Left on St. Truth-Be-Well (2 page)

“Not even if I knew they were gonna save my life someday,” he said truthfully and then turned around and fled toward his car.

T
HE
next morning, Carson stumbled out of the Super 8 hotel and glared impotently across the street at his unholy nemesis.

By day, it looked even tawdrier than it had in the night. The stucco was chipping, and the sign, advertising a silverware sales convention, was missing a couple of letters. The bird shit all over the parrot rendered it uglier in the day than it had been at night, when half the lights were out.

Oh God. If only there was some way he could go back to last night and the cover of darkness.

He fumbled for the sunglasses in the breast pocket of his leather jacket. It was going to be too warm for the jacket in a few hours, but right now, the heaviness was comforting. And the sunglasses saved his life.

The parking lot had a long driveway for a hotel, and it sat right next to a rank field of weeds, the sort of place that collected used things: condoms, wine bottles, socks, plastic grocery bags. All of ’em used. But once you got to the end of the driveway and turned left, he saw—as promised—hot coffee, good food, and some folks who knew everybody.

Fucking A.

Or, actually, FA. The FA Café. Carson could only pray it lived up to the Fucking Awesome of its name.

The outside was small and the inside smaller, wood floors and wood walls with assorted surfing kitsch being the predominant décor. Carson didn’t care. Even a little. He was promised coffee. That’s what the guy at the desk of the Super 8 said. Good coffee. Reasonably priced ham and eggs. Please, oh please, let this place put out.

He looked across the street and shuddered.

“Heya, can I help you?”

Carson looked up at the guy behind the counter and then raised his sunglasses to get a better look. God. They sure did make them pretty here.

His brown hair was curly and sun-streaked, and his stubble was blond. He had hooded blue eyes, sparkling like the ocean should have been, and tanned skin. The neck of his T-shirt and his sleeves were ripped out, so Carson got to see lots of that tanned skin and a sort of rangy, appealing musculature.

Carson caught himself staring blankly at the guy and made an effort to put his tongue back in his mouth. “Uhm, coffee,” he said, craving it even as he suffered through the headache of withdrawal. “Lots of coffee!”

Florida guy smiled easily at him and pulled up one corner of his upper lip. “Anything to eat with that?”

Carson was shaking his head when Florida nodded.

“Of course there is. We’re gonna fix you up. One breakfast taco platter—sausage, taters, bacon, eggs, fish—you’ll see. You can eat it in a hurry, since you seem to be a little rushed.”

The guy spoke s-l-o-w-l-y, each word stretched out, laved, mauled, and sensitized by the indolent drawl of his tongue.

Carson realized he was twitching his thumb about ten beats per word, and he flushed. “Sorry. Man, coffee. That is one serious drug, you know?”

Florida nodded. “I’ll have some out for you. You look like crap. You didn’t sleep over there, did you?”

Involuntarily, Carson shuddered. “No,” he said, his eyes wide and his voice haunted. “But it was a near thing.”

Florida laughed some more and then, unbelievably, reached across the counter and patted Carson’s cheek. “Tell you what, city boy, you go pick a table. I’ll bring you some real food, and you can tell me all about it.”

“But—”

“You don’t like the food, you don’t have to pay.”

It was like he was one of those bobblehead dolls. He nodded, mouth open, and Florida winked. Carson moved, his autopilot taking him outside to one of three picnic tables covered in red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and he sank down on it gratefully and rested his chin in his hands.

He must have shut his eyes, because when he opened them, he was staring at a well-endowed crotch in a pair of faded 501 cutoffs, and he flailed backward, almost falling over.

That syrupy laugh hauled him forward by his dignity, and a thirty-two-ounce Styrofoam cup plunked down in front of him, with cream and sugar packets stacked on top of the lid.

“So, you didn’t spend the night across the street?”

Carson met Florida’s bright blue eyes.

“No,” he said, thinking he was going to have to relive the horror soon anyway. “I checked in, but I did not stay.”

Florida laughed, a low, dirty laugh that did something melty to Carson’s insides, and Carson hurriedly started to fix his coffee. He did not have this reaction to men, oh no he did not. Women made him melty, men made him humpty. It was usually that simple. But no, this guy’s laugh… it made him melty. It was the brown skin on his shoulders that made Carson humpty, but now was not the time.

“Well, that sounds like a story. Walk me through it.”

Carson took a deep breath and opened a package of artificial sweetener, then took the lid off his coffee to dump it in. “Well, for starters, it was open,” he said. “I mean, I thought it was an accident or something, but I went down to the car to get my stuff, and when I came back, I realized the fucking door wouldn’t lock. And it was twelve o’clock at night, right? And I thought, you know, I used to live by Cabrini-Green before it got demolished, I could deal with a door that didn’t lock—no worries. So I threw my stuff on the bed and turned on the light and…”

“Mold,” Florida said knowingly. He tore open another packet of sweetener and dumped it in, then followed that up with two creamers. Carson glared in annoyance. It had taken him a year to give up creamer, in a painstaking effort to carve his abs into a six-pack. It hadn’t quite worked, but he’d kept the creamer out of his diet just on general principle. Florida ignored his glare, stirred the coffee, put the lid on and peeled back the little plastic flap, and handed it to him. “Tastes better with cream,” he said, and his tone brooked no argument.

Carson needed that coffee. He sank into it with a blissful sigh. God, it would have been good even without the creamer.

“Yeah,” he breathed after a minute. “There was mold. Black mold on the sink, white mold on the carpet… but, you know… my first apartment was pretty shitty. I thought I could deal with the mold.” He took another blissful swallow of coffee. “And the termite wood dust in the corner.”

“And the holes in the floor under the carpet?”

Carson smiled a little, both in memory of his first apartment and at the dryness in Florida’s voice. “And the shredded wallpaper, and the closet door off the hook and the drapes that wouldn’t close and the Internet that wasn’t there—”

“Oh, the horror!”

“Hey!” Carson laughed, recovering his good humor a little. “A boy has to have his porn! Anyway, so, yeah. The place is a dump. The birds freaked me out. But that’s not what drove me away.”

Florida laughed and rested his chin on his palms, batting his eyes like a little girl in a story circle. “Do tell!”

Carson sensed a challenge. “Man, the mold was gross, but I stayed. The holes under the carpet were life-threatening, but I stayed. The fumigation smell—”

“Oh God!”

“Oh really! The fumigation smell was horrendous, but I stayed!”

Florida nodded, urging him to drop the shoe, and Carson winked.

“But when the cockroach, the ant, and the bedbug walked across the spooge stain on the sheets, you can bet your sweet ass I checked into the Hotel fucking 8!”

Florida had a great laugh. It started from his toes, but it must have lingered around his groin, because when it came out his mouth, it was all sex. Melty and humpty met and mated, and Carson had to take a deep breath to keep himself from searching for any handy broom closets.

When the laugh was over, Florida just grinned and shook his head. “Yeah, that place got semidemolished by a hurricane a few years back. They had construction crews in here eating, and they kept telling us that it was so frustrating. They needed to be replacing the drywall and the flooring, but they were told to wallpaper and carpet over it. Man, that place is bad news. You’re much better off at the Super 8 or the little Hyatt.”

Carson grimaced, and Florida held up his hand.

“Hold that thought. I’ll be back in a minute with your food.”

Carson nodded and sipped his coffee meditatively. Florida boys. Go figure. Must be the surfing. If he peered past the Bates Parrot, he could see (or maybe imagine) the ocean, and he remembered that moment, right before he’d tried the handle of the door, when he’d looked out into the matte blackness of the night. He’d imagined a sort of freedom in the thick air, and it reminded him of walking through Grant Park in the late spring. The wind had lost its edge by May, but it still smelled like the water, and if you didn’t look too hard for the far side of the lake, you could imagine it stretched over the horizon.

What would it be like to be able to swim in that water, to be able to surf?

To look over the edge and know the horizon stretched on forever?

Carson felt a sudden hunger to do just that, which he tried to tamp down before Florida returned. He was just visiting. Florida didn’t need him mooning over the ocean or whining about not having his freedom.

Which left Carson sitting, eyes half-mast, gazing across the road, when he saw a figure peek around the corner of the hotel. The hair was a yellow mess instead of a slicked-back coif, and the guy was hunched down, trying to hide his face and his build, but he bore a striking resemblance to…

“Stassy?” Carson said. He said it out loud but not loudly, and there were cars crossing the road. (Okay, it was a freeway, but not a very busy one. St. Aubrey’s had a population of about ten thousand, and most of those were snowbirds.) Still, something must have alerted Stassy, because he lifted his head and glanced around like a squirrel getting ready to dart into traffic. His squirrel senses must have been tingling, though, because instead of darting into traffic, he slunk backward into the shadow of the hotel and disappeared. “Aw, hey, Stassy!” Carson looked left and right and realized that if he leapt the rail and tried to cross the street in the next few seconds, he’d be roadkill. In the meantime, Stassy was long gone, and Carson was stuck having eggs at the FA Café.

“You see something?”

Carson jerked his attention back to Florida and had a moment to reflect that he was wearing flip-flops and cutoffs to work. Jesus, how awesome was that?

“Just the guy I was sent down here to get hold of.” Carson sighed, sinking back down to the picnic table. He perked up when he realized the promised breakfast was right there in front of him. “Ohmigod! That’s huge. It’s… it’s like… like breakfast-zilla! Do people really eat that much breakfast or do they just worship it until the eggs turn cold and then throw it out and worship the next one? I mean… I’ve seen families fed on that much stuff! Seriously, people eat that?”

“No,” said Florida with a droll look. “They don’t eat it. They talk it to death and then bury it in the backyard.”

Carson squeezed his eyes closed, embarrassed. “Shutting up now. Hey, do you guys got any, you know, ketchup or—”

“I do know what ketchup is,” Florida said seriously. “And you won’t want to put any on that. I do have some FA sauce inside. Here.” He reached over to the table next to them and grabbed a red plastic bottle. “You put this on your potatoes if you have to. I’ll be right back.”

Carson dutifully shook some ketchup on his potatoes and took a bite. Oh, sweet baby Jesus. Crunchy on the outside, tender on the in, and seasoned all points in between. God. Better with ketchup, but he could see why someone would get picky. He finished off the potatoes and looked inside to see where his friend in the cutoffs had gone, and realized business had gotten pretty brisk since he’d last been inside. Florida was talking to customers and taking cash, and Carson thought a little wistfully of the promised FA sauce and a little more wistfully of the company. Ah, well. At least the egg tacos were still there.

By the second bite he was in love. Oh man! It was a good thing he wasn’t talking the eggs to death—that was no way for good eggs to die! Good eggs should be savored, made lurve to, nuzzled. He got through the first taco on his plate and was looking at the other three with great excitement when he heard a gentle thunk and a softly reproving voice.

“I said I’d get it for you!”

“Well, yeah, but you were busy,” Carson apologized through a full mouth. “And thank you, but you know, these eggs are awesome. I don’t know what’s in them, but—”

“Sausage, bacon, cheese, and fish,” Florida said, squirting some of the sauce he’d thunked on the table. “Now try that.”

Carson’s eyes crossed with his first bite. “I’m eating here every day,” he vowed fervently and then took another bite. And another. Florida let him get through that taco, and he’d started on the third on the plate before the guy started asking questions.

“I saw you standing up and waving to someone. Anyone I’d know?”

Carson swallowed. “Yeah, maybe. I’m here looking for my manager’s nephew, Anastacio. Stassy sort of disappeared, and I got sent down here.” Carson reached for his phone and pulled up a picture of Stassy. “Anyway, Ivan’s worried, because his brother-in-law is built like a truck and Stassy was sort of his responsibility, and I’m down here looking for him. You seen a guy like that?”

Florida looked carefully at the picture. “Yeah, he’s been down here a couple of weeks, right?”

Carson felt a ping of excitement. Damn. Maybe this guy knew him! Could get hold of him!
Something
, and Carson could get the hell out of here and go back home!

“Yeah. He was staying across the street—”

“Yeah. He didn’t complain like you did. Just sort of sucked it up and dealt. He’d come over here for breakfast, sometimes with a guy I know. You, uhm, know, they looked pretty friendly.”

Carson’s shrug pretty much summed it up. “Yeah, well, that’s most of us at Ivan O’Leary’s. That’s the bar where we work. Anyway, girls, boys, we’re all sort of, you know. It’s not a deal.”

Florida raised his eyebrows. “Well, it seemed like a big deal to him.”

Oh wow. Look at that. One last taco left! Carson could probably choke this one down nice and slow, hence relieving him of the embarrassment of trying to explain to Florida here why he had reason to know Stassy might take it
all
a little personally.