Chapter 2 A Pond of Sand
A Pond of Sand
HIS NAME may have been Eric James Christiansen on his driver’s license, passport, registration, and the deeds to three of his properties in the United States and Canada, but it wasn’t the name he was born with.
Sometimes he liked to think he didn’t know the name he was born with—nuh-uh, couldn’t remember, no such person ever existed, who were we talking about again?
But then everything in his chest and brain would become rootless, unfocused, a foggy wasteland without a point of reference.
He’d be forced to backtrack through each name, each identity, each kill in order to clear the fog, to make everything hard-edged and crystal in his mind and heart, or he’d be lost in the past and he’d forget his name now.
It was easier to simply keep that past on the periphery and know he could go there if he was ever forced to again.
But it wasn’t his past that he was obsessing with today.
No. Today, it was whether he should put his bright and shiny name on the new, unfurnished house that he was currently pirating water, electricity, and sewage from via illegal RV hookups.
Pensively, he pondered the neighborhood as he sat on the steps of the RV itself, pushing at the six- and seven-toed kitten who kept trying to flounder his way out the door.
“No,” he said, hoping his voice was firm. It was hard to be firm when you were talking to a special-needs black cat. Black cats as a whole were stompy and loud and perfect, and while this one could barely walk, he was no less stompy and loud and perfect.
“Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow…,” his little friend complained, pushing his nose against Eric’s back.
“I wouldn’t let you out even if you had four toes,” Eric told him crisply. “This isn’t a special needs thing, this is a ‘I don’t want you to become a coyote’s dinner’ thing. Give it up….” He floundered for a name. He’d told people it was Oliver, but somehow that wasn’t sticking right now.
“Eddie,” he said, inspired. A fragment of his education—both the one he’d had in high school and the one he’d subjected himself to so he could appear cultured and well-read—drifted through his consciousness. Something about “clubbed feet.”
Oedipus.
Oedipus.
Eddie. Puss.
He started cackling to himself. Finally, after a month of cohabitation, he’d found the name for his stompy, loud little friend.
“Mew.” This next push against his back was a little harder. Not because the little tiger stripe was more agile, but because the tiny cart that carried her back end was so well-balanced, the kitten could breathe against the ground and push it half a mile.
“Katie,” he said to the kitten. “Katie, my darling little girl, no, my little one. Simply no.”
“Mew.”
He reached behind him and smoothed her crinkled whiskers back against her crimped, tiger-striped fur. Both kittens forgot immediately about escape, and she folded her paws in front of her and leaned against his backside, while Eddie gamboled to his sister to clean her ears.
He didn’t even have to look at them—he’d seen this dance before—and while his eyes had never left his new neighborhood, he sharpened his concentration on it again and tried to make his decision.
If this cul-de-sac—hell, if this block—had been placed anywhere else in the country, it would have been seen as a prime piece of real estate.
The houses were well-crafted, individual, and spacious, and their landscaping was drought friendly, which was great since they were practically in the middle of a place called Death Valley.
Death Valley tried to kill life forms dead—who wanted to live there?
He was lucky, he figured. He’d landed here in late February, about a month after an historic inland flood—a western hurricane, which was a once-in-a-hundred-year event—and he’d had a couple of days to figure that the high sixties was what passed as winter in a place that got to 120 regularly in the summer.
He needed to have his shit together by then, he thought, sipping his coffee appreciatively. If he was going to keep Katie and Eddie—most definitely Eddie—then he had to have a place that he could keep cool when he was not in it.
The RV he’d been living in for the last two months didn’t qualify—although he had seen some beautiful scenery traveling from Northern to Southern California between December and January.
But if he wanted to stay here, he had to… what?
He glanced around the cul-de-sac again, remembering that one of the residents had told him that while only one person on the block kept his pool filled, they all knew each other, and were welcome to use it.
On the one hand, it sounded unbearably ’70s and “let’s all get naked in the disco pool,” but having met all the residents, Eric had realized that while some of those men were criminals, none of them were “let’s get naked in the disco pool” types. This was both disappointing and reassuring, really.
Reassuring because Eric had realized that his “fucking everything that moved” days needed to be left in his rearview—that sort of thing could be fun, but it wasn’t good for him, not when he’d been craving a place to be accepted—and maybe redeemed—for the last nearly two decades of his life.
Disappointing because, well, damn. He was surrounded by taken gay men, not one of whom he’d kick out of bed for eating crackers.
Oh, and speaking of whom… here came one now.
Ernie—it was the only name he’d been given, and Eric knew better than to dig—was in his early to mid-twenties, willow slender, with dark curly hair and eyes so brown they were almost black. He had a narrow, almost vulpine face and an appealing, dreamy-eyed smile.
And his boyfriend was possibly one of the scariest motherfuckers Eric had ever met, in a long line of scary motherfuckers that Eric had either worked for or killed.
No, Eric would not be jumping into the disco pool with Lee Burton’s boyfriend, thank you very much.
But he would accept a pastry from the plate Ernie carried, because he understood Ernie’s donuts were a rite of passage and a blessing in the little community he’d found himself in.
“Oh my God,” he muttered as Ernie got near and the scent wafted toward him. “Cinnamon rolls?”
Ernie gave a winsome smile. “Yes, I know,” he said smugly. “Your favorite.”
Eric stared at him helplessly. “I, uhm, have some milk if you’d like to sit down with me?” He’d worked with psychics before—or people who had little tiny bits of the gift strewn in with their psyches here and there.
He’d never worked or met with an Ernie before. Ernie had taken one look at him, shaken his hand, and known him. The good and the bad. And oh boy, did Eric Christiansen have an awful lot of bad in his soul.
But Ernie had given him a chance—given him a vetting—into the exclusive little club that centered on this cul-de-sac, and he could only be grateful. He seemed to recall that gratitude involved social niceties. He’d have to brush up on his etiquette.
“I’d like that,” Ernie said. “Here, give me the coffee, and you can pick up the babies.”
“Thanks,” Eric told him, and he really was grateful.
He scooped up the sleeping kittens and placed them gently in their top-loading crate.
The inside of the crate featured a thick, soft bed, and if he was careful and timed it right—no more than two hours of napping in the crate—he could manage to get both kittens to their litter box before anything untoward happened.
Right now, it kept them from being underfoot, which, given that the RV was not exactly spacious, was what he wanted.
“Have you decided yet?” Ernie asked when they were situated with a glass of milk each and the amazing cinnamon rolls between them on the RV kitchenette table.
“Decided what?”
Eric was inhaling his pastry reverently, breathing softly in.
“Whether to move into the house,” Ernie said patiently, and Eric nodded in acknowledgment before pulling off a piece and dipping it in milk.
He took a bite that was like an explosion of innocence and lust on his palate and made sounds he would have been ashamed to make in bed.
Swallowing almost left him drained.
After another deep breath—and a tentative bite of the pastry to see if it was just as good as the first (it was)—he relaxed a little and met Ernie’s patient gaze.
“Was this to talk me into it?” he asked.
Ernie shrugged. “You made an impression at the barbecue. Sonny is already asking if he can visit the kittens, and while he’s a grown man and can take disappointment, I like to cushion the blow a little.”
Eric blinked. Sonny Daye, definitely not his real name, had been…
interesting. Eric knew that there was something fundamentally broken in himself, something that made killing no big deal, that left him absolutely oblivious to the suffering of his fellow human beings once they’d passed a certain line in the sand.
Sonny should have been on the other side of that line, except Sonny had never killed another human being outside of battle.
Ever. His lover and protector, Ace (also not his real name), had shielded him from that choice.
Sonny was, for all intents and purposes, an innocent psychopath.
Eric rather enjoyed the little man’s company. He was like a small, misbehaving dog. He was a good dog at heart, but he had… intrusive thoughts. Eric rather desperately wanted the good dog to win out. That meant there was hope for him as well.
And Sonny really loved the kittens.
“What would I have to do?” Eric asked, not even sure he knew who to contact to buy the house he was currently squatting next to.
Hell, he had no idea how this entire cul-de-sac functioned—there was power, water, even trash services, but to quote a movie, they were out in the middle of the fucking desert!
How did you apply for a lease on a house in a cul-de-sac in the middle of the fucking desert?
“Tell Burton and Jason,” Ernie said, seemingly oblivious to Eric’s grimace.