The Book of Skulls

chapter nineteen Oliver

Maybe I did make too much fuss over picking up that hitchhiker. I don’t know. The whole episode puzzles me. Usually my motives for anything are clear, right out on the surface, but not this time. I was really shouting and rampaging at Ned. Why? Eli chewed me out for it afterward, saying that I had no business interfering with Ned’s freely taken decision to offer help to another human being. Ned was driving; he was in charge. Even Timothy, who backed me up when it happened, told me later that he thought I’d overreacted to the situation. The only one who didn’t say anything in the evening was Ned; but I knew Ned was burning about it.

Why did I do it, I wonder? I couldn’t have been in that much of a hurry to get to the skullhouse. Even if the hitchhiker had taken us fifteen minutes out of our way, so what? Throw a fit over fifteen minutes, with all of eternity ahead? It wasn’t the waste of time that was bugging me. It wasn’t that garbage about Charles Manson, either. It was something deeper, that I know.

I had this flash of intuition just as Ned was slowing down to offer the hippie a ride. The hippie is a fag, I thought. In just those words. The hippie is a fag. Ned has spotted him, I told myself; using the ESP that his kind seems to have, Ned has spotted him right on the highway, and Ned’s going to pick him up and bring him to the motel tonight. I have to be honest with myself. That was what I thought. Accompanied by an image of Ned and the hitchhiker in bed together, kissing, gasping, rolling around, fingering each other, doing whatever it is that homos like to do. I didn’t have any reason for suspecting stuff like that. The hippie was just a hippie, like five million others: barefoot, long messy hair, furry vest, tie-dyed jeans. Why did I think he was a fag? And even if he was a fag, so what? Didn’t Timothy and I pick up girls in New York and Chicago? Why shouldn’t Ned get some action of the kind he prefers? What do I have against homosexuals? One of my own roommates is one, isn’t he? One of my closest friends? I knew what Ned was when he moved in with us. I didn’t care, so long as he didn’t make passes at me. I liked Ned for himself, I didn’t give a shit about his sexual preferences. So why this sudden bigotry on the highway? Think about it some, Oliver. Think.

Maybe you were jealous. Eh? What about that possibility, Oliver? Maybe you didn’t want Ned carrying on with somebody else? Would you care to examine that notion for a little while?

All right. I know he’s interested in me. He always has been. That puppydog look in his eyes when he looks at me, that dreamy wistfulness — I know what that means. Not that Ned’s ever approached me. He’s afraid to, afraid to explode a pretty useful friendship by stepping across the line. But even so, the desire’s there. Was I a dog in the manger, then, not giving Ned what he wants from me but not letting him get it from that hippie, either? What a tangled mess this is. But I have to sort everything out. My anger when Ned slowed the car. The shouting. The hysteria. Obviously something was being triggered in me. I’ve got to think some more about this. I’ve got to get it together. This frightens me. I’m likely to find out something about myself that I don’t want to know.