Clear Water

by Amy Lane

  Whiskey sighed and dragged his hand through his hair, but he didn’t back away. “Water, some sandwiches, maybe some trail mix. And sunblock. And wear your hat.”

  Patrick felt a quiet smile from somewhere. “And Patrick is flammable,” he added, laughing a little at his own joke.

  Whiskey nodded and looked away. “And Patrick is flammable,” he added, but he sounded, if anything, sad.

  Patrick cranked up his smile about three notches and said, “Yeah, let me do the dishes, then I’ll pack. Go get Fly Bait and do your science-dude shit. I’ll be ready when you are.”

  Whiskey was still looking some place past Patrick’s shoulder, and suddenly his brown eyes met Patrick’s with a sort of inscrutable intensity. “Patrick, this isn’t over, okay? You and me? You want to stay here, you want to keep sleeping in my bed, that’s fine. I like you there. You’re warm and you’re kind, and it’s comfortable, having you there. But I’m going to want you, and you’re going to want me, and if you don’t want to follow through on that, that’s fine too. But you’ll need to decide which way you want it, and you need to make it clear when you make your decision. I’m, like, twelve years older than you, and I don’t sleep around. I’m not going to hit on you just because you’re cute and you’re here. I need to know it’s something you want, and it’s something you need, and you’re not just doing it because you think you need to put out because I’m being human to you. You don’t. All you need to do is be human back.”

  Patrick couldn’t look at him anymore. He stared at his hands instead. “I thought we already established I’m a spaz,” he muttered.

  Whiskey’s half-irritated laugh was less intense than the long speech that Patrick, thanks to his fucking LBP, had been able to keep track of through each painful, embarrassing word. “All we’ve really established is that you sleep with the wrong men.”

  Patrick thought of Cal, thought of waking up half-dead and bereft of his credit cards and his cash and his phone and his car. “Can’t argue with that,” he muttered. “Not really sure I want to fuck with the one guy who hasn’t tried to take advantage of me,” he said apologetically.

  Whiskey nodded. “Well, you let me know if you change your mind about that.” He turned then, before Patrick could say anything, and Patrick watched him go. God, he was easy to look at. And kind. And unassuming. And not trying to get Patrick’s money or a piece of his ass.

  He was, in short, everything Patrick didn’t know what to do with in a man. Patrick, in fact, was probably more comfortable with the two-headed frog.

  HELPING Whiskey plant the probes should have been a pain in the ass. It was hot; the marsh grass kept razoring Patrick’s legs; every step sank him into the mud, and it was smelly and gross; and there were bugs, and they were making Patrick just plain old apeshit. But listening to Whiskey’s conversation with Fly Bait and his general grump-funking at the world in general was high amusement. Patrick managed not to talk for most of the time simply because Whiskey was so entertaining.

  “Yeah, I’m putting the goddamned probe in. No, I don’t know which one it is. Should I? Well, no shit, Fly Bait, I’m not going to put the sulfur probe in a place with too much vegetation. I’ve got as many goddamned letters after my name as you do—why not tell me not to put the methane probe in a pile of cowshit while you’re at it?”

  Fly Bait—in spite of her unusual nickname—didn’t rise to the bait often. In fact, most of the time, her response was, “Fuck you, Whiskey,” and then she’d move on to the next task. She did this often enough that Patrick could mimic her timing perfectly.

  “Oh, Jesus, is that one registering? It looks dinged. I fucking dinged it last time I used it. Fuck. Well, they say they’ll withstand anything. Fly Bait, are you getting that one yet? Fly Bait? Jesus, Fly Bait, how fucking long does it take to register a fucking probe?”

  “Fuck you, Whiskey. I’ve got it.”

  And so on. Until suddenly Whiskey brought up something that neither of them could blow off.

  “Aw, fuck. Did we bring any of the fucking Off? The mosquitoes are eating the fuck out of me. Patrick here is a walking bite. This is a fucking West Nile zone, isn’t it? Goddammit….”

  “Oh, fuck.” Fly Bait’s voice was succinct. “Jesus, Whiskey—I didn’t even think when you guys went out there. They’ve been pretty good with the standing water protocols—Jesus, sometimes the letters behind the name… you know the rest.”

  “Only spell dumbass,” Whiskey finished for her. He looked over his shoulder at Patrick, who looked back, scratching at his neck.

  “Am I gonna die of the bird flu?” he asked without interest.

  “Probably not. But if you are, you won’t know it until you wake up blind or with some sort of shitty side effect that no one’s heard of.”

  “Fucking awesome. Are we almost done? If I’m going to die, I want to swim first.”

  Whiskey grinned at him, the first absolutely voluntary action of non-irritation that Patrick had seen since they’d hiked down the little dirt road by the abandoned dock and taken a right into the wetlands. “Me too. But let’s go back early, and then we can go in town and get some mosquito repellent.”

  Patrick sighed. “Yeah. Fine. Fucking bugs—they really are going to fuck up the best part of the day, aren’t they?”

  Again that irrepressible, oh-so-sexy, confident grin. The best thing about it was that Patrick could see the Wesley Keenan in it, the undergrad who couldn’t get laid. The worst thing was that it made his heart race, his stomach cramp, and his breathing come so fast he was light headed. “You mean listening to me swear at equipment wasn’t a treat?”

  Aw, fuckitall. Patrick grinned back. “Okay. The second-best part of the day.”

  Whiskey chuckled and asked for the next neatly labeled probe. Patrick handed it over, Whiskey reported where he was sticking it, and Fly Bait registered that it was sending telemetry.

  “You know that in two days we have to come back and pick them all up again, don’t you?” Whiskey asked, and Patrick nodded.

  “How come two days?”

  “Because the last quadrant numbers are really wonky. We’re leaving a set of probes there, and this spot is upriver. We want to see if the numbers are wonky here or if whatever is going on with the baking soda and the illegal pesticides is going on somewhere in the middle.” Whiskey grew sober for a minute. “You know what’s between this dock and the other one, don’t you, Patrick?”

  “My dad’s factory, a paper factory, and an abandoned warehouse my dad owns but doesn’t use,” Patrick replied promptly, and Whiskey must have been startled, because he fumbled the probe in his hands and almost dropped it.

  Patrick shrugged. “I know the area. Sue me. But you’re not going to find my dad’s recycling plant is doing anything wrong.”

  Whiskey looked at him, and he seemed honestly interested. Patrick shrugged and looked around at the hip-high marsh grasses. They’d seen pheasants, frogs, rabbits, and, far off, a coyote, in this unoccupied strip of land by the Sacramento River. It was far from abandoned. He could see why Whiskey and Fly Bait and whomever they were working for would be upset that something was fucking with the frogs, and not just because whatever fucked with the frogs was going to start jacking up the humans. Poor frogs. Just sitting around eating and fucking, and suddenly their babies started coming out like Patrick—too freaky for words. But there were two things he knew, and one thing he was sure of.

  “Two things,” he said. “Thing one: the pesticide thing. I heard you and Fly Bait talking—the major chemical you’re looking for… azhra-watsis? Yeah. You said that was a pesticide. Now my dad’s reclamation factory deals with a lot of bad shit—mercury, cadmium, lead, bromine, PVC, and other shit I forgot. All that shit will just lay waste to a place like this—I know that, you know that. If my dad wasn’t taking care of his shit like he’s supposed to, this would be a bad place. But none of it is the shit that’s making the frogs wonky—I listened. You’re afraid of pesticides, but that’s not th
e same shit that’s in the computer recycling place. So it’s probably not him.”

  Whiskey nodded his head. “We’d thought about that. But it had occurred to us that maybe your dad—or maybe the paper plant—hasn’t been playing by the rules. Or, I don’t know, maybe something totally unprecedented happened, and we have no fucking idea. It was a thought. Those places don’t always run as clean as they say they do. What’s the other thing?”

  Patrick didn’t even need to ask him—he could actually track their conversation, which, for him, was a big deal, and one of his favorite effects of the LBP. “My dad’s not a fuckup. He doesn’t cut corners. He doesn’t take this whole thing lightly. Maybe not even because he wants to save the planet, but because he just does shit right, and that’s the end of it.”

  Whiskey blinked slowly and shook his head.

  “I’m totally serious!” Patrick snapped, because he wanted to make it absolutely clear.

  “I know you’re serious,” Whiskey snapped back. “And you may even be right, although I’m not ready to place bets. But even if you were right and he’s totally free and clear, that wouldn’t stop me from sort of wishing he was our big polluter, okay?”

  Patrick felt like he’d been slugged in the chest. “Why would you even say a thing like that?”

  “Because.” Whiskey looked away and then looked back. “Because. If you knew he lied about something like this, maybe it would prove to you that all that other shit he’s said is bullshit.”

  Patrick took a breath, and it hurt, like holding your breath too long underwater hurt, or breathing through a glass storm would hurt. “What other shit?”

  “The shit that makes you think that you’re a loser and a fuckup. The shit that makes you say you’re sorry when you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Patrick gaped at him, without words. Whiskey swung away and resumed tramping through the gray-brown-sorta-green grass and the soft baby-shit colored swamp dirt.

  “Close your mouth, Patrick. You’re going to swallow a bug. What’s the next fucking probe we’re putting in?”

  Patrick fumbled it out of the knapsack he was carrying because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. “Mercury.”

  “Fucking peachy. Fly Bait, this one’s fucking mercury. I’ll try not to stab it through my phone when I plant it, okay?”

  Patrick handed it to Whiskey tentatively, and Whiskey snatched it out of his hand and slammed it into the ground with unnecessary force. The brightly painted neon yellow head of the black tube was flat against the ground, and Whiskey didn’t even swear.

  “Patrick, could you get me one of those orange flags? We’re gonna fucking need it.”

  Patrick did, and they continued dropping probes in the quiet, deserted wetlands while the mosquitoes dined happily on brooding and blood.

  Whiskey

  Nail It Until It’s Flat

  THE three of them spent the late afternoon coordinating the data from the probes, and Patrick proved to be pretty useful. Whiskey wanted to praise him like he would an undergrad, but every time he tried to say “good job,” Patrick shrugged it off, like it was something a child could do competently and Whiskey was just humoring him. It made Whiskey want to break a clipboard over his head, and about the time he was flipping a mental coin between doing that or kissing the damned kid silly, Patrick’s medication wore off.

  It was easy to tell when it happened too. One minute, Fly Bait was reading off data and Patrick was recording it, and everything was happy. The next minute, Patrick’s elbow shot out in the confined space of the quarters and knocked over a sensitive piece of equipment. Patrick dropped his clipboard and pen, bent over, and bumped his head on the table when he tried to pick it up, dropped the console again (and this time Whiskey was there to catch it), and then jerked back so quickly he fell on his ass and banged the back of his head on the cupboards when he jerked again.

  Whiskey and Fly Bait looked at him as he glared at the clipboard at his feet and rubbed the back of his head.

  Whiskey said, “Okay, then. Time for dinner and a swim. Patrick, you swim. I’ll do dinner.”

  Patrick’s expression wrinkled into one of self-loathing, and Whiskey sighed and offered him a hand up.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

  Whiskey pulled him up sharply, and Patrick pitched forward into his arms. Whiskey shuddered and clasped him tight. For a minute Patrick resisted, but he must have felt something in Whiskey’s arms, something that meant it, because that slender, taut body relaxed fractionally, and Patrick’s head came to rest on his shoulder.

  “Go swim, Patrick,” Whiskey said softly. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be sorry.”

  Patrick took a deep breath and backed up. He ducked his head at Fly Bait and then ran up top, where there were towels and he could dump his shirt and flip-flops at will. Whiskey sighed and turned to Fly Bait.

  “You wouldn’t want to make sure he….”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll go put sunblock on his back. But it’s a real fucking waste of skin on skin, because it doesn’t make him any less gay man or me any less a lesbo.”

  Whiskey found himself growling. “Which is why you’re the perfect candidate.”

  Fly Bait rolled her eyes and left.

  Whiskey set the equipment to rights and finished up the last few notations. They hadn’t been that far from quitting time—Patrick had helped to make quick work of it. He probably would have been helpful even after he’d had his moment of spaz, but he wouldn’t let himself live it down. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! He shouldn’t be. Patrick shouldn’t be sorry. But Whiskey was starting to really think that somebody should be.

  He put everything back where Patrick had organized it.

  Patrick looked so happy in the water, sort of like a big, pink otter. He was free there, and his arms and legs and head were absolutely not smacking into anything they shouldn’t be. He was, in fact, graceful and joyous, and Whiskey didn’t have the heart to call him in so they could go get mosquito repellent, of all things.

  They spent another night at the deserted dock, swam in the (cold!) river in the gray morning, and puttered to the dock where their car was parked before ten in the morning.

  Whiskey didn’t feel like he’d gotten much sleep at all.

  Patrick had gone docilely to Whiskey’s berth and slid into bed in front, as he had before. It had cooled down in the evening, and the air through the open windows was chilly enough to make the blanket welcome. Whiskey wrapped an arm around Patrick’s shoulders and pulled him in against Whiskey’s chest. Again, Patrick went without protest.

  They’d spent the morning hiking, the afternoon working, and the evening swimming—his taut body, with the muscles and bones that sometimes moved counter to each other, went limp very quickly, and Whiskey shuddered and pulled him tighter, rubbing his cheek on a bare shoulder that smelled of river water and, unaccountably, something sweet and floral and almost feminine.

  Patrick’s voice, hoarse in the darkness, surprised him. “This is getting to be a habit.”

  “It takes six weeks to make a habit,” Whiskey said roughly. “This is four days.”

  Patrick laughed softly. “In six weeks, you’ll pay someone to take me off your hands.”

  “I doubt it.” In six weeks, the thought of you not being here will ache in ways I’ve never imagined.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so nice to me all the time,” Patrick said practically. Even Whiskey could tell it hurt him to say.

  “I’ve got no other way to be.”

  “But—”

  Whiskey didn’t want to hear it. “Patrick, one day a couple of frogs laid their eggs and a couple other frogs jerked off and came on them. Something was in the water that fucked with the baby frogs, and a bunch of people saw frogs like Cal and Catherine and started screaming about the apocalypse.

  “A guy with a doctorate and a serious case of wanderlust wrote a grant so he could hang out on the river with his buddy and talk to two-head
ed frogs and maybe stop more of the poor fuckers from being made. This guy was out walking one night, because he realized he sort of loved it here, in spite of the shitty political climate and the fact that there’s not a fucking thing to do here and the fact that there are places in this river where I expect sturgeon to emerge as some sort of sentient being because the pollution has been dicking with their DNA.

  “And there this poor researcher was, looking at the stars and wondering if he had enough saved to buy a really shitty houseboat so when he got back from his next expedition he could maybe have his first home since his parents died, and he hears this really fucking unbelievable noise. And you know the rest.”

  Patrick let out a sound that was half amusement and half befuddlement. “That’s a really fucking awesome bedtime story, Whiskey. Why’d I get to hear it?”

  “Because life is fucking weird. Four days ago, I thought that making fun of Fly Bait and looking at two-headed frogs would be the best part of my summer. But then I dragged you into my bed like some sort of half-dead albino frog, and I have to say, things are definitely looking up. Don’t question it, man. Just close your eyes and go to sleep.”

  Patrick’s shoulders shook for a few moments after that, but Whiskey was pretty sure it was laughter. He closed his eyes and was getting ready to drift off when Patrick rolled over and placed a quick and dirty kiss on Whiskey’s mouth and then rolled back.

  “Thanks for pulling me out of the river, Whiskey.”

  “Thanks for being a decent human being and totally worth the trouble, Patrick.”

  Again, his shoulders shook. “Believe me. It was the least I could do.”

  “Naw, man. It’s everything in you.”

  “Shut up, Whiskey. I’m happy right now. I don’t want to argue with you about what a fuckup I am.”

  “A-the-hell-men.”

  “Yeah, right.” But that was all. His body stayed limp, went even limper, and his breathing evened out, and Whiskey closed his eyes and dreamed that he’d been sleeping with Patrick in his arms for years.