Clear Water (7 page)

“Yeah. In fact, I was doing all sorts of fancy shit
on my phone!
”

Whiskey glared at her sourly. “You don’t need the Internet for that. All you need for that is a phone plan through someone who doesn’t deal off the back of a truck. I meant on the computer. But it doesn’t matter. You’re right—I can look at it from my phone.”

He pulled out his phone—one of his few actual toys—and typed in Ritalin for the search engine, then sat down on the little bench and had himself some reading.

A
HALF
an hour later, he took his phone and went in to wake the kid up.

He was stretched out on the berth, his chin pillowed in his hands, his shoulders hunched protectively around his face, and Whiskey couldn’t help what he did next. He sat next to the boy (Patrick!) and rubbed between his shoulder blades gently until those self-protective shoulders relaxed and the kid gave an unconscious groan.

“Kid? Kid—Patrick. C’mon, buddy, I need you to wake up, okay?”

“Why?”

Whiskey looked sideways and saw that those pretty blue eyes were open, and he was looking at Whiskey unhappily.

“A couple of reasons. The first one is I thought you’d like to try to cancel your credit cards again. The second one is I was wondering if you bothered to take your meds this morning, because maybe, you could take them tomorrow morning, and we could all keep our phones intact.”

“The meds are a crutch,” Patrick mumbled woodenly. “If I was a real grown-up I could pull my own shit together and not need to be dependent on chemicals.”

“Well, yeah, if you were ninety-eight percent of all the people in the world, sure! But doctors don’t prescribe this stuff to adults because they’re using it as a crutch. They prescribe it to adults because your brain chemistry isn’t outfitted for the twenty-first century, and you need a little help.”

“Wonderful. I don’t even fit into the
time
I was born in. You got equipment out there that can measure my happiness?”

Whiskey had to laugh. Patrick was talking into his folded arms, but he was still letting his smart-ass show.

“C’mon, kid. I would really rather not have you knock yourself unconscious on the side of the boat, okay? We’ve got a limited grant and not a lot of insurance, and….” Whiskey moved his hand to cover Patrick’s forehead. There was a bump there, a dark spot against the pale skin. “And I just don’t want to see you hurt yourself anymore.”

Patrick nodded in the middle of a long silence. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. Now sit up. You had the right idea about cancelling your credit cards. You want to try this again?”

Patrick sighed. “I should just call my dad and tell him they got stolen.”

“I take it you don’t want to talk to your dad?”

Patrick closed his eyes. “I’m a chickenshit fuckup,” he said, and Whiskey winced, even though the kid seemed to take it in stride. Patrick Cleary, five foot eight, pretty blue eyes, chickenshit fuckup.

“Won’t he be worried?”

Patrick seemed to think about it. “No,” he said after a few heartbeats. “I sincerely doubt it.”

Whiskey didn’t. Whiskey couldn’t imagine a kid like this, all this earnestness and fragility, wouldn’t have anyone who worried about him. But Whiskey wasn’t volunteering to step in and be Daddy, either, so he wasn’t going to push the issue.

“Well, then, here. I looked up the major credit card companies, and all you have to do is call the ones that are yours. I’ll stay right here. You start getting all twisted, give the phone to me, I’ll walk you through it, okay?”

Patrick nodded and wiped the back of his hand wearily over his eyes. “This is hella nice of you. I’m so—”

“Fuck sorry. Don’t want to hear sorry. Don’t want to hear thank you. Just want to hear you get your shit sorted, ’kay?”

Patrick nodded. “’Kay.”

He hit the appropriate number and send and then locked his limpid, hurt blue eyes with Whiskey’s and started what seemed an impossible navigation with bureaucracy. By the time he was done, Whiskey wanted a drink and a baseball bat and something to hit. But more than that, he wanted someone to blame, because Patrick hurt, and it seemed like nobody had paid.

Patrick
Someone Else

I
N
HIS
entire life, Patrick had never wanted so badly to be someone else.

Whiskey—sexy, dark-eyed, black-stubbled Whiskey—was treating him like a child, a kid brother, a well-meaning seventh grader, and Patrick kept looking at him with fully adult eyes.

And Patrick couldn’t blame him—not even a little.

Making the phone calls was painful.

“Six thousand dollars?” he asked, his voice void of emotion. He simply didn’t have any left. “Six thousand dollars? It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. How could he have racked up six thousand dollars?”

Patrick was aware that he was clenching Whiskey’s hand in his own and fighting the urge to fall apart. Hell, even the woman on the other line sounded sympathetic.

“Do you verify that these charges are not authorized?”

“Anything after six o’clock last night was not authorized.”

“Are you aware that you have a multi-card protection on your cards? If you give me your mother’s maiden name as verification, I can check on and cancel every card you’ve been issued.”

Patrick had not been aware—it must have been his father’s doing. Well, once again, Shawn Cleary had his shit together where his son clearly did not.

When the phone call was over, the damage was staggering.

“Twenty-three thousand dollars,” Patrick muttered, looking at Whiskey in shock. The little berth had the hatches open, but it was still sweltering at five in the afternoon, and Whiskey’s dark skin was glistening and sticky with sweat. “He put a down payment on a
car,
for Christ’s sake.”

“Slick little fucker.” There was a tinge of admiration in Whiskey’s voice, and Patrick looked at him sharply.

“Well,” Whiskey said with a shrug, “if he was going to be a skeezemonkey, at least he picked a path and committed.”

Unlike Patrick, who apparently couldn’t even commit to staying alive.

“I hate him,” Patrick said, his voice flat and dead.

“No you don’t,” Whiskey said, shaking his head.

“The hell I don’t!”

“I’m serious,” Whiskey said, patting his hand kindly. “You’d have to love him to hate him, and I don’t think you ever did.”

Patrick blinked. “I thought I did….”

“Yeah, but think about it, Patrick. You knew. You woke up without a wallet, and you knew. You asked where the guy was, and I told you he’d ditched you—you knew. You didn’t trust him to save you, you jumped to the right conclusion about him drugging you—you can’t love a guy you don’t trust. You didn’t trust him, you didn’t love him, you can’t hate him.”

Patrick glared at him. “Then why do I want to smash his face in?”

Whiskey smiled. “Excellent. Perfectly logical reaction. You want to smash his face in because he’s a skeezeweasel and he needs to have his head caved in by a rock. It’s perfectly natural. Makes me think better of you, actually.”

Patrick slumped miserably. “I thought it was childish and immature.”

Whiskey’s dark eyes narrowed and moved sideways to the thinking-things-through place. “Well, only in the way that comes with two testicles and a dumbstick.”

Patrick laughed and rubbed a hand over the slickness on the back of his neck. “God, it’s hot. Did you say something about swimming?”

Whiskey told Patrick to go up on the deck, and Fly Bait unlashed the boat from the dock and then cast off while Whiskey piloted, heading for a swimming hole upriver.

“It’s beyond any bad shit being pumped in—at least that we know about—and it’s private.” Whiskey seemed to like the idea of “private,” and Patrick, who had done most of his swimming at the health club pool, the better to show off and hook up, was suddenly a fan of it too.

Patrick stood at the prow and leaned against the hip-high rail as the boat putt-putted its way through the green waters of the Sacramento River. At some point, he became almost hypnotized by the dark water beneath him, and he leaned forward, fascinated by the hidden world submerged in the water’s reflection. He could see the larger rocks about ten to twelve feet down, he reckoned, and the submerged tree trunks, and even the occasional fish, slow to flee from the noise of the biofuel engine. The putt-putting grew slower, and Patrick raised his head to see a small deserted dock. There was an abandoned gas pump near the water and a wooden quay that was barely sound. Whiskey came out of the cabin, where he’d been steering, and vaulted off the deck and to the dock, lashing the boat to the quay irons with deft, confident movements, and Patrick watched him, envious.

In all his life, he’d never moved like he owned something. His father seemed to own the entire world, but Patrick hadn’t even felt like he owned his car.

But Whiskey—Whiskey moved like he owned the air he breathed and earth beneath his feet. That was all he wanted, that was all he needed, and he would master it simply because it was his.

Patrick wondered what he would master if he could, and then he watched as Whiskey kicked off his battered slip-on tennies and shucked his jeans. Wearing only a pair of boxers, he executed a neat dive off the quay to the water, swimming cleanly under water for at least fifteen yards before surfacing and waving to Patrick.

“Jump in, kid.”

Patrick wasn’t about to strip down to his underwear, but hell, all he was wearing was holey cut-offs anyway—he’d been barefoot all day. Without hesitation, he stripped off the ribbed tank top and hit the water.

It was
glorious.
No smell of oil or diesel fuel, no vegetation rot from the marshes, just clean water, moving lazily and keeping the cool from the mountain feeds without the fearsome current of rivers closer to the Sierras, like the American.

Patrick rolled in the water, using his momentum to execute a flip, and came up tossing water from his hair and holding his face to the sunshine.

“Whooooooooottt!” It was a joyous sound, completely spontaneous, and when he opened his eyes, Whiskey was grinning at him from across the expanse of five yards or so.

He heard another splash, and both of them turned in time to see Fly Bait jumping in. She was actually wearing a plain bikini, and her stringy, tanned body looked sleek and comfortable arcing through the air and into the natural water. Patrick didn’t have a lot of experience with women in any capacity, but he did admire her grace. She had the same self-assured quality as Whiskey, as if she owned the air she breathed and the ground she walked on, and that was all she needed. He liked that about her.

Nobody was talking, and he noticed that the current, though slight, was carrying them toward the center of the river. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming sense of… of
freedom,
from
everything.
Without a word, he eyed the horizon upstream and struck out, just
swimming.
His arms hauled water and his legs kicked and his breathing evened out, and everything—his father, his car, his skeezeweasel boyfriend, all of it—disappeared in the wondrous muscle-pumping bliss of mastering the cool water. He swam until his arms ached and his breath came too short to support him, and then he flipped around and took stock.

He’d gone a
long
way—at least 200 yards—and Whiskey and Fly Bait were in the distance. He stopped and treaded water, letting the current bear him back to his beginnings, and for the first time since the conversation with his father, felt like he could
breathe.

He wasn’t anyone here. No one thought he was weak. No one seemed to be drawing any judgments about his medication or his skeezeweasel boyfriend or… or anything. They just expected him to try. God, when was the last time anyone had expected him to try—and given him credit for doing just that?

He opened his arms and let the current bear him back like thick wind. For the first time in his life, he felt like he could fly.

H
E
STARTED
out in the berth by himself that night—Whiskey grabbed a sleeping bag and threw it out on the deck and told him not to worry. The next day, Patrick could start with the reorg on the equipment over the convertible dining room table, and that way, Whiskey could sleep on
that
instead.

“But it’s your room!” Patrick complained. “Shouldn’t I be the one sleeping on the deck?” The idea made him shudder. Not the outside—that actually sounded cool. He’d never done a campout or anything resembling one. No, what made him shudder was that the prow wall sloped down to the deck level about a quarter of the way down the ship, and although there was a waist high rail that covered the stern, there was a chance (however small) that someone sleeping on the rounded part of the prow might roll down and off the side of the boat. They’d fall either into the water or onto the quay and very likely be just fine, if a little bruised or a lot surprised, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that sleeping without the rail brought Patrick to a cold sweat.

Whiskey shrugged. “Maybe sometime when it doesn’t make you wet your pants. For right now, take my berth.”

There was a full moon that night, and it cast sharp shadows through the hatches. The shadows moved with the slight rocking of the boat, and Patrick lay with his head pillowed on his hands and tried to imagine what those shadows could be. He was half-asleep, after swimming for an hour and a dinner of Chipotle leftovers and listening to Whiskey and Fly Bait talk in shorthand about the water quality and chemical composition, and his imagination—usually fairly active—started drawing little mental .gifs in the play of dark and light.

He saw frogs in the shadows, talking to each other, and dark water rushing in through an open window. He saw a man with an impossibly wide chest holding the world on his back—and then bouncing it on his foot and his knee like a hackey-sack. He saw birds with oily feathers dive-bombing a pool of crumpled clothes.

He saw Whiskey, his rangy, narrow chest covered with dark hair (it peeked out of the holes in his T-shirt) and wet boxer shorts transparent from the river.