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So Rico doesn't come back as a dog or the president, after all. Rico, if he comes back at all, comes back as himself. Still there. Still him. It's either that, or Joe's going insane.
The first time he sees Rico he's standing in a hotel bar like a mirage in the sweltering Florida heat. Rico, in his periphery, leaning on a nearby table and chatting with a waitress. Joe had gotten up too fast, heart beating like a jack rabbit's. He couldn't have mistaken another person for him. No way. Not with the distinctive look Rico had going on. He'd felt his vision swim then, and when he'd let his gaze finally drift over to the place where the small man in the white jacket had been standing, all he could see was a waitress bending over a table, a pink jug on the tray she was holding up high over her shoulder. For a moment he lingered, looking at her enough so she in turn looked back at him, and then blinked and turned away. He dropped his drink from all the shaking his hand was doing, and it had smashed on the ground, glass going everywhere, making people sitting at the bar turn towards him. All those eyes on him. Joe had got the hell out of there.
He sees Rico again, standing on the beach, on a commute to work. These days Joe worked washing dishes at some perky little restaurant, and it made him too sad to think about it long, but in a way it was almost funny, so funny you could cry and puke, that he went from Texas to New York to Florida and still ended up being a dishwasher. Sometimes when he's drying those dishes in front of a rack, listening to people in the kitchen yell at each other, he feels his eyes cloud over for no reason at all. No reason at all. He's glad nobody sees it or cares enough to ask him what's wrong.
It was late morning and the sun shone, and when Joe rode the bus he always looked out the window. It was his escape, seeing all those people and tourists on the beach like little dots of dirt on the window, playing and laughing. He sees a little kid with an ice cream, a lady in a bathing suit, and he makes up stories in his head about who these people are and what they're going to do on the beach that day. And while he's doing that, making up stories, wishing he was on the beach too, he sees Rico. Wearing the clothes he died in, the ones he was put in the ground wearing. Joe squints once absently. Even from this far away, even as the bus passes by, Joe sees Rico take a step and it's a limping step. Joe can't tell from this distance what expression he's wearing, though. He stands up while the bus is still moving, shouting at the driver to stop the bus, and gets stared at (again). He's kicked off the bus in the end. Joe supposes in a way, it was only fair. If he saw someone acting as crazy as him on the bus, he'd wish the driver had the guts to throw him off, too.
Next time, he thinks. Next time I see him, things will be different.
Joe spends the coming months on his own. At some point he's with a girl for a week or two, but she goes back to her boyfriend and Joe doesn't care. He sits in the B&B room he's staying in and gets drunk most afternoons. There's nothing else to do. No one to talk to anymore, and even if there was, he thinks, he wouldn't want anything to do with them. He's not as sociable as he was, but he can't help that.
He's almost slipping into sleep in front of the TV, which is turned up loud and bright and comforting, when he hears Rico's voice. He jolts awake, but then he takes one sleepy yet startled look at the screen and sees he was just dreaming. The mind goes funny places when it's halfway between asleep and awake, huh Joe?
He yawns and sits up on the couch, watching the TV for a while, now that he's awake, wearily. There's a segment on the news about a guy who could juggle bowling balls. And then a celebrity interview, but he can't place who the celebrity is, so he resigns himself back into dream land again, tucked up in blankets.
"Mr Rizzo, with this movie coming out so soon, is there anything you'd like to say to your fans?" A tinny voice asks, and Joe thinks about how much charisma the questioner seems to lack distantly. Under his eyelids, Joe's eyes move restlessly, flickering.
"Yeah, sure. I got something to say." Rico Rizzo looks into the cameras, faces them with a cigarette in his mouth. "This one goes out to all the fans. If Joe Buck gets wasted again for the fourth time in a row this week, I'm gonna strangle him. I swear to god."
"What?" Joe screams. He feels a cold shiver run down him, and he moves fast and scared, kicking his legs out and scattering beer bottles off the coffee table and onto the floor.
The audience on the tv clap uproariously at this comment, and Joe catches only the last snatches of a conversation, the clapping drowning out everything, the cameras zooming out, away from the celebrity now.
"C'mon Joe! That's dummy stuff!" Laughter from the audience.
Joe's hands fly up to his face. He turns the TV off. That night he doesn't sleep.
After that, Rico gets braver.
He sees Rico all the time soon enough, always standing in a sunny spot somewhere. One time he sees a whole cycling group pull up to a bike stand on a slow wheeling walk, Florida palm trees standing tall and healthy behind them. They park their bikes and take off their helmets, locking the bikes and helmets up safely. When they leave, he sees Rico leaning on the bike rack, tapping out cigarette ash into a green racing helmet. When he blinks, Rico isn't there anymore, but he sees the image imprinted in his mind all the while he's washing and drying the dishes in the back of Minny's restaurant, and sees it on the slow walk home too.
He hangs his coat up on the hanger as he walks into the Bed and Breakfast, the temporary place, the place it seems like he'll be in forever now. He puts the six pack of Coors he'd stopped to buy on the way home on the coffee table, slapping the rest of the empty cans and bottles off of it to make space. The evenings were long and lonely when he got home from work. TV Rico said he would be in for a strangling if he got drunk again, but it wasn't like TV Rico was real, so who was going to tell him not to? The only real Rico he'd seen since he'd got to Florida was the Rico in the casket, he reminded himself, looking just as pale and tired as he had been when he was alive. There's a brief fizzing noise as he pulls the tab on a Coors, cutting off that thought.
Joe raises a can to his lips, the TV chattering safely on, (the television had become his new radio, now, and whilst he misses his radio it's like being a kid again, like he's eating the dinner his grandma had left out in front of the television) and then puts the second can away like he did the first one. Then, well, then, a few more cans disappear and he's comfortably buzzed before he knows it. "That's okay, buddy, getting buzzed occasionally. If it helps, it helps." Some soothing voice inside him says, and he finds himself loving that voice more than anything else. Maybe even more than the TV.
Then he hears the door to his room slam open. Except when he looks, panicky and alert, the door is still closed. Somebody, he feels, came in, though. He knows it.
Then there's Rico, standing in the middle of the room.
"You've gotta be kidding me!" There's Rico in the flesh, burning scorches into the carpet with every step, making his theatrical entrance, angry as all hell.
"What'd I tell you? Dumb cowboy!" Rico shouts, "Were you even listening back there or did I have to pay you a personal visit?"
Joe leaps up, wild and bug-eyed, not comfortably buzzed anymore. He thinks distantly that Rico sounds like an enforcer for the mob talking like that, and then he passes out.
He wakes up some time later on the floor, slow to open his eyes, head hurting. He instinctively moves to touch the back of his head, grimacing, only to see Rico crouched over him, sitting on the floor and studying him in silence. The same way he'd sit in his chair and watch Joe by candle light when they were living in that cold, abandoned place in New York.
"Jeez, I thought I'd killed you or something." Rico mutters, still looking at Joe, but with less apt concentration. Joe says nothing, but not for lack of trying. His mouth was working overtime, as hard as it could, spluttering, to say something.
"And where would we be then?" Rico says, more to himself than to Joe, but then he sees Joe's expression and he clears his throat.
"Sorry about that, by the way. It was my fault. Shouldn't of scared you like that." Rico looks apologetic, watching Joe sit up now, and Rico moves to fix his collar instinctively.
"Rico." Joe says, and he wants to say it again, over and over. He wants to reach out and touch Rico. He'd read somewhere the way to tell if you were having a hallucination or not was to check if you could hear AND see the thing you were seeing. Usually people either saw or heard something, but never both. But he was seeing and hearing Rico, alright. So maybe, if he reached out and touched Rico and felt nothing, Rico would simply disappear before his eyes, and he would be a special kind of hallucination that only Joe, as far as he knew, had experienced ever, in history.
When he felt Rico's hands on him, fixing his collar, he dropped his hands entirely. It was no hallucination. Rico's hands were cold when they brushed against the nape of his neck.
"Rico, are you... Real?" He asks.
Rico laughs at him. Christ. What a thing to lay on a guy.
"That depends on what you believe." Rico says cryptically, with a gleam in his eyes, knowing full well that was probably going to make Joe mad.
"Well, you're either real or you ain't!" Joe blusters, and that makes Rico laugh harder, and Joe braces himself for a coughing fit that never comes.
"Sometimes I think I'm both." Rico stops laughing to talk at least earnestly. "Cause, lemme tell ya, Joe, I was real disappointed when I found out all the spots for being a dog or a president were taken. I was sorta banking on that reincarnation thing, yknow, instead of going to hell or being a ghost or something." Rico says, and there's still the spark of a grin on his face, but the way he scratches his head it makes Joe think he's as confused about it as himself.
"You're a... Ghost?" Joe asks, planted to the floor now, both of them probably making a sight, sitting so close, cross-legged and across from each other like they're playing cards on the floor.
"You know that unfinished business rule?" Rico says suddenly.
Joe nods.
"It's real. All of it. I limped all the way to the gate, and it was a hell of a walk, Joe, really fuckin' long, and when I got there, they said, get this." Rico imitated a higher, snottier voice than his own. "'Sawry, seems like you can't go out there and be a grasshopper like you were scheduled to, and uh, it says here you can't just take a break, either. On account of this... Big dumb cowboy, see, back in Florida, who needs ya'". Rico finished. And Joe closes his eyes, letting Rico's familiar voice wash over him, the expressions Rico uses that he knows so well, and his flimsy way of putting things that always struck Joe funny... He'd missed it.
"What a buncha fags, huh?"
Joe rubs at his eyes, smiling, but sure he's crying a little too. "Yeah. What a buncha f-fags." He grabs Rico by the shoulders and hugs him tight. Rico tenses, and then relaxes into the hug. Joe embraces him, also covertly feeling for angel wings on Rico's back, just to check. He tries to picture Rico as an angel, blessed and holy. Wings and all. He can't help doubting the folks upstairs would ever let Rico get away with it. Not with all the stuff Rico's stole in his life. He'd probably steal a halo too, if he had the chance.
"Rico, it's lonely around here." He says into Rico's shoulder, muffled by his coat.
"How come?" Rico blinks. "I was under the impression there were thousands of pretty broads down here, crawling the beaches, lying in wait for a handsome cowboy like you to come along." Rico sounds cheery, better than how he had been before, when he was alive on the bus, all sick and feverish, barely making any sense at the best of times. Dying must have done him some good.
Joe moves back into his seated position to shake his head emphatically. "Not what I meant. I mean... It's lonely here without you."
Rico's face softens. "Well I'm here now, ain't I?"
Joe's shoulders slump. "But you're gonna leave after this, right? Go somewhere else." His face looks so sad, forlorn like a kid who's dropped his icecream, enough to make Rico lose his smile momentarily.
"No." He says quickly. "No! Why the hell would I want to?"
Joe looks up with renewed hope. "So you're sticking around?"
Rico preens, happy to have the attention, happy that they're getting along. "For as long as you want. It's not like I'm busy or anything these days." He shrugs. Joe snorts in response, and he feels better for the first time in months. The TV and Coors beer and what they meant to him in the interim between him and Rico seeing each other again are discarded now, thrown aside in favor of something better. Rico's here, now. He may not be alive, but at least he's not an inanimate object. If he's crazy, it's a good kind of crazy.
"Oh, wait. On one condition." Rico looks serious and his brows furrow. He gets up off the floor to stand over Joe, be the taller guy for once. "As long as you stop getting blotto all the time. And go out once in a while, yknow, meet some people for Christ's sake! It's no life living like this." He kicks over a beer can to demonstrate this sentiment.
Suddenly, it's like nothing's changed at all, like they're back the way they were.
"Sure, Rico." Joe stands up too now, with replenished vigor, shaking out a dead leg. "I promise."
They meet one another's gaze, grinning the same lopsided grin of understanding.
"Just don't get jealous if I meet a girl one fine night when I go out like you wanted me to, okay?"
"Yeah yeah. Whatever. I won't care. I'll just haunt the place. Y'know, rattle my chains at midnight when you're laid up in bed with this broad, make things difficult for you." Rico chuckles.
Life, after Rico's death, is finally picking up for Joe.