Blind Fall

by Christopher Rice

  Anger surged inside him, and the kid rocked back on his heels at the sight of his expression. “You don’t need to be an asshole,” John said.

  “I give a lot of head a lot of the time. If you want my help, stop acting like I called your mother a whore, girlfriend.”

  “Where is he?” John asked quietly.

  “Why do you want to know?” the guy repeated, slowly, drawing out each word as if John were a badly behaved eight-year-old.

  “I said some things to him earlier tonight that I’m not proud of. I’m here to apologize.” Spiky squinted at him; John figured Alex hadn’t confided that much in the little shit-ass, so he decided to keep the details to himself.

  “Philip Bloch,” the guy said, as if just giving John his full name was some kind of defeat. Then, he summoned a co-worker to take his place, and John followed him into a crowded wood-paneled room that led out onto an equally crowded patio, where two muscular men in thong underwear gyrated on boxes above a largely oblivious crowd. John was busy trying to avert his eyes from the sexualized display of male flesh when he knocked into a drag queen done up like a 1940s cigarette girl, only in a nod to the current age, her cigarette box was filled with candy and breath mints. John smiled against his will and the girl said, “If you ever feel like doing porn, call me.”

  Philip jerked him forward by one shoulder and pulled him deeper into the crowd. John said, “Alex actually came here?”

  “He used to work here. Is that a problem for you?” Philip stopped suddenly and turned to face him. Their noses almost touched, and John realized that Philip had deliberately brought them to a halt in the middle of a veritable sea of homosexuals.

  “This is about Mike, isn’t it?” Against his will, John found himself scanning the crowd around him.

  The men all around him were more clean-cut and attractive than he would have liked them to be, and the long looks they were giving him were cold, intent, focused—they made him feel as if he had farted in church. This was the cycle he went through with Alex, and now with these men. First came the belief that they weren’t truly homosexual because they didn’t look like those leather-clad slow dancers at The Blue Oyster Bar in the Police Academy movies he’d loved as a kid. Then came the paralyzing embarrassment, as if their looks meant he had something hanging from his nose. Then, like a lightning bolt, the anger struck—anger that other men he could take in a fight, hands down, could make his cheeks get hot.

  “Hiding in plain sight,” Philip shouted over the music. “That’s all he told me. You want to tell me why he needs to hide anywhere?”

  “There’s been some trouble,” John said. Back in his real hometown, Baton Rouge, “trouble” was a polite term used to describe everything from flat tires to wife-beatings, and John couldn’t manage a more suitably general term for the gay stranger standing nose-to-nose with him.

  Philip sneered and started to lead him through the crowd again. John had barely made it another few steps when a hand sunk into his ass. He seized the guy’s wrist and used it to bend his entire arm back over his right shoulder. The perv was about half John’s height and twice his weight, but John kept pushing back on the guy’s awkwardly bent arm until the man bent at the knees and his mouth became a silent O. He shoved the guy backward and when he saw how much trouble he had regaining his footing, John realized how drunk the stupid son of a bitch was.

  John turned around, preparing himself for Philip’s anger. But his new guide was standing with his hands on his hips, having watched their brief tussle with what appeared to be boredom.

  “Sorry,” John said. “Was that a hate crime?”

  “Not in my book,” Philip said. “Nobody has the right to grab my ass unless I invite them to, and I didn’t hear you invite him, so you get a pass on that one.” They started through the crowd again, toward a door in a small outbuilding that sat at the back of the courtyard. Once they were inside a cramped and darkened hallway, Philip said, “He wanted to stay here until my shift ended and then I was supposed to take him home with me.”

  They passed a cramped employee lounge, then a messy office where a heavyset woman in a white T-shirt that bore the bar’s logo sat behind a desk talking quietly into a phone. She looked like she could hammer the shit out of them both. “And after you took him home? Then what?”

  “Then we were going to make sweet, sweet love in the morning light. I don’t know what. All I know is that he showed up here a couple hours ago looking like he had run all the way from that hick mountain town he’s been living in. He won’t tell me what the hell’s going on but I have a pretty good guess it’s got—”

  John cut him off with, “What about his parents?”

  “His mother’s a fucking bitch. She pretty much cut him off when she found out he was a fag. Hasn’t said a word to him since.”

  “His father? He gave him the house they were living in, right?”

  “I’m sorry. Are you actually friends with Alex? His father’s been dead for three years. Wait! They were living in it? Did they move?” When John didn’t answer, Philip went pale and cursed under his breath as he stared at the floor between them. A transformation seemed to take place inside him as he realized that by harboring Alex he had taken part in something more far-reaching than he had previously assumed. He averted his eyes from John, led him to a closed door, opened it, and ushered him inside quickly, which fooled John into thinking they were walking into a real room. Then he knocked into a rolling mop bucket and saw Alex sitting on a bar stool right next to it, looking ghostly under the single hanging bulb. The three of them were wedged inside a crowded janitor’s closet.

  Philip stood just inside the door. John noticed he was holding the knob with one hand wedged between the door and the small of his back, as if he were trying to keep them both prisoners now that all of three of them were together. Alex studied John with a furrowed brow and a pained look that exhibited his deep fatigue.

  Philip broke the silence. “Your new friend here started using the past tense when we were talking about your house. So I guess that means that either your house burned down or—”

  John cut him off. “You really thought this was a good place to come?”

  “I didn’t plan on staying here for very long,” Alex said.

  “Right. Philip was supposed to take you home. Which puts him in danger.”

  “You’re real helpful all of a sudden.”

  Philip stepped forward. “I need one of you to tell me what’s going on.” Neither man answered. “Fine. Then I need one of you to tell me what the fuck happened to Mike.”

  The mere mention of Mike’s name sent a shudder through Alex. Philip noticed this, and as Alex screwed his eyes shut and tried to suck in a breath through his nose, Philip closed the distance between them, tenderly cupped Alex’s chin in one hand. “Babe,” he whispered gently. John couldn’t take his eyes off this display, couldn’t decide whether it was their motions that seemed unreal to him or the ease with which they executed them. They’ve got to be kidding me with this, John thought. They’re homos. Not women.

  Alex blinked back tears and tried to meet Philip’s gaze, but then he seemed to remember John’s presence. He reached up and took Philip’s hand away from his chin, shook his head brusquely. It had been a small moment, but it told John that Alex was filtering himself—not lying to him, but showing him a different face than the one he almost displayed to his close friend, a furious and angry one, meant to imply that the guy who wore it was tougher than he actually was. “Can you give us a minute?” John asked Philip.

  “I’ll start counting right now,” Philip said.

  He left them alone with bass beats knocking at the walls all around them and rattling the mops in their buckets. Finally John said, “You pull another move like you did in my trailer and you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “What are you doing here, John?” Alex asked, his voice breathy and distant, his eyes glazed with exhaustion and the kind of numbness that moves in to turn fear i
nto something bearable.

  “We’re going to go to the authorities. The right authorities.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “The sheriff of Hanrock County.”

  Alex’s silent laughter shook his shoulders, twisted his mouth into a joker’s grimace. “Are you shitting me? Hanrock County is one of the most right-wing places in the country. If I’m going to accuse one of their own of murder without a shred of physical evidence, I’ll need the entire Marine Corps backing me up. Can you arrange that? Besides, what are we going to accuse him of? Having a weird fucking handprint?”

  “Trying to frame you for murder.”

  “Bullshit. He wanted to kill me.”

  “Then why did he spend so much time on Mike while you were drugged downstairs?”

  “Maybe you stopped him. Maybe I was next.”

  “So he ties Mike to the bed and leaves you there, passed out, without any restraints?” Alex took a moment to consider this. John checked the door behind them to make sure Philip wasn’t eavesdropping. “He wasn’t interested in killing you. He wanted you to take the fall for it. If I hadn’t shown up, it might have worked. I didn’t believe your story about Mike spiking your drink when you first told me. If I hadn’t seen Duncan’s handprint on the doorknob, I still wouldn’t believe it.”

  Alex took this in, closed his eyes briefly as he seemed to accept it.

  “We need to get out of here,” John said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Someplace where you can think this through. Look at what your options really are.”

  “You’re going to help me? That’s one of my options?” John nodded because it was easier than giving voice to his agreement. When Alex stared into his eyes intently, it looked as if he were about to reject an offer John hadn’t brought himself to make explicitly. “Because Mike saved your life. Semper Fi and all that?”

  There was nothing John hated more than when civilians used Marine Corps expressions with false bravado. But Alex was a few steps closer than your average civilian to knowing the true meaning of expressions like the one he had just used. John just had trouble with what had put Alex in such a place.

  “Fine,” Alex said, as if the offer on the table were nothing more than a lunch date. “Start by handling Philip.”

  In the hallway outside the broom closet, Philip leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest, lips puckered in anger. He stood up straight when he saw the door open. “Did anyone see him come in?” John asked.

  “No,” Philip said. “He called my cell and asked me to meet him in back.”

  “Good.”

  “It is?”

  John stared at the guy, hoping to unnerve him. He didn’t see any evidence of this taking place so he said, “It’s called plausible deniability, my friend.”

  “Is Mike dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murdered?”

  “You got any vacation days coming to you, Philip? Because if you keep asking me questions like this, you better take them all, starting tomorrow, so that when the people who are looking for us come here asking questions—”

  A door opened behind them, and John turned to see the heavyset lesbian he had spotted earlier emerging from the office down the hallway. Philip gave her a terse nod and a smile, and the woman pointed a finger at them in warning before she shuffled off. Maybe she thought they were trying to sneak a romantic moment together. Once the woman was gone, Philip said, “I’ve got two weeks of vacation and some sick days. From both my jobs.”

  The color left Philip’s face as John told him the entire story. Then, in the silence that followed, it returned until the guy’s cheeks were flame red with an outrage John had yet to marshal.

  “You’re here to help him?” Philip asked.

  John had barely addressed the question himself, so he just nodded, hoping Philip would move on.

  “How?” Philip asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Philip seemed genuinely affected by this display of vulnerability on John’s part, if only because he waited a considerable amount of time before asking his next question.

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to.” When Philip shook his head in confusion, John added, “Mike saved my life.”

  At the sound of these words, Philip retreated into his anger. “Mike’s dead,” he said.

  “That doesn’t change what he did.”

  “What he did for you, maybe. You want to know what he did to Alex? He forced him to give up his entire life. He forced him to move to the middle of fucking nowhere, where this kind of shit can happen and nobody notices. I don’t care about Mike Bowers and I don’t care what kind of bullshit death-before-dishonor crap you’ve got all tied up in this. I am asking you: What are you going to do for Alex?”

  “I’m going to protect him,” John snapped. “It’s the only thing I know how to do for him, all right? I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a cop. I’m not even a Marine anymore. But I know how to protect him, and that’s what I’m going to do, okay?”

  Philip seemed to relax, studying John without any sense of anger or urgency. “I swear to God, I watched Alex fuck up his entire life for one Marine. I won’t watch him do it for another one. If you so much as make him sniffle…”

  John thought of Emilio’s foul comment about the sex appeal of Marines. An ace in every hole, man. Now Philip was basically saying that Alex was no different from the type of woman Emilio had been referring to—the kind of woman who got freaky and stupid for any man in uniform. But what had been in it for Mike? Maybe he just got off on being worshiped.

  Philip was about to turn away when John said, “You make it sound like Mike used to beat the shit out of him.”

  “No!” Philip snapped, taking the bait with a child’s petulance. He seemed to sense that he had exposed his own jealousy because he dropped his eyes. “I just can’t help but wonder if we would be here right now if Alex could have loved someone like Alex.”

  “Or like you,” John said.

  John walked back to his truck but stopped half a block away. For a good while he stood in the entrance to a service alley and scanned the street for any unfamiliar vehicles. A small-town captain like Duncan surely didn’t have unmarked cars at his disposal, but there was a chance he might have put out some sort of bogus APB on John and Alex, enlisting other police departments in the hunt. Of course, that wouldn’t fit with Duncan’s previous behavior, which included running like hell and not calling for backup.

  Once he was satisfied he wasn’t being watched, John got in his truck and circled the block. He steered through the tiny service alley behind the club, saw Philip waiting for him, the back door open and propped against one shoulder.

  As soon as Alex was in the car, John let his foot off the brake.

  “I need to go to my car,” Alex said. A visit to Alex’s vehicle had not been part of the escape plan they had just discussed. John kept his mouth shut, but Alex could sense his anger. “I need something out of the backseat. It’ll take two seconds.”

  “Fine.”

  Alex gave him directions to a quiet street three blocks from The Catch Trap that was lined with tall, sickly palm trees and unadorned stucco duplexes with barren front lawns. When Alex saw his car, he placed his hand around the door handle and unbuckled his seat belt. But just then, John saw the black Royal Marquis parked across the street and several car lengths away, in a spot that offered a perfect view of Alex’s vehicle for the police officer John imagined was sitting behind the heavily tinted windshield.

  When John accelerated, Alex cried, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “There’s a cop back there!”

  “Bullshit!”

  Alex unlocked the door, cracked it by several inches, so John accelerated more and turned the first corner. “Knock it off!”

  “Every piece of evidence I have that Mike ever existed is in the trunk of that car. Now you stop this fucking truck!”

  “There is an un
marked cop car waiting for you back there.”

  “Then shoot him!”

  Alex threw open the passenger door and, because he felt he had no other choice, John slammed on the brakes. He wasn’t sure whether the sudden stop threw Alex from the truck, but the next thing John knew, Alex was skittering toward the sidewalk like a circus clown, as he tried to break into a run and get his balance at the same time. He half-succeeded, almost tripping over the curb, then taking off into the shadows between streetlights.

  The passenger door stood open. For what felt like a dangerously long moment John just sat there, listening to the hum of his idling engine. Then he reached across the empty seat, pulled the passenger door shut, and hit the accelerator. As he approached the street where Alex’s car was parked, he killed his headlights, slowed to about five miles per hour, and nosed slightly around the corner. He saw a single shadow standing in the middle of the street. The Marquis hadn’t moved. The shadow started walking toward John. It appeared misshapen at first, and then John realized Alex was carrying a large cardboard box in both arms. Without a word, he dropped it in the truck’s cargo bay; then he opened the passenger-side door and got into the cab.

  They sat in frosty silence like a married couple that had just argued themselves into exhaustion. Finally John said, “You really expected me to shoot a cop for you?”

  “No. I expected you to leave.”

  “I should have.”

  “That box is the only evidence I have that Mike Bowers was a part of my life,” he said. “You can be sure that if his parents ever get their hands on his body, I will not be invited to the funeral.”

  John didn’t take the bait, nursed his anger for the next few minutes.

  “Where are we going?” Alex asked him.

  “I’ve got a stop to make, too.”

  Almost forty minutes later, they were leaving behind the Pacific Beach neighborhood where John had switched his Tacoma’s license plates with those of a Honda Accord parked in front of a Cape Cod–style cottage a few blocks from the ocean.