Sleep, Sweatshirts, and Burgers
Huxley hadn’t locked the front door of his trailer, which made sense. It was a good way off the road, secluded in a small meadow behind the lilac bushes behind the main house.
By the time Bill had stumbled up the front step, he’d finished his tea, so once inside, he rinsed the mug and left it in the sink. The kitchen floor— he found out the painful way—was strewn with sharp bits of walnut shell so he swept it up, noting there were no actual bits of walnut left.
The crow had been thorough.
He also found a not-insubstantial chunk of slag—probably something Huxley had lying around because it reminded him of something, or he thought the shapes were interesting—abandoned among the shells. The walnut shell dust on its corners suggested it had been used to smash the nuts open.
“Smart fucker.” He set the black stone on the kitchen table, gaze lingering on it for a second, because it reminded him of something, too, only he couldn’t, in his sleep-deprived state, think what.
He also saw that the bird had done his business on the rug in front of the kitchen sink, so he brought that to the washer, which had other rugs inside, already washed. He switched them to the dryer, rinsed the one he’d picked up, and turned on the dryer.
“Gonna have to teach that bird s few manners.”
He found Funk roosting inside a cardboard box, turned on its side, sitting on the bedside table. A stack of books, an overturned laundry basket, and a chair stacked with more books offered makeshift steps up to the perch for the bird who couldn’t fly. The crow peered at him through one beady eye but didn’t otherwise stir.
“Almost like he was born to do this,” Bill observed, admiring Huxley’s ingenuity in meeting the bird’s needs.
The crow made a low croaking noise, and Bill yawned.
“You seem fine. I’m going to shower.”
Like the rest of the trailer, the bathroom was tidy, if full of stuff. He found everything he needed to get clean in the shower stall itself, and a neat pile of towels, a face cloth and a toothbrush still in the package on the vanity.
Most of the time it took him to dry off, he spent examining Huxley’s maximalist decor. A shelf above the mirror held a display of interesting rocks, root knots and pinecones. Strings of glass beads and water-worn bits of glass bottles wrapped in wire hung in the window, bouncing light off every surface, creating a riotous rainbow of colour over the white fixtures. The walls were hung with prints of feathers, trees, and beachscapes.
And that was just the bathroom.
“So, you still keep everything that catches your fancy,” Bill mused, fingering a blue, bulbus bottle he distinctly remembered finding on the bank of a creek running through the Jackson property. Anther antique bottle held a collection of river pebbles he and Huxley had collected one summer day when they’d been about eight and tended to spend their afternoons sitting in the shallow creek to cool off.
A yawn made his vision blurry, and tears trickle down his face, so he set the bottle carefully back and returned to the bedroom.
Like the living room, the south-facing bedroom window was shrouded in plants, giving the room a cool, green shadowy feel, though the light coming through was still only a vague morning glow from the sun rising on the other side of the trailer. Half a dozen rag rugs, a threadbare Persian rug and a few kilims overlapped to cover most of the ugly linoleum flooring, and the bed was piled with more afghans.
Grateful for the layers of homey comfort, Bill pulled on a T-shirt and pair of boxers he found folded on the bed and crawled under the covers. He’d barely breathed in the soothing scent of Huxley’s soap and sleepy body scent before he dropped off.
Afternoon sunlight streamed through the window when he woke to the feel of something dropping onto his head.
“The hell?” He batted at the annoyance and tried to roll over, only to find his pillow covered in unshelled nuts.
“I think he’s expecting your head to be hard enough to crack his nuts open.” Huxley’s amused voice dragged Bill the rest of the way out of sleep, and he pushed himself up.
“What time is it?”
“About three.” Huxley leaned on the doorframe, arms crossed in front of himself. The light picked up the golden fuzz of the hair along his arms and his socked feet crossed at the ankle. He was more than a little mouth watering.
“You should have woken me sooner.”
“You were up all night.”
“How are they?” He flopped his hands in his lap on top of the sheets.
“Fine. Susan came by around noon to check on them. Good temps, strong joints. She took blood to run tests on their livers and listened to hearts and lungs. She’s pleased with their condition. Recommends we try and keep them quiet and off their feet for a little while, to make sure their joints are fully developed, but otherwise, they look good.”
Bill yawned. “Leave it to your father to do the impossible.”
Huxley shrugged. “Everything about it, beginning to end, was best case.”
“I’d say he got lucky, but that man makes his own luck.”
“That he does.” Huxley pushed away from the door frame and sidled into the room. He clapped a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “Don’t forget that neither of them would be here if you hadn’t intervened with the first one.”
“That’s literally my job.”
“Doesn’t make us less grateful.”
“Well, you’re very welcome. It isn’t every day I get to see something good but that shouldn’t happen, happen. We were very lucky it all turned out as well as it did.”
“We know. Don’t think Dad’s going to breed her again.”
“Just because she twinned once doesn’t mean she will again.”
“She was Mom’s horse.” Huxley sighed. “He won’t risk it. He’s had a hard time with how much he misses her.” He pursed his lips, then, and turned for the door. “You hungry?”
“I could eat.”
“I’ll put burgers on the grill. How many you want?”
“Just one. Got anything green?”
“Might be able to find something.”
“That’d be nice.”
“I’ll see what I can rustle up.”
With a sigh, Bill flopped back onto the pillow, glad he had no place to be.
Another nut bounced off his forehead and he glared up at the crow. “What is your problem?” he asked it.
Funk croaked at him.
“Same to you.” He sat up again and collected the nuts, which he dropped back into the bowl by the crow’s feet. “Go find your rock, you PITA.”
A crow’s normal caw, in the confines of a bedroom, was ear-splittingly loud.
“The hell?” Huxley was at the door in an instant.
“He started it,” Bill muttered, swinging his legs out of bed.
“Very mature, Mr. Veterinarian.”
“Where are my pants?”
“Still in the dryer.” Huxley went to his dresser and pulled out a pair of sweats. “Wear these.” He tossed them at Bill’s head.
The crow chucked, bobbing up and down and dancing from foot to foot.
“What did I ever do to you?” he asked it as he yanked the pants away from his face.
The bird continued to laugh at him.
“You’ll want this, too. Feels like we’re doing early spring out there. Don’t let the sunshine fool you. If it was raining, it would be snow.”
“Weather roulette. You know, St. Kits weather was never like this. It was very predictable.”
Huxley grunted as he left the room.
The ‘this’ Huxley had tossed at Bill was a well-worn hooded sweatshirt with the University of Guelph name and griffon splashed across the chest. He fingered the small holes, fringed with faded material, where bleach he had splashed across the front pocket almost a decade ago.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” He pulled the sweatshirt over his head with a grin. Susan had borrowed this sweatshirt from him in first year, when she had returned home for Thanksgiving in October, and he had not. She’d returned to the university without it at the end of the weekend, having forgotten it. Or so she said.
He stood and caught a glance of his bedraggled self in the mirror above the dresser. His black hair stood out in a scruffy, bed-headed shag around his face, both it and his beard in serious need of a trim.
“Geeze. I look like shit.”
“You look fine.” Huxley was back, wearing one oven mitt, holding a BBQ spatula, and a beer, the latter which he held out to Bill. “You want?”
“You need glasses?” Bill asked, taking the beer and combing fingers through his hopelessly tangled hair.
“Meh.” Huxley shrugged then winked. “You look exactly like you should, getting out of my bed at three on a Monday afternoon. Rumpled. Tired. Wearing my clothes.” His grin curled half his mouth, and Bill’s gut turned over at the memory of that expression. “Suits you. Now put those pants on and git your ass out here. You have salad to mix.”
And then he walked away, as if what he’d said meant nothing at all.
As though it didn’t get Bill’s heart pounding and his cock waking up like the stupid, hopeful idiot it was. He was tempted to go hide in the bathroom until that went away, but Huxley’s “hurry up!” from the kitchen spurred him to finish getting dressed instead.
Despite having fallen into bed around six in the morning and slept like the dead for nine hours, Bill still felt groggy and thick. The beer went straight to his head on his empty stomach, causing the world to spin a bit and his tongue to loosen.
“You steal this sweatshirt from Susan?” he asked, plunking the heavy salad bowl on the table, and speaking to Huxley through the screen door.
“Is that where it came from?” Huxley didnt look up from the grill. “I’ve had it forever.”
“You’ve had it for ten years.” He slipped out the door, grateful as soon as he did, for the sweatshirt in question. Huxley had been right about the chill.
“Maybe.”
“Why’d you steal my shirt, Hux?” Bill asked.
“It’s yours?”
“You thought it was Sussan’s? She’s five foot four. It would reach her knees.” Huxley’s dismissiveness lifted his hackles.
“Hmm. It did reach her knees, just about. I wondered about that.” He turned from the grill to peer at him through narrowed eyes. “How do you know it’s yours, though? Ever think I met some other hunk from Guelph and stole his sweatshirt?”
“You think I’m a hunk?”
Both of Huxley’s eyebrows went up, but his bland expression didn’t otherwise change.
Infuriating man. Bill poked a finger through one of the holes in the pocket. “First time I washed it.”
“Shouldn’t use bleach on coloured loads.”
“Well, I know that now, don’t I?”
Huxley nodded, his expression going thoughtful, which was at least a change from blank. “I expect we both know a lot more now than we did then.”
“Well shit.”
There went Huxley’s brows again, and Bill clamped his mouth shut, because he had not meant to say that out loud.