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“Carl, hey, Carl,” says that damnable and familiar New York accent right next to his ear, and he hates himself for it a moment after, but he gives an involuntary start.
Kid’s smooth, moves out of the way quickly before he gets the top of Carl’s skull square in the jaw, but if he did it would be his own fault, and Frank laughs, half a grin and the ghost of a chuckle.
“Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you not to do that?” Carl swears, and fuck it all, some of the other guys have noticed the incident by now and are laughing at the slow flush creeping up his neck. Old Handratty’s such a hardass, only that fucking kid throws him for a loop like it’s nothing, ex-convict and focus of his career still able to get under his skin. And it’s true, every word of it, the half-heard conversations that stutter to a halt as he rounds a corner or enters a room, men scattering like doves. Frank spoke Carl’s name into his ear not a minute ago, and he can still feel the gust of breath, like the heat rising and sweat beading under his shirt collar. Goddamn him.
“At least a few more times,” Frank says, and slides into the chair across from him, easy and fluid grace. “I was gonna ask you, Carl, can I look at that?”
Peripherally, he hears everyone else disperse. There’s no need for another set of eyes when they two are discussing a fraudulent check; anyone else would waste time, get in the way. Carl knows he’s just about gotten all he can out of this slip of paper, that Frank, the brat, will momentarily take it from him and figure out the missing pieces in half the time, with half the mental strain. But still, he shoots him a well-aimed glare over the top of his glasses and says, “Do you mind waiting until I’m done first?”
“Take your time,” Frank tells him graciously, always the expert liar with impeccable manners. He knows Carl is done already, but on occasion he likes playing this game. And he definitely knows Carl can’t concentrate while he’s watching him with those cold blue eyes and that mocking smile that on his worse days he imagines has the slightest hint of endearment, but usually, he prefers to tell himself that it’s as fake as everything else.
“Here,” he snaps, after a minute of pure and brutal agony, and slides the check over. “What do you think?”
“Thanks.” Frank smiles, and lets their hands touch as he accepts the paper, just messing with his head again, because there’s no reason he had to do that; there was plenty of room. It’s a stupid prank he pulls every so often, because every time, Carl’s not expecting it, and every time, he yanks his hand away like it’s been burned. Frank continues smiling for a long moment, longer than is necessary, their table a brief piece of silence in the office’s overwhelming cacophony.
Frank barely looks at the check, and he snorts. “Complete amateur,” he says, and goes on to explain why, but Carl is barely listening. He’s still stuck in that moment where Frank smiled at him, and he’s remembering how that same smile haunted his dreams as well as his waking hours for over three years, until France.
It was supposed to stop after he caught him, after he brought the boy in himself.
It was supposed to.
It didn’t.
*
They always spoke on Christmas. At first Carl laughed because it meant Frank had no one else, for all his stolen money and glamour he was alone.
And then because the louder he laughed, the easier it was to forget that for all his hard work and dedication, so was he.
They paralleled each other, and in some ways began to meet in the middle. They had both witnessed the limping and inevitable destruction of their families, and had both suffered desertion at the hands of the women they loved. Carl could sympathise with that brand of pain—he still wore his wedding ring, and didn’t bother to pretend to himself that it hadn’t stung when Frank picked up on that particular bit of evidence.
Carl has a theory, that he and Frank are two halves of the same coin, equal brilliance in a shared talent. On his worse days, he likes to think that Frank developed the same unhealthy obsession, a need to see who was better that manifested into a competition in the only manner possible, one on either side of the law.
Later, it became something different for Carl. The mask of a man, the ice-cold con artist without a care for a single living soul slipped off, to reveal a scared child underneath, a child whose intelligence and desperation had pushed him into the wrong means of survival. He’d dug himself so deep he could no longer see daylight, and it was not the phoney secret service agent who kept him up nights, but the lost and terrified boy who called him on Christmas.
After Frank managed to slip through his fingers only to fall and land in Europe, he began to fear that the kid would go the wrong place, piss off the wrong people, and the charm he was so dependent on would be wholly inadequate to save his life. It transformed from a simple manner of needing to catch Frank to a much more complicated matter of needing to save him, because if he didn’t that silver, slitted grin would hook into him and never leave, and the image of a terrified child would superimpose itself over the inside of his eyelids every night, and never let him rest.
When the French policemen arrested Frank, it was a picturesque Christmas, with midnight mass going on in the church next door, and maybe it was not the sort of thing that should happen, not on that holiday. There was a time Carl was scared that he had failed, that Frank would he lost to him again in a final, awful way, for a space of months after he met the wide, blue eyes of the lost boy through the back window of a police car and felt all the terror he saw in them, as one would hear an echo bouncing back.
It should have ended there, but it didn’t. And in all honesty, he doubted it ever would.
*
“Carl, hey, Carl.”
He didn’t start this time, had heard the door to his office open first, and it was a familiar sound, that and the weight of his footfalls immediately after.
“Yes, Frank,” he says, deliberately continuing to punch out lines on the typewriter, doesn’t look at him. If he looks, it will be like admitting defeat, even though he isn’t sure yet what they’re fighting over. But it’s something. It’s always something.
“What’re you doing tomorrow, Carl?” he asks, casually leaning against the door, one leg crossed neatly over the other, shoe scraping across the tile in the way he must know is absolutely maddening.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas, Frank,” he replies. “I’m working. I always work Christmas, and you know that, so what do you want?”
The kid frowns, and he doesn’t look, but he can feel the vibe like he feels the change in temperature when he steps outside in the winter. “Why do you always have to work Christmas, Carl?”
“I don’t have to Frank, I volunteer,” he snaps, and makes the mistake of looking at him, brought to a sudden halt by that thoughtful face and searching gaze. He recovers, gradually, and it feels like hours but must be only seconds later when he unglues his tongue from the top of his mouth and repeats, “What do you want?”
“What should I do tomorrow?” he asks, and he’s giving him this look like he expects Carl to know all the answers, some sort of fucking oracle. His daughter used to give him that look, when she was four and he was still the only father she knew, the final authority on her entire world. And Frank is, is twenty-five now and has seen and done and dared more than he ever will, and is smarter than him to boot, and here he’s giving him that same stupid look like he has a right to.
Carl sighs, and silently counts to ten. He has completely forgotten whatever letter he was writing, despite fixing his eyes on the page spilling out the top of the machine. The alphabet has become strange hieroglyphics, unseen since they were carved on the subterranean inside of a pharaoh’s tomb, because Frank has the power to transform everyone else’s reality along with his own, but he still doesn’t know what to do tomorrow.
And he thinks Carl should.
“How should I know, Frank?” he asks tiredly, thoughtlessly adds, “Why don’t you visit your mother?”
He ought to have refrained from looking at him again, could have spared himself from seeing that twisted, angry sneer. He’d hurt him, he realised, and regretted it instantly. He’d hurt him by taking a shot in the dark.
“Why don’t you visit your daughter?” Frank shoots back brutally, and that’s it. Bull’s eye. Perfect answer. He doesn’t wait for a response, is already swinging out the door because the clock is tolling five, the end of the day.
“See you tomorrow, Carl,” he calls back over his shoulder, and it doesn’t register until he’s out the door, that he’ll be dreading that for hours, possibly, come morning.
He just wishes Frank would have stuck around long enough for him to apologise.
*
Frank had always been well-behaved in jail.
It had been a surprise for Carl to learn that; if someone had made him take a guess beforehand he would have said the kid would have tried to impersonate a prison guard and gotten several years added to his sentence for his troubles. But it would have been a hell of a story. With Frank, it was always a hell of a story.
But Frank was well-behaved, and that was why they let him deliver the mail. It went without saying that they trusted the boy about as far as they could throw him, but that was enough to know he wouldn’t come up with some scheme and try to bolt while doing his rounds. Or slip something to prisoners through the bars, some forbidden trinket or means of escape.
And still, Carl visited him on Christmas. It was perhaps because by that point he was done pretending he had any real friends or family to visit, or because knowing that he wanted to see someone worse off than him, or because in a truly pathetic and embarrassing way he knew that Frank was the only person he’d make a difference to. So he went.
He’d kept his hair short. It was a weak type of shock because he’d had to before, for the trial, but whenever Carl thought back on him he imagined Frank as he was in the hotel in France after he’d gotten him out of prison, or during the plane ride back, all that hair around his face making him look like a mountain-man. But his hair was short and his face was dead, and that’s when it became clear that he was hibernating. Frank was waiting, biding his time until his sentence was up, and whatever would become of him then, there was no sign of it now. This place was not real to him. It would barely scratch his surface.
After that, Carl always half-consciously hoped that something he did could bring life back to this boy, but for all his smiles and good intentions it was like he was not speaking to someone merely incarcerated, but also terminally ill. He did not see Frank again until he showed him that fake check, a single mark in the paper trail he’d been chasing. Bright and interested, in his element, and painting a picture so clear it would inevitably lead to the end of the road, another testimony to the fact that the house always wins.
It had taken him four years to get Frank into a United States prison, and it took another four to get him out. Frank would not run because no one would be chasing him, because no one had ever given him the chance to do something great before, and after the changeover he could not return to the mere grandiose.
Frank would not run, Carl told his superiors over and over again. I just need this one thing, I need this kid on my team.
Frank wouldn’t run, he said.
And he never doubted it for a minute.
*
Frank waltzes into the office at two in the afternoon on Christmas day, the scent of Chinese take-out wafting around him like some terrible joke of potpourri, and Carl has been dreading this for hours and yet can’t help smiling like a goon.
“Merry Christmas, Carl,” Frank says. There’s colour in his cheeks and snow in his hair, and that image of him standing in the light of a single desk-lamp with his arms full of paper bags is forever seared into his memory, and for a long moment he can’t speak.
“What’s all this?” he asks, and struggles not to wince, it’s such a dumb question.
“Christmas,” Frank says unnecessarily, and dumps the bags on the neighbouring desk. “I got Chinese, you like Chinese, right? You eat it all the time, but I hope you’re not sick of it or anything—”
“Yeah,” Carl interrupts. “I mean yes, it’s fine. Thank you.”
“Sure.” Frank’s grinning now, for once no mockery and all joy, and begins hastily unpacking the uniform white-and-red containers, and then a bottle of rum.
“Oh, no,” Carl says. “We are not drinking on the job. You just put that away and save it for later.”
“I have been saving it, and it is later,” Frank says, paving over his words as if they were never there, buried beneath the new layer of asphalt. “C’mon, Carl, it’s Christmas,” he tells him, conspiratorially low. “No one’s here, and it’s not check fraud. No paper trail, Carl. No one’s gonna find us out.”
They get spectacularly drunk on rum and orange juice and fat on Chinese food, and Carl makes a mental note to berate himself soundly for this later, this lapse in judgement, throwing caution to the winds.
It’s nearing six when Frank says, “Oh yeah, I got something for you,” and before Carl can tell him he shouldn’t have, he has a small, brown paper package in his hands and the kid’s expectant eyes on him , and he’s thinking that if something bites him someone’s getting throttled.
But it doesn’t bite, because it’s a check-book, and whatever cow this leather came from is long since dead. It’s so appropriate that Carl laughs, and then thanks him, and laughs again.
“I didn’t get you anything,” Carl tells him presently. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Hey, you got me out of jail,” Frank reminds him. “I think that makes up for. For everything.”
They’re sitting on the floor with coats spread out beneath them, back of a desk for support. Carl is very warm, and finds he can’t move all that easily, everything slow and stretching like molasses. “Yeah, I also put you in jail,” he says, like that closes the matter.
“You saved my life,” Franks says, so quiet he may have only meant to think it. “More than once, you saved my life.”
“Yeah, well,” Carl rejoins. His mouth feels very dry, his limbs heavy. He should have gone home by now. He shouldn’t have had so much to drink. “I didn’t mean to. Not exactly.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that you did,” Frank says, and it’s convoluted and incomplete, but he decides to take it as a thank you.
They remain for a minute in a sort of awful silence, and then Frank says, “Carl, what if I grew my hair long again? Like it was in France?”
Carl wants to laugh, but he’s drunk and it comes out as a stupid kind of snigger. “Then you’d look like a damn hippy, Frank, and one of the higher-ups would make you cut it. What are you thinking, growing your hair out? It looks damn good as is,” he says, and grabs him by the back of the head for emphasis, ruffling the aforementioned hair.
And Frank leans his head back, grins at him sloppily; it’s Christmas and he’s drunk and well-fed and not in jail and happy with it, and he’s smiling, and he looks so dumb like that, so young.
Something breaks like that, a smile wide on Frank’s face and Carl’s hand buried in his hair, some vital internal organ like his heart or lungs that has shattered beyond all hope of healing, the powder keg of spontaneous combustion set off by the perfect structure of that single moment. And then Carl yanks his hand back like he’s touched a hot stove.
They part soon after that, each venturing out into the freezing winter night and going home. Carl tries to sleep in his cold and dark apartment and thinks about Frank in his own, just thinks about Frank, and knows that all things considered, it’s the best Christmas he’s had in a long time.
Before falling asleep, he comes to terms with the fact that he’s discovered something, stumbled upon it like he has this mysterious broken organ in his chest, and he come to terms with the fact that no matter what happens, he will do his best never to think about it.
*
For two days after rescuing him from that horrible, leaking cell in a French prison like Europe sometimes forgot it wasn’t mediaeval, Frank was thrashing and delirious, eyes rolling aimlessly up the walls and ceiling, slicked in oil and stuck to it. Carl sat with him the entire time, occasionally slipping out of consciousness and waking up sprawling in his chair with his back and his neck thrown all out of order, but never letting the boy more than three feet away from him.
The doctor shook his head at this American’s vigilance, told him in a thick French accent, “He cannot escape again, monsieur. The doors and the windows, they are all locked, and besides, he is very sick.”
Carl had nodded, did not trust himself to speak, for that wasn’t why he waited, and he didn’t want anyone else to know this, to know how badly this chase and this boy had affected him.
It was that first night that Frank woke up, had something that might have been a lucid moment and might have been the afterimage of a dream. “Carl,” he rasped, sometime around three in the morning.
“Yes, Frank,” he said immediately. “I’m here. You’re in a hospital, and as soon as you’re better you’re going home. We’re taking you back to America, you understand?”
“Carl,” he repeated slowly. “Your daughter. What was her name? Grace?”
“Yes,” he said guardedly. “My daughter is Grace.”
“When she was a kid,” Frank began, and paused to cough, a painful, wracking noise that sounded as if it threatened to tear apart his entire body, “did you ever read her this story, it’s called, ‘The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo.’”
“No,” Carl answered. “No, I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot of things,” Frank said cryptically. “But you, you’re the Dingo, Carl. And I’m the Kangaroo.”
He promptly passed out again, and then his pulse rate dropped so low that Carl was forced to call the doctor. And if he’d thought much about it after, he would have thought that Frank would never remember the two minutes’ conversation in the dead of the night. But then again, he never really thought about it.
*
After the New Year, Carl comes to work one morning to find that though he always gets there early, someone had gotten there earlier, and had left a children’s book on his desk.
Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. He frowns, and briefly entertains the thought that someone had left it there by accident, but his desk is in the office in the corner and very much out of the way. Perhaps the maintenance people, perhaps not. Cautiously, he sits and his desk and opens the cover and then the title page, searching for an inscription, some sort of clue attached to this mystery item. The table of contents reads a bit like an instruction manual for anyone looking to create a circus, but he reads through it carefully: How the Whale Got His Throat, How the Camel Got His Hump, How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin, How the Leopard Got His Spots, The Elephant’s Child—
The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo.
“Ah, Frank,” he laughed quietly. That goddamn kid, that unpredictable genius of a goddamn kid.
Not always was the Kangaroo as now we do behold him, but a Different Animal with four short legs. He was grey and he was woolly and his pride was inordinate: he danced on an outcrop in the middle of Australia, and he went to the Little God Nqa.
It doesn’t take him ten minutes to read it, but by the end of it the morning’s first employees are yawning their way through coffee, and Frank is barging into his office, as always neglecting to knock, but this time armed with bagels.
“Here, I got you one,” he says unnecessarily, and drops the box on his desk, a few papers falling to the floor like dry leaves, but he isn’t going to make a thing of it. Not today.
“Oh,” Frank says, noticing the book. “Do you like it?”
“It’s, it’s very cute,” Carl manages. “Good for kids.”
He has not really looked at Frank since Christmas, always around him or with his back turned, never to his face, but now he finds himself looking again, like a moth to a candle. The boy’s smiling lopsided and brilliant, snow in his hair and colour in his cheeks, and that broken organ in his chest gives a painful throb, reminds him, it’s déjà vu.
Carl leans back in his chair and regards him steadily, arms folded behind his head. “Are you sorry, Frank?” It’s the one question he’s never asked.
“Sorry?” he repeats. “For the banks I stole from, or the airlines? Carl, I know you know how much money these people have.”
“Hey, that’s not the point,” he amends hastily. “You’re smart Frank, you could have done anything. Don’t you ever wish you’d just stayed home instead of running away? You could have gone to college, been a real pilot or lawyer or doctor by now.”
“So,” Frank says, “What you mean to ask me is if I could take it all back, would I?”
“Yeah.” Carl wishes his heart wasn’t pounding quite so hard, not for such a simple question. “Yeah, I guess.”
Frank smiled, the mocking one, and it was something familiar, from when they’d met in Atlanta all those years ago. He nodded towards the book. “Would the Kangaroo?”
“No,” Carl said, turning back to his desk, “I suppose not.”
Frank nodded, the barest hint of a genuine smile like a reprieve, and grabbed a bagel on his way out the door, adding, “You know, I think the Kangaroo really was grateful to the Dingo for chasing him all over Australia all day and running him into his new shape. He probably just didn’t know it at the time.”
He leaves Carl feeling ill, his stomach hurting nearly as badly as his chest. He’s not sure what it is, this thing with Frank. Maybe Carl had been looking for a child, his daughter so lost to him that all he could think about was saving someone else’s son. Maybe Frank had been looking for a surrogate parent, his father too lenient and his mother too indifferent, then his father dead and his mother relegating him to the failure of a previous marriage. And maybe it was something else entirely, a discovery he made and forbid himself to think about.
But it was just a misplacement of affection, a momentary lapse. He’d been obsessed with catching the creator of this paper trail before he knew his face or his name, for three years after he’d learned both, with rescuing him from France and bringing him to a more humane prison in America, with replacing even that with a job for the FBI. He had accomplished everything, and this too would pass.
And so it did.
~End