by J. M. Snyder
“He’s a jerk,” Aissa says. “Gerrick, not Blain. He about bit my head off for bringing up his bags this morning. He didn’t even tell you I stopped by?” Trin shakes his head, slapping her foot a second time when she kicks at him. “You know he can’t keep his hands to himself, right? You saw him with Gertie at dinner, and this morning he was all over Dray. I surely hope you had fun while it lasted, Trin. I hate to be the one to break this to you but—”
Trin interrupts her. “Let him look, if he has to. He’s still staying with me.”
“He told you that?” The incredulous tone of her voice says she won’t believe it, even if the gunner told her himself.
Trying hard not to smirk, Trin replies loftily, “He said to keep you out of my room until he leaves. If that doesn’t say he’s sleeping there—”
“It doesn’t,” Aissa points out. “Until he leaves what, the waystation? Arens?” With arched brows, she adds, “You?”
“Shut up,” he tells her again.
She tries a different approach. “All I’m saying, Trini, is he probably has a boy in every outpost between here and the border, and every single one of them thinks he’s the only one. I know you’ve been waiting a long time for this but I don’t want you blowing it all out of proportion. Once you fix his truck, he’s gone.”
Trin feels that pout tug at his lips again and he covers his mouth with one hand so Aissa won’t see the frown. “I know he has to move on but you’re wrong, Aissa. Last night wasn’t just another fuck, I’m telling you.” She gives him a look that says he’s fooling himself but he shakes his head, adamant. “It wasn’t.”
“Alright,” she concedes. She still sounds unconvinced.
Suddenly Trin surges to his feet and gives her a push off the workbench. “Get outta here,” he says, stretching to get his blood flowing again. He doesn’t want to hear about Gerrick checking out Gertie or pawing over Dray, who Trin has never heard of before but suspects might be that bounder by the juke last night. But whose room are the gunner’s bags in, hmm?
“I’ve got work to do,” he tells Aissa, giving her a shove towards the door. “Go on, get out of here.”
* * * *
By the time the sun burns red and low in the sky, Trin is all too ready to get with Gerrick again. He still can’t quite comprehend it, the gunner’s his—he’ll be fiddling with the spark plugs or repadding the brakes and the memory of last night will hit him so hard, he almost reels beneath it. His hands tremble to dwell on their sex, his lips still feel their kisses, and the longer the shadows grow, the more anxious he becomes. Sure, the gunner’s been gone all day, as Aissa so maliciously pointed out, but whose pallet is he going to bed down in tonight?
Trin works until it grows too dark to see and he has to squint as he rebuilds the engine that doesn’t belong in Gerrick’s truck. He keeps on, though, until the Christ bells ring out when the sun finally falls from the sky. The bells hang high in the loft of a building along the far side of the palisade, a place the older folks call a church but it’s no more holy than anything else in this world.
Trin’s only been inside of it once, when his parents were brought back to the outpost and laid to earth. He remembers staring at his father’s hands folded across his lifeless chest, large hands, grey with death. When Blain came up behind him and touched his shoulder, Trin bit back a startled cry—for a brief moment he thought it was his father’s hand on him, resurrected. He almost expected to hear the man’s voice, too, “Come away, Trini.” As the years pass and they both grow older, Blain sounds more and more like their father every day.
The bells signal nightfall but to Trin, they mean supper. At the front of the garage he has to jump to reach the chain hanging from the top-sliding bay doors. He misses on the first jump, just grazes the chain with his fingertips on the second, then grabs it in a tight fist and yanks hard until the doors come shuddering down.
The padlock that keeps them down at night hangs from the bolt where Trin left it this morning, locked. He’s so eager to get out of here that he can’t get the damn thing open at first—his fingers fumble through the combination but it just won’t unlock. Why did he have to snap it shut when he opened the front doors anyway? Why not just thread it through the bolt and leave it like that? Stupid, he berates silently, twirling the lock face to clear it. Taking a deep breath, he forces himself to slow down as he runs through the combination again. God, he’s probably wondering where the hell I am, horny as fuck I’m sure, and I can’t get the goddamn lock—
This time he feels the telltale click in his hands. “Holy hell,” he mutters, moving quickly to make up for lost time. He latches the doors down, locks them shut, checks the back door then double checks it because he can’t remember if it’s locked or not. It is. The garage is dark around him now, and he’s all too ready to go.
He strips off his overalls where he stands and leaves them in a ball on the floor at his feet. Beneath the work clothes he wears a dingy t-shirt that the jumper did little to protect and a pair of jeans washed colorless by time. Squatting down, he wipes his hands on the overalls, his skin almost as black as the shadows, covered in grease and oil that refuses to come off easily. The pump in the corner gleams with a dull shine but he doesn’t feel like using it—he’ll shower upstairs and sit naked on his pallet while he waits for Gerrick. Who’s probably already up there, he tells himself. He’s hard just thinking about the gunner, and in his room! Trin can’t seem to get over that part of it.
With one last look around the garage, he leaves through the back door. Outside the air is hot and stifling despite the growing dusk, and Trin works up a thin sheen of sweat simply crossing the junkyard to the kitchen entrance of the waystation. The door is open but the screen locked—he leans against it, hands cupped to his face, and sees one of the chore girls at the grill.
She’s younger than he is, younger than Aissa, with straight black hair that shines blue where the light hits it. Trin likes her because she doesn’t like Gerrick, not the way he does. She doesn’t like men, and sleeps with two of the other girls in the room next to his.
“Beck,” he calls out. She can’t hear him over the sizzle of chopped steak so he raises his voice a little. “Hey Beck, let me in here, will you?”
Without glancing up from the grill, Beck stretches one arm towards the door and unhooks the latch. Trin falls into the room. “Thanks,” he sighs. He locks the door behind him before she can ask. On the grill, the sandwich steaks look so tempting that he has to ask, “One of those for me?”
Beck gives him a quick smile. “Blain’s looking for you,” she says by way of hello. “He’s out behind the bar—”
“I’m a mess,” Trin interrupts.
As if noticing his dirty hands for the first time, Beck raises her eyebrows but says nothing.
The last thing Trin wants right now is to see his brother—it’ll be why didn’t he get the trucks done today and take a look at the new jalopy before he turns in and what they’re saying about Gerrick isn’t true, is it? For some reason he thinks that’s going to be Blain’s biggest gripe, him and the gunner. I’ve talked him up for years—you can’t think I’m not going to seize this chance now that he’s finally here.
Stepping up beside Beck, Trin pinches a bite of chopped steak off the grill and pops it in his mouth. He blows his cheeks out, mouth open slightly, to cool the morsel off. “Sweet damn, that’s hot!”
“Idiot,” Beck mutters. When he reaches for another bite, she smacks the back of his hand with the flat of her stainless steel spatula. “What’d you think, it’d be cold? Go find your brother and stop picking at my food.”
Blithely, Trin replies, “Blain can wait.”
“I’m going to tell him you said that,” Beck warns.
With an uneasy laugh, Trin tries to snag another bite of steak from the grill but she slaps his hand away again. “Do you have a death wish? Stop it already or I’ll call your brother. Blain!”
She raises her voice slightly—not enough to be h
eard out in the common room, true, but enough to scare Trin into thinking Blain might come running. “Tell him I had to wash up.” He steals one more tiny piece of the sizzling meat, nothing he can even taste, it’s so small, but he likes the way Beck squeals as she swings the spatula his way. He dances out of reach, laughing. “I’m gone.”
A narrow flight of stairs leads from the kitchen up to the back hall—not as grand or sturdy as the steps out in the common, but these come out right by Trin’s room. More importantly, he won’t have to push through the swinging door that separates the kitchen from the bar. He won’t have to chance sneaking past his brother. Trin might be twenty-one years of age but his brother is twice that and still scares the fuck out of him. Not because he’s ever raised a hand against him, which he hasn’t, or because they fight a lot, which they don’t, but because there’s a very small part of him that thinks Blain feels saddled with him.
Disappointed in life, in his life, and who wouldn’t be? He gave up gunning when he had to take on the waystation, and Trin knows that no matter how much Blain swears he didn’t mind it—that he wanted a change of pace, he wanted to slow down—the thrill of the run still quickens his blood. It must. Why else would he take off like he does?
Sure, he says it’s for parts but he’s not the mech, Trin is. And Blain never hires a gunner to ride with him between outposts, never. He carries his own guns, holstered low on his hips within easy reach. Drawing them is easy—it’s something he’ll never forget. Even now he still comes back with devlar hides drying on the rack of his truck.
Those are the real reason he rides out. There’s a streak in him that likes the killing, the adventure, and he’ll never be satisfied with a staid life behind the bar of a waystation. It’s that streak of gunner in him that Trin doesn’t want to face tonight.
Quickly he crosses the kitchen, weaving through the chore girls busy with dinner. He holds his hands out so they can see the grease up to his elbows and won’t ask him to help. His mind is on one thing, and one thing only. Gerrick. He’s so sure the gunner’s in his room right this moment waiting for him that he has to choke back the urge to call out that he’s coming. There’s a pull in his stride from the way his hard cock rubs into his jeans. Oh jeez am I ever.
He takes the staircase two steps at a time and he’s halfway upstairs when he hears the whap-whap of the kitchen door swinging shut. No, he prays, his feet faltering. Don’t let it be—
“Trin.”
Blain’s voice is like a stone wall in front of him and he stops.
Shit.
He stares into the darkness of the stairwell, up the last few steps, so close…
“Get down here, boy.”
Clearing his throat, Trin looks straight ahead and calls out, “I have to get cleaned up, Blain. I’ll be right down.”
Blain waits. At his sides Trin’s hands curl into dirty fists and he tells himself to keep walking but he can’t. His feet won’t move. He’s not the most obedient person in this world, Lord knows, but he’s never been able to ignore Blain. There’s too much of his father in the man, too damn much.
The kitchen has grown quiet, the chatter of the girls silent, the running spigot turned off. Even the sizzle of the grill sounds subdued. Waiting. Watching. Keep going, Trin tells himself. His body refuses to listen. When his feet finally move again it’s backwards, down the stairs.
On the last step, Trin holds out his hands and looks down at them so he won’t have to meet Blain’s steady gaze. “I’m filthy,” he says softly. In the stillness of the kitchen, he feels like he’s shouting. “I need to wash up.”
“Use the pump down here,” Blain tells him. Trin nods—there’s no argument in him. In the same even voice, his brother adds, “I’ll prime it for you. Haven’t seen you all day, kid. You girls get back to work.”
Trin follows Blain to the kitchen pump, set back in the corner beneath the stairs. There’s one single bulb hung from the underside of the steps and a long, frayed string dangles down from the socket. The string is threaded through a small picture hook tacked to the wall so that whoever wants to use the pump doesn’t have to stumble around in the darkness or splash through the water in the drain trying to find the light pull. Trin doesn’t see why he can’t use the pump upstairs.
Somehow this is Beck’s fault, she distracted him and Blain heard her call his name. If Trin had only been a little faster on the steps then his brother would’ve seen an empty staircase when he came into the kitchen and Trin would be with Gerrick already, fending the hungry gunner off with giggles and half-hearted protests.
“I’m a mess,” he’d say. Gerrick would be smiling and his moustache tickling Trin’s neck right about now. Should be anyway.
“Blain,” he tries, hating the whine in his voice. “I can do this upstairs—”
“You’re already here.” His brother tugs at the string and the bulb flares to life, illuminating the warped floor around the rusted pump. Blain’s sleeves are already rolled up on his forearms but he shoves them past his elbows and grabs the pump’s handle in both hands. Large hands, his father’s hands. Muscles stand out from his arms and neck as he works the pump once, twice. Trin hopes the thing’s rusted shut.
But on the third prime, water spurts from the mouth of the pump in a reddish rush and Blain sighs. “There you go,” he says. As Trin watches, the water begins to run clear. “It’s a little cold, I’d imagine. I see the gunners rolled in. Soap’s in the corner there.”
He points out a pumice soapstone and Trin reaches for it automatically. I see the gunners rolled in…so that’s what this is all about. Trin suspected as much. Next it’ll be mind that Gerrick, he’s a rover. Trin wants to say don’t bother, he’s heard the spiel from Aissa, but he can’t talk to Blain like that. Rubbing the harsh soap between his hands, Trin watches blue-brown lather rise up from the grease and oil on his skin and tries to think of nothing at all. Maybe Blain just wants to talk at him. If he doesn’t ask an outright question, Trin doesn’t really have to answer.
Unfortunately, his brother doesn’t play like that. He leans against the pump and watches Trin work the soap into stained skin. When he speaks, it’s in an almost bored tone of voice, like he’s just trying to pass the time and heaven knows he has all damn day. “I can’t believe Reech still has that old heap of junk. It’s about ready for the yard, don’t you think?”
Trin shrugs—he doesn’t know who Reech is, but from the way Blain talks it’s probably the gunner who owns the truck that isn’t Gerrick’s. “When did they ride in?”
“Yesterday,” Trin mutters. He frowns as he rubs soapy streaks up his arms, first one, then the other. It takes all the strength he has not to say more.
When he doesn’t offer anything else, Blain primes the pump again to get the water flowing and tells him, “Rinse off, Trini. How are you coming along on the trucks?”
Trin shrugs again and plunges his hands into the icy water. “Alright.”
Blain gives him a look that says he saw the parts strewn across the concrete floor out in the garage. “So you finally met him,” he says.
No preamble, no name even, but Trin’s heart flutters nonetheless. Gerrick. Who has to be upstairs by now, has to be wondering where the fuck his boy is at. Above Trin, the bare bulb buzzes faintly. The back of his neck warms under the light and he feels like a criminal at an interrogation. If his brother wasn’t so humorless, he could almost think Blain planned this. The burning light, the itching soap, the whole bit. As Trin rinses his arms, Blain wants to know, “What do you think? Did you get to talk to him?”
“A little.” We didn’t really talk much, but he doesn’t say that. Blain already knows Gerrick spent the night in Trin’s pallet—it’s written out in his eyes.
Aissa must’ve said something as soon as he walked through the door this morning. Three guesses who our Trini’s bedding down with. And what of it? He’d like to know but he’s too scared to ask. Quietly, he adds, “I’m sure Aissa told you as much.”
&n
bsp; Blain barely nods. “He’s the best gunner running,” he says, as if Trin doesn’t know this already. “Fastest draw in the outposts bar none. I ran with him, boy. I’m telling you real.”
In Trin’s hands, the water trickles off. “I know. The pump…”
Ignoring him, Blain continues. “He’s a fun guy, Gerrick is. Always smiling, don’t you know, and dead on with that gun. But listen, you look at me, kid.”
Here it comes. Without raising his head, he looks at his brother and doesn’t like the gunner he sees looking back.
Blain leans over the pump, close enough that Trin can see the individual hairs that make up his brother’s bushy eyebrows. Thin hairs, wiry, silver in the harsh light. For the first time, Blain looks old to him, the lines on his face wrinkles, the grey at his temples like pockets of snow clinging to the earth stubbornly after a thaw. But his eyes are as sharp as a preybird closing in and there’s nothing old in his hands, strong fingers gripping the pump handle so hard that the tips have drained of blood. “Listen to me, Trin,” he whispers.
Trin nods.
“He’s still just a man, you got that?”
Another nod, this one emphatic.
“Sure as hell ain’t whatever it is you’ve made him up in your mind to be. So don’t get all strung out on this, I’m telling you. It’ll pass. He’ll move on, they all do.”
“I know,” Trin murmurs.
Blain shakes his head. “You don’t know, kid. If you did, you’d never pull your pants down for any of them, let alone the gunners. They’re like the wind, Gerrick worst of all. They blow through here today and tomorrow they’re halfway to Konstas, or to the coast maybe, or inland, who the hell knows? You can’t change a man like that and the devil knows you can’t keep him.”
Trin wants to point out that Blain himself was a gunner once and he’s changed. Aissa has him on a short leash now, even if she does play the rope out a bit from time to time.
As if he can hear Trin’s thoughts, Blain hurries on before he can put them into words. “Your responsibility is the garage, you got that? Get those trucks running again and stand aside, boy, because no matter what that bastard says to you between the sheets, sure as shit he’s gone in a weeks’ time and you know it.”