forthedog | Entries tagged with hutchinson

The next few days, he waits and he tries to pretend that he isn't waiting. He lies awake at night, staring up at the patterns of the shadows on the ceiling and listening to the footsteps in the hall outside his door, but he doesn't push the call button and ask for more painkillers, for anything to take the edge off and knock him out.

He doesn't want to be taken out of the world. He wants to feel the edges of it. With increasing terror, he realizes that he actually might want to stay alive.

At least for the next few days.

"Hope your friend comes back soon," one of the nurses says as he's being helped out of bed, a young man with sandy hair and a broad smile who, like the pretty blond physical therapist, Mike wouldn't have minded getting to know a little better in happier days. "I think you've been doing better since he stopped by."

Mike shrugs. He doesn't want to make any commitments. No promises. Nothing he can fail at.

But a day later he's waving away the nurse, sliding his stump into the socket by himself. And when he's helped back to his room after therapy, still dragging that goddamn IV stand around with him, he waves away the offered assistance again, standing there in his sweaty clothes, unsteady and tired, feeling something solidifying in his spine.

"I'm gonna stay up for a few more minutes." He shoots the nurse a crooked, twisted smile. "I'm fucking sick of that bed. And I gotta get used to this."

The nurse nods, looking slightly doubtful but seeming to see the sense in this. Mike turns back to the window, leans against the sill and closes his eye, lifting his face into the sunlight. He hates the prosthetic. He hates the tightness of his own skin, the dryness of it, the way no part of his body still seems to comfortably belong to him. But he doesn't hate the sun, and he doesn't hate the cool breeze on his face.

And Neil is coming back. He does believe it. Neil is coming back.

God help me.

Somewhere between finding out the news and hitting the tarmac in Newark, he decides not to go to Neil immediately.

Some of it is fear, plain and simple, though he'd only come out and call it that under extreme duress. But it's not fear of Neil, not really. It's both more complex and more horrible than that. It's fear of disappointing him. Fear of what it might mean that he's afraid of that. Fear of commitment. Fear of not committing. Fear of being hurt. Fear of becoming someone who can't be hurt at all, because they don't feel anything.

At Newark he rents a car for a day and drives into Trenton; it's a sad little town in a lot of ways, that sign on the bridge somehow reproachful rather than proud--the world takes everything from us and leaves us with nothing--but something about it speaks to him all the same. It's not New York. It's not really like anywhere he's lived.

After about half an hour, it occurs to him that probably the closest it comes to is Hutchinson.

Shortly after that, leaning on the hood of the car and watching rain drip sullenly into the gray river, a cigarette burning down to a stub between his fingers, he comes to another decision. It doesn't take him very long. Really, he thinks maybe he's already made it, and the hard part was just realizing that it was made.

He picks up a local paper, finds three places that he can look at that afternoon, and jumps on the third one. It's small, old, clean. Is it all right if he pays for a few months in advance? He has to go overseas for a while and won't actually be living in it until he returns. Yes, it's fine. A modest and unspent inheritance and years and years of intensely minimal expenses mean that he has money. Really, he has more than he knows what to do with.

And now he knows.

He signs the application, agrees to come back in a day or two to sign the lease itself, hits the road. It's getting dark and raining harder. He takes a detour and stops in front of the gates of Fort Dix, looks at the lights in the early gathering twilight and thinks about what might have been. What won't be. What will.

It's late when he gets into the city itself, and though Neil's told him where the bar is he gets lost twice, the streets becoming oddly maze-like. Parking should be a nightmare but once he finds the place itself, there's a spot across the street, and he slides into it, dumping change into the meter without counting the time.

It's a hole in the wall, but it's got good atmosphere, dim and smoky, music too loud. The kind of place he likes, as a rule.

It's not too crowded but it's small, and people line the bar, and he only catches sight of Neil when he pushes his way to the front. For a moment he doesn't speak, doesn't breathe, and there's the fear again. Is he making a huge fucking mistake? Is he giving up too much for someone he still hardly fucking knows?

Is there a name for this? One he can use?

He catches Neil's eye, taps the bar and manages a thin smile. "Whiskey. Straight."

He wakes up slowly, and it takes him a while to realize that it isn't the first time, and longer to understand why the body draped over him and the limbs tangled up with his don't seem strange or out of place. Once he's awake enough to grasp that, he's awake enough to wonder what time it is--he can see light through the curtains--but he can't see the clock without shifting position, and that isn't something he wants to do. Not just yet.

This whole experience is just too... novel.

He reaches up and combs his fingers lightly through Neil's hair, again just for the novelty of it. This, he thinks, is what he came here for. Not something as specific as waking up with Neil McCormick, but maybe he'd hoped for something along those lines.

Going back to Texas and leaving this behind is a harder thought to bear than he ever expected it to be.

Neil,

So it's fucking boring down here. I don't know what I expected out of Texas, but so far it's been a lot of the same as Kansas was. And it's hot like you wouldn't believe, and it seems like the AC breaks down every other day. I haven't felt heat like this since I was in the Gulf. At least here you can get some decent beer. And the food is fantastic. Everyone here's got boots, giant hats, huge belt buckles. Pretty much like you'd think Texas would be, except maybe you'd think it's like one of those stereotypes of a place that ends up not being true once you get there. But it is.

I'm not sure what made me decide to do this. It's boring, like I said. And I was remembering what you said about New York, and I figured you must be getting ready to go there soon, if you saved up enough. I remember how that felt, just wanting to get the fuck out, except the place I wanted to get the fuck out of was New York. Grass is always greener, right? Just be careful, if you're still going. Whatever you think it's like, well, I hope it'll be everything you want it to be. But watch yourself. There's rough people floating around there. Rougher than you probably ever met in Hutchinson.

And here I go, sounding like your fucking dad. Maybe I won't even send this. I haven't decided yet. It feels like a strange letter to send, but a lot of shit is strange these days.

I'm thinking I'm not going to stay here that much longer, if I can get reassigned. I don't know where I'll go next. Anywhere, maybe. I'll let you know. If you care at all.

Thing about it being boring is you have way too much time to think. That's how it was in the Gulf, too.

Write back if you have time. If you want to.

-M

In the end he's not sure what to do with the news. It doesn't come as a shock--someone like him gets moved around a lot, and he knows by now to not get comfortable anywhere he goes--and really it should come as a relief, leaving the middle of fucking nowhere, even if he's going to a more southerly bit of fucking nowhere, because as least that will be a change.

But that will be a change. Which might be why he sits on his bunk for ten minutes, looking at his orders and thinking and trying, very hard, not to think at all. Which might be why, a few days later, when he asks for a day pass and he gets one, he finds himself driving again, same fucking pickup, and he swears to God he can still smell their fucking in the front seat.

It takes him until late afternoon to get on the road and it's early evening by the time he rolls into Hutchinson, fucking Hutchinson, lengthening shadows on small town middle America and somewhere in all of it is a teenage hooker he suddenly can't get out of his head.

He's not sure when this happened, but it did without his realizing it, and now he's just probably fucked.

But he's leaving.

He remembers where Neil's house is and he ends up there without really giving it conscious thought, turning onto the street and feeling suddenly more like some kind of fucking pervert than he has throughout all of this. But Neil's house is right there, sunset painting it orange, and he guesses he can't really go back now.

He shouldn't be back here. It's a refrain that's been playing over and over in his head since he left, and he shouldn't have even come this far, not on a regular pass, not when he's not sure what's even at the end of it, but it's been a week and a half, and he should be over it by now. Quick grope in the cab of the truck--this truck, borrowed again, and when he really concentrates he thinks maybe he can still smell them in it. Beer, pot smoke, sex. And if that had been any kind of a tip-off, at least there's no way to tell who had been involved in it with him. Sex is sex. Body parts are something else.

And all of this is something else.

"Fuck," he mutters, fingers tapping impatient little patterns on the steering wheel as he rolls through the shitty little town, identical to any number of other shitty little towns he's been through, except for one important thing. And how is he expecting to find it? What is he even looking for?

He doesn't fucking know. But here he is.

He's actually entertaining--not entirely speculatively--the idea of rolling down the window and trying to stop someone on the street--Hey, do you know this kid named Neil, about yea high, skinny, dark hair, tongue that could melt the fucking paint off a wall?--when he slides past a ratty-looking playground and does a double-take. It's pretty distant, almost a football field away, but in the daylight, in the dark, whichever; he doesn't think he could mistake that lanky aspect.

He's been seeing it when he closes his eyes.

"Fuck," he mutters again, pulling to a stop and just looking. Creepy. Really, really fucking creepy. And watching him there, half leaning on one of the swingsets, he looks a lot younger. Maybe just the context. Maybe not. Is he technically a rapist now? Would that even be that significant a step down?

Something twists in his chest and he feels a corresponding twist of impotent anger. He's not doing this. He's staying in this fucking truck, and he's going back to Fort Riley.

Any second now.