Baptism in Blood(107)

“I don’t think anyone here is homophobic,” Henry put in. “I don’t think anybody here is afraid of homosexu­ality. I think a good many of us abominate it, but that’s a different thing.”

You could feel it in the room then, the sea change, the shift. Up until the time that Henry had said his little piece about homophobia, everything had still been basically all right. People were listening to Naomi and Betsey talk, but not taking them very seriously. People were nibbling away at sandwiches and sipping at coffee and thinking about home. Henry’s voice seemed to boom out over all of them. It sounded too loud even to him. The words seemed to hang in the air after they had been said, drops of water threaten­ing to become rain.

“Shit,” the reporter sitting at Henry’s side said. “I can’t stand this anymore. This is total crap.”

Henry had no idea what the young man was talking about: Bellerton? the murders? this diner? God? It wasn’t logic but emotion that swung Henry around on his stool. He had spent the day without feeling much of anything at all. Now it was all coming up in him, like bile rising in his throat, and he was furious.

“I do not understand,” he said, feeling the blood pounding under his skull, “what it is about being the resi­dent of some big city that makes it impossible to respect other people and their beliefs instead of—”

“I know who that is,” somebody else in the room said. “That’s the preacher. The one who had the cross up at the camp when that woman’s body was found. The one who’s always talking about the devil.”

“How can you talk about respecting people?” the woman who had spoken before said. “You don’t respect women. You’d rather see them dead than let them be inde­pendent of men.”

“I’ve never wanted to see a woman dead in my life,” Henry Holborn said, confused.

“Wait a minute,” Betsey said, suddenly visibly scared. “Wait a minute, now. We should all calm down.”

“Oh, I’m sick of calming down.” The woman was sitting in the big semicircular booth in the far back corner with three other people. The three other people sat there while she stood up and strode across the diner to where Henry Holborn was sitting. She was an attractive-looking woman, in her thirties, in a suit. In any other situation, Henry Holborn would barely have noticed her.

She got to Henry Holborn’s stool, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him around. “Listen to me,” she de­manded. “You think you’re all sick of us? Well, I’m sick of all of you. I’m sick of having my radio alarm go off every morning and some loudmouthed jerk come on telling me to accept Christ as my personal savior. I’m sick of sitting at traffic lights behind cars with bumper stickers that say ‘Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.’ I’m sick of listening to you all go on endlessly about how wonderful you all are. You’re a bunch of tenth-rate backwoods hicks, and if you don’t know it yet, you’d better learn.”

Betsey drew herself up to her full height and puffed out her chest. “Get out of here,” she demanded. “Get out of here right this minute. And don’t come back.”

“Oh, I’ll get out all right,” the woman said. “I’ll be happy to. But before I get out of town, I think I’m going to leave all of you something to remember me by. Maybe I’ll give a lot of money to that camp up there so that they can open an abortion clinic. This is the twentieth century. It’s practically the twenty-first. Get real.”

“Get out,” Betsey said.

Henry Holborn still had a cup two-thirds full of coffee sitting in front of him. The woman leaned past him and picked it up. For an instant, there was some doubt about what was going to happen next. The young man sitting next to Henry looked faintly alarmed. Naomi was struggling to her feet, getting ready to defend Henry if she could. Even so, the room was incredibly hostile. Henry had preached to rooms like this when he was first starting out, and calling them nests of vipers was not indulging in exaggeration. Blood lust was as old as the human race. Look at Adam and Eve. Look at Cain and Abel. The urge to kill came out of hiding whenever it got a chance.

The woman had Henry’s coffee cup in her hand. Henry knew what she was going to do, but he couldn’t make himself move out of the way of it. It was like waiting for the Apocalypse.

“Wait a minute,” the young man on the other side of Henry said, but it was too late.

The coffee cup was high in the air over Henry Holborn’s head. The woman turned it upside down and let a cascade of brown liquid fall into his hair. Then she waved the cup even higher, and the saucer too, and sent them both crashing to the floor.