William Bernhardt - Hate Crime

“Go-to-hell!” Charlie brought his fists up under the man’s chin and ran, ran as fast as he could manage in his too-tight jeans. He was almost a mile away before he checked to see if the gardener was following him.

He was alone.

Jesus Christ, what a day. And for what? Fifty frigging dollars? Fifty-five, technically.

He ran his hands through his hair, trying to catch his breath. The sudden shock had reminded him of how vulnerable he was. This was life and death, and he wasn’t talking about the sex pervert gardener, either. He knew he was being hunted, just like a fox at an English country house. He could run and run and run, but eventually, like all foxes, he would be caught. His only chance was to get himself out of the race.

Before it was too late. Like it was for Manny. And Tony Barovick.

“Who are we?” shouted the man at the front of the small auditorium.

“We are the Minutemen,” came the thunderous response.

“What is our job?”

“To sound the alarm.”

“Where is the danger?”

“Here, now, all around us.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“We will fight!”

Loving rubbed his weary brow. This had been going on for half an hour, and he’d had about as much of it as he could take.

He’d read somewhere-maybe in a Reader’s Digest article in a dentist’s office-that insanity could be contagious, and he supposed it must be true. And he was enduring this for what-this case? Not exactly his favorite. He’d almost been proud of the Skipper when he’d declined to take on Johnny Christensen. It certainly looked like the sort of loser Ben would jump at. But he’d said no, and Loving realized they’d dodged a major-league bullet. Until Christina caught it and inserted it in their collective hearts.

He was sure there was some reason why he should care whether the pig who’d beat the hell out of that poor college kid got the death penalty or not, but he was having a hard time figuring out what it was. He didn’t know where a kid like that could come from-so full of hate, so ready to act on it, at the expense of others. But now that he’d sat through this Christian Minutemen crap, he was beginning to think it was a miracle there weren’t more like him.

As near as Loving could tell, the Christian Minutemen were the product of some sort of weird crossbreeding experiment between the Promise Keepers and the Moral Majority. All of the members appeared to be men, most of them young, most of them from a lower tax bracket, or with roots in one. His kind of people, Loving would normally think, but after listening to some of the drivel he’d had to put up with since he’d showed up at the YMCA tonight, he wasn’t so sure. He gathered that the organization normally encompassed a wide variety of social and political issues, but tonight, not too surprisingly, the only topic was homosexuality.

“They sayyyyy that it’s just a different lifestyle,” the speaker on the stage intoned, with all the fervor of a Baptist preacher which, as it turned out, he was. “They sayyyyy they can’t help themselves. That’s just the way they are. They have no choice. But do we believe they have no choice?”

“No, sir!” the crowd shouted back.

“That’s right. Our Savior blessed each of us with the right to choose. Since the serpent came into the Garden of Eden, our Lord has given us the chance to choose between a life of sin or a life of Godliness. God does not create sinners. Sinners create sinners.”

“A-men!”

“Amen, indeed, brothers. Make no mistake about it, permissive homosexuality is the last and greatest portent of the end of civilization as we know it. It brought down ancient Greece. It brought down Rome, the greatest empire the world had ever seen. And it will bring down this great nation as well-if we let it. Are we going to let it?”

“No, sir!”

He paced back and forth across the stage, working the crowd, acting as a conduit for the energy bubbling up in the room.”I’m glad to hear it, my brethren. Because the time for action has come. This is the day when we must all stand up and be counted. This is the day when we must all be willing to fight!”

In a notebook hidden in his lap, Loving made notes. He recognized several of the men in attendance as members of Johnny Christensen’s fraternity, Beta Theta Whatever. That didn’t surprise him. He knew there was a close relationship between the two; that was what had brought him here tonight. Apparently the frat president was high in the Minutemen hierarchy, and there were links at the national level as well.

One of the frat boys, a shortish, sandy-haired kid named Gary Scholes, caught Loving’s interest. Not just because he belonged to the club. And not just because Loving knew the kid’s name was on the prosecutor’s witness list, although that was certainly a point of interest. But mostly because he looked as if he really didn’t want to be here. Most of the others were eating it up, chanting back, playing the parts of true believers. But not Scholes. He was much more sedate. Something was bothering him.

And Loving really wanted to know what that was.

Less than ten minutes later, he saw Scholes make an unobtrusive exit. Loving decided to follow. He was happy to have an excuse to escape this chanting. And he had a hunch there was a lot more cheese down Gary Scholes’s tunnel.

Loving was not surprised to learn that ANGER-the militant gay rights group-held its meetings in the parish hall at St. Crispin’s. He had been told this Episcopal church was generally considered one of the most liberal in the greater Chicago area. What did surprise him was that he had trailed Gary Scholes all the way from the Christian Minutemen meeting to this one.

It only took about two seconds to realize that this was a group that would probably not have been welcome at the YMCA. ANGER was well named, because Loving had rarely seen so much of it packed together in one room. Good thing he didn’t subscribe to any of the stereotypes of gay men as weak and effeminate, because this visit would’ve seriously disillusioned him. Most of these hotheads were ready to start a revolution-World War III, if necessary.

Loving wandered around the room, making small talk, drawing people out, starting conversations on any topic other than the one he wanted to know about. In his experience, conversations like these-he liked to call them “unofficial interrogations”-went better if the subjects had no suspicions that he was interested in a delicate subject. So he tried to find a neutral topic that they were comfortable with, maybe even eager to talk about-their children, last night’s ball game, their dog. Dogs were best. If he could get people talking about their dogs, he could own them.

As the meeting was called to order, everyone took a seat in the folding chairs arranged in the center of the room. The arrangement was deliberately nonhierarchal. The chairs were placed in a circle; leadership was all but invisible.

Scholes was sitting next to a stout Latino named Jesus Menendez who, according to the scuttlebutt Loving had managed to gather, was thought to have been the best friend of Paul Allen Metheny-the man who had stolen the bailiff’s gun and shot Brett Mathers.

“If we let this happen once, it’ll recur a thousand times,” one of the men in attendance said.

“They’ve hit us-hard,” said Menendez, who Loving thought was the leader. “We have to strike back. Not just against the friends and family and lawyers. Against the hatemongers themselves!”

This sort of dialogue continued for a good long while. There was a time, it occurred to Loving, when sitting in a room with three dozen guys, all of whom were probably gay, might’ve bothered him. But he liked to think he was past that. He didn’t much care what people did with each other anymore, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone. He tried to stay out of people’s business, and hoped others would show him the same courtesy. Problem was-sometimes they didn’t.