We didn’t get far before he messed up my vow. Crossing over the river into Oregon, he said, “Say goodbye to the SayWA State.”
I looked to see if the Oregon welcome sign was the same as the old, shot-up one we’d seen the day before. At the end of the bridge the sign said WELCOME TO OREGON—WE LOVE DREAMERS. If I hadn’t been so miserable I would’ve laughed my guts out.
Ruah passed the entrance to the interstate and drove toward a town.
“Where we going?”
“To the thing I wanna show you.”
We parked in front of a drugstore. I followed him inside, and he stopped in an aisle. “See the magazines?”
At the end of the aisle was a wall of magazines. “Yeah.”
“I want you to do a little experiment.” He took a can of Old Spice shaving cream off the shelf. “Go find the magazine covers with half-naked people on ’em. They’ll be girls and guys. Open one of each, look at the pictures, and see which ones throw your switch.”
I felt my cheeks turn red as the Old Spice can. “You’re kidding.”
“That’s the deal.” He kept studying the can. “You wanna ride to Portland, you gotta see what throws your switch.”
I went over to the magazine rack, found a girlie magazine, and opened it. The naked woman staring back at me threw my switch right away. I turned a few more pages. The women made Victoria’s Secret models look like nuns in skimpy habits. Then I took down a magazine with an oily muscleman on the cover and flipped it open. What stared back at me gave me a major case of chung. I shut the magazine and turned around. Ruah was gone.
I went outside. He was in the camper.
Driving to the interstate, he said, “Did your body tell you something?”
“Yeah.”
“For sure, for sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
There was a long pause. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t asking me what. “You don’t wanna know?”
He lowered his shades over his eyes with a slight smile. “I’m all ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ remember? Besides, I thought you didn’t wanna talk.”
But I did. I wanted to do more than talk. I wanted to shout out the window. Hey, everybody, I passed the crotch test! I like girls! I’m not queer! I didn’t, of course. It would’ve been rude, considering Ruah. I also didn’t because I still didn’t get why I’d trampolined off the gay cliff. I just said, “I’m straight.”
He nodded. “Congratulations. That’s gotta be a demon off your back.”
A laugh jumped out of me.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” I said.
“Yes and no what?”
“Yeah, it’s a demon off my back, and no, it’s not, because last night I was sure it was God’s will for me to be gay. I’m a little confused about God right now.”
His forehead wrinkled. “I was wondering about that. I mean, it’s one thing to be horny and do something crazy. It’s another thing to think T.L.’s the one pulling your strings.” There was a long pause, then he asked, “Ever heard of walking back the cat?”
“No.”
“It’s from the spy business. When something bad goes down—like a cat killing a mouse—you walk the cat backward to figure out how it happened.” He looked over. “Someday, not necessarily today, you should walk back the cat on last night.”
I thought about it and realized today was as good as any. I mean, who else was I going to walk back the cat with? Mom? Case and the R-boys? Yeah, right. So I started telling him about the signs God had thrown me that made me think I was gay.
I told him about kissing Spring, and not liking her glow-in-the-dark boobs. He said anyone might be turned off by that. “When you kiss a girl, wanna make love to her, and her tits turn out to be bright enough to read by, that’s usually a deal breaker.” After I stopped laughing, he said, “Don’t tell me you thought you were gay because of one encounter with Martian boobs.”
“No.” I wanted to tell him about the dream, but I couldn’t. I skipped that and cut to the chase. “The Bible made me do it.”
“The Bible made you do it?”
I told him about my providence check, and how God guided my finger to the verse in Job about me being born to trouble.
He shook his head in disbelief. “I’m not sure poking your finger in the Bible to see if you’re straight or gay is a good idea. It’s the Good Book, but it’s not that good.”
I was debating whether to tell him about the dream or not, when he started chuckling. “I mean, if everyone decided sexual orientation by the finger-in-a-book test, imagine what would happen if someone didn’t have a Bible around for their moment of truth. What if some kid who only had The Polar Express, poked his finger in it and discovered God wanted him to be a Santa-sexual? Or if someone stuck their finger in Moby-Dick and decided they were a whale-sexual? And what if, God forbid, someone opened their favorite cookbook? There’d be some miserable guy out there convinced he was an eggbeater-sexual.”
I knew he was having fun and trying to make me laugh—and I did a little—but it made me realize that the only way he was going to understand why I did what I did was to tell him about the dream. If I was going to walk back the cat, I couldn’t lift the cat over that one.
After I told him, he thought about it for a while. “I’m no shrink or dreamworker,” he said, “but it sounds to me like your dream confirms it.”
“Confirms what?”
“That you’re no different than any other teenage boy: you think everything is about sex. But maybe your dream wasn’t about sex at all. Maybe you’re confusing sex with intimacy.”
“I don’t get it.”
“In your dream, you said it felt natural to put your arm around me, and I said, ‘This feels nice.’ Maybe that’s all it was. Maybe your dream was asking, ‘What do you want your relationship with Ruah Branch to be?’ And the answer was simply, ‘Close buddies.’ ”
“But we were in a motel in the same bed.”
“We’ve been in the same camper for a week, sleeping five feet away from each other. That doesn’t make anyone lovers.” He shook his head. “I hate to disappoint you, Billy, but I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure you’re straight. If you doubt it just give yourself another test. Next time you walk down the street, ask yourself who you imagine naked, the women or the men.”
“It’s that simple?”
He laughed. “For guys, pretty much. We’re pretty dumb that way. Of course, I’m talking about sex, not love. Love’s a whole different ball game. And for God’s sake, don’t spend the rest of your life beating yourself up over last night. People get loopy and do crazy things. When you’re young, experimentation with the big three—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—sometimes just gets down to the company you keep. Hell, if you’d traveled two thousand miles with a whale-sexual, you might’ve gotten to Portland, forgotten your father’s treasure, and headed straight to the water for some whale watching.”
“You keep talking about whale-sexuals,” I said with a smirk. “Are you saying you’re one of those, too?”
He laughed. “No, I’m not bi. But I do believe every man and woman walking the earth has it in ’em to be a zigzag-sexual.”
“A zigzag-sexual? Is that something you learn in health class?”
Ruah grinned. “You’ll only hear it from me. It’s one of my dumb theories.”
“And I suppose it comes with the all-the-way-to-Portland travel package?”
“No, this one’s an extra. You see, hard-core straights say God makes everyone straight, and that gays are sick and need to be cured. Hard-core gays say we’re all hardwired to be straight or gay and being either is our ‘sexual orientation.’ What if they’re both wrong? What if the sexual urge is like any other human appetite: it can change over a lifetime? I mean, if a little kid who despises eating his vegetables grows up to be a full-on vegan, then you have to say his ‘vegetable orientation’ has changed. When it comes to the appetite for sex and intimacy, I don’t think it’s much different. Appetites change. So if we’re made in God’s image, and He is a zigzag God, then we’re capable of zigging and zagging right along with Him.”
I heard what he was saying, but I had zigzagged to other things. My eyes were seeing the morning sun bouncing off the Columbia River. My head was filled with a parade of pretty dresses moving along a street. And my imagination was doing whoop-de-doos on the mounds and curves underneath them.