Sleepwalker

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Our lips met. He sighed against my mouth, gently, everything about him gentle, like he might float away if I hadn’t been anchored between his knees. He shifted his grip on my chin and caressed my jaw with his fingers that smelled like turpentine, and this time I felt the small, wet touch of his tongue.

  Yes.

  I got my arms around his waist and inched up closer, swept my tongue over his lower lip. I pictured his mouth, how pretty it looked when he slept, and I teased it more, dared him to let me in good and deep.

  I couldn’t get him to rise to the bait. He pulled back—gently, of course—and sucked on his lower lip briefly before he spoke, with his face shyly averted. “I can finish here by seven,” he said, and he slid off the railing. I didn’t move back to give him room, and his whole body rubbed the length of mine as he did it. I wanted to touch him so badly I ached with the need to do it, to peel off that flannel shirt and unhitch that heavy belt, and all the while run my lips over his suntanned skin....

  “Mr. Weber.”

  I jumped back from Jesse like I’d been shot in the ass with a triple-pumped air rifle. Bridget stood in the alcove that led back to the Denizens of the Sky. She saw. Exactly how much, I didn’t know. But she’d seen enough.

  “We were taking a break,” Jesse said reasonably, and I had to hand it to him, for a small-town farm boy, he was pretty cool and collected about being caught making out on the job with another guy.

  Then again, he was just a temp.

  “Break time’s over,” Bridget said.

  Jesse crouched down to gather up his tool roll, and metal clattered on marble as tools scattered. Maybe he wasn’t quite as collected as he looked.

  “I’m taking my lunch,” I said, and I tried to angle past Bridget, but somehow she managed to block the entire twelve-foot alcove span.

  “Just a minute, Dan.”

  I kept walking. I heard the squeaks of her rubber-soled shoes pursuing my loud footsteps.

  “Danny....”

  I stopped in front of the locked Admin door, swept my ugly baseball cap off my head and ran my fingers through my hair. “My father was Danny. It’s Web. My name is Web.”

  She gave a loud, exasperated sigh. “What are you doing to me, here? What were you thinking? We’ve only got a few more hours before Mr. Trevino gets here, and you’re off messing around with the taxidermist.”

  “It was like...two minutes.”

  “I’m not closed-minded, you know. I don’t care what your preference is. I’d say the same thing if it was Theresa back there. Just...keep it in your pants until the MAHPS meeting. Understood?”

  I’d bet she wouldn’t say the exact same thing to Theresa—but I got the message loud and clear. I nodded, and said, “I really do need to eat.” And take my pill.

  She gestured at the door. “Go.”

  I unlocked the Admin door, took my pill and ate my sandwich. Bridget stormed in as I was finishing the last few bites, and said, “I’m really disappointed in you.”

  “Who are you, my mother?” Oops. A George-slip. Really.

  “That...was in very poor taste.” She grabbed her purse out of her office, slammed her door, and power-walked out.

  I popped a couple inches of crust into my mouth. Oh well. Nothing I could do about it now.

  I was finishing my tap water when my phone rang. JR Jones on the caller ID. “Bad timing,” he said.

  “I shoulda known better—she’s famous for acting like she’s leaving and showing back up. It’s creepy—like she’s got a secret passage, watching you through portraits with their eyes cut out.”

  “I’m really sorry, man. Are you in big trouble?”

  I sighed. “No. Maybe. Uh, I dunno. She’s just on the rag ’cause of the grant.”

  “I’ve gotta triple-check everything so she doesn’t find an excuse to knock down my old man’s fee, y’know? But I’m gonna haul ass, and I will be done at seven—that’s a promise.” He hung up.

  My throat was dry. I drank more tap water.

  I’d never been the type of guy to work too hard at the whole relationship thing. If someone got to be too much trouble, there were other fish in the sea—even in the small sea of Faris. “Let’s not rush things” would have translated into “Somewhere down the line you’ll figure out I’m way too high maintenance,” and the guy’s number would mysteriously disappear from my address book.

  So why did Jesse’s one step forward, two steps back approach make me feel like I had smoking hot lava coursing through my veins where my blood used to be? Maybe it was just my meds reacting to something.

  Right.

  I stood and stretched, and got ready to make the rounds again, when I noticed the door to Luke’s office. There was no light creeping out from under it, and it was closed, as usual for the middle of the night. So why did it look positively sinister now, when before it had simply been a door?

  I tried it. Locked. I picked through my heavy keyring—eeny, meeny, miny, moe. There—I selected the key, turned it, and I was in. The computer fired up just fine, but the login was password protected and after a couple of obvious tries, including “asshat,” I gave up and shut the box back down. Luke’s chair creaked as I rocked back in it and drummed my fingers on the armrests.

  It wasn’t as if I needed to see more emails to know Luke was backstabbing me, but I wanted to get a bead on exactly when I should expect the axe to fall. Bridget had been angling to keep me on as some kind of supervisor—good luck with that now. Sonofabitch. I put my face in my hands and rocked in the squeaky chair, and did my best not to imagine myself with half my brain scooped out in a state hospital straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for lack of decent health coverage.

  The not-imagining wasn’t going so well.

  I breathed, and tried to calm down, and checked my watch. After three. All my time was present and accounted for, and better still, it also meant I might at least see some action in a few hours. That notion cheered me up, a little.

  The desktop was clean, which wasn’t surprising, since Luke was expecting a visiting dignitary first thing in the morning, but the trash can hadn’t been emptied. No cleaning crew—and while Jesse was probably ten times better than them at dusting off old Isaac Faris, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to gain access to the offices and empty the wastebaskets.

  I rifled through. Quotes from cleaners, lists of grants and organizations, pages of phone numbers, napkins, paper cups, and brittle wads of gum wrapped in sticky notes. No conveniently-printed emails about me and my job, not that I’d actually expected there to be.

  There was a wadded-up letter that hadn’t compressed very well since it was printed on cotton rag, the type of stock you’d put a resume on, with a raised MAHPS logo on top.

  Dear Mr. Presioso: blah blah blah. General stuff about the visit, the time. And then the last paragraph got interesting.

  “We’ll also work out a solution to the Isaac Faris lead mine diorama, pending the recent slavery allegations of the Kickapoo nation and their demands for reparation. A larger memorial to the ten victims of the tornado would be in better taste.”

  Eleven, counting Walter Bronski, who’d died five days later of the heart attack he’d suffered when the tornado plowed past his house and sucked all the dishes out of the dishwasher through the kitchen skylight.

  I touched my eye to see if it was twitching. Seemed to be under control. I re-wadded the thick letter and kept searching.

  A to-do list—a handwritten thing, complete with boxes he’d drawn beside the items, and then checked off as he’d done them. Talk about obnoxious. I scanned it for anything related to me, but since the list only included things he wanted to get ready for the visit, the only reference was benign.

  (X) X-tra guard - web’s cous?

  (X) Fresh water break room

  (X) Good coffee, not too showy

  ( ) Class visit? Conference day - call home schoolers

  (X) Van Dyke appraisal, bison hide - 22-24k! Call insurance.<
br />
  I stared at the last item. The only reason to call the insurance would be if he was planning on dinging Jesse’s liability for damaging the hide.

  That fucking bastard. He was going to try to milk twenty-four grand out of Jesse’s insurance, when it was the Center that had placed the thing under a mildewy duct and ruined it—when they’d shaken on it, for Chrissakes.

  I had to tell Jesse...and for a minute there I was tempted to wait until after our 7 a.m. rendezvous—but I only considered it for a second—maybe two. Of course I’d tell him. Immediately.

  I was hell-bent on letting the cat out of the bag when I found myself in the cab of a pickup truck with the sun slanting in my eyes. “Oh, fuck me.”

  “Is that Web I’m talking to, or George?”

  I checked my watch, though I hardly needed to, given the sunrise. Ten after seven. “Sonofabitch—I’m missing three hours!”

  “That long, huh? I found you about an hour and a half ago giving the People of the Plains a good talking to. Let’s hope you didn’t do anything too wild before then.”

  An hour and a half. I closed my eyes and cradled my forehead in my hand. “Did I say anything that would make me wish I’d never been born?”

  “Well, the running theme was ‘Gotta tell him,’ but you wouldn’t say who you needed to tell, or what it was you were going to say. Then there was, ‘Gonna kick that fucking snake’s ass.’ Hate to break it to you, but snakes don’t have asses. Just an anal slit.”

  I peeked at him through my fingers. Dimples.

  “You’re taking this awfully well.”

  “No way, man. You shoulda seen me for the first half hour, I freaked. Got you to unlock your phone, found your cousin’s number and called him. He told me it wasn’t dangerous, and since it didn’t make any difference whether you were at the Center or at home, you might as well stay and get paid for your whole shift.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yep.”

  Pragmatic. I guess. “Anything else?”

  Jesse’s smile got even wider. “He said if I dicked you over, his wife would have my nuts on a platter.”

  “Oh God. Let me die now. Please.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut tight, but I swore I could still feel him smiling.

  “I was rummaging through Luke’s office,” I said. “We’ve gotta go back and lock it up.”

  “Sorry. He came in right after I hung up with Alex. I had to make it look like you were helping me with the tarp again.”

  “Oh fuck. I am so screwed.”

  “Look at it this way—maybe you did lock up after yourself. And if not, maybe he didn’t even notice. If he saw anything funny, don’t you think he would’ve come out and said something on the spot?”

  Like Bridget had when she caught Jesse and me getting familiar. Huh. Maybe Luke would have, maybe not. Maybe instead he’d save it up as ammo to blow me out of my job the second I let my guard down.

  The fifteen-minute walk from the Center was more like a three-minute drive and we were already back, but I couldn’t just charge upstairs without telling him what I’d seen. “Listen, Jesse...I don’t know how to say this.”

  He cut the engine, and watched me carefully.

  “The thing I found in Luke’s office—I think he’s trying to stick your insurance with the appraised value of that bison hide.”

  Jesse took off his bandanna, threw it down on the dash, then slammed his back against the seat. “What a prick! You were there when he promised it was all good, weren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  Jesse shook his head. “I’ll be. I knew better, I damn well knew, but I wanted to help him out of a bind. I’ll bet it’s a period piece and he won’t take a trade.”

  “I dunno. It was just a one-line note to call your insurance.”

  “Maybe I can pay him off. Trade the hide and pay the difference so it doesn’t end up costing my old man’s shop its liability.”

  “So...how much does a bison hide run these days?”

  “A good one? Two grand. Not that the one he had was any good even before he wrecked it.”

  “The figure on the paper was higher than that.”

  He cut his eyes to me, and it tore me up to see him looking so serious. I wished George could take over for maybe thirty seconds so I didn’t have to tell him that number and see what it did to him.

  “Add twenty thousand.”

  He stared at me for a long time, a really long time, and finally said, “Oh, that lyin’ ass sonofabitch.”

  10

  SO MUCH FOR THE “BIG reward” I’d been promising myself for holding it together until MAHPS day. If life’s taught me anything, it’s that you might as well eat your dessert first, ’cause the ceiling might fall in before you’re even done with your salad. Still, in the face of Jesse being threatened with losing his livelihood, I’d be a real tool if I tried to score with him now. I said, “If you need to go home and deal with this....”

  He pulled out his phone, checked the time, and threw his hands up in aggravation. “No one’s around yet, it’s too early. And if I start driving now, I’ll be in the middle of nowhere when the agent’s office opens. If it’s cool with you, I’d rather stick around ’til I can see what my options are, make a few phone calls and figure out what I’m doing.”

  “It’s cool.”

  We went upstairs, but instead of heading for the bedroom, I poured us the rest of the Mountain Dew while Jesse waited for my laptop to stop downloading updates and take him online.

  “I wish I could do something,” I said.

  Jesse glanced up from the screen. “Dude, you gave me a heads-up. That’s huge.”

  I would’ve offered to give him a little something else if I thought it would take his mind off things, but his focus had narrowed to the twenty-some thousand dollars Luke was planning to wring out of him, and I figured it was best if he didn’t associate me with the whole mess as anything other than the bearer of bad news.

  Normally, I’m not much of a napper, so I had my doubts that I’d actually do any sleeping before my second shift of the day—especially knowing that I had Jesse one room away. Pissed off, true...but here. I set my alarm for nine, triple checked that I’d chosen a.m. and not p.m., then checked that the a.m./p.m. was even set correctly to begin with, and crawled into bed.

  I listened for a while to the bursts of keyboard clatter and occasional sighs from the next room, and imagined those sighs being about something a hell of a lot more fun, and next thing I knew the weather guy was predicting clouds and a twenty percent chance of rain. I sat up, disoriented, and looked at the alarm clock. Nine a.m.—time for round two at the Center.

  A flyer for Sky High Pie, the worst pizzeria in Old Faris, lay face down on my closed laptop. On the back, Jesse had written in huge block letters, “Thanks Web! I’ll call you!!!”

  Yeah. I’d heard that one before.

  I didn’t bother eating anything—no appetite. I brushed my teeth, but without much actual effort. I dressed, but I couldn’t find my mag light and pepper spray, and Alex had my spares. I was nearly late when I clumped down the stairs to his apartment and knocked on the door, but not quite. I had my health insurance to think of.

  “Oh, shit,” Alex said. “We’d better leave right now—did you even comb your hair? You need a haircut or something. Maybe start putting some gel in it. You look like you think you’re in one of those indie college bands.” He beeped his car locks open, I climbed in, and he started the engine. Sports radio blasted for a second, then Alex turned it down.

  “Good,” I said. “I’m glad. Maybe I don’t want to make a good impression. I wish I’d quit washing my hair a week ago. I wish it smelled. It’d serve that fuckface Luke right.”

  Alex stopped backing out of the driveway and looked at me.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “Who am I talking to, Web or George?”

  “Don’t be a jag.”

  He checked the street for traffic and pulled the rest
of the way out. “I’m not being a jag, I’m serious. You’re pissed off at Luke? I can’t remember the last time you were pissed off at anybody. Hell, you put the fairy in laissez-faire.”

  I shrugged.

  “I figured maybe you’re tired,” he said. “Maybe you haven’t been getting enough...sleep.”

  “I wish.”

  “Serious? What do you mean, you haven’t been getting lucky all this time? I always thought it’d be easier to be gay—no offense. But you wouldn’t have to figure out if you were in the doghouse because you didn’t notice your girl’s new blouse, or you slipped and said something stupid about her mother.”

  I sighed, and tried to figure out how to explain it to Alex in a way he’d understand, when I didn’t really get what was going on myself. “He’s gone already, back to Iowa. It’s all Luke’s fault—he’s trying to stick Jesse with over twenty grand in liability for something that was already ruined when he got there.”

  “Shit,” Alex said gravely.

  We pulled into the parking lot and I got a look at the west façade, which I don’t normally see since I walk to work from the opposite direction. The shrubs looked scraggly and overgrown, though at least someone had made an effort to pick up the drifting trash. Theresa’s ancient hatchback and Luke’s SUV were lined up at the far end of the lot. Bridget’s hybrid was nowhere to be seen, but I wouldn’t put it past her to prove how ecologically-conscious she was by walking to work, even on the day the MAHPS guy was coming. I wondered if I could convince Alex to park close enough to ding the side of the SUV when he opened his door. Probably not.

  As we neared the building, the sound of knocking rang through the lot, and Alex and I exchanged a puzzled look. “That sounds like the front entrance,” I said. We rounded some overgrown evergreens and headed toward the main doors. At the top of the white marble stairs, a middle-aged guy in a brown suit stood with his arms crossed, frowning, while Theresa struggled with a key, then knocked again on the glass.