Read Online The True Detective by Theodore Weesner - Free Book Online Page A

much.”
    “Hey, come on! ” Duncan says. “There’s no reason to be cruel. What’s with you two?”
    “Don’t like faggots, man,” Leon says. “Sure as fuck don’t like living with one.”
    “My God, I can’t believe this,” Duncan says.
    “So don’t believe it,” Leon says. “That mean you’re one yourself?”
    “Man, you are getting me pissed off now. I don’t care how drunk you are.”
    “It’s simple,” Leon says, crushing a beer can and tossing it into a standing grocery bag. “Either he is. Or isn’t. I have a fucking right, you see, to know, see, who the fuck I live with. Vernon, you a faggot or not?”
    “You’re an asshole!” Duncan says then. “You hear me! You fucking ignorant asshole!”
    “Let him answer,” Leon says. He turns back from the refrigerator with a can of beer, pops the tab.
    “He doesn’t have to answer anything,” Duncan says. “Even if he’s gay, that’s his business. Who are you, with all your fucking Hustler magazines? What’s the difference between you reading Hustler, jacking off in the fucking john all the time, and Vernon spending his time at the library. If that makes him a bookworm, it makes you a fucking outhouse.”
    “Okay. I read Hustler. I jerk off in the bathroom. It’s true. Only that’s normal. The fucking library, as I’m sure you know, is used for more than reading books.”
    “You’re disgusting,” Duncan says. “What the fuck you doing in college?”
    “The point is,” Leon says, “the point is, you may not like me, and you may not approve of what I read, but I have the right, I do have the right, to know who the fuck I live with!”
    Pausing, Duncan says, “You don’t read anything, you look.”
    “Beside the point,” Leon says. Turning, he says to Vernon, “Well?”
    “You—” Vernon says, trembling. “Talk about right. You have no right. To ask me anything.”
    “I do,” Leon says. “I have the right to live with people of my choice.” Leon forces a smile. As always, when he smiles, the end of his nose tips, and Vernon hates him all at once for the ugliness and cruelty he sees in the tipping of his nose.
    “I don’t believe this,” Duncan is saying. “You don’t have rights like that. You do not have the right to insist that anyone—anywhere, any time—make that kind of disclosure. It doesn’t even matter that you advertised these rooms. Sex, religion, politics, fucking taste in clothes or music. You can live where you like, you can like what you like. But you cannot—under no circumstances, legal or human—batter someone, if only verbally, toanswer your stupid, fucking, self-indulgent questions. I tell you I’m ready to take a stand on this. You want to go outside, take it on, I’m ready. I won’t stand for your bullying. That’s it.”
    “I don’t like faggots,” Leon says.
    “Talk to me,” Duncan says. “You’re a hick, that’s what you are. What’re you doing in a university? You’re a drunken hick who sits around reading skin magazines. You shouldn’t be here. You should be somewhere cleaning pig pens.”
    “Now you take it easy now,” Leon says.
    “Why—” Wayne starts to say.
    “Shut up!” Duncan snaps. “I’ll tell you this,” he says, raising a finger.
    “You want to get down to fucking cases, I’ll tell you this. As for being truly gay—my guess is a serious case could be made for you two! All you do is read jack-off magazines. Is that why you came to college? Read about throbbing ten-inch cocks and jack off? Salivate, I imagine—one of you going at it in the bathroom, the other in the bedroom. What you’d probably really like to do—you two buddies —would be to reach over and take hold of each other’s dongs. Down in there somewhere, that is fag city—you fucking hicky high school homoerotic buddies from fucking nowhere New Hampshire! Maybe that’s what you didn’t want to live with. You ever think of that? ”
    “I think you better not say any more,”