You Don't Know About Me (32 page)

“But what if they still tried to take me?”

With his good hand he reached behind the seat and pulled up a sawed-off baseball bat. “Even with one hand, I still swing a mean bat.”

I laughed out of relief. “Okay, but how did you know so much about flesh-eating disease?”

“I didn't,” he replied. “I made it up.”

“It was a great fake-out.”

“It wasn't a total fake-out.”

I didn't follow. Either he knew about flesh-eating disease, or he didn't.

He caught my confused look. “Hold the wheel for a sec.” I did and he dug his wallet out of his pocket. He handed it to me.

“What's this for?”

“Open it, go into the deepest right pocket, and pull out what's there.”

I pulled out a picture. It was of a white guy with dark wavy hair and a friendly face. What made him look extra friendly, and maybe funny, too, was a gap between his front teeth. “Who's this?”

“Jerome Silks. He was my first real boyfriend.”

I stared at the picture. I had no idea what to say.

Ruah went on. “Jerry died from AIDS. The way he went wasn't much different than from flesh-eating disease.”

Staring at the picture, I tried to come up with the right thing to say. If there was a right thing to say. I slipped the photo back in the wallet and mumbled, “I'm sorry.”

Ruah chuckled. “Sorry about Jerry, or sorry you asked?”

“Him, of course.”

He took his wallet and dropped it on the console. “Thanks.” After a moment, he chuckled again. “I'll always remember Jerry for inventing a new Major League Baseball stat.”

“What?”

“He always told me I led the league in dishonesty.”

“I don't get it.”

“The two of us had been together for over a year when he gave me an ultimatum. I could start being honest, come out of the closet, and we would stay together. Or I could keep lying, stay in the closet, and we'd break up. I chose the closet and the relationship ended. But we stayed friends.”

Ruah stared ahead. In the late-afternoon light, his dark skin looked bronze. His face was statue-hard. It turned to molten lava as he spoke again. “A couple of seasons after we broke up Jerry got sick, real sick. I was traveling a lot, but whenever I got home I visited him in his apartment or at the hospital. Then he moved back to his apartment to die. Jerry's parents came to see him but never when I was around. I never even met them. In the last few weeks, his folks moved in. They wouldn't let me see him anymore. After he died, they even scheduled the funeral for a date I was on the road.”

“Did you go back for it?”

He shook his head. “When you're in the closet, playing by ‘Don't ask, don't tell,' you don't walk into your manager's office and tell him the family matter you gotta go home for is your ex-boyfriend's funeral. When they buried Jerry, I was in center field at Dodger Stadium, running down fly balls and bawling my eyes out.”

I said I was sorry again, but I'm not sure he heard me.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think if I had come out, my baseball career would've been over, but Jerry Silks would still be alive.”

We drove in silence after that. I started thinking about the times I'd called him an abomination. I couldn't deny it, part of me still believed it. But another part got to thinking about other abominations. Like what people do to each other. Like Jerry's parents not letting Ruah see him when he was dying. Like having the funeral on a day when they knew Ruah couldn't come.

As I sat there, something started making me feel worse. At first, I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me like an antelope leaping out of nowhere. The abomination done to Ruah had been done to me. The door to his friend had been slammed in his face. The door to my father had been shut my whole life. Ruah couldn't go to his friend's funeral because he wasn't wanted. I couldn't go to my father's funeral because I never knew he was alive. Maybe those kind of things aren't abominations to the Lord; maybe you don't find them in the Bible. But they're horrible just the same. They're the abominable sin of letting a man freeze in the Desert of Cold Hearts.

We crossed into Oregon. We were on such a back highway, the welcome sign was in rough shape. It was rusty, hung at an angle, and punched with bullet holes. It still managed to say
WELCOME TO OREGON
—
THINGS LOOK DIFFERENT HERE.

Neither of us said anything. I guess we didn't feel like making fun of it, or trying to make it better. As I look back, I know why. Sometimes the truth is too true to be made fun of.

I pulled out the last chapter of
Huck Finn
that I'd gotten in Notus and had already read on the playa at Burning Man. I read it to Ruah.

At the end, Huck says something about a person's conscience that summed up how I was feeling. Maybe it summed up Ruah's feelings, too. Huck says a conscience “takes up more than all the rest of a person's insides.”

As the sun dropped lower, we stopped in a town before heading to Farewell Bend State Park. I was still wearing the ghost-miner costume, so Ruah went into a store and bought me a pair of jeans, a couple shirts, and sneakers. He joked that if people saw me in ratty overalls and holey boots, the police might arrest him for child neglect or maybe white slavery.

At Farewell Bend we found a campsite at the end of the lake. After being with the wacko Potlatchers, it felt like an old routine, getting back to how Ruah did things. As he started dinner I got a campfire going and cut marshmallow sticks.

I watched dusk slowly push the last sunlight up the bare hills that surrounded the lake. The hills were so brown and pillowy they could have been named the Breadloaf Mountains. The fishermen on the lake were bringing their boats to the boat ramp. I liked seeing how each boat trailer splashed into the water, disappeared, caught a boat, and rose out of the lake in a gush of water. Even if the fishermen
hadn't caught a fish, at the end of the day they always landed “the big one,” their boat.

After dinner, we got out marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars. When Ruah was s'mored out, he leaned back and checked out the stars. I made another one and gorped it down.

Staring skyward, he said, “Remember how Huck and Jim wondered if God made the stars or if they just happened?”

“Yeah.”

“I got another one for you. Did T.L. carve the Grand Canyon, or did it just happen?”

I was sure God created the world, but if He'd done
everything
, right down to the Grand Canyon, I wasn't sure He would've had time for His day of rest. And I was a big believer in days of rest. “I haven't decided on that one,” I told Ruah.

“Okay, you'll take a pass.” He kept looking up. “Got one more. Jerry Silks—the guy whose picture I showed you—do you think he died of AIDS 'cause God was punishing him, or did it just happen?”

I tossed my s'mores stick in the fire. “Why are you asking me about what God did or didn't do?”

He shrugged like all he was doing was asking my favorite color. “Just curious. But I'll put a different spin on it. Do you think Jerry's in Heaven?”

I squinted into the fire. “I dunno.”

He gazed back at the stars. “I know he's up there.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The Bible tells me so.”

I almost laughed, and I would have if he'd been talking
about anything but his dead friend. “There's nothing in the Bible about gays going to Heaven.”

“Not in those words,” he said. “But when I was killing time back in the Sunnydale Motel, I opened my Bible and reread the book of Jonah. That's where I found out Jerry's in Heaven.”

“There's nothing in Jonah about gays in Heaven.”

“Yes there is, and no there isn't.” The firelight lit up his big smile. “And I'm gonna tell you about it. You can hear it tonight, or tomorrow on the road; your call. It's part of the all-the-way-to-Portland travel package.”

In the past few days I'd had my share of blackmail. At least this was more like graymail. I let out a sigh. “If I gotta listen to your crazy ideas I might as well listen to 'em on a stomach full of s'mores.”

He laughed. “As long as they don't make you hurl.”

“Right.”

“Okay, quick review. God tells Jonah to go preach to the Ninevites—Jonah runs away—gets swallowed by mondo fish—repents inside fish—prays for God's full-on forgiveness—gets it—and goes and preaches to the Ninevites. But when the Ninevites do the
same
as Jonah—see their sinful ways, repent, and get forgiven when God pulls his wrathful punch on their city—guess who gets all pissed off?”

“Jonah,” I said, trying not to sound irritated by the fact that I hardly needed the SparkNotes on Jonah.

“Right. Which makes him a hypocrite.”

“I never heard anyone call Jonah a hypocrite.”

“But he is. He accepts God's compassion and forgiveness
for
himself
, then he gets steamed when T.L. gives it to others.”

“Okay, but that's got nothing to do with gays in Heaven.”

“But it does. The lesson of Jonah is that life's journey, whether it takes you into a fish belly and back, to hell and back, or wherever and back, changes your view of the world, or it doesn't. Jonah's journey hardly changed him at all. At the end he's pissed 'cause T.L. didn't fire-'n'-brimstone Nineveh like He said He would. But
God
went on Jonah's trip too, 'cause God is everywhere. And Jonah's journey
did
change God.”

“How?”

“When T.L. answered Jonah's prayer of repentance in the fish, it reminded God of His own capacity for compassionate forgiveness. Not just for one guy, but for a whole city. It reminded God that He doesn't always ride the hard, straight line. Sometimes He zigs, sometimes He zags. The real meaning of Jonah is obvious: if T.L. can change His mind, and let compassion overrule wrath, so can we.”

I didn't know what that had to do with gays, but I didn't say a word. I just let him cruise on.

“As I was doing my Sunnydale Bible study, I realized the Jonah story was just an earlier version of the Christ story. T.L. gave His peeps the Jonah story, but a lot of 'em didn't get it. So God did a rewrite. He gave us the Christ story and people finally got it: Christ chooses compassion over wrath. God can't say it any clearer than when His Boy says,
For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; you shall love your neighbor as yourself
.

“But two thousand years later there are some Christians who still don't get it. They want a hard-line, no-contradictions God. They run around screaming, ‘Give 'em wrath, Lord. New York deserves nine-eleven. New Orleans deserves Katrina. Gays deserve AIDS.' They've turned
Love thy neighbor
into
Loathe thy neighbor
. You know what these latter-day Jonahs remind me of?”

I'd been quiet so long I didn't want him thinking I'd fallen into a sugar coma and he'd have to preach his sermon again in the morning. “No, what do they remind you of?”

“Hitters that can't get wood on a curveball.”

It made me laugh; talk about out of left field. “What the heck do latter-day Jonahs have to do with baseball batters?”

“ 'Cause that's what God threw Jonah at the end of the story: the big, curving slider of merciful forgiveness. Jonah totally whiffed and went stomping back to the dugout.”

I wondered if Ruah was drunk. He could've bought a bottle of something back in Homedale and drunk it while he'd made dinner. “Where do you get all this stuff?”

He flashed a smile. “From being stuck in a motel with the Book, and the fact that I know a little something about God's curveball of merciful forgiveness.”

He lost me again. “What's that?”

He pointed to Heaven. “T.L. threw me one.”

I didn't ask. I just watched him gather something inside himself.

“After I was with Jerry I never became HIV positive. We were careful, sure, and took precautions, but I think
there was something else. It's right there in Jonah, hidden in plain sight. God chooses compassion over wrath.”

“Maybe He does,” I said. I didn't want to say what I was thinking, but he was being honest; I had to do the same. “God didn't exactly choose compassion over wrath with Jerry.”

“You could say that. But what if Jerry dying was just the AIDS virus doing what a virus does? What if God had nuthin to do with it?”

“How can God have ‘nuthin to do with it?' ”

“Because God tells us what He really thinks of gays in Jonah. In fact, if T.L. ever wrote the book of Gay it wouldn't be much different than the book of Jonah. It would start with Old Testy all wrathed up. He decrees homo sexuality to be an abomination punishable by death. After all, back in the day, homosexuals weren't obeying His order to be fruitful and multiply. But just like in Jonah, along the way, God changes His mind. 'Cause in today's world with a surplus of baby makers and a shortage of loving couples to raise unwanted babies, maybe, just maybe, T.L. has rethought His homosexuals-as-abominations thing. And maybe T.L. is throwing peeps the same curveball of compassion He threw Jonah when it came to the Ninevites.”