Clear Water (6 page)

Whiskey grunted at him, gesturing to the food on the table, and the boy’s movements were fluid and willowy as he pulled out his food. He looked around at the couches and chairs, realized that most of them were full of equipment, and then backed up to the counter/wet bar (yeah, this was a classy joint) across from Whiskey and slid down the cabinets, sitting with casual cross-legged grace.

Whiskey looked around the kitchen/dining room/living room and then started moving equipment, making room for him on one of the couches at the table. He looked at the spot, grunted, and gestured with his chin again.

“Thanks, Whiskey—it’s nice of you to go all Planet of Martha Stewart and the Apes on me, but seriously, I can sit down. It’s your science shit—don’t knock yourself out.”

Whiskey blushed. “Kid—”

“Patrick.”

Well, yeah. But “Patrick” was a name he could imagine calling out when he came. “Kid,” on the other hand, was someone he was absolutely never going to touch with his work-roughened, desperate, shaking hands.

“Kid—”

“You can call me Trix if you want.”

Whiskey was suddenly distracted. “Trix? What in the hell kind of name is that?”

Patrick (Holy Ned help him!) blushed. “It’s what my old boyfriends used to call me. I don’t know why it started—but, you know. If you don’t like Patrick.”

Eat, Wesley. Eat. Try to pretend your hands aren’t shaking with rage.
“Trix isn’t someone you take seriously,” he said. Trix was, in fact, someone you passed around to your friends because he was easy, lubed, and had a sweet mouth. Whether this kid had actually been that sort of Trix or whether he was just someone guys liked to take advantage of, it didn’t matter. Someone should have been looking out for this kid—and someone had fallen down on the job.

“Well,” the kid said through a thoughtfully full mouth, “maybe I’m not either.”

Whiskey took another bite. “This place is a pit. Tomorrow me and Fly Bait are out in the field. Clean it up. Stack shit. Make it look organized. I’ll leave you the car and some cash. Get some dish soap and some groceries. Jesus. Get us some yoghurt that won’t make me hurl. We good?”

Patrick took a bite and nodded. “Can I write all that down?” he asked, his voice small. “I get distracted. When we’re not eating, I need to make a list.”

Whiskey was about to say something smart—something about how any moron could clean a house and buy groceries—but that look was starting to come back. The one that had made Patrick throw a cell phone and bang his head against the fiberglass side of the boat. Whiskey discovered that particular look made his stomach churn, and decided against the smart-assed remark. “Yeah, kid, no problem. As soon as we’re done eating, ’kay?”

“Trix,” the kid said hopefully, and Whiskey shook his head, angry.

“You’re not a one night stand, kid. You’re not a party toy.”

“I’m not a kid.”

Fuck me raw if you’re not.
“Fine. Patrick.”

“Thank you.” The look on the kid’s face? Pure joy, and Whiskey’s stomach started to churn again.

Whiskey grunted back, because an honest-to-Christ “you’re welcome” really might have made him choke.

W
HISKEY
and Fly Bait spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the frog anomalies and the chemical additives in the water, until Patrick, who had taken it upon himself to clean up after lunch and then to do the laundry, finally got himself some spray cleaner and one of Whiskey’s better shirts (he had the nerve to call it a rag) and started on the bathroom.

The bathroom was awkward. The kid (fuck! Patrick!) kept knocking his elbows and knees and shit on the toilet and the tiny shower, and the steady stream of swearwords that issued forth from the head would have done up a gawdshonest Merchant Marine for a world of pride.

Whiskey and Fly Bait conversed in brief, truncated sentences:

“Chlorine levels?”

“Below x.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not it.”

“Mercury?”

“High but not abnormal.”

“Other chems?”

“Don’t have a sig.”

And all of a sudden, their code, the back and forth they’d practiced over nearly two decades of environmental studies in each other’s company, was shattered on the rocks of Patrick’s profanity.

“Manufacturer’s list?”

“The recycling plant or—”

“Mother-fucking—”

Bam!

“—the paper company—”

Crash!

“—cock-sucking—”

Crack!

“—or the warehouse for—”

Smack!

“Ouch! Son-of-a-fucking-whore-slurping-ass-banging—”

Whiskey and Fly Bait stopped completely then.

“—come-jerking-prick-teasing-bastard-mother-fucker—”
Smash! Bang! Kaboom!
“Ouch! Fuck! Ouch!”

Fly Bait’s eyes narrowed in the sudden silence, and Whiskey shrugged.

“What?”

“He hurt himself.”

Whiskey felt his eyes grow large, round, and shiny. “You care about this?”

“He just cleaned the bathroom.”

“So?”

“I’ve been sending samples into the lab when I got bored. They are as of yet unidentified. It never occurred to me to clean the damned thing.”

Whiskey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know, I know, I know—you don’t want to get blood all over it now that it’s clean.”

Fly Bait shrugged apologetically, as though it had maybe just once occurred to her that she was a girl. In the middle of her silence there were a couple of deep, shuddering breaths from the head that Whiskey swore made the boat rock in her berth.

“Why am I the one who gets to bandage his boo-boos?”

Fly Bait just looked at him, and he realized he didn’t want to answer that question, and he really would rather she didn’t either.

“Fine. Fuck.” He stalked to the bathroom and gingerly opened the door. Sure enough, Patrick was trying to bandage a cut on his hand with a roll of gauze and a piece of duct tape, and Whiskey mentally added another couple of items to that grocery list he was going to go over.

“Here,” he commanded gruffly, and Patrick pulled his hand to his chest protectively.

“I can do it.”

“No you can’t. Give me your fucking hand.”

“I’m not helpless.”

“So you keep telling me. Give me your fucking hand.”

Patrick scowled at him. “I’m not a burden or a leech.”

“If you were, Fly Bait would have let you bleed to death. Or starve. Now give me your fucking hand.”

Patrick extended it, and Whiskey sighed. “You need to rinse it off.” He took that slender, bony white hand and ran it under the faucet. The slightly gaping slice across the top of his knuckles swished in the water, and the blood ran down the sink. Whiskey looked sideways and saw Patrick looking at his hand and gritting his teeth.

“You don’t have to look,” Whiskey said gently, and Patrick shrugged.

“This is the weirdest day,” he said out of nowhere, and Whiskey couldn’t argue.

“Is there a clean towel in here?”

Patrick handed him a small towel that must have just come out of the quay’s small drier, and Whiskey looked at it and sighed.

“Not that I’m complaining, but I didn’t mean you had to start right away.” He dabbed at the cut to get the excess water off the skin and risked a look at Patrick’s face.

His lips were pouty and pillowy, although his mouth looked like the wide kind, the kind that smiled easily and could probably be vivacious if he weren’t all tense and in pain and trying not to talk about getting pulled out of a sinking car.

“I don’t have anything else to do,” Patrick murmured, and Whiskey tsked and started rewrapping the gauze.

“You know, you sort of had a really shitty night, and you haven’t done half bad at fucking up your day. Maybe just sit for a little, have a bottle of water, maybe go back to the bunk and take a nap.”

“I can pull—”

“Your own weight.” Whiskey sighed and gave the gauze a little tug before reaching into the cabinet and bringing out the sterile tape. “I know. Look, ki—
Patrick,
I don’t know what’s going on in your twisted little noggin, but nobody here has accused you of being a fuckup. So maybe you wait until you have something to do before you start trying to prove you can do it.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Whiskey finished the dressing and realized he was still holding onto Patrick’s hand. He didn’t let go.

“Who called you a fuckup?” he asked after a moment.

Patrick had the prettiest eyes—blue. Crystal lake blue, and his lashes were brown. His hair was sort of a sun-streaked toffee, now that it was dry, and Whiskey didn’t see any tell-tale marks that would indicate that it wasn’t natural.

“Please,” Patrick whispered. “Please. Don’t make me be pathetic. You’ve been really nice to me. Maybe, for a little while, I can just hang out and not be pathetic, okay?”

“You’re a good kid.” Whiskey ruffled his hair. Get it? He was a kid, right? “Maybe cut yourself a break and relax. You try to clean the bathroom all tense like that and this isn’t the only blood you’re going to shed.”

Patrick nodded and smiled a little. That wide, mobile mouth looked like maybe smiling was what he was best at. Whiskey resolved to see more of it.

“Why is your name Whiskey?” the kid asked seriously, and Whiskey sighed.

“Because Wesley Keenan sounds like a science geek who can’t get laid,” he told the young man honestly. “Fly Bait started calling me Whiskey when we were undergrads. I’d been calling her Fly Bait since we met. The names stuck.”

The kid nodded. “You guys, uhm…?”

Whiskey’s mouth twisted. “Not at present. Just here to do the job.”

The shot of relief that blew across that little, round, transparent face made Whiskey feel like shit.
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Should have said yes.

“What job?”

“Want to find out what’s fucking up the frogs.”

The kid’s hands were oddly shaped. The fingers were long and splayed, like a frog’s fingers or a spider’s legs, and that long-fingered hand was still in his own, and he was breathing shallowly, like he was conscious that each breath might disturb the moment. It was a good time to think about frogs or spiders, because maybe that would make the pale expanse of skin on the kid’s arm not quite so magnetic.

The kid blinked, lost his self-conscious presence, and pulled back. “You mean like Cal and Catherine?” he asked. “Or the little anomaly-frog-babies? What do you think would do that?”

Whiskey couldn’t help it. It was an honest, curious question, and the kid had asked it guilelessly, without an academic agenda, just because he was curious. That, and he’d called the frogs by their names. It was an unspoken empathy thing, and it made Whiskey like him even more.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Frog anomalies have been popping up a lot where water pollution has increased. Usually it’s caused by a particular pesticide, which is pretty damned illegal right now. A frog’s skin is designed to breathe, so it’s more permeable than most other creatures’. But that means it lets all sorts of shit in to fuck with its genetic makeup, so—”

“Two-headed frogs. Can they mate with each other, because I know that sometimes frogs can change their genders if there’s too many boy frogs and not enough girl frogs, and if Cal could knock up Catherine,
that
would be totally fucked up, like masturbation but better, you know, like one of those freaky yoga guys who give themselves their own blowjobs and shit, right?”

Whiskey’s pants got really, really tight. He couldn’t help himself. “Can
you
do that?” he asked, knowing his voice squeaked and not caring. “Because I saw you doing yoga.”

Patrick’s face fell. “Not yet.” He brightened. “I’m working on it though.” And then that visible, unhidden mood swing again. “Especially because I’m single again. I’m going to need to know how to do that.”

Whiskey couldn’t help it. He imagined that impossibly thin, limber young body contorted and Patrick’s wide, mobile mouth engulfing his own cock, and he found he had to rest his head against the doorframe. What he said next made no sense—it was like some other man, some
better
man, had taken over his head. “Being single can be a good thing,” he muttered. “Maybe you should stay single for a while.”

A sigh—it seemed to carry the weight of the world. “Well, it’s not like I can do any better than Cal anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Whiskey said, the thought of the skeezemonkey crawling out of the car and leaving Patrick to die making his cock shrivel in his jeans. “A bald gorilla would be better than that fucker,” he snapped, and then he went to turn around and get out of there before the kid could start talking about anything else that would make his cock explode.

“A bald gorilla wouldn’t have me,” the kid snapped back, and Whiskey closed his eyes.

“He’d have you, kid—he’d bend you over and fuck you until your eyeballs bled come. But just because he’d have you, and even if he was the only one who wanted you, it wouldn’t mean that you didn’t deserve way better.”

He couldn’t take anymore of this conversation, so he turned away and said, “Stop cleaning the fucking bathroom, come out here, and sit down. We’ve got books. Read. Watch movies on my phone. Go swimming off the back dock if you want. But stop trying to earn your keep. It’s quitting time.”

He stalked back into the kitchen/dining room with Fly Bait and looked at the clock. It was four in the afternoon, and he and Fly Bait had probably two or three more hours of analyzing data. Fuck. But he’d meant what he said to the kid (Patrick!) too. That kid needed to lighten up and back off from himself.

He heard movement behind him and he looked at Fly Bait. After a moment and a closed door, she said, “He’s gone into your berth—probably to lie down. Good. Junior needs a nap.”

“Jesus, Fly Bait—that was almost maternal.”

Fly Bait shrugged. “Yeah, well, there’s ovaries in there. They kick in once a month—you’ve felt it.”

Whiskey grunted. By his count, he and Patrick had six days to go before he hauled the kid out by his ear on field work and let Fly Bait plan the destruction of all testosterone-based land mammals on general principle. “Yup.” He would have left it there, but there was something else… fuck it, so
many
things bothering him. “Fly Bait, you got the Internet going?”