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They’d found an alleyway off the harbor and dumped the motorbike. Junior hadn’t said anything on the way home, even though when they’d got back the sleeve of Barbie’s jacket had been dark with blood, most of it dried.
Junior lingered by the counter sipping from a bottle of sparkling water, watching him. His dark-gold hair was damp from the shower, sticking up and messily raked back, and his shirt had long sleeves so that the bandage on his right arm peeked out at the wrist.
With one skilled, unshaking hand, Barbie tilted the frying pan over the plate.
Dinner was stir-fried beef, carrots and potatoes diced into specks, broccoli and beetroot and thick flakes of red-bell peppers. The whole kitchen was saturated with the smoke, the rich rising aroma of spices and olive oil and deep-frying onion, the pan sizzling beneath a dash of brown sugar, a lovely vigorous hiss of vegetables shriveling and tossed up in the air. He felt bruised and bumped-up all over, but that was alright – like wrapped in a bone-dry blanket of warmth after finally shrugging off the damp, ice-cold clothes sticking to your skin. For now the heated aroma of cooking had for a frazzled moment drowned out all else.
He dished the food out onto the pair of plates and nudged it in Junior’s direction, next to which the kid picked up a fork, and for the first time without Barbie’s impatient prodded encouragement, actually began to eat. He gobbled it right up, a forkful after the other. Barbie looked up his own plate and said as much, and this time the kid responded with a proper glare, at which Barbie nearly laughed but covered it shoveling half a forkful of stir-fry into his mouth.
He booked his plane-ticket for San Diego while they ate. The flight took roughly six hours, and was the best one he could find. From Logan International to SAN, nine a.m. to half past three.
He was doing the washing up when Junior finally turned around for the refrigerator, and was rummaging around for a bottle of Jack Daniels when Barbie turned around.
“Do me a favor today, kid.” He reached out and grabbed his wrist, at which Junior looked up, wide-eyed. “Give it a rest.”
A half-hesitant blink, before those blue eyes narrowed, tired. “Get off my back.”
“Say we share, then?”
Junior gave him another look like he was out of his mind, and reached for two separate glasses in the drawer. Poured it, and nudged the half-filled glass across the counter. Barbie downed it in one gulp hiding a smile. The sip of whiskey was ice-cool, bittersweet, and spread stirring warmth from his ribs all the way down to his stomach.
“Thanks,” he said.
Junior glanced up and shrugged, took a slow swig from his own glass. For a while neither of them said any more, in the warm trickling of water running over his knuckles and the clean chemical scent of detergent tinging the air over the faint, gentle aftertaste of cooking.
He heard footsteps, above the water. Junior was standing behind him, now… self-conscious, tentative, treading the borderline of something invisible and barely there.
“Can I help?”
“With the dishes?” Barbie asked, without turning back. “I’m good. Thanks.”
“Is there something-–”
“You’re in no condition to be up to your elbows in soap, kid. Go rest your war-wound.”
Junior lingered another moment more, awkwardly, leaning against the kitchen doorframe, before trudging back a step and settling his backside against the edge of the counter.
“Where d’you go before you got to The Mill?” Junior asked. Put the glass down on the counter.
“All over the world, kid. Spring from Clinton off the river in Iowa, but I’ve ended up all over the place.”
“The Mill’s a small place to settle after all that.”
“Call it luck or providence.”
“When d’you join the army?” Junior asked, from behind the rim of his whiskey glass. And then: “I’m asking you you. Not for this world’s version of you.”
“Eighteen.”
“Just for the kicks, I’m guessing?”
“You could call it that,” Barbie said.
Minutes passed, soap oozing and foaming across the cutlery. Junior was leaning against the kitchen doorframe, still looking at him, as if he wasn’t sure where else to go. The lights above him seemed clear yet rimmed with a hazy edge, softer than they usually looked.
“Your turn,” Barbie said.
“Huh?”
“How many times had you been to Boston before you got out of Dodge?”
He waited, a second – to see what the young man would say, mainly – but Junior only laughed. Briefly, without much humor… but without much anger, either. The anger seemed to have gone out of him.
“Once,” he said. “On a field-trip, fifth grade.”
Barbie smiled. “You got nerve, kiddo.”
“Stop calling me that. And if we’re playing Twenty Questions then I’d like to know what’s up next, hotshot.”
“Fine. When was the last time you did something for your birthday?”
Junior snorted. “How the fuck are you coming up with this?”
“You started it. And we’re having the first nice conversation we’ve had since I stepped foot in here, Rennie, so don’t ruin it now.”
“Sixteen. Sweet fuckin’ birthday. We bought gallons of vodka and rum and coffee brandy and threw it in this crazy-ass bowl of punch. There were tea-lights all over the backyard that nearly set the house on fire and we pulled the Hummer from the garage and danced on the windshield and blasted the music so loud rumor says everyone in Tarker’s Mill and Harlow heard us screaming.”
“Was your mom there?”
The lights froze, for the fraction of the second.
Junior bit his lip.
“Yeah,” he said. “Out of town.”
“Did she throw a fit when she came back?”
“No. She might’ve, if–” a pause, “–if, say, it had been a few years ago. But by then she’d already been… vague. I don’t remember.” He curled a hand slowly into a fist, against his chin, then let go of it. “Why’d you ask?”
Barbie looked at him.
“Can you tell me about her?”
Junior didn’t say anything, for a beat or two. The silence was faded, muffled in the trickling of the water. “How much do you already know?”
“Not much at all.”
“Well. Right before she died she’d been a neatnik, kinda like you.”
“Hey,” Barbie said. “Now that’s pushing it.”
“You clean up everywhere you go like you’re going to eat off it. You arrange the couch every morning, and it’s not even a fuckin’ bed.”
“Was she like you?”
Junior Rennie managed a laugh. Tried to, at least. “Hell no. Don’t think so.” Breathed in, raked a hand through his hair. He sounded shaky, but not uncertain. “She used to be better. Before she got sick -– she was better.”
“Where’d she get sick?”
“In the lungs. It wasn’t operable. Tumor the size of a fuckin’ peach. It got bad when she was sick.”
Barbie said nothing. He rinsed the frothing soap from the plates. The sudden silence was indication enough that he was listening.
“She was smart," Junior said. "Smarter than she looked. She liked to hold her own. I don’t know if she knew about the whole meth-deal, but… if she did, she would’ve told on him. She used to be able to stand up to my dad, I guess. That too.”
A footstep on the linoleum floor, trudging away from him.
“She was calm. You couldn’t make her mad. I used to try, I suppose, back in grade-school, but it ended up just making me feel awful, and she just wouldn’t be mad. She had this way of looking at you – all quietly, without saying a thing, but it made you feel like you were standing in the dock. Used to drive people nuts. I couldn’t get away with a single thing when she looked at me like that.”
Barbie wrung the dishrag, letting the gentle splattering hit the sink, letting the silence run along with Junior’s voice, impossibly distant from the other side of the room.
“If you ask me, I’d say my dad was wary of her. At the end. He felt safer with her gone, see. He found a case where he could do it while thinking he’s the goddamn moral one – a way of doing when he could tell himself he did the right thing, that he stopped her suffering or whatnot–-”
Drew in a breath. He was drifting away from Barbie’s shoulder again.
“But he didn’t do because of that, and we all know it. He wanted her gone. He fuckin’ wanted it, he wanted a good way to do it and he found it. Because she bothered him, I think. Somewhere along the line, she bothered him too much.”
A pause.
Then Barbie asked: “What else was your mother like?”
“Tall. Taller than my dad, and you bet he didn’t like it.” A laugh. “She didn’t say much, but when she did she’d say something dead-sharp, something sharp or funny or just true."
Junior was smiling, just a little -– Barbie could hear it. A sheepish, almost disbelieving smile, as if he’d reached for the memory without expecting it to be there, but closed his hand around the whole thing, new and clean as a rising balloon.
“She didn’t do hugs or touching or – any of that bullshit. Only time I remembered was once before I went off to camp third-grade, she came up and kissed me on the forehead. We both surprised the hell outta ourselves, I think, and we looked at each other and laughed. Before she got sick she could laugh. She used to sing around the house, and her voice, it – it sounded richer than you’d believe, easy, even, like honey.”
“Do you miss her?” Barbie asked. The room fell silent again, a knife hitting the chopping board. He’d crossed the line, he knew. The line that had stretched across between them thin as a wire.
“On some days,” Junior replied, quietly. “When I’m not angry about how she’d let him kill her.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause she would’ve known.”
Junior laughed. Tired sound. It released the tension in the air, a little, like loosening a clenched fist.
“She would’ve known,” he said. “She did know. She just didn’t think it was worth it, hanging on. Staying alive.”
Barbie wrenched the tap closed. There was silence again, for what seemed like a long time.
“She sounds like an amazing woman, Rennie,” he said.
He turned around and looked up. The compass was sitting at the other end of the counter, the glass’s reflection catching in the dining room’s light, and the prickle of warmth – a rising, soft, barely-there wisp of warmth, like a faraway laugh – in the kitchen had nothing to do with the compass.
“How are you going to eat in here after today without me, Rennie?” he asked. “You’d starve.”
“Fuck you,” Junior said. “When’s the flight?”
“Nine.”
“What time are you leaving?”
“Early.” He turned the tap off. “Won’t wake you up. I’ll get a cab.”
“Is that what’s going to happen? You fly off to sunny California and he won’t remember a thing?”
“I don’t think so.” Paused. “I don’t know.”
Junior was silent, for a second. Then, softly, too softly for the gruff casualness to be genuine: “And then what happens after that?”
“We’ll have to see,” Barbie said.
“Can you tell me more about your world?”
“About what?”
“Everything,” Junior Rennie said, quietly. With the flicker of a smile. “Everyone.”
Barbie tugged off his apron and hung it on the little hook on the wall. Downstairs a stereo was playing, the faintest murmur of music thrumming into the floorboards.
“After the Dome came down? I only got about three days into the week before I was hauled into jail, but from what I’ve seen, it hadn’t looked all that good.”
“How did you get out?”
“The others staged a break-in. And you showed up, all red-eyed, waving a gun screaming you were going to kill me.”
“How did it go down?” And then, when Barbie gave him a look: “I mean, seriously. You can let me know. It’s how I -– how he died, right?”
“You went wild on the shots upstairs and killed three officers, and by the time you came down the stairs –- I don’t know how you managed, you left leg was basically paralyzed –- you were going to go for Rusty Everett, so I had to do something.”
“What did you do?”
“You were going on about how I poisoned you and I played into it. Plus I flipped you a double-bird, started going off about how I’d cleaned your clock during the fight at Dipper’s. You bet that distracted you.”
“You did not.”
“You were pelting bullets at me like I was a firing target, so cut me some slack.”
“You haven’t got the fuckin’ balls.”
“I don’t know.” It seemed hilarious, now that he thought about it, hilarious and faraway. “Hell, I thought I was going to die, kid. I’m pretty sure at one point I started going on about how you couldn’t get it up and called you El Limpdick Supremo. Also gave on a speech on how I’d fucked Angie McCain.”
At that Junior began to laugh.
“Jesus fuck.” Still laughing. “Maybe you’re ballsier than I thought. Fuckin’ hell.” And then: “Have you?”
“Gotten into bed with Angie? Of course not.”
“Wasn’t that what the whole shebang at Dipper’s was about?”
“Pretty much.”
“And is that why I had it in for you?”
“Who knows. That’s not for me to say. Some days you’re a mystery.”
The air around them, beneath the vaguely revolving lights, seemed gentle in its drunken, lingering familiarity. Barbie wondered if they’d given up on the pronouns. He, she, I.
He said: “After the bar-fight I’d only seen you a couple of times -– at the arrest, couple of times on the street.”
“Yeah?”
“You were sick. It wasn’t just migraines. It was obvious to anyone who looked close enough. If you’d had help earlier it would’ve been a different story, but–”
“But it was nothing to do with you, right? You didn’t know me.”
“That’s besides the point.”
“See what I mean?” Junior said. But he was smiling, a little bemusedly, a hint of sadness light enough for Barbie to wonder if he’d imagined it. “You should really learn to stay out of my business. Gives you nothing but… headaches.”
They met each other’s eyes again, and this time both of them laughed.
“If the cops come after me about what happened today,” Junior said, “I’m blaming it on you. Whether you’re in this world or not.”
“Never thought you’d be so worked up about a little infringement of the law.”
“You were an absolute fuckin’ nutcase,” Junior said, in genuine sincerity. “And you’re full of shit.”
“You shouldn’t have been there. But thanks for sticking with me. You were good.”
“Huh?”
“You were good,” Barbie said –- wind tearing through his hair, the warmth of the kid’s arms around his waist, clinging for dear life and sheer stubborn conviction -– and felt something land in his stomach. He’d grown familiar to the apartment, he thought. He’d gotten familiar to all of it, somewhere along the lines. Hell. He’d gotten familiar to Junior.
“Is there anyone you gotta meet? Miz Shumway?”
“If I can.”
Junior rolled his eyes. “You like her, don’t you?”
“Maybe a little.”
He thought about Julia reaching for him in the pink dawn-light, her face rosy in the shimmer of sun in the sky. Her sharp tongue, her wily, willful head -– she was beautiful, too bright, too stubborn and forward. Julia had that streak of toughness in her, the kind that came from the heart, the kind of sharpness and curiosity that called for calm strength in return.
When Barbie turned back again, there was a smile on his lips: a wistful but not exactly unamused smile. He said: “But sometimes I think she’s too good for me.”
He turned off the lights in the kitchen. The light in the hallway was dimmer, now the dining room was dark.
Junior was standing by the edge of the living room hallway: standing there, hovering, leant back against the corner of the wall, prodding the wood with his knuckles.
“I might even miss you, Rennie.”
“Like I said -– you’re full of shit.”
“I might,” Barbie said. “It’s real nice to know that someone would always be there scowling when you walk into the room.”
The corner of Junior’s lips curled, so slightly, and part of Barbie wished it was a real smile. He leant forward, a little, and almost instinctively Junior drew back -– just a step. He could hear the kid’s breathing, in the silence: a quickening rhythm, gentle, like the sigh of smoke escaping a vent.
“What happens if he remembers?” Junior asked.
“Who?”
“You,” he said. “Once you leave. What happens if this you remembers and he comes back?”
“Then you’d look after him. Calm him down. I bet you’d do a wonderful job.”
Junior sighed. “This is not fuckin’ funny.”
“He’s not going to remember, Rennie. I can’t say for sure, but with a good bet, let’s hope he won’t.”
“Yeah,” Junior said. “It’s a fucked-up deal either ways, isn’t it?”
Which was right, and Barbie could not disagree with him.
“Tell me more about where you’re from,” Junior said.
“I made friends with some of the best people I’ve ever met, at The Mill. Brave ones. Crazily brave ones. Seen some of the worst people I’ve ever met, too.”
“Is that me? M’honored. Guilty as charged.”
“You’re not horrible,” Barbie said. “You’re just… a really bad flat-mate.” And swore he could hear Junior laugh, fleetingly, under his breath.
The lighting in the hallway was low and he was standing back in the shadow, distant, vaguely elusive. There was no mirror at the end of the hall anymore, only odd wallpaper darkness surrounding them on both sides.
“And you’re not all that bad,” Junior Rennie said.
A beat.
“I can’t believe you just say that.”
“Oh really?”
“No, I’m serious. Come again? Can I take a recording?”
From the shadows Junior stepped out and thumped him, in the chest. “Asshole.”
Barbie stumbled a step backwards. “Look who’s talking.” The ghost of a smile seemed to light up the hallway, regardless of the low lighting.
“You’re a-–”
“It’s my last evening here, and you’re actually acting like a human being. Don’t ruin the moment.”
Junior laughed. Not his usual laugh, but the real one: a soft, startled sound that left Barbie feeling briefly lightheaded.
“Thank you. For letting me stay the two extra days.”
“Couldn’t get rid of you if I tried,” Junior said. “And I tried.”
There was one full second where something in Junior’s breathing quickened, and nothing else happened. Two. Three.
“You should…” He nudged his chin, over Barbie’s shoulder. “Early night. You’re getting up early tomorrow.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway, Barbara, so don’t waste your breath.”
“You made your mind to hate me the minute I showed up out your door, didn't you?”
The eye-roll that followed was audible. “So did you.” Which didn’t, technically speaking, answer the question.
The smile half-surfaced on Barbie’s lips again. “Considering how many times we’ve spoken together, my judgment wouldn’t have been all that fair.”
That was true for both of them. Feeling Junior’s quiet dark-blue gaze travel over him up and down, Barbie thought the kid knew it, too.
“How many times have we spoken?” Junior asked. “In your world?”
“Don’t mention it. Four times? None of them were very great conversations, let me tell you that.”
“Tell me.”
“Let me think. There was Dipper’s. Then there was that time on the street, in front of the gas-station, and when you arrested me at the hospital.”
Another step forward. Junior was leaning against the doorframe of the bedroom, and now when he leaned back again, out of sheer instinct, his back touched the light-switch, and the light above their heads plunged into darkness.
“Shit,” Junior said, quietly. Laughed. “Now I can’t see you.”
“You came to visit once when I was in jail, too.”
For a moment neither of them said anything -– just stayed there, cloaked in halfhearted silence, looking at each other. The couch seemed a million miles away, all the way deep in the living room of silver-tinged darkness.
“What did I do?” Junior asked. “When I came to visit you?”
“Tried to get me to sign some of your dad’s papers. To crack me, I guess, but you didn’t do a great job -– it was more the other way around.”
Junior tilted his chin out. Met his eyes. “Your fly’s unzipped,” he said. The little smile was in his voice even in the dark.
Barbie laughed, mostly of the surprise. He did not need to glance down to reconfirm such an observation. “Now that’s a kindergarten trick, Rennie. And way below you.”
And Junior laughed again, his real laugh, and in that moment it took all Barbie had not to reach out and pull him closer. “Didn’t know they taught y’all that shit in goddamn cornfed Iowa.”
“We even know the trick that comes with it, I kid you not. Like this.”
He closed the final step between them, with a single tread.
“Gotcha,” he said, gently, and with an impossibly light flick of his finger, nicked Junior Rennie’s chin. Heard the hitch in the young man’s breathing that came with it.
“You…”
The hallway was quiet, the light radiating from the open bedroom door was as faraway as a dream.
Barbie leant forward and kissed him. Very quickly and very simply, on the mouth.
He blinked. Drew back, an inch. Junior’s face was all shadowed in the dark, blurred silhouette and angles, but he could just make out the lines and feel the warmth of him. Then Junior tilted his face up and kissed him back -- hard, vehement, clumsy -- and the world powered off, the light and the walls and the floor, leaving just the two of them blazing and ferocious and alive, alive, so thrillingly alive.
By the time they broke apart, it seemed as if time had skipped its cord. It seemed simultaneously an age and a single blink later.
“Whoa,” Junior said. Breathlessly. The word catching in his throat.
“Pretty much,” Barbie said. And then: “I…”
Junior reached up and kissed him again. Briskly, hesitantly, on Barbie’s mouth: it was shaky and startlingly, vulnerably euphoric.
He asked: “And what happened after that?”
“You told me I shouldn’t have put my hands on you,” Barbie said. “You told me it was my mistake.”
He had his hands over Junior Rennie now. On his shoulder, on his hips, trailing down his side.
Junior raised his eyes, and in the hallway, they were floating, out of reach but so very close: a dancing, tentative dark shade of blue. Like the ocean. Barbie thought of Claudette Sanders and her flying instructor falling out of a bright blue sky, and thought that for the world to end like this, right here and right now, wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, either.
“Guess you didn’t take that advice to the heart, either,” Junior said. Then he reached up and kissed him again, briefly, on the lips -– it hit Barbie like downing a shot of burning liquor, and the whole world was submerged beneath it: bobbing, swaying in the shadowy dark of the hallway, the sudden lurch of surprise mingled with aching amazement like a large fist closing up around his heart, stifling, fit to crush. The warmth rushed up to his head, whamming, scalding and pleasant, and all the blood in his body rushed away from his brain and downwards… to somewhere else entirely.
“We could’ve done this a while ago, if you’d made up your mind,” Barbie said. Matter-of-factly. He couldn’t believe any of it, but he felt as if he was only moving along: coasting on the drum of his heart, on seconds flowing away like water. Junior made a snort-like sound and this time he wasn’t sure who inched forward and who kissed whom, and at this point, like fuck did it matter.
By the time they pulled apart, the darkness had fallen silent again, as if the whole world had sucked in a breath and stopped its course, eager, breathless and wide-eyed, to watch.
“You’re not going to be back again, are you?” Junior asked him. Softly. “After tomorrow?”
Barbie shook his head. He felt buzzing from the touch of Junior Rennie’s mouth, from being so close to him: light, invincible, filled with a bewildered, doped-up sense of happiness like cotton in dappled sunlight.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
And Junior whispered back: “Alright.”
A hand fluttering, his knuckles resting against the hollow of Junior’s throat, feeling the moth-like beating of the young man’s heartbeat. Curled around the thin fabric of his collar.
Junior led him a few steps, like leading a partner across the dance-floor. He yanked Barbie towards him by the wrist, towards the light, towards the door of his bedroom now. The lights inside were alit, large, shimmering and white.
Junior let go of him. Took a step back, over the threshold of his bedroom. He shrugged, looked over his shoulder, and looked back, raising an eyebrow. An invitation.
Barbie raised an eyebrow in return. “Who are you and what have you done to Junior Rennie?”
Junior tilted his head and laughed, again. How Barbie loved that laugh. “Left him in another universe, maybe.”
For the second time, and for the first time with invitation, Dale Barbara stepped into New-Yorkverse Junior’s bedroom. The young man was there to meet him, letting go a fisted hand and stretching towards him, curling around Barbie’s sleeve and pulling him closer and down for a kiss. It was a good kiss – profound, fierce, excruciatingly lovely – and it lasted all the way until they made it into the room and the back of Junior’s knees struck the bed, half-staggered, and murmured laughter as he fell and dragged Barbie down with him.
There was one single lamp alit on Junior’s bedside table. They’d turned the rest of the lights off, and the whole room was awash in its pale, almost pastel-like glow. Even as the streets shimmered from beyond the half-transparent curtains masking the window, the world seemed to have ceased its churning sound, and fallen to a hush.
They were lying together, Junior’s cheek resting on his shoulder, the back of his head leaning against the hard wooden bed-board, and Barbie thought it might be the only lamp alit in the entire city.
“Turn ’em off?” Barbie had asked, softly, with a little laugh beneath his breath, looking up towards the lights beaming from the ceiling, and a beat later Junior reached for the switch, leaving the room in darkness apart from the lamp on the bedside. They’d ended up tangled together against the bed-post, Junior’s head lying on the crook of his arm – and neither of them had protested. The silence was complete, bobbing, gentle as a nightlight.
Finally, Junior raised his head, a little.
“Have you done it before? With a guy?”
“Nope. Never.”
“I would’ve thought you could’ve. You know, with Iraq and everything. Plenty of kids and fellas you can try to bugger when you’re not too busy blowing those bastards up.”
Junior relented, however, after he said it, a few beats of silence later. He gave in, curled up a little more against his side and nuzzled Barbie’s neck. An apology. Barbie accepted it.
He moved, a little, and brushed his chin against Junior’s forehead. “You?”
“Fuck no. What do you think?”
A smile. “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
Barbie pulled him closer. He could feel the kid’s ribs pressed up against his side: protruding, almost poking into him. There were too many things floating around his head, too many voices, like a muffled, ghostly parade – his own, Julia’s, Big Jim’s, Duke Perkins, Carter and the rest of those goons at Dipper’s – and he had no wish to listen to any of them. Not now. The fact that he could feel the rise and ebb of Junior’s breathing along with it both amused and amazed him.
See the stars, Brenda Perkins had said. So bright. Her bright eyes, looking at him from beneath the dark sky. Smiling. But they always make me feel very small… very brief. Would you mind if I took your arm, Barbie?
You salt your bread? Go on, don’t be shy. Do you, assface?
Every time he pushed them away, like waving away mosquitoes and cigarette smoke on a summer evening porch – he kept trying to, but in the end some of them just came back.
What are you doing, Dale Barbara, what in the name of hell do you think you’re doing?
Junior glanced up and blinked at him. “What?”
“I was just thinking,” he said, “what would your dad do if he saw us. Right now.”
Junior stared at him for a split second, then started to laugh. He laughed for what felt like a long time, that laughter of sheer delighted hilarity ringing out across the room and echoing all the way out to the window to the city beyond it, and Barbie wished he could bottle it up, hold the sound of that laughter to himself like cupping a firefly in his hands before letting it fly off and disintegrate into the dark forever.
“Pull up a gun and shoot you,” Junior declared. “And shoot me, too.” Giggled again, tilting his head back. “Actually, maybe not in that order.”
“You’re okay with it?”
“Huh?”
“This. The fact that I’m in here.” On the bed, in the bedroom where he’d once come to clean and opened a half-rattling bathroom drawer, almost without realizing. The bedroom seemed spin around them, barely susceptibly, a faint drunken spin like lights on the ballroom floor.
Junior pressed a kiss along his collarbone. Nibbled on his neck. “Fuck if I know,” he said, with a gravelly, almost husky tenderness. “But it’ll do.”
Barbie rolled around, and shifted their bodies a little closer together. The kid’s hair was still faintly, barely damp, and his shirt smelled of soap: a faint mixture of mint and the homely apple-like aroma of the laundry detergent.
“I didn’t mean any of that, y’know,” he said. Laid his head back, against the cool wood of the bed-board.
“What?”
“What I said, down in the jug, in my universe. When you were trying to kill me.”
“Which part?” Junior asked. “The bit about how you poisoned me or the bit about how I couldn’t get it up?”
Barbie smiled, in spite of himself. “All of it.”
Junior looked up, a faint sneer hiding the smile. “You’re close enough to see for yourself, on the second part. But who knows.” His eyes widened, feigning gruff, half-lazy innocence. “Glad you’ve got me exactly where you’ve wanted me.”
Barbie nudged him, bumping their shoulders. “You got cheek, sonny.”
“I thought you knew that,” Junior said. “I thought that was the first thing you knew about me.”
“Damn right.” He leant closer. Catching the bump of his chin against the side of the young man’s temple, and was contented to stay there. “We were in the roadhouse’s parking lot with Duke Perkins showing up in his cruiser. First thing you do is to raise your head and start hollering, the cook started it.”
“Huh.” Junior glanced up, lips pursed to one side. “I think I could do better.”
“I booted you pretty badly in the stomach couple of minutes ago, so put it down to that.”
Junior laughed, and Barbie felt it on his neck.
“I meant it,” he said. Flipped around, until he was half on top of Junior, again, leaning up on his elbows. “When I said, you aren’t even the same person. Because you’re not.”
Something in Barbie’s voice must’ve shaken through, because this time Junior didn’t laugh or slur out an insult or shower him in the usual glower. They looked at each other in the long drawn-out space of the moment, blue eyes on blue, as if halting in a middle of a dance.
Then Junior reached up and kissed the corner of his mouth. A sluggish, sweet – shakily, intoxicatingly sweet – kiss.
“Shut up about it already,” he said. “You’re giving me a headache.” He wound his knee around Barbie’s leg, and fitted his head against his collarbone. They moved clumsily, prodding and elbowing each other every chance they had, but on times like these Barbie thought the world felt immersed with a new, stunned drunken filter, as if the lights from outside had risen up into the sky and to the ceiling. He wished that time would stand still. It was a clearheaded but wonderful feeling.
You never should’ve put your hands on me, you know. That was your big mistake.
Junior ran a hand across his abdomen and rested it there, warm, like a flush of wine. Fingertips skimming the buttons on his shirt. Junior’s sleeve was rolled up slightly to reveal the white bandage around his forearm, and the gauze scratched against Barbie’s wrist.
“Tell me about your Chester’s Mill,” he said. His breathing was a light tickle again Barbie’s neck, light as a feather.
Barbie smiled. “You’re a nosy thing tonight, aren’t you.”
Another deliberate jolt of Junior’s hip, bumping against his own.
“I lived above Andy Sanders’s drugstore. Place had decent rent, and Petra Searles – your good chum’s sister, y’know – was always there to look after the keys along with the cashier. It looked out onto Main Street, and I could see the Calvert statue from the living room window every evening, in the sunset.”
He lifted a hand. Junior snuggled up a little tighter, against his side.
“My first night in town, Sweetbriar was the first place I went. I had a coffee, heard that she was missing a short-order man, worked up my nerve, went straight in there for the prettiest black-haired lady juggling the plates and asked for a job. It was early March, spring barely there and cold as a witch’s toe. I must’ve been dressed like a tramp, one battered backpack on my shoulder and my boots worn to scruff, but she took pity on me, I think. It’d been a busy day, a Friday night, and by the time she came in I’d cleaned up the kitchen for her, put the coffee pot on, and made two killer waffles from her leftover batter. Rose Twitchell took one look at me, her hair wild and me wearing one of her dirty aprons and both of us all half-dazed and exhausted, pointed a finger and said, mister, you’re hired. That night she was the first friend I’d made.”
Junior had closed his eyes. His face, in the lamplight, bathed in a strangely radiant light. Barbie smoothed a hand across the kid’s hair, ruffling, and earned a light kick of Junior’s knee against his shin.
“Rosie gave me a place to help out – mostly on the grill and the cook-stove, but sometimes at the cashier if she wanted me there. You got to know everyone, being at the diner, ’cause folks gotta eat, and everyone comes over sooner or later. And I mean everyone. You got to listen in on the best bits – juiciest details on whose dog pissed in whose backyard, and who cheated at Dipper’s poker table last night. They were a good crowd.”
Junior Rennie’s hand, curling into a fist against his stomach, like Barbie’s voice was water and he was trying to find something to hang onto.
“Summer came along. On Fourth of July Rose invited me to stay after hours and along with a bunch of her usuals, cracked open a bottle of whiskey and watched the fireworks. In the evenings those days I showed up at the softball games, sometimes volunteered to referee. When Lissa Jamieson asked me to help her out at the Middle School Book Drive, I lugged entire cartons of those donations around the library – stayed till seven in the evening, where she blasted ABBA on the vintage radio and tried to show me her entire collection of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.”
Junior fidgeted. Muffled a giggle, into his shirt.
“I was there when the bingo ladies organized the trash clean-up at the Town Common. That was a good day, too, beginning of October – about a week before you and your buddies decide to corner me at the local bar – and there’s a place out near Prestile Stream, by the woods, and when the sun hits the trees in the afternoon, it’s like all the sounds of the highway get blotted away for a second.”
His knuckles curled and rubbed, gently, at Barbie’s stomach. Back and forth. It felt good, so good, and Barbie turned to plant a halfhearted kiss against the young man’s temple and wondered how any of this was possible and wondered if the world outside had gone away, wondered if the world had stopped because gravity had now shifted force and weight had altered.
“Would you have stayed?” Junior asked him.
Barbie thought about selling his last car to a salesman in Punta Gorda, Florida, on a long-shaded street beneath the summer sun, and thought about hitch-hiking and sitting along the backseats the highways of Tennessee and West Virginia, those weeks at a roadhouse in Brooklyn scrambling eggs and serving up butter-coated muffins, to frying lobsters and rimming liquor glasses with sugar near the coast of Long Island. They said he kept his head so well, that he was a natural, that he could hit off with anyone and fit in anywhere because he had an aura about him, a level head on his shoulders, but at the end of the day Barbie thought he had never fit in anywhere.
He breathed in. “If you –- the other you, I mean -– had given me a chance, say. Maybe I would’ve thought about it.”
Junior’s hand fell still, on his stomach.
“Junior?”
“Huh?”
“You know, your mother died earlier where I’m from.”
Junior stiffened against him. Only for a second.
“Sure. So?”
“I don’t know,” Barbie said. From what he could remember, in the Domeverse, she’d passed away when the younger James Rennie was eight or nine, instead of sixteen. “I guess… I guess I’m just glad that you got to have her for much longer.”
Junior didn’t move. His head rested heavy on Barbie’s shoulder, a stethoscope pressed against his heart.
Then he asked: “Was it my dad?”
“I’m not sure.”
Barbie tugged him closer and burrowed mildly into the crook of his neck. Waited until Junior relented, and leaned into him.
“How many people have you got him down for?”
“Big Jim? That he’d killed?” Barbie let go of him. “Lester Coggins and Brenda Perkins. To say for sure.”
Junior was silent, but only for a few beats. “Coggins?” he asked. “What for?”
“It had something to do with the meth business they were running. I don’t think the Reverend wanted to go along with the game anymore–”
“There’s something else you’re not telling me. Was I part of it?”
“Possible, but we don’t know. I already told you–-”
“What about Miz Perkins?” Junior blinked, like he was remembering. Brenda must’ve been kind to him. Barbie had no doubt of that. “He hasn’t got the guts to kill her.”
“Her husband was dead, at the point. And she held most of the evidence he’d collected.”
“And I helped him?”
A beat. “Most likely, we guess. Your dad made y’all cops, when the crisis happened. Special Deputies, he called you.”
“Cops?” His head on Barbie’s shoulder, again. Another muffled snort. “That’s a laugh. They must’ve been fuckin’ berserk.”
“I know.”
“Is that why I was allowed to slap the handcuffs on you? And visit you in jail and all that?”
“Uh-huh. I remembered what you said I saw you on the street that street that day. You eyed me and pointed to your badge and went, Perkins’s dead and I’m the law.”
Silence.
“You were thin as a living rake, by the end of it,” Barbie said. “Surprisingly strong, though. Anyone would’ve caved and lapsed days ago, let alone drag themselves out of the hospital, load a gun, and limp to the police department. The tumor… the pain – according to Rusty Everett, that is – would’ve been too much. You had a lot in you.”
Junior raised his eyes to him. “What else?”
“You used to draw the first syllable of my name, every time you said it. You started it. Got your chums to do it too. To you it was goddamn hilarious.”
Junior quirked a little smile, a little flash of teeth. “Like, Baaarbie?”
Barbie flinched. So slightly that he barely felt it himself. It was a mere automatic reaction at the sound – for the voice was familiar, so familiar, a sneer reaching out from the dead, but Junior was pressed up close enough next to him to have felt the fraction of a second where his limbs tightened.
And now the air was suddenly, vacantly empty, in the low light.
Junior pushed himself up, on one hand. Away from him.
The pillow wedged behind the small of his back crumpled.
“Maybe you should get out of here,” he said.
“Rennie-–”
“You should go.”
Barbie swallowed. The air in the room was soundless, and suddenly so heavy.
Junior tilted his head back. He was sitting away from him. Knees drawn up to his chin. “You know what’s bullshit? Telling me we’re not the same – we’re different fuckin’ people. Junior Rennie 2.0, the batshit nutjob. That guy ruined it for you. For me. Sonofabitch’s a real bastard.” He turned his eyes on him, too. Those hard, dark eyes, brimming. “How fuckin’ dumb do you think I am?"
Barbie closed his eyes, and opened them. His shoulder was beginning to hurt from where he was leaning it against the headboard.
“You don’t wanna be here, not really," Junior said. "Every time you look at me you’re wondering when that screw in my head’s going to turn loose, every time I move you’re thinking you should block me because what if I attack you, and every time I touch you you’re wondering if I’m putting those same hands I fondled those dead fuckin’ bodies with all over you–-”
“Stop it.”
He reached out, and Junior dodged out of his grip.
“Is that why you wanna have the lights so low? So you don’t even have to see my fuckin’ face?”
There was a few more seconds of silence –- silence of dim light and ragged breathing.
Junior was sitting on the edge of the bed, now, his back facing him.
“Get out of here,” he said quietly.
Barbie reached out, with one soundless hand, towards the wall. He found the switch and flicked it. White light flooded the room, glaring, bright as daybreak.
“Junior?”
Nothing.
“I’m sorry.”
Still nothing.
But he saw the kid’s shoulders deflate, with another low, ragged exhale of breath. He swore he could see those shoulders quivering.
The mattress creaked. The sheets rustled, as Barbie sat up.
“Get over here, Rennie.”
This time Junior Rennie didn’t need telling twice.
He turned around, and those seconds passed. He got back to the other side of the bed. Set his head onto Barbie’s shoulder again, elbows and ribs knocking and wrapping -– there was a mechanic shakiness to it, like cogs clicking together, and he thought it took a while for Junior to stop shaking even when he held him.
“You,” Barbie said, into his hair, not knowing if he wanted to kiss him or backhand him one, “are absolutely fuckin’ insufferable.” Then, for good measure: “Idiot.”
He hasn’t ruined it for me, he thought. He hasn’t. Over my dead body.
“Mmm,” Junior said, into his shirt.
“I want to be here, Rennie. I mean that. I mean every single thing I say, and you know it.”
Junior had wound himself back into his arms again, his left leg curled around Barbie’s right, his cheek resting against his chest. The lights beamed down on him from above, illuminating the rumpled bedsheets a stark, glaring white beneath the navy-dark bedcovers.
“Can you stay?” Junior whispered. What felt like an eternity later. “For a bit? Tonight?”
“You’re a living contradiction, that’s what.” Kissed his cheek. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Do you want the car when you drive over to the airport?”
“I’ll be fine.” And then: “I don’t know who’s over here now, and hey. Better if no one can trace me to you.”
Junior reached up, for Barbie’s upheld hand. He twined their fingers together, a second, then let go. “Be careful.”
“Always do my best,” Barbie said. Smiled, against his neck. “And I’m going to dub that the second nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Junior grinned –- small, humorless, too gentle for a split-second to be mean. “Didn’t I tell you… don’t make it a habit.”
Barbie tilted his face up, with two fingers under the kid’s chin, and kissed his mouth again. There was a warm flush to the kid’s skin and a deep, pulsing warmth in his own throat, soft, tingling, the best kind of tipsy. Junior brought a hand up to touch his cheek, slid it down his neck into his collar, fisting around fabric to pull him closer -- lightly, treading so lightly -- and somewhere in the blur where the lights bored down on them the kiss sharpened. He tensed up and made a small sound into Barbie’s mouth, and Barbie thought maybe what they said was true: sometimes it really was a pleasure to burn.
“I need to tell you something,” Junior said, when they’d stopped. And when Barbie ran another kiss across his collarbone, he grabbed his collar again. “Stop it.”
His words came in a rush.
“I don’t think he hated you. Like, your version of me. He might’ve, I know that, but the whole fuckin’ thing is…” Junior stopped, and sucked in a breath. There was the hint of a slow flush across his cheeks, like light illuminating through a paper-lantern. His eyes were bright, but clear. Just nervous. “He wasn’t thinking right, okay. From being sick. I bet you bothered him like hell, probably drove him a little batshit, same way you annoy the shit outta me, with the way you acted like you saw right through me-–”
Barbie brushed his cheek, with his knuckles.
“Rennie,” he said.
“--and it was one bitch of a shitshow. But when he came over to find you in the police department with the gun, I don’t think he meant it. To kill you. I think part of him held it back. He did some fucked-up shit but he could still hold it back, I think.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t shoot that badly,” Junior said. “Not so bad that I can’t fire at one tall-ass guy in a tiny-ass cell. Even if I only had vision in one eye.” He tilted his chin and stared Barbie, right in the eye. “And I should know.”
Close your eyes, Fusty, whispered the echo in Barbie’s skull. It’s better this way.
Junior looking at him, pointing a finger. Payback’s a bitch, Baaarbie.
Andy Sanders’s mad eyes, hollows of madness, bawling from beyond the bars of Barbie’s cell and scrabbling for Randolph’s gun. He killed her, he killed my precious girl. Julia’s face, looking over her shoulder, glowing beneath the firelight that used to be her newspaper. Rusty Everett’s hand, red and swollen, those fingers and knuckles jutting out grotesquely, his eyes big and glassy with pain. Henry Morrison saying, right before they threw him in the cell: I’d puke up everything you made me if I could. Frankie DeLesseps pouring a big tank of beer down his back, Mel Searles’s snickering laugh as he came downstairs to piss through the bars of Barbie’s cell, and Carter Thibodeau’s fist driving right into his stomach. He wondered how he could possibly let himself be here. He wondered what Carter and his other buddies would say, if they saw him now. He wondered what Big Jim Rennie would say. Can you, Barbie? Can you really, can you really look him in the eye and say you can tell the difference?
Barbie bent down, and kissed him. The voices were all coming back to him: crowding him, rushing, swirling a whirlpool in his mind… and with all the fierceness in his squeezed-tight heart, he wished they’d go away. He was still wishing they’d go away when Junior sat up, reaching for another kiss, and Barbie pressed him all the way back, onto the bed, gravity tilting like a never-ending fall.
“One last thing,” Junior whispered, against his throat.
Barbie drew back an inch. So that they could look at each other.
“If he really is like me -– if he’s the slightest bit like me at all-–”
Junior thought about it, and met the other man’s eyes. It was a plain, hopeful look of simple weary faith that damn near crushed Barbie’s heart.
“I can’t imagine how anyone can be even a little bit like me and not be crazy about you.”
Almost in slow motion, he reached forward again, as all concentration of sound and light seemed to slow along with it and glow, coursing all over, the room a single burning thing just as he reached forward -- and having made his point, Junior tilted his head up and kissed him.
The voices in his head had started again, and he just ground harder against Junior Rennie’s lips until they stopped.
Mercifully, for a while, they did.