Clear Water Read online

  “Where’s the person who was driving?” he asked in that same flat, incurious voice.

  “I couldn’t tell you, kid. He bailed. I pulled you out and you… you hadn’t even noticed we’d gone in.”

  There was a deep breath and it came out shuddery, like a wobbly antique table. And another one. And another one.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake… kid, are you crying?”

  “No.”

  Worst. Lie. Ever.

  “Look, kid—do you want me to tell the police you’re here?”

  A sudden pause, almost optimistic. “Do you have to?” came the muffled reply, and Whiskey shrugged.

  “No. Are you in trouble with the law?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Do you have any idea what kind of drugs you were on?”

  The kid groaned. “Roofies, Ritalin, and beer.”

  Whiskey crossed his eyes with the pain of all of that. “Jesus, kid—what were you trying to do?”

  Again, that suspicious sniffle. “I was trying to get my life together. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to wallow in how well that worked out, okay?”

  Whiskey’s mouth lifted in appreciation. The kid was a smart-ass. Of all the wide variety of asses—feminine and soft, male and hard, open and begging, reluctant and tight, Whiskey’s most favorite, very bestest type of ass was this type right here. The snark-at-the-world smart-ass.

  He dropped a hand to the kid’s shoulder and squeezed. “Okay. You’re entitled. When you wake up, there’s clothes in the drawer and a shower in the head. It’s a small boat. You’ll find your way around. We’ll talk when I get back, okay?”

  There was another sniffle, this one bravely held back. “Did you pull me out of the car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank you. Should have spared yourself the trouble.”

  “Wasn’t any trouble,” he lied. “I wasn’t getting any sleep anyway.”

  One of those horrible sounds followed—the kind when you laughed reluctantly through tears. “Glad to help,” the kid mumbled. “Now please go away?”

  “Yeah. Hey, kid—your scrip bottle—it says Patrick. That your name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can call me Whiskey.”

  Patrick turned away from the wall, looking as pathetic as any kid ever did. “Whiskey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re a good guy, but I’m a lot of fucking trouble. I’ll try and be out of your hair soon, okay?”

  Whiskey ruffled his crusty hair. “No worries. We can always use slave labor. Help when you’re ready.”

  And with that, he turned around and left the tiny, dark-paneled berth. He didn’t hear any more sobs as he went, but he imagined he wouldn’t hear any giggles either. Didn’t matter. He had shit to do.

  Trix

  Counting Tadpoles

  PATRICK did eventually fall back asleep, and when he woke up, he was surprised to find that his head was mostly okay but that his mouth still tasted like ass and his body felt like it had been worked over by a steamroller.

  He smelled pretty rank too.

  Whiskey. Was that really the guy’s name? Patrick liked it. It suited him. His dark hair was curly and long, his eyes were dark amber-brown, his voice was rough, he had a cheek full of black stubble, and most of the skin Patrick had seen peeking out of his shredded clothing had been tan.

  He looked like whiskey, and not the shitty kind that Cal used to down, either. He looked like the good kind, the dark tawny kind that his dad kept in the bar at home and only broke out when he had clients or employees over for carefully orchestrated dinners.

  His growly voice alone made Patrick’s cock hard the minute he opened his mouth, and considering how gawd-fucking-awful the rest of Patrick had felt, that had been some voice.

  But now he was gone, and Patrick had to get up and face wherever the fuck he was and whatever scrape he’d gotten himself into. Yay! Did this win him maturity points? Because Jesus, something had to!

  He rolled out of the hard pedestal bed onto some crappy orange carpeting and felt the subtle change of motion when he did. All sorts of things started to make sense to him then—the unsettling, unanchored feeling he’d had in his stomach since he’d awakened, the faint slap-shush sound that had worked its way into his dreams, the fact that he smelled like sewage and diesel oil. Cal’s favorite club was near the Garden Highway—right off the river. They were down near the delta somewhere, and he was on one of those big houseboat thingies.

  What were you doing, Cal? he thought bitterly. Where were you taking me after you slipped me a fucking roofie?

  One beer. He’d swear to it—and not only that, he’d swear he hadn’t finished it. Oh, yeah, he knew about Cal and the little mini-pharmacy in his pocket. Cal had lots of friends interested in that mini-pharmacy, but Patrick had always thought that he’d been special, because Patrick had been interested in Cal.

  Apparently, the only reason Patrick had been special was that Patrick gave Cal money without even needing to get drugs back.

  Aw, fuck. Cal probably had his wallet and maybe even his phone. Patrick didn’t know how much time Cal would have had after he wrecked the car, but he doubted Cal would have left without Patrick’s credit cards and bank card. Patrick had even written his pin codes on a card, just for psycho drug dealing losers to use to steal from him. Jesus—it was ten o’clock in the morning. Not that his dad couldn’t afford it and lots of it, but the idea that Cal would clean out all his bank accounts so he could live off of Shawn Cleary’s dime for a little while? Ugh. Patrick put his hand on his stomach and thought about how glad he was that he didn’t get sick easily. Jesus, his dad’s worst fear, and Patrick hadn’t even thought it was possible. Not his boyfriend—not Cal!

  Right. Well, there ya go. Shawn Cleary: 1,000 right guesses about life. His son Patrick: zero. Wonderful.

  Patrick sighed and started rifling through the drawers to come out with something that fit. Oh. My. God. The word clothes had been sort of an exaggeration. Well, it was hot, probably in the high nineties like the day before, so Patrick grabbed a pair of boxers and a pair of frayed cut-offs and then a ribbed white tank top, which was the only thing that didn’t have holes in it.

  The berth was tiny—the pedestal bed took up most of it, and the drawer underneath that was a veritable walk-in closet compared to the rest of the plastic-paneled set-in cupboards—and at around ten-thirty in the morning, even with the round open windows, it was stifling. Patrick grabbed one of the towels off the bed and gave it a shake, then tucked everything under his arm like a parcel and ventured past the doorway.

  The rest of the boat was surprisingly big. There was a dining room/living room area, the kind with a dinette table and couches/benches on either side of it, a small kitchen, and a couple of swiveling captain’s chairs up by the steering console. The captain’s chairs could probably double as regular furniture—they looked comfortable enough—and they were one of the few spaces that could actually be used for human purposes. Every other flat space in the place, including one of the couch/benches, was covered in equipment.

  Patrick had once gone on a science field trip in junior college with his professor, and the school-funded RV had looked something like this. There were stacks of sanitized test tubes, and stacks of sanitized data sheets, and stacks of electronic monitoring devices, and stacks of reactive chemicals to test what went into the test tubes, and basically what looked to be a massive clutter of stuff that was only useful to the occupants of the boat.

  It reminded Patrick of his brain sometimes. He could sort of relate.

  There was a thin, wiry, tanned, freckled person wandering among all of the equipment with an electronic clipboard in front her. She made notations every now and then, and for a moment, Patrick stopped, wondering if he should acknowledge her.

  “Don’t use all the fucking water in the bathroom, Twink,” she said, her voice flat. It could have been she was being shitty, or it could have been she just wanted
to remind him not to use all the fucking water in the bathroom. The twink part was something Patrick assumed was just to differentiate him from, oh, maybe that Whiskey person with the fifty-dollar-scotch voice.

  “Okay,” he said, trying to oblige. He got into the bathroom and tried not to grimace. Ewww. He’d seen what frat boys could do to a bathroom—he’d screwed a couple of them in his community college days. Not together, of course, but they had been roommates, and only one of them had been out. When he’d broken up with that one, the one who was still in the closet had comforted him and then laid him, promising to come out and be the he-man of Patrick’s sad little dreams. Of course, those sad little dreams had disappeared after a couple of months of being Chad’s dirty little secret, but Patrick still remembered the way Chad excused the nastiness in his bathroom as his way of saying only a gay man would give a shit. The entire exercise had taught Patrick, a) not to date anyone in the closet, and b) that if being gay meant that he could scrub a toilet before it started speaking in tongues, then he was damned glad he was gay!

  Or at least he had been, until his father had suggested that being gay was just another way he was fucking up.

  He wouldn’t think about that. Not now. His whole body was a mess of aches, even with Whiskey’s ibuprofen, and he’d focus on the hot water sluicing on his skin for just long enough—

  Bang bang bang! “Goddammit, Twink, how much water do you think we have?”

  Oh, shit. “Sorry!” Goddammit… of all the times to lose time. Patrick wondered where Whiskey had put his little brown pills, the ones that seemed to make it easier to keep track of minutes and what he was doing in them. He set a thirty-second record for soaping his hair, pits, and creases and was out of the shower almost before he had time to rinse.

  “Sorry!” he said again. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to. I was trying to… goddammit, it’s small in here! How am I supposed to remember to do anything when my elbows… fuck, my toe… Jesus, my knee—”

  “Jesus, fuck me, kid—stop talking! You turned off the water, we’re all good!”

  But it was too late. Patrick was already self-conscious and banging all the aforementioned body parts on the toilet, sink, shower, mirror, wall, and, at one point, the light fixture, and by the time he came out, he was flustered and upset and scattered. He wanted some music, or a video game or his LBP (little brown pill!) or something, because he wasn’t up for human beings right now.

  But he came out of the bathroom, and instead of a bitchy, impatient woman (he thought) tapping her foot in front of the door, there was the calm researcher placidly reviewing the data produced by the telemetry devices on the table.

  Patrick waited for her to notice him for several minutes, and he’d about given up hope when she turned her back and said, “Jesus, Twink, do you want me to paint a target on your ass?”

  “It was the only thing that was clean,” he muttered.

  “And you tied a knot at the waist because?”

  “It was too big.”

  So, uhm, yeah. The tank knotted at the waist and the cut-off shorts really did scream “South Beach,” but, well, that wasn’t going to change, right?

  The girl grunted, and Patrick may or may not have detected some humor in the sound. Then she said, “Fruit, yoghurt, cereal, bread, lunch meat. Whatever.”

  She didn’t say anything after that, and for a moment, Patrick thought the “fruit” was referring to him. Then Patrick put together an offer to eat and said “Thank you” before padding to the small refrigerator in the one part of the kitchen space that looked like it might be meant for humans.

  She didn’t answer, and he was left to hunt and gather on his own. He decided on bread (stale) and salami (not stinky) without mayo (questionable) and thought that maybe yoghurt would have been safer even with the expired date on the top. He didn’t even want to smell the milk. It didn’t matter—the bread settled his stomach, the meat gave him some protein and solidity, and after a few moments of eating, he felt his brain settle down and some of that horrible, flustered feeling he thought he’d gotten out of his system in high school passed.

  He started to pay attention to what she was doing.

  God, he had liked this. The categorization of information, putting everything neatly in its place. When he’d been taking science classes, it had always seemed like doing these things to the natural world was simple, whereas organizing his own tangled brain was not.

  He stood up and watched the woman quietly for a few moments before asking, “Can I help?”

  She blinked at him. “Don’t you have better things to do?”

  Call his father and tell him that not only was he still gay, he was also still a world-class fuckup instead of just a minor, pain-in-the-ass one? Call Cal and say, “Hey, I’m alive! Did you really drug me and leave me in a sinking car? And where the hell is my wallet and phone?” Call his mother, who sent him a birthday card every year, and say, “Hey—remember me? It’s not my birthday, but I’m in a jam here, could you help me out?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I can’t think of another damned thing I’d rather be doing.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows, chewed her bottom lip and bobbed her head for a minute, and then said, “Can you count, kid?”

  “You mean in real whole numbers? Yes. I did pass first grade.”

  He caught it—a minor tightening of certain lip muscles that, if intensified, might pass as a smile. He wanted to do a victory dance and a chest bump for that alone. “Excellent. C’mere.”

  She walked him up to the deck of what appeared to be a truly tacky and appalling flat-bottomed houseboat with a slightly raised deck/submerged living quarters and a secondary steering console on the roof (Deck? Top deck? Whatever. He didn’t fucking sail) of the quarters. The thing needed to be painted/resurfaced or whatever and definitely needed a good mopping (or was it swabbing, since it was a boat, although that always made Patrick think of a big Q-tip and a sphincter… uhm, eww…) and generally, was put to shame by the other houseboats—most of them showplaces and summer homes, lined up at the little quay north of Sacramento.

  Without acknowledging the clutter of boots, wading gear, big empty tubs of whatever, and dirty cages (?) littering up the deck, the girl (still didn’t have a name) brought Patrick up to the side of the boat that was in the shade. It was permanent shade, because there was an awning there overhead with a drop-down curtain, so the area would never get too much direct sunlight. Against the wall of the boat, were three big translucent containers of water and small swimming things that Patrick first assumed were fish. There was a smaller container of the same type balanced on top of one of the bigger ones, with something large and brown and shifting inside.

  The woman moved the small container off the top of the three larger ones and opened up the one on the bottom. It had water. That was it. Plain river water. Then she opened up the container next to it.

  It had what looked to be a gazillion tadpoles in it.

  Patrick couldn’t help but smile.

  “Heya, little guys? How’s it hopping?” They were early in their development—no hopping yet, not even any legs dangling from their flat-tailed brown/green bodies. But they did seem to swim around in the algae/bug-ridden water with great enthusiasm, no hopping required.

  “What you need to do,” the woman said, startling him from his happy contemplation of baby frogs, “is count them. Here.” She gave him a regular, non-electronic clipboard and a pen, as well as a little net with a handle.

  “Take them out of one bucket, put them in the other one, and count them as you go. Look for anomalies and make note of how many tadpoles with anomalies you actually see out of how many total. Stop when you’re done with the first tub, come in and show me what you’ve got.”

  Patrick blinked and looked inside the tub again. “Anomalies?”

  Without ceremony, the woman took the lid off of the small container and thrust it under Patrick’s face.

  “Meet Caleb and Catherine. They’re what
you’d call an anomaly.”

  Patrick stood up and backed up so fast that the woman almost dropped the box with Caleb and Catherine in it, and he glared at her as she raised an amused eyebrow back.

  “You got a problem?”

  “What. In the fuck. Is that?”

  “That, my friend, is what happens when factory contaminants or pesticides get into a frog’s backyard.”

  Patrick steeled himself and looked into the tub again. The frog had six legs—two in the back and four in the front, two of the four hanging in the middle and flopping uselessly. The torso was wider to accommodate the extra limbs—and also to make room for the extra head. The creature(s?) looked at each other (itself?) as it (they?) breathed, and Patrick’s teen tiny little brain totally fucking imploded.

  “Does that count as two frogs or one when I’m picking them up in the net?” he asked, completely at a loss.

  The woman’s lip twitched, and she smacked at one of the small marsh flies that had started to perch on her tanned, freckled shoulder. “One,” she said with decision. “Any other questions?”

  “Yeah. Which side is Cal, which side is Catherine?”

  Another lip twitch. “The one on the left is Cal. Why does it matter?”

  “Because that’s the name of the guy who crashed my car and left me for dead. I wanted to know which side of the frog to hate.”

  A smile made a brief, tense appearance. “You got a name, kid?”

  “Patrick.”

  “Patrick, call me Fly Bait. You get this done quick enough, I’ll call Whiskey and have him bring us takeout, what do you say?”

  Patrick closed his eyes in anticipation. “I’d say that sounds totally worth it. Could you have him bring some milk you can’t chew?”

  “He’ll do his best. This is Whiskey. This is cooking—it’s not his strong suit. Now get to work—we don’t have all day, and I’m starving.”

  PATRICK counted and caught 237 tadpoles. He found two with split tails and one with two heads.