The Last Exit to Normal (20 page)

CHAPTER 28

I
ran. My breath came in ragged heaves and my chest felt like it would explode, and when I finally got to Mr. Hinks’s house, I stopped. No sign of Ron. I walked across the lawn, looking, but he was nowhere to be found. My heart slowed. Maybe I’d been wrong. I walked up the Hinkses’ drive, then across our side yard to the back.

“I knew you’d come.”

I turned, and just before everything went black, I saw Ron Jamison and the two-by-four flashing toward my head.

I woke up coughing. I felt like forty midgets with jackhammers were playing tag in my head. I coughed again. Smoke. I jerked up and felt the heat on my face, my eyes going to the Hinkses’ house.

Flames licked the eaves, and I heard the sirens already. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but the house was almost fully engulfed. I stood up, the pain making me dizzy, and looked around. Billy. I searched the grounds. No Billy.

Then I knew. The Can.

I ran.

The front door was on fire, and as I scrambled to the back, flames licked the siding of the house. The sirens grew louder. Smoke billowed in the sky. Two empty gas cans lay scattered on the driveway, and as I reached the door, I saw Ron Jamison standing in the field behind the house, smiling at me. Then he was gone.

I tried the back door, but it was locked. In a panic and with the heat searing me, I kicked three times before the door gave way. Then I was inside, screaming for Billy. No answer.

Flames had spread up the walls and across the ceiling. As I screamed for Billy, the heat sucked into my lungs stopped me from breathing. I choked, running through the kitchen with my shirt over my mouth. Smoke clouded the rooms and I knew I was almost out of time. He’d die. I’d die. Time stopped. I kept running. I opened doors to flames and smoke and heat, and finally, in the hall, I found it.

The Can. I opened the door, and through the smoke I saw Billy huddled in the corner. His eyes were closed. I yanked him up and carried him, my shirt falling from my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes burned and my ears were filled with the dull roar of flames. I ran to the closest room as the hair on my arms curled up and the heat seared me. My entire body ached. Then I found a window. Without a thought, I dropped Billy, braced my hands on the sill, and kicked the glass out, cutting my arms as I frantically cleared the wicked shards.

Arms slick with my blood, I picked up Billy’s limp body, the acrid smoke almost smothering me as it poured from the window, and shoved him through. His foot caught on the sill but he tumbled to the grass, then I dove out myself, landing in a heap on top of him.

Cool air. Light. I sucked in a breath, then dragged Billy away, yanking him out of reach of the flames. My head spun. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. The sirens screeched. The last thing I saw was three men in yellow jackets running toward us.

When I came to, a man’s voice was explaining something about smoke inhalation. I heard Dad’s voice, and opened my eyes. He and a firefighter stood over me. The Hinkses’ house was still burning. I looked over and saw Billy sitting up, his face covered with soot, his father standing yards away, staring at the inferno. My own father’s face—his expression, the look in his eyes as he studied me—needed no words, and I realized right then that no matter what happened between us, one thing would never change. He loved his son. And I loved him.

EPILOGUE

R
on Jamison was charged with arson. Montana is a wild place, but the judge didn’t take it too kindly that a little boy was almost killed. He sentenced Ron to juvenile detention, with a transfer of four years in prison when he turned eighteen. He also mandated heavy psychiatric treatment. Ron is appealing the verdict, but I don’t care. He’s gone, and that’s all that matters.

Sheriff Wilkins served Mr. Hinks with custody papers one week after his house burned down. The custody hearing was set for a month later, and by the time I gave a deposition on what kind of treatment I’d seen Mr. Hinks give Billy, my eyebrows and arm hair had grown back. Mr. Hinks lost custody of Billy, and with no home and under threat of arrest by the Montana Highway Patrol and the FBI for promising to get revenge on Mrs. Lindy, he left Rough Butte. No one knows where he lives now.

Mr. Hinks never thanked me for saving his son’s life. Billy did, though, and he writes me from Las Vegas every once in a while. They have three cats. Mrs. Lindy calls Miss Mae, too, asking after us. Billy’s little brother was born without a hitch, and they named him Christopher and say he’s got Billy’s eyes.

Billy got a new skateboard for his twelfth birthday, and he tells me he’s getting pretty good with it. He’s in school, happy, and decided to join the baseball team. Mrs. Lindy sent us a picture of him in his uniform, and I barely recognized him with his hair grown out and a few pounds put on his scarecrow frame. I miss him.

Dad and Edward had the grand opening of Benjamin’s, and it got rave reviews from the local paper. Great steaks, friendly service, decent prices, and they’re busy. The town seems just fine with them, and I’m glad that I was so incredibly wrong about this place. The people of Rough Butte are good.

Me? Well, this place, this last exit to normal, taught me that nothing is ever really normal. It’s what you make it. I got my damn license, I’m working at the Johan place, and Dirk left for Wyoming a while back. I bust ass every day, then study at night. I’m saving to buy a new truck. Morgan Johan is a good man, and he told me I have a job as long as the place is here.

Dirk forgave me for giving him the shits. Skeet sired a litter of puppies, and Dirk gave me one before he left. I named him Moe. I eat supper at Miss Mae’s a couple times a week with Dad and Edward, and sometimes Kim, too. Miss Mae is eternal, I think. She’ll never die. She did retire the wooden spoon, and she even let me hug her once.

Dad and I are getting along better, and after several beers one night, Edward finally admitted that he smoked pot as a teenager, and I didn’t let on that I already knew. I’ll give him a hard time about it forever.

I called my mom, too, and I was scared to do it. Scared of what she’d say or not say, and scared it would all come back to the surface like some festering wound. It didn’t. There was pain in her voice, the kind that I knew and understood, even after almost four years, and I realized that she was just as human as I was. We talked for over an hour, she told me she loved me, and she gave me the answer to something I’d wondered about since she left: she had loved my dad, and she still did. That’s why leaving him hurt so bad.

She also said that maybe in a while, when she felt ready, she’d come to Rough Butte to visit. I don’t think she will, but maybe I’m wrong. Just like Miss Mae told me one time after dinner as she and I sat on the front porch: time is a blessing. We’ll see.

Every now and then, when the sun goes down and the moon rises full over that huge and empty sky I hated so much when we got here, I go to Billy’s ruined pet cemetery and sit, thinking about everything that led me here. That led us here. All the crap and turmoil that we’d been through and all the things that had almost destroyed me brought us to this place. Who would have known?

And each and every time I sit in the moonlight on the rise overlooking all those dug-up graves, I tell myself I like it here. It fits. I can do something here, and I can be somebody here. I shake my head and laugh every time I think about it. Ben Campbell, country boy. My friends in Spokane wouldn’t know me.

And then there’s Kimberly Johan. Yeah. Kimberly Johan. I think I’ll stay.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hanks to my wife, Kimberly, the strongest woman I know, and to my family. To George Nicholson of Sterling Lord Literistic: thanks and gratitude for the faith, enthusiasm, friendship, and vast experience. Thanks also go to my editor, Joan Slattery, and her assistant editor, Allison Wortche, for advising and working with me in such extraordinary fashion. And, as always, thanks are in order for that timeless place, The River.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ichael Harmon is the author of
Skate,
a “remarkable first novel,” according to
Kirkus Reviews.
He was born in Los Angeles and now lives with his wife and two children in the Pacific Northwest, where he is at work on his next novel for Knopf. To learn more about Michael Harmon and his books, please visit
www.booksbyharmon.com
.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Michael Harmon

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harmon, Michael B.
The last exit to normal / Michael Harmon. — 1st ed.
                                    p. cm.
SUMMARY
: Yanked out of his city life and plunked down into a small Montana town with his father and his father’s boyfriend, seventeen-year-old Ben, angry and resentful about the changed circumstances of his life, begins to notice that something is not quite right with the little boy next door and determines to do something about it.
[1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Homosexuality—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. Child abuse—Fiction. 5. Coming of age—Fiction. 6. Montana—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H22723Las 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2007010107

eISBN: 978-0-375-84939-8

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