Soundless as a ghost, he passed through shadows so dense they made him feel like part of the night, while wind rasped along the pavement like a saw striking bone. Clawing grit from his eyes, Tim peered back at random trees. Thickly bent as ancient slaves, they heaved through concrete to engulf iron rails. Trees always made him sad. He hardly ever saw anyone on the street at this hour—good thing really. His blond hair made him a target, and he kept his head down as he walked.

Few cars lurched along these cobblestones anymore. This dying row of industrial structures barely constituted a neighborhood. And few people lived here. But some. Definitely some. As he trudged, hands deep in his pockets, he tried to guess which blind windows stared.

Periodically, he hitched up the frayed pants that kept slipping past bony hips. Cold deepened around him. Even the sparse light seemed coarse and granular, but darkness spread along the cement like oil. Stumbling over cracks, he wondered what could shatter concrete this way. Sledgehammer? Bomb? A street lamp bled out when he passed beneath it—they always did—but the glimmer instantly dripped back, smearing a faint muddy blue along the roof of a parked car. Missing doors gave the car an eviscerated look, and he supposed the windshield might have been hit with a cinderblock.

He hurried.

With a hissing stutter, brick particles scattered from the wall. He ran, weaving, as he fumbled keys out of his jeans.

The front door stuck the way it always did, and he had to jerk the key with one hand and twist the knob with the other, then hit the jamb with his thin shoulder. Slamming it behind him, he panted in the blackness. Actually not quite blackness. At the top of the steep, narrow staircase, a bulb gleamed dimly. Good, he thought, hoisting himself along the banister: he had company. As he ascended toward the light, he brushed the wall, the old paint lumpy and porous. His was the only apartment in the building. In sedimentary disorder, fragments of paper mulched the apartment door: layered sheets from a yellow tablet, torn loose leaf, even some index cards he’d found—tacked and taped up—all covered with words he’d scribbled late at night. Often, it spurted from him in a surge. Afterwards, he could never quite figure out what any of it meant, but he liked the way that seeing it made him feel he really lived here.

When he tried to slide the key in, the door swung open. “Stupid,” he muttered. Closing it firmly behind him, he pushed the button down so it would click automatically. “Yo?” He marched down the dark corridor. “You here?”

At the end of the hall, lights seeped under a makeshift drapery, and he pushed through into a room where smoke eddied like dirty water. Hunched on the floor, Conrad fiddled with a spoon and candle. By his knee, a mound of butts smoldered. He didn’t look up, and it took Tim a moment to realize Con wasn’t alone in the murk. Sprawled on a couch, his friend from the garage was so dark he was hard to see.

“Hey, man.” In a black shirt, shiny with grime, Paolo blinked from the shadows and, leaning forward, resumed wrestling with something that resembled a lead box on the low table in front of him. “How you doin’?”

Tim ignored him. “Can’t you speak?”

Con ignored him.

“Right, Conny,” said Tim as he perched rigidly on a crippled stool. “I’m happy to see you too.” He sighed raggedly. It went this way whenever Con’s friends came over.

Concentrating, Con had his shirt open, sleeves rolled tight on powerful arms. Moving with extreme precision, like someone diffusing an explosive device, he passed the works to Paolo without even glancing at Tim.

“Right, he needs more,” Tim muttered. “Look at his eyes. And you didn’t lock the door again.”

Con peered up through clots of long, dark hair. “Got a problem?” His growl sounded soft and hard at the same time: dangerous.

Tim knew all the signs—despite a period of separation, they’d been together long enough. Though never mentioned, that separation seldom faded from Tim’s mind. The worst part of his whole not-so-good life had been when Con got out of the Youth Study Center first, leaving him unprotected. Days felt like years. When Tim finally got released, there’d been nowhere to go but the street, and those weeks had been a century in hell. Then Con came and saved him. (Some negligible corner of his mind recognized the possibility that Con might not have been cruising for him that evening, at least not specifically.) Before that night had ended, Tim knew all about where Con had been and what he’d been up to. Jail. (A brief stint.) Marriage and a job. (Both recent developments.) But he hadn’t cared. Much. Drowning, he’d just grabbed hold.

Still, it churned sour sometimes. Tim mostly stayed in this space Con had found, while Con lived with his new wife’s parents and worked for her father. Very sour.

“Where you coming from?” asked Con. Nothing animated the sharp, smooth face; yet his eyes—mournful and menacing—glimmered.

“Nowheres. What do you care? Turning the place into a shooting gallery. Again.” Folding his arms, he anticipated the outrage he felt sure his next words would provoke. “And I’m pretty sure your brother-in-law just took another pop at me.”

Con shrugged, his hand twitching like a broken crab toward a bottle of bourbon.

Slapped by the silence, Tim just watched him pick it up.

“Don’t start with this, man,” said Con, taking a swig. “This nagging crap. Shit, I got a wife already. You ain’t …”

“What? What ain’t we?” Tim heard his voice get shrill. “I said …”

“What else you want from me?” Con cut him off. “I pay the rent here, don’t I? What? You want blood or something? That ain’t right. Deal. Shit—you’re just someplace I stop on the way to work.”

“And after work. And weekends.” On his feet again, Tim paced around the small room. “Did you hear me? Your brother-in-law tried to shoot me again. Right? This is how you think you’re gonna get your life together? These people?”

“Don’t start,” Con repeated. Then he added, “I find out you’re turning tricks or something, you’re dead meat.”

“I’m not.”

“Then where was you?” put in Paolo, suddenly all caught up in their stuff. “And why you getting so twisted?” Gesturing with the works in his big hands, he turned to Con in sincere puzzlement. “Know what I’m saying?”

“Forget him, man. He gets like this. Bullshit. Just forget him.” Con’s gaze crawled across the black guy…

…until Tim couldn’t watch anymore. He never could figure out how much Con’s friends knew about the two of them. “So why are you doing that weirdness anyways?” he asked Paolo.

Paolo went back to messing about with the box thing. Grunting, he hefted it, dripping fluid into a dented metal bowl they usually used for popcorn and stuff. Barely visible on his hands, black grease smeared everywhere.

“That’s nuts,” Tim decided.

“Don’t tell him that,” Con told him.

“It’s cause… you know… sometimes you just gotta do some things.” Paolo giggled—a deep, boiling noise. “You don’t know nothing about cars, do you? Just draining the acid out of this battery. I mean, you know?”

“Okay,” said Tim as he moved to the derelict sofa and for just a second let one finger slide beneath the cushion to stroke the handle of what he kept there. He’d found it in the kitchen the day he moved in. Brown with rust. Heavy. Sometimes Con’s friends made him nervous. Sometimes Con did. Touching it made him feel better.

“I want to talk to you,” said Con, something flaring damply in his face.

“I didn’t…”

Con scrambled up off the floor, agile and ungainly as an ape. “I don’t want you starting this shit in front of my friends.”

“But…”

“It ain’t right.” Con slouched tensely at the curtain. “Come with me. Some stuff I need to say to you.”

Looking up, Paolo grinned his approval with teeth as brown as his fingernails.

“Make it hurt.”

Tim felt lost, his arms pale and feeble against the darkly muscled back. It always panicked and confused him when Con got like this, which he did whenever they had guests but secretively… as though nobody knew where they’d gone or could hear them in the next room. And Tim never got used to the reversal. Clutching him harder at the hips, he tried not to imagine Con doing this in prison. Did he think this didn’t count as long as it was with him?

Beyond the narrow window a fire escape sank to the black canyon of an alley, and darkness passed freely through naked glass.

“Yeah,” Con grunted. “That’s it.”

Panting, Tim labored, frustrated… what with Con being so big he couldn’t get traction and the way groaning noises from the other room kept distracting him. (He could hear Paolo arguing with himself or something.) Yeah, he thought, remembering how Con’s gaze had slid up and down his buddy. Prison. Made sense. He gritted down on the image.

Sweat-slicked flesh—mounded and muscular—gleamed thickly when Con leaned from the bed to grope on the floor. “Thought so,” he announced with satisfaction, locating a crusty hand towel. Tossing it to Tim, he switched on a lamp and started shrugging into his shirt. The lamp buzzed out. He smacked the shade, and it flickered while he pulled on the rest of his clothes. “Let me see if he wants a pizza or something,” he said, buckling his jeans. A single thread of cigarette smoke trailed him to the doorway; then the lamp died.

“Jerk.” Alone in the dark, Tim felt around the bed for his pants. He knew that if Con and Paolo went out, he wouldn’t see them again until dawn, when Con would need to crash for twenty minutes before work. Then he might not visit again for days. The awareness hollowed him.

“Stupid.” A voice cracked from the front room. “Shit.”

Tim hurried to join him.

Con stood there, staring down.

“Shit,” Tim echoed.

Paolo sprawled on the floor. Open eyes saw nothing. Fluid dark as purple ink splotched the syringe.

“He is, isn’t he?” Tim could barely hear himself.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” mumbled Con, suddenly crouching to feel the throat.

“Shit.”

“Quit saying that.” Con gave him a hard look.

A slow moment dripped through the room.

Pulling Paolo up by the shoulders as though to kiss him, Con snaked his arms tight around the chest, then hoisted. Tim grabbed the feet. Paolo gurgled a little as they hefted him: he even sounded dead. They tottered through the curtain and down the hall, grunting.

“Where we taking him?”

“Just… here.” Con lurched into the bathroom, Tim stumbling after. Dumping Paolo into the claw-footed tub produced a muted clang.

“Shit.” Tim immediately added, “Sorry.” Then he leaned against the sink, breathing hard. “Fucking heavy.”

Con nodded. “Big guy.”

“Now what?” asked Tim.

“Can’t stay here.”

“We can’t?”

“He can’t.”

Tim turned on the tap.

“The fuck you doing?”

“Saw it in a movie once,” explained Tim. “I think it stops the body from stinking.”

“Turn that off. I swear you’re crazy sometimes.” Con strutted away. “Now he’s all wet.”

Tim twisted the faucet off, then followed to the dirty little kitchen where he found Con tilting a beer to his wet mouth. Even the pulse in his throat seemed slow and sad.

At first they said nothing. Smoke from Con’s cigarette just twisted like thoughts in the air, until he tossed the empty can into the sink. “You stay put,” he told Tim finally.

“What? You going out? Where? You going to leave me here?”

“I’ll get a car.”

“Where’s yours?”

Con’s eyes looked wet. “Battery.” He shook his head, his gaze straying down the hall. “Shouldn’t use mine anyway.”

“You mean that was from your…? Are you nuts letting him…?” Tim stopped himself. “Where’re you going to find a car?”

“I’ll get one.”

“Oh.”

Con left right away. In the shadowed hallway, Tim felt held in place by the quiet. He forced himself to move. Pacing to the front room, he closed the curtain tightly and shivered a little. Why was it always so cold in here? He couldn’t sit down, didn’t want to go near the window. What if Con never came back? He swore he could hear noises from the bathroom, and twice went to look at Paolo. Both times, he found the head at the same angle, one arm sticking up crookedly. He swore he heard things anyway: angry clicks, like beetles in the woodwork. Noises had never bothered him here before, but then he’d never been shut up with a…

He shuddered again. No, he wouldn’t stay here. He’d wait outside. Grabbing his keys, he yanked open the door, and his notes fluttered. For the first time, he thought they looked foolish, and the dark stairs seemed tight as a coffin. Dirt spread like shadows; shadows spread like dirt. He couldn’t get down fast enough.

It had rained. Could that be what he’d heard? Streetlights glinted off the wet, empty street, and he just skulked in the doorway until a damp chill clicked his teeth together. Finally, he stepped out of the shadows. He needed to move. Now. Maybe he’d wait at the corner. Would he be able to see Con coming from there? He walked faster. Maybe he’d just keep moving until…

It came right at him. Lurching over the curb, the car dragged along the side of a building with a shriek of metal, sparks splintering the night. It almost reached him, halting in a swirl of exhaust, close enough for him to make out the driver’s bright hair. Instantly, he knew who she must be.

Clawing the door open, he dragged her out. Slack faced, she stood a foot taller than him and outweighed him by sixty pounds. He slammed her against the wall.

“Get away from her, asshole.”

A man had gotten out on the passenger side.

“Right.” Letting go of the woman, Tim turned to face him. “You must be the brother-in-law.” Trying to sound tough, he stared at the gun until he realized he’d backed up against the wall.

“Shut the fuck up.” Short as a kid and balding already, the guy couldn’t have been much more than twenty, and the attempt at a beard just made his face look dirty. “Really stupid, April.”

Stumbling over to survey the car, she wept aggressively now, a stunned choke caught in her throat, as though she’d just come out of a trance to find herself here.

“Stupid,” the little guy repeated. “Somebody’s liable to see us now. Damn it. We got to get off the street.” He made her get back in the car and steer it down off the sidewalk, for some reason a laborious process throughout which she sobbed and coughed. “You,” he told Tim, “get back to the building. Now. Does this fucking look like I’m kidding?” He pointed with the revolver. “Open that door.”

Watching him, Tim thought the guy moved oddly. Everything seemed to work—arms swung, head swiveled, but out of sync somehow, like he’d been assembled from some sort of kit. Perhaps pieces had been missing from the box. “So what do you want?” Tim sidled toward the curb. “Con’s not even here.”

“Does that feel like I’m kidding?” Moving behind Tim, he pushed the gun into his back. “Shit. You probably like it.”

She trailed after them. “Jeff, maybe we shouldn’t…”

“What? You try to run him the fuck over, but I’m not allowed to handle things? Guess what. I’m handling things.” He pushed again. “Move.”

Opening the front door, Tim smiled apologetically. “All the way up,” he explained. They followed him in silence, while he fumbled with the key. When the apartment door swung open, he slipped in quickly, but Jeff already blocked the doorway.

“Look at this shit.” Jeff perused the postings. “Fucking crazy.”

Tim started down the hall, but slowly, suddenly listless with dread. “The parlor is this way,” he said, trying to sound like a host. Muted by the curtains, their footsteps drummed behind him.

Jeff glared at Tim’s bookcase. Composed of raw boards on cinderblocks, it displayed his treasures: a vintage hubcap; a cobalt blue bottle; the helmet of a horseshoe crab, ridged like the skull of a dinosaur, souvenir of a midnight drive to the beach. “Jesus.” He gazed around the room. “You fucking live like this?”

Shedding his jacket, Tim shrugged, sincerely puzzled. He liked this place.

“This is where the husband you want so bad comes to? This toilet? With this scrawny…?”

“So you’re Timothy. I don’t see what’s so hot.” Plopping down in the only real chair like she owned the place, April resumed sobbing.

“You hurt?” Standing close, Tim let his hip press her shoulder. Her hair, shit brown for about four inches from the scalp, burnished a red-purple to its straggling ends. She resembled a clown, he thought—a tall clown—but he found himself stroking her sticky face. “Don’t cry.” When she closed her eyes, his thumb gently pressed an eyelid, and he felt like a priest giving absolution. He had forgotten how soft girl’s skin could be, and her tears felt cool and gelid. “Conny told you I was hot?” He tried not to picture him rolling around with her.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you know she’s gonna have a baby? Or didn’t your boyfriend tell you that?”

“Jeff. He doesn’t care.” Not recoiling from the hand on her face, she even sort of leaned into it. “Just do it.”

“Shut up.” Jeff paced to the window. “Stupid slut,” he muttered, peering down at the street. “I can’t believe you fucked up the car.”

Taking his fingers from her cheek, Tim wiped them on his leg. “Wrong with me?” he began with a stubborn falter. “Right. How many times you try to shoot me?”

“I could a shot you anytime. Why the hell didn’t you take off?”

“I live here.” His hands tightened into white fists, the knuckles brittle ridges.

Jeff laughed at him, but tentatively, almost absentmindedly. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” Acutely conscious of the gun in his hand, he repeated, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“You on meth?” Savagely bitten fingernails dug into Tim’s palms.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“You don’t love him,” said April. Between wet gulps, she wailed with a fervent shrug. “Why can’t you leave him alone? You don’t know how much I love him. Nobody knows. You messed everything up.”

As though he needed time to decode everything they said, another second passed before Tim realized she spoke to him and not Jeff. When he drew breath to respond, he heard a ticking noise in his chest, and small spasms shook him.

“Yeah, great,” snarled Jeff. “The junkie queer. Make a great dad.”

“Do something,” she said. “Why don’t you help me?”

Once more, Tim tried to reply.

But she added, “You’re supposed to be my brother.”

Their words smeared in his mind. Tim blinked, blinked again. “Oh, I thought you meant me.”

“I’m here, ain’t I?” said Jeff.

She gnawed miserably on a tendril of hair. “I need to use the bathroom.”

“You kidding me?”

“I’m pregnant, remember?”

“So what?”

“So I need to pee.”

“It’s down the hall,” Tim told her. He tried to sound calm, but a hum like wind through high-tension wires resonated in his voice

“Don’t you speak to me.” She heaved herself up. As she left the room, she called back over her shoulder. “Do something.”

“What? Oh.” Adrenalin fogging his brain, it again took Tim a moment to identify which of them she addressed. Rather than making him sharper, fear muffled his thoughts, rendering him drowsy. He’d heard somewhere that freezing to death felt like this. The curtain stopped swinging, and her footsteps faded. In the quiet, he tried to think of something to say. As he edged toward the sofa, his fists drummed against his thighs, each impact feeble and erratic. He stumbled, feeling as though hot wires had been poked into all his joints, severing nerve connections, so that no part of him responded correctly. Maybe the same thing had happened to Jeff. Something kicked in then. All at once, Tim seemed aware of everything, the dust in the corners, the stains on the ceiling, the way Jeff stared at the gun in his hand while his face contorted. It almost looked like he approached orgasm.

“No!” April screamed. “Oh my God!”

“What’s going on?” Jeff spun, more peevish than alarmed.

“He’s dead.” She ran back in with her pants open.

“What? Con? Where?”

“Back there. No.” She fell up against the wall and kept opening and closing her mouth. “Some black guy.”

They peered down the hall. “Right,” said Tim, “Look at me.” He slung the contents of the bowl. They yelled, and April grabbed for the gun, which got it out of her brother’s hand while Tim reached under the cushion.

He kept hitting her with it until he realized she wasn’t fighting but merely twitching with each blow. Then he rolled off her. Dripping, he found Jeff down the hall, trying to pull the door open while clawing at his eyes. He was crying. Tim only struck him once in the back of the head because he couldn’t get the cleaver out.

Shadows pooled in the doorway, and he trembled, clutching a bundle under his arm. No way would he go back upstairs. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he tried to identify his feelings, but everything just twisted and tangled as he shivered. The gashes he’d made on his forehead stung and bled, but nowhere near enough to account for all the blood on him. He just hoped Con wouldn’t look too closely. A moment later, exhaustion hit him so abruptly he nearly toppled.

As he leaned there, darkness thickened, streaming as clouds ripped across the blade of the moon. It had been so long since he’d really looked at the sky, he realized, and he sucked the air in deeply, tasting the cold. He let his nervous gaze sink to the empty street that glittered like rhinestones. Maybe if he talked fast enough, got Con moving fast enough…

Shuddering, he went over his story in his head, knowing he had to get it right the first time.

“She did that to you?” Keeping both hands on the wheel, Con looked him over.

“The brother. Right? Kept hitting me with the gun.” Even though Con navigated slowly through the streets, the car bounced over cobblestones, rattling like it would come apart, and Tim doubted the owner would miss it much. “When I tried to keep them out,” he continued. “Anyway… soon as they found Paolo, they ran for the cops. April said we could be cellmates, if you wanted me so bad.” The car veered around a snarl of dark trees, throwing him against the door. “Maybe you should drive faster. All right?” He stared out the window but saw nothing. “Where’re we going?” Except for the drone of the engine, silence filled the car, and he looked hard at Con. “How long will it take?” He pressed his eyes closed. “Don’t make it hurt,” he whispered inaudibly. The car shook. Then he took a deep breath. With a lot of thrashing and huffing, he wriggled out of his shirt and pants and into the relatively fresh clothes he’d brought, hoping that Con noticed how his slender form gleamed like something carved in ice.

“I know a spot I can pull over,” said Con, noticing.

“No, don’t. I mean, you don’t have to.” He stuffed bloodied clothes under the seat. “Just keep going.”

“Don’t worry, Timmy.” Nothing in Con’s face softened, but the tip of his cigarette flared. “I’m with you.” He fiddled with the radio, jumbling together fragments of broken music. “No problem,” Con said. “So we take a little trip. My buddy Garth’s been wanting me to get into… something… with him anyways.”

The night plunged past them, and Tim leaned into him. Already, tongues of dawn smeared the sky. In a moment, Tim would think of whatever else he needed to say, but for right now he just let his eyes drift shut. The highway throbbed beneath them, and damp heat pulsed through Con’s shirt. Weariness spiraled through him, and he breathed in the scent of Con, acid and sweet. This is mine, he thought, hunching down. Finally, something is mine. Darkness broke around them like surf as they reached the highway. Fiddling with Con’s zipper and lowering his mouth, he again struggled to identify the sensation in his gut. Then he had it. Safe. He felt safe.

Everything would be all right now.

 

© 2007 Robert Dunbar - Contributor's Bio

Read a companion story, “Getting Wet”