I.
Pluto stood, insensate, watching the end of the fry-up. Grilled cheese for his new friend, Cristofer. Burned on the griddle because, three-and-a-half minutes ago, Cristofer had said, "Velveeta is homo cheese."
Pluto now contemplated what those words meant. Hostilely affectionate. Affectionately hostile. The difference between the two. The difference between Pluto and Cristofer; a joke and a smiting; the difference between taking it easy and taking it lying down.
Slid the blackened luncheon onto a paper plate.
Cristofer ate butter and toast, as if he did not notice the rancid char, or Pluto's glare, and he savored the melted cheese-food, pressed between two inedibles. Pluto slinked out of the kitchen, backwards, and into the bathroom, where he loaded his dead brother's Glock 17. Pluto returned to the kitchen, hand steady, eyes narrowed.
"Sagen Sie dumme Dinge mir nicht." Pluto's words, each a quiet but fierce convulsion.
In his usual, soft, English-as-a-second-language berceuse, Cristofer said, "I told you. Speak English, my friend. And you are stupid one." He wiped his greasy hands on his trousers and focused on Pluto's blossoming black pupils. "I dare you."
Pluto's torso shuddered. His hand shook. He retrained the gun on Cristofer's left eyebrow. The handsome face of Pluto's new friend, the face of a friend found loitering outside Pet Spot with no pet, was now stony and inscrutable. Pluto wanted to see fear there, would settle for amusement. But nothing.
A few singed crumbs were stuck to Cristofer's lips, and he wiped them away with the back of a large, dirty hand. His eyes, a dull grey, were set slightly too close to one another, and made him appear, at times, more intelligent than he was. Neither scared nor startled, Cristofer now flared his nostrils, disclosing a suddenly lowered opinion of his present, gun-wielding company. He turned his back on the gun and on Pluto's rabid cat pupils and calmly lifted the lid of the green plastic trashcan. His remaining crusts, two ninety-degree angles of bread, fell to the floor as the paper plate fluttered into the can. He turned slowly back to Pluto and the gun.
"What do you see?" Cristofer asked. "Me, shaking in boots? Fuck you." He took a brazen step toward the gun. "Put weapon down on counter. I give you to ten. I count in head."
Pluto began to speak, German again, and Cristofer barked, "English!"
"Your zipper's down," Pluto lied in a hushed but steady voice.
Cristofer knew that his zipper was up. To prove he knew that it was up, Cristofer stretched, languorously, his skin melting over orbs of muscle. He placed joints in flexion, in case Pluto—what friend pulls a gun?—was one of those surprise ready-steady-mental jobs. Joints in flexion for deterrence.
Pluto aimed for Cristofer's shoulder. He nodded and stepped closer. Cristofer grinned and shook his head. Pluto nodded. Cristofer swallowed air, his throat pinching, and he shook his head, no. Yes, Pluto nodded, yes. Pluto squeezed the trigger.
The shot was clean, close range, and done that way on purpose, by an expert Scouts Canada. Pluto placed the bullet straight through the bases of flesh, superior to the superior border of the scapula, no splinters of bone, no splinters at all. The bullet blew out a hole in Cristofer's back, blasting past four-star muscle lodging, and billeted in the wall of the green and red kitchen. (Pluto will always say he planned it this way. Pluto will always say that.)
Cristofer dropped first to his knees and then to his side while clutching his shoulder. He writhed like a newly tranquilized leopard on the linoleum flooring. He growled and groaned. He screeched. His mouth stretched as far open as it would, and the screech dropped to a low, endless howl.
Frantic, Pluto put the gun in the drawer with the silverware and called an ambulance. He steeled himself for the next forty-eight hours. There would be interrogations. Cristofer might be made to return to the United States. Pluto vomited in his mouth and spit the vomitus into the kitchen sink. He steadied himself and then spun around.
"I'm sorry," Pluto crouched next to Cristofer's twisting form and whispered. "I'm sorry. That was an accident. I'm so sorry. Accident, accident." Then, he fluttered around the kitchen looking for tea towels. He found a green one and placed it against Cristofer's wound, the entry point. The exit wound wept, too, but Pluto could not see another tea towel.
"Bad!" Cristofer snarled at the tea towel.
"I have to," Pluto pleaded.
"Get off!" Cristofer was breathless. He desperately tried to roll out of Pluto's reach.
"I have to," Pluto ground out. He held Cristofer as still as he could and put the towel over the wound once more.
Cristofer shook his head, wailed as a cat in heat, and clutched what was in reach, Pluto's biceps. Pluto could do nothing but push the tea towel more firmly against the wound. Cristofer kicked his legs, as if he were running, a child's tantrum, spinning in circles on the smooth flooring.
The police arrived a few minutes after the ambulance did. Two police cars parked on the front lawn, but the ambulance pulled into the driveway. Inside the home, three or four officers had their weapons holstered, but their hands anticipated trouble.
II.
Before his skin exploded in Pluto's kitchen, Cristofer's life had been a leash on the pavement, constantly pinned by a foot, and he could never reach the bush, the bowl, the bone. All Cristofer's skin had done for him, while intact, was cage an arcadian stooge-soul. He accepted his lockup, yes, but he would not have balked if flayed by a third party. Would have loved to watch his unsheathed organs shrivel. Would have loved his essence proved to be no component of the viscera.
The skin-suit, for his twenty-three years, had served to remind Cristofer that he was nothing but a deep curtsy to animal obligations: to having fathered a stillborn child at twelve in his native country; to his strained ties to an adoptive family in Delaware; and to the insincere Lutheran congregation that placed him there at sixteen. Skin had held Cristofer, especially, to those times when he'd said that it was his last day alive, and yet it never was his last day. Here he was, still.
And now, with flesh torn, pain sinking him, and the face of a new friend that loomed over his bleeding out body, he felt it might be the last day, and he did not wish it so.
Pluto rocked on his heels and chewed his cheek as ambulance men and women bustled about the kitchen. The officials eyed first Pluto, then Cristofer, as if the two were lovers and poets, the wound resultant of a quarrel. The black crusts of the grilled cheese sandwich lay on the linoleum, guiltier than would be spilled absinthe and leftover braised ox cheek.
The ambulance workers gathered Cristofer into the van. Pluto was told to stay behind, to wait for questioning, and he was eventually driven to the police station. He wrung his hands in the backseat. He pulled his shirt into his mouth and dragged the cotton over his teeth to clean off the residual vomit.
"You all right?" one of the police persons asked him.
Pluto, eighteen, Canadian, scared to the point of leaking piss, nodded. Yesterday, he was selling bath towels at Montenegro's, plodding through CEGEP, aching for a legitimate, post-secondary education in mathematics. Yesterday, Pluto was just a plain, horse-fucking, light brown Canadian with poor endurance for anything but thought. Often, these thoughts would spiral all day until the day was used up, and he found he had not eaten. These thoughts were mostly to do with maths and reason, and rarely to do with human behavior.
He was born to parents of Algerian and French descent, but genocide and genealogy meant nothing to him, not really. Why should he know how to fire a gun? But he did. So alone with his body for eighteen years, any extension of it felt natural. Unless he was being sexually indulgent, Pluto did not contemplate his physical self, not at all. His unavoidable reflection in the disengaged flatscreen, or in the shiny bottom of the soup pan, showed an almost-grown man with black, glossy hair, kept just below the collar; wide, seemingly lidless, charcoal eyes; and lips as if those lips had been punched. His mom reminded him, daily, that he walked with a limp on the left, had different-sized feet.
As the two officers in the squad car drove well below the posted speed limits, Pluto thought of his new friend, Cristofer. It was easily done: to think of Cristofer's physical self, and to think of it often, was Pluto's pleasure. He'd sometimes imagine Cristofer while Cristofer was standing right in front of him. Pluto could close his eyes and see the nose, almost too long. Then, when he opened his eyes, he would see the nose, and see that it was even longer than he'd just considered. Cristofer would be talking with a mouth crammed with horseradish-cheese and table crackers, and Pluto would let his eyes close again, so that Cristofer's lips were then still, unsullied, and light red. Pluto could pretend that those lips, the lips of his new friend, Cristofer, had never consumed anything.
Before the grilled cheese, before the shooting, Pluto and Cristofer had grown tense with one another. It had been an argument about languages, as usual. Since age twelve, Pluto had practiced Russian, Ukrainian, French, two Afro-Asiatic dialects, Pashto, German, Maltese, English, and Catalan. A self-taught multi-linguist, Pluto at times caressed and conquered these languages. Most times, however, he slew or hiccupped them. No matter; his zeal eclipsed his inelegance. This was Pluto's German year, and for five months, until Cristofer's invitation and insinuation into Pluto's life, he had been speaking and thinking German ninety-percent of his time.
Although Cristofer was not born on U.S. soil, he was, by passport, an American. He believed that one language was enough and had abandoned his mother tongue at sixteen. Regardless of the dropped articles and oftentimes poorly chosen verbs, Cristofer spoke English elegantly and carefully. When Pluto told him that other Americans sounded weary and dispassionate when they spoke, as if talking around mouthfuls of rocks, Cristofer would squint, guffaw, and shake his head in disbelief.
To Pluto, more important than language, more important than any insistence by Cristofer that he adhere to the square drawl of the Western Anchor, was Pluto's core. Inside Pluto lived unfastened bubbles of language recursion, claw-marks, sperm, and occasional muscle weakness with fatigue. Inside, there lived the idea that one might have a friend.
Many men had smoothed, licked, bristled, and bitten the outside of Pluto. But never Cristofer. Pluto's skin, the changeless map, was never Cristofer's interest. Because Cristofer was the front cover, the noxious not-oxygen, and both blades of the scissors, and Pluto, conversely, and though not ugly, was so very back-flap, bottom-of-the-aerosol-can, the part of the scissor blades that no one needed to touch. Pluto was all about maths, glory-hole sex since age thirteen, and assuming that he was misunderstood by and isolated from most everyone; Cristofer was about survival and scheming, about being candid and being coarsely handsome.
Pluto relished how Cristofer regarded him with acute interest. The way Cristofer never minded that Pluto acted queer; the way he touched Pluto's arm with unmistakable affection in the middle of Burnside Ave.; the way he plucked an unmindful Pluto from oncoming traffic, these acts led Pluto to believe he had a friend.
"What would you like to eat today?" Cristofer once asked.
"Breakfast burrito," Pluto answered.
Cristofer's face had twisted in contemplation. He'd felt his empty pockets. "Would have to steal."
"Oh."
"But is no problem. Breakfast burrito for you, my friend."
"Thank you."
Cristofer winked, and Pluto felt his face heat.
Cristofer grinned. "Maybe you want military secrets. What do you think? I should steal them for you, too?"
III.
Cristofer survived the bullet wound. He pressed no charges.
"We thought was not loaded," he said at the hospital during the police interview. The police, in whispers that the victim was meant to hear, called Cristofer a vagrant. The authorities seemed more concerned with why Cristofer was in the country and how he had been making a living for the past year.
"Why are you here?" they asked.
To one female officer with a sloppy bun at the back of her head, Cristofer flashed a smile and said, "Adventure travel."
Alternatively, police were kind to Pluto, his association with the vagrant a point of interest and pity; his Algerian heritage and his grandfather's Red Hand were overlooked or misattended. The Canadian police probably knew all that Pluto knew. The café bombing, to which Grandfather was never officially linked, saw fifteen people dead, so said the Parisian government. Regardless, by the time warrants were drawn, Grandfather BB was enjoying a lengthy, self-imposed exile in Egypt, where he met Pluto's Gram, an Ontarian on a church tour. The two then moved swiftly and easily through Europe, the Red Hand having turned the color of European paper money, and settled in Belgium.
Until they came to Toronto in 1971, Grandfather BB and Gram worked as green grocers, selling courgettes and apricots near the Brussels-South railway station. Truly, the only interesting violent encounter to which Grandfather BB admitted participation was a late luncheon in August with a detestable Guy Debord that ended with one party or another slapping a bread plate against the table and threatening to loose someone's balls from his body.
Polizei. Four of them, now pacing around Pluto, waiting to understand, and yet sympathetic because Pluto looked so sad. No, pathetic. He heard one of them say that. Pluto expected Queensbury rules—fair, but with ample room for pummeling. Instead, Pluto was handled easily. Not once, but twice, by two different officers (one man brownish with facial hair swirling almost up to his eyes, and another who was paper-white and carried a yellow legal pad everywhere). Pluto was asked would he like to share a warm meal after custody.
When questioned about Cristofer, Pluto began to proceed in German, but halted, reversed, and experienced three full minutes of aphasia. Finally, he commanded his brain to choose the lazy tongue, explaining, "He isn't a vagrant. Cristofer has a home in Albion. Upstate New York. He has a cello. And an original Jamie Wyeth. He told me that he used to meet him at breakfast. For three years, every weekend, in a Pennsylvania diner. He isn't a vagrant."
After his release, Pluto spent weeks alone, waiting for contact. He clocked in and out of Montenegro's, folding towels halfheartedly and hoping for termination, which never came. He saved his paychecks, spending what little he allotted himself on broadband, phone service, online language courses, and vegetables. He resigned himself to thinking that Cristofer was shipped back to the United States, and on the very day he imagined Cristofer roaming with no shirt in the mysterious state of Delaware, the phone in his pocket vibrated on its special setting. This setting was reserved for Cristofer, the new friend, whom he—shit, did he?—had shot.
They arranged to meet in a sandwich shop, and Pluto made sure he arrived first and could see the door. The small eatery smelled like bleach and onions. Pluto sulked at a green table in the corner. Cristofer stepped inside, and there was no gun, nor any signs of vengeance whispering across Cristofer's handsome features. Cristofer was buoyant, and his arm was in a sling.
The boy is colored blue, Cristofer thought when he set eyes on Pluto. Cristofer's shoulder twitched, as did the tendons in his neck. He neared Pluto, could smell him, and seizing a loose fistful of Pluto's black hair, Cristofer tugged once and said, "Relax. You know, I do not press charges." He slid into the booth across from his sullen shooter.
Pluto nodded glumly, considered removing the wax paper from his vegetable sandwich. Should he speak in German? Should he speak at all? These were the only thoughts he allowed himself.
"Was joke," Cristofer said.
"I know."
"You smile then."
Pluto tried. He nodded at Cristofer's arm. "You'll have to rehab that, won't you?"
Rehabilitation? Seemed tiresome, just the word on Cristofer's tongue. Cristofer promised the dep cashier, two nurses, the Home Hardware manager, and the lady from whom he bought his gasoline and cigarettes that he would follow through with the rehabilitation, but he would not tell his only friend this lie.
"No. Will take pass on that, I think."
Cristofer reached across the melamine table and grabbed Pluto's hand. He shoved his t-shirt and the sling aside and made Pluto press his finger into the healing bullet hole. "Feel that," Cristofer hissed. "You did that." Both proud and surprised.
Pluto looked down at the stale roll. He thought, Okay, there is this sandwich, and then there will be nothing else. I want Cristofer. What I want is no longer anonymous and poking at me through a hole in the wall. I want Cristofer. I don't want to suck him without seeing him. I want to suck him so my nose mashes against his crotch, no baked enamel or self-lubricating solid plastic bathroom partitions between my face and his groin, no.
Pinched the skin on his thighs beneath expensive trousers.
That did nothing to bridle the feelings of lust, not to mention the sick grind of self-loathing because he'd fallen so short of his mark. That bullet hole had done nothing. He made himself look at Cristofer, who snarled, as usual, because of some snaggletooth.
"I really feel as if I need to leave here," Pluto muttered.
"This restaurant?"
Pluto shook his head.
You, Pluto thought. I need to leave you.
"Leave Canada?" Cristofer's face brightened. "Yes. I know place. No bribes. No murder. Only rental life in American city." He watched, but Pluto's face did not brighten. Cristofer tsked and said, "Was joke."
Pluto had no balls for refusal, for acceptance, so he did only as he was told to do, which was move south and east with a man that had called him a homo for cooking with Velveeta.
IV.
Cristofer plucked up their history, stopped in Albion to collect his better goods, and moved them to Rochester. Route 104 across the Bridge of Sighs. On the last leg of their journey, as Cristofer slept, Pluto picked up an abandoned ladies' magazine from the floor of their van/cab: McLeod's Balm diminishes the appearance of your scars and burns. Pluto turned and pulled Cristofer's t-shirt away from his skin. The scar was puckered and mean. Eyes still closed, Cristofer swatted Pluto's hand away and pulled his shirt back into place.
"You are some artist?" Cristofer said with a snort.
They reached an apartment dowsed in tomcat urine and purple glitter. Two blocks from a beer distributor, three blocks from the post office. Before they unpacked any sacks or boxes, Pluto walked to the Rite Aid and bought McLeod's in a plastic pot. He then bought fried chicken and cole slaw. At home, in their semi-furnished apartment, Cristofer was asleep at the foot of the bed; some boxes and sacks were unpacked around him, but no household goods as yet in their proper places.
Pluto placed the meal of chicken on a bath towel. He put the pot of salve in between the breast and thigh. He crawled onto the bare mattress and waited, hoping that the smell of the chicken would rouse Cristofer. He drifted off. When Pluto awoke, the chicken, towel, and salve were gone, and Cristofer was on the mattress next to Pluto. Cristofer wore only dark red underwear with American slang across the band. His dirt-colored hair was neglected, unruly, and long. Had been cut with a knife. Cristofer's cheaply inked skin said something, but so did the bordering skillful inks of tree frogs, brimstone, and a blue, brown, and black contour-line map of Belarus. Professional, imaginative, never smudged. Said something else, those. Pluto touched a blue tree frog. Cristofer stirred. The rest of their bodies never touched.
The next day, Pluto's mother, eccentric, always doting, flew to Buffalo, took a train, hired a car, and arrived at the new apartment just as he and Cristofer finished their breakfast cereals. She presented them with an inspirational calendar, a crockpot, and an Afghani prayer rug, which, she said, she expected no one to use.
With a tough pinch of Pluto's trapezium, she kissed him on the lips and said, "I love you, baby bear. All grown up."
Pluto blushed and nodded. He ushered her toward his new best friend. She looked at Cristofer as if they had never before met, though they had: at the police station, in the living room, at her poetry reading last month. His mom shook Cristofer's hand, and then he excused himself with a dramatic bow. Pluto blushed again.
After his mom surveyed the three rooms and came away looking queasy, she lighted a brown cigarette and began to unpack some linen. She did not understand why there were so few pieces of linen. While Cristofer showered, Pluto and his mom had tea. She rose to put her cup in a kitchen sink that was rusty and whose sides were painted with food too old to be scrubbed away. She groaned.
Pluto's mom stuttered and stutter-stepped when Cristofer reappeared, bulging with muscle and ruin, in a threadbare bath towel, dripping city water, and oozing steam from a shower. Cristofer took Pluto's mom by the shoulder. With a wet, veined arm, he guided her to their shredded, plaid sofa.
He whispered to her, "He's good boy. I keep him safe, eh?"
She said little more. She left. She misunderstood their dearth of linens and was confused by Cristofer's obvious erection underneath the bath towel. Pluto knew that she had once desired American citizenship, and he knew now that she no longer would. Rugged they were, Americans, but also absurd, like gorged parasites. She would think that forever.
Cristofer and Pluto ate pot noodles all night. One pot after the last pot, onto the next pot, they filled so full of yellowed noodles that Pluto, high, said that he could see the noodles worming out of Cristofer's healing bullet hole. Ha ha. They wrestled and laughed all night and morning, until 0512. A fight about the languages again. Incensed, Cristofer garroted Pluto with a weich D string from his cello, took his time, and dabbled in some lo-fi attempted murder.
As he loosened the noose about Pluto's neck and slapped his best friend on the shoulder—what does not cut, does not matter—Cristofer knew he could never please a Canadian. Not one born of the French-Algerian zygote. It was treason, besides, on so many tiers. He leaned in, bit Pluto's neck, and felt his lips purse in a kiss.
Lick that neck, Cristofer thought, and you are one dirty dog.
Backed away with a gasp that he covered with a grunt, and Cristofer muttered, "Shit."
Pluto touched his neck where the bite still stung. He pressed out a groan. He said, "Why did you even bring me here?"
Cristofer snorted and said, "Adventure travel." Then, he cleaned the coffee press and went to bed.
All days and nights, from then on, became a gamble. A drunken, jobless, incautious gamble. Days passed, and neither spoke. Days passed, and they spoke, excitedly, over one another. Nights passed, and they screamed at each other until both throats were raw.
"This is gamble," Cristofer said while they shopped for inexpensive winter socks.
"Yes, it certainly is," Pluto said.
They rolled a four. They rolled a nine. A seven, then. A wash-up.
V.
America! Pluto thought. Our southern sister, farting out mammoth children, so lazy with their thoughts, yet so easily fraught with suspicion.
The oily man, whose fat, smooth cheeks obscured his eyes, monitored Pluto as he made his luncheon selection. Pluto had intended to steal, yes, but he hated the idea that this burnt out American convenience store clerk had caught on. Pluto left the store empty-handed, and Cristofer, who waited in the parking lot, leaning against a car that was not theirs, rolled his eyes.
"I do it," Cristofer huffed and stomped into the store.
No doubt that Cristofer would.
January, and all around Pluto, the comfort of shelter and food and friendship crumbled. It was his Ukrainian year, but that mattered very little to Pluto while he was so cold, so hungry, so lonely.
At first, their apartment fell to insect and rodent infestation. Then black mold, no heat, no food. A smattering of squatters—some of which Cristofer had invited and later regretted - and then it was more pleasant for Cristofer and Pluto to sleep on the steps of the apartment building than inside their fetid apartment. A padlock was placed; eviction was official.
Their whole scene collapsed, and they were made to live on warmed pavement in the day and sleep on the frosted grass at night. Pluto and Cristofer found themselves stealing blankets from strollers and eating what normal people dropped on the sidewalk. They possessed only layered clothing, a field knife, their passports, turkey jerky, McLeod's balm, some dollar bills, three blankets, a sack of shoes and socks, a English/Ukrainian speech-to-speech talking dictionary, and no prospects for—and no interest in—permanent employment. They had sold everything else. They had sold things that were not theirs to sell.
Cristofer returned with candy bars and a hard apple.
"Now is time to get serious," Cristofer said through chattering teeth. He tore into a Snickers. "Talk about future of you and me. The bastard friend. I am bastard friend. I know that you know. You shot me. You shot me for things I did before you grew out of blue-eyes of babies. So, I know that you know."
Pluto frowned. Why wouldn't Cristofer just—? Why wouldn't this man take what Pluto wanted to offer? Please, just touch the keratin, and smooth down the hair. Please.
Pluto studied his friend, as Cristofer ate, slept rough, stole food and ran with it, and had a shit under a pine tree or in the dumpster. He watched him all the time. Cristofer sported erections and spoke of needing to come, and he grabbed his crotch in frustration and indistinct desire. Pluto posed, in the most provocatively aloof way he knew how, on their favorite chained-down rickety bench in town-center. Nothing. No eyeballing. No touch of knee to thigh. Where did Cristofer's erections go?
They did not go inside Pluto.
A vagrant acquaintance named F invited them to a disused warehouse. F had lost some teeth, but she always had an apple, pilfered from a market that both Cristofer and Pluto knew as an easy target. The owner was blind in one eye, a fact that lent itself easily to jokes that no one ever felt like making.
Inside the lofty warehouse, someone had made a fire, the foundation of which was a roasting, suede recliner. Including their hostess with the apple, there were four other sleeping vagrants in the cool, damp building with colorless walls. One man slept on a pallet on orange shelving. A pile of blankets called to Pluto and Cristofer from the corner of the expansive warehouse. They took more than they should, and no one woke up to rebuke them for their greediness. Pluto and Cristofer knew this to mean that every one here was sufficiently warm. All were vagrants, after all. A unit, a congregation, when a fire was going or when competition was nil, but each would detach himself from the whole and fight like a pit bull with meat sewn to his cheeks for one centimeter of personal gain.
Cristofer and Pluto heaped seven on top of their tired bodies. Cristofer spoke quietly, his breath blowing into Pluto's ear and ruffling his dusty hair. "We are in arctic elements of Rochester, New York, United States of America. No prospects. Ugly."
Pluto began to speak, and he tried a bit of Ukrainian.
Cristofer hissed, "English."
Pluto's soft palate rebelled as he switched from the boat-tongued, Slavic mouthfuls to the long-tongued, Canadian English. "I should go back home. We missed Christmas and the New Year celebration."
Cristofer nodded. "I go with you."
"Oh." Pluto flinched. "You want to go with me?"
Cristofer flinched. "You do not want me to go with you?"
Pluto shrugged.
Cristofer threw his leg over his friend's legs, pulled him closer, and tried to sleep, hoping this was not the sad end that it felt.
Before dawn, with Cristofer's field knife, the two rolled the vagrants for valuables and coins. Nineteen dollars. A couple phones with no carriers. A Montblanc pen. Very strange. Traded some things for cash.
With no words shared, they walked west and north until a ride was offered. Cristofer and Pluto walked more and got three more rides. Four days. Did they look like their passport photographs anymore? They handed them to the border people, and the world was staring at them. Two dirty men presenting similarly colored books, which were embossed with different words. The difference between the two. The difference between United States of America and Canada; a joke and a smiting; the difference between taking it easy and taking it lying down.
Had pity, though, those Canadian border guard beauties. So obvious that these two frowzy, dispirited men were dying to get back to their mommy. America had taken them, easily, yes, and tossed them as a killer whale tossed a seal.
You! Play with me! Whee!
And then I ate you for breakfast, you stupid motherfucker.
VI.
Inside Pluto's home, his small bedroom, four rooms removed from the room in which he had shot his best friend, Pluto dropped their sack of belongings and invited Cristofer to a bath. Pluto washed his friend's hair with the shower attachment. When Cristofer stood and reached for a bath towel, Pluto glanced down at the water, which was dark grey and with a topcoat of swirling oil.
"I have to get work again," Cristofer said, scrubbing his hard body dry. "Construction job is reliable. But then have to travel far out of city."
"My mom will let you stay here," Pluto said. He drained the tub water, rinsed the grime from its sides, and filled it again with hot water.
"No, she will not like that," Cristofer said. "She does not enjoy me."
"She's green. Or blue. A serpent."
"Pardon?"
"She doesn't know what it means to me to have you here."
"She is serpent?"
"Was joke." Pluto grinned.
Pluto undressed and stepped into the tub. He stood in five inches of water. Waited as it filled to fourteen inches, and then lowered his body into the wet heat. He had not had a bath or shower for almost a month. A hand-wash in a public toilet had been about it.
Cristofer closed the lid of the toilet and sat. He waited. He waited for Pluto to be clean, for Pluto to wash his own hair, and for the tub water to be the color of the Erie Canal. Once, he felt his hand twitch, wanting to hold the shower attachment and control the water that ran over Pluto's ratty, black hair.
Cristofer thought: A crow. Blue-black eclipse plumage, if crows do that.
Cristofer wanted to caress the scalp, caked with grass, gravel, sebum, and clay, until the skin squeaked from soap, from being the cleanest it had ever been. But he just sat on the toilet. He trimmed his nails with Pluto's mother's nail clippers.
Pluto stood and reached for a bath towel. As Pluto touched the fluffy, yellow cotton, Cristofer snatched the towel out of his hand.
"Step out of tub," Cristofer said.
Stepped out of the tub.
Pluto was naked, dripping water, very aware of his heavy penis and how it curved with interest. How it was heavy from the heat and from the afterglow of washing Cristofer's head and hair.
Cristofer stood. They were almost the same height, though Pluto leaned to his right because of the thing—an undisclosed thing—that made him limp when he walked. Cristofer remembered sleeping, his legs wrapped around the body before him, to be warm, so they would not die, and how their stomachs made the same creaky noises in the night. Hunger.
Cristofer jerked forward one inch. Then another inch. He pressed his mouth against Pluto's mouth. He seized Pluto's arms, raised them, and pinned him to the bathroom wall, against a bar of hanging bath towels. He slid his hands along the delicate skin inside Pluto's arms.
Pluto opened his mouth and moved his tongue across Cristofer's teeth. He freed an arm, reached out, and fingered the furrowed skin of the bullet hole, now only a slight aberration on Cristofer's terrain. Almost ordinary, like the tattoos and the hills of muscle.
Cristofer's towel fell to the tiled floor. He dropped to his knees in front of Pluto and bit the inside of Pluto's thigh. Pluto grunted. His erection nudged Cristofer's unshaven cheek.
Quietly, Cristofer said, "I thought it was end. You did not want to bring me back. Or has ended, already? I do not know."
Pluto shook his head. "Not ended."
"Is okay now, eh?"
Pluto nodded. Touched the ink. The hair. And the scar. Things he touched when Cristofer slept but longed to touch like this, invited, in the daylight. Wished he'd done more living before this, now that he knew how to live.
Once more, Cristofer bit the tender flesh of Pluto's inner thigh. Then, he rose from his knees and tilted his head. He stood, legs spread slightly, so that his eyes were even with Pluto's. Their noses touched once.
"I am stubborn," Cristofer said. "Like mule. But when I thought it was end . . ." Shrugged. " . . . I could have begged you, as child."
"Could have." Pluto curled his lip.
"I did not want to beg."
"Understood." Entès. Verstanden. Compris. Ʒpoʒyмiв. Mifhuma.
"But to be mule is . . . deadlock."
Pluto touched the bullet hole. "Understood."
"Easy, then." Cristofer held Pluto's face in his warm, damp hands. "Do not behave like mule, eh?"
"You'd still have that hole in your shoulder, though," Pluto mumbled and looked up cautiously.
Cristofer shrugged. "You shot me before mule days. Was wasp. Wasp days, then mule days. These are—"
"Cheetah days."
"Hummingbird."
"Cassowary."
"What is cassowary?"
Pluto shook his head. "Hippopotamus days."
"Hippopotamus days. Okay," Cristofer said. "But they are cannibals, no?"
Easygoing now, the smile. No sneer, no dare, no gamble. Scoured one another until all the sounds in the house were as the low-frequency booms of the cassowaries, or the grunts and bellows of hippos in mud pits.
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