by Rhys Ford
“Afterwards… when the detective was talking to me… it got so I was beginning to question what I’d seen up there,” Jake confessed. His hands were large, dwarfing the small tumbler of light amber water and ice, and Dallas caught himself following the trail of Jake’s thumbs through the condensation on the glass. “Like was that blood we saw on the floor, on the rug and papers. It could have been anything, and my brain made it… bigger, darker.”
“It looks… bad, not going to lie. The guy’s head was crushed in, but the coroner who looked at the body said that might have happened after he died. There was a lot of stuff on top of him, some of it pretty fucking heavy.” It’d been an odd conversation to be witness to, a pair of detectives and a man in a white medical hazmat suit discussing a dead man he’d found upstairs. “They kept asking if anything’d been moved since I was up there last. Couldn’t tell them anything other than we’d stuck our heads in, took a look at the mess, then turned tail and ran. Only reason I went up there today was to look for those extra panels.”
“They going to let you know when they find out who he is?” Someone laughed, a boisterous spark of bright noise, and Jake turned toward the sound, a somber flower seeking the light. “I’d like to pay my respects once they get him… settled.”
“Yeah, the cop said she’d call me. And that leads me into asking if you want to talk about Celeste. Or we can just leave her on the street corner where she’s more comfortable.” Dallas caught Jake in midsip of his drink, waiting to see if the small coughing fit that followed required more than a bit of sympathy and a napkin. “Sorry, I’ll time it better next time. Need me to pound your back?”
“No, no. Shit, give me some warning before you do something like that.” Jake gave one final cough, then took another swallow of tea. The bashfulness was back in full force, and Dallas deeply regretted putting the wariness in Jake’s thoughtful expression. “Celeste. Um… what’d she tell you?”
“You want the unvarnished truth, or do you want me to pussyfoot around and feel out what to say?” He moved his utensils out of the way for the deep-fried whole mackerel being placed in front of him. They were silent for as long as the taciturn server bustled about, sliding tiny plates over the surface of the table. Then Dallas cleared his throat when she was gone as quickly as she’d arrived. “Do you eat the head off these things?”
“Head’s the best part,” Jake replied softly, the odd thrum in his voice deepening. “Fins too. You don’t?”
“The crunchy bits are the best,” Dallas agreed, more than a little bit concerned over the amount of chilies and oil Jake spread over his fish. “So what’s it going to be? Hard or soft?”
“Hard’s better.” His shrug was an elegant lift of broad shoulders and slight grimace. “Is she pissed off at me?”
“Concerned. Probably worried you’re pissed off at her,” Dallas corrected. “You’ve known me for what? A day? We haven’t had enough time together to figure out how to talk to each other, and she’s had even less time, wandering off to the coffee shop. Seriously, useless as a teenager, our girl. She’s… enthusiastic, and unfortunately for you, likes you a lot. So in her mind, that means she can meddle. So yeah, I’d get it if you were pissy about her shoving into your life without asking.”
“Shouldn’t have snapped at her. Wasn’t warranted,” Jake argued gently, his hands engulfing the glass again. “I mean, people you guys know probably wouldn’t blink at her saying stuff like that, and I go and get into her face? It’s not right. As much not right as that guy dying without anyone knowing about it. I don’t know why I was an asshole to her, but… she didn’t deserve it and I’m sorry for it.”
“Jake, Celeste’s been my best friend for years, and she stomps all over me every chance she gets. She assumed, and well, she goes from stranger to intrusive friend about five minutes after an introduction.” Dallas chuckled when Jake snorted a quick laugh, his half smile lifting a few of the shadows from his handsome face. “Look, she’ll probably apologize like hell when she sees you the next time, so I ask you, ride her hard for it because she never says she’s sorry when she does it to me.”
“Truth is, I don’t want to lose the job. Evancho would kill me for one, but mostly I want to fix those inlays. You can’t see it now, but it looks like that building used to be really sharp. Like downstairs? I think there’s some nice wood floors under that crap that’s there now.” Jake stifled a yawn, and the restaurant’s lights saturated the purple tones under his eyes. “It’ll be nice to see it looking how it did back in the day.”
“I should find some pictures. Talking to you made me want to do something cool with the place. Bring it back.” Dallas’s stomach flipped over with glee at Jake’s dimple making another appearance.
“Archives at UCLA might have something. Or the historical society. I know some people who can get their hands on stuff like that. I reach out to them when I need to do vintage restoration.” Jake picked at the fish, expertly peeling back the flesh and skin from the central bones with his chopsticks. After digging the cheek meat out, he dipped it into a pool of chili oil and shoyu near the fish’s belly, then popped the morsel into his mouth. Catching Dallas watching him, Jake mumbled around his food, “What?”
“You tell any of my Texas relatives I said this, I’ll deny it and call you a liar, but just so you know, my mouth would be on fire with that much hot sauce,” Dallas admitted with a shake of his head. “And if it makes you feel better, I’d kick Celeste to the curb before I fired you. Okay, maybe not to the curb but tell her to stay home. You’re a hell of a lot more useful than she is. One rat and she goes screaming blue bloody murder. She’s from New York City. Rats should be nothing to her.”
“Like I said, she’s got nothing to say sorry for.” Another shrug, but this time, Jake relaxed afterward. “It’s just been shitty lately and… I guess I wasn’t ready for her to ask me if I was gay. Not something the guys I work with talk about. Like ever.”
Dallas picked at his own fish, trying out some of the peppery oil on the soft white flesh. “So not a lot of male bonding and backslaps over at Evancho’s? And like the last time I pointed something like that out, I am teasing.”
“Yeah, I get that, but no, not a lot. Couple of guys there are dicks, but really, Evancho is cool. He cuts me a lot of slack on things.” Jake crunched through a fin, slowly working over the fried tidbit. “What about you? You work someplace other than… whatever it is you’re doing over there?”
“Ah, I have degrees in business management and a few other stupid things that basically say I can run something into the ground and know why I’m doing it but am helpless to stop.” Dallas chuckled. “I buy properties and fix them up, then either rent them out or run a business in them. This is the first time I’m doing something historically valuable… or personal. Most of the time it’s houses or apartment buildings, but I’ve got a couple of clubs down in WeHo. Those are run by people who know what they’re doing. Same here, once we get Bombshells and Beauties looking pretty, someone will come in to manage it. Hell, Celeste might even come out of retirement to do some actual work.”
“If you’re going to neon the old marquee on the front of the building, that name’s not going to fit.” Jake held a bowl of salted bean sprouts out for Dallas before taking some for himself. “Well, you could, but it’d be hard to read.”
“Good point.” Dallas took tidbits of panchan from each of the plates as Jake lifted them up from the table. It was an odd courtesy, an unconscious one by the distracted look on the man’s face as he continued to mull over the building’s front signage. “It’s a working name. I could just call it Bombshells. Nothing’s engraved in stone… or neon just yet.”
Their food arrived, mounds of fragrant charred at the edges short ribs and a scoop of rice in a metal bowl for each of them. The soft click of steel chopsticks on plates chimed under the murmur of discussion around them, and Dallas studied Jake as he ate.
“Kinda weird having a guy watching me while I eat,”
Jake said between bites, not looking up from his food. “Not as weird as finding a dead guy under shit but still… weird.”
“Most people I come here with pick food apart. They don’t eat fins, fish eyeballs….” Dallas tapped a bare rib bone he’d cleaned off himself a few moments before. “And they leave a lot of the meat around the bone. It’s kind of cool to be with someone who just… eats. Chew everything off a chicken wing?”
“No other way to eat them,” Jake grunted, digging into the kimchee. “Maybe it’s from growing up poor or your parents being poor? You eat what you’ve got.”
“And sometimes you don’t know when you’re going to get it again,” he murmured. “We were… I don’t know if we were poor, but there was a lot of blue box mac and cheese growing up. ’Course, that could have also been because my mom worked nights and my dad’s a shitty cook. Then my grandpa died—my mom’s dad—and well, he was pissed off she married some trailer trash kid she’d met at college, but I guess he figured he was dead, so might as well divide things up evenly. Oil. Land. Crazy kind of shit. Life got a hell of a lot easier after that. Dad got to finish his degree, and Mom got to stay at home and raise chickens and us. Okay, and hold mini-revolutions. She’s kind of a… tie-dyed hippie sort of mom slash activist who throws bake sales.”
“What’s your dad do?”
“He’s a rocket scientist.” Dallas laughed at Jake’s incredulous scoff. “Seriously, he loves it. Hasn’t blown anything up in years, though. I think he’s losing his touch. He’s a menace, and well, Mom saves… well, fucking everything. Whales, kittens, one-eyed jaguars, you name it, the ranch has it. Five million damned chickens, ducks, pigs, and cows, and we go grocery shopping for our meat. That’s my mother and father. What about your parents?”
“Mom’s… dead.” Jake swallowed, and Dallas knew there was a story behind those two words from the hitching breath he took before he continued. “Dad used to be a welder. Not like me. Shipyards. Big stuff. He got sick… years ago. Docs say he doesn’t have long to live, so he’s in hospice now. I go to see him after work.”
“Dying sucks.”
“Living’s worse. The old man’s not… he’s not real popular with the staff. He needs the care, but… he’s got dementia now. Makes him act… worse, and he wasn’t a treat before he got sick.” The murmuring grew softer, and Dallas had to strain to hear. “It’s like a fucking death march, and they keep moving the finish line.”
The stall in their conversation wasn’t comfortable, but not as prickly hot as when Jake’d sat down. Dallas asked for a refill of fish cake, then added the jalapeño cabbage pickles as well when Jake finished off the last of the spicy dish. The server returned in a few seconds with heaping bowls of both and left with instructions for them to shout out if they needed something because she was going to be busy with a table of ten.
“Usually they’re trying to shove me out the door.” Jake nodded toward the hostess at the entrance. “Not her. She’s always stuffing extra food into my bag when I do takeout. Last time I came home from this place, I had about six fish wrapped up in plastic shoved in between about a gallon of kimchee.”
“She’s very generous.” This time Dallas beat Jake to the panchan dishes, tilting them up for him to take his portion first. There was a slight hesitation, as if he didn’t know what to do, and then he hurriedly moved some food onto his plate. “If you’re still hungry, grab something else. My treat, remember?”
“Nah, I’m good,” Jake replied as one of the younger servers plopped a plate of steaming fried mackerel onto the table. “Okay, so obviously we’re having more fish. You take what you want first.”
Ignoring Jake’s protests, Dallas dumped the largest fish onto Jake’s dish, then helped himself. The meat was tender, fragrant with only a dusting of salt to season it, and his stomach made a little protest when he drizzled hot sauce over the crispy skin.
“Can I ask you one thing?” Jake ventured, taking the oil from Dallas when it was offered across the table.
“Shoot. Open book here,” Dallas assured him. “Ain’t nothing I haven’t heard, done, or said myself.”
“Celeste… what she… said.” Jake shredded a bit of his fish into his rice bowl, mingling the white grains with the meat. “How’d she know? About me, I mean. About me being… that.”
Six
“DO YOU want to have that discussion here?” Dallas asked softly, mindful of the noise and chatter rising up around them. “Because we can go elsewhere.”
He wanted to reach across the table and put his hands over Jake’s, to give the man some kind of physical contact simply to reassure him. It was a human thing to do, something he’d done countless times before with friends and even strangers, but Dallas held back. Jake Moore trembled and shook under his skin, as fragile and delicate as antique glass, overheated by emotion and stress.
“I don’t want to have this discussion at all.” The brittle reached Jake’s face, stretching his skin taut over his cheekbones and tightening his mouth. Shaking his head, he looked everywhere but at Dallas, his throat moving as he gulped in a mouthful of air. “Stupid I brought it up. Just forget about—”
“Jake—” Dallas clamped down on the “sugar” that nearly followed the man’s name. “Shit, listen to me, man.”
Habits were hard to break, even harder when he was stepping back into a world he no longer lived in. A world where people didn’t touch or console one another for fear of it being taken as a sexual overture. Dallas clenched his hands into fists under the table, frustrated, but Jake would view them as a sign of aggression. He was certain of that.
“Look, you and I… shared something today that not a lot of people ever run into,” Dallas began gently. “We stumbled upon a man who should have had a better end, and sometimes that leads a guy to thinking about the what-ifs or the I-don’t-knows. And that’s good. It’s okay. Doesn’t mean you have to look at everything that it brings up.
“Shit, it doesn’t mean anything other than maybe you and I can be friends for a bit if you don’t feel like dumping everything you’re carrying, man, but the short answer to your question is, I don’t know what Celeste saw or thought she saw.” The conversations at the tables next to them pitched up as a group of young men slid into an empty spot. Jake flinched, and Dallas tucked a few bills into the billfold the server left on the table. “And I really think we should be having this talk someplace you can get pissed off at me or something. Although I would appreciate it if you didn’t punch me in the face for talking.”
“You don’t… hit people. That’s just…,” Jake mumbled. “Fuck, I hope you don’t let a guy hit you.”
The look of horror on Jake’s face was comical until Dallas saw the pain shining through his eyes. This time he did reach for the man, placing his hand on the table next to Jake’s, his fingers close enough to feel the heat of Jake’s body but far enough away not to make contact.
“No, I don’t. No one should. Okay, some people are into that, but me? Not so much.” He grimaced at the thought of someone striking him with a paddle or a belt. “I couldn’t even take my mom scolding me when I was a kid, and I’m going to ask some guy to whack me? Not my thing. Now, how about if I ask them to pack the food up and we go grab a coffee or something? We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. Deal?”
“Look, I’m beat—”
“Then I’ll drop you off at home and we’ll see each other Monday,” Dallas replied. “No harm, no foul. Look, Jake, at the very least, I like you. You’re a good guy, and from the sounds of it, could use a good friend. That’s it. Nothing else. You want to talk about shit, I’m here. Grab a beer? I can do that too. Life just seems kind of… tightly wound around you, man, and you look like you’re about ready to pop.”
“Yeah. I think… I am,” Jake whispered softly. His words were buried under the noise in the restaurant, and he chewed on his lower lip, contemplating God only knew what, but Dallas hoped it was at least the offer of friendship. “Decaf would
be okay. I’ve got to get some sleep tonight. Saturday’s kind of when Dad needs the most… help down at the place he lives. I need to be awake enough to drive down there if they call.”
“Easily done. And besides, we’ve had a fuck-ass long day, you and I.” Dallas mimed a clamshell opening and closing at one of the servers near the front, and she nodded, reaching for some Styrofoam take-out containers. “Pack everything up for you? There’s got to be at least three more mackerel here. She must love you something fierce.”
“Only if you don’t want it.” Jake ducked his head down when the server slid her arm over his shoulder, dumping the take-out trays onto their table. “Screw the teach-a-man-to-fish thing. Someone offers you a free fish, you better damned well take it and eat another day.”
THEY WALKED, crossing a couple of blocks in silence while Jake fought with the demons pulling him down into the dank mire he’d brewed inside of him.
Leaving the leftovers in Dallas’s car, they’d set out for a coffee shop Jake knew would still be open. A couple of giant iced lattes to go and he found himself walking shoulder to shoulder with a man who’d made him want more than what he had, leaving Jake with a regret that grew with every step he took.
Koreatown on a Friday night was busy without being intrusive, pockets of energy contained within bubbles of parking lots and dots on the sidewalks. The streets were lit up with signs, flashing and sparkling to draw in the eye and potentially a customer or two. Most places had their doors thrown open, but a few were more discreet, closed and guarded by large men wearing all black and humorless expressions. One cocked an eyebrow at them as they drew near, reaching for the entrance’s doorknob, then dropping his hand when Dallas shook his head before his fingers touched the metal latch.
A low-slung Toyota ambled by, its windows rattling from the bass thumping out of its speakers, and its driver, a flat-eyed Korean teen, quickly looked away when Jake glanced his way. The car stopped in the middle of its left turn, letting a pack of elderly women shuffle across the walk, their hands waving quick thank-yous as they hurried against the light. Hands clutched tightly around plastic bags, they bobbed and wove around Dallas and Jake as they passed, a flight of colorful birds gliding over the winding cement path.
