He had been groped before, certainly - in movie theaters, mostly, but there had been the men's-shop clerk in North Hollywood who had cheerfully offered to blow him in a changing booth (and when Jack told him no thanks, the clerk said, 'Fine, now try on the blue blazer, okay?').
These were annoyances a good-looking twelve-year-old boy in Los Angeles simply learned to put up with, the way a pretty woman learns to put up with being groped occasionally on the subway. You eventually find a way to cope without letting it spoil your whole day. The deliberate passes, such as the one this Ferguson was making, were less of a problem than the sudden gropes from ambush. They could simply be shunted aside.
At least in California they could. Eastern g*ys - especially out here in the sticks - apparently had a different way of dealing with rejection.
Ferguson had come to a screeching, sliding halt, leaving forty yards of rubber behind his Pontiac and throwing a cloud of shoulder-dust into the air.
'Who you calling D.C.?' he screamed. 'Who you calling queer? I'm not queer! Jesus! Give a kid a f**king ride and he calls you a f**king queer!'
Jack was looking at him, dazed. Unprepared for the sudden stop, he had thumped his head a damned good one on the padded dash. Ferguson, who had only a moment before been looking at him with melting brown eyes, now looked ready to kill him.
'Get out!' Ferguson yelled. 'You're the queer, not me! You're the queer! Get out, you little queerboy! Get out! I've got a wife! I've got kids! I've probably got bastards scattered all over New England! I'm not queer! You're the queer, not me, SO GET OUT OF MY CAR!'
More terrified than he had been since his encounter with Osmond, Jack had done just that. Ferguson tore out, spraying him with gravel, still raving. Jack staggered over to a rock wall, sat down, and began to giggle. The giggles became shrieks of laughter, and he decided right then and there that he would have to develop A POLICY, at least until he got out of the boondocks. 'Any serious problem demands A POLICY,' his father had said once. Morgan had agreed vigorously, but Jack decided he shouldn't let that hold him back.
His POLICY had worked well enough with Bob Darrent, and he had no reason to believe it wouldn't also work with Emory Light . . . but in the meantime he was cold and his nose was running. He wished Light would head em up and move em out. Standing in the trees, Jack could see him down there, walking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, his large bald head gleaming mellowly under the white-out sky. On the turnpike, big semis droned by, filling the air with the stink of burned diesel fuel. The woods here were trashed-out, the way the woods bordering any interstate rest area always were. Empty Dorito bags. Squashed Big Mac boxes. Crimped Pepsi and Budweiser cans with pop-tops that rattled inside if you kicked them. Smashed bottles of Wild Irish Rose and Five O'Clock gin. A pair of shredded nylon panties over there, with a mouldering sanitary napkin still glued to the crotch. A rubber poked over a broken branch. Plenty of nifty stuff, all right, hey-hey. And lots of graffiti jotted on the walls of the men's room, almost all of it the sort a fellow like Emory W. Light could really relate to: I LIKE TO SUK BIG FAT COX. BE HERE AT 4 FOR THE BEST BLOJOB YOU EVER HAD. REEM OUT MY BUTT. And here was a g*y poet with large aspirations: LET THE HOLE HUMAN RACE/JERK OFF ON MY SMILING FACE.
I'm homesick for the Territories, Jack thought, and there was no surprise at all in the realization. Here he stood behind two brick outhouses off I-70 somewhere in western Ohio, shivering in a ragged sweater he had bought in a thrift store for a buck and a half, waiting for that large bald man down there to get back on his horse and ride.
Jack's POLICY was simplicity itself: don't antagonize a man with large bald hands and a large bald voice.
Jack sighed with relief. Now it was starting to work. An expression that was half-anger, half-disgust, had settled over Emory W. Light's large bald face. He went back to his car, got in, backed up so fast he almost hit the pick-up truck passing behind him (there was a brief blare of horns and the passenger in the truck shot Emory W. Light the finger), and then left.
Now it was only a matter of standing on the ramp where the rest-area traffic rejoined the turnpike traffic with his thumb out . . . and, he hoped, catching a ride before it started to rain.
Jack spared another look around. Ugly, wretched. These words came quite naturally to mind as he looked around at the littery desolation here on the rest area's pimply backside. It occurred to Jack that there was a feeling of death here - not just at this rest area or on the interstate roads but pressed deep into all the country he had travelled. Jack thought that sometimes he could even see it, a desperate shade of hot dark brown, like the exhaust from the shortstack of a fast-moving Jimmy-Pete.
The new homesickness came back - the wanting to go to the Territories and see that dark blue sky, the slight curve at the edge of the horizon
But it plays those Jerry Bledsoe changes.