Sidecar (3 page)

“Okay,” he said, still uncertain, and Mysterious Stranger stuck out a hand.

“I’m Josiah Daniels. You can call me Joe.”

Casey had to walk forward a bit before he could take that hand. “Casey,” he said, not wanting to talk about his last name. His parents didn’t want him; he didn’t want them. Joe’s hand was still out, and he held perfectly still until Casey grasped it, and then he shook slowly, carefully, letting Casey control the pressure. Casey was reassured somehow. That hand was warmer than his, and it was bigger, stronger, with calluses, but it didn’t do anything it didn’t have to do.

Joe gestured to the motorcycle and then got on first, which was good, because Casey needed to grab hold of his shoulders to swing his leg over. In spite of the fact that Casey was pretty sure his body stench was scaring off small animals, Joe didn’t even flinch. He held very still until Casey’s arms were around his waist, and then started the bike up again, pulled it up from its lean on the kickstand, and took off in one smooth motion.

Casey would remember that ride behind Joe forever.

The man’s chest really was wide, and his waist was trim, and he had a way of moving his body to block the wind. The sky above them had turned the color of a girl’s party dress, and the road was purple, like a bruise. The trees were all pine and fir here, and they lined the road like serene sentinels, gesturing the way toward that cotton-candy sky. Without the bite of the wind, the colors and the shadows of the chill of the Sierras were almost friendly, and Casey forgave the cold for trying to kill him a while ago, because he was snuggled deep inside Joe’s jacket, and nothing could hurt him. Instead, Casey grasped that trim waist and tightened against him and closed his eyes, and between the whoosh of the air and the rumble of the bike, he might have fallen asleep if Joe hadn’t felt his grip slacken and grabbed his hands and shaken them every so often.

It was the first peace Casey had felt in months. No one yelling at him, nobody wanting something from him—just this guy, this warm, big guy putting Casey’s destiny in his big, rough hands. Casey sort of wished that ride could have gone on forever.

As it was, Josiah-call-me-Joe took a turn into a barely there road off of Foresthill and then another turn into what looked like a driveway. The driveway was at least a quarter of a mile long and freshly paved, which was a good thing, because the chopper didn’t look like it was ready for the sort of off-roading this country seemed to lend itself to. At the end of the driveway was a little pathway of broken paving stones—the round kind—that led to a ramshackle two-story house with a new roof and a desperate need for new siding. At present, the house was sided with silvering, splintered shingles that were rotting off seemingly as Casey looked. There was a garage on one side of the house, as well as a dilapidated carport on the other side with a plastic roof that was threatening to cave in the middle, and a shitload of new lumber and drywall tucked into the side of the carport.

Casey took a look around the whole thing with dull eyes, not sure he had the wherewithal to really take in all the damage.

“God, you weren’t kidding about day labor,” was what he did say, and he caught Joe’s grin as the bigger man swung off the bike and then gave Casey a hand off himself.

“Nope. Just bought the place a couple of months ago.”

“It’s a wreck. Why bother?” Casey’s mind boggled at the amount of work to be done, but Josiah Daniels didn’t seem to be offended.

“Listen to that,” he said, the smile on his face like one of those saints in a painting.

“Listen to what?”

“Do you hear the neighbors?”

“No.”

“Do you hear the traffic?”

“No.”

“Exactly.” Joe moved toward the house before Casey could chew on that any longer, and Casey followed him, because there were at least two miles of cold black road between him and another human being, and he was done with the running.

Inside, it was simple and plain. The entryway opened up to a kitchen with a small dining table on the left, and a living room with a couch on the right. The carpet was plain light brown, old, and badly in need of stretching. Joe gestured to the table.

“Wash your hands in the kitchen sink, sit down, and I’ll feed you. Then you can shower—I’ll get you some night clothes, okay?”

Casey nodded, grateful that the food would come first, although just looking at the clean dinette set, the clean brown corduroy couch, and the clean white walls made him itch even more. As he used the sink—washing his hands several times with dish soap before he stopped seeing them brown and wrinkled with filth—Joe busied himself in the refrigerator. Casey sat down to a solid peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a microwaved bowl of chicken noodle soup.

It was heaven. He’d forgotten how much he liked peanut butter and jelly as a kid. He’d forgotten the saltiness and solidness of the peanut butter and the burst of sweetness as the jelly just sang on your tongue. He’d forgotten the solid earthiness of wheat bread and how the whole thing felt right and perfect in his stomach. Milk was a gift from the gods. The sandwich was gone, and he was literally licking the bowl that had held the chicken noodle soup when he felt Joe’s hand on his shoulder and realized he’d lost a little bit of time from sitting down to scarfing down.

“Kid, I’m going to make you some more stuff, but first, we’ll let that settle, okay?”

No! Food! More food now!
Casey kept that back in his head with a whimper and stood up, reluctant to shed the wonderful jacket, even though Josiah had apparently started a fire while he’d been lost in food-land. “Okay,” he whispered. “What now?” He knew. He’d known when he’d first taken the jacket. But he’d been fed, and now he didn’t care so much.

“Shower, remember? C’mere.”

The living room had a short hallway, and Casey’s companion sighed as he led the way.

“Eventually, I’ll have the loft upstairs all fixed up, and I’ll be sleeping there. Right now, we’re in the guest bedrooms, and they share a bathroom. We’re lucky—I just put in a tub, so you can soak for a while before you stand up and rinse off. But first….”

Joe opened a door into a small bedroom. “Here, wait for a sec.” He disappeared again, and Casey took off the jacket and laid it neatly on the plain queen-size bed. There was a generic tan bedspread on the top and what looked to be stolen hospital sheets underneath—and they didn’t fit, either, because the one on the bottom was just sort of on top of the mattress, and the edges were bare flowered nylon. But it had pillows, and a single dresser next to the headboard. They were the only objects in the room, and Casey could appreciate that Joe maybe hadn’t been as interested in decorating as he had been in simply making things serviceable.

He started taking off his clothes then, shuddering as they slid down into a puddle at his feet. He wanted to grab a sheet or something to hide himself, but he didn’t want any of the things living on his skin to get on that too. In a sudden panic, he grabbed the jacket and held it up against his naked body, not even wanting to look at himself. He was skinny. When he’d left his parents’ house with only the clothes on his back and a wallet two months earlier, he’d been developing a chest and some muscles—training for basketball did that to a guy.

Of course, getting caught blowing your center after practice when your parents came home early was what got you kicked out and on the streets, so maybe basketball wasn’t such a great thing after all. He was only ever going to be five foot eight, tops, so it wasn’t like he’d been bound for the pros.

He held the jacket up and shivered, a little surprised that there was a knock at the door before it swung open.

“Whoa!” Joe cried out, holding his full hands up to his eyes. “No! No, no, no—not for me to see. Shit.” Carefully, keeping his back to Casey like he was some virgin girl, Joe edged over to the bed and put down a set of sea-green hospital scrubs.

“They’re my old shit—gonna be really fucking big.”

Casey almost laughed, the guy was so uncomfortable. For a minute, he wanted to point out that there was nothing there that random truckers and assholes hadn’t been seeing for two months, but he had a sudden thought of the kindness and the warm jacket and the food, and he didn’t. For a minute, he
really
didn’t want Joe to know he was a slutty man-pussy, and everyone’s meat. This guy had been treating him like he was worth something. Casey was going to let him keep his illusions.

“And here.”

Casey looked, and Joe had put down a pharmacy squirt bottle, brown, on top of the clothes.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Kwell. You’re going to want to rub it into your hair… uhm…
all
of your hair, even over your… you know….”

“Pubes?” It felt like he was being delicate, but Joe shook his head, and the back of his neck under his ponytail was getting redder by the second.

“Not just the pubes. Your asshole hair too.”

“I’ve got hair on my asshole?” Jesus! Casey hadn’t gotten that far or that intimate with anybody. It was usually just “Bend over, boy!” and that was the extent of it.

“Well, you might not, but a lot of guys do!” The irritation must have helped with the embarrassment, because his neck paled a little. “And you need to not get it on any open sores, because it will sting like a motherfucker.”

Casey whimpered, and the sound must have been pretty naked, because Joe turned around.

“What?”

Casey shrugged. “Uhm, about my asshole….” He winced, and Joe winced, and then Joe sighed.

“Okay, look, kid. Use the Kwell on everything else, just wash that. We’ll put the Kwell back on in a week, okay?”

Casey nodded. His eyes were watering, and he couldn’t pinpoint why.

“Don’t get anything in your eyes, okay? The bathroom has two doors—one to my room. I want you to lock that door whenever you’re in there because I just don’t want to walk in on you, okay? You lock that door, the only way in is through your door, right? So rub the shit in your hair, upstairs and downstairs, go get in the tub, soak off the dirt, and rinse the shit off your head. I’ll go through it with a pick while you eat round two, and let’s see if we can get you healthy, okay?”

Casey nodded, his vision blurring, and Joe turned to go. He stopped midstride and sighed, took a few steps forward, and then took Casey’s chin in his fingers.

“It’s going to be all right, okay, boy? I’ll find you someplace to stay, we’ll keep you safe, okay?”

Casey nodded, his jaw working. “Why?” he asked, unsure of where the question came from, and Joe shrugged and looked away.

“I was just always taught to do good works. I know… sounds like freaky hippy shit. But that’s just what I learned growing up.”

He turned around and left, and Casey didn’t even get to say thank you. He was left there in the room, and after laying the jacket down carefully on the end table so it wouldn’t get any cooties on the sheets, he went to work with the greasy white stuff in the bottle.

After he was done massaging it all in, he spent about an hour in the tub. He must have washed himself about five hundred times with the Irish Spring soap and the washcloth, and his hair could not be shampooed enough. It wasn’t until the water got to be frigid—long after his fingers and toes got to be pruney—t---- that he finally got out.

The water in the tub was brown, and he spent a few minutes washing the ring off the edges before going into the guest room and putting on the scrubs. Well, they were clean, they were comfy, and they seemed to be one-size-fits-all. What wasn’t to like, right? He went commando, which was fine, because his pubes were still tingling from all of the chemical attention.

When he got into the living room, Casey saw the back of Joe’s head where he sat on the couch, watching television, in a similar set of scrubs, a small plate with crumbs next to him on the end table. There was a plate of hamburgers, the kind made from the frozen patties and regular bread, on the table in the kitchen.

“Is that food for me?” he asked and was surprised when the big man on the couch startled.

“Wha? Yeah.” Joe yawned. “Eat yourself stupid. Sorry. I just worked three twelves in a row—I’m sort of beat.”

Casey started digging into the hamburgers—and they were no less heavenly than the PB&J. He was on his third, and not even thinking about slowing down, when Joe got up from the couch and came up behind him to touch his head.

And Casey spazzed out, throwing one arm back in defense and dropping the hamburger on the plate. His hand smacked Joe in the chin, and Joe grunted and took a step back.

“Sorry, kid,” he said after an awkward moment, during which Casey picked up the hamburger out of sheer reflex. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ll remember to be more careful. I was just going to check your hair for nits.”

Casey took a bite to mask his quickened breathing, and then swallowed. “While I’m eating?”

“You were looking pretty out of it. I thought I could get this done and you could go to sleep.” There was a silence, and Casey took a quick look to the side and saw that Joe was looking sheepish. “Yeah, I guess that’s sort of gross while you’re eating.”

Casey shrugged. Really? He was going to complain about gross after what he’d just washed off his body? “Knock yourself out,” he said, trying to mask his embarrassment. “It would be good not to itch.”

He made it through another hamburger before he pushed the plate away. Joe’s fingers were gentle and firm on his scalp as he sectioned little locks of hair from each other and pulled the tiny nit comb through. Casey could hear the rasp of the teeth against the strands of his hair whenever Joe found something. The television was still on in the front room—a big set, but not a console type—it was playing a sitcom on low volume. Casey’s head lowered to his hands, and above him, Joe started humming as he worked.

“I was born… six gun in my hand…”

It was old rock, nothing that Casey had on cassette tapes back home. Casey had George Michael and Boy George and Madonna, but still, he knew this song. He found himself humming along.

“Bad company, I can’t deny…”

Joe let him, and Casey was still hearing that deep from-your-toes voice as he closed his eyes.