PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-09 00:33:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | robin hood, sam winchester |
Who: Russ and Ford Campbell
What: Construction sites make for odd meeting places. Also Russ gets a bomb dropped on him.
Where: Russ's workplace -> Diner
When: Almost immediately after the plot ends!
Warnings: N/A
Construction work was early morning. In the dead of desert winter, four a.m. was below fifty degrees, and Ford could see his breath as it steamed in front of his face, tasting of cheap coffee and fatigue. It obscured the view, but Ford was alright with that, because it wasn’t much of a view. Flat land on either side, rocks and dirt spreading out into a clear gray distance that was the slowly shifting shadow in advance of real sunlight. Not that it was going to be much warmer when the sun showed up, and Ford’s heavy cloth-and-canvas coat wasn’t doing much while he was standing still. If he was lucky, he would get some work, and then the cold wouldn’t matter quite as much. If he was unlucky, he still had time to go into the city and try to find something else.
It was sometimes dangerous, showing up at construction sites like this. If there was a union things could get ugly when skilled guys tried to run unskilled upstarts out, but sometimes the foreman was behind schedule and he was willing to spend some supply money on a few extra hands just to get things done. Whether or not the thing stayed up after he was gone was not Ford’s problem, after all. He looked at the squat, rectangular frame that was going to make up a new mini-mall on the outskirts of the Strip. He’d seen dozens just like it all over the Southwest, and they all looked depressingly similar once they were built, but sometimes he liked seeing the bones of a building more than the building itself. This one wasn’t anywhere near done, and he might make a few bucks hauling trash--hunks of wood and metal shavings, that kind of thing. The place was a mess, to his practiced eye. He wouldn’t have to attempt to say anything to the foreman if he did show up; he and a few other guys were standing around, which told him this was usual practice. The coffee in his paper cup wasn’t going to beat this cold, and he hissed around his tongue, willing the guy to show up.
This side of the morning most of the guys were bleary-eyed and came with their hands curled around plastic cups of coffee, steaming sweet-milky in the cold of the air. The ones with wedding rings jammed on their hands, they came with lunch packed for them, and the ones with kids, they came with the fatigue smeared thick and dark around their eyes, bloodshot in the four am clarity. The motorbike was a sputter and a whirr, the thick, choking cough of exhaust cut out precisely as the man on the bike leaned in and hard, and one boot came down hard onto wood-shavings and scarred tarmac as the bike stopped. Russ was a tall figure in the clear-washed blue and he was warm enough, wrapped around the cooling metal of an engine on the way not to need much more than the jacket shrugged on over his workshirt, battered boots and his hands dug deep in his pockets as he trudged toward the site, same look of expectation all the guys got when they came up this close.
It weren’t the best of places to work; men did the hard jobs and the foreman was real quick to cut where he could, put some of that saving into his own pocket. The hours were long, when they were there and the supplies, they moved along slow and irregular when the foreman put the orders in. Some mornings, they was quite a crowd before they were told to go on home. Russ could smell the coffee in the air and he could smell the sweet, dusty smell of fresh-sawn wood, the raw scent of pine and the murk and tang of metal. It was a smell of sites all over the state, same place you pulled up to and you kept your head down and you worked good and thorough on your own so no one had any fight to pick with you. These sites had small knots of men before the sun was fully up and before work could start; spokes of those anxious for work fanned out from the construction center.
Russ rubbed his hands together, the grit of the air already in his eyes and he stamped a little on the spot, keeping the heat of the bike for as long as he could before the movement of the day kept him his own kind of warm. The keys jangled in his palm, little bit of his own before he became as uniform as any one of the men who’d been coming longer than most and stood back because they knew their names would be on the list. There was always a list.
The bike attracted some attention, Ford’s included. Most of these guys drove trucks, or at least something that could carry more than two people. The hard growl of the engine suggested something different was coming, and human nature had at least half the crowd pausing in their foot-stamping and their impatient boredom long enough to see what it was. About two-thirds of those guys glanced away again once the abnormality turned out to be some guy on a bike--no more, no less--but Ford wasn’t one of those.
It wasn’t the bike, because while Ford respected engines, he wasn’t motor oil crazy like some of these guys. He wasn’t checking the guy out, either, because construction sites with unions got about fifty times angrier if there was even the slightest suggestion that there was such a thing as homosexuality in a fifty mile radius. At first he thought maybe the guy was the foreman, or at least somebody on site to order someone else around. It had to do with the way he held himself and the way he walked; Ford himself was neither tall nor big, and by most standards he was rather short for a man, no more than 5’6”, and that was in boots. Ford figured more people would have left him alone if he was this guy’s size, but it was a casual observation, and not nearly as bitter as it could have been.
Ford was standing at the edge of a lot, waiting in the suggestion of shelter provided by a couple temporary buildings and a line where more workers’ trucks would soon pull up. He shifted on his feet--work ready jeans and low boots that weren’t exactly safety committee material. He raised the cup and then lowered it again. He turned his head and looked again at the man, trying to figure out where he’d seen him before. Another job? He felt like it had been before that. Someone from home? No way had he known anyone that tall. His stare became wandering, confused, but it remained unblinking as the guy got nearer.
Plenty of people came down to construction sites to take a look. Not all that many, none of the cars that slid on past on the highway, fancy paint and purring engines but he’d seen families, come right close to that line drawn between the site itself and the hustle of it, the banging and rattling of work and the vast empty space beyond like they were tourists getting a real old look. Women, too; they came looking for what was easier, less time demanding and their eyes were harder than the men, lips gone thin and flat with making business transactions out of something that lost its meaning in the mess. Russ had seen plenty of men stand at the edges of sites and look with something close to longing; for the money, for the job, for the meaning in it. Meaning, as far as Russ was concerned, had nothing to do with something that was hands and sweat and the copper-burn of working muscles but their own cerebral overlay put on top of it. Some men looked with the same purpose as the women; Russ wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t much given to caring either, but being stared at didn’t sit right on squared-off shoulders. He hunched over, back curling as much against the staring as the wind that snaked across the site, bone-cold.
He looked instead, head up and around and there was something steel about the mouth and the eyes. Russ was used to being looked at by those who wanted to start something but the only one doing the looking was a kid half his size and skinny with it, wearing some piece of shit jacket rather than the kind of battered thing that would withstand the sparks and the heat. He had a paper cup of coffee like he’d come straight from some shitty motel or diner rather than his own home and his boots were scuffed across the toes, nothing solid to them. The kid was driftwood on a site like this, another hand held out for work that was tight anyway. There weren’t much distance to them now, but Russ took three strides more and he came up close, big and tall and broad enough to blot out the light, all work-worn denim and muscle-corded forearms bared below the elbow, and he stared right damn back at the kid, eyes cool as hard metal and his mouth a thin flat thing of a line.
“You visiting or you lost?” Russ said, and the words came short and flinty, like they were precious to part with. People didn’t talk much on a site, nor before the work began and there was a wind whistling precious-loud flapping at the plastic tied down over the site that made it noisy. He pitched his voice low enough to fight against the racket, low enough it was almost conversational and it wasn’t clear if he was starting something or cutting it off before it began, all frown down at a kid he had five inches on.
The crowd saw the big guy from the bike coming, and they didn’t so much scatter as press away from the oncoming storm, much the way leaves shifted down concrete in advance of a strong wind. Ford blinked halfway through guy’s approach and realized the extent of his stare, but by then it was too late to do any pretending. He snatched a glance to his right to see those guys nearest casually turning away as if something interesting was happening just out of sight, and then he looked forward again just in time to see the big shadow overtake him like a freight train.
Obviously Ford’s first impulse was to retreat. He wasn’t going to win a fight, and he didn’t want to start one because he wasn’t going to get any work at all if he started pissing off people before the day even started. The fear rapidly turned to aggression, though. Ford stared right back up through five inches of cold empty air and narrowed the big blue eyes that used to get his mother whatever she wanted. His jaw firmed and he brought his chin up in the wordless message I am not afraid of you. It was not all bravado, either, as Ford was not afraid of being hit, and that was probably the worst that could happen to him just now, besides an empty wallet.
Up close, that sense of familiarity got stronger. Ford’s eyes flicked from the big man’s angry gaze to his nose, which had a softer shape than the rest of him. He tried again to focus on communicating, but came up short. He had a lot to say, mostly having to do with I am not lost and Fuck off unless you can pay me but none of those words came immediately to him. He felt competing thoughts stacking up just at the top of his throat, and his heart did a clamor against his ribs. No way was he going to get a full word out whole.
After a moment, he just shook his head. It was a solid movement, deliberate, a decided American negative that took his chin to either side without breaking eye contact. Ford wished the guy had given him a yes or no answer. He glanced suddenly left, where the fellow lingerers had just been, and he tossed a few teaspoons of coffee out of the bottom of his cup onto the curb. No point in getting coffee on him if he was going to get shoved.
Russ was real used to the kind of fights that took place in small spaces; bars or maybe he’d not hustled fast enough for some girl who didn’t tell him the boyfriend was on the way home. He held himself the way a man used to tight-spots did, bristling thick but wary with it and light on his feet like he’d be ready to move. He wasn’t in the habit of shoving people around for the sake of it, and he wasn’t used to looming over quite so high. The kid, up close, he was hard cheekbones under the skin and blue eyes that glared back at him like he’d cornered something half-feral that didn’t want to turn and bite but it would. He didn’t say one word though, stood his ground toe to toe and the men turned their shoulders away from confrontation, like turning their backs made it not-so. Russ watched the piddle of coffee into the beige dust with a certain fascination for it, and he looked at the kid hard, like he was trying to put pieces together that didn’t fit.
“You new, looking for work?” he asked instead, and he squinted, all suspicion and wrinkled eyes. Russ had the hard look of the desert weather wearing away at a man, his hair was the blond that was bare-headed under hot sun and his beard was scruff across his chin that kept the dust and the dirt from his nose and mouth more than it was any kind of statement. He was halfway to forty and he looked almost all the way there, the kind of weight and solidity to him that came of muscle layering itself grimly over bone, and sticking there because it had to.
The kid wasn’t that, not that at all. But the thing with the coffee, the self-preservation along with the shitty boots; Russ frowned like none of it made sense together at all.
Ford was aware of his size, his height, and the state of his wallet. He knew the clothes might make him look homeless if he didn’t take the time to keep them coin-laundry clean, and he knew that not saying anything marked him out as easy prey. It was, then, always important to communicate that he was not a little lost puppy. That way if he did end up saying anything--and no doubt butchering it--then he was less likely to be automatically downgraded to a five-year-old. Ford shook at the paper coffee cup to get rid of the last droplets and then he put it somewhat carefully in his jacket pocket. If it didn’t get crushed, he could go sneak a refill at the same place at the lunch hour. He took his hands back out, just in case he needed to use them.
The turn of the conversation, however, was a good thing. Ford was surprised at the automatic shift in inquiry, that the guy had moved from a no-answer to the right question, and his dark brows made a short jump toward the close straggle of equally dark hair. The blue eyes seemed ever bluer against the darkness of his hair, and for the first time he thought maybe he wasn’t going to have to deal with bruises. His expression wary but less hostile, Ford dipped his head in affirmative. Yes new. And another nod. Yes, looking for work.
Deliberately, Ford’s eyes moved to the biggest temporary building, a sort of on-site office, the nucleus of the whole place. It was the place you went and asked for work, and got a solid answer usually within the first hour once the foreman was in. Right now it was cold and dark, but he was hoping this guy might give him some answers, since he wasn’t swinging yet. Ford indicated the place with a tip of his head and then gave Russ a deliberate stare and higher brows in question. You the boss? or Is that your place? worked equally well.
Russ wouldn’t say he had a heart. Not a one for lost things and driftwood like the kid here, not a bit of him left for lost causes and no-hopers. He stood his ground and his hands went back into his pockets, dug deep there until his jacket was pulled taut across his shoulders with the stretch of it, and he looked across at the building the kid had indicated, like he was thinking. Kid didn’t know there wasn’t work enough for the men clustered at the edges, men who stood quiet and came ready to work, men who looked like they could take the load, work real hard til they were swaying on their feet. So he was brave or stupid or crazy enough to stand and glare right back at him, but that didn’t mean shit when the load slipped and all you had between you and your bankruptcy to medical costs was the guy stood beside you. “I ain’t got a coin in the toss,” he said, abruptly and hard, like he was dealing out bad news and he didn’t care, not a bit. The edge of the kid’s jacket was thin, worn away threads floating like dandelion seed and whilst he weren’t young enough to be kicked back to school by someone who cared enough to do it, time hadn’t etched itself hard across those bones, written much alongside his mouth.
“Everyone here wants work. You got a card, something?” The kid didn’t look union, any more than any of the men did; Vegas had more construction going than other places and it meant the desperate crept out and worked for pennies on the dollar than for men who had organization and something behind them to bail when it all went South. But if the kid was union, there were sites, better sites, where someone wet behind the ears could go and learn without killing himself. “Know anything about this?” This, a gesture, cut of his hand into the cold of the air, the growing dawn. “Any of it?” He doubted it. Kid had any of that, he wouldn’t be keeping paper cups in his pocket like he was planning on making every penny spent on the original cup work for him.
Something, hard and gritty worked at the back of Russ’s throat. It was recognizable, that little gesture, the efficiency with which you made something work for you over and over until you couldn’t anymore. He didn’t care; he stared at the kid with something like fierceness and he folded his arms over his chest instead, like he was betting the kid had nothing to lay out on the table at all.
This conversation was now going extraordinarily well for Ford. The prospect of a fight seemed highly unlikely now, and Ford folded rough hands back into his own pockets. He stepped back, not to retreat, just so he wouldn’t break his neck during the (one-sided) talk. The information that he didn’t have a chance of finding anything here was disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. Ford’s body language was fairly expressive when he tipped all of his weight onto one knee, settled it astride again, and then shrugged. Oh well. Can’t win them all.
The new questions brought his gaze up again, and again he got that funny, infuriating feeling that he knew this guy. For some reason it made him think of leftovers, like leftover food, and he couldn’t figure out why that was. He frowned right back, but answered the questions each in turn. Shake of the head. No, no union, no card. A glance at the site, and a slight but less decisive nod. A little twist of his body. I know some. A little more solid of a nod. A little more than some. Experience, Ford wanted to say, but when he even started thinking about explaining that he’d done some of it before, he just knew he would say it wrong, so he stopped and only shrugged again. He took out a white hand and pointed at the shovels leaning against the corner of the dumpster. Moving trash was extremely difficult work but required no skills whatsoever. It certainly wasn’t a popular job, and, if true, suggested that Ford was much stronger than he looked. One would hope. He didn’t look that strong.
The site wasn’t real full and it wasn’t real close to time to start but there was a shush and a sense of something happening, even if nothing happened at all. The men moved, like a tide that butted up against the framework of the unit, and they followed one man - a new man’s - progress along the lot, from the trucks and the dust right over to the building the kid had rightly pointed toward as the place for the boss-man, the one that handed out work like it was a finite thing. Russ took his eyes off the kid then, and he hustled the way the rest of them did, squared shoulders and straight back and not a look in his eyes bar the blank one, the one that said he’d be good and willing, so long as the work was hard and the pay enough. He sauntered up front, where he took a spot like he knew it was his and the rest of the men made way because he looked like he’d argue some if they didn’t. Russ stood with his hands shoved into his jeans pockets, and he listened as the foreman gave some kind of shit like he was in charge and everyone listened for the words about pay and overtime, needing to move fast because the money would be good then.
He looked back at the kid for one long second, and he looked a little out of place, for all the desert wind that stood dark hair on end, and the way he held himself like he was ready for what would be handed out. It was a little like a mirror that had rippled some, tossed out a reflection that weren’t no reflection at all. Rangy, Russ decided, the way of skinny dogs and the coyotes who lived on nothing because they survived. When the foreman came by with his list - and he came near Russ at the top of it, because Russ had earned the spot - he bent forward and they had a conversation that was short and to the point and the wind stole away the words before anyone could hear them.
When Russ turned, walking back to the bike so he could shed the jacket, lock the whole thing up tight for the day, he brushed Ford’s shoulder with his own, and he said curt and crisp, like it was a passing thing, “You got one day. Get shoveling, kid.”
Ford didn’t attempt to follow in the big man’s wake. He wasn’t a regular here and he didn’t have the time or the energy to fight his way to the top of a pecking order that wasn’t going to provide him more than a few dollars before he moved on to the next job. Instead, he moved around the edge of the crowd until he was standing with a few guys that had been here early, like him, blank faces and watered-down hope from just crossing the border not too long ago. He listened to the spiel on the site, moved his estimation of the foreman down another notch for being a blowhard, and watched the big guy with the familiar face take a spot up front like he was an army sergeant.
By the time the foreman was getting into it, Ford had already decided to move on. If the big guy was to be believed there wasn’t the budget to pay more guys here, and for all he knew the trash would just stay where it was until there was a handy wall to hide it all behind. Rather than burning his bridges, Ford stayed through the speech and the murmur following it, but all thought was entirely interrupted by the big guy’s look back. It was the slight three-quarter profile that did it. Not dead on, because the height and the facial hair got in the way, but the vague thoughtful turn of the head, that put the face where it belonged, and Ford could have sworn he heard a fucking lightbulb click in his head.
He thought leftovers because the picture had been on the fridge. Mom’s fridge, where she used the cheap magnets from pizza joints to keep their yearbook pictures in place. Ford had asked about the oldest pictures and he’d been told who they belonged to, but the guy was a ghost and long gone, and Ford had been trying to forget about him for ages. And here he was, his face a little browner and a little wider, the teenager head on top of a big body and a bigger bike, but it was him.
Ford felt like he’d been hit with something hard and fast and he was having trouble recovering. The resemblance got stronger as the guy came back, just like it had the first time, in the lot. The sensation was bizarre, and cold air was getting through the space between Ford’s parted lips and loose jaw. He barely heard what the guy said as he passed. He blinked, turned quickly himself to track the big guy’s movement. “What?” He didn’t stutter. He wasn’t even listening to himself speak. He wasn’t even aware he’d done it.
Revelations weren’t for parking lots in front of building sites, they were something for books and preachers and the kind of churches Russ swerved around like they didn’t exist so long as he didn’t acknowledge them. He’d never set foot in one, nor in a doctor’s office for longer than it took to slap antiseptic and a bandage over whatever ailed him and he didn’t spend time psychoanalyzing his life and finding things in it to get discovery-like over. Revelation didn’t write itself across the kid’s face but something did. It looked a lot like surprise and Russ was expecting that, so much as he was expecting anything at all. One man did a turn for another only when he had enough in his wallet to lose out on his own job; he had money stashed in it from the garage pay-day but not enough for the stake for Friday’s game and that was enough to keep him wary about keeping his job.
He grinned, hard and brief as the wind blowing at the men’s backs, short enough to be gone completely in a blink, and Russ’s face fell into the solid lines of someone who didn’t much look like they grinned once a week, let alone in a day. Surprise made him feel good, in a small, low-down sneaking kind of way and then the feeling good made him suspicious, and the suspicion knotted up his mouth some, like he’d been sucking on something sour.
“Go on, get. Shoveling. You wanted it,” his hand shooed the kid, as effectively as he’d dealt with kids in the garage, all gooey-eyed over engines and not a spit of work in them to take the time to learn. “Just one day. You stand yourself tomorrow.” And he’d be bringing the same paper cup of coffee, Russ would bet, and then he bit down against that like it was some kind of stink dragging on his heels.
Ford stared back at him, too astonished to really acknowledge the grin properly. He’d never seen the boy in the picture smiling, nor did he expect to see this man do it either, but there was a way that he held his mouth under his eyes in mirth that was so strongly the woman that raised him that Ford automatically responded with a faint smile of his own, just like he’d done a thousand times over. This man didn’t have the coyness and the calculating tip of head the way Ford’s mother did, but the resemblance was there. Ford felt vaguely sick, as if the concrete had started rocking under his feet.
Ford turned fully toward man and bike, squaring his shoulders. He wanted to ask him what his name was; the desire was so strong that he actually had his mouth open in an attempt to form the words, but nothing came out. He stood there for a second, eyes questioning, mouth moving in an echo of the first word, the what, but still no sound.
The kid looked like he was about to plumb fall over, ass on concrete. He’d gone the yellow-white color of spoiled milk and he was staring again, less wanting in young eyes and more like there was something wrong that Russ ought to know but didn’t. It made him nervous, sat hot and itchy under his skin and he shifted uneasily, bulk and weight from one foot to another and he folded his arms tight, locked wall of whipcord and worn-out denim and a scowl that set itself into the thin folded lines of his face, like a battered piece of paper sat too long in a pocket somewhere.
“You planning on working or passing out?” Russ’s voice had got real steady and real even; the jacket was off, and it was folded away and he was stood there, square blot of dark blue on a landscape all washed out sand and sky and steel. The kid’s gaping mouth made him twitchy and he didn’t like twitchy well enough at the best of times. He scratched the scruff of his chin a little, and he glared, like that would deal with it.
Ford recovered his expression. He still felt haunted by the woman in the trailer park, but that was just a feeling, and it didn’t have any proper sense to it, no real meaning. The woman wasn’t here. This was some guy he was related to--and only then maybe. He could be a freak of nature, just happened to be that right age and right look. It didn’t make him the prodigal son, since a guy like that probably wasn’t planning on doing any returning. Even Ford’s mother hadn’t expected it.
Ford gave the big guy one last look, and this one had hints of uncertainty and maybe a little panic, since there were direct questions he didn’t want to answer. He decided finding out the guy’s name was not worth the difficulty of asking what it was, and besides, who had time to stand there and wait for him to get such a stupid question out? Ford gave a faint shake of his head that could have meant anything, and he turned around and escaped in the direction he’d been told to go. He pulled a pair of second- or third-hand gloves out of his inside pocket as he went, at least some indication he had come prepared, and he shot the big guy a look over his shoulder as he gained the curb and pushed through the unlucky in the direction of the dumpster.
Russ would’ve given a look if only because the kid recovered fast - but the line had started moving, a slow ponderous thing like ants sliding on in to the work and for the next hours’ passing there was no thought at all of the kid and the hunched way he moved through the crowd and back to the work he’d been given - everything was the pull and twist of his own muscles, the pitch-pine smell that dusted his nose and his mouth and the tense of his back against the weight of the loads as they hustled as a group. It was something hard and ill-formed but it moved like one thing, like men who knew how to drop what they took with them and be one part of a whole, men who didn’t have ego when they had hands with work in them, and it was the shrill squeal of the whistle that meant downtime and lunch, because even a project without a union had lunch, kept the workers going long past dusk.
Russ’s stomach clenched hungrily, and he’d eaten stood up, hurried at the kitchen sink with a swig or three of coffee to chase it down and he’d closed the door on the girl from the night before without looking back and without time to take over breakfast, either. He’d worked up a film of sweat that sat shiny over his tan, and his hair was damp at the back of his neck, his shirt clinging at the v of his throat and across the spread of his shoulders, along with an appetite, and he made for the bike and his jacket, shrugging it on and looking around for the squat little diner, sat five minutes’ walk from the place but hot and filling for a couple of bucks.
Ford had spent his hours thinking. This kind of work didn’t require a lot of his attention, just enough to keep from getting brained or blinded, and Ford was both stronger and smarter than he looked. He was not cut out for any kind of long-term work, and he didn’t trust himself to do any kind of measuring that would land him something in this business, but that was fine. He was hoping for a few bills that would pay for a meal and shelter for tonight and tomorrow night, which would put him ahead of the curve. The shovel and the lifting was just raw energy, and with his mind he occupied the problem of the big guy and the vague memory on the refrigerator back home. For the first couple hours he tried to talk himself out of the possibility. Maybe he got the memory wrong, maybe it was just chance. But that still left a possibility which stuck him back where he started.
Ford was not the kind of person who could just walk away. Circumstances were not always in his favor, but when they were he couldn’t ignore the occurrence. There was also a curiosity that accompanied the wish to not be alone, because the fact that his mother’s precious Russell had struck out a decade before suggested to Ford that they were probably more alike than they were different. On top of that, this guy seemed almost unbelievably decent. He got him the day’s work, and there wasn’t a better gift than that. Ford wasn’t looking for handouts or hugs. He just wanted confirmation.
So he started planning how to get it. Most of Ford’s planning consisted of him attempting to get what he wanted with a minimum of talking, but there was also a certain amount of fragility to the situation. Ford wasn’t entirely sure the guy wouldn’t just take off, and if he did, that would probably be the end of him. No more second chances. So Ford was careful. He decided to hang back to see where everyone went for food, and then follow along. If the guy looked like he was in a good mood, and the place wasn’t too crowded...
Ford was watching from the curb as the big guy took his jacket off the bike. Ford’s own jacket was hanging from his left hand, and in the clear cold sunlight he looked older than he had before. He was still built of stretched angles, and he was still short, but there was more of toughness and muscle to him, particularly in the shoulders. The resemblance slowly veered from starving coyote to starving wolf, complete with the frank eyes and ready stance. The dark sweaty hair grew in a thick thatch off the top of his head, and he noted himself that the other guy’s skin was a few shades darker than his. Doubt suffused his visage again. He waited to see which way the guy would go.
The curb was wide and there were plenty enough guys going all ways and directions to hide one kid amidst the lot. Russ looked - not long, just a second’s swerve of a look round the place but there was no ribbon-thin kid all long arms and skinny shoulders and there were too many dark heads in amidst the tight knot of the Mexicans, all of a similar height. His belly growled and pulled at him some and that was more important than some kid who probably lit out half an hour in, that shoveling too damn much for someone who looked like he probably slept in some $10 a night motel room. Russ shrugged the jacket on over the now-clammy flannel shirt and he flexed his shoulders a little, the weight of it sticking the chilly damp of his shirt to his body unpleasantly. He stepped off and he walked toward the diner with the solid, sure stride of knowing the quickest path there, a trimmed down motion that was all that was necessary and nothing extra. Russ didn’t swing his arms, he held himself tight, like the energy he had was balled at his center for use rather than wasted.
The diner door was steamed good with the bodies crammed in and the heat that spilled out over Russ as he opened it was dry and smelled of sweat and bodies and grease. He shoved on in, edged in past a line of those hemming and hawing over spending a few bucks for hot food, and he sat down in a booth, cracked plastic top and menus damp from being swiped over with a cleaning cloth. It didn’t take long for service and Russ sprawled, the long length of him stretched out and his dusty boots kicked up onto the opposite side of the booth with a rangy, enjoyable expanse of limbs that looked like a dog rubbing itself up against a tree, simple relief but unconscious at that.
There were too many people in the place to notice anyone else’s comings and goings, and a plate of something hot and sitting in a pool of its own grease was set in front of Russ fast enough that he’d begun shoveling it in with the steady rate of a man who eats for fuel rather than for taste.
There weren’t enough good circumstances at work to make Ford feel like this was his lucky day. He wished that the guy hadn’t picked a booth. Booths were, by definition, very close and contained. The seats were more comfortable but they implied a binary set-up, one side and the second side, and unlike a table, where you could get away with the lack of chairs, sitting in another man’s booth had very obvious complications. Ford was already cautious of appearing to be too admiring of any particular man (not that there were any here he was interested in admiring), and sitting down in the booth uninvited made him nervous.
Stalling, Ford moved off to the side into the shelter of an antique bubble gum machine the contents of which he wouldn’t have eaten even being as hungry as he was. He looked at the plastic menus; not entirely out of his budget, which was, to be quite honest, about six dollars total for the entire day. He could afford some ice water and a couple eggs, a common order because it had a lot of protein and sometimes he could wrangle some calories out of a two-egg meal if the waitress was feeling kind. It was probably too busy for any kindness, so it would just be the two eggs, and Ford was about ready to kill for them just then.
Ford looked again at the booth with the maybe-brother sitting at it, and he decided to hell with it. Moving around the bubble gum gone to concrete, Ford threaded through the room and slid over the sticky plastic across from the big guy. Still no jacket, so a lot of pale muscle and hunched defensiveness along with a certain wary quality. He flagged at a waitress without actually touching her--he knew how waitresses hated being grabbed at--and flipped open a menu as she came nearer. He pointed at what he wanted and said the word “Up” in response to how he wanted them cooked; not because he actually liked his eggs sunny side up, but rather because it was ten times easier to say than the word “scrambled.” He looked across the table to see how the big guy was taking it.
The big guy - Russ - froze with his fork halfway to his mouth and a goodly part of the content slid free, all slick yellow yolk and bacon still pronged solidly on the fork. He’d been splayed, relaxed in that vast way of men who are largely unconcerned with being either noticed or disturbed, and now the booted feet retreated from the booth-side with slow caution, one foot dropping heavily to the ground and then the next, one, two. He weren’t used to being approached with caution, the kind that came when you looked like you could take someone in a fight, and he frowned something fierce at the skinny kid from the site, all suspicion creeping over his shoulders and sitting there, solid and tight in muscle.
“You planning on sitting here?” he asked, all twitch of the eyebrow and the corner of the mouth that made it plain this wasn’t real advisable at the best of times, and he sat back in the booth and the fork laid down on the plate gentle enough to not lose the rest of the load. “Get some kind of idea back there?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of the site, and he glared at the kid, like he might be expected to pay for his meal or something.
The response was not entirely unexpected, but Ford’s face soured anyway. He was still placed at the edge of his booth, the right third, perfect for potential getaway, with his knee out in the aisleway. This close, Ford was hoping that his scrubbed appearance and a work-defined physique would dispel the “kid” problem, but people seemed intent on reminding him he wasn’t technically old enough to drink. He wasn’t sure exactly what kind of ideas the big guy thought he had, whether it was for handouts or for something a little more private. Either way he was wrong. Ford shook his head, the definitive shake that, in his vocabulary, was a No, you’re wrong. It might even be extended to a fuck off, which amounted to the same thing.
The waitress went away, and Ford settled his jacket across his lap. His eyes slid down across the number of sticky plates in front of the big guy, which indicated to him a certain amount of prosperity. The bike sent the same message, and Ford kind of approved of the idea that this guy was doing okay. If he was the same person he was looking for. He was going to have to ask, no matter how much he abhorred the idea. Working up to it was going to make it worse. Ford concentrated on the menu, as people listening always made the difficulty even more intense than usual.
The first syllable hung him up. What was a very common word, and typically Ford had more problems with hard sounding words, syllables that started with t and d, but he was putting more pressure on himself to get this out, and that made the first word absolute murder. The wha sound repeated four or five times, until finally he moved into the full pattern of the sentence. “What is your na-name?” Not bad. In fact a little better than not bad. It was like a six point landing off a gymnast’s vault. Ford looked rapidly up as soon as he the sound was out, because he wanted to know the answer to his question since he’d sacrificed enough to say it.
You didn’t grow up as a half-fed, skinny misfit from a trailer park without getting to know what being a misfit really meant; it was being lumped in with the other kids, those who were off, or different or a little bit strange at the bottom of the social scale until you pitched enough fights with enough anger from being shoved down there, to get out. Russ wasn’t impatient, the same itchy-hot sense of something like embarrassment and something like reminder settled thinly across the skin beneath his shirt and he remembered lunch-halls and the flat, thick taste of warm milk on his tongue and how it had felt for a hot minute that took away from being tall and solid and capable of shoving down anyone who took him back there for just enough to sit and wince through the stumbled beginning of a word he could have finished for him in half the time. The kid didn’t look like he wanted it finished, he looked like it was as painful for him as it was to listen to it, and Russ set his teeth hard, and his jaw went to solid granite and he waited, his food going cold and his hands curling tense at his sides.
He didn’t want to give it. It weren’t nothing, he didn’t have anything hanging over his head that he wasn’t aware of - Russ didn’t pick fights he couldn’t finish and if he walked away from those he didn’t pick and didn’t win, he was wary enough to know who mattered. But he didn’t hand out his name like it meant nothing at all - but staring down the kid, flinty-eyed like he’d asked for his plate of food and perhaps to clean out his wallet as seconds, he could hear that word inch out over and over, until Russ squeezed his fingers tight into his palm like it was painful.
“Russ,” he said, flat and it wasn’t an invitation to ask anything more. “You got one?”
Too many circumstances for coincidence. Ford was just looking for something to make his conclusion a little more likely. Even if the guy had said something different, Ford (like most people) thought he was a good enough at reading faces to know if it was a lie. He didn’t respond to the obvious defensive anger with anger of his own, in complete counter to his behavior in the parking lot. On the contrary, he was abruptly untroubled by the big guy’s temper, as if the idea of a fight had just moved out of unlikely to entirely impossible.
Ford’s blue eyes moved out from under the shade of his dark hair and targeted the kitchen. The eggs weren’t coming any time soon. He didn’t answer the request for his own name. Instead, he looked down; not just to avoid Russ’ stare, but rather to inspect his jacket. He pulled at the material, turning a limp sleeve aside, settling it atop his knee. He slid two fingers into a pocket and pulled out a photo. He settled it on the table and put it down flat, leaving the ragged end of one nail on the edge of the plastic to prevent it from going too far from him.
The photo wasn’t long for this world. It was one of the cheap ones given out by fried chicken places for birthdays, and it was overexposed to the point of supernova explosion on one side. Three people sat in a corner booth. Everyone was smiling, and yet no one looked overjoyed to be there. Lou was in the middle. Ford, looking even skinnier and paler, more like a starving fox than anything like a threat, was on the right. The girl on the left was probably the most recognizable of the three.
Ford left it there, next to the coffee cup. He left his hand on the table too, in case Russ decided to take exception to it.
He’d had good will toward the kid. He’d come in without the hangover, the coffee had been hot and quick before the morning had punched through to cold, and Russ had had enough in his back pocket to feel generous, the kind of generous that had men buy a round after a particularly good poker hand. Those kind of generosities were expected if you wanted to play the same men again and carry on taking their money from them, and Russ carried them over occasionally with the same honey-slick of a grin turned toward some woman or another in a bar, the expansiveness that came with total lack of threat. Russ didn’t know what the kid was reaching for, not a gun but something - his eyes narrowed hard like he was expecting trouble, and he’d sat still and tensed there in the booth like something old, used to fighting its way out of corners. The photo was a frown, a hard look at the kid and then at the table top, a ‘are you for real?’ without words.
Gingerly, Russ picked it up, if it was so important to the kid. It was blurry, smeared like it had been carried around a whole lot more than any photo had any right to - he wasn’t real sure how long photos lasted, he’d not had a single one. He held it in his fingertips, careful with blunt callouses because if it got carried around a lot, it was precious and he knew what it was like to have little enough without someone else shitting on it.
The photo dropped. It fluttered, like a leaf caught a little in a back-draft and it settled, shiny side down on the sticky plastic, and Russ sat with his hands out in front of him and they curled from being stiff, plastic-statue hands to fists. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, that photo, and it was the kind that got pinned to fridges with crappy magnets, the kind that got kept long after the people in them were long gone and left. He recognized one face, the middle one and his mouth got stiff and tight and stretched like a rubber band past its breaking point. His eyes slid on to the left, and Russ didn’t give much in the way of expressions but a muscle began to flicker in his jaw, something tight.
When he looked at the kid, he seemed to be mulling over words, tasting them before they got out, and when they came it was gravel gritting over broken glass. “The fuck is this shit, kid.” A weird, sick-swaying kind of feeling in the pit of his stomach, like standing on a boat in the middle of the diner and Russ leaned forward rather than back because back meant they’d gotten to you, back meant you’d taken the hit they’d intended, and his elbows went down on the top of the table, heavy like menace.
“Get the fuck out.”
The abrupt fall of the photo concerned Ford. It wasn’t that the photo was gold. He wasn’t crying about missing his dear old mom, after all. It was just that the photo represented a one-time deal. Those three people were ever going to sit in the same place long enough to take a photo ever again, and Ford liked to be able to carry around the image in one photo, like a pipe dream in square form. Rapidly, Ford retrieved the photo. He shoved it away into the coat on his lap without bothering to look at it, because it was more what it represented than what it was that mattered.
Ford let his eyes narrow and the bullfighter in the ring reaction came back, just like the parking lot, only this time he was hungry and tired and the wolf gave the big bear a snarl. It took him four tries to get out the word no, but he got there. It ended up being a very nasal, vicious sound. “N-n-nu-no.” He used his right hand, scraped raw even through the gloves from the days’ work, to shove a finger at the menu he’d left on the table. He just ordered. He wasn’t leaving.
Ford shifted until he was squared again, as if for a fight across the table. His chin tipped up to indicate the big man across the table. Then he struggled out exactly the wrong thing. “You look like her.” This is what it ended up being, but the youdiced into six or seven syllables first. Judging from Ford’s expression he was willing to slaughter the sound just to make it happen.
It was salt streaked across raw-open wound. The table juddered some, the tableware that had been propped on the side of the plate, that fell onto the matte surface of the booth-top and the yolk spilled across it in a gloriously sticky-yellow arc. Russ stood, abruptly and his knees caught against the solid sturdiness of the table and that hurt but it didn’t stop him standing. He didn’t pick fights he couldn’t win and he didn’t hit what couldn’t hit back with at least a little swing to it to make it interesting. But the photo, hidden away was something enough and the murderous look in Russ’s eyes was clear enough, even if he was scowling half-fit to bust. He stretched out one hand - just the one, and his fist came close, enough for heat and the full power of his own momentum hauled jerkily back by a decision made in a second.
It wasn’t neat, the movement and it wasn’t conservation of anything at all. Russ scrabbled at his back pocket for his wallet, and he dropped three bills on the table, fives or fifties, they could have been anything but they covered the half-eaten meal and the cup of coffee that was meant to be on its way and he didn’t need to look. “Fine,” Russ said, gritted teeth and a hiss of breath that was something like holding back rage in a place too crowded to put it to use, and he felt, for a second, seventeen once again, tall and impossibly angry and impotently incapable of doing anything at all about it but to dig his heels in and then to run. His jacket he flung over one arm, and he strode toward the door, abandoning meal and sickening rush of his own past sauntering up and sitting down to eat with him, in favor of hard tempered glass between him and the kid, the solidity of the sidewalk beneath his feet until he could take the bike somewhere they served the kind of thing he wanted now.
It was too crowded in the diner for anyone to take much notice of one guy storming out, even if he did slam his knees into the table first. Ford didn’t exactly cower, but he flinched and pressed his back into the edge of the booth, tipping his weight in a slight turn so he could get out into more open space if that fist actually did head his way. While plenty of people had made Ford’s life difficult, he didn’t accept violence as a matter of course, and he wasn’t going to just take it, nor was he going to react with more fear than the survivalist technically needed.
It was obvious by Ford’s expression, transparently surprised and cautious more than angry or vindicated, that he hadn’t expected his comment to have this effect. To him, it was an explanation, a thing to say because it painted out his presence in Russ’ booth and in this world all in one phrase. Not even impatient assholes reacted to things Ford butchered with such vehemence, and Ford was fairly intelligent. He realized he had made a mistake and that the comment had been an insult. He realized it shouldn’t surprise him; the guy took off early and Lou was a bitch. Everybody who knew her knew that.
Ford was more surprised that the anger was directed at him. He hadn’t been asking for anything, and he didn’t know that his existence was a total surprise. He’d figured he would get denial or grudging acknowledgment, and that’s all he’d been going for. Explosive rage, not so much. He turned on his padded plastic seat and watched the big guy stalk away back toward the site. Slowly, he turned back, looking at the cold plates and frowning at the unpredictability of life. He’d fucked that up.
His eyes fell on the bills, and he leaned forward to save them before the mess got to them. There was still half a meal here, some coffee, and two eggs coming. The bills would pay for all that and would have enough left over for a very modest tip and maybe even a fund for the following night.