“Now.” His voice sounding like he had a napkin stuffed in his mouth, the hiker wagged the knife at Tommy like an impolite finger. “Nobody says ‘gimme’ and nobody fucks anyone else’s shit . . .” Tommy just looked up at the blurry man, confused and not remembering what he’d said. “And we can be hiking friends. Not going for coffee, talking about the bone spurs in my ankle and how it’s weird that Fiona got married like four months after we broke up, capital F capital R capital I capital E and so forth friends. But, maybe, grab a hike, watch baseball, whack a tennis ball around and shoot the shit type pals. That’s better, anyway. I’m sort of done with depth, y’know? Depth as an important thing.”
Tommy croaked out a vague, affirmative sound and fumbled his dinged-up glasses back on.
The hiker got this weird smile on his face, placed the knife on the mossy rock beside him, and tossed his water bottle to Tommy. He wiggled the joint up and down in his mouth for a second, watching Tommy pull himself painfully up to a seated position and drain the water. “You look drawn. That’s, in my experience anyhow, that’s a sign of a silly diet or a guilty conscience” — the hiker smiled at Tommy as if Tommy were a funny joke the hiker’d heard a hundred times — “or both.”
Tommy was still struggling too much to follow. He dropped his head and looked at the ground, trying to gather the courage to touch his testicles.
The hiker went on: “What do we have here, then? Is it an either, or is it an all kind of a thing?”
25
Mousey hadn’t met a person like Tommy Marlo in a long time, and he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed people exactly like Tommy Marlo until he did.
It had taken less than three minutes of conversation for Mousey to confirm his file-read on Tommy, and less than fifteen to elicit a confession for the money-stash robbery. The kid was a small-time street mugger with about a half a lobe more than most of his contemporaries and a lobe and a half less than a modestly talented sixth-grade debater. Mousey liked him, he was a nice kid, all armed robberies aside.
Even his last decade in Chicago, working SIU and Internal Affairs, running bag for the DA, he’d been operating at too high a level to meet many Marlos. Sketchy, dumb, funny, reckless, and sweet small-time street criminals. Tommy was exactly the kind of person Mousey had always used and sometimes helped and usually made friends with working vice, when Mousey had been a young guy who was having fun doing his job.
Talking to Tommy, even just looking him in the eye, Mousey knew him to an acute degree. Knew how to play him, knew how well Marlo meant, knew how dangerous he really was and really wasn’t. On the street, guys like Marlo were victims who just got out in front of it and did their victimizing first. It reminded Mousey not just of people he’d known but of a time, and of himself. When he’d loved it. When he’d been having the time of his life, working crazy shifts, riding obscene, joyful amphetamine rushes, playing a quick, scary, hilarious game every second of his life.
Tommy had finally gotten up to stand, pacing gingerly with his hands consciously elevated, as if maintaining an imaginary force field over his lower body. He stilled himself, caught Mousey’s eye. “You’re a cop. Right, Mousey? You’re a cop.”
Mousey held Marlo’s gaze, took a sip of his water, and then set to staring at the thick, layered spread of forest leading up the hill. “Not at this moment, no.”
Mousey stayed staring off, but he heard Marlo start moving around again, kicking sticks as he paced. “That’s a thing you’re saying to fuck with me. Right? I mean, you’re not a cop at this moment means you’re a cop sometime. And for the fucking police, that time is anytime. So tell me, I’m ready to go, man.”
“Go where?” Mousey looked over at Marlo, half a smile peeking through his grimace like sun through an eyelid. “Well, Tommy, you’re going wherever you want. I used to be a cop, as in I’m not anymore, and I wasn’t exactly a stickler even when I was. So you’re going wherever you want to go, Tommy. That’s your business.”
“Why’d you pump me for all the details, then?”
“I was a cop. I’m nosy as fuck, that part stays with you. Even if you’re not a stickler.”
Tommy seemed to accept that, moved over to an adjacent rock, and started to sit down with extreme care. It took him at least twenty seconds, which is one of those amounts of time that seems long when all you’re doing is watching another person sit down.
Looking at Marlo, Mousey remembered being twenty-four years old, two weeks out of uniform, running an errand for his new senior partner, picking up a brick of coke that Kenny (the partner) was planning to chop up and split among the squad to make up for the money everybody’d dropped on the Bears that year.
Mousey, the low man on the pole in the vice squad, waiting out on a street corner for a drug dealer, feeling small in his jacket. Showing up five minutes early and pacing, checking his watch for fifteen, seventeen, twenty minutes. Finally, a beat-up old Cutlass rolled up, a dealer named Rob at the wheel, scar across his face, girlfriend in the back seat, looking about fifteen years old. And Mousey remembered how nervous, how scared he’d been. How much he’d cared about all the consequences, and he remembered feeling that there were so many. He remembered gulping and getting in and barely croaking out a hello. The scar on Rob’s face running from eyebrow to lower lip, thin and discontinuous and spaced out into skipping stones of raised tissue, like it’d been done with a coat hanger, which, Mousey would find out later, it had.
And they were both really nice. The girl in the back looked fifteen but was really twenty; she offered him half of her orange and asked if he’d seen a brand-new show about this bruiser of a chick who swordfights with gods and snakes and shit, and he’d said no, and Rob had crinkled his scar by winking, patting him on the leg and saying, “You’ll love it.” They’d sped to the apartment, which was a huge, horrifying tenement with a coat of paint on it, hustled past the crackheads, and gotten to the TV just in time to catch the third episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.
That was really a moment. One of those days that you can actually and accurately point to as a day that started a whole series of years, and as having everything those years had in them: surprise, relief, dread, fun, genuine interest, all permeated with straight-up human misery and humour, in not quite equal measure.
Mousey left his would-be mugger alone for a while longer. The young man had had a rough morning. The detective strolled up the path a few paces and climbed onto one of the taller rocks. He looked across the surface of the lake as it rippled and moved with the shifts of the wind, and he thought one thing: fuck Mike Richmond. Fuck him forever.
If Mike wanted to catch this kid, he was going to have to catch him solo, Mousey wasn’t going to help him. He was sick of weak, ambitious men. He’d been an ambitious man for a good stretch in his late twenties to mid-thirties, and it made him feel strange and distant from himself to think of that time, like the three-week summer camp he’d been to as a kid where he told everyone a bunch of lies about how many girls he’d kissed and how much he drank and how many cigarettes he smoked on his way home from school.
Mousey was going to help Tommy the only real way he could, right that second: give him some food and go swimming with him.
Ø
Having smoked half the joint and run harder than usual, Mousey found himself not without regrets about giving away his protein bar as he and Tommy sat on a log, waiting it out so Tommy could swim without a cramp. The young man was still recovering from the beating Mousey’d given him and had his head craned down, looking at the sand, his hand rubbing repeatedly over the stubble of his shaved head, making a brisk scraping sound, clearly audible in the early-morning silence.
A stern rumble emanated from Mousey’s stomach as he stood and stripped to his swimming clothes. He hooked a thumb towards the lake. “How’re your balls?”
Tommy smiled and popped off the log, placed his mangled glasses carefully down, and started peeling off his shirt. He spoke with the stretched fabric pulled tight
over his face. “Good enough to wade. I’m not a big backstroker or whatever.”
Tommy got the shirt over his head and Mousey considered him carefully for a few seconds. The knife was about five steps closer to Tommy. It was sitting on the log, the blade still, redirecting light onto one small spot in the sand.
An eagle glided soundlessly a hundred feet over their heads, and the two men watched the bird as it smoothly drifted over the lake, sliding across in a casual semicircle, then moving its wings twice and disappearing over the opposite treeline. They looked back at each other, and Tommy smiled in a way that suggested crying. Mousey turned his back and walked into the lake until he was underwater.
It was a sunny but windy day, and after a little convincing, Tommy agreed that he’d be better off with more of his body under the surface, warming himself by treading water. The two men splashed around aimlessly for a while, and then Tommy decided he’d have more fun and be less worried with something floating to hang onto, so he dog-paddled over and pulled a log to Mousey.
“It’s big enough for both of us.”
Mousey tested the log’s buoyancy by pressing it below the surface. “This side’s heavier, I’ll take this one. You take the other to balance.”
Tommy nodded seriously and took his station at the other end, holding onto it with white knuckles and using his legs as an engine for the craft. Mousey balanced on the other side of the log, alternating between straddling the log and pinching it with his knees, paddling with his arms to help Tommy, trying to stay balanced on the log as Tommy powered it forward. After a while, they saw a big log that was also a floating greenhouse, three different kinds of fern growing out of the top. They communicated wordlessly and floated smoothly towards it.
Mousey almost fell as he tried to pull the two logs together, hanging stretched between them, one toe fiercely gripping their first log, his hand anchoring them to the fern log. Tommy had little actual depth perception, so his efforts to move the logs closer together mostly resulted in random, lurchy parallel shoves. Eventually, after a minute’s silent labour, they had the two logs firmly anchored, the tip of their first tucked securely under the new fern log. They sat together and breathed.
Tommy’s mood seemed to have brightened. “We’ve brought them together.”
Mousey nodded, glanced briefly over the sun-soaked fern leaves. “What do we do now? We didn’t really think this one through.”
Tommy closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. Mousey stayed quiet for an uncomfortably long time. The water on his legs was starting to separate into drops. “I think I might leave you now, Tommy. Are you going to be all right?”
Tommy didn’t turn his head or open his eyes. He smiled and nodded.
“How about I’ll get you some groceries, I’ll leave them in the parking lot. Before dinner tonight.”
Tommy opened his eyes and looked at Mousey. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Mousey nodded. It was time. “Tommy, I knew about the, uh, the money. The gas station job. You didn’t kill anyone.”
Tommy looked like he was swallowing something about the size of his throat. “What?”
This, right here, was why Mousey had always preferred the Tommys of the world to the Mike Richmonds. Tommy, a lifelong fuck up, would torture himself forever over the idea, the possibility that he’d accidentally run over a guy who was actively trying to shoot him in head. Tommy would never even check, see if he was right; he’d just suffer. Mike Richmond would let a homeless kid choke to death on her own vomit and torture himself with the worry that he’d get a bad fitness report that quarter. Mike Richmond would Google comparable situations in which officers had escaped punishment, print them off, and present them at his hearing. “I heard about that thing, the Victoria deal. Nobody died. You were talking about people dying, but you’ve been in the news. Nobody got run over. You, uh, I don’t know, man. You didn’t hit anyone with your car.”
Tommy stared at the space between them on the log. Then he closed his eyes again, angling his head back up. Mousey slid off the log and swam to shore. He got dressed and looked back, Tommy still cross-legged on the fern log, looking straight at the sun with his eyes closed.
26
Tommy wasn’t really sure how long he spent on the log, but he stayed there with his eyes closed, sort of dreaming, for long enough that his thoughts turned fuzzily sexual (as they will), and in spite of or maybe a little bit as a reaction to his recent groin injury, he became almost fully aroused. Eventually, he noticed how chilly he was. He rolled off the log and paddled back to shore. He didn’t put his glasses on for a second, just looked at the smudgy black patch of them on the driftwood beside his pants as he reflected sadly on the fact that he didn’t have a towel. As he slipped the glasses on, Mousey slid into focus, leaning heavily on a tree, looking like somebody was forcing him to grin.
“Hi.”
“Did you forget something?” Tommy twisted his hips slightly, trying to disguise his spongily engorged penis. He was trying to get the bulk of it down a leg of his shorts, which it was just barely pliable enough to do.
“See, I’m going to tell you something, Tommy. I find myself doing it a lot lately, telling people things, and I think, y’know, when did I become such a tool? It’s an impossible question.”
“You seem nice to me.”
“I’ve been nice to you, that might be why.” Mousey pushed himself off the tree, and all of sudden, Tommy started to wonder who should feel sorry for whom. “Aside from the beating. What I’m saying: you’d believe me if I told you I’d done some pretty horrible things in my life.”
Tommy gingerly fingered the rising swelling and raw skin on his lower chest. “I’d believe you.”
“You put down two serial rapists . . . maybe not serial. Multiple rapists, anyhow. You do that thing just two times, and it is such a good, necessary thing you did that it gets really hard to find one bad thing you could do to compete with it. And you look around, you look at all these people with all this money, and you look at yourself, and you realize that it cost you. It cost you a lot. And every good thing you ever did was a little bit horrible to somebody.”
Tommy had literally no idea what he was talking about. When had rape come into the picture? “Sure.”
“I mean, everything we eat was living at one time.”
It had been a long time since Tommy had considered the fact that plants, even though they don’t move, are still alive. “Not processed cheese.”
“Not any kind of cheese.”
“Yeah. Yeah, man, no kinds of cheese.”
“Do you think dolphins have better lives than people?”
Tommy was openly shivering now. Mousey was still looking at him with these faraway eyes. Tommy felt the familiar ice-drip of something big about to happen, like Mousey was either going to give Tommy a million dollars or kill him. He was too scared to talk, and Mousey let the pause go on way too long.
“Me, personally, I think there was probably a good couple million years where it was better to be a dolphin. Back in the day, y’know, people barely have fire. Wolves are a legit enemy to mankind. Like, it’s a world war against wolves and starving to death and cutting your foot and getting a staph infection, all the time. Dolphins, they’re just fucking each other’s brains out. They’re playing and swimming in pods, carousing. We’re still not that much smarter than dolphins. They just don’t have these.” He wiggled both his thumbs. “Without these, you’re in a spot where you wait a few million years, and the animals with thumbs will build a bunch of shit that can kill you. And they can dump poison into your whole paradigm. The ocean’s a paradigm. So are thumbs.”
Tommy relaxed a little. The guy wasn’t going to kill him, he was just zombie-eye stoned. The guy kept rambling.
“And you can’t do anything about it, because it’s just you and your fins and your dick that you use for fun. You’re a dolphin. You’re a dolphin in this version.”
Tommy wiped the back of his neck nervously a
nd reached for his pants. The water had soaked through Mousey’s shirt in odd patches, sticking to him in four spots. “Yeah, man, I see that.” Tommy saw just about nothing, in either a literal or a figurative sense.
“Put your clothes on, Tommy. I’m getting you a tent.”
“Wait, seriously?”
Mousey pulled his shirt off his chest then let it fall back to where it’d just been stuck. “I get you some groceries, I leave you here, and I do it knowing the kind of trouble you’re in? That’s amateur, sleep-at-night, Good Samaritan bullshit. And one thing I’ll never be is a Good Samaritan. You and me, Tommy, we’re low-lifes. Two different kinds, but kinds of the same thing. Nobody looks out for low-lifes but other low-lifes.”
Tommy started nodding several seconds before he understood what the guy was saying, then he kept nodding. “It’s like how everybody hates smokers but smokers always let you bum one. Smokers share more than anybody.”
“We can pull this one off, Tommy. You come with me, you trust me a little bit, we can pull this one off.”
For the last minute or so, Tommy’s dick hadn’t been stiff at all and had really wanted to go back to the middle of his shorts, but it was caught in a fold. It was time. Tommy reached down and moved his dick back to its proper, neutral spot, ready to go.
Wherever.
27
Tommy showed Mousey the patch of grass where he’d slept and left his bag, and Mousey told him to gather it all up. The kid had pretty much submitted to him now, he was going to take whatever Mousey gave. He patted the kid on the shoulder and pointed at the bag, at the shape of the bag. “You’re going to throw out that skillet.”
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