A Champion for Tinker Creek, page 12
“Ha!” He started to soap up.
I noticed he favored his left hand, so I came up on that side with some soap. “Let me,” I said, and I began lathering where his injured arm would not let him reach. He started to object but then gave in as I soon had him clean and rinsed.
“Ready to get out?” I said.
“What about you?”
“I’ve already showered, remember? This was just so I didn’t go through the day smelling like sex.”
Outside I toweled him off, then let him hold on to my shoulder to pull on a pair of shorts and helped him maneuver into a loose shirt. I thought getting him showered and at least partially dressed had gone well, but I could read the frustration and pain on his face.
“Can’t wait for this to be over,” he muttered as we went back into the bedroom.
“Ready for some painkillers?” I asked. “Earlier you talked about not taking the opioids. Are you sticking to that position?”
“I think so,” he said. “But let’s hold off on that decision until after breakfast.”
In the kitchen, we faced the next challenge. What did he have to eat?
“One of those push-down coffeepots is in the center cabinet,” he said, “along with a bag of coffee. Creamer is on the fridge door. Sugar is in the side cabinet. Bagels in the freezer. The wide mouth toaster on the counter will make them nice and brown. Peanut butter in the cabinet top right or soft cream cheese in the fridge.”
After he caught my glance, he bristled slightly. “What? It’s usually only me, and I don’t have time to cook breakfast. I got things to do and places to go.”
“Okay, chill,” I said. “Sit down, and today I’ll make you some breakfast.”
He sat at the counter while I busied myself with heating water for coffee and dropping three frozen bagels into the toaster. The peanut butter and cream cheese were just where he said they would be.
Coffee made and poured, bagels toasted on a plate, small bowls with cream cheese, peanut butter, and honey waiting with spoons or spreaders, I looked over the counter with some pride.
He grunted. “This is nice. I don’t usually go to this trouble for just me.”
He sipped his coffee, smiled again, and spread some peanut butter on a bagel. I grabbed one as well but went for the cream cheese. He took a bite of his and then put it down.
“Manny, this is nice and all, but we need to talk, and now is probably the best bad time to do it,” he said.
I put down my bagel. “This sounds bad,” I said.
“It’s just…man, what are you doing here?”
I didn’t have any words then.
“I mean this was—is—very nice and all. And the dinner was great. And it’s been great having help to do stuff I can’t do, and of course you’re sexy as fuck, but the last time we saw each other we were gonna leave things on hold until—maybe—maybe a couple of phone calls and maybe go on from there.”
I felt a red tide of embarrassment creeping up from my neck to engulf my face but still lacked any words. He got off the stool, refilled his coffee cup, and started pacing back and forth on his side of the counter.
“Now you’re here like Florence Goddamn Nightingale, and you’re in my bed, and you’re making sure I’m fed and I take my meds and I get dried off after I shower. And please don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful as hell for what you’ve done, but man, what the fuck? Why are you here? What’s your angle?”
“Maybe I don’t have an angle?” I ventured softly.
“Bullshit. Everybody has an angle. What’s yours?”
“Okay,” I said, thinking aloud. “One, you’re the sexiest man I have ever been with in my life, so I’m naturally drawn to you. Two, you made me feel things in bed the other night that I’ve never felt before, and I don’t want that to stop. Three, you’re the most mysterious man I know, and I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Nonsense. There’s nothing mysterious about me.”
I laughed. “And you’re the least self-aware man I know,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I was also standing by this point, leaning back against the refrigerator and holding up my hand to count down my assertions.
“You live in a space that looks like it came right out of Architectural Digest,” I said, “but you eat off dishes you bought at Walmart. Your staff appears to adore you, but you don’t number a single friend among them as far as I can tell. You’re out to your inner circle, such as it is, but are okay letting the broader world assume you’re straight. You work at making yourself unapproachable, but you’re actually one of the kindest men I have ever met.”
“What’s your point?”
“Nothing, except that all these things intrigue me and make me want to learn more.”
He sat back down on his stool, appearing frustrated. “Look, I appreciate all you have done for me—I genuinely do. And I can even buy that you might find me interesting. But there’s a reason I don’t have a lover or boyfriend or partner or whatever we’re using as the term of the month.” He pushed the coffee mug toward me. “Can I get a refill?”
“I’ll make another pot.”
We munched on our bagels while we waited for the water to boil. After letting the liquid brew, I poured us both another mug and slid his back over to him.
“So, why don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked.
“I don’t want one,” he said immediately, almost like pulling down a shield. “Or, to be more specific, I don’t want to do what it would take to have one.”
“And what would that be?”
He almost visibly squirmed in front of me.
“You know, all that ‘relationship’ stuff,” he said, using his voice to add the scare quotes. “All the honesty and trust and compromise and consideration and all of that.”
“You don’t think you would be good at those things?” I asked, a little bit surprised because I believed he had them.
“No, I think I would be fine offering those things. I just don’t believe anybody else would be.”
I guess I looked perplexed.
“Look, I don’t have a lot of close personal history with other people,” he said. “My mom died in a pedestrian hit-and-run when I was ten. She’d been struggling with the booze for a while, so I was the adult in the relationship. It wasn’t great, but it was stable. My dad was deployed with the Army up until then, and I thought he might get out and come be my dad after we buried her, but he decided to stay in. I had to go live with his older brother, my Uncle Donovan.
“That was okay, but I really didn’t fit in. Plus there weren’t any other kids around. But he knew this priest chaplain from his old Army days who left the Army to teach history at the Benedictine military school in Savannah. He got in contact with Father Joe, and then both of them contacted my dad, and they talked him into sending me there.”
“Wow. Did they ask you about it? How did you feel about that?”
“Naw, they didn’t ask me about it. I was twelve. I don’t really remember feeling much of anything at all about being sent to the school, to tell the truth. By the time Uncle Donovan told me I was going there, I had pretty much ridden that emotional roller coaster as much as I could ride. Mostly I remember hoping the school would be a place I could stay a while.”
“And could you?”
“Yep. Boarding schools can be lonely places, but I was already lonely, so that wasn’t a big change. Plus its rules, norms, and traditions gave me structure and identity nothing else could give me. On school holidays, I would go join Uncle Donovan at his place or sometimes someplace else. But even when I was away from school, I kept my school identity. Like, if we were someplace else, I would store my clothes in the hotel room just like I folded and stored them in my dorm room at school.”
“When did your dad come back into your life?”
“The year after I graduated. Father Joe worked it so I could live in one of the caretaker’s houses on school grounds and work part-time as a handyman and assistant football coach as well as take classes at Savannah Tech. Dad came out of the military later that year.”
“What was that like?” I asked, but he smirked and slid his mug back over.
“I’m not the only one who’s gonna spill his guts today. Let’s kill the pot, and it’s your turn to answer questions.”
“Okay,” I said, pouring the last of the coffee. “What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with basics. Like what do you do for a living?”
“Okay, but you’re not going to like the answer.”
“Try me.”
“I’m a reporter for the South Georgia Record,” I said softly.
I predicted correctly, he didn’t like it. A grimace flew across his face, and while it lasted a moment, it left a shadow in his eyes.
“Is that really so bad?” I asked.
His mouth made a crooked smile as he took another sip of coffee. “Yes,” he said, pulling his hand over his face. “Or no. Maybe. How’d you know I wouldn’t like your job?”
“Because I called you the other night to give you a tip about the information you could get from the city clerk’s office. You weren’t thrilled to hear from me.”
“That was you?” He looked bewildered.
“I was working, so I called from my work mobile. Then I was waiting, trying to figure out what to do, when the explosion happened. And now I’m here.”
“So, how’d you really find out about me being hurt?”
“I haven’t lied to you. For real, my friend and housemate Tommy had to go to the courthouse for a permit or something, and he overheard someone talk about it there. My aunt owns the restaurant and I had just eaten there, so that’s where the box of food idea came from.”
He started taking utensils and cups to the sink.
“Let me,” I said, but he kept on until he cleared the counter.
“So, are we good?” I asked quietly.
“My dad hadn’t planned on getting out of the service when he did,” Lyle said. “He had eighteen months left and had a promotion pending to master sergeant. He was going to come out with a good pension and well situated for civilian life. But then a reporter wrote a story about a unit that my dad had belonged to years before, when he was just a private first class, almost the lowest rank in the Army. Turned out a bunch of guys from that unit had been involved in some shit involving smuggling and civilian murders—”
“The Al-Fawad scandal!”
“Yeah, that was one name for it. All the reporter had was allegations, but he was off to the races, and then they all were. Like a pack of fucking dogs.”
“But the Al-Fawad allegations were true,” I said. “There was evidence and court-martials and everything.”
He turned on me, eyes blazing. “Yeah, there were! Four. Four guys got terms in Leavenworth, and then kicked out of the Army for that shit. You want to know how many guys had served with that unit while in country? Almost five hundred. You want to guess how many guys got fingered as guilty with no trial, no evidence, no chance to clear their name, because of the media firestorm? Almost five hundred. My dad had belonged to that unit for thirteen weeks. He never knew the guys who had been involved in that shit, and they never knew him. But nonetheless they put his pending promotion into administrative review and then, three months later, informed him that they wanted him to go ahead and take retirement. His commander told him, privately, that it was all he could do to make sure his discharge would remain honorable.”
I looked down to find his knuckles white from holding on to the counter.
“He never recovered from that shame. That and the PTSD he already had tipped him into the bottle, and he never could get out of it. He died only a few years later.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, overwhelmed by everything I had heard.
“Yeah, well, one of the things I have discovered is that sorry is a pile of shit,” he growled, before turning and stalking out of the kitchen.
I numbly rinsed the dishes and added them to the dishwasher. Afterward, I found him in the corner of his apartment he had set up as a gym, sitting on a weight bench looking up on the monkey bars. He stood up as I approached.
“I owe you an apology,” he stated stiffly. “You didn’t deserve that.”
“Thank you, but I understand,” I replied.
He grimaced again. “I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I think you should leave now,” he said.
“Um—”
“Please.”
I nodded.
“I also think you should know your tip about the city clerk’s office was only half right,” he said. “They have the information, but they made me file a request for it that’ll take weeks to fulfill.”
I nodded again. That was weird and, I thought, possibly against the law, but I wasn’t about to argue with Lyle now.
“The elevator will lock itself after you get off,” he said, before he turned back to the exercise equipment he couldn’t use.
Back on the pavement outside the shop, I texted Tommy.
Headed to office. Things ended rougher than they started. Lunch??
Sorry 2 hear. Absolutely. Meet me at front door at 12:30?
Good to go
Chapter Twelve
A Leak in the Dam
As the sound of the elevator died away, I paced beneath my now-useless monkey bar gym and finally smacked my palm into one of the poles.
“Dammit,” I said out loud.
I built the gym for days like these. Working out calmed and quieted me, offering a package of natural rhythms I used to regain my sense of control. Each heartbeat coupled with every inhalation, each breath tied into every movement, all of them working together to remind me that I remained master of my life.
But now injury locked me off from working out, and all that lovely source of peace stood like a distant mountain across an ocean of pain.
I walked back to the kitchen and grabbed my mobile to call Parker. Voice mail. Dammit again, I thought. I tried the office line. Success this time. Carlos picked up.
“Morning, Carlos, where’s Parker?”
“Out front giving an estimate,” Carlos said. “You can probably see him from your front windows. You need to speak to him, boss?”
“Naw, it’s okay. Just tell him I’ve decided not to come down today. Gonna try to rest and heal up a bit more quickly.”
We hung up, which gave me the time to wonder if I’d made a correct decision not going in. At least I’d be busy in the shop. Up here, I wouldn’t have anything to do but think about Manny, dammit.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t ever had a crush on somebody or hadn’t had a fling or ten before. I had done that. But those had been facile, easy to control. Because they were all shallow, on the surface, sex but nothing close to the heart. Manny wasn’t any of those things. Or he was all of them, but not them alone. I could hang out with Manny and talk, I realized. It didn’t boil down to sex by itself. We could have lazy weekends, spending time together and doing shit or nothing at all—until I had to put up with his character assassinations on people in that damn paper, I thought.
Argh. Fuck, I was a mess. It had been too hard to tell Manny to leave, and thank God he had been a gentleman and left. If he had objected, I might not have been able to kick him out.
My phone rang with the royal trumpet ringtone I had assigned to Eva’s personal mobile a few years ago.
“Yes, my queen,” I answered.
“Oh my God, Lyle. I just got back into town last night and heard you were in the hospital? Are you all right? What happened? Was there really a bomb?”
She spoke in a higher range than I had ever heard her use before and breathed like she had climbed four flights of stairs. I deliberately lowered my voice and slowed my speech in response.
“Calm down. I’m ninety-seven percent fine. Yes, there was an explosion, and it involved a vehicle, but I don’t believe the authorities have declared it a car bomb,” I said. “The blast blew me off my feet, and my left shoulder and arm got hurt, but I’ve seen a doctor and I’m mending.”
“Oh, thank God,” she said in a more normal voice and cadence. “Is this a good time to talk? Can you tell me what happened?”
I told her about everything, beginning with the snake encounter, which made her scream, up through the explosion and Lucinda remaining in the hospital in an induced coma. When I finished, she accused me of being in denial.
“Of course it was a car bomb,” she snapped. “The police may not say so because they don’t want to panic people, especially tourists. But I grew up in Beirut, and I know that cars, especially SUVs, do not just blow up in the street by themselves. Trust me on this. The only remaining questions are who planted it and who was the intended target.”
I agreed with her, but I tried to downplay the attack when talking about it to damp down fear.
“So, were you the target?”
“I don’t think I was the direct target. I think I was the snake’s target, but the bomb was focused on Lucinda. However, I also think that neither one of us was supposed to die.”
“Why not?”
“Because the snake was never a very accurate weapon. It could have bitten me, but I might not have died. Or it could have bitten someone else entirely. If they really wanted to kill me, they could have waited outside until I came downstairs and shot me. And I think someone set the bomb off from a distance, while they were watching the car.”
“Why do you think that?”
“If you think about it, a car bomb is a pretty expensive weapon. It draws a lot of attention. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is involved now. It gets you on the national news. For that kind of cost, you’re going to want more control.”
