The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [44]
“Don’t be retarded. And don’t call yourself that,” Jeremy said.
“What?”
“That word.”
“What word?”
“The one you used. Anyway, dummy, you’re not gay.” Jeremy said this through a mouthful of food. “Not this week.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m not discussing this. This is ridiculous. Please pass the meatloaf.”
“I’m as queer as a three-dollar bill.”
“You can’t decide things like that. Come back when you start dating guys, and we’ll talk.” Great quantities of meatloaf were shoveled onto Jeremy’s plate and quickly disappeared into his mouth. I reminded myself that I should issue instructions to him now and then to chew. But he’s getting too old for that. Next year he’ll be out of the house. You can’t order a seventeen-year-old boy to chew his food.
“Me and my queer friends are gonna do something big,” Michael announced. Then he lifted his boyish fist. “Power to the queer nation.”
“‘My queer friends and I,’” Laura corrected him, with a weariness close to Jeremy’s.
“Hey, you’re queer, too, Mom?” Michael asked, seeing his advantage. “I never knew that.”
Changing the subject, my wife inquired, “How was school today?”
“It was a scene of unparalleled horror,” Michael told her. “This kid threw up in class.”
So much for that. Usually Laura and I let Jeremy be the spokesperson for worldliness when confronted with Michael’s latest idea and his latest expression, such as “a scene of unparalleled horror,” which, these last few days, he has employed every ten minutes.
“How’s German class?”
Michael pointed at the nearly empty serving tray. “Ich muß meine meatloaf haben, bitte.”
After going through a phase when he claimed that he would “convert” to African-Americanism, Michael tried to pass himself off as a Communist. “Property is theft,” he informed us one night over the tuna-noodle casserole. He was then just barely ten years old. His brother sighed his practiced sigh and asked him if he planned to start a career in shoplifting. Six months later Michael announced that he would grow up to be a Mormon missionary. Mormonism! Where had that come from? Had we heard, he asked us one afternoon, that he would soon leave for Mozambique on a mission? He would have to learn Swahili, or whatever they spoke in that faraway nation, and he would have to do it right away. Jeremy asked him his opinions about Joseph Smith, and Michael said, “Who?” I used to catch Michael reading the encyclopedia—a dangerous hobby with a kid like that. So is surfing the Web. Weird ideas are out there for the picking: he is convinced, for example, that if you turn your TV set to a blank static channel, the dead will find a way to send you a message through the ambient snow on the screen, or through the white noise on the speakers. I have seen him sitting patiently next to the TV set, tuned, he claimed, to the Dead Channel.
Some of his interests, his habits of mind, can probably be credited to me. When he was about six years old, I was delegated—Laura ordered me—to go up to his bedroom and tell him a bedtime story. I climbed the stairs and in the dim light began a tale of Heroic Henry. This fellow had been born an orphan in a cabbage field but had been trained by a wizard in bravery, guile, and fighting skills. In the first story, Heroic Henry fights back an army of killer gnomes threatening the village. The villagers reward him with a beautiful house and bride. Then, somewhat abruptly, because I had grown a bit sleepy myself, Heroic Henry dies.
“He dies?” Michael asked, disbelieving, sitting up in bed.
I nodded. Tears threatened to appear on my son’s face.
“He can’t die!” Michael told me.
“Well,” I said, “he does. I’m sorry, but that’s what happened.” I kissed him good night and, after waiting for him to calm down a bit, went back downstairs.
The next night I told another story about Heroic Henry. In this