Cockeyed - Stevenson Richard. Страница 6

To Hood, I said, “The church did shut down the compensation machinery at some point. Didn’t your friends urge you to file a claim before it was too late? Did Hunny know about this?”

“I didn’t tell anybody back then. In fact, I kind of forgot about it. A guy I was involved with for a while kept asking me why I didn’t like to get fucked, and then I remembered.”

“And that’s when you wrote to the pope?”

“Another guy I used to date who had a computer helped me send an e-mail to the Vatican. Maybe the pope only speaks Italian, but there must be other dudes who work in his office who speak English. I think the guy is just a geek, that’s all.”

“You said you’ve had counseling. When was that?”

“At the farm the judge sent me to. I was thirteen years of age.

Anyway, that wasn’t about sex, it was about fires.”

“Have you had any problems with the law since then? Hunny said he was unaware of any run-ins. But he said that when you drink you sometimes threaten to set people’s houses on fire, or CoCkeyed 21

their cars, and it is very frightening to people.”

“That’s just the Bud Lite talking,” Hood said. “I would never do it. Hunny doesn’t have to worry. Though I would appreciate a little compensation for Hunny turning me into a homo, since it looks like the friggin’ pope is gonna be of no use to me whatsoever.”

“Hunny told me about your parents,” I said. “And about the terrible way they died. That must weigh on you, too.”

“Hunny has a big mouth.”

“It’s why even though he is fond of you, he is somewhat afraid of you.”

“Yeah, well. Mom and Pop never replaced the battery in their smoke alarm. Does he know that part of it? Let that be a lesson to Hunny.”

“Stu, what you are saying to me isn’t all that reassuring.”

“What I’m saying to you, Strachey, is that I don’t set fires anymore. I’m all talk. Talk and beer, beer and talk. And if it’s reassurance you want on a Saturday afternoon, this homo bar is not the place to find it.”

ChAPteR fouR

Hunny was back on the Channel 13 news Saturday evening at six. This time he was defending his lottery boodle not against blackmailers but against a co-worker at BJ’s Warehouse who claimed that half of Hunny’s winnings were rightfully his. Dave DeCarlo said he had given Hunny ten dollars to buy twenty dollars’ worth of tickets for the two of them, and they had agreed to split the winnings from any of the tickets purchased.

DeCarlo, who was interviewed first, along with his attorney, Thurmont Fewster, said it was the deep pain of being betrayed by a man he had always thought of as a friend that was hurting him most of all. His lawyer focused on what he referred to as a

“broken oral contract.”

When it was Hunny’s turn, he said that while he and DeCarlo had once purchased lottery tickets together, that had been back in the spring and had been for an entirely different drawing, not the August Instant Warren. Hunny added that while he had planned on giving all his co-workers what he called an “August bonus” from his lottery winnings, now that DeCarlo was trying to swindle him, “that bleep bleep” wasn’t going to get a cent.

Timmy and I were watching the news in our bedroom at our house on Crow Street before heading out for a Saturday night Thai dinner with friends. After that, I planned on meeting another of the blackmailers when his cleaning-crew shift at a Corporate Woods office building ended at eleven.

Timmy said, “Hunny is quite the sleazoid-magnet. It looks as if he’s going to keep you hopping.”

“DeCarlo does appear to be an unscrupulous fellow. Most of the other skeletons tumbling out of Hunny’s voluminous closet, though, look like they’re just hapless shmoes. I phoned three of them this morning after Hunny left my office and warned them off, and none of the ones I talked to seemed to want any trouble. I’m more worried about two other guys who do sound a 24 Richard Stevenson

bit unhinged and maybe even dangerous. I saw one of them this afternoon at the Watering Hole. He’s a hustler named Stu Hood who has a history of arson.”

“Oh no.”

“He has only one conviction, as a juvenile, but Hunny says the guy was a suspect in a number of later cases. When Hood was thirteen, he burned down his parents’ house with them in it. He was supposed to be out mowing the lawn, but instead he poured gasoline from the lawn mower can all around the downstairs and lit it and ran out. He told the police he didn’t know his mother and father were upstairs napping and that he thought they had gone out for the afternoon. But Hunny said the family car was in the driveway, so Hood’s story was widely doubted. On Thursday, Hood threatened Hunny and told him he would torch his and Art’s house if Hunny didn’t go fifty-fifty with Hood on the lottery winnings. He claims Hunny turned him into a homosexual after Hunny picked him up while Hood was cruising the park.”

“Why, Donald, it’s our story.”

“Exactly. I was a confused youth, and when you fondled me behind that bush, I thought, oh, wow, I could get used to this.”

“You were the mixed-up youth? I’m reasonably certain it was the other way around.”

“Then how come you were carrying that towel thing around with you at eleven o’clock at night? You even told me at the time that it was so you wouldn’t get moss on your knees.”

“I seem to have repressed any memory of that.”

“Anyway, Hood’s story is as ugly as it gets. He told me that he was repeatedly raped by a priest when he was eleven years old but that he didn’t recall these incidents until it was too late for any legal recourse.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I’m not sure. But it was two years later that he started setting fires. Or two years that anybody knows of.”

“Were there any church fires around that time?”

CoCkeyed 25

“Good question. But my role here is not to prosecute or to clear Stu Hood for any crimes he may have committed in years gone by. My job is to get him off Hunny Van Horn’s back.”

Timmy zapped off the TV — no more Hunny news for the moment — and started getting into his dinner togs, his nicely pressed slacks and a polo shirt he had ironed earlier in the day. He said, “I keep hearing that gay people in the Capitol really do wish somebody other than Hunny had won the Instant Warren. He is just such an excruciating public embarrassment.”

“I find him interesting and sometimes even entertaining,” I said. “Hunny is one of a vanishing species. Also, here is a client who, when I bill him at the end of the month, will be in a good position to pay it.”

“Vanishing species, I don’t think so. God, if only.”

“Hunny is gay man at his most primitive. He’s the untamed queer Neanderthal. He’s the rugged individualist on the old gay frontier. He’s a homo Huck before Aunt Polly tried to civilize him. Hunny is proudly out and proudly nelly. Hunny am what he am.”

“What Hunny am,” Timmy said, “is a loudmouth drunk and a hideous old letch. It wouldn’t surprise me if the greatest threat to Hunny at this point is not some juvenile delinquent arsonist he had sex with, but any of the thousands of decent, sober, well-behaved gay men and women across America who see Hunny on national television and are now looking for ways to make this grotesquely embarrassing creature just disappear.”

Timmy had at least a partial point. Maybe looking after Hunny was going to be even more complicated than I thought.

§ § § § §

The first thing Mason Doebler said to me was, “I’m not taking any shit from Hunny and I’m not taking any shit from you. Don’t waste your time threatening me, and don’t waste your time pissing me off. Hunny has owed me three thousand dollars for four years, and now he can afford to pay his debt to me —