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Nice Nurses

Clay could recite to the thread what he’d worn that early-summer brunch at Roscoe’s apartment; the loose, worn cords that were so easy to pull up his legs one-handed with the nice button that behaved in the cute little pants-slot (button eye? Hole, simple-pat? Jules would know, but he hadn’t met Jules just yet, if details were the thing). The cords were light green. Over this, he wore an oversized t-shirt, grey, one he could pull over his head without a battle, and over that a very long-sleeved chambray shirt he did not button because he enjoyed when it billowed behind his underarms. It made him feel like a famous painter, and nothing untoward showed to upset anyone. A recitation by rote and not of recollection, as Clay hadn’t found the need to recollect much for twenty-five years. Why bother, when it was such a pretty May Day, and the sidewalks were beginning to stay warm, and a robin plumped over there, in that very shrub?

And a soiree! How fun! Phil of all people opened the door for him. Strange, since Roscoe was quite host-y about these matters. “Here we are,” Phil said, with his standard dissected warmth. “Now the party’s started.”

“Darling,” said Clay Carrell, “I hope if already has.”

“And fashionably late, too.”

“I arrive, exactly as I have always arrived, when I intend to.”

He took a turn around the front room, received his acknowledgements and the few respectful touches or kisses some guests felt fit to grant him. He breezed by the goody table (it wasn’t nice manners to show undue interest in the food, directly after your entrance) and treated himself to a peep out the window. Roscoe did not have curtains to sensuously fling aside, a pity. Roscoe!

“Where, now?” He asked Bo G., who unlike others, solidly clapped Clay’s trim shoulder.

“He’s in the damn kitchen.” Bo G. understood him perfectly. “With that damn kid.”

Clay knew, theoretically, about the presence of a damn kid, but memory lay in the eye of the beholder and Clay had never managed to see him. He’d heard bizarre rumors Roscoe kept him stuffed in the shop basement; Clay thought that was a senseless place to store a child. Knowing now he must see at last, off he swanned to the kitchen entryway toward the damp clatter and crash of soapy dishware. He rapped the doorframe smartly. “Now you,” he said, “you, who did not answer your own door! I see you now!”

“Oh Clay,” Roscoe half-turned, smiled vaguely, and held up his bubbling hands. “That’s Clay,” he said to the long, young creature beside him who dangled on a tall stool. It didn’t answer. Clay thought that was only fair, as half the child’s face was a healing fog of yellows and burgundies and eggplant, all in evil gradients, descending from a half-swollen blue-skinned eye before dispersing and reconnecting among a strip of unbecoming, hairy stitches encrusted smack in the middle of the cheek. It could hardly have hurt to tape some nice white gauze over it, but not everyone knew the niceties of Gloria Vanderbilt as well as Clay.

“Clay,” Roscoe continued in the solid, directorial voice he affected whenever Clay was in the room, “Clay, this is Jules. I don’t think you two have run into each other.”

“I am so incredibly charmed,” Clay said. He noticed right away that Jules was looking down, with a teenager’s cruel intent, to work out if Clay’s squashy white shoes truly fastened together with Velcro. “Hideous whispers informed me you were stuck in a basement somewhere. I’m so glad you’re not; people belong aboveground.”

Titters in the room behind Clay. The events could have been connected; he was a witty person. “I can see you’re being very helpful to our lovely man – that’s fine, Roscoe works too hard to arrange the fun then misses out on it.” He scanned automatically over the child’s hands, which were long and battered, adolescently screwboned. He didn’t store them awkwardly like other wallflowers.

Clay felt keen, momentarily. “What do you play?”

The child’s one fully open eye was merely surface-bright and dark and blank. “Piano,” he said. He talked out one side of his mouth and his teeth didn’t show when he spoke.

“You do?” Roscoe was surprised. Their acquaintance was, apparently, short.

Clay dandled his stronger hand in front of his chest. “No-no,” he clarified, “you play?”

“Instruments,” Roscoe tried.

“Cards, my darling.”

“Oh.” The child – J name, Clay would need to hear it a few more times before it could be swallowed – cupped his hands and touched his thumbs together, the poor form of shuffling. “Right. I play.”

“What’s your special?”

“Anything.”

“How did you learn?”

“Old people.”

Clay, delighted, clapped his stronger palm against his weak knuckles. “Marvelous,” he declared. “They’re the best teachers because they’ve played so long – and so sour about it! I bet you have superior attention span to other babies your age. I bet you could play me right now. Roscoe?”

The little foundling looked to Roscoe. Either through injury or through stupidity, his face didn’t appear to express much.

“Sure, you should go and play if you want to play,” Roscoe encouraged. “I got it covered here.”

Clay always made sure he had large pockets, and he always carried a pack on him if suspected a social situation. He steered the child through the crowd out front – everybody seemed to be looking their way with one big grin – directly to the tiny second room and gestured for the magazines to be cleared off one of the end tables. “And pull up that little chair for your young bones,” he bossed. “And I will sit on the couch, and then we will play Gin Rummy – consider this your audition.”

Two men sharing the same chair in the corner yelped together. “Don’t let Frank hear you saying that, Clay!”

“Leave Frank to me.” Clay dismissed them all and cut the deck one handed. He braced his other wrist as firmly as he could against the table, to use it as a base to shuffle against. At this point, those who didn’t know Clay generally said please, I can do that for you! But this one just stared at the feat.

“Now.” Clay settled in after he served out two shares of ten and established the discard. “You must remind me of your name again, and then you may draw first, seeing as you’re brand new.”

“Jules,” said Jules. He drew and then discarded an ace of hearts, which Clay’s brain filed away of its own accord, along with the name as well, if he was lucky.

Clay graciously helped himself through three rounds of passive, plodding gameplay on Jules’ part. He appeared to be thinking merely through muscle memory and allowed Clay to initiate the knocks. Several times he failed to spot where his deadwood coincided with Clay’s melds, requiring a sporting nudge of the shoe on Clay’s part, who briefly worried, after three Gins, that despite the automatic nature of his play, the boy was a little stupid after all. Then he looked round and noticed three other gentlemen had thronged alongside the two on the chair and were absorbing the proceedings quite immodestly – a relief, the only problem at present being the teenage disease of self-consciousness.

“For goodness sakes.” Clay snapped his fingers, a rudeness he did not like to resort to. “If you please?”

The attention dispersed and they continued.

“You can’t mind people when they don’t even know what we’re doing,” Clay suggested.

“I can do whatever I want,” Jules muttered, rude enough. Clay wondered if he was in pain. He was playing one-handed himself, insistently rubbing the unblotted side of his jaw, and he kept jerking his chin apropos to nothing. Whenever a partygoer wandered into the room all these tics would halt for a time, before forcibly sputtering through his body to reignite the cycle. The agitation made him more aggressive in play, and Clay gradually realized he had (pardon his French) a real bitch on his hands. Frank’s opinion be damned – he’d get along just fine.

Now he just needed an opening to extend the invitation, but Clay was not much of a talker in play, and Jules seemed to mirror him. Roscoe wandered in with two orange juice glasses, the dearheart, and being the sensitive kind, left without pestering – minus a small jab at Clay. “You’re not wearing your bracelet,” he scolded.

“It’s ugly,” Clay explained. “Now, you can see we’re busy.”

Roscoe put a brief hand to Jules’ shoulder, who only looked up when he departed. He peered with sudden plaintiveness past Clay’s shoulder, then downward, spotting a folded napkin Roscoe had placed beside his cards. His face absented itself again. Without an expression, the wounds on his face became ghastlier and stood out sharply, deeply nuzzled as they were in winter-sallow skin, teenage skin or no. It was difficult to tell if, after healing, he would be pretty or ugly.

“You came to us very suddenly, I hear,” Clay said.

“I don’t want to know what you heard.” Jules spoke decisively through pink teeth and put the napkin to the corner of his mouth because he was, Clay finally noticed, bleeding. Clay discarded this data as a distraction.

“You’re a lucky little boy,” Clay continued, as Jules’ eyes revolved nastily around the room. “Roscoe is a very nice person. I myself am part of a very exclusive club, that could benefit you socially.”

“Oh, thure.”

“Oh, yeth. Did your old people teach you how to play bridge?”

“Hell,” Jules said. “Since, like, ten? Whatever.” He sipped from the orange juice, pulled an awful, squint-eyed face, and shook his head very slowly. The rim of the glass came away red and slimy and he was reluctant to swallow. “My gran had her old ladies, and I had to round out the play. My boyfriend’s mom played too –” It took him forever, in this state, to spit out the words and without the scaffold of cardplay, Clay had to mentally sweat to grasp the information. “– But he didn’t like me to play with her.”

“Who?”

“My boyfriend didn’t like –”

“Oh, forget him.” Clay waved away all these superfluous people. “I won’t allow almost ten years of experience to be sneezed at.”

He laid out the parameters of the card club to Jules, who rested the unharmed side of his face against balled knuckles and appeared to doze right through it. “They won’t like it,” he murmured, after Clay outlined the sparkling personalities of Frank F., Bo G. (introduced) and numerous others. “They’ll say I’m too young. And I’m tired of old people.”

“But you’re used to them.” Clay, a smooth fifty-five, considered himself a world apart from Frank and Bo.

“I’m doing stuff for Roscoe. I need to find a real job, too.”

“We meet multiple times a week – we have many people to satisfy!”

Jules’ slit eyes popped wide. He gradually lifted himself from his worn slouch. Clay noted Phil’s dour presence piercing his shoulder, and a bowl of pretzels placed sacrilegiously over the discard pile. “Give it up,” Phil said, in his never-ending mildness – amused by everything, and happy about none of it. “Bo already knows what you’re up to with our battered bride. He told me Frank’s gonna rip you a new one after he tattles.”

“Frank can’t rip his own farts,” Clay said. “He suffered chilblains in his youth.”

“I’ll tell him that for you and save you the trouble.”

“A number of people would!” Quite a few in fact, following Phil’s scalpel-edged lead, had taken the second room for open and were dousing it in separate conversations. Jules sat far back in his seat as if to observe, but Phil was the only one he kept his healthy eye on.

“Who’s winning?” Phil directed the question to Clay but put a hand against Jules’ spine and squeezed snappily. Jules twisted away.

“I am,” Clay said, modestly as possible. “But I have many unfair advantages. I’m on the home team. And being as I’m vice-president of the club –”

Jules worked his jaw until it clicked. His hand jerked toward his chin, but he caught himself and fished for the pretzels instead, which he gnawed on uneasily. The color he’d possessed, unattractive as it had been, had drained from his face leaving him claylike and nervous.

“–With all privileges,” Clay continued, “afforded to me thereof, regarding membership –”

Jules gagged – an abrupt and distinctly un-partylike sound that silenced the room in an instant – and as easily as if he were part of the organic conversation occurring between Clay and Phil, he sat forward and ejected a neat spout of blood from his mouth, dirtying the juice and the cards, and overtop all this he spat and scattered a single sharp dirty pearl of a tooth.

The blood put pause deep in Clay’s gut, but, he noted, the color returned rapidly to Jules’ face, a vast improvement too; his body must have been relieved to rid itself of the little nag. The boy automatically wiped his speckled chin, but he’d already put his fingers through the mess on the table. He couldn’t take his eyes off the tooth. Neither could Phil.

“I believe we need a napkin,” Clay said to the room at large – certainly everybody could look, but nobody would do! The problem of crowds. Phil stepped back. He smiled, for whatever mysterious reason people behaved untowardly in odd social situations.

Jules simply got up, his hand politely clasped over his gushing mouth, and calmly left the room as though he’d been called away.

“For goodness sakes.” Clay followed suit; He had the vague inclination he must find Roscoe, to play mother. He left the cards and dental trash for others to sort – people had a bad habit of tidying up after him.

Once, a stranger’s voice floated up behind, I knew a guy who told me it was better the less teeth they had –

“Shut up Louis,” Phil’s voice responded, uncommonly hard. “I’m tired of hearing about what you’ve been told.”

“He’s too young!” Frank F. barked.

“I’m young – almost the youngest one here.” Clay sipped his coffee, which he didn’t like, but drank during card meetings for conviviality. It was important to belong to the group. “And an injection of youth and energy could be what we, as a gathering, have been yearning for.”

Frank glared around the folding table, at anybody on the committee who had dared to yearn without disclosing the fact. “Well?” He demanded. “Who’s found our energy wanting?”

“We’ve been in odd numbers for two months,” Alan M. helpfully pointed out. “Bo doesn’t have a partner, since Gregory.”

“Gregory. Right there.” Frank pointed. “Started here in his sixties, unretired, and I had my doubts – too young!”

“For god’s sake Frank,” Clay said. “The man dropped dead.”

“He couldn’t handle the stress.”

“Cease with Gregory,” Alan (sixties) requested, rubbing his chest anxiously. “Gives me the creeps.”

“I’ve never set eyes on this fabled kid,” Frank said. “Just how young is he?”

Clay, who had pumped Roscoe for information, drew this one out, for his own pleasure. Everybody leaned forward.

“Oh,” he said, with delicacy. “Around, say, nineteen or so.”

Frank bashed the table with his fist. “There!” He roared. “Too young!”

“A very new nineteen, at that – at least Roscoe says so.”

Frank F., overwhelmed with passion, got up and left the room to do something loud and rackety in the kitchen. Clay sat back and basked while everybody fought it out, not worried a jot. Committee days were so stimulating.

“Young is one thing, Clay,” said Alan, conveniently as Frank returned to the table. “A teenager is a whole other thing.”

“Half a thing,” Frank declared.

“He’ll have to be working,” Bo G. said. "He'll be hopping jobs. No consistent schedule."

“He’s going to get his first fucking boyfriend,” Frank added, “and the second that happens – goodbye, card club!”

“Oh, he’s already had a boyfriend.” Clay had no idea how he knew this – maybe he was lying. “And he’s not bound to get another for a while – I saw him at Roscoe’s brunch, and he looks very ugly.”

Frank turned to Bo. “He’s ugly?” He demanded.

Bo G., perhaps taking his own pleasure, took a long time to put his coffee down. “I saw him at Roscoe’s too. He’s not ugly. Somebody just worked his face over damn good.”

Frank jabbed his finger at Clay. “He’s going to heal up,” he predicted. “And bam – a boyfriend!”

“Who worked him over?” Alan asked, alarmed. “Somebody here?”

The facts, from Roscoe, were few enough, but Clay had written them down to assist his memory. He took out his little spiral pad. “Not here,” he soothed. “He arrived – approximately a month ago – from Indiana – probably nineteen –”

“Probably?”

“The bad thing happened; no Alan, I don’t know who – and voila – arrives at Roscoe’s. Who is kind enough, mind you, to lend a helping hand to a helpless, ugly urchin.”

“If Roscoe had any damn brains,” Bo said, “he’d find some understanding lady or a dyke, so he could work out these fatherly instincts in a less disruptive way.”

“Dykes want to keep their own babies – they’re the ones looking at us gents.”

“That’s what Martin did,” Bo said, pulling the empty mugs together into a friendly group at the center of the table. “Got pinned by some girl, not long after Val died, remember. What, ’88? – he’d carry this stacked blonde girl in with him from New York, when he came to visit Roscoe and Phil. Knocked her up and had to follow her to San Francisco.”

“Who?” Clay asked politely.

“Nobody expects you to remember important things,” Frank snapped. Such a shot, in mixed company, would have inspired somebody to scold Frank, but in the confines of the card committee, Clay was left to fend for himself, which was bliss – for Clay, polite, socially able, a smart dresser, a knower of vocab and etiquette, and demon card shark, was also tough. Most people had forgotten.

“His grandmother taught him to play when he was ten,” Clay announced. “He’s been playing as part of a group for years. Among other games, if we’d like him for our mixed open house – I played a two-on-two with him at Roscoe’s brunch before disaster struck, and he’s perfectly teachable. The groundwork is all there.”

“Disaster?” Frank was no dummy, unfortunately.

“Oh.” Clay flapped his hand at the inconvenient details. “Nothing. He lost a tooth and was mortified.”

“He’s still losing his baby teeth. It’s going to look like an elementary school in here.”

He spoke like a man who’d already made his decision. Everybody hopped on the ball, but Frank held them in suspense. He gave the floor to Bo.

“Considering,” he said, “You’re the one short a partner. This is an egalitarian club.”

Clay, who’d known from the start he would win, let his attention drift. Bo G., maybe unaware yet of the victory, worked it out to himself. He turned to Clay. “He’s not a complete dumbass, is he?”

“Haven’t the slightest.”

“Oh, go to hell.” Bo stood up and gathered up the bouquet of mugs. “Let the kid in. Let’s see what happens.”

“What,” Alan suggested, “would Gregory say about being replaced by a nineteen-year-old?”

“The problem with death is that’s it’s boring,” Bo G. mumbled to himself, as he stumped toward the kitchen. “Jesus Frank, what did you do in here?”

“I love egalitarianism,” Clay chirped. “It always seems to mean I win.”

Frank F. rubbed his spotted temples. “Clay,” he requested, “just shut the hell up.”

Months along, Clay Carrell tripped down a burning sunny sidewalk on his way somewhere – to Roscoe, maybe – it was a beautiful day again and he needed no reason to be out and about, as an independent man.

He passed by a line of parking jobs and as curiosity merited, he peeped into the windows until coming upon a mouse-colored car that still contained its driver. Clay peeked closer and to his delight, recognized Jules, even though his face was turned away and resting on his folded arms against the steering wheel.

Clay rapped the window. Jules jumped and shouted, saw Clay, and slouched back against the seat. The window buzzed.

“Don’t scare me, oh my god.”

“You’re a silly child,” Clay pronounced. “Because there’s nothing to be frightened of. Where are you going?”

Jules glanced around him, as if surprised to find he was still in the car. “I don’t know,” he said. “Somewhere, I guess.”

“Well, you’re in luck. I don’t know where I’m going either.” Clay trotted around to the passenger seat and helped himself inside – the door was unlocked. “You should secure that if you’re just going to loiter,” Clay said. “Any stranger could help themselves inside and do away with you.”

“You just said there’s nothing to be scared of.”

“You should always obey your instincts,” Clay advised. He buckled his seatbelt. “One of the first things I was taught, on independent living, was to lock the door behind me. I put a sticky-note on the wall to remind me, for that very purpose. Naturally I don’t need that anymore. Now, let’s be off.”

“Where?”

Irritated by this passiveness, Clay swept his hand at the potted road. Endless possibilities! Jules turned the key, and off they popped. What a relief, Clay thought, to be moving somewhere faster than usual. He checked the sun, saw they were heading vaguely west, and that was enough for him, context-wise. He settled back to let the young people do the work.

Jules, for his part, looked mildly amused, his usual expression around Clay. Driving a car, he looked more relaxed than Clay had ever seen. His face, a few months down the line, had healed in fits and starts, and now struggled to throw off the scrubby laceration on one cheek, and a stubborn blackened crescent hung on the bone underneath the eye. To the disappointment of the committee, Jules was not ugly – when the swelling cooled off, he was a fine-faced youth with a hawk nose braced by huge, dark eyes that were at turns combative or entirely closed away. He had black, vainly tousled hair and what Alan called an intriguing mouth before Frank told him to shut the hell up.

To everybody’s relief, these physical positives were usually obliterated by Jules’ general sourness, a bad attitude that occasionally banana-rotted into downright childishness. This was not a problem in the club, where squabbling was half the reason for arriving. The first significant interaction he provoked with Bo G. was a fight about Bo bringing up, too much in their first partnered scrimmage, what Gregory would have done in that scenario.

“I’m just saying,” Bo had said, “that Greg wouldn’t have overpromised on that bid, especially if he was aware he was a stranger in a new situation –”

“Go dig him up,” Jules suggested, “and see what bid you’ll get out of him now, asshole.”

Clay, in the present, snooped through a collection of CD cases hidden in the door’s side pocket. “Oh my,” he said. “Throbbing Gristle. Sounds disgusting. What is it?”

“Put it in and see.”

Clay did; He sat for several minutes through a groaning, desexed voice with a foreign accent working out some struggling words overtop an auditory ambiance of what Clay thought resembled seasick trains.

“How interesting,” Clay said. “It makes me feel ill.”

“That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

“I suppose nowadays bands function in all sorts of interesting ways.”

“They’re not nowadays, they’re from the seventies.” Jules, ignorant in many ways, still felt perfectly free to get snippy and rude with Clay. “They did this song,” he explained, “they did this one song based on this letter this mail-artist did from back then, about working in a burn unit.”

Clay felt the need to check for the sun’s location. “Really now?” He said politely.

“Yeah, about this woman in there who was burned so badly she couldn’t sleep. From the waist up she was like, just meat. She had no ears or nose or eyes, it was that bad. But they had to keep her alive.”

“Ah,” Clay understood. “Like me.”

Jules shut up – a rare feat – and Clay stared out at rushing traffic, wondering where everybody needed to be in such a damn hurry. He was curious to see if Roscoe had attempted, in his appropriate way, to fill Jules in. Apparently not.

“Uh,” Jules said. He flicked his eyes from the road and flashed them, with obligatory understanding across Clay’s weak, folded arm. “Sorry?”

“Oh hush,” Clay dismissed. “You couldn’t know.”

“I kind of just thought you were paralyzed for some reason,” Jules continued brashly, to Clay’s relief.

“I certainly am,” Clay confirmed. “Paralyzed. And disfigured! It’s very ugly.”

“Your hand looks regular, just kind of little.”

“I was involved, incidentally, within a grease fire. A freak accident. The muscles shrank. The rest of the arm isn’t regular,” Clay said. “Nor the shoulder it connects to, or part of my chest and stomach. I try to be sensitive to the – the sensitivities of onlookers.”

“Can I see?”

Clay pierced him with a pretty decent look. “Darling,” he said. “Use your brains.”

Stopped at a red light, Jules could turn his head and bare his teeth in the approximation of a happy grin. His teeth, bless him, were getting awful scarecrow on one side. “It looks bad, right?” Jules asked.

“I suppose some don’t care about ugliness.” Clay turned to the CD library in his lap. “Cannibal Corpse,” he observed. The cover was so lurid he had to flip it over. “Good lord. Were you raised in a whorehouse?”

“In a regular house,” Jules said. “So, worse.”

Because it made sense, Clay insisted they stop for lunch at his absolute favorite restaurant, Panera Bread. They were on an interstate at this point, and Jules had to flip around on the exits to get them there. “I don’t really have much money,” he said.

“What a coincidence, neither do I.”

They went halfsies on one meal. They both shared weak appetites and lanky, girlish figures.

“I want to ask you a question,” Jules said.

Clay assented; how novel.

“What do you think about Phil?”

Clay wondered if the privacy of the booth was affecting him. It had been so long since he’d been asked for his opinion, outside of the context of cardplay or his health, that he completely forgot the question. “Pardon?”

Jules repeated himself patiently.

“I suppose I’ve known him for years,” Clay said. “The same way I’ve known Roscoe for years. He’s not exactly a man you have opinions on – he doesn’t share himself well.”

Jules dissected his half of the sandwich. He didn’t appear put out by the lack of information.

“Why do you want to know, dear?”

“He talks to me sometimes.”

“Well, that’s only polite. He’s around.”

“He’ll go out of his way to talk to me,” Jules clarified. “Kind of in a different way than other guys. And I want to talk to him back, which doesn’t really happen with anyone else. Except Roscoe sometimes.”

“Then there you have it.”

“But it’s different than with Roscoe.”

“Why?”

This question was beyond Jules’ capabilities. “I don’t know,” he said, and looked straight at Clay, hiding nothing. For the first time since Roscoe’s brunch, Clay saw he really was nothing more than a helpless, untrained child. Others might have been alarmed at him playing chauffeur.

“And then,” Jules continued, “he’ll stop talking to me for a long time. I’ll try and he’ll ignore me. And I don’t get why it bothers me. I don’t know if I even like him.”

“I don’t think you could like him,” Clay said. “Not in any significant way. He’s vulpine – you’re equine.”

“I’m what?”

Clay trotted the salt and pepper shakers across the tabletop. “Have you never seen the Kentucky Derby?” He asked. “And observed all the pretty horses? How they stamp their feet beforehand and toss their beautiful manes, when after all, there can be only one winner, draped with roses? Not only have we trained them to want to compete, we’ve taught them the difference between winning and losing. They’ll suffer forever, knowing the reality of competition – and they want it, despite the cruel reality of only one getting ahead, all the others left behind. Equine. That’s you.”

“I’m born to suffer.” For someone with such an egregious taste in music, he seemed put out by the prospect.

“You’re an aggressive competitor,” Clay explained. He knew enough from the club. “You seek out games to win. Losing fuels your spirit even more than a win might. Phil avoids other people’s games – I can’t tell you how many invitations he’s received to the miscellaneous open-house – but he’ll slink behind other people’s finish lines all the same. Just to see how they act when he’s spotted. If he chooses to be. Vulpine.” Clay had looked this up in the dictionary – it was defined in one of his many spiral notebooks. “Foxy, darling. Of sneaky temperament.”

“I know what it means,” Jules whined. “I’m sneaky.”

“You are a mean little pony who spits out his sugar,” Clay said. “That does not a fox make, my dear.”

“You’re mean,” Jules sulked.

“It goes so often unobserved in me,” Clay agreed. “Because I’m most beloved and well taken care of. But that means I’ve been stuck in the stable for years – hellish.”

“You’re not in the stable,” Jules, ignorant, insisted. “You’re right here with me.”

“Wait and see,” Clay said. “Just wait.”

A problem of Clay’s existence was his inability to seek people out. Certainly, he could come across people in the bounds of everyday back-and-forth – he could spot someone at a gathering, or loiter, in acceptable places, where others were known to loiter. But if someone didn’t want to be found, Clay could not find them. He had limited addresses, phone numbers, emails. Computers frightened him. He had no end of ways to get ahold of Roscoe – they were all pasted up on Clay’s refrigerator, and an ugly collage they made, too.

Weeks, and months, slipped by, and Clay, even with the aid of his notes, lost why he’d been interested in speaking to Phil in the first place. The memo in his social calendar read 8/19/2006 – Jules in car at PB, talk of Phil – it signified nothing, except that Clay truly hated his handwriting. He was glad he hadn’t written more. He could have shown Jules and asked for clarification, but there were certain facts Jules didn’t need to be aware of yet. And Roscoe, if deputized, might tattletale and turn the boy against him, and just when he and Bo G. were starting to find a rapport not based on conflict.

Around Halloweentime, in fact, he overheard the most bizarre and intimate conversation between the two.

It had occurred during a rubber open play in Frank’s basement. Clay had no details, except that Jules had shown up for a couple weeks peaked and pale. His face, other than that, was of normal color, but forebodingly swollen around the nose and eyes. Clay thought he’d been coming down with something. Frank agreed and threatened to send him home – he’d been playing without ardor anyway. Jules hadn’t fought, for once – Bo G., of all people, ordered him to stay.

Clay had gone upstairs to freshen his seltzer. The screen to the patio was unguarded, and the kitchen was cool and buffeted. He saw Jules and Bo outside on the little concrete stamp, dashed overhead by a browning tree as they guarded their cigarettes from the wind. It was spooky – Clay hadn’t noticed them leaving the basement, and he briefly entertained the possibility of two copies of each body – one pair outside, one pair stashed underground.

He plastered himself against the wall, obeying the twitching muscle of an instinct he could no longer attach to a situation. He waited.

Jules spoke first. “I think Harper knows.”

“Did you tell him?” Bo G.

“No. I think he guessed.” The wind carried inside a crusty leaf and some mentholated air. “He says I should tell.”

Bo snorted, forcefully. “What does he know?”

“He says it’ll happen again if I don’t.”

“Maybe it will. You’ll never know. It’ll be to someone else.”

Jules had no answer to that.

“It’ll be someone else,” Bo said. “It’s done. You got it over with – think of it like that. You know what you need to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You put it away,” Bo said. “You take it in your hands, and you put it away, and you shut the lid. You don’t look at it ever again. It only has to happen to you once. You did that part. That’s all you’re obligated to survive, that – the initial experience of it. Thinking it over – that’s the stuff that’ll kill you. You know what’ll happen if you think it over?”

Jules had yet to think of an answer.

“It’ll happen again,” Bo said. “To you. Again, and again. You’ll arrange the situations. You’ll put yourself in them, without knowing…”

Clay watched some crumbs of ash light across the kitchen, but by the time they reached the stove they’d cooled.

“Have you seen him again?” Bo demanded to know. He sounded angry, for reasons Clay could not possibly discern.

“I’ll always see him. I can’t not. He’s around.”

“For christ’s sake.”

“Do you know who I’m talking about?” Jules was beginning to sound shrill. “Do you know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”

Sniffle, sniffle, clack. Somebody’s lighter flared up and died.

“I know this isn’t easy to hear.” It was odd to hear Bo G. attempt to behave gently. “Don’t think I don’t know. I understand.”

“Shut up. You don’t want to hear about me. I don’t want to hear about you. I don’t care what happened to you. Fuck what happened to you.”

“I know because I’m older than you –”

“You don’t know anything!” The sentence began loudly, and ended in a crazed whisper, as if Jules had realized too late they weren’t in total privacy. “You don’t know anything because you’re older! You’re all so fucking old and useless. I fucking hate all of you.”

“Jules –”

“You’re all so fucking old and stupid and miserable and alone and I hate all of you.” The hacked whisper began dissolving damply halfway through.

“Don’t start crying,” Bo ordered. “You can’t cry about this.”

“I can do whatever I want.”

Jules’ voice, crying, was about as ugly as his injured face had been, but Clay was already having trouble recalling it. Drawing – now there was a talent. Writing, frankly, sucked.

“You can’t do whatever you want.” Bo’s voice shifted, as he moved presumably closer to Jules. He sounded lost. He sounded like he was repeating some unlikeable stranger. “You have to be a man about this.”

“I’m not a man. That’s why it happened.”

“You are a man. You’re a man. If someone tries to push you around like that again, you have to stand up for yourself. You can’t wait until it’s too late – do you want to end up like Clay? Okay – Here – a little bit longer.”

Jules, crying, sounded like a little cat trying to throw up.

“Get it out,” Bo counseled. “Get it all out, then put it away. You don’t have to think about it again.”

“I made a mistake,” Jules sobbed. “It’s my fault.”

“It was an accident. Accidents happen.”

“I thought he liked me.”

“Accidents happen,” Bo repeated. He appeared stuck on it. “Accidents happen. They happen. You’re too young to know any better.”

“I thought he liked me.”

Clay took all this, and his empty glass, back down the stairs. He collided with Frank at the bottom.

“Don’t tell me he’s being sick up there,” Frank grouched.

“Nobody’s sick.” Clay pressed him back toward the tables. “He’s been a little stressed about work,” he explained. “Let Bo handle it.”

Lying was a treat he could rarely indulge in. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it. He could only guess if it had done any good – but that’s not where the pleasure was.

Christmastimes – happy times. And no snow yet! A shame. Clay wrote NO SNOW on his big calendar on the wall. He’d been getting hung up on details lately, when normally, he did not sweat the small stuff.

Wanting to be helpful in the spirit of the season (he made lovely cards, but true presents were rarely affordable) Clay found himself in the shop basement with Roscoe, sorting through the endless memorabilia through the years. Jules was present too, working, if lazily, at a little sloped desk with a harsh, bendable lamp clamped on one edge. He was doing strange things to two pieces of smelly rubber. A sharp alcohol stink pricked Clay’s head. He found himself getting snippy by turns, and, feeling bad, forced an abundant cheer. “You’ll be sorting this garbage forever,” he declared, cheerfully. “Val was collecting for years and years, all the surplus of his events.”

“Some tell me it’s history,” Roscoe said, looking up with interest for some reason. “But either way, it sure brings in the mice.”

“I saw one yesterday,” Jules called over the desk. “It ran right around the glue trap. You’re training them to be smart.”

“Do you know where the humane electric trap is? That looks like a little box?”

“I stomped it. The mouse. When you get smart, you get slow.”

“Marvelous. Spare me the details.”

“I heard it’s little bones break,” Jules chanted. “All the guts exploded out its mouth. It’s eyeballs –”

“You watch too much morbid stuff. You need to expand your horizons.”

“He’s a grim little boy,” Clay added. “He can be funny, though. Jules, what’s the funny word you showed me the other day?”

Jules started giggling and said noooo shut up! Clay, realizing he was being drawn into a contract, started giggling too. He looked toward the little desk to make sure he was matching the hilarity, but the desk light had swollen, swallowing all detail in Jules’ face to the point of bloodless beheading.

“Come on,” Roscoe said. “What was it?”

It came to Clay – painfully, with an equal throb in his good hand. He put down the little tin he was holding and had been struggling to open. “Faggotron,” he declared, with much purpose.

Jules snort-wheezed dismally. Whatever he was dipping his weeny paintbrush into smelled abominably.

“Jules, you know better,” Roscoe was scolding. “– get both of you in trouble –”

“Good god,” Clay exploded. “Whatever you’re working on, child, close it up – it stinks.”

“I have surgical masks. Gimme a sec –”

“Jules, now.” Roscoe said. “Clay, do you feel okay?”

“How could I not be well? Discussing mouse insides, among all this dust, and that piercing light –” Clay struggled to his knees.

“Clay, sit back down, alright?”

A ghastly sense of return, a return to a far worse time, froze Clay’s spine. The adrenaline forced words through his throat, more chemical than logical. “Where is Val?” he demanded. “Tell me this instant. Where did he go?”

“What’s happening?” Jules shrilled onward and upward in hideous alarm, but Clay’s visual perception shrank to exclude him. Roscoe vanished too, more purposeful in disintegration than he was in life. Clay heard a decisive voice call a strange spell – NO staywhereyouare – the always-herald of the big black brick whanged upside his head, a splitting log, the muting of the light he ached to perceive despite the pain, the smell of spitting, overflowing fat – though nobody ever believed him, when said that was what he always smelled. They didn’t believe him even when he wrote it down.

Time out of time out of time out time again and again. Alas. Clay snapped to on a squalid concrete floor. He turned his head and spied Roscoe, a couple feet away, his heavy thighs arranged in a runner’s lunge, consulting his watch. “You alright?” he asked, in utter calm.

From the bottom of his heart, Clay hated him – hated him with ease and abundance of an illogical baby. “Goddamn you to hell,” he said. “Did you put a finger on me?”

“You were going to hit your head on the floor,” Roscoe said. Clay hated him even more, knowing he was telling the perfect truth. “There was nothing soft to put in your way. I made sure you got down okay, then I let go.”

“You’re a beast for touching me,” Clay spit. “A beast. A wild animal. Fuck you.”

“I’m sorry,” Roscoe said simply. “Do you want to try sitting up?”

Clay’s good hand ached horribly. It would stress him for days, the idea of losing both hands. The anticipation was foul. Clay sat up. “How long?” he asked.

“About a minute. Fifty-eight and some milliseconds. I think that’s around the last one. We need to write it down in the little book.”

“You ruined my life.” Again, a cruel muscle flexed, one that understood something beyond Clay’s conscious understanding. “You ruined my life.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was beautiful, and you destroyed me. You’re an animal.”

“I’m sorry.” Roscoe would take everything he did not deserve, and it only made Clay hate him more.

Beast himself, Clay looked around his enclosure. “Somebody else was here,” he said.

“Jules was here.”

“Where is he?”

“I made him go upstairs. He couldn’t deal with it.”

“He’s a tiny stupid coward.” There was nothing and nobody Clay wouldn’t smash to bits right now. “Childish bitch. What does he have to be afraid of?”

“You’re his friend and he was scared. I don’t think he’s seen something like that before.” Roscoe made his attention scarce, and Clay recognized, for dignity’s sake, he was supposed to check to see if he’d soiled himself. Came up negative. He recalled visiting the bathroom all day outside of all logic, with mounting anxiety. He was sure that was written down somewhere too – useless.

“And if you ever wore your goddamn bracelet,” Roscoe accused, “he might have had some idea of what to expect. Don’t go calling him a bitch or a coward. He’s just a kid.”

The only time Roscoe ever got irritated and demanding of Clay was immediately after witnessing one of the seizures. If Clay did not irrevocably and acutely despise any poor soul who became the main witness of one of his seizures, this propensity would have made him feel more tender toward the man. And now that Jules had seen one, his own time was coming.

“How long has Val been dead?” Clay asked.

“Twenty years. A long time.”

“I know his name. I can’t remember anything of his face.”

“You knew him before I ever showed up. I’ve known him dead longer than I knew him alive – I can’t picture his face either. Not without help.”

“How miserable it must be – that I’m one of the pieces of trash you’ve inherited from him.”

“You’re my friend.”

“Oh no. We’ll be friends again in a few days when I’ve forgotten all this. You’re counting down the seconds, as it gets foggier to me.” Clay raked his nails over his temples. He felt a dent and a curious, inorganic hardness deforming his fine skull. His hair was thinning. Fifty-five. How long since thirty-five? Going to sleep and waking old. “Being robbed of that – that I can’t even be angry at you, at anyone, all the time!”

Roscoe sat through all of this with his forehead balanced on his fingers, as if he were too tired to care. As if he’d heard this a dozen times before, this important speech of Clay’s. “What do you want to tell Jules?” he said.

“I told him about the burns,” Clay said. “And now he knows about this disgrace. And that’s as far as it should go, frankly.”

“If he doesn’t hear it from you, or from someone who cares about you, he’s going to get the details in a bad way.”

“Why shouldn’t he – as nasty gossip? That’s all it happened for – for nasty gossip.”

“You wrote it down once in your own words, remember? When you had that good health aide years ago; she helped you with the police report and court documents and – and the X-rays and things. Show him that – it’s in one of your binders.”

Clay had been told about this magic essay many times. Roscoe attached most importance to it, as an independent effort of self-authority. Clay, to his recollection (which was often wrong) had never shown it to anyone but himself, again and again. He would bring it out before bed, the time of day when he felt at his worst, and parse the stubby, emotionless sentences written by some imbecile who deserved whatever he got.

“He needs to know how these things happen.” Roscoe going on, and on, and on. “If we hide this stuff, it’s just going to repeat itself.”

“You’re far too late,” Clay said. “He’s already some slut.”

Roscoe got up and walked toward Jules’ little desk. He turned off the little light. When he was truly inspired to high anger, he always walked away. Not like a man at all, Clay thought. He couldn’t think of a worse person to teach Jules how to stand up for himself. If the child was lucky, he’d lose the next teeth on the other side of his face – invite some symmetry.

“Have Bo G. tell him,” Clay said, surprising himself.

Roscoe was surprised too. “Why Bo?”

“He was around during that time. He knows what to say. They’re partners, after all. Tell Bo I said so. I won’t ask myself. I won’t take responsibility –” Clay used a filing cabinet to help gather his feet underneath him. “Nobody allows me to take responsibility. So I won’t. Make Bo tell him. And just watch. He’ll treat me differently. He’ll treat me like all of you treat me.”

“I’ll tell Bo.”

“I want to go home now. You take me home. And I don’t want to be bothered tomorrow.”

He would have liked to say I hate you again. Such a vibrant phrase; but already, the stimulating anger was giving way to a constricting drowsiness. Roscoe, like he hadn’t heard Clay insult him and close friends, like he hadn’t said awful swear words he would never repeat in company, came over and helped him pick his way out of the historical mess he’d fallen within.

Time and time again – everybody became another year older. Clay got older. Roscoe got older. He helped Clay find a big new calendar for the wall. Jules, a new nineteen, presumably became a new twenty at some point. After a time, a more experienced twenty. It hardly made a difference to his maturity. He partnered so often with Bo he became a solid figure in Clay’s mental foreground – and for all Clay knew, he’d been there as long as Roscoe and Phil and the rest.

Another seizure, in writing, if not in memory. Clay saw it on the calendar. This time overseen by Alan M., in Frank’s kitchen, after the house had emptied from a post-tournament cocktail hour. Small mercy.

Exciting pastimes: Jules and Clay, driven to madness after begging a pack of Rider-Waite cards from an occultist friend of Roscoe’s longhaired shop cashier, tried their hand adapting it to the French Tarot and to introduce this to the club at large; rejected by Frank, Clay suggested a portes ouvertes of antique French parlor games which, using more conventional decks, Frank could hardly decline. Jules, though not part of the upper committee, had established himself socially as Clay’s deputy, and he was an efficient bully.

At one of these novel events, a blistering cold March afternoon, Clay was reminded of yet another novelty – the arrival of someone new. Which, as it turned out, was someone old. Roscoe said Clay had known Martin since the eighties. He was back from sunny California, for reasons Clay might have learned before he forgot.

He showed up among the basement folding tables that day, unfashionably early to take Frank to some expo or whatnot in the suburbs. A clumsy faux pas, Clay commented, as he oversaw a trial Piquet scrimmage between Jules and Bo G.

“I know what he’s here for,” Bo commented archly.

“Shut up,” Jules said.

Martin worked through the tables. Gregarious as he was, he always seemed to stop short, childishly bashful before Clay, unsure as to the amount of kid glove required in the interaction. Clay had piled up enough consistent interactions with the man to form this sustaining judgment.

“You are so very kind to safely usher our favorite senile gentleman,” Clay said, after the initial awkward greeting took place. “Not many would be so generous.”

“Let him crash,” Bo said. “Put him out of his misery. Then I’ll be president.”

“As vice-president,” Clay corrected, “I will be president.”

“I’m going to put rat poison in one of Alan’s gross fucking brandy alexanders,” Jules joined in. “And then I’ll be treasurer.”

“Is it safe for me to be overhearing this?” Martin asked, directing the question to Jules.

“Stick around and find out,” Jules grumbled.

“As a club representative, you must be more polite,” Clay scolded. “You’re a young man now. And Martin is an old friend.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Martin said. He put his hand gently on the table. “Am I old enough to learn what the hell this game is?”

“Show him, Jules. Start a new game.”

“He doesn’t have to do a damn thing,” Bo said, abruptly. “Shut up, Clay.”

Jules, ignoring them both and shutting down any expression in his eyes, steered Martin to an empty table and forced him down into a chair. Clay snooped enough to spy Jules, in a nasty masterstroke, laying out a hand of Solitaire. Martin was too good-natured to pick up on the slight. He sat attentively under Jules’ pointed posture and followed his jabbing fingers, a docile lamb.

“He’s too old for him,” Bo G. declared. He smothered the gameplay and restacked the cards.

Clay sat down. “We’re all too old,” he said. “Isn’t it a tragedy?”

The Stock, Jules’ instructions floated over his head. The Waste. The Foundations. The Tableau. Undisciplined Martin gazed not at the cards, but at the face that made the words. He’d have to smarten up, Clay thought, if wanted to survive Jules’ bossing. After that he looked away. The sight made him melancholy.

Departing the remnants of the occasion that evening, he left Frank’s at sundown for the first time all day and was struck dumb by the stifling blanket of snow that had fallen. Clay’s mind, geared toward spring and daffodils and birds’ eggs and shining sun, whirlpooled a split moment into terror. Then he caught himself. How nice – a final, light-bright hug from jack frost.

Despite this pep talk, he had trouble moving. He tingled all over, his body recalling other falls in that cold cushion.

“Clay?”

“Oh gracious.” He turned around toward the porch. “Now, would you look at this landscape? And what on earth were you doing in there, without my noticing?”

Phil descended the steps easily. He stepped inside Clay’s tentative footprints. “Miscommunication,” he explained. “I thought Martin was going to be here, but he got shanghaied by Frank.”

“Appreciated, too.”

“Salvatore caught me and gabbed my ear off about a damn hour.” Phil reached out and took Clay’s elbow and started leading him down the unshoveled walkway. “Let me drive you home. You don’t get around so great in this stuff.”

“You’re a doll.”

Clay enjoyed riding in cars. It was something he wanted to do more. It was cozy inside Phil’s, with the big soft flakes suspended in the air as the spaces between all foundations darkened to black.

“Martin is not comfortable around me,” Clay said.

“Nobody’s really comfortable with you,” Phil explained. “You’re not a person to anybody. You remind people.”

Clay was fond of bluntness, even when he couldn’t understand what lay behind its’ motivation. “Of what?”

“That we can’t trust anybody – not even the people we’re closest to - who we see every day.” The tires zizzled pleasantly through a wet right turn. “Martin is just embarrassed. Since fatherhood made him mature, he’d prefer to think he was always that way. But he knows we all remember what he did to Drake.”

“Who, now?” Clay asked.

“Drake. He started sniffing around the neighborhood for you, after your group home closed. Years and years ago."

“Hmmm?”

Traffic piled up against a red light and Phil could turn to look at Clay. “You know something interesting I wonder about sometimes?”

“What could it be, darling?”

“If you remember more than you let on,” Phil revealed. He said this with no urgency or true amusement. Phil always spoke as if held no worries and felt no significance. He was most relaxed. Here was a man you could have a seizure around. “If you remember everything, and you’ve just been having fun with us this whole time.”

“What an idea!” Clay had to laugh. “And a tempting one. You want to know what I remember, dear?”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing. Not a speck. Zot. If only I could have fun with you all.” The cars inched forward. “I’d like to thank you, you know.”

“For what?”

“I have a feeling,” Clay said, “that you’ve always been very frank with me. And frankness is something I appreciate. You know who you remind me of? You remind me of Jules.”

Phil, driving comfortably with one hand on the wheel, pushed his head gently against the driver’s seat. He started to smile, close-lipped.

“Jules once asked me if my arm was never going to work normally, or look normally, then why didn’t the doctors simply amputate? Can you imagine anyone else having the nerve? But I appreciated being asked, all the same.” The question had pleased Clay so much, he’d made Jules write it down himself in the little notebook.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I was hardly in a state to be consulted.”

“You know how to get Jules to shut up?” Phil said in turn. “You get him on his stomach, and you grind his face into the floor.”

Clay cackled at such an absurd image. “Now stop,” he said. “That’s quite mean!”

“You get your knee pressed in real low on his spine,” Phil continued quietly, “and you shove his face in, and you twist. You don’t stop until his nose starts bleeding. After that he quiets down and gets to liking it."

“That’s quite enough,” Clay insisted, patting his own mouth to discourage his giggles. “Don’t tease him when he’s not here to defend himself.”

Phil steered down the narrow enclave of a one-way street. They were entirely in the dark now, purged in fountains of orange light. Clay squeezed Phil’s wrist. “Stop!” he asked. “Just stop. Stop a moment.”

Phil braked. Eventually, he shifted to park. They watched the unseasonal snow drowse in the air, suspended in swags of streetlight. Clay could not see the end of the road. Nobody was out and about. A pleasant enclosure calmed his heart.

“Now just look at that,” he said, still holding Phil’s wrist. “Why must artists always act like they’re so miserable? If I could paint this picture, I would never be sad again.”

“Yeah,” Phil agreed, dreamily. “I see what you mean.”

He was watching the snow – Clay checked to confirm, and it made him glad. Watching together, faces trained out within a safe shelter like clever woodland creatures, Clay could believe he had somebody by his side who understood him by instinct, if not through conscious effort. He could communicate, through the act of sitting together, all the secrets his brain and body held away from his knowledge. It was the darkness that reminded him – not doing for oneself, not eating for oneself, nor speaking nor toileting for oneself, in a mass of years so long he could no longer comprehend; and lighted hour upon lighted hour, lying there and anticipating the moment of terror – terror he had yanked pleasure from, after many years of practice – when the light would go out.

Clay sat there and he wished to make this known – in goodwill, in peace, in love, surrounded, with no respite, by his beloved friends.

#safeworld #2006 2007 & 2008

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