Sidecar (14 page)

Deb’s parents hadn’t come to visit once. Her boyfriend had killed himself before she’d even had to be hospitalized. She had a sister in Sacramento who wouldn’t open her letters because she was afraid of contamination. Joe heard her voice, sometimes coherent and sometimes dreamy and unfocused, and knew that this hour right here, like the hours Joe had spent with her, was the bright moment, the moment she lived for, the thing that made death hopeful.

They got the test results five days later.

Negative. Casey just sat and looked at the little piece of paper for half an hour, his hands shaking. When he was done, he looked up at Joe with a furrow between his deep brows.

“It’s a do-over,” he said, his voice unsteady. “It’s just like you said. I got do-overs. You gave me one. God gave me another.”

Joe wanted to bite back on that. He wanted to say, “God didn’t give you shit!” but he couldn’t. Because although he hadn’t realized it until Casey had opened the piece of paper in the mail, Joe had been thinking,
Oh please, please, please, please, please, please
the whole time. If he didn’t believe the Big Guy gave you a break sometimes, who’d he been asking “please?”

“Okay,” he said out loud. “Okay. You got a do-over. You’ve been doing it right so far, kid. You just keep on keeping on, okay?”

Casey nodded and wiped his mouth with a shaking palm. “Okay. Can I go visit Debbie again? I’d like to tell her myself.”

Joe said yeah, and he went by her bed to check on his way out of work that night.

She wasn’t there.

He got home that night and woke Casey up. He knocked first, but he really didn’t need to. Dev had taken the news that Casey was negative quietly, but he was still a little freaked out. Casey didn’t have to say anything, but Joe recognized all the signs of taking a little time-out when Dev didn’t come over for a couple of days.

“Casey?”

“Come in.”

Casey was reading one of Joe’s books—this time it was
The Stand
, and Joe would have told him not to read that
now
,
but he figured if Casey scared the piss out of himself some more, that could only work for the best.

Slowly, feeling truly old and not just old in comparison, Joe took a couple of steps to the bed and sat down heavily.

“Joe?” Casey said quietly, and Joe sighed.

“Kid, you won’t be able to visit Debbie tomorrow.”

Casey looked stricken, and his lower lip started to wobble. “No?”

“No.”

Casey nodded like he was going to be stoic for a minute, and Joe opened his arms, because no one should be stoic for things like that. Casey cried in his arms like a baby, and Joe cried with him, and Joe actually said thank you to God in real words this time, because this was the worst pain Casey would know right now, and it was bad enough.

Land of Confusion

~Casey

1989

M
AYBE
it was that Dev’s horniness won out over his fear, or maybe it was Dev’s reluctance to start school without an ally on his side, even one who went to another school and whom all of his bound-for-college buddies would probably despise. Either way, Casey called him for Debbie’s funeral, and three days later Casey, Joe, and Dev all squeezed
into the pickup truck on the way to a tiny crematorium where a
perfunctory service was held for them and them alone.

Because they were the only ones there, Casey figured that for Dev the realization might have been that everyone died and it would be nice not to die alone. Melodramatic? Oh yeah—but Dev was very young that way. No matter how it happened, though, Casey and Dev were back together by the time school started, which was nice, because that year it meant Casey had a boyfriend for his seventeenth birthday.

Joe took them out to dinner at the Sizzler and then to ice cream at Leatherby’s, where he dared Casey to eat the giant sundae. Casey and Dev managed to eat the whole thing together, and Joe took a Polaroid of the two of them—faces covered in fudge sauce, smiling greenly at the camera—that stayed on their refrigerator for years.

Dev didn’t stay that night—they both had school the next day—although they had sleepovers on the weekends, when the job and the extracurricular activities didn’t get in the way. Joe was good about treating Casey like an adult in that department, and Casey appreciated it.

He especially appreciated it when he made another attempt to sneak into Joe’s bed the night of his seventeenth birthday. He wound up on his ass on the floor, of course, but this time he was expecting it, and as Joe swore up a storm above him, he stood up and giggled his way back downstairs to his room.

Of course he wasn’t giggling that November, when Joe’s newest rescue—a very beautiful, very broken boy with corn silk hair and pale eyes, and whom Joe called Sunshine since he wouldn’t give his name—tried the same trick.

Sunshine ended up being walked gently back to his room, and Joe asked Casey to sit with him until he fell asleep.

“Why doesn’t he want me?” Sunshine said softly, lying in the dark.

Casey smoothed his hair back from his face like he would a little kid. “He doesn’t want… doesn’t want you to think that love has to mean sex,” Casey said, mostly because he’d figured this out for himself.

“But… but how will I make him
keep
me, if he doesn’t want that?” Sunshine was honest-to-God crying now, and Casey sighed. He and Dev had been bickering back and forth for a month. Casey didn’t think they were going to break up immediately, but he could see the end coming. Dev wasn’t that bright, but he got real good grades. A part of him bought into the snobbery that because Casey wasn’t graduating from a real school, he wasn’t real smart. Casey had tried to correct this idea, but it didn’t stop Dev from talking down to Casey, or Casey from saying shit that Dev didn’t understand and then not explaining it just so Casey could laugh at him.

“Sex can’t be all you’re staking your claim on,” Casey said, his voice echoing in Joe’s old room. Joe had let him paint the walls a nice sailor blue once he’d moved upstairs. Casey had painted his own room sort of a sky blue, with white and lavender trim. Yeah, it looked gay, but then, so was Casey, and Joe didn’t seem to give a ripe shit.

“It’s all I have,” the boy said. God, what was he? Thirteen?

“You’ve got so much more,” Casey told him, still stroking that hair. Casey had helped pick the nits out of it for three nights running, until they’d Kwell-treated him again. The boy’s scalp had been a mess of bleeding sores, but he hadn’t even scratched. He’d just looked at Joe and Casey with that passive, expectant look, waiting for the “thing” to happen, the one that meant he could eat some more or have a place to sleep. Unlike with Stacia, Casey hadn’t been excited about watching Sunshine fail in his little trip to Joe’s room. He’d known, just like Joe had, that Sunshine had to be treated like thin, untempered glass.

“I thought it was all I had too, once.” Casey kept talking, wondering if his voice was helping or not. “But I’m going to graduate and go to college. I’m going to travel—there’s like, whole other
countries
I haven’t even
heard of
yet that I’m going to see. Sex is good—but there’s music and movies and books and—”

“It’s all I have,” Sunshine repeated.

Casey kept talking to him, telling him about all the places he could go, the things he could see and do, and for a little while, Sunshine lived there and he did okay. Joe had gotten chickens over the summer because he liked the fresh eggs, and Sunshine took it upon himself to feed them and take care of them. For a couple of weeks it worked, and then Casey got home one day and found Joe’s firewood axe, covered in blood, in the middle of the coop, and the remains of the rooster next to it. Sunshine was crouched, feral and weeping, in the back of the chicken coop, and Casey left him there and called Joe.

The social worker (a different one than the recently divorced Mrs. Cahill) had come with an ambulance then, and taken the boy away to Chana, the medical institution, not Casey’s continuation school. Mr. Petty was a tall man, almost completely bald except for a fringe of gray hair around the edge of his head, like a watermelon in a hula skirt. He told Casey that they were damned lucky it hadn’t been one of them lying mutilated in the chicken coop and that Joe needed to be careful whom he took into his home.

For his part, by the time Joe had gotten home, he’d been pale, sweaty, and shaking. The ambulance had gone, and Casey had been in the kitchen, making himself an egg sandwich, when Joe stomped into the kitchen and wrapped his arms around Casey, shaking so hard Casey sat him down so he didn’t just collapse on the kitchen floor.

“I’m sorry,” Joe muttered. “So sorry. I didn’t know… God, I didn’t know he was that damaged. He could have
hurt you
.”

Casey shook his head, not even seeing what all the fuss was about. “He wouldn’t have hurt us,” he said confidently. “It was all about that rooster chasing the damned hens around. I think….” Casey’s voice dropped, and he looked at Joe carefully, uncertain how to put this into words. “I think, maybe, not sleeping with the kids you pick up—maybe it’s a good idea, though. I think maybe that’s why he didn’t go after you with an axe too. Or me neither.”

Joe just shuddered and held him closer, a big man who smelled like antiseptic and sweat, and Casey held Joe’s head against his stomach and stroked his long hair back from his face while his egg sandwich burned behind him. He wondered how long, exactly, he was going to wait until he understood everything about love.

Sunshine was out of the mental institution and into a halfway house with a security lock by the time Casey graduated from high school. He and Joe sent the boy letters religiously, and they were both grateful, for once, for the social worker. For his part, Mr. Petty had determined in one visit that Casey was old enough to run away from any home they placed him in, and he seemed to be doing okay at Joe’s. Joe was so grateful, he actually forgave Casey for making him sleep with Mrs. Cahill. Casey was so grateful, he actually felt bad that Joe had to break up with his girlfriend in order to do that.

Joe had a paramedic trying to get him into bed now. Casey didn’t know Derrick that well, but he approved on general principle. If it was a guy, someday Casey might have a chance.

And time went on. As the year after Debbie’s funeral progressed, Joe and Casey helped to clean up Ira’s place—and Joe and Ira insisted that Ira’s stiff-necked, venal prick of a son pay Casey for his time. The son sold the property for a
fortune
to a developer who turned the parcel of land into five different lots and built big houses on them. In spite of the fact that Ira had given them
both
an unexpected cut of the profits (probably because he knew in his bones who would be visiting him in the old age home—and they had), Joe hated it, at first. He complained about it for most of a year, bitterly, even when he spent the money on new siding for the house. He hated the construction noises, he hated the idea that big business won, and he
loathed
the fact that what used to be twenty acres of mostly wilderness was now twenty acres of residential area with
really big
backyards.

But the zoning laws were strict, at least. A family every four acres was really not bad. In early August, before Casey’s
eighteenth
birthday, Casey stood outside, throwing a ball to Hi and Rufus, trying not to get it in the chicken coop because that way lay disaster, and watching Joe ride up the drive after work.

When the engine noise faded to echoes, Casey called out to him. “Here, Joe. Listen.”

Joe stood out in the long shadows of late August afternoon, pulled off his helmet, and listened.

There was a pickup game at one of the houses, the one that had been built on Ira’s old lot, and what sounded like a family—Mom, Dad, and four kids—was playing basketball on a driveway court. It was a good sound, lots of squeals from the girls and hoots of triumph from the boys, and the noises were distant, not up close and personal. Joe listened for a minute and then sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, well, it’s not silence,” he muttered, but under the Fu Manchu mustache and soul patch, his lips were quirking up.

“If you’d wanted silence, you wouldn’t have kept me,” Casey said smugly, and Joe socked him in the arm, then stumped inside to fix dinner. Casey laughed softly to himself because Joe didn’t have to fix dinner—Casey had done it—and continued to throw the ball to the dogs until they were too tired to move.

It was a month before his eighteenth birthday, and in the meantime, he’d held his job, done his schoolwork, and graduated from continuation school early, in a little ceremony in January. He might not have had a cap and gown, but his diploma was just as good as anyone else’s, and he hadn’t objected when it had appeared on his wall in a frame. Joe had taken him and Dev out to eat again and given him the keys to an actual car—used, but sound—as a gift. He would be responsible for insurance and gas, but he’d about cried when he’d seen the almost stately Taurus sedan sitting outside the restaurant, where Joe’d had a friend park it.

A future—a real future—that was his for the taking. But mostly because Joe had given it to him.

Casey had gotten home from work early that day with the mixings of chicken casserole, the kind with the mayonnaise and the potato chips on the top and the cheese and pimentos. It was his favorite, after Joe had made it for him in Casey’s first month there, and Casey didn’t even mind that Joe said it was too fattening for him now. Casey liked Joe’s solid body—there was plenty of heavy muscle, and still that adorable little tummy that Casey got to see in the summer when they went swimming at Sugar Pine or Joe slept without his shirt.

“What’s the occasion, kid?” Joe asked as he set the table. Casey had put a cassette in the boom box Joe had bought him for his birthday the year before, and U2’s
Rattle and Hum
was playing in the background. U2 and INXS were two bands that Joe and Casey could agree on, and they played a lot of them. Joe was trying to get Casey to like Guns N’ Roses, and Casey was almost a convert, which meant that maybe they’d hear a little less Madonna, which was always something for Joe to look forward to. That made Casey happy too.