Again he thought of just leaving. But every time he tried to outrun the weight on his shoulders, the burden just became heavier. It was time to face his demons. Not just Ben, the newest of them, but all of the others, the ones from which he’d run for too long. It was Ben’s misfortune that he had, by whatever means, become one of them.

It’s your doing. The dark voice rose in his mind, harsh and accusing. His father’s voice. You did it to him, Lincoln Jones continued. You touched him. It’s your poison doing this to him.

His father had once spoken aloud the words he now whispered in silence. Hudson was thirteen, in the throes of becoming a man. The one to whom his father had said the words was already a man. He was a neighbor, a man with a wife and two boys, one of them Hudson’s classmate. One hot summer afternoon when Hudson was at the neighbor’s house enjoying their newly acquired aboveground swimming pool, he had walked into the bathroom and found the father masturbating furiously over a magazine lying open on the pink tile floor. Hudson had stared at the picture of a naked man, trying very hard not to look at the one in front of him. Then the father had taken Hudson’s hand and placed it on his hard cock.

It was a month later that his father caught them together in the garage. This time, Hudson was standing while the neighbor knelt on the floor, his head bobbing up and down on Hudson’s erect penis. Hudson, close to release, had opened his eyes to see his father standing not ten feet away, the garbage bag he was carrying to the trash hanging from his hand like a headless corpse.

The neighbor had made excuses, accused Hudson of initiating their couplings. Mr. Jones had silenced him with threats of imprisonment and bodily harm until the man, begging for mercy, had fled from the garage. When, two days later, the news came that he had left his bewildered wife and sons and disappeared, Lincoln Jones had said nothing. Hudson, however, had wept in his room until his father had come and ordered him to take out the trash.

When, five years later, Hudson came out to his parents, his father had said only, “Some poison you can’t never get out.” They had never discussed it again, but Lincoln Jones had made no secret of his disappointment in his son. Even a scholarship to Yale had failed to impress him, and Hudson had departed for New Haven with little more than a handshake and the ten dollars his father handed him at the bus station.