“Reverend, we’ve been in rehearsal for almost two months. The kids have worked hard.”
“And they deserve credit for that, you’re right, but they’ve been… let’s say misguided. If they’re as talented as the principal here tells me, then I bet they could work over the holidays and give us another, more suitable play in January.”
George shook his head. “We’ve generated a fair amount of publicity with those letters to the editor. I think we’re going to have record audiences, probably sell out every night. And I would hate to disappoint the cast and crew.”
For the first time, Hunnicutt frowned. “I think you’re wrong. Nobody’s likely to step foot in this place those nights. I saw what I saw this afternoon, Mr. Keating, and it turned my stomach. To force two boys to… to engage in such… to go against their natures and—”
“To kiss each other, you mean.”
The pastor threw George a ferocious look. “Yes, to kiss,” he said as if the words burned his tongue. “It’s unconscionable to force them into it.”
“Believe me,” George said, “there was no forcing involved. These students are committed to the play and the message it provides.”
“The message is ungodly.”
“I disagree, respectfully, but that’s a matter of opinion.”
For the first time Hiram spoke up. “George, have you considered—”
George rounded on Hiram in an instant. “Do I have the support of this school’s administration, or don’t I?”
Hiram was definitely caught where it pinched, literally standing between his theater teacher and the pastor of one of the more prominent churches in town. “I support my teachers, yes, but it’s clear that—”
“Until I’m instructed otherwise, Rent is the play.”
Hunnicutt sighed loudly. “I am sorry to tell you that you will be instructed otherwise. I had hoped that you’d see reason somehow, but that’s not to be, I guess. I hope the good Lord changes your mind in the meantime.”
“What do you mean?” Kevin asked.
“On Thursday the God-fearing people in this town will let the school board members know what we think of all this… this filth and perversion being sponsored by a public school.”
George’s eyes narrowed. It was clear he hadn’t expected that, even if in my worst dreams I had. My worst dreams: the play debated in public. And here is Mr. Smith, the assistant director, the teacher nobody’s ever looked at closely before, stepping into the spotlight.
“I’ve seen the agenda for the meeting,” George said. “There isn’t anything there about—”
“We’re the last item on the agenda. We just got it in to the board in time.”
How had I been trapped like this? I would need to be there, acting again, pretending to support a play I’d opposed from the beginning even if for my own most personal reasons. If Channing wasn’t the only one clued in about Mr. Smith’s private thoughts and desires, then I’d be the gay assistant director pushing my own perverted, disgusting lifestyle on the innocent children of west Texas. All because George had been too persuasive back in September and because Kevin had come back into my life. I wanted to howl.
“Pastor Hunnicutt.” That was Kevin speaking up. “Have you had the chance to talk to the students in the play? My daughter Channing is in one of the lead roles, and she kisses another girl on stage. She….” He paused. He must have been remembering JJ. “She doesn’t have a problem with the character she portrays, and her mother and I support her one hundred percent.”
If Channing’s pregnancy became known, there were some in the community who would lay the blame for it at our doorstep. And with good reason too. What a nightmare. Give it up, George!
“Then all I can say is that I’ll offer prayers for the two of you, Mr. Bannerman,” Hunnicutt said, “because no God-fearing Christian would ever support this play. Are you a churchgoer, sir?”
“Not recently, no.”
“Then maybe your wife and you would like to join us some Sunday morning. We’d be pleased to welcome you.”
I could see it flash in Kevin’s eyes: the impulse to tell the reverend to kiss his ass, that he’d divorced his wife because he liked men. He even opened his mouth, and I took a tiny step backward.
His gaze flicked to me, and he closed his mouth. If there was a God—not the one that Hunnicutt worshiped, but the one who looked over bitter, wounded, cynical men like me, who wished that everybody in His creation could accept everybody else just the way we were—then that God urged Kevin to say instead, “Thanks for the invitation, but I don’t think so.”
“Our church has stood on Jefferson Street for one hundred and ten years, so if you change your mind, we’ll be there. Mr. Keating, I imagine we’ll see you on Thursday.”
With a hopeless glance at the three of us, Hiram escorted Hunnicutt up the aisle and then out of sight through the back doors. I felt as if I’d been tensed, on the edge of battle, for hours. My arm was on fire.
“Are you going to take that sitting down, George?” Kevin asked.
George’s self-confidence had disappeared. He was pale as he rubbed the back of his neck. “What else do you want me to do?” he snapped. “I’ll show up Thursday and defend the play from narrow-minded people who don’t live in the twenty-first century yet. The rest is up to the board.”
“You said that the board already approved the play, right? Back in the summer?”
“A committee,” George said wearily. “Not everybody. Look, I’ve got a play to get on stage, and time is running out. I’m not going to waste the last hour of rehearsal.”
I stepped in front of him as he moved to go. “Rehearsal?” I said incredulously. “You can’t ask them…. Wait a minute, George, you need to rethink that.”
“What do you mean?”
I gestured toward where Johnny had disappeared. “All the kids know that something’s happened by now. They’re going to be worried. Rehearsing isn’t nearly as important now as calming them down and telling them the truth.”
He seemed to visibly deflate, as if suddenly his clothes were much too large on him. “The truth? I thought we could bluster our way through this.”
“I know. But I don’t think we can.”
He sighed heavily, then said, “Okay, let’s go. We’ll talk to the cast. This isn’t going to be easy.”
“No, wait,” Kevin said. “We need to alert more than the kids. What about their parents? What about drumming up some support?”
George looked at me, but I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine spending the night phoning parents and begging for support. I couldn’t imagine spending tonight any other way than locking my doors, closing my blinds, and getting drunk.
Kevin understood. “Okay, then, let me do it. I’ve got all the contact information that you handed out at the beginning, plus I bet Channing has more numbers in her cell phone. If we could get a group together to come to the meeting, that would have to help. We can show the board there are two sides to the story.”
George waved his hand in the air as he headed for the Little Theater. “Sure, do it, but you’re on your own. This is unofficial, and I don’t have any part in it.”
I followed him up the aisle, but Kevin called, “Tom.”
Damn him! “Sorry, I don’t have time right now.”
He called louder. “Mr. Smith! I need to ask you something about the contact sheet.”
There were still plenty of people watching our every move, and I couldn’t afford to ignore him so obviously. I stopped where I was and worked not to clench my fists. Then I turned and said, “What?”
My confident Kevin was gone; he looked desperate as he came up close to me and pleaded, “Tom, we’ve got to talk. Tonight, could we have dinner? Please?”
He really didn’t understand, did he? I wanted to tell him that he was out of his mind, and ask him if he’d heard what Hunnicutt was threatening. The play, George, and me, we’d be under the public microscope, and I couldn’t afford to be seen w
ith Kevin no matter the truth of how I felt about him.
“No,” I said, and I left him.
Chapter 7
Meeting of Minds
THE SCHOOL board meeting room was packed. In the tense hours between the end of a subdued rehearsal and the eight o’clock start time, I’d debated whether to sit with George, but that decision had been taken out of my hands. I’d hidden in the Miata for a good five minutes with my fingers clenched on the steering wheel as I wrestled with my out-and-out fear of going inside, but when I finally got myself moving and into the meeting hall, George and his wife Jenny were seated in the fifth row with no spots open near them.
I didn’t even try to catch his eye. I was desperate to glide unseen and unknown through the evening, and that meant not calling attention to myself in any way. So I gratefully headed up the steps to the last row, where the overhang from the projection booth threw the seats into shadow. As I climbed, the hair on the back of my neck prickled and rose, and I felt as if that spotlight were on me. I waited for heads to turn or for the whispers to start, but nobody seemed to notice me at all. Except Kevin. Of the two or three hundred people in the place, my eyes riveted on him—staring at me, unblinking, unhappy—but just as quickly I trained my attention somewhere else, anywhere else. I couldn’t afford to be seen looking his way. Didn’t he understand that? He had to understand that. It felt like everything that had happened between us had disintegrated: the good times, the good words, his support, his hands on me, Tommy. I could hardly wrap my head around how wrong everything had gone in less than a week.
I wiped my sweaty hands on my Dockers and edged into the row, past the good citizens of Gunning to the open chair. Once seated, I intended to stay there; others were more than capable of arguing for our cause. I was wedged between an intent woman holding her Bible and a man in a leather jacket and blue jeans with his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail—he looked like a biker, totally out of place in Gunning—who quietly nodded to me.
While everyone waited for the board to start, I scanned the crowd. Whatever Kevin had done over the past two days and nights had worked. There were a lot of familiar faces from the cast and crew along with plenty of other students, some with parents, others clumped together the way teenagers tended to do. Every parent of our eight lead actors was there, including Julianne Carlton and Kevin, sitting with Channing three rows in front of me. They were close enough even in the subdued lighting of the hall for me to see how solemn Kevin looked. He wasn’t my weekend friend of the sparkling smile and joie de vivre any more. Robbie and his parents were right next to them, Mr. Sutton stern like always and Mrs. Sutton seeming serene. Robbie and Channing were seated side by side, looking scared and whispering to each other. I breathed a sigh of profound relief that Robbie wasn’t next to Steven instead. I wasn’t sure what was going on there, but the two of them together could only raise eyebrows that wouldn’t do us any good.
No eyebrows raised, no suspicions triggered, no vague guesses confirmed: that was my personal goal for the evening. I hadn’t been able to swallow any food before I came, and I’d resisted the temptation to down a jigger—or two or three—of whiskey. The echoes of a genuine hangover already sounded through my head from the night before… and the night before that.
The board filed in, and everybody stood for the pledge of allegiance to America and then the pledge of allegiance to Texas and then the invocation, given by none other than Reverend Hunnicutt. Any hope that I’d had of the evening going George’s way disappeared right then. I was tempted to walk out. But from the back row? Everybody would see me.
A full ninety minutes passed while the board took up one order of business after another, until finally the last item on the agenda came up. “Agenda item number thirteen,” the school board president said from his place in the center of the table facing the audience. “Citizen objections to the performance of Rent at Gunning High School.”
The president, John Mayfield, announced that the board had decided the best way to approach the subject would be to allow the public to have their say, and he hoped everybody was prepared to stay for a while, because there were many people who’d signed up to talk.
Mayfield was a small man with quick, precise mannerisms. He adjusted his microphone and said, “We’ll call five at a time. We mixed them up, so this is a random drawing. We’ll start with these.” From a stack of index cards in front of him, he picked some from the top and called out five names. “Come on down here in that order,” he pointed to an area next to the board’s table, “and wait for your turn.”
The first person to the citizen’s input podium was a middle-aged woman in a Sunday dress. “That’s my neighbor,” the woman next to me told me.
“That’s nice,” I murmured.
“I’m Ella Dexter,” the woman announced to the board. She glanced behind her anxiously. “Uh, I didn’t expect to be the first one to talk, but….”
“It’s all right,” Mayfield encouraged. “Tell us what you think. But short and sweet,” he said with a smile, “would probably be better than long and involved.”
“All right. I’m against this play for two reasons. First, I think homosexuality is disgusting. It’s against the Bible, and if everybody was homosexual, we wouldn’t have families, and no children. There wouldn’t be any more people in the world now, would there? Eventually we’d all be dead.”
The man next to me stretched out one leg and then pulled it in sharply as titters swept through the audience. I recognized that sound: teenagers amused at the rank stupidity of their elders. Savagely, I wished that I could clap my hands over their mouths to shut them up. This wasn’t a laughing matter, and there’d be plenty of well-spoken opponents protesting the play, even if Ella Dexter wasn’t one of them.
She heard them; she threw a nasty look up into the crowd, and the amusement died down. She pointed a finger, right where several of the cast and crew were seated together. Steven was in that group, two rows up from the floor, with George three rows behind them. “It’s easy to laugh, but not so easy to live an upright life. Using illegal drugs can ruin your life, and it’s a sin that heroin is in this play, that it’s actually on the stage! That’s my second reason. My sister went to New York and died of a heroin overdose, so I know what I’m talking about.”
She turned back to the board and blinked back tears. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean….”
“That’s all right, take a minute.”
“No, no, I’m all right. Listen, I feel very strongly about this. The drugs, the homosexuality, it’s all immoral. We expect our kids to attend church on Sunday, but then up at the school, are we going to let them see this… this… this… I don’t know what to call it.”
“Perversion!” somebody yelled from the crowd.
“Right. If this play goes on, I’m going to be outside the school picketing. My sign will say ‘In Donna’s memory’, because that’s my sister’s name.”
Vigorous applause erupted from the audience, and the woman next to me jumped up and cheered, “I’ll be with you, Ella!” Other voices from the crowd joined hers, and dread filled me. Their protesting wasn’t casual; it was heartfelt. If the play went on, there might be a real demonstration outside Gunning High School.
Mayfield pounded his gavel. “Calm down, please!” When the audience quieted, he asked, “Anything else?”
Dexter lifted her chin. “Yes. I don’t mean to sound negative or anything, but there’s a school board election coming up next May, and I will not vote for any member who allows this play to go on. And, past that, I’m glad to be heard, and thank you.”
The five men and two women who were seated in the hot spots all nodded, and none of them seemed too frightened at the prospect of not getting her vote. Maybe they’d all been threatened like this before, or maybe they’d already made up their minds about the play and knew they didn’t have anything to worry about.
“Thank you, Mrs. Dexter. Okay, next up?”
An old man, limping a litt
le, approached the mike this time. “You remember 1962 in this town?”
“If you would state your name, please,” Mayfield said.
“You know well who I am. I’m Curtis Felton. I was born in Gunning in 1932, so I’m seventy-six years old. In 1962 Olin Winchester was arrested for the rape and murder of a little five-year-old boy, out in the cotton field that used to be north of where Jerry’s garage is now. That was a sorry, sorry day, and I was glad when that bastard was sent up to the prison for good.”
He paused and seemed to be satisfied with what he’d said. Mayfield asked, “Did you have something to add about the play at Gunning High School, Mr. Felton?”
“Sure I do. I thought that was the blackest day Gunning could have, but if you let this play go on, you’ll all rot in hell for letting this kind of perversion back into our town. We’ve got to protect the kids, no matter what these big city sign-wavers say.” Felton looked to the floor, as if he wanted to find someplace safe to spit. He didn’t, so he swallowed noisily. His gullet-clearing came through over the mike.
“And another thing. I don’t understand the folks who let their sons and daughters act in this Rent thing. Where’d common sense go these days? If one of my great-grandsons wanted to be in this here play, I’d whip them good. God created Adam, and then he created Eve, and he wants us joined in marriage to one another. It’s the way things are, see?”
“I hear you, Mr. Felton. Thank you for coming to the meeting today.”
“Humph.” Felton didn’t want to leave the podium, that was clear, but he didn’t say anything more. He didn’t bother to return to his seat either. He stumped across in front of the entire board and left the hall. The members of the board all watched him as he left, their heads turning and then swiveling back when he disappeared.
The next one up was a young man, about thirty, wearing a good gray suit with a striped tie. He consulted a sheet of paper as he approached the mike and then placed it on the reading surface of the podium.
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