by Amy Lane
“I was just always taught to do good works. I know… sounds like freaky hippy shit. But that’s just what I learned growing up.”
He turned around and left, and Casey didn’t even get to say thank you. He was left there in the room, and after laying the jacket down carefully on the end table so it wouldn’t get any cooties on the sheets, he went to work with the greasy white stuff in the bottle.
After he was done massaging it all in, he spent about an hour in the tub. He must have washed himself about five hundred times with the Irish Spring soap and the washcloth, and his hair could not be shampooed enough. It wasn’t until the water got to be frigid—long after his fingers and toes got to be pruney—t---- that he finally got out.
The water in the tub was brown, and he spent a few minutes washing the ring off the edges before going into the guest room and putting on the scrubs. Well, they were clean, they were comfy, and they seemed to be one-size-fits-all. What wasn’t to like, right? He went commando, which was fine, because his pubes were still tingling from all of the chemical attention.
When he got into the living room, Casey saw the back of Joe’s head where he sat on the couch, watching television, in a similar set of scrubs, a small plate with crumbs next to him on the end table. There was a plate of hamburgers, the kind made from the frozen patties and regular bread, on the table in the kitchen.
“Is that food for me?” he asked and was surprised when the big man on the couch startled.
“Wha? Yeah.” Joe yawned. “Eat yourself stupid. Sorry. I just worked three twelves in a row—I’m sort of beat.”
Casey started digging into the hamburgers—and they were no less heavenly than the PB&J. He was on his third, and not even thinking about slowing down, when Joe got up from the couch and came up behind him to touch his head.
And Casey spazzed out, throwing one arm back in defense and dropping the hamburger on the plate. His hand smacked Joe in the chin, and Joe grunted and took a step back.
“Sorry, kid,” he said after an awkward moment, during which Casey picked up the hamburger out of sheer reflex. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ll remember to be more careful. I was just going to check your hair for nits.”
Casey took a bite to mask his quickened breathing, and then swallowed. “While I’m eating?”
“You were looking pretty out of it. I thought I could get this done and you could go to sleep.” There was a silence, and Casey took a quick look to the side and saw that Joe was looking sheepish. “Yeah, I guess that’s sort of gross while you’re eating.”
Casey shrugged. Really? He was going to complain about gross after what he’d just washed off his body? “Knock yourself out,” he said, trying to mask his embarrassment. “It would be good not to itch.”
He made it through another hamburger before he pushed the plate away. Joe’s fingers were gentle and firm on his scalp as he sectioned little locks of hair from each other and pulled the tiny nit comb through. Casey could hear the rasp of the teeth against the strands of his hair whenever Joe found something. The television was still on in the front room—a big set, but not a console type—it was playing a sitcom on low volume. Casey’s head lowered to his hands, and above him, Joe started humming as he worked.
“I was born… six gun in my hand…”
It was old rock, nothing that Casey had on cassette tapes back home. Casey had George Michael and Boy George and Madonna, but still, he knew this song. He found himself humming along.
“Bad company, I can’t deny…”
Joe let him, and Casey was still hearing that deep from-your-toes voice as he closed his eyes.
He wasn’t sure when, but eventually Joe shook his shoulders gently. “C’mon, kid, you’re too big to carry.”
Casey wanted to say that he wasn’t a kid. He’d lived through the last two months, right? But big warm hands were on his shoulders, and he stood up to be steered gently down the hall. Joe made him stop and turn at the bedroom, and then pulled down the sheets for him.
“Don’t worry about getting up, kid. You sleep as long as you want. Remember, lock my side of the bathroom when you’re in there, and I’ll know not to come in.”
Casey grunted, then looked up. “I’m not sleeping in your bed?”
“No, Goldilocks, this one here is just right.”
That was really all Casey needed to know before he fell asleep for more than fifteen hours.
Brilliant Disguise
~Josiah
THE Quaker movement, or the Religious Society of Friends, was not as prevalent or as structured or as organized as it had been at the country’s inception, but there were still pockets of Quakers throughout the northeast. Joe’s parents had been raised Quakers in the relative quiet of upstate New York, in a tiny village not far from the Canadian border. They were both soft-spoken, sturdy people—his mother had been a nurse, his father a history teacher—and together they’d raised a quiet, happy family before they retired. Joe had three brothers and two sisters, all older than he was.
His older sister, the second oldest in the family, had loved him best of all. When he’d first come to California in the early eighties, everybody was talking about astrological signs, and Joe had learned that he was a Scorpio, because his birthday was November 19, and Jeannie had been a Virgo. Virgos and Scorpios adored each other—it was literally written in the stars.
Jeannie had loved him best, even though she’d been nearly fourteen years his senior. She had been the sister who held him most as a baby and who fed and dressed him as he grew older. In the mornings, she was the one who walked him to the neighbor’s when their mother had a shift, and she had always secretly given him the biggest cupcake. Jeannie read him stories when he was little, about firemen and policemen and teachers, and when they went to church, and he sat through the simple service, she explained that working to make the world a better place was working for God.
Josiah had always had a sort of hazy idea about God. The God of the Quakers was a gentle sort, a forgiving sort, and Joe liked that fine, but it often seemed he was inactive about the things Joe thought he should be most active about. If God, whom everybody was supposed to have all this faith in, was so all-God-damned powerful, he should have been able to see through the despair of an eighteen-year-old girl, shouldn’t he? He should have seen that Jeannie had been struggling, that the boy that she’d nursed a painful crush on through her senior year had showed her a whole bunch of attention and then just left her alone. He should have seen that her friends had been taunting her.
God should have been watching as Joe’s older sister took her life in her hands and went to see a drunken doctor who would work under the table. He should have given her the strength to see that their parents would have forgiven her anything, and God should have told her not to go. He should have given her the immune system to fight a botched abortion.
God should have done something, and he didn’t. God let Jeannie stumble home, bleeding, to die of a fever as Joe sat at her bedside and their mother cried. God let that happen when Jeannie had only ever sung his praises and taught Joe to do the same. At six, even before Josiah understood everything about what had happened to Jeannie Daniels, Joe was ’bout done with God. Besides, it seemed like serving the rest of the world was a better option—if that worked well, Joe shouldn’t have to worry about God. Joe could take care of people just fine.
So that was what he grew up to do. But the growing up grew complicated.
Josiah was nine years old when Woodstock shook his little corner of the world. His parents’ small town north of Bear Mountain was really nowhere near Bethel, New York, but everybody heard about it. Josiah was entranced by the idea. People gathered together to listen to music. Josiah adored music—“Simple Gifts” was his favorite song when he was nine. And even though those people weren’t listening to “Simple Gifts,” those people who gathered took care of each other and didn’t listen to what God or teachers told them about rules? Right away, no matter what the music, Josia
h was a fan!
When he was nineteen, the world was a more cynical place. The music, for one thing, was not as good. Josiah liked Bad Company, Journey, Bruce Springsteen, and Kansas just fine, but he was not a fan of disco. In fact, that entire five years of the music scene had been incredibly painful for him. For one thing, he had no rhythm. He moved too slowly for any of that music. But power rock? That moved just right for him.
Joe graduated from high school and moved to California the year Darkness on the Edge of Town was released. He’d always loved that the album had been recorded not too far from where he lived. The pretext for moving to California was that he had a scholarship at a nursing school. This was true, but there were plenty of nursing schools in New York or New Jersey or Vermont. The truth was that he wanted to be somewhere nobody knew him.
Upstate New York was incredibly beautiful. National parks, Bear Mountain, acres of rural farmland. Josiah loved it; it was a part of his heart and bones. But after Jeannie’s death, he looked at it and somehow saw only lines. County lines, township lines, lines that surrounded what a person should be. Maybe it was because he’d spent twelve years thinking about Jeannie and how ashamed she must have been about crossing lines, about being someone besides the good girl she’d tried so hard to be.
Maybe it was because he played percussion for the symphonic band, and one summer night, as he walked home from band practice, the lead trumpet player had taken him behind a stand of trees and kissed him on the mouth. Joe had returned the kiss—surprised, because it had been his first and he’d always assumed it would be with a girl—and then Tim had tilted Joe’s head back and told him to look at the stars. Joe had, and Tim had proceeded to kiss down his throat, under his rucked-up shirt, and to the soft swell of his stomach. He’d bitten there, and suckled the flesh into his mouth, and before Joe could do more than groan in sudden want, Tim had unzipped his cut-off jeans and taken Joe’s cock into his mouth.
Suddenly the stars were behind Joe’s eyes as well as in front of them, and Tim pulled back and stroked Joe until he’d finished spurting into the leaf mold Tim was kneeling on. When Tim stood up, he’d kissed Joe again and said next time Joe could return the favor. Joe had. For an entire summer, they’d stopped in that stand of trees and simply explored each other, unhurriedly, without talking about a relationship or what they were doing or how it was wrong. When the summer was over, Tim told Joe he was going to ask out Kathy, a flute player, and Joe was okay with that.
Joe had dated her friend, Susan, for most of their junior year.
But when high school ended, Josiah didn’t want to marry Susan. He didn’t want to marry Tim, for that matter. He simply wanted to be somewhere… different. Somewhere without the little lines telling him that he should want to marry Susan instead of Tim. Somewhere a girl like Jeannie might not feel like she’d be better off putting her life at risk than facing her parents with the results of an accident in the back seat of a car after the Valentine’s Day dance.
That being said, he could have been bitterly disappointed in California.
Yes, it was true. San Francisco State College was a lot different than upstate New York. There were no boundaries—either personal or moral—that Joe didn’t get a chance to cross. It was a good thing Josiah was relatively bright, because he killed a lot of brain cells in college—and had learned to use a rubber right quick after his first dose of penicillin for the clap, because there wasn’t much, both male and female, that he didn’t do.
In spite of all that (and a harpy of an attending professor who thought that men shouldn’t be nurses, and who butchered all of his papers to try and prove that point), Joe finished up his schooling with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, which, in the early eighties, could get him a job about anywhere in the country.
But by then, Joe was tired of the city and really tired of having his personal boundaries overridden, especially by so many sweating, heaving bodies. Sex was okay, but he would rather have it be kept personal, thank you very much, and he would be just as glad to wait for the right persons to keep it that way.
Besides. He missed the quiet of the Adirondacks. He missed the way you could walk a mile from one house to the next without seeing anyone.
He looked around. At first he wanted farmland, but Bakersfield and Fresno held no appeal to him whatsoever, and he started looking into the Sierra Foothills.
He liked pretty much everything north of Rocklin, which, back then, was a flea speck of a town whose only claim to fame was Sierra Community College. He got a job at Auburn General and, after living in a rental for a little while, started looking for his own property.
Foresthill was about a twenty-mile commute, which wasn’t bad, even on the bike, and like he said to Casey, you couldn’t hear anything. Not a neighbor, not a car. Just the rush of the wind in the trees overhead and the occasional owl.
Of course, the morning after Casey arrived, there was the goddamned neighbor’s dog, who wouldn’t shut the fuck up, and Josiah groaned as he rolled out of bed.
Oh Jesus, couldn’t that ornery old geezer feed his fucking Rottweiler? (Joe had learned to embrace swearing in college. It was, to his mind, even better than pot and beer, and he planned to keep that habit a lot longer than he’d kept pot and beer, too!) With a yawn and a stretch, he put on a jacket over his scrub top and put his feet into moccasins. He’d left the thermostat at sixty the night before, and it was damned cold in the house in the morning, but since he hadn’t had time to insulate, he couldn’t afford to heat it all the way when blankets would do just fine.
He’d showered the night before but hadn’t dried his hair, and it was a frightful, kinky mess down his back as he padded toward the garage, but he didn’t care. If the damned dog had woken Casey up to see him look like the bride of fucking Frankenstein, Casey would have let him know already.
Casey was not, in fact, his first rescue. His first rescue had been a pair of kids who’d been left on the side of the road like unwanted kittens. (He’d rescued a number of those too, and he remembered to put a giant scoop of cat food into the bowl by the door leading from the kitchen to the garage.) He’d taken them home, given them baths, fed them, and called social services the next day. Social services had come and gotten them, and Josiah had spent the next week picking cootie nits out of his hair because he hadn’t been careful. He knew better now—kept a gamut of medication for those sorts of things on his shelves, and the hospital had been an oblivious benefactor for his altruistic pursuits.
So the truth was, it didn’t matter if Casey did see him looking like the Bride of Fucking Frankenstein and it scared him. As soon as Joe was done feeding Ira Kenby’s fucking dog, he was going to call social services again, and Casey would be taken to a home that would be more appropriate for a runaway.
So really, Joe would say, they owed much of their lives together to a senile old man and a dog tortured by hunger to the point it didn’t know better. (Casey would always reply that they would have met again, because there was just no way they could have lived without each other, but Joe’s faith didn’t run that deep. Casey would say that was because Joe didn’t have a Josiah Daniels in his life, and Joe would shake his head and walk off, but that was later in their story.)
Joe’s neighbor lived about a half a mile away by the dirt road that had brought the motorcycle to the garage the night before, but if you cut through the back, you could find the fence that divided the property (an anomaly in New York, but Joe had gotten used to them here in “free” California) about two hundred yards through the trees. Joe’s property spanned about twenty acres, but Joe hadn’t been that interested in those numbers when he’d been looking at it to buy. He’d mostly just seen the big batch of space between the two houses and been sold.
And the only time that space didn’t seem to be a blessing was when he was scratching the hell out of his ankles on the underbrush as he walked the path he himself had worn between his house and the fence. Fucking Rufus. Damned dog would be eating Kenby out of house and
home, but Joe had made the mistake of bringing home some kitchen scraps for him once—one lousy, fucking time—and the dog had lost his mind. Now, if old Kenby didn’t dig deep enough into the gargantuan bag of kibble for the poor bastard, Rufus was howling at the fence, trying to get Joe’s attention.
Except… oh, dammit. This time, of all moronic fucking things! Rufus was tangled in the bent pig fence, having chewed his way through the support post and leapt halfway over the fence before it twisted. Oh crap. It looked like the dog’s leg was broken in one of the smaller gaps, and Joe resisted the urge to just turn around and call Ira and have him clean up his mess.
Rufus caught sight of him then and let loose with a howl, both pathetic and pitiful, and Joe sighed. Ira was too old to be living alone as it was.
“All right, Rufus. C’mon, big guy. You and me, we’re going to have to work together, see? Now I’m just going to move the fence so—”
A howl punctuated the sudden quiet as Josiah shifted the fencing so that he could walk on top of it and get to the dog to help free him.
“Yeah, yeah—I’m sorry about that, big guy. Here. Here. See? Here I am, got my arm over your shoulder, I’m working the leg through, okay? And—fuck!” Oh, ouch, oh fuck, oh shit, oh holy fucking Moses in a bushel basket with cookies, ouch!
“Jesus, Rufus!” Joe fought back tears and the urge to look at his bicep, where the damned dog, in his fear and pain, had just sunk his big long fucking teeth through the denim jacket, the skin, and the muscle, right to the fucking bone. But Joe was this close to getting the dog’s leg out, and the dog already had a hold of his arm—why the hell not finish the job?
Suddenly the leg came free, broken and bloody, and Joe let go of it, hoping that Rufus would let go of his arm.
Rufus did, and sank to the ground in a whimpering puddle, hurt and scared and probably embarrassed and sorry to boot.
Joe still didn’t look at his arm. Instead, he knelt on the flattened pig wire and picked Rufus up—all one hundred pounds of him—and then walked over the pig wire back toward his house. It was an effort—his arm was bitching up a storm—but he carried Rufus to the back of the beat-to-shit Chevy Half-Ton that sat in the carport, next to the Harley.