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 [Mystery]



[Government Gay]

An Excerpt from Chapter Three of Government Gay

By Fred Hunter



[Having been visited by the feds and learned that the attack on him the night before wasn't completely random, Alex Reynolds and his Mother decide to take the day off:]

After Martin left, we went about our normal business. For us Saturday is a school day, meaning Peter has to work. Since I freelance, my time is more or less my own, so I usually try to arrange my schedule around his. Sundays and Wednesdays are our days off. He donned his gray silk suit and maroon tie. There was something comforting about spending that time with him after the excitement of the last twenty-four hours.

Like most people who work out of their homes, I try very hard to stay to a strict schedule so that I don't get slothful and spend all my time wandering around Marshall Field's, scanning everything I would buy if I had money. But I was too anxious to work, so I let Mother talk me into going to the zoo with her. I always feel guilty when I blow off work, but I didn't have any pressuring deadlines, other than a brochure I was designing for one of the smaller local professional associations, and that wasn't going to take up a lot of my time. It wasn't due for a couple of weeks, and they had such strict corporate standards that creativity didn't enter into the picture. Any residual guilt was dealt with by reminding myself that my lip still hurt. Who could work with that?

We headed out about ten. The Lincoln Park Zoo is a short walk from our townhouse, and one of the things I like to think of as a true Chicago anomaly: a fully stocked zoo in the most humanly congested area of the city. The people who live in high-rise apartment buildings for several blocks around will suddenly, in the still of the night, be woken by elephants trumpeting or lions roaring.

We started at the north end of the zoo and made our way to the center, where all the concessions are located. It is also the site of the seal pool. The front of the pool has a large brass railing along which you can stand to watch the seals at play; the back has several tiers of seats where you can rest while you watch. We decided to stand by the rail. As we watched the seals, I ate a cup of something called "frozen lemonade." We'd been there several minutes when I spotted him. He was wearing a low-class corduroy version of what they used to call a driving cap, and a short coat that was much too heavy for the warm summer day. he looked like an over aged Bowery Boy. I almost dropped the cup and I was glad I didn't because I didn't want to draw attention to myself, although I figured that he had to have followed us: I couldn't believe that he'd just by chance decided to take a day off from spying and spend it at the zoo. It then occurred to me that if he'd followed us here, he knew where we lived.

Without turning my head, my eyes still on the seals, I said to Mother, "My God, don't look!"

Her head immediately swiveled around to me, and she said, "What are you talking about?"

"He's here!"

"Who?" she said, looking this way and that.

"Stop that!" I said to her, more sharply than I would usually talk to my mother because...well, she's my mother. "I don't want him to know we've seen him!"

"We haven't seen him," she said evenly. "Who on earth are you talking about?"

"One of the clay people is here!"

Mother did what they call in the movies a "slow take," and said, "Hmmm?"

"One of the thugs that attacked me last night!"

I was still spooning the lemonade stuff into my mouth, at intervals so regular I must have looked like an autistic with an eating disorder. Mother's hands clenched the railing, and the muscles in her arms tightened. I knew if I wasn't careful, she would bolt up to where he was and confront him.

"Where?" she demanded.

"You're not going to do anything," I said with carefully measured calm. "I don't want him to know we've spotted him."

"Where?" she said again.

"In the bleachers. Far right side. Last row. Corduroy cap."

Mother lowered her head and rolled her eyes upward, so that she would appear to be looking down when in reality she was looking up. The short clay person was perched on the bench I'd indicated. He appeared to be staring down at nothing in particular in the pool. Mother let out a "hmmph."

"I wonder where the other one is," I whispered.

Mother said, "I don't like the idea of someone with a following us around."

She has a natural gift for understatement.

"Well," I said slowly, in order to give her the impression that I was actually giving my next idea some serious consideration, "I know this will sound nuts, but maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe we just decided to come to the zoo on the same day."

Mother looked down her fine English nose at me and said, "Pah!"

"It could be," I protested.

Mother gave the man in the bleachers a brief, cunning glance, then quickly surveyed the area.

"Well, there's one way to find out," she said.

I had that sudden sinking feeling that Ethel Mertz used to exhibit whenever Lucy uttered those fateful words, "I've got an idea."

"You know," I said, "his partner has to be somewhere. I wonder if he's watching us from somewhere else."

"Let's go," she said, a cunning smile on her face.

I tried to use my almost nonexistent peripheral vision to see whether or not the man was noticing our departure, but I couldn't tell. We rounded the left side of the seal enclosure, passing around the back. The area behind the bleachers was a short sloping hill, which, under the present circumstances, reminded me of the now infamous grassy knoll in Dallas. I could just see the top of the clay person's head over the crest of the hill. He hadn't turned to watch us.

We made a leisurely beeline for the lion house, which has an entrance just across from the seals. Once inside, Mother said, "Let's go," again, this time in a more purposeful voice. We swept through the lion house, which was almost devoid of visitors since most of the cats were enjoying the hot weather in their outside cages. We got to the other entrance, and Mother stopped just inside the doorway, hiding by a post. I stood barely concealed behind another post on the opposite side. We watched the other doors across the wide expanse of the room. The footsteps of the few visitors who ventured in to visit the gift shop echoed loudly off the white-tiled floor. We watched for so long that we were beginning to think we'd been wrong.

Mother cocked her head toward the outer door, indicating it was time to leave. At that moment a figure appeared in the doorway on the other side of the lion house. From that distance, backlit by the bright summer sunlight, it was difficult at first to even discern if the figure was a man or a woman. It came slowly into the room, and as it passed through the doorway, there was that strange effect of sunlight passing >from around it, like the parting of a celestial Red Sea, and the man emerged in full view. His eyes swept the room, and he looked a little unsure. Then he seemed to hear voices from the gift shop, and slowly made his way to a cage opposite the shop, where he stopped. I knew what he was doing: he thought perhaps we'd gone into the shop, and he as pretending to watch the contents of the cage until the people emerged, to make sure he hadn't lost us.

But that was all it took to convince my mother and me that we were, indeed, being followed: he was staring into an empty cage. Mother glanced at me, I nodded, and we left through the back entrance. We paused for a moment just outside the door to adjust to the bright light, and I heard footsteps, walking with a determined step toward the exit through which we'd just passed. Mother motioned for us to head south.

We veered through the masses of weekend zoo-goers, all in floral shirts and shorts, various kinds of sunglasses, and many dragging children behind them or pushing children ahead of them in strollers and carriages. This was my idea of what hell would be like: doomed for eternity to try to fight my way through an endless strollerthon of squalling brats and screaming parents.

"My God, he is after us," I said without looking back.

"Don't worry, I know what to do," said Mother.

I'm sure that, for most people, hearing those words from one's mother would be comforting and reassuring. Now I felt like Ethel Mertz on drugs.

We continued south, not bothering to make it look leisurely anymore, and Mother headed straight for the primate house. We hurried inside and found the exhibit, as usual, very hot, crammed with people and fetid animal smells. Mother quickly led me up the ramp to the second level, stopping just at the space where the second level is cut off from the first. A few of the other visitors were a bit more curious about my mother than the apes: she stayed crouched, peeking around the corner at the top of the ramp, watching the front door. After a few moments the clay man came in, his eyes darting around. He hesitated in the doorway as if unsure which way to go, or whether to go at all. Fortunately for us, he started into the crowd on the first floor, his progress impeded by the masses and strollers. We waited a few moments for him to get far enough around the curve to be out of sight, then hurried back down the ramp to the muffled protestations of the people trying to get in.

When I said that it was fortunate for us that he went into the exhibit, I didn't mean because he chose the first floor: I mean because apparently he didn't know that the exhibit was circular and that the only exit came back around to the front. If he had simply stayed by the doors, we would have been trapped.

We hurried out through the door with Mother in the lead, much to the consternation of an overweight, spandex-clad woman who was toting a baby in the crook of her arm. The baby's legs were resting on the woman's protruding stomach, and she looked as if she found her position precarious enough without being jostled by a fugitive mother and son.

We kept up a brisk pace to the south entrance of the zoo: a small gate that stands sideways, facing west, so it's not entirely visible as you walk south. If you didn't know the zoo well, you could easily miss this entrance until you were right on top of it. We hurried across the park and grabbed a cab heading north on Stockton, the curvy street that winds through Lincoln Park, lunged in, and gave the driver our address.

I knew I was going to have to reassess my vision of Mother and me as Lucy and Ethel: her plan had worked.

Copyright © l997, Fred Hunter.



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