Sidecar Page 4

  He set Rufus inside and got some old blankets and tarps from the garage, covered the animal so he’d be okay when he went into shock, and then walked back into the house, looking at the clock on his brand-new microwave as he opened the door.

  Oh shit! Was that the time? God, poor Rufus. The three twelve-hour shifts in a row had about knocked Joe on his ass. Usually he heard the dog barking at around eight in the morning, and it was already ten. Casey had been asleep since around seven the night before. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Joe closed his eyes and tried to put shit in order. Okay. Casey first, Rufus second. He brushed his arm against the doorframe and saw black. Scratch that. First aid first, Casey second, Rufus to the vet’s third.

  He stumbled to his bedroom and shed his jacket in the corner, not even wanting to look at the sleeve, then went into the bathroom for some antiseptic and bandages. Oh God—a dog’s mouth. Those animals licked dead things, then licked their balls, then threw up and ate it. Joe got the bottle of rubbing alcohol out, braced his hurt arm on the sink, and, regardless of the mess, dumped half of it over the double jagged row of dripping, red bite marks. Each round hole was slightly torn, probably from when Rufus had jerked as Joe freed his leg, and Joe closed his eyes at the thought of infection and stitches. He put the rest of the alcohol away and pulled out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and then dumped that too, hissing as it bubbled. Oh God. The bite was pretty high up, and Joe fought off a mutter to himself. He was going to need help.

  “Kid!” he called through the door. “Kid, you up yet?”

  “Mmmffff….”

  Poor baby. He probably hadn’t slept in months—Joe hated to wake him up this way.

  “Kid—Casey! Buddy, I need your help here. I hate to wake you up, but if you could, maybe, come in here and give me a hand here with something?”

  Then, clear through the door, came the grumpy reply. “I thought you said I wouldn’t have to do that.”

  Oh God. Really? Jesus, this kid didn’t give an inch, did he? “Not that, dammit! I need to bandage my arm, and I can’t fuckin’ reach!”

  There was some movement and the uneven padding of feet. The kid who opened the door was bleary and irritated—but he wasn’t starving, freezing, or frightened, so maybe that was an improvement.

  He wasn’t a bad-looking kid—narrow chin and a heart-shaped face made him look almost girl-pretty. He had deep-set gray eyes, the kind that almost always looked sleepy or irritated unless he was actively trying to smile. Joe only imagined that last part. The kid hadn’t had a lot to smile about since they met.

  Those eyes widened when they saw Joe using a towel to gingerly dry off his arm.

  “Holy shit!”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’ll be sixteen on September fifteenth,” the boy said, and Joe raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s November twelfth,” he said, and he was unprepared for the terrible look of disappointment on Casey’s face.

  “Oh yeah… then I’m sixteen.”

  Joe grimaced and set about getting the antibiotic ointment out of the cabinet too. “How long since you knew what day it was?”

  “September third,” Casey said hoarsely. “Coach let practice out early, and me and Dillon got to my house early.”

  Joe sighed. He knew where this was going. The kid didn’t have it tattooed on his ass, but then, he wouldn’t need to wear his bandana in the right pocket in public to get laid, either. “What happened?” he prodded gently, dabbing the ointment on his arm and keeping his attention on Casey so he wouldn’t have to think about the pain.

  Casey couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off of Joe’s wound. “I started necking with Dillon, because, you know, we got bored, and we were talking about girls, and I started saying how my last blowjob almost made me queasy. He said him too. Maybe we should try with boys. So we did.”

  Joe almost laughed. God. Fifteen. It could be a fun age when that shit started happening. He’d always wondered what happened to Tim. But Joe and Tim’s story had been over when the summer was over. Casey’s story had just started.

  “An-nd?” There was a tear on the underside of his arm, where shit got really sensitive, and that needed a lot of attention.

  “And my folks caught us. And started screaming. And my dad said I wasn’t his son. He rushed Dillon, and both of us ran out of there. Dillon went home and….” He swallowed.

  “And you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “You talked to them since?”

  Casey shook his head. “No.”

  Joe breathed out. “Kid, I’m going to have to call social services, you know that, right?”

  Casey looked at him, just looked at him, those naturally guarded eyes open and limpid. “Please,” he whispered. “It took me two months to get someplace I don’t hate.”

  Joe was going to tell him no—or at least he was going to try to tell him no—but then his arm slipped off the sink and his vision got a little gray. Not gray enough to miss the total expression of triumph in Casey’s eyes, though.

  “You can’t let me go!” he said excitedly, taking two steps into the bathroom and taking the gauze. “You can’t. You need me!”

  “Wash your hands,” Joe said sharply, and Casey nodded like he should have known. Still, his hands were steady as he wrapped the gauze around Joe’s arm again and again, until the roll was gone and there was nothing to do but tape the ends and then tape them to Joe’s arm.

  He did—in fact, he was good at it. For some reason, the pressure of the bandage and the lack of exposure to the air helped, and Joe nodded.

  “Good. Thanks, kid. Let me get some Tylenol, ’kay? Then I’ve got to take the damned dog to the vet’s.”

  “The dog that bit you?” Casey stepped back and looked at him like he was insane.

  Joe sighed. Well, yeah. Maybe. “He was scared and hurt. Broke his leg in the fence because I was a dumbass and overslept. Now we got to get him fixed, or Mr. Kenby’s going to come over here and fuckin’ shoot me for hurting his dog. You good to stay here alone, kid? There’s food, your clothes are in the dryer—”

  “I was sort of hoping you burned them.”

  “Well, I don’t know if any of them are left after three cycles in hot—that may still be an option. I can get you something after I take Rufus to the vet in town, but I gotta get a move on.”

  Casey looked down at his scrubs and then back at Joe. “Uhm, can I come with you? You’re not looking too good.”

  Joe scowled. “You wouldn’t look that great either, kid.” He didn’t want to see, but he risked a look in the mirror. He was pale and sweating and his hair was all over the place, and he swore. “All right. Tell you what. You come with me to keep me from driving off the road, and we can stop in town and get you some clothes.”

  Casey looked down, unaccountably shy. “I can’t pay you,” he said, his voice muffled. “Are you sure you don’t want—”

  “Oh Jesus, kid, give it a rest. You’re fifteen—”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Nah. You get a pass. No sixteenth birthday party, no sixteen. You’re fifteen. If I caught anyone my age sniffing around you, I’d run ’em off with a shotgun. Now forget about sex for a minute and go into my room. There’s another pair of moccasins in there that should fit—grab those and a couple of sweatshirts from the drawer. I’m gonna need help getting in mine, so make it big and loose, okay?”

  Casey was already through the other door, and Joe was there in his plain little bathroom. He’d picked out dark-blue tile for it, because he liked it, and the towels were dark blue and dark yellow, but other than that, the walls were white, and so was the shower curtain. Well, one thing at a time. His big project had been getting the roof redone. Now he needed to fix up the carport, because the snows were going to crush it, and he didn’t have much longer.

  He heard the kid rooting around in his room and sighed. Well, help he might need, but he’d been planning on a work party with a bunch of people from work, not on
recruiting slave labor from the side of the road. He’d sort of lied to Casey about that the night before. He would have done about anything to get that kid off the side of the road, because he hadn’t looked like he’d make it one more day.

  And Joe might still have the work party, and he might still let Casey help with the repairs on the house. He might still do that. But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t going to be calling social services today.

  Lean on Me

  ~Casey

  JOE was a tough sonuvabitch, that was for certain. They drove the dog to the vet’s, and since Joe had also taken him in for his rabies shots, they didn’t have to kill the damned thing and dissect his brain. Joe seemed especially relieved about this, but Casey was sort of hoping he’d get to shoot the slobbering monster himself. The one guy to be nice to Casey in two months, and the dog damned near tore his arm off? Casey was not amused, and everything was not copacetic, and Casey was not forgiving.

  Joe told him to take a deep breath and let it go. There was no use holding a creature’s nature against him. It was like beating a child for spilling milk.

  Casey had subsided then, although he’d made Joe go to the hospital before they went to get clothes. He was sweating buckets by the time they pulled into the tiny parking lot of Auburn General, and his breathing was strained with the effort of keeping back the pain.

  The admissions nurse, a pretty woman with brown hair and freckles, knew him and took him into a cubicle to clean the wound. Casey knew he wasn’t kin, knew he was just some stray off the street, but for some reason, when she went to pull the curtain to give him privacy, a sound came out of Casey’s mouth a lot like the sound that had come out of Rufus’s when Joe had picked him up out of the bed of the pickup truck.

  “Let the boy stay,” Joe said easily. “He doesn’t like to be left alone.”

  The nurse glanced at Casey in his scrubs and moccasins, and Casey stared defiantly back. “Nice,” she muttered. “Your nephew?”

  And then Joe said a curious thing—something Casey would use a lot in the coming years as a reason to hope. “Friend of the family. C’mere, kid.”

  Casey did, sitting in the small chair by the head of the bed. The nurse checked out the wound, grunting, and then said, “Okay, the doc’s probably going to want to give you a tetanus shot and a shot of antibiotics. It’s all puncture wounds, and they’ve got scabs now—irrigating them is going to be a bitch, and they’re probably going to get infected anyway, even with the shot, so you’re in for a ride. You’re sure this dog didn’t have rabies?”

  Joe pulled out the piece of paper he’d gotten from the vet, proving that he didn’t have to go through the rabies course, and the nurse seemed satisfied.

  “I’m doubting you’ll be able to work for a couple of days. I’ll trade out your shifts for a week, if that’s okay.”

  Joe sighed. “Five days.”

  “A week.”

  “I’m going to be working on my carport the whole time. It feels like sort of a scam. Five days.”

  “God, you’re stubborn. Five days it is. If you finish your carport, does that mean we’re not having the work party?”

  “I’m going to need some serious help.” Joe nodded. “I’m saying the work party’s still a go. Next week. My pizza, my beer, my hammers and nails.”

  “Good. I’ll tell Jimmy and the guys. They’re looking forward to it. You bought good beer when they helped with the roof.”

  Joe smiled a little and she left, and Casey watched as he plumped the pillow, adjusted the bed so it was sitting up, and then leaned back. “Might as well get comfy, kid. It’s going to take a while.”

  Casey did, kicking back in the chair and leaning his head against the bed. They’d stopped at McDonald’s after they’d taken Rufus to the vet’s, so he wasn’t hungry, but he couldn’t help contrasting Joe’s easy generosity—“What do you want? That all? I’ll double it.”—with the guy he’d run away from the last time he was there.

  “You’re nice,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Sometimes.”

  “No, you’re really nice. My dad, he’d see someone like you, with all the hair, and the pickup truck, and he’d say mean shit about bikers and hippies, and then he’d find out you’re a nurse and call you a fag—but you’re nice.”

  Joe looked at him, and Casey reflected that his eyes were really large and really brown. “Is that the same dad who drove you out of the house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe we don’t think so much about the shit he used to say about other people, ’kay?”

  “Even me?”

  “Especially you.”

  God, it put paid to so much. Casey’s dad wouldn’t have liked Joe—wouldn’t have liked his hair, or his bike, or his profession. And he would have been wrong, wrong about all of it. So maybe that shit, that horrible shit about being a worthless fag and a slut and an open asshole and anyone’s meat, maybe that shit was wrong too. To his horror, Casey found his eyes were watering.

  “You can’t call social services,” he whispered. “You can’t. They won’t tell me things like that.”

  “Kid, I can be an incredibly grumpy bastard.”

  “But you’ve got a spare room. I’ll work for you, I will. I can help. I’ll make your place real nice, I’ll—”

  “You’d have to go to school.”

  Casey looked away. “After all the shit I’ve done?”

  Joe grunted. “Casey, from the looks of it, a lot of it wasn’t what you’d done but what was done to you. And either way, that shit is yours to keep. You start school, however you do that, and you start over. You be a kid. You don’t tell anyone.”

  Casey sucked in his breath, captivated by the thought. He’d been a jock, because his dad had thrown a ball at him since he was little, but suddenly, he didn’t have to do that anymore. He’d been a cutup, a pain in the ass, a kid who’d rather play the fool than work at his grades. That was how he’d gotten attention. That was why Dillon had wanted to come home with him. That was how he’d gotten his dad to talk at the dinner table. That had been Casey.

  But now? He didn’t have to do that anymore. It was… it was like walking out of that semi and across the great canyon over the clean space had been walking out of the old Casey. He could do anything.

  As long as he didn’t have to go home.

  “I don’t want you to call social services,” he said, and he must have been in his head for quite some time, because Joe grunted like he’d fallen asleep.

  “Well,” Joe conceded, his voice groggy, “it’s not going to happen today.”

  There was a whooshing sound, and the doctor came to dress Joe’s wound some more, and Casey took what he could get.

  JOE took an injected painkiller instead of an oral one because he still had to drive home, and Casey thought that maybe a driver’s license was something he’d want to get started on. He was sixteen, right? Excellent. He’d put it on his list of things for Joe to help him get. Not once did he think Joe wouldn’t help him out. He’d wonder at that later—how arrogant the young were, and how easily they reaped the rewards of a faith they took for granted. Joe had fed him, clothed him, cleaned him, and spoken to him like he wasn’t stupid or subhuman. Joe would take care of him.

  Casey just had to be very, very good.

  They stopped at a bank with a vacuum tube drive-through, and Joe pulled out some cash, then drove to a Ross department store not far from old-town Auburn. By now, Joe’s pain meds had about worn off, and he was not looking so good.

  He made a terrible whining sound when he pulled up on the chrome handle of the pickup, and Casey looked at him worriedly.

  “Tell you what,” he said, thinking that he really needed clothes. “How ’bout I go inside and get some clothes, and you rest in here.”

  Joe closed his eyes. “Not gonna find you on the side of the road again, am I?”

  “Not if you promise not to call social services when you’re better.”

  Joe grunted
a little in pain. “Oh God, kid. Shit. Can I just promise not to do it without talking it over with you first?”

  Yippee!

  “I’ll let that stand for now,” Casey said, feeling generous.

  Joe reached with an effort into his wallet and pulled out five twenties. Casey grimaced. One of the things he had liked about his past life had been the clothes. Mom had dropped him off at the mall anytime he asked, and given him a credit card. Sure, it wasn’t his money, but that didn’t mean he didn’t see the amount.

  A hundred dollars wasn’t it.

  “Keep it simple today,” Joe said, his breath coming hard through the pain. “Two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts and underwear, a couple of basic sweatshirts. If you can wear scrubs to bed, you can get yourself some cheap tennis shoes and some socks. Will that do?”

  Yeah, this guy just gave a kid who wasn’t his a hundred dollars to buy clothes to live in. Casey decided that for the moment, he was over being a fashion plate. He also decided he really wanted a job of his own, but now was not the time.

  “You want to take those pain pills?” he asked instead. He grabbed the pharmacy bag and pulled them out, then grabbed Joe’s soda from McDonald’s, because there was still half a cup left.

  “Don’t want to pass out on you, kid.”

  Casey didn’t want to see him in pain. “Here. I’ll wake you up when I’m done. It’ll be an hour at least, right?”

  Joe grunted, and he must really have been feeling it, because he took the pills and slumped back against the window. There was a gap between the seat and the back of the truck, and Casey searched it for a blanket, pleased to see that there was an old Army surplus wool thing back there, like he’d suspected. Joe seemed the type to come prepared. He covered Joe up and jogged across the parking lot to try to become a real boy.