Trailer Trash (12 page)

Nate stared down at his feet. “I’ve seen them.”

“Everybody calls it the Shit Hole. Like, the last place all the trash in this town goes before it dies.”

“And Cody lives there?”

Logan squinted at him through the haze of his cigarette. “Maybe you should ask him.”

Nate pinched the bridge of his nose. Somebody drove by blasting Van Halen, David Lee Roth encouraging them to jump, before the truck rounded the corner and the music faded into the night. “What about the rest? Something about his mom? And lizards? And Cody?” He had to take a deep breath to make himself say the words. “Is he really gay?”

Logan didn’t answer, and Nate finally dropped his hand and faced him. Logan still had his arms crossed. He’d almost finished the cigarette. It smoldered between two thick fingers. “The way Cody tells it, you guys were pretty close over break. Seems like you were friends.”

“We were.”

“But then school starts, and you just run off with your buddies from the Grove without a backward glance.”

“No!” He wasn’t sure if he was angry or just frustrated as hell. “That’s not how it happened. He’s the one avoiding me! I’ve looked for him. I’ve tried to find him. Jesus, that’s why I came here tonight, to this fucking joke of a bowling alley, trying to figure out where the hell he’s been hiding!” He sighed, scrubbing his hand through his hair, his sudden burst of temper already burned out. “It’s like he’s afraid of me or something.”

Logan dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath the toe of his boot. “Or something.”

He obviously knew Cody better than Nate at this point, and Nate tried not to hate him for it. “Look, are you going to tell me where he is or not?”

“At work.” Logan put his hands in his jacket pockets. Nate expected him to pull his cigarettes out again, but he didn’t. “He’s been washing dishes with me up the Tomahawk.”

Nate certainly hadn’t expected that. “Since when?”

“Since school started. We alternate Mondays. He works Wednesday and Friday, so I can play football. I work Tuesday, Thursday. We both work Saturdays, sometimes together, sometimes back-to-back.”

Okay. Here was information Nate could really work with. He felt a small surge of hope. “So he’s there right now?”

“He’s scheduled to work till ten.”

“And what about tomorrow?”

“Sunday? Tomahawk’s closed on Sundays.”

Of course it was. Nate still wasn’t used to living in a town that shut down completely every seventh day. Only Pat’s, the bar on the edge of the town, was open on Sundays, and from what Nate could see, it seemed to do pretty good business too. “Will you see him before then?”

Logan cocked his head, studying Nate as if he couldn’t quite tell if he was a butterfly or just a dumb old miller moth. “Maybe.”

But the way he said it clearly meant,
If I decide I want to.

“Will you ask him to meet me? Tell him I’ve been looking for him. Please. Tell him I’ll meet him tomorrow at noon. At the usual place. Tell him—” He almost said,
Tell him I’m sorry
, but he stopped himself. Cody deserved to hear his apology in person. “Just tell him to come. Will you do that for me? Please?”

Logan pushed off the side of his car and turned to unlock the driver-side door. “For you? No. I won’t do a goddamned thing for you.” He didn’t even glance over his shoulder as he climbed inside. “But I’ll do it for Cody.”

Cody was glad when ten o’clock rolled around. Logan had left at eight, and without him to talk to, the last two hours of Cody’s shift had crawled by. He could have left early—they weren’t all that busy—but unless Frank specifically told him to clock out, Cody kept working, doing the math in his head over and over, trying to determine exactly how much his next paycheck would be worth. It was late October, and the bite of winter was in the air. It was a miracle they hadn’t had snow yet, and all Cody could think about was whether or not this paycheck would give him enough to get a coat.

Not if he wanted a brand-new one from the Sears catalog. He’d need several more weeks for that. He thought of the secondhand shop Nate had taken him to in Rock Springs.

There wasn’t much chance of getting a ride from Nate this time around.

He pushed through the back door of the Tomahawk into the employee parking lot, already reaching for his cigarettes. He was surprised to find Logan there, leaning against the fender of his Camaro and smoking.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Came to give you a ride.”

“Oh.” Logan had given him rides home before, but only when they both got out of work at the same time. Making a second trip back to pick him up was unexpected, but not unwelcome. Sometimes Cody didn’t mind the one-and-a-half-mile walk back home, but he sure wasn’t going to complain about getting to skip it. “Thanks.”

Inside, the Camaro was still warm from the drive over. Cody knew from past trips that Logan didn’t mind people smoking in his car, so he lit one up and cracked the window a bit to let the smoke out.

The engine rumbled to life, and Logan edged them out into the street, turning west. The car had a cassette player, and Logan had some kind of country music on low. Cody wasn’t much into country, but he figured it was better than R.E.M. or Depeche Mode.

“I saw Nate tonight.”

Cody froze, his stomach fluttering. So that’s why Logan had come by—to talk about Nate. Cody kept his eyes averted, staring out the passenger-side window. “So?”

“At the bowling alley.”

That got his attention. His head whipped Logan’s direction. “Nate went to the bowling alley?” He couldn’t even imagine it—Nate walking into that dive, all the burnouts lounging against the video games, smoking so much the ashtrays were overflowing halfway through the night. “Why?”

Logan glanced pointedly his way. “Looking for you.”

Cody’s heart did a funny little dance. He didn’t know if it was from excitement or dread. “What’d he want?”

Logan’s shrug was dramatically casual. “Well, if you had to ask me—and it turns out, you do—I’d say he misses you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I told you, man. He’s been trying to get your attention in social studies all week.”

Cody turned away to stare out the window again. “Not trying too hard, is he?”

Logan made a snorting, scoffing sound of disgust. “You’re not exactly being fair. You think I don’t notice how hard you work to
not
see him looking over at you every five minutes? Jesus, he was staring at you so long on Friday, he didn’t even hear the teacher call his name.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Yeah. Okay.” But he could hear the amusement in Logan’s voice. “That’s how it is. I’m the one who’s full of shit. You betcha.”

Logan could almost always make him laugh, but not this time. “He has his new friends now. All those assholes from Orange Grove. He’s probably just going to ask me to buy him some beer so he can look cool for Jennifer Parker. He knows Vera will sell to me. Then he and his rich pals can all have a good laugh about it.”

“Jesus. Only you could come up with something so pessimistic, you know that?”

Cody didn’t answer.

“Listen, I’ve been up to the mine with those assholes from the Grove. I’ve been to their parties. I’ve seen Nate there with them. And I know you don’t want to believe me, but he doesn’t fit in with them as well as you think. Hell, he didn’t even last thirty minutes at Jennifer Carrington’s party a couple of weeks ago. Ran out of there like his life depended on it, except, you know, trying to look all casual while he did it.” Logan laughed. “I heard he walked in on Brian and Brad doing lines. I think your boyfriend’s too uptight for that scene.”

Cody turned reluctantly toward Logan again, not wanting to expose too much of himself, but wanting to see Logan’s face so he could judge how much of what he said was true and how much was bullshit. He didn’t even bother to contradict the “boyfriend” remark. “But he’s one of them.”

“He has the clothes, I’ll give you that, but that’s as far as it goes. He always sort of hangs back, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world than where he is.”

Cody hadn’t expected that.

They turned into the trailer park, and Logan slowed the car to a crawl on the speed bumps. Cody tossed his smoke out the window and watched the trailers creep past. They dipped under the train tracks, and Logan braked to a stop outside Cody’s trailer. Cody was already reaching for the handle, anxious to escape their awkward conversation.

“Wait.”

Cody did. It’d be damn rude to do anything else after Logan had gone out of his way just to give him a ride.

“He wants to see you. He wanted me to tell you he’ll meet you tomorrow at noon. He said ‘in the usual place,’ whatever that means.”

Cody closed his eyes, trying to stop the little glow that blossomed in his heart. It felt like hope, but hope was a lie. Hope was dangerous. Hope would make him bleed like nothing else in the world could. “Okay.”

He started to pull the handle, but Logan spoke again before he could open the door.

“There’s more.”

And based on the tone of his voice, Cody wasn’t going to like it.

“Jimmy and Larry were there, and Larry gave him an earful, man.”

Cody closed his eyes, leaning his temple against the cold window. “Was this before or after Nate said he wanted to see me?” Because it was possible Nate had asked to see Cody, but then changed his mind after Larry flapped his fat mouth.

“Before. Larry went off. You know how he is. He’s a loudmouth asshole, and he started saying, well . . . He said—”

“I know what he said. I know what they all say.”

“But after that, Nate and I left, and he asked me if any of it was true.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him to ask you.”

Cody wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse. He appreciated that Logan wouldn’t talk shit about him, and yet it almost would have been easier to let Nate get the confirmation he needed from somebody else so that Cody wouldn’t have to see the disgust on his face when he found out the rumors were true.

Some of them, at least.

“And even after all that, he asked me—no, man, he practically fucking
begged
me—to tell you that he wanted to see you. I think he really misses you.” Logan’s voice was quieter now. Upsettingly gentle. “But I thought you deserved fair warning, so you could decide what exactly you wanted to say.”

Cody nodded. He couldn’t deny just how far Logan had gone, not only to deliver Nate’s message, but to make it easier on Cody. “Thanks. For the ride, I mean, and—”
for being my friend.
But he wasn’t sappy enough to say it out loud. “Thanks for everything, man.”

He went quietly into the trailer. His mom’s car was gone, so either she was working, or she was at one of the local bars. He was glad to have the house to himself.

He wouldn’t lie to Nate. That was the one thing he knew. Whatever Nate asked, Cody would tell him the truth. It’d be a relief to finally have it out in the open.

And then?

That was the part he wasn’t sure of.

He brushed his teeth, changed into a pair of sweats, and lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining all the ways their conversation could go.

Some of them ended with them as friends.

Some ended with Nate turning his back on Cody forever.

A few strayed into a place he hadn’t dared imagine before—a place where Nate took Cody’s hand. Where Nate leaned forward and kissed him while the Wyoming wind tried to blow them both away.

He wasn’t sure which possibility scared him more.

Nate spent half the night thinking about the things Larry had told him, and about Logan’s refusal to give him straight answers. He suspected Larry hadn’t lied about the Hole. As much as Nate hated to think it was true, it fit. Why else would Cody have worked so hard to hide his home from him? It bothered him that Cody hadn’t trusted him.

As for the rest of the things Larry had said?

Nate was pretty sure those would turn out to be nothing more than teenagers being assholes. He spent the next morning debating whether or not to confront Cody with Larry’s lies.

Nate arrived at the Hole just before noon. He parked his car where he always did, on the edge of the dirt lot that held the four decrepit trailers. He climbed out of his car and glanced at them, each one somehow seeming worse than the last.