Oasis of Night (39 page)

“Tex, can you cook?” I was already untying my apron.

He nodded. “Sure.”

“Here.” I handed him the scrap of cloth. “Tie one on. The kitchen's that way. We serve all the usual stuff. Chris—” I pointed him out at the other end of the bar, “and I will take care of the drinks. Think you can handle it?”

He double-tied the apron around his slender waist and grinned. “You won't regret this, Jack.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and I'm not sure, but I think he was whistling “Dixie.”

“Who's the redhead?” Chris laid a tray of empty glasses on the bar.

I told him. “He's a nice kid from Texas. Go easy on him, huh?”

“Texas?” Chris made a rude noise. “Yeah, I'll go easy on him.” He nodded, acknowledging a summons from the far corner of the cafe. “You sure do like to collect strays, Jack.”

Tex was as good as his word, turning out sandwiches and hamburgers, french fries, and tuna salad, until the supper rush was over. I found him in the kitchen, stacking plates for the dishwasher. “Hey, Tex, you got a roof?”

“Nothing yet. I'm staying at the Y.”

“There's a spare room at the back of the cafe. It's nothing special, but the bed's comfortable and there's a radio. It's yours if you want it.”

He stared at me for a moment like he didn't quite believe me. “Well, jeez, Jack… thanks.”

“Least I can do.” I grinned. “You never know, I might hit you up for another massage.”

Around seven, the crowd began to slack off, and I was able to go upstairs to my quarters and get showered and changed. I wasn't sure what to expect—Rick Callan hadn't said where we'd be going or what we'd be doing—but the October evenings were cold, so I wore dark flannel trousers and a sweater, and layered my shearling jacket over it.

At quarter after seven, I went downstairs and saw Rick Callan sitting at a corner table sipping a cup of coffee. He raised a hand when he saw me, stood up, and summoned me over. We shook hands as if this were just an ordinary business meeting instead of what it actually was. For a moment, holding Rick Callan's warm, strong hand, I wondered if I wasn't being too hasty. Sam hadn't actually said it was over between us—I'd only assumed it—and maybe it was too soon to start dating again.

“Good to see you, Jack.” Callan was wearing dark trousers and a dark, V-neck sweater over a white shirt. His shoes were buffed to a gleaming shine, and he was clean-shaven. I had the feeling Sergeant Callan was just as nervous as I was about this whole date business. “I was starting to think you'd stood me up.”

I laughed. “Hey, if you want to back out, don't let me stop you.”

“Oh, you ain't getting rid of me that easily.” Callan looked me up and down briefly. “It's a real nice night out. I figured maybe we could take a drive in the country, maybe head toward Topsail way. Not too cold, if you're dressed for it.”

That sounded good to me, so I followed Callan outside. He'd parked his car in front of the Heartache Cafe, a nice, late model Buick. I made to open the door but Callan slipped in ahead of me and tripped the latch. “Never too late to get off to a good start.”

I made some feeble joke about how Callan was a romantic, but I was starting to get a little bit nervous. I wasn't afraid of Callan—he seemed like a steady enough guy—but I wondered exactly what he expected out of tonight's date.

We chatted amiably as he turned the car north, heading out of the city and into the dark, wooded valleys of Conception Bay. I didn't do a lot of driving outside the city, and it was weird to see the road in front of us illuminated by the two tiny slits of light emanating from Callan's blacked out headlights. The city and its environs had been under blackout order almost since the war started; it was thought that even the smallest glimmer of light from any of the coastal communities would draw unwanted attention to the numerous Allied warships patrolling the waters around the island. There weren't a lot of other cars on the road, but every one had the same kind of blackout shields over the head lamps. Nobody was taking any chances.

Topsail was only a few miles from the city, and Callan was a good driver, as well as being good company. He kept me entertained and laughing with ridiculous tales of his boyhood spent in rural Mississippi. I gathered his parents' marriage had been an unhappy one. Callan was an only child, and when the union was finally dissolved in divorce, he went to live with his mother. His father became a shadowy figure, seen once or twice a year at Christmas and on Callan's birthday. “He died when I was twenty-one.” Callan's big hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, and I sensed that he was struggling with some dark emotion. “Momma didn't hold with how I felt about Daddy.” The sergeant shook his head. “Hoo boy! Didn't she carry on when I told her I was going to Daddy's funeral. You'd a thought I stuck a knife in her back.”

I told him a little bit about my family, how my father had been killed one day at work, struck down by a runaway locomotive at the Philly rail yard where he'd been employed since he was seventeen years old. “I guess I had to be the man of the family after that. My mother didn't have much, but she did the best she could, and she raised me right.”

Callan took a right turn off the main road and for maybe a minute, we bumped and bounced over a narrow, rutted gravel road. The full moon had risen, and I could see a narrow band of gleaming silver on the bay. “There's a real nice beach down here. Doesn't have much sand on it, but there's a trail that goes up over the hill and a place where we can sit down and look out over the water. That okay by you, Jack?”

“Sure. Yeah, I'd like to take a walk.”

Callan pulled the car up next to a narrow strip of trees and cut the motor. He rolled the window down and for a moment, we sat in silence, listening to the faraway lap of waves against the shore. “You know, it don't seem to matter how angry or pissed off my life makes me. All I gotta do is come out here and sit for a while and somehow it all just”—Callan waved a hand—“washes away.”

He was quiet, lost in some private reverie, and I wondered what he was thinking about, what he was remembering. Maybe he'd taken Private Thomas out here, hoping to make some sort of a connection and never thinking he would be rebuffed. I wondered about that: Callan seemed to be reasonably astute about things. Had he really misread Thomas's intentions? Or had Thomas lost his nerve?

“Come on.” Callan opened the car door and got out. “Let's head up the trail a ways, see what we can find.”

We walked for perhaps ten minutes, sometimes in companionable silence and sometimes chatting quietly about nothing much. Callan was interesting and educated and funny; there seemed to be no end to the hilarious stories he remembered or the ones he could make up on the spot. “You know, Jack, there ain't a lot of people I can talk to round these parts. My job being what it is, I gotta be careful.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I'd seen the posters: BUTTON YOUR LIP and SOMEONE TALKED in bold type, with illustrations of screaming, dying men—lurid reminders of what loose talk could cost the Allies. “Everybody's extra careful these days. It's hard to know who you can trust.”

“That's for sure. And me, being the kind of man I am, well.”

We had been following a narrow path for some distance through the forest. On our right the dark bulk of the mountain hoisted itself head and shoulders over the smooth back of the waiting sea, and I could hear the waves still murmuring in the distance. “But you don't…. You don't talk about that, do you?”

Callan was walking slightly ahead of me, and he stopped, turned back to look at me. “No, Jack, I don't talk about that.” There was strong emphasis on the word “that,” and I sensed I'd hit a nerve. “How long do you think I'd last in this man's army if everybody knew I was a—”

He didn't say the word, but I knew what he meant. Yeah, I'd heard that word a lot. I hated that word.

“Hey, look.” I caught up with him and took hold of his arm just above the elbow, turning him to face me. His face in the moonlight had a beauty and nobility that belonged solely to him, and his big, dark eyes were sad. I cupped his cheek in my hand; his skin was warm, and I sensed the subtle rise and fall of his breath as he struggled to calm himself. “They kicked me out on a blue ticket. You might as well know. That's why I'm here instead of on the front lines with the rest of the boys.” Some of the bitterness I felt inevitably spilled over into my voice and it made me sound weak and self-pitying, and I hated that. “You think every goddamn American, every Brit, every Australian—” I thought about Kevin MacBride for some reason, and his friend Andros Scala. “I spend the war serving beer and sandwiches to tourists or topping up coffee cups.”

“Blue ticket?” Callan shook his head. “I'd like to get my hands on the sons of bitches who think giving a man a blue ticket is any way to win this war.” He leaned in and kissed me, a gentle touch of his lips against mine, but it went through me like a bolt of lightning. I gathered him into my arms as I deepened the kiss, probing his mouth with my tongue, tasting him. It felt so good to hold him in my arms, to feel the heat of his body burning through my clothes.

“Well, boy!” He grinned at me. “Why, you're all about diving right in, ain't you?”

“Sorry.” I suddenly felt foolish, like a teenage boy on his first date. “I hope you don't think….”

“What I think is we have reached our destination.” He indicated a bench, set in a hollow depression behind a grove of trees. “Come on, sit down here with me.” He patted the wooden seat next to him, and I sat down. From this vantage point, the entire expanse of Conception Bay spread out before us, glistening darkly in the moonlight. “Yeah, makes you wonder how many goddamn tin fish are out there right now, waiting to blow this whole island to kingdom come.” Callan fished a hip flask out of his pocket, handed it to me. “Drink?”

“No, thanks, I….”

He took a pull. “Don't drink?”

“Gave it up for Lent.”

Callan laughed. “You're a funny one, Jack. How'd you come to be running a cafe here, anyway? I mean, why here?”

I shrugged. “Why not here?” I told him about Frankie Missalo, about how I'd left Philly to follow him up here after Judy died. I left out the part about the botched back-alley abortion and about standing on the bridge over the Delaware that freezing cold morning. “Seemed as good a place as any.”

“You afraid they were gonna charge you with that girl's murder?”

Something deep inside my gut clenched. “I didn't kill her.” I remember how Tex's face had looked when I said it. Was Tex her brother? Had my intuition been right about that? It seemed too close to be a coincidence, when he'd told me about her, back in Cairo. Did he know about me and Judy? Did anybody?

“Ain't nobody saying you did.” He studied me for a long moment, and then turned to look at the expanse of shining water in front of us. “Where I come from—little place called Vardaman, in Mississippi—we ain't close to the sea. Well, not this close, at any rate. I used to dream about seeing the ocean up close like this, so close you can taste the salt on your tongue.”

I caught the point of his chin and turned his face to me and kissed him. I didn't want to talk. I just wanted this.

Callan groaned as I deepened the kiss, and his arms went around me, pulling me tight against him. The zipper on his jacket was so cold it burned my fingers; I yanked the tab down and slipped my hand inside, under his clothes, my palm flat against his warm skin. His chest was muscular and lightly furred, his nipples exquisitely sensitive to touch.

“You gonna kill me.” Callan dragged my face up and kissed me savagely, guiding my hand to the clothed bulge at his groin. I cupped my hand around his hard cock and rubbed, starting slow and easy, pacing him and myself while we kissed, our mingled breath steaming white into the cold night air. Callan's hand made short work of my zipper, slipped into my pants and swiftly negotiated the gap in the front of my shorts, fingers closing around my cock. He bent over me and sucked me into his mouth and the world went away. I was dimly aware of the hard bench digging into the back of my head, of the cloak of stars unfurled above me and the narrow trunks of the trees that obligingly screened us, but my entire universe had shrunk down to a set of sharply defined sensory impressions. He sucked me like an old pro, and within maybe ten strokes, I was coming, but feebly, and what should have been a tidal wave of glorious sensation was instead a mere shudder. An awful sense of guilt dropped over me like a filthy curtain.

“Stop.” I pushed him away from me. “Stop. We have to stop.”
Jack, let us bathe together now, and then we will love each other slowly….

He sat up, wiping his mouth on his handkerchief. “What's wrong?”

I was saved from uncomfortable explanations by the sound of voices coming up the path. “I… somebody's coming.”

The whirling red beam of a police car stabbed the darkness, and I could hear men shouting. I tucked myself inside my clothes while Rick Callan did the same, and then we started back down the path together, walking side by side but not speaking.

Alphonsus Picco met us halfway up the hill, carrying a flashlight. He swept the beam over our faces. “Mr. Stoyles, I think you had best come with me.” It was a measure of Picco's agitation that he didn't ask what I'd been doing up in the woods with Callan in the dark.

“Sergeant Picco. Is something wrong?” One of Picco's constables was asking Callan for identification, which the sergeant provided. The constable looked it over quickly and seemed satisfied; he motioned Callan to go on.

Picco's pale eyes flickered over my face, and he seemed to be barely holding back an expression of disgust. “Your… friend is free to go, but I insist you accompany me back to the city.”