"What are you trying to insinuate?" Sandifer said, looking as if he might be about to put me in a category.
Rutka just stared at me, and before I could "insinuate" that the two might have staged the shooting for their own strategic purposes-Rutka had stated publicly that in the cause of "gay survival" the end always justified the means-he said calmly, "Yes, a shell was found. The cop didn't find a weapon, and they're still looking for the bullet, I think, but a slug was found by the Handbag cop who answered Eddie's call. The shell was in the gutter about fifty feet from the house, where the car was probably parked with the pig in it who shot me. The cop showed us the slug while I was being put into the ambulance. God, it was hard to believe such a tiny piece of metal was part of what hit me. It felt like getting slammed in the foot with a sledgehammer."
"There was just one shot? That's all you heard?"
"I think so," he said. "It happened so fast, I'm not sure. I guess they'll talk to other people in the neighborhood, won't they?
Somebody must have seen something."
"They'll ask around. That's what they do. Even though their opinion of a man in a Queer Nation shirt is probably lower than their opinion of a nun at a school crossing who gets shot, they'll be obliged to make some inquiries."
Sandifer said, "I don't suppose there's any point in expecting the Handbag police to bust their butts going after this guy unless they're pressured into it. We'll probably have to organize something."
"Maybe," I said. "Although small-city police departments can usually be counted on to perk up when they run into an attempted murder. It's a little unusual and it's a challenge. And your chief out there, Bub Bailey, is supposed to be a competent and decent enough guy. That's his reputation."
"My dad knew him," Rutka said gloomily. "They were in the K of C together and bowled when they were younger."
"That should help keep Bub's interest up too. The chief probably regards you as a Martian, but if you're one of the parish Martians he'll feel obliged to nudge the case along."
Rutka looked at me with one eye, and with his other at an ambulance arriving off to the left. He gave a little mirthless laugh and said, "This is queer. One of Dad's bowling buddies lending a hand to Queer Nation. It doesn't surprise me, though. Those guys stuck together even if they had a fag son. Dad would have done the same-for somebody else's son."
"He's not living?"
"No, he's dead," Rutka said. "My father died last summer and my mom a month later. They were both fifty-five. They had short lives and unhappy deaths from lung cancer. We all smoked at our house. My sister and I started when we were twelve, and I quit when Dad was diagnosed. Mom didn't give it up until they brought in the oxygen and somebody told her if she lit up she might blow up the neighborhood. It was the only time during the whole ordeal when I ever saw her cry. She wept for her lost Chesterfields."
I hadn't had a cigarette in ten years, but every time I heard one of these horror stories, I ached for one. I said, "That's when you came back to Handbag from New York? When your parents were dying?"
"Eddie and I moved into my old room. They had to have known we were boyfriends. We'd been active in ACT-UP in the city and talked about it. But they always treated Eddie as if he was a school friend I was having sleep over. This is when Eddie was thirty-one and I was thirty."
I said, "What if somebody had written a column in the Times Union, or whatever paper your family read, about John Rutka, the homosexual? How would they have reacted? How would you have liked it?"
Without hesitation, Rutka said, "The question is aca demic. The T-U won't out anybody-unless, of course, they're busted by the Albany cops for sex in the park, or some asinine thing like that. Now that I'm a notorious public fag, though, they'll probably write up the shooting as an attack on an 'admitted homosexual.' Since I'm not a convenience store, they won't be able to bury it as just another robbery attempt by a deranged member of Albany's poorly disciplined underclass."
This didn't answer my question or address at all Rutka's apparent double standard on the question of involuntarily dragging gay persons out of the closet into a homophobic glare. But with him leaning awkwardly against a car, supported by one foot and a sweating man with a glistening lavender dome, it didn't seem like the time or place to pursue it.
I asked Sandifer to give me his version of the shooting incident, and he gave me a look of frustrated befuddlement. "I'm just not sure what happened," he said. "The thing is, I was in taking a whizz and I must have flushed just when it happened. I knew I heard something-or thought I did. And then I went out and found John on the front walk. At first I thought he fell down the porch steps-they're getting kind of rickety. And then I saw the blood and John's sneaker torn up. But I don't really know what I heard. I wasn't listening for anything."
Sandifer glanced at Rutka, as if looking for a cue to add more or open up another area of discussion, but Rutka was busy watching me watching Sandifer. I asked Rutka if he had received any physical threats from people he'd outed in his controversial journalistic career during the past year, or from anyone else.
"Too many for me to count," he said with a snort, "and almost all of them anonymous. Nine were from people I could identify. I keep a file."
"You're quite an accountant."
"Not an accountant, a nurse. Nurses spend half their lives doing reports and not leaving anything out and not making mistakes.
Keeping records is as natural to me as breathing."
"Were these threats written, or oral, or what?"
"They were all verbal. Who's going to be stupid enough to put a death threat in writing? Two were face to face, in the presence of other people. Seven were on the phone, people calling me, usually late at night, and of those seven, four identified themselves and three didn't but I recognized their voices. I've got notes on all the threats in my files."
Rutka's files. These alone seemed enough to get a person shot in the foot. I had never seen them-no one had, that I knew of and that only made them all the more tantalizing, and for a lot of people inflammatory.
Since Rutka and Sandifer had moved back to the Albany area a year earlier, Rutka-who'd been active with assorted radical gay groups in New York and had been arrested and fined twice for demonstrations inside St. Patrick's Cathedral-had become Albany's own "morally correct J. Edgar Hoover," as he'd once phrased it to a local TV newswoman.
Rutka had compiled files on hundreds of Hudson Valley "known homosexuals," as he called them. He seemed to love taking this menacing term from the fifties and by throwing it around airily, ironically, defusing it.
Except, for a lot of closeted and semicloseted gays, Rutka might as well have been Hoover or McCarthy. He began by using his column in the alternative weekly Cityscape to out some of the city's most notoriously, and dangerously, homophobic gay men and Lesbians: an eager aide to a state senator who led the fight to kill an anti-gay-bashing bill; an editorial writer at the sneeringly reactionary Albany Times Union; and an antigay Albany city councilman. These revelations, which caused countless dinner-party shouting matches over the ethics of uncloseting any gay person against his or her will, were minor compared to what came next.
Rutka began outing gay men and women who were not necessarily wicked and dangerous, but merely prominent: several business owners; a local TV weatherman; pols of all stations and creeds; the inevitable slew of Episcopalian clergy; a miscellany of others.
Since there is nothing wrong with being gay, and since heterosexuals' dating and mating habits were described all the time, well-known people had to expect this, Rutka said. His column, called "The Society Pages," was Rutka's way of helping "normalize" being gay and removing its stigma for future generations.