by Jamie Mason
He snapped the cover down over the keypad and sighed hugely, raking his hands through his dark, Hollywood mane. It takes a very particular type of hair to make light of helmet-head. Straight hair gets bent. Curly hair gets molded into hilarity. And the sort of man who relies on sticky products to keep him looking potent will be outed for a fraud once the brain-bucket comes off. This man’s hair was mussed perfect, and it took more than Jason had in him to leave off admiring it. Not even noticing as he did it, he ran his fingers through his own wispy hair as he sized up the stranger’s predicament.
Jason was in a good mood that was just cresting over to full-on glad, having decided right then and there that a dog would chase off the last of the demons. And Jason had, earlier that day, read an e-mail, one of those stupid chain letters that promised sad times if you didn’t replicate its viral cheer to five people within the next five minutes. Ten people promised an orgasm of good fortune, and fifteen would make your head explode in a shower of gold ducats to be replaced by a fresh new mind-set enclosed in a better-looking face than you’d had before. Probably topped with hair like this guy’s. The body of the message touted random acts of kindness as the cure for all the ills of the world. A couple of trite poems and a series of improbably lit photos positively purred with serenity.
Jason hadn’t had fifteen or even five people he felt chummy enough with to spread the love to, but that was okay. He didn’t believe in good luck. Or bad luck. But maybe, just for today, at the gas pump, he did believe what the e-mail had preached.
“Excuse me!” Jason called out to the man, bent over the saddlebag once again.
“Yeah?” The man looked over his shoulder, a neutral appraisal roaming Jason from head to shoes and back again.
“I couldn’t help but hear your phone conversation.”
The man straightened around to face Jason. “I’m sorry, man. Cut me some slack. I didn’t mean to cuss a cloud over your sunshine.”
Jason bloomed in heat. He’d already gotten it wrong, reaping confrontation where he’d hoped only to sow goodwill. “No, no, that’s fine. That’s not what I meant. I was just going to say that I’d be happy to buy you a tank of gas.”
“No shit? I mean, really?”
“Yeah.” Jason smiled. He felt nobler already.
“You don’t have to buy a whole tank. Just a splash would get me where I’m headed.”
“No, it’s okay. Might as well get some mileage out of a ‘random act of kindness,’ right?”
Something in the younger man’s easy smile and slack shoulders made Jason feel bold. Some of it was envy and the guy knew it, was accustomed to it even. But he carried such an excess of confidence that he could afford to make a magic mirror of it. You looked into his face and he gave it back to you. For a moment, you were the one at ease in your own skin; you smiled and showed big, white, all-the-better-to-eat-you-with teeth; you felt your hair curling at its robust tips and your eyebrows cocking humor into everything. And when the young man looked away, it was as if a lamp had been snapped off, and suddenly you were the size you’d always been, your borders shrunk back to the contours of your place in the food chain.
Jason extended his hand. “Jason Getty.”
The smirking man took the offer with a grip and a deeper smile. “Jason Getty, you saved my life. I will make it up to you, man. I’m Gary Harris.”
Harris convinced Jason to give him his address, insisting that he be allowed to reimburse Jason for the gas when he was next in the area. The glow of camaraderie lasted hours. The pride of having been the nice guy boosted Jason along for a week. As the days from the encounter marched into double digits, though, a faint annoyance at Harris for not showing up as he’d promised was a fly in the ointment. No, a gnat really. It was okay. Jason honestly hadn’t wanted to be paid back.
But if he would only have admitted it, although not having anyone handy to admit it to, he very much wanted to look into that mirror again, into that face that made him so sure he could mimic it all, have it all, with a wink and a swagger.
The Saturday that Jason had set aside to shop for dogs in earnest was ripped to soaking gray shreds by a thunderstorm that clattered at the windows. Jason bent over the newspaper, circling the classified ads showing dogs for sale and looking up breed information on the Internet. He ticked addresses on the opened map with a highlighter. Peals of thunder pressed in close behind the lightning, making him jump, and the rain splatted the glass in startling bursts.
One rumble lasted well past the overhead rolling, and it took Jason a moment to realize that the banging was picking up tempo and rattling his front door frame. He opened the door to find Gary Harris, holding a soggy pizza coupon over his head. Water dripped from the tip of his nose.
“Jesus, man, it’s fuckin’ pouring. You gonna make me stand out here all day?” He stepped in as Jason moved aside.
Jason made the invitation official with a sweep of his hand. “Wow! No. Sorry, I didn’t hear you with all that thunder.” But by the end of his sentence, he was already speaking to Harris’s back as he’d continued on down the hall, peering into Jason’s rooms as he went.
“Heh. Well, look at you,” Harris crooned, admiring the big plasma television in the den. “Nice digs.” He looked Jason up and down. “Who’da thunk it?”
Jason smiled, pleased with being pleasing.
Harris clapped him on the back. “Gotta beer?”
9
He was “Gary” to Jason at first. Calling someone by his last name was the province of bullies and hateful phys ed teachers and the drill instructors Jason had seen in films. He had never once been called out by his last name that it hadn’t felt like a rolled-up newspaper to the snout. And he wasn’t inclined to be combative. In fact, with Gary, Jason wasn’t inclined to be anything at all. He nearly forgot himself completely. No cringing, no nerves, no self-consciousness, no self. For those hours he was only the expression on Gary’s face. He fed out stories and was rewarded with the interest, amusement, agreement, and outrage reflected back to him in Gary’s lively reactions. It was good to be lost. It felt like freedom.
Gary was mostly everything Jason was not. He was good-looking, with broad shoulders tapering to small hips, and annoyingly it was as a result of good genes, not endless hours in the gym. Jason wasn’t homely, only pale and soft, and even more so on the inside. Gary had big teeth and wore his clothes with ease. Jason’s shirts always came untucked and his smile flickered uneasily in the lower wattages.
Jason started stocking beer after that first visit, having been set to blushing at not having a drop of anything festive in the house. Gary played like a party on two feet or two wheels and liked to keep his good mood lubricated. An endless supply kept the magic mirror in place, so Jason ran out and bought beer. Lots of beer.
They’d talked that first afternoon. Harris rode to the store with Jason for the first case of domestic he’d ever bought, and afterward, they sat at the kitchen table and just jawed, a thing Jason hadn’t done since college. “So where’d you grow up?” rolled easily into deeper waters. The cans piled up and the stories came out—of Jason anyway. In retrospect, he could only recall Gary doing a lot of nodding and smiling.
The end of that first evening came too quickly for Jason, although in actuality hours had passed and the thunderstorms had blown themselves out without his noticing. By then, he was exhausted, wrung out, and happily empty of stories for the moment, head humming where it wasn’t numb from more drink than he was used to. Gary, looking far less worn by the marathon, promised they’d “do it again soon.” Jason hadn’t believed it for a second.
But to his delight, Gary showed up again. And again. The number of days in between would vary, and Gary wouldn’t allow himself to be cornered into a schedule. But he always came back.
He had balked when Jason asked for a phone number. “You’re not my girlfriend.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jason pouted.
“Don’t get sore. There are just lik
e four people in the whole world who have my phone number. It’s nothing personal.”
“Well, how do people get in touch with you?”
“They don’t. If I keep it low, I keep it sane. I don’t want people thinking they can have a piece of me at the push of some buttons.”
“But everyone gets phone calls. It’s normal,” Jason said. “I never know when the heck you’re coming over.”
Gary squinted his irritation at Jason. “Tell you what. If I ring the bell too many times that you don’t answer, I’ll manage to get over it somehow.” There was more he could say. Jason saw something hateful and, worse, something possibly true straining against Gary’s tightened lips. But the insult stayed caged, wrestled silent by a brutish diplomacy for the win. Gary’s patience wasn’t much more than a look he wore part of the time, but it would always be for the win.
Jason backed up a step, then two. “No, it’s fine. I was just asking. Forget it.”
Gary shook off the cloud and, with it, the muzzle. “Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Like I said, it’s nothing personal. Look, I’ve learned to avoid hassles. And believe me, anyone can turn into a hassle—at any time. I don’t give out my number and I don’t give out my schedule. Besides, my ex and her family, they’ve got it in for me. If I don’t get any calls, then I always know it’s not them.”
“Pffffft. I know how that is.” In every hope of steering them back to placid waters, Jason unknowingly baited a hook. The conversation veered to complaining about in-laws, and according to Gary’s face, Jason had never been so fascinating.
• • •
Jason found himself cramming errands into the afternoon commute only to end up twiddling his thumbs through the evening hours and going off to bed grumpy, unable even to gripe over botched plans. There were never any plans.
The day that Gary showed up with his own drinks, he smiled more than usual and brought along something else as well: a bedraggled girl called Bella. Her waist-long hair was a few tousles shy of starting dreadlocks and was the color of a rust stain in a dirty sink. Fifteen additional pounds would have had her healthy-looking, but her face was a perfect porcelain heart, set with misty blue eyes and a tiny, impossibly pink mouth. Her laughter slid as easily up her throat as the booze slid down. It was fairy dust, her laugh, and it softened Jason’s attention to keeping count of his own drinks. He was almost sure he’d sipped at number seven more than once. By the time Gary was inclined to leave, rather earlier than was his usual habit, Bella was too woozy to be trusted to hang on for the motorcycle ride back, and Jason was too far gone to drive her home in his own car.
Gary pulled him aside once Jason’s fidgety discomfort had made even the twirling and giggling Bella concerned for her welcome. “Just let her crash here, man. What difference does it make?”
Jason wasn’t so sure, but he was, at this point, so readable that Gary only laughed at him. “God, you’re a freak. A cute girl—a cute, wasted girl—needs to sleep on your sofa, and you look like you’re about to shit your pants.” Gary grabbed Jason by the shoulders and gave him a bolstering shake. “Just don’t give her any more to drink or she’ll puke on the carpet, son. Take her home in the morning. Easy peasy.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, big guy.” And with a wink and a nod, like some skinny, sardonic Santa, Gary was gone.
They didn’t drink more, but Bella didn’t sleep on the sofa either. Jason woke up to her staring at him. The soft glow of her eyes turned out to be a natural asset, not a by-product of too much alcohol. She smiled at him, unself-conscious in her nakedness. The sheet, only a few shades brighter than her milk-white hip, was scrunched out of the way of everything important. Her radiance, at odds with her crazy hair, was plenty searing to Jason’s already burning eyes. He blinked and they watered up as he gaped at her, trying too hard not to appear to be gaping. Jason’s head pounded, a very few clear-ish thoughts sneaking out between the pulses that boomed from somewhere deep behind his ears. Each surge seemed just a fraction bigger than the last one, as if both halves of his tenderized brain were lunging to meet in the middle for some evil brand of fission.
He remembered making her laugh, a bona fide sparkle that anointed him with courage. He batted at the cobwebs between him and the memory of feeling charming. She’d called him sweet. He’d called her beautiful.
It was several moments before he realized that he, too, was bare under the covers, without so much as a pair of socks on. Sheets and skin and a naked girl. Bella. Right. And he needed to pee. Desperately.
“I, um, I need to get up and, well, um, go, you know, out there.” Jason pointed toward the hall.
“Go ahead,” she cooed.
Jason circled his finger in the air, dialing his blush brighter as much as pantomiming his request. “Do you mind turning around?”
She shifted around in a rustle of bedclothes, a sound Jason hadn’t noticed that he’d been missing. His bed had been so quiet since Patty had last turned beside him, whenever that last time had been. In the swish and crinkle of sheets, the sound of a woman twisting away from him sparked a twinge-memory—the bewilderment of rejection. But it was also the background music of not being alone. He wished he had known it was going away, the sound of his wife. He wished he had known to remember it.
He nearly reached for Bella then, wanting to know soberly what her skin felt like under his hand, but he didn’t. Bella’s silvery chuckle, as she faced the wall, was more embarrassing than her watching his naked butt hustling out the door would ever have been.
• • •
A week later, Gary, for the first time, invited Jason along for an outing.
“Out where?”
“I don’t know. It’s a party. We’ll hang out. Drink somebody else’s beer for a change. Trust me. You need to get out.”
Jason assumed he’d be the designated driver, but Gary stopped him with a nod to his motorcycle.
“Leave it. Let’s take my bike.”
• • •
The gathering was a noisy, smoky clutch of people too old to look right at a house party and too rough to be less than an intimidating nuisance out in public. Gary didn’t seem to know anyone in the fray. He kept leaving Jason alone, dropped in the middle of the room like forgotten luggage. Jason seemed unable to get out of his own way, much less anyone else’s. He tightrope-walked Gary’s absences, dancing forward and back to accommodate the flow of leather and stubble and too snug tank tops as they slipped behind him or pinballed off the front of him. Gary was making calls, he said, looking for better fun, but it never presented itself. So they wandered laps of the grubby house, bumping shoulders and going deaf under the constant babble and bass.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gary said after a long hour had overshot Jason’s last hope for a nice evening.
Back home, at the landing, Jason clearly didn’t need his key. The front door, to his dismay, showed an inch of foyer in its distance from the jamb. He pushed it wide, but looked to Gary for agreement before stepping in. “I know this door was locked. I never leave the door unlocked.”
“No. You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Should we go in first or just call the police?”
Gary held a smirk at bay and looked up and down the street. “Let’s just go in.”
The house looked as it should have, more or less, but the walls rang with the stealthy echo of trespass. The nap of the carpet didn’t quite match up to the way Jason thought he’d left it, and everything looked ogled. Then there was the dust-bordered clean spot on the credenza, a shrieking blank spot in the space between the shelves of his music and movie collections. His television was quite gone.
“Come on, quick! We’ve got to get out of here,” cried Jason.
“Relax,” said Gary. “There’s no one here.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, they’re awful quiet if they are.” Gary strolled down the hall, unbothered, Jason trailing after him. Gary crouched a
t every doorway and pounced through, yelling, “Boo!,” and waggling his eyebrows at Jason with each discovery that a room was indeed unoccupied except for the two of them.
In the bedroom, Gary flipped back the bedclothes, crowing, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Meanwhile, Jason discovered that his dress watch, an engraved present from Patty, was the only item missing from the scattered contents of the catchall dish on the dresser.
“Oh my God. I don’t believe this. You’re right, I don’t think they’re still here. But don’t touch anything. I gotta call the police.” Jason dashed for the phone with Gary closing fast on his heels.
“Hang on, hang on.” Gary’s gentle pressure on Jason’s arm wouldn’t have been enough to keep Jason from raising the phone to his ear, but the smile that played on Gary’s lips most certainly was.
“What’s going on?”
“You can’t call the police,” said Gary.
“What do you mean?”
“Take it easy. You can replace the television. And a watch? Pffffft!”
“What? I have to make a police report.”
Gary was laughing now. “No, honestly, you really don’t.” He held Jason’s arm harder.
“What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because you just won’t. Look, let’s go crack a beer and I’ll spell it out for you. You’re probably going to be pissed, but if you can look at it a certain way, it’s pretty fuckin’ funny. And I promise, at the end of the day, you’re not out anything. Could even be karma at work, my man. You may just feel like the cat that ate the father-in-law’s canary.”
So it was at his own kitchen table, watching Gary swill the beer that Jason kept on hand expressly for his visits, that the con was detailed for him.
• • •
A surgeon needs steady hands. A teacher needs patience. A garbage collector needs a strong stomach and a wandering mind to put him elsewhere in his drudgery. As in all endeavors, a swindler needs a skill set. Gary Harris was an ace at snatching relevant facts from casual conversation. Names, dates, places, habits, and appetites, they all stacked up in neat columns and rows in a corner of his head until an equation presented itself. The solution to the math usually involved larceny, and it always resulted in a net profit.
