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“Stop it. You don’treallyhave seventy-thousand dollars.”
“I do. It was an inheritance. I’ve never touched it.”
“And now you want to give it to me to buy a house your name isn’t going to be on? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I trust you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“You’re not trustworthy?”
“I am. But in general boyfriends aren’t.”
That made me smile. “Ronnie, I’m already aware of that.”
“I think it’s time you started telling me about your past.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“I’m supposed to take seventy-thousand dollars from you and not ask questions?”
“That sounds like a deal to me.”
“I’m going to have to think about it.”
He thought about it for a few days and then he agreed. Sixteen months later, he took a second on the Bennett house to put fifty thousand down on the 2nd Street house. He rented the little house to a cute, young lesbian couple named Brown and Melissa, who had a three-year-old boy they fostered.
Getting out of the Jeep, I walked up to the front door and knocked. When Melissa answered, I asked if I could rent back the garage for a week or two. I offered her fifty bucks a week in cash. When I asked her not to mention it to Ronnie, the price went up to a hundred. She’s nobody’s fool. I agreed to her price if she’d throw in a ride home.
I parked the Jeep in the garage, grabbed the video, the box of Larry Wilkes transcripts, and my cellular phone (Ronnie had called twice but I’d ignored the calls.) Melissa drove me home. There wasn’t a lot to say on the ride. I asked after Brown and their kid, whose name I couldn’t remember, and then we fell into silence. She dropped me off a couple blocks from my house.
I scanned the neighborhood for the blue Neon. I didn’t think Hamlet Gilbody knew where I lived, but I couldn’t be a hundred percent certain. I didn’t see anything suspicious.
When I walked in the house, Ronnie immediately said, “Where’ve you been?”
“I had to do an interview for Lydia. Last minute. Sorry.”
I held out the black video bag. He took it and pulled out the tape.
“Babe? You brought home a movie about a pig?”
INTERLUDE
May 1976
The high school was large, fourteen buildings, and taught more than three thousand students in grades nine through twelve. On a campus that large, with that many buildings there were always nooks and crannies, places that were ignored in favor of large, open areas where the popular could congregate. Larry Wilkes avoided the popular places and spent his lunch sitting on the ground behind one of the buildings on Z quad, which was a good distance from the cafeteria. It was against the rules for him to eat there, but he didn’t care.
Every night before bed, he made himself a bagged lunch. He made one for his younger sister, too, but she never seemed to appreciate it. She wanted the glamor of buying a cafeteria lunch, and seemed to think if Larry stopped making her lunch she’d be given the money to buy lunch tickets. She was wrong, of course. A bagged lunch was cheaper, so that’s what she’d get.
Larry had known he was gay since before there were words for it. When he was young, his father worked at Coca-Cola. He remembered there was a Christmas party his parents went to one year. Larry was left at a babysitter with his sister. After the party, late at night, his parents picked them up and laid them sleeping in the back seat of what was probably a blue 1962 Dodge Polara, though it might have been the maroon 1964 Chrysler New Yorker they had later. He couldn’t remember.
What he did remember was his parents talking about the party. His mother had danced with a man who’d been charming and an excellent dancer.
“You know he’s light in the loafers, don’t you?” Larry’s father had said. And Larry knew that meant he was a man like him. That it wasn’t another way of saying the man was a good dancer, but instead meant he was an oddity, someone on the outside, someone who’d never have a life like his parents. A life Larry wouldn’t have either.
He didn’t know how old he was, but he wasn’t old. He was still young enough to need a babysitter, young enough to stretch out on the backseat with his sister. It was odd that he knew what they were talking about, but he did.
Later he’d see things on television, news reports about “The Homosexual” and eventually stories about Gay Liberation. While the stories told him there were others like him, they also implied he shouldn’t feel too safe. He didn’t belong with his family. They wouldn’t want him if they truly knew him. The world taught him he’d never have his own family, never have a relationship, never be happy.
