The Last Exit to Normal (2 page)

I rubbed my head. I couldn’t believe I was standing here being systematically beaten by an old lady with a wooden spoon. Even the dried gel in my spikes didn’t protect me. And besides that, she’d just stolen my smokes. I looked around for another wooden spoon so I could whack her back, but gave up. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Get on out of here. I’ll holler when supper is ready.”

She turned to the bowl. I reached for my smokes on the counter and the spoon whipped out faster than lightning and cracked my knuckles again. Then she went back to mixing. “We got ourselves a deal. You get me smokes without Eddie knowing about it and I’ll overlook the fact that you shouldn’t be smoking in the first place. Now get.”

I walked outside, rubbing my hand. Edward and Dad were still sitting on the porch, and a man was standing at the steps, talking to them. Dad gave me a look when I came out, then turned his attention back to the conversation. The man, a few years older than my dad, looked at me with dark eyes set in a gaunt, weather-beaten face. With skinny arms, legs sheathed in Wranglers, and a tight short-sleeved checked shirt and pointy-toed cowboy boots, he had a pooch over his belt buckle and carefully combed salt-and-pepper hair. Tension oozed from him like bad B.O.

Dad introduced me. “Mr. Hinks, this is Ben, my son.”

He gave me a second glance, his face a statue. No nod, no handshake, no hello. His eyes went back to Edward. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you back here, Eddie.”

Edward gave him a stilted smile. “Didn’t really ever think I’d be back, Norman.”

Mr. Hinks looked around, swiveling his head to survey the neighborhood. “Some things don’t change.”

Edward shrugged. “Some things do.”

“Be here long?”

Edward smiled. “As long as it takes.”

I’d never heard Edward talk like he was talking. Usually there was some sort of sarcastic humor in everything he said, but now he was careful. Guarded. Mr. Hinks cleared his throat. “Got me a son named Billy. You’ll see him around, I’m sure.”

Edward looked at Mr. Hinks’s hands. No wedding ring. “Mrs. Hinks?”

Mr. Hinks smirked. “Up and left three years back. Never was right in the head.”

Dad spoke up. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Mr. Hinks glanced at Dad, then turned his attention back to Edward. “You’ll be wanting to leave him be.”

“Who?”

“My boy. Not to be offensive about it, but you know I never held account of the way you are.” He nodded when Edward remained silent. “And with us bein’ neighbors and all, I thought I’d just set things straight so we can get along without no trouble.”

Edward smiled, some of his sarcasm coming back. “It’s not contagious, Norman. Unless you want it to be.”

Mr. Hinks cleared his throat, a tinge of anger coming into his voice. “I told you I ain’t giving offense here, and I don’t mean no harm, but I got a boy to raise the way I see fit, and you and I see things different. Ain’t nothing else than that.”

Edward took a drink of beer. “Not like the harm you meant when we were kids, right?”

Mr. Hinks shook his head. “We ain’t kids no more, Eddie, and I’m not sayin’ that what I did to you when we was youngsters was Christian, but I’m not going to stand here and try to make peace with my neighbor and be put on about it. You live your life and I live mine and we don’t have no conflict. That’s all. I got nothing against you as long as you and yours keep to yourselfs.”

Dad, of course, didn’t say anything. Edward, surprisingly, didn’t tell Mr. Hinks where to shove it. I smiled, then sat on the steps to the side of them. “You know, I read something once where they said that guys who hate fags actually want to get it on with another dude. You know, some sort of subliminal thing.”

Dad stared at me like he’d enjoy killing me, Edward sighed and took a drink of his beer, and Mr. Hinks scowled before completely ignoring me. I watched the muscles in his jaw work before he spoke to Edward. “I came over to say my hellos and I guess I’ve done it, and I don’t need no kid mouthing me without getting put in his place for it.”

Edward nodded. “I guess you have said hello, Norman. Goodbye.”

After he’d gone, Edward looked at me. “Ever think of going into community relations, Benjamin? You have such a knack for diplomacy.”

I smiled. “What’s with him, anyway? Going for the Jerkoff of the Year award or something?”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t think he was trying to start something, Ben. I think he’s not used to different lifestyles, and it will just take a while for him to see that we’re not a threat.”

Edward smiled. “Yes, we must educate and enlighten, not intimidate and alienate.” He looked at Dad. “Didn’t Liberace say that? Or was it the Pope? I distinctly recollect somebody in the entertainment business saying that.”

I remembered the deer hanging by its heels, then shrugged. “Well, at least he didn’t alienate himself or anything. God knows we wouldn’t want that.”

Edward smiled. “You have batter running down your forehead.”

I wiped at it. “Your mom beat me up with a wooden spoon.”

Edward laughed. “Don’t mouth her.”

“How’d you know I mouthed her?”

He raised his beer and clinked bottles with Dad as they enjoyed some inside joke about me being abused by an old woman with cooking utensils. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

I nearly told them she stole my cigarettes, but remembered our deal. If I broke it, she’d probably sneak into my room tonight and eviscerate me with a paring knife. “What’s a rube?”

“She called you a rube?”

“Yeah.”

“A rube is an idiot.”

I rolled my eyes. “Very funny. Supper’s almost ready.”

Dad looked at me. “Supper?”

“Whatever. That’s how they say it around here, and you didn’t just have your knuckles broken by a crazy old bag.”

Dad lowered his voice. “Respect, Ben. You know . . .”

Edward laughed. “Paul, if there is one thing my mother is, it’s a crazy old bag. Just don’t say that around her or you’ll wish for the spoon.”

CHAPTER 3

T
he first week of imprisonment at the Redneck Internment Camp for Teenage Degenerates began in my room because I didn’t want to go outside and be lynched. I liked pretending it was a sauna, because if I didn’t, it would be considered an oven. I wondered why the whole town, even situated in a hollow as it was, didn’t shrivel up and crumble to dust in the heat. No wonder Miss Mae’s face looked like a slab of dried leather. Anything would, after eighty years in this heat.

I didn’t even know how long we were going to be here. Every time I asked Dad, he shrugged and told me that he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure. We’ll see how things go. That—coming from my dad, who was the most consistent and scheduled person in the world—was one thing: bullshit. What it meant was that he didn’t want to tell me, and the only reason he wouldn’t want to tell me was because I’d go off the deep end if I knew. And going off the deep end meant
permanent.
Or at least until I turned eighteen and skated this joint myself.

And that meant the grim and dim possibility of school. My grand and supposed-to-be-wonderful senior year. I pictured Rough Butte High School as a one-room clapboard building with a corral instead of a parking lot. Hitch your horse to the rail, step in, and learn your numbers, boy. I’d take my lunch to school in a tin pail just like Laura Ingalls on
Little House on the Prairie.
Yahoo.

Life in Rough Butte consisted of two things: being bored and coming downstairs when Miss Mae yelled that it was time to eat. I did see the kid next door, Billy, take a dead cat by the tail, open the gate in the rear of the backyard, and disappear into the fields with it. Pure entertainment.

By the time I decided I should venture out into no-man’s-land, I’d sweated at least a swimming pool. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and the whopping three channels we got on the TV didn’t cut it, because even if there was a show on that I liked, every time Miss Mae walked by, she grumbled and turned it off.

Miss Mae was nothing but misery. She didn’t smile about anything, and I wondered if her face would fall off if she did. The last time she walked by and turned the TV off, I turned it back on before she got out of the room. Hellfire and damnation erupted in the house. She spun around quick as a cat, her eyes burning into me. “You got a problem with my television being turned off when I turn it off, Benjamin?”

“Yeah. I was watching it.”

“You’ll watch it when I say you’ll watch it.” She stomped over and turned it off.

I pushed the remote button and turned it back on.

“What’s the big deal? It’s just TV.”

She put her hands on her hips. “It ain’t just television, it’s a waste of time for no-accounts that waste time.” Then her voice cracked through the house. “EDDIE!”

Edward, thinking she’d hurt herself or something, sprang through the front door, then stopped, relaxing when he remembered that his mom didn’t have a nervous system. She couldn’t be hurt. He looked from her to me and back to her. “Yes?”

She pointed a talon at the TV. “You get this infernal thing out of my house this instant! I won’t have this . . . boy . . . sitting around in my house all day watching it. Out. Out right now or I’ll get your father’s shotgun and kill it.”

Edward sighed. “Mom . . .”

She faced him, her eyes challenging. Then she grimaced, nodding her head. “So you think livin’ in the city for all these years makes it just fine to sass your mother? Don’t you think for a second that I can’t strap a full-grown man if I’ve a mind to, Eddie. Get it out of my house!”

Edward stared icicles at me, like I was to blame. I shook my head. “I was just watching the damn thing.”

The next thing I knew, Miss Mae’s hand flashed out and I’d just been slapped across the mouth. She peered at me. “I told you I’ll have no cussing in this house. Now get into your room until such a time as I talk to your father. Go.”

I might be a rebel without a cause in my own mind, but I was stunned. I’d never been hit before. Not by an adult, at least. I looked at Edward in wonderment, touching my lip; then I walked up the stairs, utterly defeated by an old lady, and went to my room like a good little boy.

Dad knocked on the door a few minutes later. “Have a word, Ben?”

I turned from playing a stupid computer game. “Sure.”

He sat on the bed. “You’ve got to understand something, Ben.”

“What? That this place sucks? I understand.”

“Miss Mae is strict.”

“Really? Jesus, I hadn’t figured that one out.”

He stood up, which was totally unlike him. Usually he’d settle in for an hour-long talk. “Mind yourself around her, Ben. That’s all I have to say. You can come out when you’re ready.” Then he left.

Ready? I was seventeen years old, and they were treating me like I was five. I grabbed my skateboard and headed downstairs. I didn’t care if a punked-out city kid with tattoos, piercings, Converse All Stars, and liberty spikes on his head might cause a few stares in this burg, I had to get out. Miss Mae sat on the front porch, fanning herself. She looked at my board, then at me, like nothing had happened. “What in God’s green earth is that contraption?”

“A skateboard.”

“What does it do?”

I held it up. “It rolls. You ride it.”

She grunted, eyeing the thing suspiciously. “I don’t hold by nothing that doesn’t have a steering wheel. Good way to break your fool neck, if you ask me.”

“Want to try?”

She sneered. “You trying to kill me before the Lord takes me away in his own time?”

I smiled. “No. I just wanted to see you break a hip.”

Even though she was still evil, her tone was lighter. “I got myself the ones I was born with and plan on keepin’ ’em until I don’t need ’em anymore.”

I smiled. “See? Watch.” I flipped the board down on the porch and jumped down the stairs, landing it perfect.

Her brow furrowed. “Do that again.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you question me!” she barked, then gestured with a saggy arm for me to do it again. I did, landing it like I did the first time. She nodded, then shooed me away. “Get on out of here, and stay out of trouble.”

I nodded, skating down the walk. “Bye.”

She called to me, her firecracker voice snapping over the street: “You be late for supper and I’ll skin your behind!”

I waved and went on my way, on a mission to get more smokes. Miss Mae was like an old record, all scratchy and rough but still functional. She’d skin you, strap you, eat your liver, take you by the ears and beat some sense into your head. I’d been hit with a wooden spoon more times in the last week than I liked to think about, and even though the thought of getting slapped in the face burned hot, there was something about her that I sort of liked. She was like a rebel herself.

Rough Butte, population four hundred and sixty-three not counting several dozen chickens roaming the streets, had a stagnant creek running through it, a bunch of small stores, and huge oak and maple trees growing everywhere. A town-square park with a wishing well and a bridge over the creek sat in the middle of everything.

If I were one to admire quaint small-town life, with its clean streets, old-fashioned sidewalk lampposts and all the trimmings, Rough Butte might have been cool, but I’m not one to appreciate anything without a grind rail on it. I couldn’t find a decent one in the whole rotten place. But I did find the sheriff. Actually, he found me.

There are no cars in Rough Butte. Everybody drives trucks. Most of them had rifles in the cab windows, and I figured impromptu animal-killing went on quite a bit around here. That included the sheriff. He drove a fullsize K-5 Blazer, and he drove up alongside me as I skated home from the drugstore, two packs of smokes stuffed in my pockets and waterfalls of sweat streaking down my body.

He wore a real cowboy hat and had a mustache, like every other cop in the history of the world. Tall and big-shouldered, and probably about fifty years old by the lines on his face, he wore a tan uniform. He gave me the eye as I skated, then tipped his hat to me, idling his truck under the trees. “Howdy,” he said.

I thought I’d been transported to a John Wayne movie. I stopped skating and made sure my hands were out of my pockets. I knew the procedure because I’d been hassled a million times back home, and if Spokane cops have one thing they’re good at, it’s acting like they’re mini-gods instead of armed meter maids. I didn’t figure it was any different here. “Hey.”

He smiled a definite not-cop smile. “You the new people staying with Bonnie Mae?”

“Yes.”

“From over Spokane way?”

“Yeah.” I looked at him, wondering what was wrong. He was treating me like a human being, and I thought that went against cop training.

He laughed. “Likely bored out of your head, huh?”

I nodded, loosening up a bit. “And hot.”

“Your name’s Ben, right? Dad is Paul?”

I nodded.

He adjusted his cowboy hat. “My name is John Wilkins. I’ve known your . . .” He looked out the windshield, trying to find a word for “your faggot dad’s faggot husband.”

I looked at my feet, embarrassed for the first time in a long time about it. “Stepdad.”

He nodded. “Yeah, your stepdad. I’ve known him ever since he was a kid. ’Course he left and all, but I knew him.”

I looked at him, not buying it and angry at my shame. Edward hadn’t “left.” He’d been shipped off. “I take it they don’t like fags around here.”

He blinked, then nodded. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

“I know what most people think.”

“Not what all people think.”

I laughed. “And now you’re going to tell me when the Rough Butte Gay Day Parade is? I’d bet that’s popular.”

He laughed back, an open, easy one. “Not saying that, Ben. Just saying it might not be as bad as you think.”

“Tell that to Mr. Hinks.”

“Norman Hinks is an opinionated man, sure enough. But he’s decent.” He put the Blazer in drive. “You say hello to Eddie for me, huh? And keep your chin up with Miss Mae.” He shook his head and smiled. “One woman in the whole state of Montana I wouldn’t want to cross, that one. Tough as nails.”

All in all, everything was good. He hadn’t beaten me to a pulp with his nightstick, at any rate, and besides the fact that every person in town stared at me like I was some deformed retard with spiked hair and calf-length shorts, Rough Butte wasn’t that bad, despite being a slab of petrified beef jerky sitting smack-dab in the middle of an inferno.

It’s funny how, a block later, things can change. It’s the decoder-card thing. I’d never fallen in love with a girl in work boots, and I never thought I would. I did right then, though.

If there’s one weakness I have in my sarcastic and cynical little heart, it’s falling in love. I’m a believer in love at first sight, and I’ve no control over myself. A block after the sheriff left, I saw her getting into a pickup truck and I knew I should run. I should turn away and skate to Oklahoma or Utah and join a commune. I should avert my eyes and think about nuns or dead kittens. I should think about Dad and Edward knocking boots. Impossible. When it comes to females, I’m mush.

I’d fallen in love before. Her name was Hailee Comstock, and she broke my heart like an elephant accidentally falling on a Popsicle-stick house. She’d been my first, and only, real girlfriend in Spokane, and she was awesome. Her mother was a heroin addict. She lived in a dark, dank, and dirty apartment building called the Coldstone in the worst part of town, and we’d danced among the beer bottles, used condoms, and trash of society’s rejects for almost five months before she dashed my heart to the ground and moved to Portland, Oregon.

This girl, though, wasn’t a Hailee Comstock. Not even close. No pierced lip, no black lipstick, no short skirts, no tattoos. Blond hair pulled in a ponytail, work gloves hanging out the back pocket of her jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and those work boots. Oh, yeah, and a body to drool over, too. She was my country-fried fantasy, and when I saw her, I could only stand there staring. I was doomed to be her slave.

She opened the door of the pickup, then looked over at me for a moment, her hand on the door as the sunlight poured down on her. As any Don Juan would do, I gave her a goofy smile and waved like a four-year-old. She smiled, got in the truck, and drove away.