Are You Nuts? (13 page)

Belutha's face was very, very red before I was even halfway through with this recitation.

“She didn't.”

“I suppose she could deny saying those things. She and I were the only two in the room.”

She gave me a look of distaste. “You're making this up.”

“Carolyn Blackburn saw me go into the office with her. Lydia told me that Jerome had promised to go after all the liberal rules the union had won in the last few contracts.”

“She told you!”

“That was the plan?”

“Yes. She did tell you. She did talk to you. How dare she speak to you?”

“I think she doesn't like you.”

“Well, I always tried to like her. I suppose I can handle being enemies. She'll be sorry.”

Great. I cared if it cleared me or Meg of any suspicion.

“She said the fights were pretty serious.”

“Lydia doesn't know what she's talking about. I met with Jerome secretly. He was on my side. People are afraid of Lydia. She's got a sharp tongue and a lot of friends. If I wasn't a Christian woman, I'd have said some hateful things about her.”

More and better. “When did you meet with Jerome?”

“Just before the PTA meeting. It was mostly about religious and family things. He was going to come back to my church. He was tired of the backbiting ways at his new place. I offered to help him get into some of the committees in the church.”

“That doesn't sound murderous.”

“Let me tell you a thing or two. We worked so hard in the last election. We lost those three school board offices by less than a total of two hundred votes. If we could have done just a bit more, we could have taken control. Lydia kept pooh-poohing my ideas. Everything I said was wrong. She thought whatever she said was wisdom straight out of the Bible.”

“It wasn't?”

“Not hardly. She kept trying to squeeze my friends out of things. She wanted to take over the school board and be its president.”

“Didn't you?”

“The plan was for all of us to get elected. After we won, there was plenty of time to decide who got what.”

“But only she won.”

“And I won the PTA election. We're making progress. After the school board election, we weren't discouraged. We still had our causes to fight for. We went ahead with the fight for the presidency of the PTA. This special union election gave us another chance. There's a lot of anger in the community about the teachers' union. Those settlements in the last few years have been outrageous. There are some teachers in this district making more than fifty thousand dollars a year.”

I thought of numerous responses to that balderdash, but I wanted to get her back on track.

“What happened at the PTA meeting?”

“Your friend Meg—yes, I know she's your friend—did what she's always done to me. She tried to shut me out. She made fun of me and my beliefs. I'm afraid I got out of control. I was so glad that Jerome told her what for.”

“Were you there or did you talk to Jerome after he spoke with Meg?”

“I spoke briefly with him afterward. He was very kind and helpful. A true friend. He couldn't talk to me long though. He said he had to meet with more people.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know who?”

“No. If he'd have told me, we'd know the killer.”

“Where did you go when you left the meeting?”

“I went to the teachers' lounge to lie down. I turned off the lights.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“I saw that Beatrix Xury still trying to buttonhole people.”

Beatrix had told me she went shopping.

Belutha continued, “Is that woman insane? Does she do anything else besides find fault?”

“You noticed.”

“While I was running for school board, she would call me and complain and ask if I got elected, would I fix this, that, or the other thing. She was constantly harping. She wanted a change in the school board so we could take care of her personal needs. I couldn't afford to alienate her. She's got a big mouth around town. She supported us.”

Traitor Beatrix. At the endorsement meeting no one, including Beatrix, had spoken against any of the union's choices. The vote on whom to endorse was unanimous. I remember Beatrix sitting near me with a fatuous smile on her face.

A child came in wearing pajamas and kissed Belutha good-night. She gave her a hug and a kiss and promised to be up in a minute to tuck her in. I could barely hear the television in this mostly quiet house. Thankfully they had air-conditioned it.

Belutha said, “I saw Beatrix talking to one of those new teachers. A blond, young man, Trevor something. They seemed to be arguing. I couldn't hear what it was about. I didn't tell the police about that. Should I have? As far as I could tell, it had nothing to do with Jerome.”

“It probably wasn't important,” is what I said, but I wasn't so sure about that.

I'd have to talk to our Beatrix and our Trevor, if that's who it was. The picture of Beatrix as a lying sack of shit appealed to me. Trevor as a total asshole worked for me as well. Of course, if he was arguing with Beatrix, he couldn't be all bad.

I asked, “What did you do?”

“When I felt better, I got up. I was still a little weak. That outburst took a physical and emotional toll on me. I'm on several different medicines from my doctor.”

“Did you see anything as you left?”

“I didn't even vote. I left by one of the side doors. I passed Meg on her way down the hall.”

“When was this?”

“I said, on my way out. I ignored her. She wasn't on the way to the library. I saw Jerome after that. He was coming back from the wing with the math department offices. He was alive when I left.”

Meg had taken a journey outside the room that I hadn't known about. And what was Jerome doing down in the math offices? Simply stopping in his classroom, or picking up something in the office he forgot, or trysting with a murderer?

“You didn't see Jerome and Meg together?”

“No, they were going in opposite directions.”

It bothered me that Meg hadn't added this to what she had told Agnes. Or had Agnes simply forgotten it or left it out deliberately? Or did Meg have something to cover up? I wanted to speak with her. Before the murder, we'd have been comparing notes and making cracks about all the people involved. Now, I'd be happy to comfort her and help her out. I needed a face-to-face meeting with her.

Belutha continued, “I talked with Jerome for another second or two. He'd been to his mailbox and found a note from that Seth person. Jerome was really angry that Seth had put out such a thing.”

“I don't remember Jerome's name being mentioned.”

“It wasn't. He was afraid it was going to make Seth successful. That people would believe and trust Seth and not Jerome. He wanted to write something against it or something more harsh. He wanted me to begin planning to have another meeting to write it up.”

“He didn't write his own propaganda?”

“Oh my, no. We would get together to decide strategy. I shouldn't tell you any more about that.”

“You've been helpful.” I got up to leave. She showed me out with some graciousness. She added at the end, “I'm going to be on the phone about Lydia tonight. She can't say those kinds of things.”

 

Instead of turning on the air-conditioning in the truck, I left the windows open. A mild sheen of sweat formed on me as I hurried through the Midwestern humidity. I smelled rain on the wind. I hoped it would make it cooler.

At home I found Scott curled in his favorite armchair. He was watching The Weather Channel on cable television. If he's depressed, he can sit there for hours enthralled by the charts, graphs, and occasional inadvertent hilarity of live television.

“Sorry I'm late.”

“There's cold pizza. You want me to microwave it for you? I made a salad or you could nuke some vegetables.”

He ate a salad while I had a late dinner. “You okay?” I asked.

I watched him carefully. He was wearing white gym socks and his oldest high school gym shorts. He'd sewn them and patched them numerous times. He wore his working-on-the-car T-shirt. It never came completely clean in the wash anymore. It had interesting patterns of old stains. It also clung tightly to the muscles on his upper arms and showed his flat stomach to great advantage.

“I'm feeling a little better,” he said. “I spent most of the day canceling engagements. Biff is not happy with me.”

His agent had some long, boring preppy name; Scott just referred to him as Biff.

“Are you happy with you?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess. As I erased each thing from my calendar, I felt better. I'm keeping only those engagements where I agreed to do a charity appearance. Most of those are AIDS-related anyway.”

A huge number of Scott's promotional appearances in the past few months had been for helping other gay people, gay health groups, gay hospices. If it was gay and they needed help, they called Scott.

He continued, “I cut back on some of those too. I want time to myself. I need to enjoy the first September I've had off since fourth grade.”

“I'm worried about you. I'm also having a little cognitive dissonance. We've been fucking like bunnies since you've been back, but you're upset about being gay?”

“Is that cognitive dissonance stuff catching?” He felt my forehead. “You don't have a fever and you don't look cognitive or dissonant.”

“I think you're better.”

“I'm still a little down, but I'm pulling it together. My comment came from a mixture of depression and being overtired and a wish that everything could be easier and simpler. I know who I am and I'm happy about it. I'm as normal as I want to be.”

I mentioned Kurt's comment about being an unhappy gay person. Scott laughed. “People are more used to dying and depressed gay people from all that shit on television. They're going to be disappointed if they do a film on my life.”

“Good.”

He asked me about the investigation and I filled him in. I finished, “I'm worried about the union election.”

“You get wrapped up in things. Whose side is winning and losing. I've seen you on election nights flipping between every network and cable television station. You are obsessed with this stuff. Are you sure that's good?”

“Isn't it important who wins the union election in my school?”

“Why would it be? How is it going to hurt you if Seth wins?”

“You're the man whose union is making huge headlines about its strike. It makes a difference if there's a moronic fool running things. I think it's important to prevent that. People invest a lot of emotion in what directly affects their lives. Look at the passion that was involved in the simple PTA election that started all of this. According to what I've learned, a lot of that began many years ago.”

He nodded. “You're right. The guys on the team get nuts about the union.”

“Nobody stands out as a major suspect yet,” I said.

“That Beorn guy, the part-time teacher, strikes me as dangerous. It's always good to have a militia member hanging around the woodwork as a murder suspect.”

“Beorn strikes me as mildly nuts, but he doesn't rate too highly as a killer.”

“Lydia?”

“Lydia or Belutha work equally well for me, but I don't see major motivation for murder there.”

“How about Beatrix?”

“If I could pin the murder on her, I would be delighted.”

“Or Meg.”

“Possible, but not probable.”

“Maybe you need to look deeper into motivation.”

“I need to look deeper into everything.”

Snuggled together on the living room couch, we watched our tape of the movie
Beautiful Thing
, something that often helps cheer him up. At one in the morning, it began to rain lightly.

When we got to bed, he pulled me close and rested his head on my chest. He rearranged my chest hair with his chin so it wouldn't tickle his nose. I put my arms around him and he sighed contentedly. I stroked his back and his shoulders gently and easily. I was still worn-out from lack of sleep. I was not looking forward to being up in a few hours to go to school.

I'd thought he'd fallen asleep when he murmured, “I love you, Tommy.”

Most everybody just calls me Tom. My mother, when she was irritated with me when I was a kid, would call me Thomas—still does. I don't usually like being called Tommy, but when Scott does it with the deep thrum in his voice with that latent Southern drawl behind it, I just melt. We don't call each other pet names often, but that's his for me in his most emotional and tender moments.

I said, “I love you.”

I felt his body relax and knew shortly after that he had truly fallen asleep. He seldom nods off all nestled around me, and I usually find it difficult to fall asleep that way as well, but I didn't care that night. I held and caressed the man I love for a long time. It was quite a while before I dozed off.

 

I woke around six. Scott was still asleep. I noted the tousled hair, the rise and fall of his chest, the occasional murmur or twitch. I still love watching him sleep.

Finally, I got up and looked outside. A light rain switching to mist continued to fall.

I decided to get in a morning workout. Tomorrow was Friday and we would have students all day. Today was a teachers' institute at the new school. The people I wanted to talk to would all be present. I thought of calling Meg. I decided to wait and see if Georgette had talked to her. Maybe Georgette would have an insight I had missed.

I'd been clanking with the weights for about fifteen minutes when Scott joined me. In silence he did his stretching exercises. We wore old sweat clothes shrunken from many washings to where they clung to various muscle groups on our bodies. We spotted each other as we lifted and groaned. About halfway through the workout his crotch brushed against my knee as I was doing a leg lift. I stopped and he moved closer. He brushed the sweat from his eyes. Sweaty sex with that man is just about the best.