You Don't Know About Me (22 page)

After stopping for body fuel, we followed the Snake River, a shiny ribbon winding through southern Idaho. The river was the blue stripe in the middle of a fatter “snake” of checkered green pastures and milk-shake-brown fields. On both sides of the valley were dry hills covered in sagebrush and scrub cedar.

When we passed a sign for an old hotel,
THE SAGE STEPPE INN
, I asked about the weird spelling. Ruah told me that sage steppe was one of the names for the high desert that stretched beyond the river valley. It was a wonky name. I mean, it looked to me like the kind of desert where no one had ever
stepped
, and if they had, they might've never stepped out of it again.

As we got off the interstate and followed the Snake River up to Notus, the sage steppe to the south got drier and wilder-looking. We even passed some giant sand dunes, like they'd been airlifted from the Sahara Desert.

The steppe looked so unstepped on by humans or animals, it got me thinking. In the Midwest, it looks like every square inch of land has been trod on by a person or an
animal at sometime or other. And if footprints never went away—like dinosaur tracks in rocks—the Midwest would be a huge carpet of footprints. But out west, in the high desert, there would be places that no human or animal had ever tread. Sure, there'd be trails and tracks from the past, but there'd also be islands of ground where no creature had
ever
set foot or hoof. There'd be places as untouched as the moon.

It made me want to ask Ruah to stop so that I could get out and walk into the desert to one of those untouched islands. When I thought I'd found one, I'd kick off my sneaks and be the first creature to ever step on that piece of God's earth. On that one little island, I'd be Adam.

It was just one of my dopey fantasies, but it was also God reminding me of something. Most of His good earth had been corrupted by the foul footprint of sin. And God's will, before I got to Notus, was to save Ruah from his sinful path.

I opened my Bible to Genesis, where the Lord destroys Sodom and Gomorrah. I read it out loud. It's as straightforward as scripture gets.

• Two angels, in the form of men, visit the town of Sodom.
  
• A man who lives there, Lot, invites the two strangers into his house. He feeds them and offers them shelter for the night.
  
• A mob of Sodomites shows up and orders Lot to give them the two men so they can “know them,” meaning have sex with them.
  
• Lot begs the mob to take his daughters instead. They refuse. They want the two men.
  
• The two men pull Lot back into the house and, being angels, blind all the Sodomites outside. The angels tell Lot to take his family and leave Sodom because it's going to be destroyed for its wickedness.
  
• And that's what the Lord does: He rains fire and brimstone on Sodom, killing everyone and everything.
  

I shut the Bible. Ruah didn't say anything. I looked over.

He'd taken off his sunglasses. His face looked puzzled, but his mouth was set in a smirk. “That story always struck me as this really sick tale about what some fathers think of their daughters.”

“That's not what it's about,” I said.

“Really? What's it about?”

“God destroyed Sodom because it was filled with homosexuals. And that's why ‘sodomy' is still the word for what you people do, and a ‘sodomite' is someone who does it.”

He slowly nodded. “Very good on the etymology, kid. Does it also follow that if anyone should know about the story of Sodom, it would be a sodomite?”

“I don't know about that.”

“Well,” he said, with his smirk back, “as a latter-day sodomite, I'd like to throw out another reason why T.L. destroyed Sodom.”

I couldn't wait to see him try and wiggle out of this one.

He raised a hand. “Okay, I'll admit, even though there's
no actual man-on-man sex in the story, there is the
threat
of it. But what the story's really about is two opposites: brotherly love and male rape.”

“What does brotherly love have to do with it?”

“It's another term for doing someone a kindness, for hospitality, don't you think?”

I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I guess so.”

“In the Holy Land, and in desert culture, when the nights get so cool, one of the worst things you can do is leave someone out in the cold. So, all through the Bible there are stories, and laws, about how strangers should be given shelter for the night, and food. But there was another good reason to be kind to strangers. You never knew when the stranger wandering into your camp or village might be a god or an angel. And that's exactly who Lot ended up taking in, two angels disguised as men, right?”

“What does any of that have to do with homosexuality?”

“I'm getting to it. You see, if the mob of Sodomites that showed up at Lot's door were really homosexuals, and if they were anything like gays today, they would've simply knocked on the door, asked if the two strangers wanted to go out for a beer, maybe hit a club, and take it from there. But no, the mob that tried to break down Lot's door wanted to ‘know' the two strangers. They wanted to rape them.”

“Exactly,” I said, “which makes them homos.”

“No,” he said, stretching out the word. “They weren't homos any more than cops using toilet-plunger handles to violate suspects are homos. It's not about sex. It's about
domination and the humiliation of male rape. And believe me, back in the good ol' holy days, male rape happened all the time.”

“No way.”

“I wish you were right, but ancient cultures had their gnarly ways. Aztecs ate the hearts and drank the blood of their conquered foes. The Holy Landers had a different way of sticking it to their beaten enemies: they raped them. But they didn't do it because they were gay. They did it to strip them of their manhood, to turn them into women. If you turned your enemy into a lowly woman, then you'd shamed him, broken his spirit. He was as good as dead. I mean, look at what Lot thought of his daughters. He offered them up as rape substitutes.”

Ruah shrugged. “Hey, if you don't believe me, think about how men still run around busting other guys' balls. You hear it in every locker room and on every playing field where guys insult each other with names like pussy, faggot, and cocksucker. Of course, we don't call it rape. We have a nicer name for it: trash talk. I hear it every day. And it goes all the way back to that mob in front of Lot's door.

“The Sodomites weren't a bunch of gays looking for a quickie. They were a lynch mob, or, in their case, a rape mob. They weren't blinded by the angels and destroyed 'cause they wanted to stick it where the sun don't shine. They were destroyed for violating the sacred law of hospitality. Their sin was a complete lack of what God sent Christ down to make clear to the world: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.' ”

I'd followed his crazy, zigzag trail from the destruction of Sodom to Christ's teaching, but it was like following a blown-up balloon that's let go and whirligigs around the room. I didn't know what to say.

The only thought I had that made sense was that it wasn't Ruah who was messing with what I knew in my heart. It was God. And His message went like this:
Billy, you're gonna have to do better than that if you wanna argue sodomy with a sodomite.
But I didn't have another chance, not until I'd read another chapter of
Huck Finn.

I pulled out Chapter 32.

Ruah waved a hand. “Wait a minute. You didn't finish the chapter.”

I held up the
Huck Finn
pages. “I haven't even started it.”

“No, I mean chapter nineteen in Genesis.”

“What?”

“If you're gonna convince me that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is about homosexuality, the least you could do is read the whole chapter.”

I didn't know what he was up to, but I opened the Bible and read the last eight verses of the chapter. I'd forgotten about them. Talk about a shocker.

• Lot and his two daughters escape to a cave in the mountains.
  
• Lot has no sons and no chance of having any because his wife looked back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and was turned into a pillar of salt.
  
• The daughters decide their father has to have sons.
  
• The first night in the cave, the daughters get Lot drunk and the older daughter has sex with him, but Lot doesn't know it because he's so drunk.
  
• The second night they get Lot drunk again, and the younger daughter has sex with him, but he doesn't know it.
  
• The daughters give birth to boys, giving Lot sons. Of course, to the daughters, they're sons and
  brothers.
  

After I finished, Ruah stroked his beard stubble. “Hmm, now that we've heard the
whole
story of Lot, what the heck is
that
all about? I don't know about you, but for me the way it depicts bad sex and good sex is really confusing. I mean, let's say you're right, and that man-on-man sex is nasty and bad no matter where, when, or why. But when Lot offers his daughters to be raped by the mob we don't hear a peep from God. And when the daughters date-rape their dad, not once but twice, Old Testy doesn't lift a finger. Call me crazy, but the only sensible one in the whole wacko crew is Lot's wife.”

“What's she got to do with anything?”

“If I was married to a man who would throw my daughters to a rape mob, and I had daughters who had it in 'em to date-rape their own dad, I'd turn into a pillar of salt too.”

I just shook my head in disgust. “Can I read Chapter Thirty-two now?”

Ruah shot me a huge smile. “I thought you'd never ask.”

I read the chapter from start to finish. It was about Huck going to the Phelpses' farm to free Jim from slavery. But things get complicated when the Phelpses think Huck is Tom Sawyer and Huck goes along with it, pretending to be Tom.

When I was done, Ruah said, “Now we know why your father picked Notus, Idaho, for the next cache.”

“Why?”

“ 'Cause Huck is
not
himself, he's Tom.”

“Maybe so.” He might've been right about that but I knew he was wrong about his way of life, because the Bible said so. But I wasn't bringing it up again until the right moment. I was going to do like Huck says before he gets to the Phelpses' farm. I was going to go … 
right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for I'd noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if I left it alone.

As the sun dropped toward the horizon I checked my GPS. We were 44 miles from Notus. Then the most incredible smell rolled through the cab. “What's that?”

Ruah inhaled a deep breath. “Mint?”

We stared at the field of dark plants. “I've never seen a mint field before.”

“Me neither.”

We rode for a couple miles just sucking up the smell. It felt like my nostrils and lungs were being scrubbed out. The sun began to set as the mint field changed back to sage steppe.

Ruah broke the silence. “We might never see eye to eye
on the whole gay thing, but as you were reading
Huck
it gave me an idea that might help you get it.”

I didn't say anything. I just stared at the wall of clouds on the horizon swirling with yellow and orange.

He went on. “When Huck pretends to be Tom it doesn't change who Huck is. He's still Huck. He can make people think he's Tom, but it doesn't change who he is. It's the same for a lot of gays. We can pretend to be straight, we can live in the closet, but it doesn't change who we are. We're still gay. And when you, or anyone else, try to turn a gay into a straight it's as impossible as truly turning Huck into Tom. There's a term for what I'm talking about. It's not in your Bible. It's called ‘sexual orientation.' ”

“Is that like gaydar?” I asked. “Do you have a sexual orienter, like a compass, and it points you in the direction of gay people?”

He laughed. “Now you're busting
my
chops. But I like that. I'll have to tell the Society of Gay Scientists to start working on a sexual orienter.”

“There's really such a group?”

He laughed harder. “Billy, you gotta stop believing so much of what people—”

Something flashed in front of us, coming from my side. I saw its black curved horns, and the shock of its white flank as it tried to leap away.

Ruah swerved to the right but hit the antelope. Its hind end thudded against the camper. We flew off the road, bouncing violently through the brush. Something grabbed the front wheels, I heard Ruah swear, the camper nose-dropped. It all happened in a split second: the front of the
camper plunged—we caught air for a nanosec—full-body blow from an air bag. It hurt.

Everything went still. We weren't falling down a ravine, or a canyon. We weren't plunging to our death.

I heard Ruah fighting his air bag and sucking air through his teeth. “Fuck! Fuck!”

My air bag went squishy; I pushed it away. It was strangely dark in the cab. We had stuck a nose wheelie in a dry gully. The sunset's band of orange had leapt to the top of the windshield. The headlights, augured in dirt, emitted a dusty glow.

Ruah swatted his air bag with his right hand. He hissed in a breath. “You alright?”

“Yeah.”

“Turn on the light.”

I turned on the overhead.

His left hand was caught in the steering wheel. There was a weird lump in his wrist. He tried to move it with his free hand. He winced in pain. “Shit.” He closed his eyes, sucking in air.

“Is it broken?”

He nodded and breathed out. His eyes opened. “That's it.”

“Someone will come along soon,” I said.