One afternoon Whale Jr. claimed a headache and the floor guard escorted him to the infirmary. When he came back his eyes were glazed with shock. “Don’t pound me,” he said. “I’m just the messenger, okay?”
The way the nurse had told it, each new batch of boys started on the top floor. In a few weeks, once they’d learned the ropes, they’d be integrated into the general population of the clinic. The nurse hadn’t cared. She’d dispensed two aspirin into his outstretched palm and told him to settle in. Nobody was ever discharged from the clinic. Not for years and years. It was only when a boy turned eighteen that he might be declared officially redeemed.
Those boys they saw shooting hoops, some of them had been admitted here when they were thirteen, even twelve years old.
To Kevin, things started to make sense. The Fag Farm was a cash cow. It made a fortune for everyone who worked there. Ultimately it made families happy, but not before pushing them to the verge of poverty. Church congregations throughout the country sponsored deviants the way they’d once financed missionaries overseas. The Commander and nurses and floor supervisors, they were all complicit.
Kevin supposed that a boy could sue. Set free, a boy could take his story to the media. Upon his release, he could charge the clinic with kidnapping or holding him against his will, but that would require admitting he’d faked his perversion and catalyzed the situation by taunting his folks. Chances were good that his parents would be furious. Besides, a judge or jury could always be convinced that such a boy was merely a vengeful, incurable Rock Hudson making scurrilous charges. It would be one admitted teenage liar’s word pitted against the Commander’s noble authority. Besides, there were all those legal forms he’d so eagerly signed.
No, a boy would do better to bide his time and emerge a hero. His victory might be delayed, but it would be intact. In the meantime there was nothing to do except study. Trigonometry. Calculus. Rhetoric. Physics. The tough stuff. As if to soften the blow, the nurse had told Whale Jr. that boys in the program almost always scored above 1400 on their SATs.
—
Beyond each door the next segment of corridor was dark. When they stepped through, automatic motion detectors switched on the lights. It was so quiet Kevin could hear the microscopic ping-pinging sounds as the fluorescent bulbs flickered, before they came on steady.
The group was bunched up, following the floor guard down yet another corridor. Troublemaker lagged behind them, whispering to Kevin. Pig the Pirate walked too close behind Tomas and gave him a flat tire, and Tomas swore at him in Spanish. Tomas fell back a few paces and fixed the back of his shoe.
Whale Jr. whispered, “I wonder how she died.”
Troublemaker said, “Her name isn’t Betsey.”
Brainerd asked, “Did you know her?”
Troublemaker whispered that she raced motorcycles. That’s how she got the scar on her leg. She ditched during the final lap of a motocross race. Instead of winning, she died taking the turn too fast for the track conditions. Massive internal injuries. Troublemaker tells this with a wistful smile. His eyes shimmering with admiration.
Pig the Pirate asked, “Was she your girlfriend?”
“She was a badass,” responded Troublemaker.
Kevin was examining his own hand. As he walked he recognized how his whole life showed in his hand. Through his fingernails he could see the pink, fresh skin he’d been covered with, all over, as a baby. Each fingernail was a little window onto who he’d been born. Conversely, the calluses on his palm showed how he’d look when he died. After he was dead his entire body would be covered with this same hoary, yellow skin. Here was proof that time passed. Looking at the difference between his baby skin and his dead skin made Kevin not want to waste a moment.
—
Urged by the Commander, they crowded around the steel table. While he folded back the greasy plastic and lifted the thing’s skirt and began to snip a few stitches, Kevin pretended to help. Kevin peeled back the cloth bandage that wrapped the wrist. The calluses on her palm were impressive. As were the muscles of her arms. Where Kevin had expected to find a slashed wrist, her skin was intact. Discolored but intact. There was a dark-blue bruise that more peeling revealed to be a tattoo. Inked on the inside of her wrist was a butterfly. On second consideration, it was a weird cross. At last, Kevin saw it as a double-bladed ax.
The Commander dimmed the basement lights. He took something from his pants pocket. Cigar-shaped it was, only shorter. He clicked a button on it. The device threw a red spot on the floor: a laser pointer. He directed its tiny red dot over Betsey’s dull, colorless insides. “Behold the glory of the ovary!” The little spotlight pinpointed an unremarkable lump.
Kevin and Troublemaker watched as Brainerd peeled the bandage from the side of the neck. Anyone could see the hair was a wig with no real hair underneath. Just a shaved head. Under the neck bandage Kevin recognized another tattoo. It began with a dark-blue “T.” Followed by an “R.” Then an “O.” Fully revealed, it said “Troublemaker,” spelled out in thorny letters.
That’s when Troublemaker dropped. Troublemaker of all people, the tough guy, his knees buckled, and he spiraled to the concrete floor.
The Commander set down the pointer so he could assist. After Troublemaker was propped in a chair and given a glass of water, the Commander turned his attention back to the ovaries, but the laser pointer was gone. He searched all through the thoracic cavity, checking behind the spleen and lungs but couldn’t find it.
—
The same as every night, Kevin crawled out of bed. After Lights Out, he waited for the swing-shift supervisor to put the floor on lockdown. The jangle of keys and the squeak of tennis shoes receded down the hallway. Around that place a person needed a key to turn on the lights. A person needed a different key to monkey with the thermostat. To keep everyone in bed and under the covers, the guard turned off the heat. Within an hour, the old building was like a meat locker. The ward was just shadows too dark for the video cameras to work. Kevin saw nothing but nighttime outside the glass. He breathed against the cold window and used his fingers to wipe a hole in the frost.
He propped his elbows on the sill and brought his hands together in front of his face. In the event he was caught he could say he was praying. His prayers consisted of a click and a double-click, a triple-click, a repeated click-click-clicking. At the same time, a tiny red light flashed, and he pointed it into the darkness where he hoped the Rock Hudsons would be lurking. He flashed them long and short strobes of red laser light. Dot, dash, double-dot, triple-dash, dibble, drabble, dribble, dot, dash, dot, double-dash.
Troublemaker snuck out of bed and came to his side, whispering, “Good job.”
Somewhere in the unknown, their little message was landing like the laser sight of a rifle. As if the question didn’t mean anything…as if it didn’t mean everything, Kevin asked, “Were you her boyfriend?”
Troublemaker squinted to see. His breath fogged the glass and he wiped it with his hand. “Not exactly.”
Kevin was still clicking away. Flashing SOS. Flashing drumrolls of fast dashes and stuttering dots. Hoping the batteries would hold out, he said, “Cub Scouts is good for more than just getting your asshole stretched.”
In a way it was a little prayer session, Kevin kneeling alongside Troublemaker. Brainerd came to kneel on Kevin’s other side. Whale Jr. snuck over and knelt beside Troublemaker until every pervert was lined up, elbows propped on the windowsill.
Tomas knelt beside Brainerd, whispering, “Troublemaker, that was the fakest faint I’ve ever seen.”
Troublemaker whispered, “It worked, didn’t it?”
Kevin whisper-shouted, “Both of you shut up.” He made what they hoped would get attention. A bright-red fairy dancing around on the gravel road. He clicked fast-then-slow, blink-dash-blanks, strobes, and blazing-red winks he hoped at least one of the Rock Hudsons could read.
Kneeling there, fogging the glass, Pig the Pirate whisper-asked, “What are you
telling them?”
Jasper whisper-ordered, “Tell them you’re a power bottom.”
Kevin ignored him.
Undeterred, Jasper insisted, “Tell them you have a smoking-hot man-gina.”
Kevin gave him a cross look.
Tomas whispered, “Promise that if they break us out, we’ll stick our hands up their butts.”
None of them knew what to look for. They looked for anything. Kevin shut off the light and waited. He pointed it at a slightly different angle and flashed the same blink-double-blink coded message.
“We’re going to get caught,” whispered Brainerd. They all held their breath and listened for the rattle of keys. The squeak of footsteps on the stairs.
Whale Jr. whisper-threatened. He swore he’d pull the fire alarm before he allowed them to screw up his big homecoming.
—
The next day, Kevin could hardly stay awake as the Commander used two latex-gloved fingers to show how their penises would enter Betsey during intercourse. In theory, at least. Extracting the fingers, he produced a pair of shears, regular kitchen shears the cooks used to cut up chickens. He snipped the stitches up the front of her, careful to veer around one side of her clitoris. There was no blood. Kevin looked at Troublemaker who stood a step back, his arms crossed over his chest. Troublemaker lifted a hand and raked his fingers through his greasy hair. When he caught Kevin watching him he scowled.
It had to suck, Kevin figured, watching bored teenage jerk-offs hack apart someone you used to love. Even if she was dead. He wasn’t without empathy, but he was still young, and the pain of other people embarrassed him. He was at an age when only his own pain seemed real so he was ashamed for Troublemaker. After that, Kevin resolved not to look at the brute. He’d been around enough bullies to know that rage and pain needed to vent, and he was careful not to make himself a target.
The Commander had to squeeze the shears with both hands to snip through the urogenital diaphragm. He flayed the vaginal cavity and laid it open as high as the cervix. He explained how sperm would collect at the upper end. Even now there was a small amount of viscous, cloudy fluid pooled there. He said just one word, “Formalin,” and used a folded paper towel to sponge it up. He referred to the formaldehyde concoction Betsey was steeped in to keep her from rotting. Even Kevin knew that. But the nasty spunk the Commander was dabbing at, every boy present recognized what it actually was.
—
Of course these details would come to light during the eventual trial. Jump forward half a year and cable television would devote twenty-four-hour coverage to showing Kevin sitting in court, testifying about the laser pointer and the mysterious spunk. He’d spill the beans about the gerbils and the dead girl butchered in the basement. Next to him would be his girlfriend. More or less his girlfriend. That could be debated. What would be obvious and undeniable is the fact she would be so very pregnant.
—
A week went by and Kevin’s dot-triple-dot-dashes got no answer. Nobody except Troublemaker knelt with him as he sent out his plea.
Kevin floated a trial idea. To him the protesters at the front gate were the equivalent of the protesters outside abortion clinics. The Rock Hudsons tried to stop people coming here the same way do-gooders tried to block people going to murder their unborn kids. The irony was in how those same rescued babies got adopted by Rock Hudsons.
Kevin said, “Between church people raising babies who would grow up to be homo and gay guys raising babies who would end up as breeders, I can’t understand the fuss.” He snorted in disdain. “To me it all looks like a wash.”
Troublemaker squinted in the direction of the gate. He rubbed a bigger hole to see through the frost. He said, “Nobody called her ‘Betsey,’ only her mom and dad.”
Talking at cross-purposes, Kevin ventured, “Imagine what Sex Ed was like for them.” Sneering his words, incredulous, he said, “Absolutely no useful information. None.” As punctuation at the end of his sentence, he slugged Troublemaker in the shoulder. “For them, Sex Education was a pointless exercise, kind of like Black History Month is for white kids.”
“Her real name,” Troublemaker said, “was ‘Suede.’ ”
Kevin listened. He didn’t know why they were having this conversation. He couldn’t guess where it was headed. Putting a sharp edge on his every word, Kevin complained. Jabbing his finger at the window, in the direction of the front gate, he crowed, “For the first hundred years of American history it was illegal to teach blacks how to read. These days, people still ridicule them for being ignorant.” Exasperated, he added, “Now we deny homos the right to get married, and at the same time we criticize them for whoring around.” Kevin continued to flash-dash-dash-triple-dot-dash-dot into the unknown.
An unknown amount of night passed before either of them spoke. It was Troublemaker, his voice strained with his righteous speculation, “Imagine…imagine if everything you know about intimacy…you learned not from your folks or your teachers, but from strangers in the public toilet of a Greyhound bus station?”
—
On another day the Commander deconstructed the breasts. In the dank basement, while the sixth-floor boys watched, he snipped the stitches and peeled them like baseballs. He laid bare the fat deposits and glands. Skinned, they looked like someone had knocked the horse hide off a pitch and socked a home run out of the ballpark. Along the way he pointed out the milk-producing alveolus…the myoepithelial cells…the lactiferous ducts…his words defusing anything mysterious and erotic that Kevin had ever dreamt about bodacious, motorboat tah-tahs.
Troublemaker stood as far from the action as the room’s size allowed, averting his eyes. Occasionally, he lifted one hand to smooth back his greasy hair. The gesture caught Kevin’s eye, and he could see how the ax tattooed on the inside of Troublemaker’s wrist matched the one on the dead girl. Suede.
Regardless, everyone else was in high spirits. The rumor was they were having pizza for dinner. In the overall giddiness, Jasper mistook the sigmoid colon for the fundus. When the Commander wasn’t watching, Kidney Bean took out the fornix and smacked it across Whale Jr.’s cheek. Only Troublemaker didn’t laugh.
—
That night, alone with Troublemaker, Kevin tried to explain his theory about parents in general. He started by asking, “You know what a manic-depressive is?”
Troublemaker didn’t answer so Kevin kept going. “My idea is my mom and dad pushed me into fooling them.” His hand knew its job by heart. The constant stream of dot-dash-dribble-dash-dot-dot never let up as Kevin built his case.
As a baby, he said, all he had to do was use the toilet and his parents showered him with praise. If he bumped his head or had a nightmare they were all over him with sympathy and attention. But the older he grew, the harder it became to get noticed. It wasn’t enough to bring home a test with an A grade. Or a failed one. The best and worst events in his life barely warranted a response from them.
He wasn’t alone. Among his friends he’d noticed a trend. As they received less attention they’d begun to escalate their highs and lows. No triumph was good enough. No defeat, too low. All the kids he knew, they’d devolved into gross caricatures of themselves. Kids who’d been funny grew to become ridiculous clowns. Girls who’d been pretty morphed, overnight, into beauty queens.
His folks were so dull. They always forced him to blow up every trouble, crisis-big, disaster-big, before they’d acknowledge it. Every triumph Kevin had to pump up, gigantic, before they’d notice. His parents had driven him to turn his whole life into a cartoon. To his folks, in-between didn’t exist. Good-enough didn’t exist. He’d become a freak.
Troublemaker still didn’t respond. The room was so dark Kevin couldn’t tell if he’d fallen asleep. Not that it mattered. Whether or not anyone was listening, Kevin still needed to say what he was saying.
He rambled on. “I figured, for the first time in my life, I’d get straight A’s. I’d break the curve…ace cunnilingus…screw a bunch of girls fo
r extra credit…”
Finally, when he didn’t know what else to talk about, Kevin ventured, “You see those babies they have out at the gate?” He told about Mindy Taylor-Jackson. He explained about the Porsches. Finally, he blurted out, “One of those babies is mine.”
He waited for a reaction. Testing the silence. He hoped Troublemaker would interrupt him and change the subject.
“At least one,” continued Kevin. “If you had binoculars or a telescope those babies look just like me.” He explained how he’d been with Mindy. They were in love, he said. He’d been heartbroken each time she’d been shipped off to some maternity home to give birth. Now he expected Mindy was missing him. His mom’s letters said as much. His mom described how Mindy was racing around like hell on her chromed wire–rimmed wheels. In secret, he and Mindy had decided twenty grand would buy them a new life together.
Troublemaker stared back, dumbfounded. “You’re a dad?”
Kevin nodded. His laser hand, dash-dashing, nonstop. He explained about his twins being due in a few months. “That’s how come I can’t stick around here until I turn eighteen.”
Dismissively, Troublemaker chuckled. “I’ve got that beat, hands down.”
Kevin waited. He was simply happy that Troublemaker was awake.
Troublemaker whisper-laughed. A helpless, trapped laugh. “Believe it or not…I’m a homo.” He scratched his head. “You can see my dilemma.” Again, like a list of words instead of a sentence, he said, “And—I’m—A—Girl.”
—
According to the Commander, Suede was a lesbian. He still called her “Betsey.” He railed, saying she’d sinned in too many ways for God to want her anymore. Her parents had donated her body to the clinic because they’d wanted to redeem her deviant soul. Kevin suspected there was more to the story than that. He suspected some revenge was involved. Even in the dim light of the basement he could see Suede was dimpled, her ears and tongue, nipples and labia, with the holes for piercings no longer in evidence.