Boy Erased (5 page)

“Besides,” I said, thinking that this moment might lead to more intimacy than we had ever allowed. “We should wait until marriage.”

“Right,” she said, removing her hand. Since we had already been together for a year and a half, the church congregation was expecting us to marry before too many years of college could change us. Earlier in the summer we had traveled to Florida with my mother and my aunt. As we were leaving for the trip, Chloe's mother leaned in through the driver's-side window to stage whisper into my mother's ear. “You know everything's going to change after this, right?” she said. “All of you in the same hotel room. E-ve-ry-
thing
.”

But nothing had changed. Chloe and I sneaking out at night with my aunt's wine coolers to sit by the neon pool and watch its waves ripple across the plastic lining, an angry tide pulsing somewhere in the darkness ahead. I had started to think we didn't need anything other than friendship. Chloe had made me feel complete in a way no one else had. She made it fun to walk through the school hallways, to see the looks of approval on people's faces. I could see in her eyes a real love I might one day be capable of returning. When we'd first met in church, her smile had been so genuine that I'd decided to ask her out right after the service, and we'd quickly settled into a happy routine. Watching movies, listening to pop music, playing video games, helping each other finish homework. It seemed there hadn't been anything to confide until that intimate moment in the car, and suddenly there was this new pressure between us.

•   •   •

M
Y
FATHER
and I left his office to join the other men at the foot of the couch, each of us sinking to our knees on the cold tile. Above our heads hung a sign that read:
NO CUSSING TOLERAT
ED—THIS IS THE LORD'
S BUSINESS
.

The man to my left, Brother Hank, clamped his eyelids shut until faint white ripples appeared above his red cheeks. My father's number one car salesman, Brother Hank could tailor his speech for any occasion. “Dear Lord,” he began, “give this boy the strength to deliver his message this morning.” He wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulders and tucked me close to his ribs. I could smell the sharp scent of menthol and, beneath that, the earthy smell of his farm, a place I had seen only in passing during one of my long walks through the forest paths surrounding our house.

Brother Hank continued: “Bestow upon him Thy divine grace and mercy.” He paused for a moment, allowing the distant ticking of my father's chrome clock to sober each man's mood. A few of the men groaned encouragement.

“Oh, yes, Lord,” they said.

“Yes oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes Lord,” they said.

Brother Hank lifted his hand from my back and left it hovering above my hair, the way my father used to do before cracking an imaginary egg on my skull and causing the imaginary yolk to trickle down my cheeks. “Let him be a vessel for truth. Let no falsehood spill from Your blessed fountain. Amen.”

“Amen!” the men shouted, rising to their feet, knees popping.

We settled into a circle of chairs around the couch, Brother Nielson and my father taking up the middle. Brother Hank removed a stack of Bibles from a nearby desk drawer and fanned them out like a deck of cards, each man choosing carefully, examining his book before flipping open the cover.

“Tell me something before we begin,” Brother Nielson said, removing his own Bible from behind a couch cushion. His name glittered in gold on the front, along the bottom of the cracked leather cover. His cracked Bible said one thing to all of us:
Here is a man whose fingers have creased and uncreased each page for the past twenty years. Here is a man who has quietly sobbed into the open spine, allowed his tears to wet and wrinkle the red letters of our Savior.
“I've been talking with the men here,” Brother Nielson continued, “and I want to know one thing, boy. What's your opinion on the Middle East problem? What do you think of our president's decision?”

I froze. The existence of Chloe had shielded me from too much direct questioning about my sexuality, but there were certain opinions that would make me a suspect no matter what. I was always nervous when I had to give an opinion on anything that could open me up to judgment. To be counted a sissy was one thing; to be counted a sissy
and
an Arab sympathizer was another. To be counted a sissy and an Arab sympathizer would pave the way for others to finally detect the attraction I felt to men. And when they discovered that secret, nothing would stop them from retroactively dismissing each detail of my
personality, each opinion of mine, as mere symptoms of homosexuality. I could boast of detailing more cars than any of my father's other workers; I could point at a boy in high school and laugh at his tight jeans and coiffed hair; but once it was suspected that I felt certain
urges
or thought certain thoughts, I would cease to be a man in these men's eyes, in my father's eyes.

“Well, boy?” Brother Nielson said. He leaned forward and smiled a watery smile. It seemed to require all of his strength to lift his back from the leather couch. “Cat got your tongue?”

I had prepared a lesson on Job, the unluckiest of a luckless Old Testament cast. I thought that by sticking to the script I might avoid scrutiny, the feel of the showroom's glass walls narrowing their yellow microscope light on my flagging belief, my suspect mannerisms. Now I didn't know what to say or do.

I coughed into a closed fist and looked down at my Bible. I ignored Brother Nielson's stare. “The lesson of Job is that we can never know God's intentions regarding the world,” I said. “Why do bad things happen? Why do bad things happen to good people?”

I turned to the passage, trying to will my hands to be steady. I could feel the heat of Brother Nielson's and my father's twin gazes, but I didn't look up. I flipped the pages back and forth, hoping my train of thought would return.

“Go on, boy,” Brother Nielson said. “Let the Holy Spirit work through you.”

I stared at the words until they became meaningless glyphs, until they swam across the pages. The simple declarative sentences I had prepared the night before refused to snap into place along the worn lines of reason the church had instilled in me three times every week since my first birthday.

“Job was a good man,” I said. “He didn't deserve what he got. But his friends didn't listen. They didn't . . .”

What I was trying to say seemed impossible and too complicated for words. When everything went wrong in Job's life, when he lost his wife and two children and all of his livestock to a bet between God and Satan, his friends could only think to ask him what he did wrong, why he deserved God's punishment. To them, this seemed the only explanation: Bad things happened to bad people. But what happened when good things happened to bad people or vice versa?

I looked up at the showroom entrance in time to see Chloe drive up. She wore her long hair in a ponytail, her smile interrupted by a string of braces that I had used one too many times as an excuse to put an end to our French kissing. Though women didn't usually attend the men's Bible study, Chloe was a bit of a rebel when it came to the church's separation of men's and women's roles, believing that women had just as much of a right to be church leaders as men, though she told me this in secret. Most of the women in my church, my mother included, believed that the Bible had clearly appointed men as the leaders of the church, though there were a few members who
were beginning to question this assumption. For now, though, Chloe stayed outside in her car, watching me for signs of what my father and these men hoped I might possess: the confidence of a future church leader. The patriarchal chain would travel directly from Brother Nielson to my father and finally to me.

I could feel my face glow red. I slapped the book shut and stared at my feet.

“I don't . . .”

The tile was dry now, and in the prints left behind by the men's rubber outsoles rested a skim of ultraviolet pollen. There were floors to be mopped. Outside, rows of cars would need spraying down with the pressure washer, last night's rain now dried water spots on my father's inventory.

“It's okay, son,” my father said, not looking up from his Bible. “We can do this some other day.”

My mouth was dry, my tongue a paperweight weighing down my syllables.

“I lost my train of thought,” I said, looking away, catching sight of our group's reflection in the Mustang's rear window. Our figures stretched by the convex glass, we looked like one long thin band of a gold ring, broken only by the space between my right leg and the arm of the couch.

Brother Nielson opened his Bible to another passage and cleared his throat. “That's okay,” he said. “Some of us aren't cut out for the reading of scripture.” He began to speak of the glories of Heaven and everlasting life.

•   •   •

S
ITTING
WITH
my mother and father and Chloe hours later at the Timberline, I would fume about Brother Nielson's words. I would glare at the gigantic radial saw across from our table and imagine it lifting from the curved nail that pinned it to the wall. I would imagine it splitting our town in half. That night, I would dream of Brother Nielson standing at the edge of one half of a living room that had been split down the middle, drifting gradually away from the rest of our town, his sagging boxers flapping in the wind, unable to leap across the widening gap with his tired and broken body, lost in a continental drift.

The truth was, Job's friends
hadn't
understood. Not Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar. Job lost his livestock, his wife, his two beautiful daughters—everything. A toss of the coin, and everything was gone. Only a mediator like Elihu, the youngest of Job's friends, could hint at the complexity of Job's loss.

A good family, a good house, a good car. To these men, and to me at the time, these were the necessary elements in securing decades of good luck. No matter that we now traded in cars rather than in livestock; no matter that the machinery of war, of Humvees cutting desert paths, was something we would never come to see or understand. At the end of the story, God would provide Job with a different wife, a different set of children, new livestock. Whatever happened—no matter how much we might suffer—if we had faith, God would restore it all, graft the skin back in place, mold us new bodies from our bone-tired ones.

•   •   •

L
IKE
THE
NI
GHT
BEFORE
, a thunderhead was moving across the Ozarks. “A cold front that'll break up by morning,” the weatherman had said, his Midwestern accent clipping his words before they could slide into a Southern drawl. “You'll hardly feel it,” he said, smiling, hazel eyes sparkling in the studio lights.

I lay awake in my bed, rereading Job in the hopes of finding a simple explanation for the scripture. I tried to quiet the critical part of my brain, the one that had caused me to stutter and falter during that morning's Bible study.

Sometimes it was simply the act of looking at the open Bible that gave me a sense of belonging. Sometimes opening the Bible and pressing the pages flat with my palm, adding an extra crack in the spine, brought me closer to my father. I ran my thumb down the indented tabs, pressed into the sides of the book until the words took on a heft I might carry and lift up as proof of my devotion. I closed the Bible and placed it on my nightstand.

Chloe texted me a few minutes later, the phone's vibrations pulling me out of semiconsciousness: “What's up?”

“Nothing,” I wrote, burying the clamshell phone under my pillow. I felt like smothering the vibrations until they stopped. From the moment she showed up at the dealership, Chloe had continually asked me how the Bible study had gone. I had evaded the question by mumbling a “fine” every now and then.

Because he wasn't snoring as usual, I could tell my father also lay awake. I was afraid that the storm wasn't what kept
him from sleep. The reverberating claps that shook so many households awake that night, sending deer scurrying across roads to smash into the sides of cars, were less severe than those that must have accompanied my father's own fears for his son. I listened for his praying for several minutes, wondering if he was experiencing another moment when Jesus stood over his bed and bled onto the sheets. My father claimed he was often burdened with such visions.

When he finally fell asleep, his snoring was almost loud enough to shake the gilded picture frames lining the hallway just outside my bedroom. Years before, my mother had moved to an adjacent guest bedroom, saying she needed time away from the earthquake that was my sleeping father, from the whining bedsprings accompanying each inhalation. When I was very young, seven or eight years old, I would wake from scripture-inspired nightmares—blue cones of flame licking my feet, chasm after chasm opening up out of a blackness more felt than seen—and walk the hallway to my father's bedroom to stand at the edge of his bed and wish him awake. I thought he should have understood me without the need for words, that the current between us was so free-flowing and deep he would have no choice but to wake up that instant. I would stand beside the mirrored closet and see the reflected room limned by the blue light of the television he left going all night, shaking and furious, terrified that I would have to return to my nightmares. Hours later, I would cross the hallway to my mother's bedroom to perform the same absurd ritual. But after only a
few minutes, my mother would feel me standing there and pull me beside her in the bed, moving over so I could have the warm spot.

“Love,” she would say.

“Love,” I would mumble, turning on my side, gliding my hand across the warm sheets until the scent of her lavender body lotion covered my skin.