Oasis of Night

by J. S. Cook

  He didn’t say the word, but I knew what he meant. Yeah, I’d heard that word a lot. I hated that word.

  “Hey, look.” I caught up with him and took hold of his arm just above the elbow, turning him to face me. His face in the moonlight had a beauty and nobility that belonged solely to him, and his big, dark eyes were sad. I cupped his cheek in my hand; his skin was warm, and I sensed the subtle rise and fall of his breath as he struggled to calm himself. “They kicked me out on a blue ticket. You might as well know. That’s why I’m here instead of on the front lines with the rest of the boys.” Some of the bitterness I felt inevitably spilled over into my voice and it made me sound weak and self-pitying, and I hated that. “You think every goddamn American, every Brit, every Australian—” I thought about Kevin MacBride for some reason, and his friend Andros Scala. “I spend the war serving beer and sandwiches to tourists or topping up coffee cups.”

  “Blue ticket?” Callan shook his head. “I’d like to get my hands on the sons of bitches who think giving a man a blue ticket is any way to win this war.” He leaned in and kissed me, a gentle touch of his lips against mine, but it went through me like a bolt of lightning. I gathered him into my arms as I deepened the kiss, probing his mouth with my tongue, tasting him. It felt so good to hold him in my arms, to feel the heat of his body burning through my clothes.

  “Well, boy!” He grinned at me. “Why, you’re all about diving right in, ain’t you?”

  “Sorry.” I suddenly felt foolish, like a teenage boy on his first date. “I hope you don’t think….”

  “What I think is we have reached our destination.” He indicated a bench, set in a hollow depression behind a grove of trees. “Come on, sit down here with me.” He patted the wooden seat next to him, and I sat down. From this vantage point, the entire expanse of Conception Bay spread out before us, glistening darkly in the moonlight. “Yeah, makes you wonder how many goddamn tin fish are out there right now, waiting to blow this whole island to kingdom come.” Callan fished a hip flask out of his pocket, handed it to me. “Drink?”

  “No, thanks, I….”

  He took a pull. “Don’t drink?”

  “Gave it up for Lent.”

  Callan laughed. “You’re a funny one, Jack. How’d you come to be running a cafe here, anyway? I mean, why here?”

  I shrugged. “Why not here?” I told him about Frankie Missalo, about how I’d left Philly to follow him up here after Judy died. I left out the part about the botched back-alley abortion and about standing on the bridge over the Delaware that freezing cold morning. “Seemed as good a place as any.”

  “You afraid they were gonna charge you with that girl’s murder?”

  Something deep inside my gut clenched. “I didn’t kill her.” I remember how Tex’s face had looked when I said it. Was Tex her brother? Had my intuition been right about that? It seemed too close to be a coincidence, when he’d told me about her, back in Cairo. Did he know about me and Judy? Did anybody?

  “Ain’t nobody saying you did.” He studied me for a long moment, and then turned to look at the expanse of shining water in front of us. “Where I come from—little place called Vardaman, in Mississippi—we ain’t close to the sea. Well, not this close, at any rate. I used to dream about seeing the ocean up close like this, so close you can taste the salt on your tongue.”

  I caught the point of his chin and turned his face to me and kissed him. I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted this.

  Callan groaned as I deepened the kiss, and his arms went around me, pulling me tight against him. The zipper on his jacket was so cold it burned my fingers; I yanked the tab down and slipped my hand inside, under his clothes, my palm flat against his warm skin. His chest was muscular and lightly furred, his nipples exquisitely sensitive to touch.

  “You gonna kill me.” Callan dragged my face up and kissed me savagely, guiding my hand to the clothed bulge at his groin. I cupped my hand around his hard cock and rubbed, starting slow and easy, pacing him and myself while we kissed, our mingled breath steaming white into the cold night air. Callan’s hand made short work of my zipper, slipped into my pants and swiftly negotiated the gap in the front of my shorts, fingers closing around my cock. He bent over me and sucked me into his mouth and the world went away. I was dimly aware of the hard bench digging into the back of my head, of the cloak of stars unfurled above me and the narrow trunks of the trees that obligingly screened us, but my entire universe had shrunk down to a set of sharply defined sensory impressions. He sucked me like an old pro, and within maybe ten strokes, I was coming, but feebly, and what should have been a tidal wave of glorious sensation was instead a mere shudder. An awful sense of guilt dropped over me like a filthy curtain.

  “Stop.” I pushed him away from me. “Stop. We have to stop.” Jack, let us bathe together now, and then we will love each other slowly….

  He sat up, wiping his mouth on his handkerchief. “What’s wrong?”

  I was saved from uncomfortable explanations by the sound of voices coming up the path. “I… somebody’s coming.”

  The whirling red beam of a police car stabbed the darkness, and I could hear men shouting. I tucked myself inside my clothes while Rick Callan did the same, and then we started back down the path together, walking side by side but not speaking.

  Alphonsus Picco met us halfway up the hill, carrying a flashlight. He swept the beam over our faces. “Mr. Stoyles, I think you had best come with me.” It was a measure of Picco’s agitation that he didn’t ask what I’d been doing up in the woods with Callan in the dark.

  “Sergeant Picco. Is something wrong?” One of Picco’s constables was asking Callan for identification, which the sergeant provided. The constable looked it over quickly and seemed satisfied; he motioned Callan to go on.

  Picco’s pale eyes flickered over my face, and he seemed to be barely holding back an expression of disgust. “Your… friend is free to go, but I insist you accompany me back to the city.”

  Callan touched my arm. “Everything okay, Jack?” There was no recrimination in his gaze. Of course, he assumed we’d merely gotten interrupted by the Constabulary’s untimely arrival. It wasn’t like he could see inside my head.

  “It’s fine.” I nodded to him. “I’ll call you in the morning.” I followed Picco back down the hill to the waiting police car. No less than three additional cars had been called out, but I didn’t think all this was for me necessarily. Some of Picco’s men were searching the beach while others had been deployed along the narrow strip of trees at the base of the hill. “You boys lose your way?”

  Picco held the passenger door open for me. “Please, sit in the front. You are not under arrest.”

  The car’s interior was as spotlessly clean as Picco himself, and just as bare of ornament. He got in and started the engine, but didn’t put the car in gear. “Mr. Stoyles… Jack.” And just like that, all the starch went out of him. He turned to me, as anguished as I’ve ever seen him. “There was an accident tonight in your cafe.”

  “What do you mean, an accident?” My gut twisted itself into a knot. “Somebody break one of my windows again?”

  Picco gazed out the windscreen, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “No. I am afraid it is much more serious this time—nngh.” This last sound was a strangled whimper, the noise a grown man makes when he’s trying his damnedest not to cry. Hearing Picco make it alarmed me like nothing else could. “Please. You must come with me at once. There’s no time to waste.” He put the car into gear with hands that shook. “There’s no more time at all.”

  Chapter 11

  THE HEARTACHE was swarming with uniformed policemen when I got there, most of them grouped around a big, sticky pool of blood just inside the cafe’s front door. I saw Tex standing off to the side, talking to a young constable, who noted everything Tex was saying; there was blood on the front of the Texan’s shirt, and his amiable, freckled face was white to the lips.

  “What the hell’s going on here?�
�� I grabbed Picco’s arm as we came in through the door. “It looks like—”

  “Jack!” Tex saw me and came rushing over. “Did he tell you?”

  “No.” We’d spent the journey back from Topsail in comparative silence, listening to the swish of the car’s tires on the road. “What’s with the blood? Somebody get stabbed in here tonight?”

  As soon as I said the word “stabbed,” everybody got real quiet.

  The constable who’d been talking to Tex flipped his notebook shut and slipped out the door. The jingling of the bell sounded like a klaxon. “Chris DuBois was injured.”

  Picco was holding himself together, but barely; I admired his restraint. If someone had stabbed the guy I was in love with—

  Yeah. Better skip it. “Chris? What happened to him?” I fumbled for a chair and sat down, and Anita brought us some coffee while Tex and Picco filled me in.

  Tex had been in the kitchen, fixing an order; Chris had been at his usual post behind the bar. The Heartache’s bar wasn’t visible from the kitchen—in order to see Chris, Tex would have had to come out of the kitchen and past my office—so Tex had no idea what was going on until he heard Chris yelling for him. He’d run out of the kitchen to see Chris slumped on the floor, right where the puddle of blood was, bleeding from numerous stab wounds. Chris wasn’t in any shape to talk, but from what Tex could make out, three guys in dark pants and dark jackets had come into the cafe asking where I was. When Chris told them I was out, they’d rushed at him and stabbed him. He’d been taken to St. Clare’s hospital in an ambulance not half an hour ago.

  THE CHARGE nurse was tall and thin, her lips pressed together in a disapproving frown. I explained to her I was Chris’s employer, and I lied and said Picco was his brother-in-law. She agreed to let us in, “But for five minutes only. Mr. DuBois is badly hurt. The doctor wants him to rest.”

  They had Chris in a room by himself, and as soon as I got closer, I knew why. Whoever had stabbed him had wanted to make a thorough job of it. He had two black eyes, and there were deep cuts in his face, across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and down his arms. His palms were cut, probably as he was defending himself, and most of his torso was a mass of bandages. I counted four drains running out of various wounds on his body. “Aw, Chris.” I laid my hand gently on his forehead. “I’m sorry.” I felt like crying. If I’d stayed at the Heartache instead of gallivanting around with Callan, none of this would have happened.

  “Not your fault, Jack.” His voice was weak and strained; obviously, he’d sustained some kind of internal injuries, probably from the stab wounds. “M’gonna be okay. Just you wait. Be back at… Heartache. No time.”

  “Never mind that. Just… concentrate on getting better. Okay? You just… get better.” There was so much I wanted to say to him, but I didn’t dare, things like you’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had and I’d go to the wall for you, Chris and tell me who did this to you so I can run over there and finish the bastards off. I didn’t say any of it. I handed him over to Picco and went out into the corridor.

  Rick Callan was waiting for me, standing by the nurses’ station with his hands in his pockets. When he saw me, he pushed away from the wall and came over. “I heard what happened at your place tonight. Anything I can do?”

  I shook my head. “Naw. I just…. I just want to get out of here.”

  His dark eyes assessed me with their usual keenness. “Don’t like hospitals, huh?”

  “Don’t like hospitals.”

  “Come on.” We went downstairs and out the front door; Callan’s car was parked in the smaller lot behind the hospital. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I rubbed my eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Little after eleven.” Callan cast a glance at me. “You sure you’re okay, Jack? You don’t look okay—now, that’s just my impression. Having one of your guys get all cut up like that’s a hard thing for a man to take, especially if he’s a friend.” He pulled onto Ricketts Road, heading for Cashin Avenue and downtown.

  “I don’t know who would do this. I don’t know why.” I searched my memory for a list of likely candidates but kept coming back to the man with Jonah Octavian’s face I’d seen in the Heartache. Maybe Octavian wasn’t really dead, and what I’d seen in Cairo had been a carefully constructed ruse meant to throw me off the scent. No…. I had seen Andros Scala kill him, and I didn’t think Scala was the type to make a mistake.

  Callan sighed. “Jack, there’s a lot I can’t tell you—a lot I don’t have clearance to tell you—but I can tell you this….” We stopped for a red signal and Callan turned to me, his features lit by the eerie glow from the car’s dashboard lights; it almost looked like he was on fire. “There are people in this town who are here for no good reason… enemies, plotters, and saboteurs. They’d target you simply because you’re an American.” The signal changed, and he let out the clutch, easing the big Packard sedan forward. “Now, don’t smirk. You mind me when I tell you something, son.”

  I smiled. It had been a long time since someone had called me that. “I’m listening.”

  “There is a lot of stuff going on in this town you don’t know nothing about.” The brakes squeaked as the big car slowly navigated the steep incline of Patrick Street. “You got guys coming off of ships in the harbor, sneaking ashore to do God knows what. Maybe it was you they were looking for—you think about that?”

  “Yeah.” Maybe I’d been followed to Cairo by men who knew what Sam really did for a living, and who were part of the gang that had kidnapped him in the first place—kidnapped him and killed Tareenah Halim. It was just possible they’d come here to find me and finish me off. “Thank you for… this.” I was suddenly and absurdly grateful for his steady, solid presence. “You’ve been real swell to me tonight.” Looking at him in the dim light of the car’s interior, I was forcibly reminded, again, of how handsome he was and how much I liked him—and reminded, too, I didn’t want to be alone tonight. “Rick?”

  “Hm?” He turned left onto Water Street, heading toward the Heartache.

  “What time are you on duty tomorrow morning?”

  “I am off tomorrow morning.” He grinned at me. “Why?”

  “Would you….” Christ, this shouldn’t have been so awkward. The man had blown me on a park bench, for chrissakes. It wasn’t like we were strangers.

  “Don’t feel like being alone?” His gaze was knowing. He saw right through me, and I didn’t know what to say. “Look, Jack. I ain’t asking you for nothing. I don’t expect nothing.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “No strings, son. Just in case you ain’t heard, there’s a war on. Ain’t none of us can make long-term plans.”

  “Do you want to… uh, come over to my place?” I was close to tears, and the damnedest thing was, I didn’t know why. I wanted comfort. I didn’t want to be alone, and there was something about Callan that I wanted to be near. He was safe.

  “Yeah.” He reached across and took my hand. “You bet.”

  Callan parked the car in the alley behind the Heartache, and we went up to my quarters above the cafe. Tex, I knew, was bunking at the Y tonight, so we had the place to ourselves. I shot a glance at the spot where Chris had been stabbed: someone—probably Tex—had cleaned up the blood. I reminded myself to give the kid a raise. Callan stopped just inside the door to my rooms and looked around. “You got a nice place here, Jack. You’ve made a real home for yourself.”

  I went to him and slid his coat off his shoulders. He sighed and leaned back against me. Stop thinking about Sam. Sam is over. This is now. “I want you to feel welcome here.” I pressed my mouth against the nape of his neck, wrapped my arms around his waist.

  “I do.” He turned in my embrace so we were facing each other. “I do feel welcome, Jack.” We were of a height, and he rested his hands on my shoulders. “As long as you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable.”

  I put out all the lights except a little oud burner on the mantelpiece, a souvenir of
my time in Cairo. I’d bought it the morning of Tareenah’s funeral, from a tiny stall at the edge of the Muski bazaar, intending to give it to Sam as a sort of mourning gift, only I’d never gotten around to it. I undressed Rick Callan by the light of its tiny, flickering flame, drawing my hands down his naked chest and pulling him into my arms. He was warm and beautiful and alive, solid and real, and when we moved to lie down together on my bed, I knew I wanted this, needed it.

  “Put your hands on me,” he murmured, and I did. I smoothed his naked flesh and kissed him, laying a trail from the hollow of his throat to his navel. He groaned quietly when I leaned in and licked the head of his swollen cock, and his strong hands moved to rest against the nape of my neck. “Oh, sweetheart.” He sighed when I drew him into my mouth. “Oh, darling.”

  His warm skin tasted like salt, and I worked him slowly, taking him up one peak and down another, until he bucked and twisted under me, seeking his release. He was quiet when he came, his big hands fisting the sheets, his body straining in every muscle and tendon, and I held him in my mouth until his release spent itself and he was still. We lay together afterward, and he was so very gentle with me as we loved each other slowly. He wrapped one leg around my waist and pulled me to him, enfolding me in his arms as our kisses grew torrid and the slow pulse began to beat inside me. There was nothing in my mind besides what we were doing, and how he was making me feel, a primitive throb thundering along my veins, filling me up inside. He was a hot mouth and a pair of warm hands and a soothing voice in the dark, and before I knew what was happening, I was sobbing my release into his shoulder as wave after wave crested and crashed over me, dragging me under.

  I didn’t know too much for a little while after that: I was a sated body and a pair of eyes staring into the dark while my muscles shivered and twitched, and a thousand tiny aftershocks sizzled along my nerves like captive sparks. I heard the scrape of a match as Rick lit a cigarette, and then the brief flare illuminated his face. “Thank you.” His voice was hushed, as if in deference to the night, or maybe this—whatever this was—had evoked the same feelings in him as it had in me. “That was… real nice.” We shared the one cigarette, smoking it down to the end, and then he crushed it out. “Well. Guess I should get going.”