Hutch accepted that, then turned to placate Maitland. “Mait, this hard time is not really new. Sex has been part-time lethal almost always, especially to artists. Syphilis alone killed half the best male writers, composers and painters of the nineteenth century.” It was not quite true, but it rang true enough for Hutch to brace it with a partial roll of the actual names. “Maybe Beethoven—that’s not quite certain. But definitely Schubert, Donizetti, Flaubert, Schumann, Verlaine, De Maupassant, Wilde, Nietzsche, Van Gogh (whom it drove to crazed suicide), Gauguin, Hugo Wolf and a whole slew more, including Rimbaud almost surely, Scott Joplin, the female Isak Dinesen, and that great painter in gore—Al Capone.
“Just lately here I read in the Times where they’ve found the remains of syphilitic skeletons thousands of years old in the Middle East, so Columbus didn’t invent it at all. No, the simple act of rubbing your joy knob—to make more babies or soothe your mind—has always been subject to slow awful death. Sometime in the next decade or so, we may well find a treatment at least for this latest plague, then we’ll pull out the old skin throttle again and go at it hard; then eventually—when our poor successors expect it least—death’ll stalk back in through somebody’s cock.”
“Or cunt,” Mait said.
“Not mine,” Boat said. “I’m the first male Afro-American nun.”
Mait said “I know I’ll die of it too.”
Hutch and Boat looked toward him, in real surprise.
Boat leaned to lay his hand on Mait’s mouth. “Take it back while you can.”
But Mait shook his head free. “I know it, that’s all. It’s in my bones. I can’t use myself and love anybody else without this plague slamming in on me soon.”
Hutch said “Mait, it’s not that easy to catch. You’re taking precautions, right?”
Mait said “Not really. Oh condoms, sure, and spermicidal jelly; but Jesus, who can even think about love—not to mention pleasure—when you’ve got to suit up like an astronaut on a poisoned planet?”
Boat said “Then you’re right, if that’s how you’re thinking. You’ll go soon, child.” He put both hands up over his eyes. “Don’t ask me to watch. Don’t let me even get to to know you, not if you’re bound to die like a fool on a window ledge.”
Even Hutch agreed.
They all sat a moment, then abruptly Mait stood. “I better go then.”
Neither Boat nor Hutch could find the will to stop anybody who was that bound to die.
Mait stopped at Wade’s door to say good night—Wade was deep asleep—so he was actually out on the front stoop before Hutch caught up and hugged him close. “You’re the best young writer I’ve known for a long time. Even better, you’re a good human being, Mait. You need to last; I need you to last.”
Mait stepped back and thanked him, but the smile was false; and for the first time in Hutch’s presence, the boy’s face bore a trace of hot despisal.
41
IT was one in the morning before Hutch was in his room, ready for bed. He’d seen that Boat had all he needed and thanked him again for being here; they’d quietly checked the sleeping Wade and smoothed his covers. Then they’d signed good night to one another, though no doors would be shut between them. So Hutch was mildly startled when he threw his own covers back and suddenly noticed Boat there on his doorsill. “Whoa, man, you scared me.”
“I scare nice people everywhere I go.” Boat was barely joking; he knew that his dark knotty face, his short bow-legs had either scared or tickled strangers from the day he was old enough to walk outdoors and meet the public.
Hutch could see that his guest’s eyes were wide awake and troubled. “Something on your mind?”
Boat’s head shook. “I know Wade’s not a praying man; but you are, aren’t you—being such a big poet?”
Hutch smiled and sat on the edge of his bed. “Oh sure, I pray several times a day—more often than that, with Wade on board—but I don’t claim to know God’s full name. I don’t offer guarantees he hears anybody.”
“You a Catholic, I bet.”
There were several Byzantine icons in the house, an ivory Spanish Corpus Christi on the wall by Hutch’s bed; but he said “No, I neglect my soul. I never found a church that didn’t turn my stomach.”
Boat agreed. “Me too. Oh I got drug to the Methodist church with my grandmama two times every Sunday; but once my body struck out on its own, all I could hear in church was meanness—old women dry as navy beans, old men limp as dishrags and all of them shipping us young ones to Hell for doing what our minds made us do.”
Tired as he was, Hutch had heard all he needed about sex tonight, sex of whatever brand; and he guessed Boat’s was queer. He smiled to try to seal off the subject. “You sure it was your mind making you act up? It’s time you put that mind to rest.”
“It is, I know it—mine and yours. But you got to be the smartest man I ever been near.”
Hutch said “Much obliged; you’ve got the wrong man. I’m your average jackass.”
Boat shut his eyes tight. “Most educated man I’ll ever meet, I can swear that to you.” When he looked out again, Boat raised his hand to stall Hutch’s clear will to send him to bed. “Tired as you are, please answer me one thing. I come all this way for just two things—to see Wade a last time and ask you one question.”
So Hutch said “Thank you. Fire away—one shot.” He pointed to an easy chair beyond him.
Boat came two steps into the room but stopped in the pool of pale light from a single hanging lamp, centered above them. More than ever, Boat knew he looked like a creature you beat when you’re mad, a troll in the one book he’d owned as a child—Three Billy Goats Gruff. He nearly laughed, then recovered his bent. “I need you to tell me where Wade and I are bound—in your best opinion.”
“Where you and Wade are bound?”
Boat nodded deeply. “Which way are we headed, do you think—up or down?”
Hutch guessed, on instinct. “Heaven or Hell?”
“That’s the two choices, right?—so far as we know.”
“If choices exist at all, maybe so.”
“You’re bound to believe in God and the Devil.” When Hutch kept silent, Boat rushed ahead. “You been watching Wade in all his shit and poisoned blood and pain; you bound to believe.”
Hutch said “Boat, I’m trying to trust one thing—” His voice failed him there.
“Tell Boat; get it out.”
“I’m trying to trust that pain as hard and long as Wade’s—pain that I know could crush rocks in the road—leads to something at least a little better than a blackout: numb darkness forever.”
Boat’s face went hot as any iron stove. “Boat knows it does.”
Hutch was nearly as serious. “Then tell me how, how you know anyway.”
Keeping his distance, Boat searched Hutch’s eyes—could he trust this man with his chief secret? He soon saw he could. “Hutch, don’t tell a living soul I shared this with you; but see, I talk to Jesus every night—that’s how I know Wade’s bound somewhere better.”
“In prayer you mean, you and Jesus in prayer?”
Boat said “Not prayer exactly. See, when this mess started ten years ago, I was scared as most queer boys—scareder than most, praise God on High; so now I’m well while my friends are dead or dying by degrees, black and white together, no prejudice at all. Scared as I was before they found the name of the virus and I tested clean, I got into coming back to my room every night in my old crazy aunt’s apartment and scrubbing my skin, my nails and mouth, the soles of my feet and every square inch of the floor in my room. I’d push back my pitiful furniture and mop with Lysol every night. I could hear germs dying to left and right; but it wore me out, hard as I worked daytimes.
“So I kept asking God Above to give me a break, let me calm down and take his lead through the trouble, let me trust he’d keep me healthy to lead his miserable boys on into their peace—some few of them anyhow, if he’d accept them. I didn’t hear an answer for
the longest time, so I kept my job delivering prescriptions for a big drugstore.
“Then maybe two months before they found out the test for AIDS, I was washing my poor floor again one evening—now I scrub it every night of my life—when up in the corner, up in the dim ceiling, this man’s voice said to me ‘You be my help.’ I recognized it was Jesus’ voice from the movies I watch on late TV; I never doubted that—he’s got a good voice, even deeper than yours. So then when, two nights later, he said ‘You help me but first get your own soul free,’ I asked him ‘Lord, get free of what please?’” Boat stopped in midair, with his voice pitched firm on a clear tenor note. He held there silent for maybe half a minute; then he took another step nearer Hutch, who was half laid back across his wide bed.
When Boat didn’t speak again, Hutch said “You think he meant free of being queer? You asking me that—did Jesus mean that?”
“A lot of people say so, left and right—church, TV, radio, nuts and crooks in the gutters and some powerful people I used to respect: bishops, you know; big senators.”
Hutch said “A lot of such people claim white is green too, and day is night. Walk down the street, doing your level best to honor the Earth and all its creatures—a fourth of the people will think you’re an asset, another fourth will think you’re an ass or a rabid felon, the other half won’t even know you’re there. You can’t pay that much attention to people. I seriously doubt that whatever God or force of nature made an infinite universe, with endless zillion stars, cares a lot about the whereabouts of my pee-pee at any given moment, long as I don’t rub it on the skin of a child or ram it into someone that’s told me plain No.”
“You don’t see nothing at all wrong with queers?” Boat’s whole face expected an answer at last.
So, while he laughed one tense dry note, Hutch had his answer fast. “Nothing deeply special, no; and I tell you that quick since—to be honest, Boat—I’ve played long innings with fine men’s bodies and never felt a trace of guilt, except for occasional stingy meanness that I laid down in other departments besides my cock.” Hutch paused to hear how far he’d gone. Be true; you can’t lie to this kind man. When he faced Boat again, Boat was patiently waiting. “No, Boat, I don’t claim to be pope; but I’ve really never seen anything especially wrong with queers, nothing that’s not wrong with everybody else I ever met—self-love, planned cruelty, ignorance and greed.”
Boat’s head half consented, though his eyes were dubious. “You don’t object to us not having kids? Preachers always talking about ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.’”
Hutch quickly thought of his talk with Strawson back in the spring—how with no child between them, they’d have never made a life. He felt the strength of that barrier still. “I strongly suspect that most queer couples run out of ways to feel and act to one another; they’re likely to perish for lack of anything else than themselves to think of or do for. But think of this too—and tell it out loud to the next flip preacher that lowers his boom on Adam and Steve: I heard the clear fact on the news this morning—250,000 children were born on the planet Earth just today, these twenty-four hours.
“A great slew of them will die starved or agonized, a scary part of all the survivors will grow into monsters, even the balance of law-abiding citizens will almost surely pollute the planet with their trails of waste and excess kids. No, thank Christ for queers.” Hutch could suddenly hear Straw’s voice speaking through him, edging him off his old objections. In sight of Boat’s near smile though, Hutch recalled one objection that needed making. “I will say this—for the past twenty years or so, queers have been turning way too fundamentalist. Few country Baptists are as shut to the full truth as many young queers—such flaming evangelists.”
Again Boat half agreed. “You’re saying you got the full truth on your side?” If he meant sarcasm, he’d flushed it from his eyes.
Hutch smiled. “I didn’t mean to claim full truth, no—just that I loathe any self-anointed team of two or more humans who claim they’re righter than any bystanders in the range of their voice.”
Hutch had gone past Boat; and to show he was lost, Boat raised both hands, shut his eyes, sealed his lips and shook his head wide. When he looked again, Hutch was waiting, still and silent. So Boat changed his tack. “See, I search the scriptures fairly steady, most nights. Old Testament gets right rough on the boys; St. Paul throws fits every time they come up.”
“You notice how Jesus never turns on them once?”
Boat said “You notice too? Why don’t people preach that on the TV?—not one word from Jesus anywhere in the Bible where he damns queers.”
Hutch had noticed long since. “And he surely knew some—roaming round Palestine with those twelve lonely men, those rich young rulers with big crushes on him and all those clerical lawyers and priests.”
Boat wanted to grin but wrestled it back. He also felt an official reluctance to take any views, just because they were white. Yet Boat was held by this talking man who made more sense than he’d dared to hope for.
Hutch said “On the contrary, come to think of it, Jesus may well bless queers by name, in person. Remember where he says ‘Some men are born eunuchs, some make themselves eunuchs, and some are made eunuchs for the Kingdom of God’?”
“A eunuch’s cut off his own balls, right?”
Hutch laughed. “Cut off? No balls at all.” Then bleared as he was, he remembered a song from the Oxford pubs and sang a quick chorus.
“No balls at all, no balls at all;
She married a man who had no balls at all.”
Boat was frowning by then. He was still in earnest. “I wish more of my boys had cut off something.”
“No you don’t.”
“You see Wade dying like a dog in the road. You don’t wish he’d of stopped using himself that way with Wyatt?”
Hutch said “No I don’t.”
“So you think Wade and me got a chance at Heaven yet?”
Hutch saw that he owed this anxious man—an undoubted angel of tireless heart—one serious answer, late as it was and dazed as he felt. He finally said “Boat, if there’s any Paradise, with any crystal river, you’ll be there in hip boots.”
“And Wade?”
“You and Wade.”
Boat waited. “And Wyatt?”
It took a long moment, but at last Hutch agreed. “I’ll let Wyatt argue his own case in Glory.”
Boat’s face had eased slightly; he’d waved good night again and turned to go, then wheeled around. “What you mean by hip boots?”
Hutch laughed. “Nothing special—the word must have poured out of what I feel. Unlikely as it seems, if there’s any place where good is repaid, Jimmy Boat, you’ll need hip boots just to breast your floods of reward.”
“You’re not fooling me? I’ve read less than ten books in my whole life, except for some filth—you wouldn’t confuse me?”
Hutch said “I’ve told you the absolute truth, so far as I can guess it. Guess is all I can give you, this late and this beat.”
Boat said “I may ask you again in the morning then.”
“Help yourself, friend; but morning or night, your host is a fool next to you; and he means it.”
Boat couldn’t bring himself to thank Hutch for that, but he looked to Hutch with a trace of fear. “You really want to know what I think about all this?”
“I’d be glad to know.”
Boat said “I been thinking here lately—God’s bound to love queers; he’s killing them so fast.”
Hutch guessed there was more than a trace of discovery buried in that; he was too beat to pursue it. “You may well be right.”
Boat left with that one sentence clear before him. He said it over more than once to himself till he slept at last on his cot next to Wade. Several times he replayed Hutch’s voice just now, laying out broad calm answers like a banquet, not spilling a morsel; and he thought Boat, you know as much common sense as him. Make up your own mind. Then he’d tell
himself The man respects me. Boat was right about that too, as his whole life was right in its unstinting gift of all he owned and could do with the hands his tireless mind freely offered to boys in howling need, boys from his native country on Earth.
42
WELL before daylight Wade woke and lay on his back a half hour, silent and still. He could hear the sound of another creature breathing slowly, off to his right. Wade had barely registered Boat’s arrival, hours ago, or the setting up of a cot by his bed; and he had no memory at all of who was with him, asleep at his side. By now his mind was mostly a sheet of clouded glass, an undamaged but thickly frosted window. He understood that much—how the plague had brought him one kindness at least, a calm blank mind most waking minutes. And though he knew he was safe from external harm, that he had guards around him, whatever their names, still he wondered who was here with him this instant.
And he strained to guess the name and the reason. The main thing he guessed was, it couldn’t be Wyatt; Wyatt was almost certainly gone from the Earth. Don’t count on it though. And the sound of the breathing was too high and easy to come from Hutch—Hutch struggled through sleep like a distance swimmer. Maitland maybe? But Wade couldn’t think why Mait would be here unless Hutch had gone again and not left word. Ann, surely Ann. Wade thought he recalled that his mother was still alive and strong, though mostly out of sight for some reason he’d long since forgot. Not Ann then, no. Not Strawson nor Grainger. Not Ivory surely.
That really left Wade with only one choice, the most unlikely guest of all—the only one he’d actually wanted. Wyatt after all. Bound to be. How’d Wyatt get here? Despite his blind eyes Wade turned to his right side, careful not to detach his intravenous needle—he was down to a single needle tonight. On his side, he was facing the regular sighs that came from maybe a yard away and—Christ—came surely from Wyatt, here.
Wade forced back a smile and tried to whisper “When did you get in?” The words came stronger than he intended. Careful here. He’d wake Hutch and start some painful scene—he still recalled Wyatt’s scorn of Hutch. So next Wade only wrote the words out on a scrim in his mind, a nonexistent surface. He and Wyatt had long since reached the point where words could pass between them in silence, intact on the air of a quiet room. Move closer to me. You won’t catch anything you haven’t had. I’m safe to hold—easy though; these bones are sharp and every joint aches.
The Promise of Rest Page 28
