Chapter 27 Levi
The game won’t end. It was tied an hour ago, it’s tied now, the two teams trading hits back and forth across a field two time zones west. The pizza’s down to grease and a couple of crusts I’m too far gone to finish.
Dante’s sunk deep into the other end of the couch watching ball like there’s nowhere on God’s earth he’s due.
It’s the best thing I’ve had in a long time, and I know to the day how long I get to keep it.
The Panhandle Country Bash starts next Saturday, but that’s not the clock that matters. My crew comes before that. Any day now, tomorrow for all I know. A van of them rolling up to flip the lights back on and start the operation that pays for all of this.
And Dante finds out the no-name bum he’s been hauling around had a name the entire time. A loud, famous one. After that, nothing in this room happens again like it’s happening now. I do the only thing I can with a good night I can’t keep. I bank it to remember later.
Sometime past midnight I get up for water.
I’m gone two minutes, no more. Glass from the tap, a look out the kitchen window at nothing, the Gulf you can hear and can’t see.
And when I come back Dante’s out. Dead asleep.
Quick. Just like that. Head gone back against the cushion, one arm slack across his stomach, the other hand open on the seat between us, palm up, fingers loose.
Hair falling across his forehead. The assembled thing he wears has slid off him.
Under it is just a tired man who closed his eyes and didn’t mean to.
I stand there in the middle of the room and I can’t move.
I’ve never seen him off guard. And here he is, gone clean under in front of me. Door wide open, me ten feet away. Defenseless as a kid, because sometime during this last week he decided I was safe to fall asleep in front of.
I’m not waking him up.
No way in hell.
The throw’s on the arm of the couch. The one I’ve carried around all week. I pick it up, and I lay it over him. Carefully so I don’t wake him. Easing it up over the slack arm and the open hand and the rise and fall of his breathing.
I stand over him with the warm throw settled across him and let myself feel the full depth of what I won’t dare say in daylight and can’t finish even in my own head.
The thought that starts… this is what it would be to… and stops right there.
I leave the throw with him. I don’t curl up on the other end of the couch a foot away from him.
That’s probably not allowed. And I don’t strip a blanket off one of the many made beds upstairs, because him and Blondie dressed every one to sell, and you can’t pull the covers off a staged bed without it showing by morning.
I go out the open door with nothing. Onto the terrace, into a Gulf night holding the day’s heat. I stretch out on the long deck chair facing the water.
It isn’t even chilly out here. A beach night in summer never is, just warm boards under me and maybe a little chill come morning.
The cold’s all inside, where that AC’s been running non-stop.
Out here I can breathe. The door at my back standing open, the flat black Gulf in front of me, nobody within reach.
It’s the only way I’ve ever known how to lie down anywhere.
I lie out here a long time, not sleeping, listening to the waves. And the thought comes around that’s been circling all week.
I should tell him.
There’s a window of time still, a day, two, however long before the crew rolls in. I could walk back in there right now, wake him up, and just say it. Get out ahead of the posters and tell him myself, while it’s still clean.
I can’t. When I get right up to the edge of it, the cliff falls away.
Because the second he knows, I lose the one thing I’ve never had. Right now, far as I can tell, far as I let myself hope, Dante likes me. He likes the plain, regular me. Not the country music star, Lee Streeter. There’s nothing he’s using me for, nothing he needs from me.
The day he finds out, I turn back into the guy everybody wants for something. I’ll never know again whether anybody in a room wants to be with me or if they’re figuring out what they can get from me.
I know I’m doing the exact thing to him that everybody’s always done to me, and I do it anyway, because I’d rather have the few clean days I’ve got left than the look that comes after.
I must go under at some point, because I wake up to the pink light from sunrise and a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey.” He’s being careful with me. “Levi.”
I come up easy. No arms over the face, no scramble.
Just his hand on my shoulder, the deck chair under me.
He puts it together behind his eyes. He knows I covered him up with the throw and came out here and slept on a deck chair so he’d have the couch.
He doesn’t say a word about it. Just stands there holding the folded throw.
“I need to run,” he says. “I’ve got clients today and I need to go get myself put back together.
Thanks for letting me crash here with you last night.
I was beat.” He doesn’t move to go. “I’ll call you.
I’ll need to come by this week to check on the house anyway.
” And then he fumbles slightly, like he’s going off script, “Maybe we get together this week, if you’re around. Go somewhere. Do something fun.”
If I’m around.
And there it is, the cruelty of our situation laid out. Dante is finally reaching to see me again, like we’re two regular people who get to make plans. Reaching for this week, of all the weeks there are.
This week the crew rolls in. This week the lights come up and the name comes back. This week’s the one that ends us, and he’s standing over me in the dawn.
I’m gutted.
“Yeah,” I tell him, and I mean it with everything I’ve got. “Yeah. This week. I’d like that. Call me.”
He nods, and his face eases. Then he holds the throw out and puts it back in my hands, and he goes.