“You’re in a great trial,” he said before I could even begin. I looked away. “It’s all over your face, kid. Lay it on me.”
“I fear for Eli’s soul.”
“You’ve got a real atavistic diction, you know that?”
“I’d call it nostalgic.”
“Potato, po-tah-to.”
He kept his boots clean, kept his jeans clean, despite not being shy with the dirt. It was a simple trick, but quite comforting, as was his cowboy-gospel mien, which, casual though it was, was rooted in a deep and abiding faith. I tried not to sound nostalgic and instead sounded only like a child.
“He’s up to something bad.”
Pastor Dale held up his palm to try to stop me.
“Something very bad. And I’ve known for weeks, and I’ve tried to stop it.”
He raised his hand two inches, and I stopped.
“Who is his spiritual leader?” he said. “Has Eli been named one of your sheep? Who hears his confession weekly? Your concern is good hearted, but look first to the beam in your own eye.”
“But he’s failed to confess this, or you wouldn’t take it so lightly.”
“If his confessions are partial that’s a matter for me. Mostly for him, really. A little for me. Trust in me. Trust in the Lord. He expects his sheep to return to him. He does not expect them never to stray, for who knows their nature better than Him?”
He waited to see if I had further objections. He clearly did not welcome them.
“Cheer up, kid,” he said, spurring Lancelot, and I had no choice but to either chase after him or let him go.
With effort I could mind his counsels during the day. But for a week I had trouble sleeping. With my eyes closed, the theater of my mind flashed only to the scene of Hugo’s buttocks saddled on his heels, of his head doing that thing to Eli, of Eli’s long body arching backwards and his face the face of his possession. And then in the darkness of the bunkroom I would lose track of whether my eyes were closed at all. After a week of this torment, which I suspected was the prompting of God to do what must be done, I took my knife from my footlocker, unfolded it silently, and padded silently across the room to Hugo’s bed. I scraped the knife twice against the skin of his neck as if shaving him, just enough to leave an abrasion and see if he would wake. When his eyelids fluttered open, I pressed the flat of the blade into his lips, and I whispered to him, perhaps I hissed, “Agents of the Devil cannot abide in holy places. You must cast yourself out or be cast out. Your Master is nothing compared to ours. Your faith is small compared to ours, and ours will not flinch. You must leave tomorrow. You are exiled from the lands of the Lord.”
His eyes were wide with awe and terror. They seemed to glow in the dark. Knowing that I would be unable to sleep after this encounter, I walked out into the frigid night air, but my body felt no cold.
ELI
I’ve never been a light sleeper, so I chalk it up to providence that I woke that night. A rustling sound repeated across the bunkroom that was not quite the wind, not quite a squirrel on the roof. My eyes adjusted, and I thought I saw Hugo standing up next to his bed, but as I strained to see in his posture hints of what was troubling him, it became clear that the height and the build and the carriage were not his. I crept closer and saw that the exposed flat buttocks, matte gray in the scant light, were certainly not his. The pauper’s haircut, the military stance—Wesley Denniston.
As soon as I got an angle enough to see Wesley stroking his erection and prodding Hugo’s sleeping lips with it, my concern for stealth disappeared, and I wrapped my fists in his shirt and lifted him off the floor, hearing the fabric at his armpits rip. He went rigid, locking his wide white eyes on mine as I shouldered open the door and carried him out into the yard and threw him in a horse trough. His limbs came unlocked when he landed in the frigid water, churning a storm out of it. I thought of helping him get out, but decided against it.
Back inside, once my eyes had adjusted back out of the starlight, I saw that a few of the students were sitting up and looking at me quizzically, sleepily. “Coyote,” I said. They nodded and lay back down. After crawling back into my bed I couldn’t sleep, keeping sentinel watch over Hugo, prepared for Wesley to return with more drastic intentions. He didn’t return at all, though, and I was kept up the rest of the night by the worry that I’d killed him. It was October now. The lows were in the 40s.
I went out in the morning to look for him, while the other students were just rising. He was fast asleep in the barn. He’d hung out his wet clothes, curled up with Columbia, and covered himself with hay. He showed up at breakfast as if nothing had happened.
WESLEY
Hugo did not heed my warning. He and Eli shifted their trysts to some other nook I was unable to discover, but their sly public glances and sensitive friendship went on undeterred. This time I did not hesitate. After allowing two days for him to leave our midst, I snuck away from my planting detail and packed his bags in the bunkroom. I grabbed the pickup keys from the office, threw his bags in the cab, and watched him all day until he ambled back alone through the already bare stone fruit trees. Just as he was turning to head out of the treeline, I roped him by the ankle, and he fell flat on his face. By the time he rolled over I had a sock stuffed in his mouth and a handkerchief between his teeth to tie it in place. Kneeling on his shoulders, I socked him twice to stop him struggling, and when he went gentle I tied his wrists together between his legs and back out around his waist. Then I tied his ankles together and looped it to the other rope. Hoisting him onto the tailgate, I looped his tethers with bungee cords to the hooks in the bed of the truck.
“If you jump out you’ll get dragged to death,” I told him. “You stay calm, and I’ll keep the ride gentle.”
Nonetheless he kept hooking his feet on the bed the whole way, trying to jimmy his hips onto the edge, and I kept having to take hard turns to shake him back into the box. The roads out there all looked like they led to nowhere. I didn’t mind him thinking maybe he was on his way to get buried. Forcing him out would obviously take more fear than I’d delivered thus far. I didn’t want him to think me incapable of it, and at the same time I struggled not to believe myself capable of it.
No one was about in Ridgecrest. It was the dominion of dust. A bus that would stop here despite the dearth of passengers seemed an idea from the realm of myth or fable, and I bought his ticket half believing that the driver would lose heart and retire before he ever made it to the station. Nonetheless, I spent the time before its scheduled arrival in the bed of the truck with Hugo, explaining to him the stakes of the situation.
“I know the Devil will draw you back to Eli like a magnet,” I said, “so I will be the other pole of the magnet, repulsing you. I will kill a thing you love each time you return.”
His eyes were defiant, but when the miracle bus arrived, I cut the ropes and slipped the ticket to Denver by way of Barstow into his pocket. I left the knife open and loose in my palm, and he got on the bus without complaint. He watched me the whole time with the Devil’s eyes, but I watched him right back with the eyes of the Holy Spirit and I saw, I thought I saw, the spirit in him quell.
ELI
I loved perhaps nothing more about Hugo than his tenderness to animals, but I also wanted to teach him the danger of loving things this way, of loving animals raised for stock or bred for labor. I taught that lesson only to myself. Hugo disappeared from campus. The police weren’t interested. He was young. He’d taken his things. They took my suspicions of Wesley to be a silly grudge.