Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  The Lowenstein family barn wasn't my first choice, but I couldn't sneak into her room now; they had family in from town to help with the harvest and the house was too crowded. The smells of the stored feed and the faint scent of manure from Nights past when the animals sheltered in here against the storm tried to distract us, but nothing could. We undressed each other there against the back wall of the barn, then sank to the makeshift bed of canvas stretched over a quarter-pallet of feed sacks and unleashed two weeks' worth of teenaged longing on each other's bodies.

  I lost myself in the feel of her warm, smooth, soft flesh, in the smell of her hair, and in the urgency of youth. And afterward, after we'd murmured "I love you" into each other's ears like the toll to be paid, we lounged in the squalor of our shelter and held each other in silence for a while. Usually, that was just a brief interlude until we tried again, squeezing as much experience as we could out of each meeting, but tonight I had to talk.

  "Jason left today," I told her. "Flew on Cathy's hopper out to Harristown, then upstairs to a freighter heading to Inferno."

  "I know," she said, caressing my cheek comfortingly, her brown hair tangled and unruly and her eyes glowing oddly in the green-tinted light of the chemical ghostlights that lined the ceiling. "Lisa messaged me. He was with her earlier, you know." I met her gaze at the odd intonation to that statement and she was grinning. "I mean, the way you and I are with each other right now." She grabbed me for emphasis and I jumped before her grip relaxed a little and she started sliding her hand back and forth in a quite pleasurable way.

  "Wow," I breathed. "I can't believe he didn't tell me."

  "She made him promise not to tell anyone," Rachel confided, giggling softly at the irony. "She knew I'd tell you, though." Then she sobered. "I feel really bad for her though. She liked him and they barely had any time together, and now he's gone, maybe forever."

  "Yeah," I said, swallowing hard. "That does suck. But if they'd been together this whole time, it might even be harder, right?"

  "Speaking of harder..." she said, grinning at what her hand was doing.

  "Umm...wait, Rache," I said reluctantly, taking her hand in mine instead. She frowned, looking at me in confusion. "I need to tell you something." I closed my eyes for a second and swallowed again. "A few weeks ago, I was over at Jase's house, and I, umm...I applied to the Service Academy on Earth."

  "What?" Her eyes went wide. "Why the hell would you do that?" It was a statement on how shocked she was that she'd said "hell." Rachel never cussed, even when we were having sex.

  "Because I don't agree that the Tahni won't ever come here," I told her, raising up on one elbow and meeting her horrified stare. "And I think if we don't stop them first, this place could go down just like all the colonies that people like Harry don't care about." I licked my lips, my mouth suddenly dry. "I got the notice from Jason before he left. I was accepted to the Academy and they have me scheduled to leave on the next ship."

  "And you're going?" She demanded, bolting upright, disbelief in her voice and her expression. "You're leaving?"

  "I have to," I insisted. "But I swear to God, Rachel, I will come back. I'm not leaving forever..."

  She was sobbing. I didn't know when it had started and I felt my gut clench. I tried to pull her into a hug, to comfort her, but she shocked me by slapping me across the face. I fell back in surprise, my cheek stinging from the blow.

  "Don't touch me!" She yelled and I cringed, hoping no one outside had heard her. She jumped up and grabbed her clothes, starting to get dressed.

  I grabbed at my pants, pulling them on in case she ran outside and I had to follow her. "Rachel," I pleaded, "I am not leaving you...I mean, I'll be gone for a while, but I can come back for visits during school and after..."

  "There is no after, you asshole," she hissed at me, utter, frightening rage on her face. "How can you do this to me? I thought you loved me!"

  "I do love you!" I insisted, wanting again to hug her, but afraid to go near her. Seeing her pulling her shoes on, I shoved my feet into my boots and yanked my shirt on over my head. "Rachel, wait!" I called as she headed for the door.

  She spun on me before I reached her, her finger poking painfully into my chest.

  "Get away from me," she said, venom in her tone. "Get out of here and don't ever come back, or I'll tell my father you tried to force yourself on me and he'll have the Constabulary arrest you." I stood stock still, realizing after a moment that my mouth was hanging open.

  This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening...

  "Get out!" she yelled at me, yanking open the door and gesturing.

  Numbly I obeyed, staggering through the exit and pacing away from the barn, scarcely glancing at her house, not caring if anyone saw me at this point.

  I gathered myself enough to turn back, seeing her standing in the door, still enraged but trying not to cry in front of me. "I'm coming back," I said again. "I promise I'm coming back."

  "Don't fucking bother," she spat, then retreated back into the barn and slammed the door shut.

  ***

  I don't know how I got home. I was walking in a daze, battered by the winds that were growing stronger as Goshen sank ever lower in the sky, not paying particular attention to where I was going; and somehow, I was just there, in front of our house. Clouds were roiling overhead and I could feel rain sprinkling on me. I think I'd been crying, but I couldn't be sure. When I wiped my face, it was wet; but it could have been the rain.

  I hadn't run into anyone on the road; it was long into everyone's sleep cycle, what we called the "little night," and should have been mine as well. I was exhausted emotionally, physically and spiritually. I'd lost my best friend and the girl I loved in the same day. Things, I thought, couldn't get any worse.

  God must have heard that.

  "Caleb, what are you doing out here?" Isaac's voice was like a bullhorn. An ugly, obnoxious, bad-tempered bullhorn.

  I ignored him, heading steadfastly towards the side door to the house.

  "I'm talking to you!" He insisted, grabbing my arm to spin me around. I brushed his hand off of me and tried to keep walking, but he placed himself directly in my path and grabbed both my arms when I tried to dodge. "Why are you wandering around out here, Caleb? What's wrong with you?"

  Believing for just a moment that he might actually be concerned about me, I met his glare with a dull stare of my own.

  "You probably remember the part where my best friend just left the planet, maybe forever," I told him in tired sarcasm. "But you might have missed the news that I broke up with my girlfriend today, too. I want to go to bed."

  "Your girlfriend?" he repeated with a frown. "You mean you've been sneaking over to the Lowenstein place again? Caleb, you know if you get caught in fornication with a girl, you'll both either have to become betrothed immediately or be shunned by the Church!"

  "Yeah, I know that," I growled, pushing him away from me. "I didn't care, because I loved her, you moron!" I think I was spitting by now, exhaustion and bitter sorrow combining to make rage. "I wanted to marry her! And now she hates me and Jason's gone and why the hell haven't you married off to some poor girl so you can go live on your own damn farm and stop sticking your nose in my business?"

  His backhand struck me out of nowhere, as unexpected as Rachel's slap but much harder. I stumbled backwards, stars in my eyes and a dull pain in the side of my head, barely managing to keep my balance. Isaac was saying something in a self-important, self-righteous tone, but I didn't hear it because of the ringing in my ear. I swung almost blindly and connected with his cheek, feeling a sharp pain in my knuckles as they hit the bone there.

  I heard him grunt and saw him stumble away as my vision cleared, but he didn't go down. That didn't seem right to me, so I threw myself into him and took him to the ground. Isaac was solid, about the same mass as me, and it felt like tackling a tree, but I brought him down, then punched him again for good measure. I'm fairly sure that one hurt my hand more than it hu
rt his head, but it must have made him mad because then he was throwing me off of him and pouncing on top of me.

  He caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head near my left eye before I got my hands up and in front of my face, but I still managed to get punched a couple times before the weight of him suddenly came off my chest. I looked up, gingerly moving my arms out of the way, and saw Dad holding Isaac back with an arm around his waist while the younger man whooshed breath like a bellows, his face red---and redder where a small cut marked his cheek. It was already starting to bruise up and made him look even more insane.

  Then Mom was there, kneeling beside me and checking my face with fussing noises before going to Isaac and doing the same. She was in her sleeping coat, as was Dad, and I gathered that our yelling had woken them. I pushed myself up to my feet and saw Isaac settling down as Mom spoke softly to him. I suddenly realized it was raining a bit harder now and I felt water dripping out of my hair and into my eyes.

  "You two are brothers," Dad said with harsh severity, looking between us. "For the love of all, why must you be at each other like dogs fighting over a bone?"

  "He thinks he's my father," I said, the words making my lip hurt where he'd hit me. "I don't answer to you, Isaac."

  "You should show some respect for your elders," Isaac shot back at me, "and for yourself! He was sneaking over to see the Lowenstein girl again and she..."

  "Shut up!" I snapped at him, taking a step forward and running into my dad's outstretched palm.

  "What did Rachel do, Caleb?" Mom asked me, concern on her face.

  "She broke up with me," I blurted, trying not to blubber again. It was difficult; my face hurt, my stomach was twisting and I felt like I was about to throw up. I clamped my mouth shut to avoid doing it in front of them.

  Dad sighed and Mom made sympathetic noises while Isaac rolled his eyes.

  "Why would she break up with you, Caleb?" Mom asked me, her hand massaging my shoulder.

  I looked down at her glumly, knowing I was going to have to tell them eventually but not really wanting it to be right then. But if not now, when? When would be a good time?

  "She felt like I was abandoning her," I explained slowly, "because I'm leaving."

  "Leaving?" Mom repeated, eyes narrowing. "I don't understand, leaving for where?"

  "I received the notice today," I said, dragging the words out of my throat. "I've been accepted to the Commonwealth Service Academy, and I leave for Earth in less than a month."

  Mom's face turned white and Dad closed his eyes, looking as if he'd been punched in the stomach.

  "So," he said after taking a moment to compose himself, "this is what that talk at the Altar was really about, not your friend Jason."

  I nodded. "I'd been thinking about it since we heard the news about the colonies," I admitted. "I don't believe God wants us to sit back and let people do evil things. I can't sit around here and listen to reports about innocent people like us getting killed and think it's okay because they weren't believers and they somehow deserved it. I have to do something about it."

  "Oh, Caleb." Mom laid her head against my arm, and I could feel her shuddering with a sob. It felt as if she wanted to say more but she didn't, just hugged me.

  "Son," Dad intoned with the gravity of a judge passing down a sentence, "I would ask you to reconsider your actions. You need to think about what this means."

  "I know what it means," I said. If you'd asked me an hour ago, I would have said it was impossible to be sadder than I was already. And I would have been wrong.

  "If you do this," Dad told me, in a formal tone, as a Church Elder and not my father, "you will be shunned by the Church. You won't be allowed to inherit our property or do business with the Church; believers will be instructed not to speak with you or give you shelter even during the Night." His voice broke then, and so did the severe facade of the Church Elder. "Son...you won't be able to stay here."

  I let my head hang back and felt the cold rain on my face, soothing the bruises there, but doing nothing for the hurts on the inside. Then I faced my father again. "I'll go pack," I said, realizing as I said it that I had idea where I would go.

  Mom stopped me with a hand on mine. "Go to the Chens' house," she advised me. "They'll put you up until your flight leaves." She couldn't quite finish the sentence without breaking off into a sob. She grabbed me and hugged my neck and we both cried there in the twilight until the strength seemed to drain from her and her arms slipped down, and she let me go.

  I walked towards the house and everything was silent except the raindrops on the ground.

  Chapter Six

  I sat on the tile floor of my dorm room and tried not to think about peeing. If I thought about it, I'd need to go, and I didn't want to venture back out into the corridors of the Fourth-Class Cadet Dormitory of the Commonwealth Service Academy any sooner than I had to. Every so often, you could hear the yelling when another Fourth-Class cadet, like me, got caught by the First Class in the hallways and reamed out for failings real and imagined. There were other shouts, some high and squeaking, as the hapless newbies tried to correctly answer questions that couldn't be answered correctly.

  I'd already experienced it first-hand when I'd carried my issued clothing and gear from supply to my room, and I wasn't eager to do it again. Thankfully, the gravity here was lighter, so the two hundred pushups I'd wound up performing hadn't left my arms totally dead. I looked down at the blue utility coveralls I'd been issued, with my name printed across the right breast pocket. They fit too tight across my chest, unless that was just psychological.

  "What the hell did I get myself into?" I wondered aloud.

  The place had looked so beautiful when I was flying in with the other Fourth Class'ers coming in from the Trans-Angeles Spaceport. The mountains were tall and jagged around it---the Rockies, they called them---and the Academy was surrounded by trackless wilderness for thousands of kilometers on all sides. I'd read in the literature they'd provided to our 'links that there used to be a city nearby called Colorado Springs, but it had been dismantled in the Crisis after the Sino-Russian War over two hundred years ago. Now it was home to huge herds of bison, elk, moose, grizzly bears, wolves, mountain lions and whatever other animals had wandered in over the decades.

  "So we won't try to escape," I muttered. Then I sniffed disdainfully. "Great, now I'm talking to myself."

  The door to the room burst open and I jumped to my feet and snapped to attention; but it was just another newbie like me, his arms piled so high with stacked uniforms that I couldn't see his face, and a duffle bag hanging off his back. He hurried inside and kicked the door closed with the sole of his boot, then plopped the clothes down on the bunk closest to the entrance.

  With the clothes out of the way, I could see that he was taller than me, but not as tall as Jason, with a build somewhere in between the two of us, and a face that seemed like it was taken off one of the commercials I'd seen during the flight over. He would have looked freakishly thin for a Canaanite, but I was coming to realize that I looked oddly broad in the face and thick in the body to Earthers, doubly so to lower gravity types like Martians or Belters. His hair was brown and, like all of ours since in-processing, cut almost to the scalp.

  He grinned crookedly and stuck out a hand. I took it and appreciated his firm grip. Too many people I'd met since leaving Canaan had wimpy handshakes.

  "Hey bud," he said, his accent a bit odd to my ears, "I'm Deacon Conner---Deke. Guess we're gonna' be roomies, eh?"

  "Caleb Mitchell," I returned. "Call me Cal. Nice to meet you."

  "Whoa, you're a real bruiser," Deke seemed to just notice, looking me up and down. He squinted discerningly. "High grav world?"

  "Canaan," I said with a nod. "One point six Earth gravities."

  "Ooh," he grinned broadly. "That'll come in handy, won't it?"

  I chuckled. "So far, it's helped when they drop me for push-ups. Where are you from?"

  "Right here on Earth," he sai
d, grabbing his clothes and beginning to arrange them in the drawers on his side of the room. "Northeast of here, one of the old cities called Montreal." He sniffed. "Not a people box like Trans-Angeles or Capital City, a real city."

  I tried to remember if I'd read or seen anything about Montreal, but it didn't ring a bell. All I knew was that he was a hell of a lot closer to home than I was.

  "So," he went on, talking fast, "I guess we're gonna' be paired up for the next four years. Anything in particular I should know? You a snorer? You like girls, boys or both? Any religious idiosyncrasies or weird philosophical beliefs?"

  I tried not to blush at his brashness. We don't ask about things like that at home...but I wasn't home anymore, and God knew whether I ever would be again. Time to make adjustments.

  "No snoring at home," I told him, "so I doubt I will in Earth gravity. I like girls, and my family are all New Society of Friends, but I had to leave the Church in order to come here and attend the Academy, because they're pacifists." It didn't sound nearly as devastating when I said it matter-of-factly.

  "Whoa," he seemed taken aback. "And your parents were cool with that?"

  "Not exactly," I replied, shrugging and sitting back down on the bunk across from him. "When I told them, they kicked me out of the house and told me I could never come home again."

  "Jesus dude," he said and whistled softly in appreciation. I winced at the casual blasphemy, but that was just another thing I'd have to get used to. "Kinda' makes my fucked-up home life seem almost normal."

  "So what about you?" I asked him. "Same questions if we're gonna' be fair."

  "Okay." He shrugged thoughtfully, then began counting off the answers on his fingers. "No snoring that I know of. I like girls too, as often as possible. No religious beliefs at all, really. I mean, there might be a Creator or something, but I seriously doubt He has time for us; we're probably part of some big science project He rigged up and is just watching it all wind down now." He rubbed his chin in consideration. "As for philosophy, I never thought much about it past the fact that I don't like a bunch of beetle-browed sons of bitches killing humans with no consequences."