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whacked him. Come up tails, and he would go down the east-
bound ramp and head home. Come up heads, he would go
on . . . and there would be no more looking back.
He stood in the dust of the soft shoulder and flicked the
coin into the chilly October air. It rose, turning over and over, kicking up glints of sun. Jack craned his head to follow its course.
A family passing in an old station-wagon stopped squabbling long enough to look at him curiously. The man driving the
wagon, a balding C.P.A. who sometimes awoke in the middle
of the night fancying that he could feel shooting pains in his chest and down his left arm, had a sudden and absurd series of thoughts: Adventure. Danger. A quest of some noble purpose. Dreams of fear and glory. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and glanced at the boy in the wagon’s rear-view mirror just as the kid leaned over to look at something. Christ, the balding C.P.A. thought. Get it out of your head, Larry, you sound like a fucking boys’ adventure book.
Larry shot into traffic, quickly getting the wagon up to seventy, forgetting about the kid in the dirty jeans by the side of the road. If he could get home by three, he’d be in good time to watch the middleweight title fight on ESPN.
The coin came down. Jack bent over it. It was heads . . . but that was not all.
The lady on the coin wasn’t Lady Liberty. It was Laura
DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories. But God, what a difference here from the pale, still, sleeping face he had glimpsed for a moment in the pavillion, surrounded by anxious nurses in their billowing white wimples! This face was alert and
aware, eager and beautiful. It was not a classic beauty; the line of the jaw was not clear enough for that, and the cheekbone which showed in profile was a little soft. Her beauty was in the regal set of her head combined with the clear sense that she was kind as well as capable.
And oh it was so like the face of his mother.
Jack’s eyes blurred with tears and he blinked them hard,
not wanting the tears to fall. He had cried enough for one day.
He had his answer, and it was not for crying over.
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When he opened his eyes again, Laura DeLoessian was
gone; the woman on the coin was Lady Liberty again.
He had his answer all the same.
Jack bent over, picked up the coin out of the dust, put it in his pocket, and headed down the westbound ramp of Interstate 70.
3
A day later; white overcast in the air that tasted of chilly rain on its way; the Ohio-Indiana border not much more than a
lick and a promise from here.
“Here” was in a scrub of woods beyond the Lewisburg rest
area on I-70. Jack was standing concealed—he hoped—
among the trees, patiently waiting for the large bald man with the large bald voice to get back into his Chevy Nova and drive away. Jack hoped he would go soon, before it started to rain.
He was cold enough without getting wet, and all morning his sinuses had been plugged, his voice foggy. He thought he
must finally be getting a cold.
The large bald man with the large bald voice had given his
name as Emory W. Light. He had picked Jack up around
eleven o’clock, north of Dayton, and Jack had felt a tired
sinking sensation in the pit of his belly almost at once. He had gotten rides with Emory W. Light before. In Vermont Light
had called himself Tom Ferguson, and said he was a shoe-
shop foreman; in Pennsylvania the alias had been Bob Dar-
rent (“Almost like that fellow who sang ‘Splish-Splash,’
ah-ha-hah-hah”), and the job had changed to District High
School Superintendent; this time Light said he was President of the First Mercantile Bank of Paradise Falls, in the town of Paradise Falls, Ohio. Ferguson had been lean and dark, Darrent as portly and pink as a freshly tubbed baby, and this
Emory W. Light was large and owlish, with eyes like boiled
eggs behind his rimless glasses.
Yet all of these differences were only superficial, Jack had found. They all listened to the Story with the same breathless interest. They all asked him if he had had any girlfriends
back home. Sooner or later he would find a hand (a large
bald hand) lying on his thigh, and when he looked at
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Ferguson/Darrent/Light, he would see an expression of half-
mad hope in the eyes (mixed with half-mad guilt) and a stipple of sweat on the upper lip (in the case of Darrent, the sweat had gleamed through a dark moustache like tiny white eyes
peering through scant underbrush).
Ferguson had asked him if he would like to make ten dol-
lars.
Darrent had upped that to twenty.
Light, in a large bald voice that nonetheless cracked and
quivered through several registers, asked him if he couldn’t use fifty dollars—he always kept a fifty in the heel of his left shoe, he said, and he’d just love to give it to Master Lewis Farren. There was a place they could go near Randolph. An
empty barn.
Jack did not make any correlation between the steadily in-
creasing monetary offers from Light in his various incarna-
tions and any changes his adventures might be working on
him—he was not introspective by nature and had little interest in self-analysis.
He had learned quickly enough how to deal with fellows
like Emory W. Light. His first experience with Light, when
Light had been calling himself Tom Ferguson, had taught him that discretion was by far the better part of valor. When Ferguson put his hand on Jack’s thigh, Jack had responded automatically out of a California sensibility in which gays had been merely part of the scenery: “No thanks, mister. I’m
strictly A.C.”
He had been groped before, certainly—in movie theaters,
mostly, but there had been the men’s-shop clerk in North Hollywood who had cheerfully offered to blow him in a changing booth (and when Jack told him no thanks, the clerk said,
“Fine, now try on the blue blazer, okay?”).
These were annoyances a good-looking twelve-year-old
boy in Los Angeles simply learned to put up with, the way a pretty woman learns to put up with being groped occasionally on the subway. You eventually find a way to cope without letting it spoil your whole day. The deliberate passes, such as the one this Ferguson was making, were less of a problem than
the sudden gropes from ambush. They could simply be
shunted aside.
At least in California they could. Eastern gays—especially
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out here in the sticks—apparently had a different way of dealing with rejection.
Ferguson had come to a screeching, sliding halt, leaving
forty yards of rubber behind his Pontiac and throwing a cloud of shoulder-dust into the air.
“Who you calling D.C.? ” he screamed. “Who you calling queer? I’m not queer! Jesus! Give a kid a fucking ride and he calls you a fucking queer! ”
Jack was looking at him, dazed. Unprepared for the sud-
den stop, he had thumped his head a damned good one on the
padded dash. Ferguson, who had only a moment before been
looking at him with melting brown eyes, now looked ready to kill him.
“Get out! ” Ferguson yelled. “You’re the queer, not me!
You’re the queer! Get out, you little queerboy! Get out! I’ve got a wife! I’ve got kids! I’ve probably got bastards scattered all over New England! I’m not queer! You’re the queer, not me, SO GET OUT OF MY CAR!”
More terrified than he had been since his encounter with
Osmond, Jack had done just that. Ferguson tore out, spraying him with gravel, still raving. Jack staggered over to a rock wall, sat down, and began to giggle. The giggles became
shrieks of laughter, and he decided right then and there that he would have to develop A POLICY, at least until he got out of the boondocks. “Any serious problem demands A POLICY,” his father had said once. Morgan had agreed vigor-
ously, but Jack decided he shouldn’t let that hold him back.
His POLICY had worked well enough with Bob Darrent,
and he had no reason to believe it wouldn’t also work with
Emory Light . . . but in the meantime he was cold and his nose was running. He wished Light would head em up and
move em out. Standing in the trees, Jack could see him down there, walking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, his large bald head gleaming mellowly under the white-out