The Bone Polisher sg-6

by Timothy Hallinan

  The Bone Polisher

  ( Simeon Grist - 6 )

  Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan

  The Bone Polisher

  PREFACE (2012)

  For more than a year, I debated making The Bone Polisher available as an ebook.

  More than the other books in the Simeon Grist series, it describes a world that has changed somewhat radically since the story was written. In the period in which the book is set, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was nearly always fatal, and it was raging like a firestorm through the gay community. Also, back in those days, gay people were even more marginalized than they are now-which was, of course, one reason the medical community took so long to get on the right track about the disease's causes. And it was also the reason that outing someone, which is part of the book's plot, was a more devastating thing, in many cases, than it is now.

  These days, someone like the character Christopher Nordine wouldn't necessarily be looking at a death sentence. At the time the book was written, though, it was almost as certain as the sun coming up in the east.

  I wrote this story in the first place because I was arrested for drunk driving. As part of my penalty, the judge sentenced me to several months in Alcoholics Anonymous. This curdled my blood. I was certain I wasn't an alcoholic, and when I thought of Alcoholics Anonymous, I imagined dingy rooms with curling linoleum floors in which a bunch of unshaven, toothless men in raincoats chain-smoked and gummed uninteresting confessions at each other. Sort of like film noir, but eleven hours long and without a plot.

  But that was not to be. I lived above the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, and West Hollywood even then had a demographically anomalous number of gay people. My local meeting was in a church at Fountain and Fairfax. When I walked into that room for the first time, I was expecting a budget production of “The Lower Depths,” but what I got was more like the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy opens the door to reveal that Oz is in color.

  The room was full of the best-looking group of men I'd ever seen, although some of them were painfully thin. It soon became apparent that quite a few of them were there because they were determined to die sober, and others had come so they could live their last year or so in clarity. I saw more grace and courage in that first hour than I'd ever seen in such a concentrated period in my entire life.

  And I both cried and laughed myself silly, in that meeting and the meetings that followed. I made dozens of friends. I learned that I was, in fact, an alcoholic, and that I was in good company. I've never had a drink since, and it saddens me to know that so many of the guys who helped me are gone now.

  When I started The Bone Polisher, I was thinking of them. Because, since I'm straight, I felt unqualified to write about gay life from the inside, yet another gay man-also HIV-positive-was kind enough to read it and show me where I was screwing it up. I'd thank him here, but he's gone, too.

  Finally, the character of Max is based on a real individual, a former actor-turned-spiritual adviser, who was a great friend and source of support to my wife during a difficult period in her life, and for many years thereafter. He died at a ripe age of nothing but a long, rich life, and we've both missed him ever since.

  One thing I like about the book as I read it now-and it was noted by several reviewers-is that Simeon is feeling his age and has acquired a healthy fear of the people he has to face. He probably should have felt that way earlier in the series. Anyway, it's an element of the book that pleased me when I proofed the ebook conversion. And I notice that reasonable fear has been a component of both Poke Rafferty and Junior Bender since I began to write them.

  Hope you enjoy The Bone Polisher.

  Hallinan, Timothy

  I have never liked anyone at first sight.

  — W. Somerset Maugham

  ONE

  Everybody Loved Max

  You know the sheriff has his problems, too, and he will surely take them out on you.

  — Warren Zevon, “Muhammad’s Radio”

  Prologue ~ Maybe Nebraska

  The farm boy looked no more than seventeen as he bent over the table. He had hair the color of corn.

  Dearest Max, he wrote. Then he leaned back and fished a package of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit one. With the cigarette in his mouth, he looked older.

  The room was just a room, one in a series of rooms. If he’d closed his eyes he couldn’t have said what color the walls were. The low table, with its stack of white paper, was the only piece of furniture. The Farm Boy was sitting on the floor.

  Thank you for writing me such sweet letters. I really can’t tell you how much they mean to me, here in this wilderness. Just to know there is someone I can talk to. After all these years, even though I’m only seventeen.

  He tapped ash from the cigarette onto the floor and laid the butt on the table, the coal hanging over the edge. The table was striped with burns, long worms of dark wood. Without thinking, he ran his fingernail down one of them. His nails were long and well kept, and he scraped charred wood beneath the nail.

  “Shit,” he said, staring at the nail. Then he scrubbed it clean on the carpet and picked up the pen again.

  Do you remember Nester in the story of the Trojan War? He guided the young men, gave them his wisdom before

  He glanced at the book that lay on the floor beside him and swore softly, then scratched out Nester and wrote Nestor above it, and continued where he had left off: they went into battle. That’s what I hope you will do for me. Prepare me for the battle to come. I’m not sure I have the strength or wisdom to pre

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and then wrote: vail.

  Please, Max, write me again soon. You don’t need to send me the photo you promised. Your words tell me all I need to know about you. You are good and kind. It doesn’t matter how old you are.

  I want to come to you, but first I want you to write me again and tell me what kind of boy you really want. Tell me everything. If I am not right for you, I don’t want to push myself into your life. I need your help, but I don’t want to hurt you. If I think I can be good for you, I’ll call to see if you can send me money for the ticket to Los Angeles you promised me. It costs $650, and cash would be best. I am enclosing the gift I promised so I can recognize you at the airport. It belonged to the uncle I told you about, the only one who understood.

  He laid down the pen and picked up two silvery metallic objects, which he clinked in the palm of his hand like small change. He dropped them to the wooden surface, beside the letter. Then he took another puff from the cigarette and put it back on the edge of the desk.

  Oh, wait, I had to change my post office box because someone saw me there today and I’ve told you how people talk here, so I’ll have to drive into Kearney to get your next letter. Here is the new box number.

  He wrote a nine-digit number quickly, without referring to any of the papers in front of him. Then he signed it:

  Hope to see you soon,

  Philip

  “Oh, boy,” he said. He crossed out Philip and wrote Phillip.

  The Farm Boy leaned back and read the letter out loud and then reached for a clean sheet of paper to copy it over.

  He lifted something, a small white paperweight, from the white rectangular stack before he took a sheet, and then he replaced it, dead-center. The paperweight was a human finger, boiled to the bone.

  1 ~ The Book of Love

  “If he can see the future,” I asked, “why does he need me?”

  “He doesn’t think he needs anything,” the young man on my couch said with exaggerated patience. His calm was a cracked shell he was trying to hold together from the inside. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Beneath th
e baggy expensive clothes, the young man on my couch, who had identified himself as Christopher Nordine, was the kind of thin you don’t want to be. I could have closed my fingers around his wrists, and his knuckles bulged like walnuts beneath the pale, papery skin of his hands.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, giving patience back. “You just want me to talk to him?”

  A hand went to his slicked-back brown hair, touched it, and then left it alone. “Well, he won’t listen to me. We’ve been fighting night and day.”

  “About something he should be able to see in the future.”

  He made a soft sound, like “peh,” dismissing the future. “Maybe he’s right,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t need anything.”

  Nordine lifted his hands slowly, as though the gesture hurt the muscles in his back, and rubbed long bony fingers over his eyelids. “Let’s say he is,” he said from behind his fingers. “Still, it’ll make me feel better.”

  He’d placed a bottle of Evian water on the table-my table, in my living room-and he took his hands from his face and raised the bottle to drink. The October heat was beating its wings against the uninsulated walls of my little wooden house in Topanga Canyon, and the temperature indoors had to be ninety-five, although Christopher seemed to have cooled it somewhat. The growing stack of very odd mail on the table-mail sent to me by dozens of companies whose computers had inexplicably decided I was about to be married-was curling at the corners. A bright brochure advertising HONEYMOON HEAVEN had slipped limply to the floor, belly-up, and gone flat. Even the rug was hot underfoot.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take off your jacket?” I was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, and I was pouring.

  “It’s wool,” he said, giving it a tug. “It breathes.”

  “I’d have to hear that from a sheep. It looks hotter than hell to me.”

  “I haven’t been hot in more than a year. I’m too skinny to get hot.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He shook the bottle-only an inch or so left-and looked irritated. “So,” he said, gathering his calm around him again, “will you do it? I’ll pay you five hundred.”

  “Money’s not the issue. And if it were, it’d be because five hundred is too much.”

  “You don’t know Max,” he said. Christopher Nordine looked to be in his middle thirties, with thinning straight coffee-brown hair and odd pale eyes that had heavy rings under them. There was a crustiness over the skin of his eyelids, as though he hadn’t washed them when he woke up. His eyes, oddly deep set and restless, skimmed the room, my face, the room again, failing to find anything to hold them. He had a high-ridged, narrow nose and a sharp, wide mouth. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the whiskers had come in patchily, heavy at the tip of his cleft chin and lighter on his cheeks. Some sort of heavy cologne rolled off him in waves. Thirty pounds ago, he would have been handsome.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “More water?”

  His sparse eyebrows went up inquiringly. “Have you got Evian?”

  “I’ve got more Evian than the source,” I said. “Someone brought me three cases of it.”

  “He must be fond of you.”

  “It’s a she,” I said, “and the fondness comes and goes.”

  “Ah.” He didn’t sound very interested. “And whose fault is that?”

  When I don’t expect a question, I’m usually stranded with the truth. “Mine.”

  “I know all about that,” Nordine said with sudden bitterness. “I could write the book.”

  “ ‘The Book of Love,’ maybe. Remember that?” I got up and went to the kitchen, a depressingly short walk, and threw open a cabinet. I had half a loaf of stale bread, two dusty cans of tuna, and thirty-six bottles of Evian, courtesy of my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, who had recently been trying to get me healthy. Again. “ ‘Chapter One says you love her, love her with all your heart.’ ”

  “ ‘Chapter Two, you break up,’ ” Christopher Nordine sang with perfect pitch, “ ‘but you give him just one more start.’ ”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said, toting a full bottle back into the living room and trying to stay upwind of myself. I needed a shower. He took the bottle eagerly.

  “I hate oldies anyway. I’m getting to be too much of an oldie myself.” He drank.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re what, thirty-three, thirty-four?”

  He took the bottle from his lips and smiled, not a pleasant smile. “I’m twenty-seven,” he said.

  As hot as it was, I could still feel my face burn. “Oh,” I said.

  “Twenty-seven, going on dead,” he said.

  It was terrible, and it was probably true, but it was also self-consciously dramatic, and I realized that one of the reasons I was resisting Christopher Nordine was that I didn’t like him very much. But it wasn’t the only reason.

  “I still don’t really understand what you want me to do.”

  His eyes gleamed, and I saw what was wrong with them; he’d lost the fat that cushioned the eyeballs, and they’d sunk back into his head, too far back for normal eyes, where they glittered like water down a well. He was burning his own body for fuel.

  “I live with the man,” he said fiercely. “He’s seventy-seven years old, and he’s living like a fool. He’s going to get himself hurt or killed.”

  “Living like a fool,” I repeated.

  “Picking up street boys and taking them in. Haunting AA meetings and adopting heroin addicts. Turning the house into the gay pound or something. They get food and clothes and, and support, and clean sheets, and he doesn’t really care if they steal his stuff. He sleeps with them in the house, for God’s sake. And he fights with me when I try to tell him he’s going to get hurt some day.”

  “Maybe he likes heroin addicts,” I said. “You know, they sit still. They’re like furniture most of the time, not much trouble as long as they can-

  “They’re trash,” he said, and he said it in two syllables: “trayush.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the extrasyllabic extravagance of the South in his speech. “He thinks he can save them. He thinks he can”-he lifted the bottle to his lips again and drank, the knobby Adam’s apple bobbing up and down-“save everybody.”

  What the hell. “And you’re jealous.”

  He threw me a scornful look over the edge of the bottle. “Give me a break,” he said. “I’m the only one he loves. He’s already told me that I’ll inherit everything.”

  “But he won’t listen to you. Why?”

  “He’s seventy-seven. He won’t listen to anybody.”

  “But if he knows it pains you-”

  “You bet it pains me. He takes them in, he pours money over their dirty little heads, he tries to get them off the dope, find them jobs, give them a future. They take his credit cards, they use his ATM cards for booze and drugs. They steal his jewelry, his furniture, and when they’ve gotten everything they can, they split. They rob him blind. They break his heart.”

  It was actorish, but the rage behind it was real. I cleared some of my extremely peculiar mail away from the middle of the table to make room for him to put down the bottle and to let a few neutral moments ground the electrical charge in the room. “Hearts aren’t that breakable.”

  “There are hearts and hearts,” he said, drinking. He put the bottle on the table and picked up a flyer. INSURE YOUR LOVE, it suggested in magenta letters.

  “Seventy-seven’s old for you,” I said neutrally.

  He raised his eyes from the flier, sat back on the couch, and gave me the cave-dwelling stare. The suppressed rage blossomed behind it, like a campfire. “And?”

  “And you’re the legatee.”

  “I… already… told… you… that,” he said, coming to a complete stop at the end of each word. “Twice.”

  “And they’re bleeding the estate.”

  “You’re an asshole,” he said. He started to rise.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He ignored me, w
orking on getting to his feet. He seemed to have to test each joint individually to make sure it still worked. “I don’t know what your problem is, but I haven’t got time for it. I offered you five hundred dollars-”

  “Which is about three hundred too much.”

  “ Fuck the money,” he snapped, standing. “I came here because I’m frightened. I’m scared for him. And you think-”

  “So convince me otherwise.” I was still in my chair.

  He started to pace. “What do you think I’m going to do? Take the money and live happily ever after? Finance a new career? Start over somewhere?” He waved an arm, and the flyer skittered out of his hand like an aeronautically challenged paper plane and crash-landed on my dreadful carpet. “Who do you think you’re talking to, Methuselah?”

  “Okay, then tell me what you’re afraid of.”

  “I’m afraid one of them is going to kill him, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “But,” I said, just trying it on, “he can see the future.”

  “Yeah, sure. About everyone but himself. The first time he saw me, he knew I was sick. He knew it before I did, but about him, he doesn’t know whether the paper will come in the morning.”

  “And he took you in,” I said, “knowing.”

  He started to say something and then he blinked rapidly and turned it into a long exhalation. “He took me in,” he said.

  “And you.”

  “I love him.” There was nothing dramatic about it.

  I loved somebody, too, but Christopher was apparently better at it than I was. “I don’t know what you think I can do,” I said, “but I’ll go see him.”

  2 ~ Blue Sky

  “You’re the boy Christy sent.” Max Grover looked down at me through the screen door.