The Bells of Times Square

by Amy Lane

  It was like a current of electricity, arc-welding him in place.

  And Walter didn’t seem to know a thing.

  “Here,” he said breezily. “You hold on to the counter, and I’ll scrub your calves and shins and such.”

  He was so humble, Nate thought. Squatting in the kitchen, bathing Nate like a Roman servant. Nate’s body was swelling shamelessly, and Walter scrubbed at Nate’s hairy shins with cheerful aplomb. In the end, Nate had to close his eyes, close his eyes and remember the last baseball game he’d attended, wearing his service uniform before he shipped out, sitting in the stands by himself wistfully because he hadn’t made friends in boot camp and the friends he would make were still half a world away.

  His body deflated, and Walter stood up and handed him a bath sheet. The world returned to normal, and he was an awkward, hairy man, standing in an abandoned kitchen.

  At least he was clean, eh?

  Walter patted him on the back. “Well done, sir. Maybe tomorrow, we can go on a little walk.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Nate said, pretending his smile was natural. “I would dearly love to get out of here.”

  The hell of it was, he really would. Having Walter so close was killing him.

  It took him another week before he felt confident enough to go walking toward the plane. He and Walter moved slowly, drinking water from a flask Walter carried and trying not to make as much noise as the finale at a big top circus as they plowed through the undergrowth of the tensely woven forest.

  It wasn’t hard to find the plane. Although the forest had begun to recover with new growth in the intervening month, the scar from the beheaded treetops still extended for a good half mile. At one of their stops, Walter tilted his head back and surveyed the damage with a low whistle.

  “Man, your pilot may have been a son of a bitch, but he sure did know what he was doing in the air!”

  Nate had to agree. Looking at that long path in, his heart started a thready tattoo in his throat.

  “It’s a miracle the plane made it,” he said softly, although to prove that God didn’t give out miracles at the drop of a hat, they spotted the plane at the next rise.

  “You might not want to look,” Walter cautioned the moment they made out the dark-gray–painted wooden siding. “I knew he was dead right off. I’m sure the animals did too.”

  “I should take his dog tags,” Nate said quietly. “And if we can, we should bury him.”

  “Not sure there’ll be anything left to bury,” Walter said, his customary bluntness in place. “See? You been laid up awhile. I reckon critters made off with the meaty parts and birds pretty much plucked all the wool from his clothes.”

  What was left was ghastly—a nightmare collection of clean bones and scant scraps of bug-infested flesh. Walter had scavenged work gloves, though, as well as an oilskin bag from the garage, and Nate murmured a blessing over the bones as they transferred them to the bag and then to a quiet place in the forest within sight of the plane.

  “What are you singing?” Walter asked after they’d dumped the contents of the sack unceremoniously into a freshly dug hole. Nate fished out the dog tags, as promised, and folded them in his kerchief. Someone would want them. The captain’s family had loved him, even if Nate couldn’t bring himself to feel much pity.

  “A prayer,” Nate said. “The Mourner’s Kaddish. It’s from Ezekiel.”

  Walter nodded. “Bible things. That’s nice. You got any words to say for him?”

  Nate shook his head. “I wish I could have mourned him,” he said after a moment. “But whether he resented me or no, I’m grateful. He saved my life.”

  Walter’s smile was the first childlike thing Nate had ever seen about him.

  “Maybe there’s special words for someone who should have been nicer,” he said decisively. “It’s a real good thing you’re doing, singing a blessing for his bones.”

  Nate sighed, pulled his gloves off, and stood up. They’d brought a camp shovel with them to dig the hole, and now he took his turn filling it in.

  “You make me feel like a better person,” Nate said honestly. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not longing for another sponge bath in the kitchen.”

  Walter nodded glumly. He’d grabbed the cards from underneath the seat right after they’d moved Captain Thompson’s remains, and they both had to admit reaching into the cubby had been a truly unpleasant job. The disheartening thing had been that the cards were all that was left. The radio had been damaged irreparably during the crash. Perhaps Joey or Hector, used to dealing with such equipment all the time, could have repaired it, but not Nate.

  “Your camera seems to be okay, though,” Walter observed as they pulled out the case.

  “That will help us very much, if there’s a Nazi outpost we need to bomb,” Nate said, trying not to be bitter.

  But now, as Walter finished filling in Captain Albert Thompson’s grave, Nate couldn’t help hoping that the camera would be intact. It might make him feel less useless if he had a weapon to cling to.

  “Should we mark it?” Walter asked.

  Without a word, Nate took the RAF insignia he’d removed from what was left of Albert’s jacket and pushed it into the earth, lodging it against the tree, as well.

  “Rest easy, Captain,” Nate said quietly, with as much reverence as he could manage. “Your duty’s done.”

  Walter wrapped the shovel in the outside of the oil bag, and together they turned and walked back toward the house.

  Nate was stumbling by the time they returned, tripping over the top step into the entryway, and Walter had to grab his elbow and help him to the couch. He’d been silent on the trip back, taciturn and exhausted, and now he glanced up at Walter with a bleakness in his heart he could not ever remember feeling.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “None. No idea what to do next. The world is going to hell around us. I probably have a mission in that little film canister—something that would help the Allies, even in a small way, but . . . I’m tired, and my French may be better but yours is appalling and we’re behind enemy lines where I could be detained for walking down the road just looking Jewish. What do we do? Lurk here like field mice?”

  “We eat,” Walter said briskly. “I put this back in the garage, and we eat. We change into some of the lounging pants that were out there, and we lounge. You read me the next adventure story, and we see if maybe my French don’t get better. We play cards, because I’m betting you’re a sure hand at rummy. We sleep. No reason to get all beat down. Peace ain’t a bad thing.”

  He turned and stumped away, and Nate watched him, smiling slightly. We eat. Perhaps, tonight, he would help Walter with food and cleanup. It wasn’t right Walter should bear the burden for all of—

  He fell asleep on the thought.

  When he woke up, Walter was browning bagels in the oven, with a nice stew going on the stovetop, and the chill he’d never noticed in the evening was warded off by the wood fire.

  And he thought, perhaps, Walter had been right after all.

  Walter went out of his way to be charming that night, and even boiled an extra pot of water so they could have a quick wipe down before bed. He moved an old crate in from the mysterious garage, and the two of them played rummy for the length of an entire candle. Nate won, hugely, and then he lost, and would continue to lose most atrociously, for nearly every hand they played together. It took him many years to figure out that while he had been playing numbers and strategy, Walter had been playing him, his facial expression, his noises, his grunts in the dark.

  When the candle burned down, they made ready for bed, undressing to their underclothes and folding their trousers and shirts over the arms of the couches, and lay down.

  “You know,” Nate murmured, thinking longingly of the second-floor bed—any bed—because the springs on the couch were weak on his big, healing body, “I think the farthest I’ll get tomorrow is upstairs.”

  “Yeah.” Walter’s voice sounded remote in t
he dark. “The bed in the main bedroom is pretty big, has some sheets left still. I think we can share it with not too much problem. It would feel better on the bones, that is for sure.”

  A pleasant thought, an easy thought. Nate fell asleep to that thought, and on the vague hope that he and Walter would sleep closely, and maybe even touch.

  A week passed. Nate’s wind grew stronger, and he could help Walter with some of the chores. He could, thank God, make it to the privy by himself without incident. The early spring of March had given way to the hard, bright spring of April, although for a few days, they were confined to the living room while rain pattered all about. There were a few holes in the roof, many of them upstairs, so they stayed on the couches where they would be sure no water would start pouring on their heads in the middle of the night. Nate thought, watching water seep in the corner by the desk, that this would, perhaps, be the last year this abandoned house could stand through the weather and still be considered adequate shelter. It was that thought of time passing that prompted him to consider making another trip to the plane. This time, with his strength about him, he thought he could look at the radio with much less despair.

  Before he had a chance to suggest it to Walter, though, they went to sleep one night and awoke to the sound of laughing, irreverent voices and a flashlight, penetrating the darkness through the boards over the windows.

  Walter bounced up like a toy on springs, and Nate, for all the aches of the day, was not much slower. The two of them grabbed their clothes and their sheets, and moved silently across the threadbare carpet, then tiptoed up the stairs.

  “Our boots!” Walter’s lips touched Nate’s ear when he whispered, and Nate’s body responded, heedless of time or place.

  “Front porch,” Nate whispered back, his nose buried in the curling hair over Walter’s ear.

  “On the ground, next to the steps,” Walter said quietly. Oh hell—hopefully they wouldn’t be seen in the dark, because there was no grabbing them now! Walter pulled ahead and Nate followed him up the stairs, left into what looked like a playroom, then to the left again into a large closet, then—

  “Gracious.” Mostly he mouthed the word. The back of the closet made a left turn into nowhere. Perhaps it had been meant to be a shoe rack, or a place for a cabinet that had never been built, but it disappeared, a slim crawl space, and Walter was shoving him backward into it.

  Then shoving himself backward against Nate.

  Nate pressed flush against the wall, knowing what Walter needed. A quick flashlight over this area would reveal what? A cabinet where none was? It was a tenuous place should anyone actually venture into the closet, but whoever was coming into the house—

  Nate heard the front door pushed in, and the voices got louder. In fact, they were disturbingly loud, and he pushed his ear against the wall to listen.

  “They’re speaking French,” he murmured, and Walter threw a heated glare over his shoulder. Nate grimaced and pressed his ear closer, listening in to what was, undoubtedly, courtship conversation.

  “You’re right: nobody is here,” said a distinctly feminine voice. Nate had spoken school French and the French from the book he’d been reading Walter— Where was that? Oh, thank heavens, it was under the couch! This was . . . young French. Uneducated. The cant was distinctly working class, even Nate could hear it.

  “Someone was here,” laughed a young man. “See? Cards.”

  “What would Jews have to do with cards?” asked the girl.

  “Nothing. But this wasn’t discarded by the family. They all ran away before the war. This was left by squatters, like us.”

  “Ooh, think they’ll show?”

  “I hope not,” muttered the young man. “I’ve got better things to do than play cards.”

  Nate heard a playful squeak next, followed by laughter, trilling, breathless, blatantly sexual.

  And then every sound was blatantly sexual.

  Nate let out a long, low breath, plastering himself against the wall even more as the young man’s filthy laughter rumbled through the empty house. The young woman was brazen, begging for his tongue on her, complimenting the size of his cock. Nate grunted in discomfort at that, thinking about sex, a naked man, hearing his grunts and his moans, as clear as a bell rung in temple.

  Walter’s body fitted itself against his, heat emanating from his skin, through their clothes, the small of Walter’s back even with Nate’s swelling, aching groin.

  Surprise and capture might have diminished the flood of Nate’s lust, but they weren’t being surprised and captured.

  They were listening to sex, loud and wanton, and the tight, sturdy body Nate had yearned for was rubbing against his cock.

  Nate dropped his head, burying his nose in Walter’s neck, and groaned. Better Walter should hate him than they should be captured, he thought fuzzily. Walter had to be still, because it was both of their fates if he lost his mind.

  He turned his head and nuzzled the hair at Nate’s temple.

  Then, oh God, he reached behind him, wedging his hand in at the small of his back, and grabbed Nate’s cock.

  Nate bit him, hard, in the juncture of neck and shoulder, the pleasure absolutely painful.

  He heard Walter’s gasp, but it was low, an almost invisible sound, especially in light of the squealing below them. He must have had her bent over the couch because they heard the furniture move with every thrust, and the young man’s own sounds were not getting any quieter.

  Walter squeezed him again.

  Nate wrapped his arms around Walter’s shoulders and hung on as a black wave of gilt fireworks exploded behind his eyes. Walter wiggled his hand, worming it under the waistband of Nate’s drawers, and his bare skin against Nate’s drew a sob against his will.

  Walter turned his head and whispered, “Sh,” briefly before catching Nate’s mouth and squeezing and stroking some more.

  Nate closed his eyes, tasting Walter—heat, the sweet rot of sleep, their attempts at keeping their teeth clean by using their fingers and baking soda from the medical kit. The sex going on downstairs continued loudly, unapologetically, but Nate’s world began and ended in the awkward pressure of Walter’s hand.

  They were nearing a climax downstairs, and Walter stroked harder, faster, scooting forward just enough to give him some room. Nate clung to the kiss, to the intimacy of their mouths fused together, of the unspeakable, unbearable things Walter was doing to his body in the invisible closeness of this tiny den within a den.

  Nate’s climax rushed him, and he deepened the kiss until he was practically crawling inside Walter, and Walter jerked on his cock with as much movement as he could manage without venturing from their hiding place. Below them, the girl screamed, perhaps reveling in the abandoned house, and the boy grunted in what was probably climax.

  And Nate geysered seed all over Walter’s hand and backside, clinging to Walter and trying not to sob as his vision dimmed and his knees gave.

  The house went quiet, the murmurs and laughter of the lovers subdued now that the act was over. Nate broke off the kiss with Walter, dropping his arms and keeping his face buried in Walter’s curling red hair.

  Walter shifted, pulling his arm from what must have been a cramped position behind his back and bringing his hand to his lips.

  He grunted, softly, meaningfully, and Nate opened his eyes. They adjusted to the closet’s darkness in time for him to watch Walter stick his tongue out deliberately and lick the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

  Equally deliberately, he popped his thumb into his mouth and sucked the smear of seed off it. And then his first finger. And then his second.

  Nate watched him, breathless, mesmerized, his message absolutely explicit. There was no excusing this. Walter’s hand behind him might have been help for a friend, or a way to keep Nate from giving away their position by holding his manhood hostage. It could have all been explained, or ignored, even the soul-melding kiss.

  But not this. Not Walter, meeting his e
yes in the dark, licking Nate’s cum from his hand. Walter opened his mouth and gave his nose a little jerk. Nate lowered his head, his heart so thick in his throat that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to answer with a spoken word.

  “You,” Walter rasped, lips touching Nate’s ear. “Me. Bed.”

  Nate’s breath caught in his throat, but he nodded, weak in spirit, apparently, because he didn’t want to fight anymore. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes.”

  Downstairs, the lovers were murmuring, and then there was the unmistakable sound of the pump being primed. Once, twice, there we go, a gush of water, probably to clean them both off. Nate could sympathize.

  Walter and Nate held their breath, listening to the quiet. Nate propped his back against the wall and made himself comfortable, wet shorts and all. After a pause, and a thought, he wrapped his arms around Walter’s shoulders and pulled him to actually lean his slight weight on Nate’s body. He closed his eyes then, hearing the comfortable postcoital murmurs, oddly tender after such an athletic-sounding bout of sex, and concentrating on the slack, easy weight of Walter against his body.

  His breathing evened out, and Walter turned his head, resting it against Nate’s shoulder. Nate rubbed his chin against Walter’s hair, and Walter wiggled against him—not in a tantalizing way, but like he was burrowing, seeking shelter, seeking safety.

  An emotion roared through Nate then that was so powerful that by the time Nate remembered his breathing again, he was surprised the house hadn’t shaken, the woods hadn’t rippled with the force of what ripped through his heart.

  Nothing to do, nothing to do, but stand there in the darkness and hold Walter, hold him and count his breaths, and treasure his body, warm, sweating a little in the closeness of the closet, and wish.