by Amy Lane
“He’s a good man!” Whiskey shouted. “He’s a good man—and you… you couldn’t even listen, could you!”
“I’m sorry!” Shawn shouted back at him, so close Whiskey could smell his breath. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t fucking listen! I’m a shitty parent! What do you want me to say?”
“That’s about it!” Whiskey snapped, and then slammed himself back against the window again and listened to himself as his voice broke. “And I want you to say he’s okay. I just really, really want to hear that he’s going to be okay.”
Suddenly Fly Bait’s little brown hands were on his shoulders, keeping him anchored, and she was petting him, and he looked down at her and realized that she was in tears.
“Me too,” she mumbled, and his eyes got bright and he hauled her in against his chest and pretended his eyes weren’t blurring too, and that his hands didn’t ache and that his head didn’t hurt like a sonofabitch and that he knew for certain, like the sun was going to rise, that Patrick was going to be okay.
DOCTORS showed up eventually and made the three of them sit down in the waiting room since they weren’t going to hang out and be treated. Whiskey got himself a spiffy new IV, this one in a different vein, and a new bandage, and a stern talking to from his nurse, but he wasn’t really aware of that. He and Fly Bait managed to hold hands, and although they didn’t usually say much to each other, that contact—that said everything.
About an hour in, Whiskey heard a rough voice and realized it was his own.
“So,” he said, and Fly Bait looked at him. “You know, that first night. Loretta came and got you, and we went out and then, you know, time for ice cream, and you know what he did?”
Fly Bait shook her head. “It had better not be gross,” she murmured, but the acid was gone.
He shot her a smile for trying and continued. “He said he wanted to thank someone, so he went up on the deck because there were stars there, and he felt like he was closer that way.”
Fly Bait’s fingers tightened in his. “God,” she muttered. She looked over Whiskey’s body to where Shawn Cleary sat, looking at the two of them in sort of a puzzled way. “Your kid is pretty fucking awesome,” Fly Bait snarled. “He really is. And I can’t believe you wouldn’t believe him.”
Whiskey kept thinking about that slender, pale figure dancing among the shadows with the light fixtures and the pipe, twenty feet off the ground without a net and with shoes held together by duct tape and a prayer. “Do you,” he asked, his vision still lost in that darkness, “have any idea what he went through to warn you?”
Shawn Cleary scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Who are you people?”
“We’re his friends,” Fly Bait told him, and Whiskey looked at her, surprised. Fly Bait did not scrap, she didn’t argue, she didn’t get on people’s cases.
He let go of her hand to wrap his arm around her shoulders. “We’re from Fish and Game,” Whiskey said, trying not to smirk because it just sounded so absurd. “One night I went out walking, and I saw this yellow car crash through a guard rail, and one guy got out, and your son didn’t. So I got him out.”
“You know, normal people would have called the police,” Shawn said distastefully.
“We’re not normal,” Fly Bait said, almost to herself, and she met Whiskey’s eyes in time for him to say, “We’re more like two-headed frogs.”
He expected her to smirk back, but instead she looked like he’d smacked her upside the head. While he was trying to decide what to say, she stood up, grabbed her IV unit, and walked over to Shawn Cleary and slapped him hard in the face. Before he could even respond, she said, “I’m going to go call my girlfriend, you homophobic motherfucker. When Patrick comes to, you’d better fucking let us in the room.”
Shawn looked after her, blinking in total confusion. “Wait. If she’s going to call her girlfriend, what are you doing here?”
Whiskey looked back at him, weary beyond belief. “He told you he was gay and you ignored that too.”
“Fine!” Shawn snapped, throwing his hands up and then wincing when the IV needle pulled at his flesh. “Fine! I’m the bad guy! I didn’t believe he was gay either. But you’re… you’re not a stupid kid—those FBI guys were fucking listening to you, you’ve got some pull. What are you doing with my son?”
Whiskey pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Falling really, really in love with him. You got a fucking problem with that?”
He was surprised when Shawn Cleary didn’t say anything. He turned his head to the side and saw that the guy was wiping tears away with the back of his hand.
“I missed him,” Shawn said brokenly. “Almost every day. Every day since he was sixteen. I mean, he’d go out with friends….” Shawn laughed a little now. “I guess he’d go have sleepovers with boyfriends mostly. But… almost every day. He’d get up when I was eating breakfast and sit down at the other end of the table and eat something that gave me a heart attack just looking at it. And we wouldn’t say anything, right? But it was damned near every day. And then… then he just wasn’t. He just wasn’t there. And I’d ask myself why I’d miss him, because we never talked. He’d just look at me and wait.” Shawn laughed humorlessly. “Wait for me to complain about something, probably. Bitch about work. About the car. About how much money he spent. But he’d wait. And then he’d say bye and go do what he was doing. And I never thought to ask what that was. Sometimes he’d tell me, you know? I thought if it was important he’d tell me. But it was important, and I didn’t listen. And now I gotta wonder, what was he waiting for, if I wasn’t going to listen?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Whiskey said. He felt mean. He felt angry. He felt like someone should suffer because he’d watched Patrick disappear into the dark and he hadn’t come back out yet. “At the end, he wasn’t waiting for you anymore. He was waiting for me. And I showed up.”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say to that. They sat there side by side, and then Fly Bait came back and leaned on him and got him a blanket and made the nurse bring him something to eat. Pudding. Tapioca pudding. It wasn’t bad.
ATF and the FBI and the DEA came and debriefed him and Fly Bait and then practically killed them with questions and more questions about Patrick’s involvement.
They told Whiskey the name of the guy in charge—who had been busted, actually, thanks to Whiskey and Patrick—but he forgot what it was until it hit the papers. In the meantime, it was up to Whiskey to clear up any misapprehensions the police had about Patrick’s involvement.
“No!” Whiskey told one sharp-faced woman. “Patrick may have known the guy dealt drugs, but he didn’t know about this! If he had known about this, do you think he would have led us into an ambush? How do I know he wouldn’t? Because he got a broken nose and cracked ribs when his ex-assfucker beat him up, that’s how. Besides.” Whiskey’s face fell a little, and the righteous anger that fueled him for a minute dissipated like fog off the delta. “Besides,” he repeated, “Patrick wouldn’t do that. He’s a good man. He lived on my boat wearing Walmart clothes and hand-me-down flip-flops for the chance to have people who liked him for him. This whole drug thing—it’s all about greed and being an asshole and mass hurting of people. And that’s not Patrick. He wouldn’t hurt….” Whiskey’s throat worked, and he almost couldn’t swallow. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly unless he was feeding it to a frog.”
There was a silence then, and the people disappeared, and Whiskey was left with Shawn Cleary just looking at him.
“What the hell is this thing with frogs?” he asked irritably, and Whiskey and Fly Bait started laughing, low and private, and they never answered.
Finally, though, a doctor came out of the doors to the surgery and looked purposefully for someone to talk to. Whiskey practically knocked Shawn over in his hurry to be the person the doctor had to talk to.
“Patrick Cleary?”
The doctor was middle aged, white, and perfectly average—average eyes, average build, as featureless as a h
ospital wall. But he did have a lovely smile. “Young Mr. Cleary is doing well. He’s stabilized and in a medically induced coma until his brain swelling goes down. He was developing a blood clot, so we put in a shunt, and it doesn’t look like the pressure was enough to do any damage. He may be disoriented when he wakes up, and he may not remember things that we think he should, but—”
“Well, that won’t be much different than usual,” Shawn Cleary said to himself, and Whiskey scowled at him. The man subsided, and Whiskey looked back at the doctor.
“When can we see him?”
The doctor eyed the three of them pointedly. “He’ll be out of it for at least eight hours. That’s plenty of time for the three of you to bathe, change your clothes, and get some sleep. You all look like the cat’s breakfast twice removed—I wouldn’t want to wake up to any of you.”
Whiskey grinned at him and nodded, but Shawn looked disgusted, and Whiskey wondered how long he was going to enjoying pissing the guy off. “He’s going to be okay?” Whiskey asked, just to be sure, and the doctor nodded.
“It’s looking like. Things can go wrong—but it’s looking good.”
Fly Bait grabbed Whiskey’s hand and squeezed, and for the first time, Whiskey let his muscles tremble and his aches settle. All of the adrenaline that had held him up flooded out, and now he could smell the stench of fire, hot metal, and a walk through the dusty weed fields that clung to his skin like mucus.
“God, Fly Bait,” Whiskey mumbled. “Where the hell are we? I don’t even know which hospital we’re in or how far we are from home.”
He didn’t realize how really tired he was until he let tiny Freya Bitner wrap her arms around his shoulders and say, “It’s okay. Letty just texted me. She’s in front of the hospital right now in a rental car. She’ll take us home.”
Whiskey held her tight, because in spite of how mundane that sounded, he knew—maybe for the first time, he knew—what it was like to know that home was the living, breathing person who made welcome in your heart.
Patrick
Zero Fucking Up, Sir
PATRICK woke up calling for Whiskey. The dumbasses taking care of him thought he was asking for a painkiller, until after what felt like forever, there was a familiar, gruff voice, growing God-thankfully closer with every snarl.
“He’s not asking for alcohol, sweetheart, he’s asking for me! That’s my name! Well not my real name, but it’s close enough!”
“Whiskey?” Oh, God. Whiskey had been there—Patrick had heard him. Something about No, you dumbshit, stay away from the fucking bomb! Or that might have been a voice in Patrick’s head—Patrick wasn’t sure. But he was sure that Whiskey had been there, and that had made it all worth it.
See, Whiskey? I’m not a fuckup. You were right. I’m a good guy.
And then Whiskey was there, peering down at him, his longish hair falling in his face, clean-shaven and wearing one of the shirts without the holes.
Patrick squinted. “You dressed up,” he observed, and Whiskey nodded, a sort of semi-hysterical sound squeaking past his throat.
“If you wanted me to dress up, all you had to do was ask for a date, asshole.” His voice was fractured and gravelly, and his eyes were bloodshot, and Patrick’s hand floated like a kite on the way to his cheek.
“You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
Whiskey looked behind him and found a stool or something and dragged it behind him, sitting down heavily and leaning into Patrick so their faces were close and their voices intimate. Patrick smiled. He liked Whiskey like this—it was just like being back in their little berth with their bed that was too small and their teeny-tiny living space. It was the way he and Whiskey should be.
“Listen here, you little shit,” Whiskey muttered, and Patrick nodded. Whiskey rarely sounded this upset—it was good to listen. “If you ever scare the hell out of me like that again, I will probably kill you myself if my heart doesn’t give out first. I am an old man—”
“You’re thirty-six—” Patrick was getting floaty, light and bright, like a burning piece of paper in an updraft, but he remembered how old Whiskey had said he was.
“How old are you?” Patrick was lying on his back, running his fingers through that shiny, dark-brown hair.
Whiskey’s stubbled chin tickled Patrick’s bare stomach, and he blew a little bubble on the smooth skin as Patrick fought not to convulse and go fetal because it tickled. “Not old enough to be your father. Yet.”
“No, seriously—I like birthday parties and birthday presents. When’s your birthday?”
“October twenty-eighth.”
“How old will you be?”
“Not twenty-eight!”
“Whiskey!”
“And not here, either.” Whiskey looked at him seriously. “But returning, right? Can you have the party later?”
“If you tell me how old you’ll be.”
“Thirty-seven.”
“I’m not thirty-six after that.” The real Whiskey looked so much more serious than the remembered one, and his eyes were getting bright and shiny. “I’m at least a hundred and six after that.”
“I’m sorry,” Patrick murmured, although Whiskey didn’t usually like for him to say it. Patrick’s whole body hurt, and his brain was foggy and uncertain, and Whiskey looked horribly unhappy. In general, Patrick felt the definition of sorry, and like anything else he felt, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it.
“You should be,” Whiskey murmured back, taking Patrick’s hand in both of his blunt, sturdy ones and kissing it. His other hand was all heavy and white and plastered, but this hand was just fine. “We fed you, we housed you, and you try to repay that by getting yourself blown up? Fucking ungrateful, that’s what it is.”
We. “How’s Fly Bait?”
“Fine. Still asleep in the houseboat. I couldn’t sleep there, so I came back here and slept in the waiting room. Then I heard you calling for me—that was good, by the way. You weren’t taking no for an answer. I was flattered.”
“They weren’t listening,” Patrick muttered. “I know everyone thinks I’m crazy, but Jesus, no one was listening.”
The back of Patrick’s hand got a little wet. “You’re not crazy,” Whiskey said. “Although my opinion would have been totally different if you’d succeeded in killing yourself.”
“I’m glad I didn’t die.” Patrick was fading out, but there was a pressing issue he had to address. “How’s my dad?”
“Fine. But I may have to kill him before you wake up again.”
Fog and dark and sort of a gray numbness were seeping through Patrick’s aching head. “Hold off on that, wouldja? I wanna tell him I was fucking right.”
Whiskey’s laugh was low and rough, and it felt like the vibrations from his chest rocked Patrick off to sleep like the river rocked the houseboat.
WHEN he woke up again, Whiskey was there talking in a furious whisper to people Patrick didn’t know.
“Who the fuck’re you?” he croaked, and Whiskey turned around and offered him some water from a little plastic pitcher with a straw.
The man was a battered, grim Hispanic man wearing a suit and a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. “I’m Agent Menendez, and I’m sort of the representative of the three different agencies that really need to talk to you, Mr. Cleary.”
“This couldn’t wait until his brain stopped swelling?” Whiskey asked, bristling with fuck-authority-until-it-bleeds.
“Mr. Cleary’s doctor has cleared ten minutes of questioning,” Agent Menendez responded with chilly civility.
Whiskey snarled, “Is he going to need a lawyer for ten minutes of questioning or not?”
Menendez sighed and defrosted a little. “I doubt it. You and Ms. Bitner have done a decent job clearing up matters for us—this looks like you stumbled into the wrong place for the weirdest reasons, and I just want a wrap-up.”
“Yeah, fine,” Patrick mumbled, thinking if this guy got his questions answered, maybe he’d get gone.
The questions were short and to the point, and Patrick was a little unhappy to realize he couldn’t remember the answers to all of them. “Why’d I leave you in the warehouse again, Whiskey?”
“Because I could probably defuse the bomb but I definitely couldn’t escape out the window.”
“Oh, yeah.” Suddenly his eyes, which had been drifting shut, shot open. “You defused that bomb, right?”
“Yeah, Patrick. Otherwise I’d be in the adjacent bed.”
“Adjacent means next to. You’d be in the bed next to me. I’d rather you be next to me in the bed.”
“Me too, baby. Now answer the rest of the nice FBI agent’s questions.”
“Okay, we’ve only got one more, Mr. Cleary. Now, your father reported you missing in May and then called us to say that you’d reported back in and were fine, and he volunteered to pay for the cost of hauling your car out of the river.”
“I’ll pay for that,” Patrick mumbled, falling asleep now.
He was surprised awake by his father’s voice saying, “I’ve got it, Patrick. No worries.”
“Dad?”
“Finish the questions, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Now, we have Mr. Roberts in custody, and he’s pretty much told us you were his dupe,” Menendez said.
Whiskey said, “Who?”
“Cal,” Patrick told him. “The non-frog one.”
“Gotcha.”
Menendez cleared his throat and went on. “We’re just wondering why, if you had nothing to do with the crash, why didn’t you go back and talk to your father?”
Patrick’s head gave him a nasty kick right between the eyes. “Because I’d just told him I was gay and he seemed to think it was all part of my fuckup’s agenda. Why would I want to go talk to him after that?”
Patrick’s father made a sort of “oolf” sound, but Patrick couldn’t deal with that now.
“Can I go to sleep now? Whiskey, I want to go to sleep now. Make them go away. But not you. You’ll just be quiet and peaceful and strong, and warm… make them go away, Whiskey, and stay.”