Damien
I go into the club and shoot the shit with the guys, drinking a whisky, and then going into the corner and sitting down with Gunner. He leans back and smooths down his ginger hair, an oddly feminine gesture. Gunner is oddly feminine in many ways, I reflect as I sit here, but he’s efficient and it makes no difference to his results. He offers me a smile, and I force a grin back. Got to keep up appearances, after all.
“Don’t worry about it, Boss,” Gunner says, as Ogre and a few of the others shoot pool at the other end of the bar, the pool cue looking like a little wand in Ogre’s paws. “We’ll sort it.”
“Sort it?” For a second I think he’s talking about Callie; for a second I think he means he’s going to go in there and sort Callie. Then I look into his face, into that soft, open face, and I realize he means the situation with the Specters’ killers. He thinks I’m pissed because we haven’t found them yet. “Damn right we will.” I nod gruffly. “Goddamn right.”
Gunner pours us both a whisky.
“You’re a good man, Gary James Smith,” I say aloud after a couple of whiskies, me and Gunner watching the pool game.
Gunner grins. “Don’t say that too loud, Boss. The men might hear.”
One of the men—a tall, blonde-haired man named Michaels—clearly has a problem with something Ogre did in the pool game. I watch as he squares up to him, and then as Ogre turns and shrugs and offers the men a reshoot. Ogre, three times the man’s size, offering him a reshoot.
“Weird, ain’t he?” I say, gesturing with my glass of whisky at Ogre.
Gunner nods. “Yes, he is.”
“Trust him?”
Gunner tilts his head at me, and then sips his whisky, and finally says: “He’s never fucked up his job, except for killing that guard outside the warehouse. And that—that was just some weird Ogre shit, I guess.”
“I guess,” I agree.
It’s good to sit out here, with my men, pretend I’m a whole man. That’s the fuckin’ problem with Callie and getting close and holding her and kissing her and all that lovey-dovey shit. It makes me remember the time I almost became half a man, makes me remember worm-fingers writhing and needles probing and a crevice-faced man grinning down at me and makes me remember that I could’ve become a young desperate thing just like Callie, makes me remember that I can huff and puff all I want but it don’t change the fact that once upon a time I was at the mercy of some perverted old man, makes me remember that we’re all just a couple of steps away from the pain and the humiliation—
“Boss?”
I snap my gaze to Gunner. “Yeah?”
He nods at my glass of whisky, which is empty. “Another?”
“Sure.”
He pours. I sip, the whisky burning down my throat, reminding me of that first night with Callie, the night I learnt about her life in the Movement. Since then, we’ve shared. I’ve told her stories about life in the orphanage, the soap-in-sock beatings and the fist fights and cigarette-trading business I started at age thirteen, told her about Wrench, an old bastard I met at a junkyard when I was twelve who taught me all about bikes, told her about how me and my pals used to go to the junkyard when it was closed and shoot air-rifles at cans. And she’s told me about how her mother would put on Johnny Cash and read to her from Of Mice and Men, of how her mother would sometimes go into fits of madness and close all the windows and turn all the clocks facedown. She’s told me about how she ran from state to state living like a rodent. We’ve pried each other apart, but there’s one part of myself I cannot share, one part which has left a scar on my soul—if I even have a soul after all the shit I’ve done in this life.
I just can’t look at her without seeing that naïve boy, that old man, the first life I ever took.
I can’t look at her without being reminded that loose slats on the bed I was tied to were the only difference between who I am today and who I might’ve become, and once you start thinking like that, you start drifting back into the past and livin’ that other life, the life that never was.
“How’re the fish, Gunner?” I ask, to change the subject.
Gunner talks at length about his tropical fish collection: how you have to feed them at certain times and keep the tanks at the correct temperature, his words punctuated only by the pool-players’ talking and the pool balls clicking against each other.
“You have to be careful, then,” I say.
“Yeah,” Gunner says.
Be careful. You have to feed them at the right time, keep them at a certain temperature, or you’ll come home one day and find them belly up on the surface of the water. And that’s the same as me, I reckon. I have to be careful. I have to keep the right distance away from emotion; I have to regulate myself to the right dosage of closeness. Or, just like Gunner’s fishes, one day that naïve boy will float right to the surface and I’ll be fucked.
For the rest of the day, I stay with the men, doing my best not to look at Callie as she prepares our food, and then when evening comes I go into my office, lock the door, and go into the bedroom.
Callie is there, sitting on the edge of my bed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both of them tight-fitting, both of them showing the subtle curves of her body. It’s a body I know well, now, and yet a body which still seems fascinating to me. The best sex I’ve ever had has been with that body. That small, lithe, dancer’s body. Callie stretches her legs to their full length and points her bare feet and I swear to Christ she doesn’t know what she’s doing, doesn’t know how beautiful she looks. And that’s part of the problem: she’s too beautiful; she’s beautiful enough to unman a man.
I force myself to walk past her and to the window seat. Then I take a toothpick from my leather and chew on it, focusing on the chewing, just chew and chew, emptying your head. It’s like meditation, I guess, just got to keep chewing so your mind doesn’t stray, because the second you stop you realize you’re thinking of shit you shouldn’t be thinking of.
“I hope the meal was okay,” Callie says.
I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s really there in her voice, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe Callie’s sensing something. Sensing my distance. Or maybe there’s shit of her own going on behind those huge brown eyes. I don’t know. All I know is there is a distance between us, much greater than the distance from the window to the bed.
“It was fine,” I say, and my voice is stiffer than it’s been with her before.
“Good,” she mutters. “I thought I might have overcooked it, but that’s really good.”
We sit in silence until the sun begins to set, but neither of us makes a move to turn on a light. I get through four toothpicks, chewing them to tatters. She needs to leave. If I am going to be the President I have to be, she needs to leave. But I can’t look into that wide-eyed, vulnerable face and ask her to just get out, just up and get the fuck out of here. I don’t think any man could do that, not with Callie.
When night comes, I undress and climb into bed. Callie does the same. We don’t move with the same passion or hunger which gripped us that first night; we don’t fuck, and we definitely don’t make love. We just lie there, Callie in my arms, me holding her stiffly. I’m hazy from the whisky, which is good because it makes falling asleep easier, but which is bad because it makes staying asleep harder. I wake every half hour, groggy, and I know that Callie is still awake. She lies with her eyes closed, feigning snoring, but there’s just something about how tense she is in my arms. It’s like she’s steeling herself up for something whilst pretending to be asleep. Her breathing is too quick, her hands fists, her face warm and flushed against my chest.
And then I wake when the sun is rising, and Callie is no longer in arms. She’s creeping around the room, shoving things into one of my rucksacks, her hair tied up in a ponytail. I open my eyes halfway, as though I could still be asleep, and watch her blearily as she goes around the room in a businesslike way, shoving clothes and cash into the rucksack.
Then she goes to the window, opens it all the way as quietly as she can, and looks back at me. I close my eyes, but I can feel her eyes on me. This is the moment: this is when I lean up and declare my affection for her and stop her leaving and tell her that it’s time for me to let go of my past and bring her into my present. This is the moment in a movie where I’d jump out of bed and fall to one knee and propose to her. This is the moment where we’d finally decide we want each other. How foolish we’ve been, and we’ll laugh about it . . . but this ain’t a movie, and when I hear Callie climb out of the window and into the street, when I hear her footsteps grow quieter across the tarmac, I do not follow.
It is better this way. She has her own shit, the cult and all that stuff, and I have my own shit, too.
People like me, and people like Callie, just aren’t made for closeness.