Gibbon’s heroin-addicted mother had given him up for adoption, Homer went through one foster home after another. In a couple of them the child had endured horrific sexual and physical abuse. One of those former foster parents was later arrested in connection with the abuse of another child, and investigators found hundreds of photos stored on the man’s computer. Photos of him and various girlfriends and drinking buddies, doing things to children—boys and girls ranging in age from five to twelve—that sickened everyone in the courtroom. Billy Trout had gone outside and thrown up in a trash can. Goat tried to look at the poster-board-sized reproductions of those photos as clinically as he could, pretending in his mind that these were movie props; but the bitter and raw truth of them gouged marks on his soul.
The photos were presented as part of Homer’s defense, claiming that any crimes he’d committed were direct results of permanent emotional and psychological disfigurement inflicted upon him as a child. Disfigurement. That was the word one psychologist used and it stuck for the duration of the trial, becoming a catchphrase. It was a word Goat had never before heard used in that context, and he could not shake the ugly awareness of all it implied.
The defense was thorough and exhaustive in an attempt to cultivate sympathy through horror, but rather than any sympathetic reaction the effect was to emotionally numb the jury. They disengaged from the evidence, and Goat watched that happen. It’s how he would have filmed the scene. As far as he saw it, the defense lost the case more than the prosecution won it, and it did so by an overuse of the most compelling argument.
The expression that flitted across Homer’s face now was tied to those memories, and Goat was absolutely sure that in that moment, Homer felt rude hands on him and cringed at the thought of how, once again, his body and his world would be plundered.
When Homer spoke, his voice was quiet, filled with a false calm that was as fragile as spun glass. “There’s a couple of people I wouldn’t mind saying hello to. People I never got around to thanking.”
“Thanking?”
Homer turned to him and the smile that formed on his lips was inhuman, repulsive. Vile.
“For opening the Black Eye and teaching me how to speak with the Red Mouth.”
Goat didn’t dare reply to that.
