I'm An Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande) (PG-13)
Series: Part 2 of Stardust (and other possible impossibilities)
Summary: Further carnival silliness. Sawyer doesn't like ponies. Or kids.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Prompts: Hey, it fits into psych_30's "19. Separation Anxiety" and fanfic100's "028. Children".
As usual, I couldn't do this without arabella_hope. She even found a recording of the song for me! :)
Part one
Stardust (and other possible impossibilities)
Part 2: I'm An Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)
He hears her giggle before he even sets foot outside.
It's so unlike Kate to giggle at all that Sawyer doesn't quite believe it, but there she is, green eyes shining, smile easy on her lips. And next to her, leaning back against a picnic table, sits none other than Jack Shephard. It's almost as if they've been waiting for Sawyer to come out of his half of the trailer.
He already isn't much of a morning person, but today he's looking at the world through the haze of a flowery-scented gin hangover, so it's just that much worse. And to top it off, half of the duo responsible seems to be putting the moves on Kate.
“See?” Jack is saying, holding a fanned-out deck of cards between his precious little fingers. “It's so easy, you just have to set them up ahead of time. It's what you do in the meantime that's important. For instance, I could be playing with my pocket, so you think I'm hiding a card in there or something...”
As if Kate's never heard of misdirection. As if Kate's never seen a card trick before. But she's laughing and nodding like an idiot.
“I got a card trick for ya,” Sawyer says, the smell of charred coffee and bacon grease assaulting his senses. He snatches the deck from the unsuspecting newcomer and bends it lengthwise, cards flying right into Jack's face and fluttering under the picnic table. “Fifty-two pickup. Heard of it?”
“Hey!” Jack says.
Sawyer thinks he hears Kate join in the protest, but strangely it gives him little satisfaction as he hurries right past the two of them, heading towards the small, smoky fire where someone is warming up a fresh pot of coffee. He's just about to help himself to a cup without asking when Charlie shows up and starts pouring the stuff into his own tin mug. Sawyer looks down at the sunburned top of his head.
“You really need to drink that much? Don't you know that shit stunts your growth?”
The dwarf's messy blond head snaps up. “Oh, that must by why I'm so small,” he says. “Problem solved. Why couldn't you have come around and blessed me with your wisdom when I was younger?”
Sawyer hunkers down close to the fire, rubbing his eyes. The nights are getting colder - he's going to have to rustle himself up another blanket or a nice warm body soon. Charlie passes him the small metal coffee pot, and Sawyer flips the top open and tips it to his lips, drinking in the bitter remnants.
“Rough night?” Charlie says, and Sawyer gives the Englishman a thorough glare before not answering.
“These Shephard people. You hear anything?”
Charlie looks amused. “What, like criminal records? Family history? Curses? Hexes?”
Sawyer looks over his shoulder. Jack is half under the picnic table, plucking playing cards out of the dry grass, while Kate talks to his backside. Her long brown hair, usually pulled back in some sort of ponytail, flows freely around her shoulders today.
“Like how do a couple of guys like that end up in a place like this? And what's the word on how long they're stayin'?”
“I assume you mean rich,” Charlie says, and Sawyer feels a flush creep over his neck, but can't stop himself from making a comment anyway.
“You seen the shoes on 'em?”
Charlie snorts. “The shoes are about all I've seen, mate.” He turns, looking over at the younger Shephard much less subtly than Sawyer has been. Then he shrugs. “There's a depression on. I doubt there's much more to it than that. It's a great equalizer, you know? Fantastic. Rock bottom's never felt so crowded, and I should know. Lived there my whole life.”
“You and me both,” Sawyer says, although it's not entirely true. He takes another long drink. Muddy sludge from the bottom of the coffee pot coats his throat, but he doesn't care.
“Morning, gentlemen.”
Sawyer squints up into bright sunlight, wondering how much the owner of the voice heard of their conversation. Christian Shephard smiles when their eyes meet, the cordial, tolerant smile of someone dealing with an annoying customer. “Would you happen to know where I can get some water?”
“Creek,” Charlie cuts in before Sawyer can say anything. He points to the thicket behind their cluster of trailers. “There's a trail through the woods, leads you right down to it. Better hurry, though, it's quite a trek, and you have to cross down through a bit of a crevasse to reach it.”
“Yeah,” Sawyer says, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. “And watch out for brown bears this time of year. They get kinda lonely right before they hibernate.”
Jack's father just stares blankly at them both and then turns tail, probably to find someone who'll direct him to the water line in the northwest corner of the field they're camped in. Sawyer would have paid good money to watch Christian Shephard hike through those woods, though.
“I pushed it too far with the bears,” he says sadly.
Charlie nods. “Oh, well. Next time.”
“Next time you'll act like human beings?”
Kate has moved in behind Sawyer, towering over them both, so close that Sawyer feels her knobby little knee jabbing into his back. He cranes his neck until she enters his field of vision, hands clamped firmly to her hips in a perfect imitation of an angry housewife.
“Him, maybe,” Charlie says. “I personally have never made any claims to the effect that I belong to the human race.”
Sawyer shoots him a death glare, but he seems too busy staring up along the planes of Kate's body to notice.
“I'm pretty sure you gotta be human to be considered a freak, Tom Thumb. And in light of your present occupation...”
Charlie waves a hand at him dismissively, still wide-eyed with appreciation as he tips his head even further back.
With a sudden demonstration of brute strength, Kate grabs Sawyer by one shoulder and hauls him back toward his trailer, her strong hands digging into his arm while his legs reel wildly under him, his balance thrown completely off for a minute before he gets his footing back. He can hear Charlie's full-throated laughter fading behind them.
“Goddamn, woman!” he yelps, struggling against her iron grip. “You auditioning for your new career as a weight lifter?”
“This way,” she says, and yanks him hard toward where Jack is standing, idly kicking one toe into the soft earth. He's examining the peeling paint on Sawyer's trailer the way only someone who was intensely bored would bother. The deck of cards is nowhere to be found, so at least he's learned a lesson on that front.
Kate, nearly twisting Sawyer's arm out of the socket, marches him right up to Jack and stands him there like a little kid forced to apologize, which is... well, she wouldn't really do that, would she?
“Hey,” Sawyer says without meeting Jack's eyes.
“Hello again.” Jack's voice is all forced nonchalance.
“Boys,” Kate says with a roll of her eyes. “Sawyer, you are about to show Jack around, make some introductions, and answer all his questions.”
Sawyer opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He wonders if maybe his vocal chords are suddenly defective. He wasn't expecting that - Shephard Junior working on the lot? He and his father must be really strapped for cash if he's sinking this low.
“Jack,” Kate continues, patting Sawyer hard on the back as she speaks, ”Sawyer's got, what is it... twenty? Thirty years' experience on this wagon ride?”
Sawyer feels a flash of heat pass through him. “Well, now, Freckles,” he mumbles, trying to look hurt. “Just how old do you think I am?”
“Old enough to know better,” she mumbles back, and he can't argue there. “Don't let his apalling behaviour fool you,” she tells Jack. “He's not all bad. Although I am fairly convinced he was, in fact, raised in a barn.”
Sawyer is about one flip remark away from pulling her metaphorical pigtails and knocking her to the ground. Jack's glance bounces between the two of them, his cheeks tightening in a hint of a smile.
“Don't knock it till you've tried it, sweetheart,” Sawyer says finally. “Them horses can get mighty warm at night.”
Kate grabs him by the shoulders once again and turns him toward the fairground, shoving him hard with both hands as she speaks. “Well, that's good, because Hurley needs someone to run the pony ride for a while, and I volunteered you and Jack. You oughta feel right at home.”
“You gotta be kiddin' me, Freckles,” Sawyer says, turning around. She just keeps shoving him, now thumping her hands against his chest as he whines. “You know all the little punks hate me. Last time I did that I got bit three times. And only once was by a pony.”
“I know no such thing,” Kate says with an evil grin. She grabs Jack by the hand and leads him forward. He just lets her, obviously disoriented by such playful behaviour. Maybe the guy was a banker in his former life.
Then she lifts up Sawyer's hand and presses his palm to Jack's. It's hot and a bit sweaty, and it feels jumpy, like a caught fish.
“There,” she says. “Have fun, boys.”
**
A couple of hours, and Sawyer is convinced that his banker theory is accurate, or at least some variation on the theme. An accountant, maybe. He watches as Jack stiffens, lifting a sticky-fingered, chocolate-faced toddler onto a pure white pony. Within seconds, the poor creature's mane is a clumped mess of fudge and grime as the kid clings on for dear life. Jack tries desperately to untangle the disaster before it gets any worse. The clueless little boy just stares off into space.
Sawyer would help him, he really would, if he wasn't currently preoccupied with his own bundle of joy, a blonde girl in a pink pinafore whose distinguishing feature seems to be the ability to make liquid ooze out of every orifice on her body. Her eyes, nose and mouth are streaming as she howls for her mother, and Sawyer could swear something's running out of her ears as well. He doesn't even want to think about down below.
The girl's mother, a plump woman in a hideous pink dress made from the same cloth as her daughter's getup, waves cheerfully from behind the fence, as if her offspring wasn't turning to goo in Sawyer's hands. So Sawyer plops the kid down unceremoniously on the grey animal they call Jess, makes sure she can stay upright for more than a couple of seconds and then he backs the hell off, wiping his hands on the front of his denims. He gives silent thanks that her crying doesn't seem to be setting the other three kids off, which is the way it normally goes.
“You lead 'em this time,” Sawyer calls to Jack. He leans back against a fence spike that he's pretty sure he put in the ground himself just yesterday, and wipes the sweat off his face with a rag. “You bein' a Shephard, after all.”
“Even if I were a real shepherd,” Jack says, looking tired, “I fail to see how walking four sad little tied-up horses around in a circle counts as shepherding. Or even as herding.”
“I ain't even gonna attempt to justify that for ya. Just walk, alright?”
Jack grabs the white pony's lead, close to the bit like Sawyer showed him, and starts walking the animals in a slow circle. The pink woman clutches her hands to her chest in adoration of her increasingly dehydrated daughter.
“There ya go,” Sawyer says, addressing Jack as if he's one of the dumb kids. “Nice and slow. Three times and then the ride's all done.”
Jack recognizes the patronizing tone and scowls.
“You seem to think I'm some kind of half-wit,” he says, passing by Sawyer and looping around again. He turns around just in time to reach out and keep the chocolate-covered kid from tipping ass over teakettle.
Sawyer doesn't know quite what to say to the accusation. He doesn't think Jack is stupid, exactly. Naïve, maybe, and a bit ridiculous, but not stupid. He's about to tell him so when Jack says, “You know, I'm a surgeon, too. It's not on the signs or anything... well, I'm not on the signs, but...”
Well. He'd been a little off with his appraisal. Go figure. Sawyer has no time to mull the information over, though, because Jack has finished his third trip around the circle, and the squirming little balls of piss and vomit have to come off the ponies so that others can take their places. Sawyer lifts the crying girl off, once again wiping his soggy hands on his thighs after he's handed her back to her mother. Then he practically tosses the two other kids to their parents, and goes to help Jack with the sticky chocolate mess. It's hardened into a kind of a crust by this point, both the toddler's hands irretrievably lost to the giant tangle of the poor creature's mane. The little guy is starting to do that about-to-cry chin-tremble as Jack tries in vain to peel the hairs off strand by strand.
“Here.”
Sawyer pulls out a pocket knife and begins to saw crudely through the clump.
“There ya go, Dodger,” he says as the kid finally comes free, hands in the air, looking like some sort of yeti. He grins up at Sawyer like he's some kind of hero.
“Dodger?” Jack says.
Sawyer lifts the kid up over the fence to his dad.
“Yeah, as in Artful. Sticky fingers, you know.”
He goes to the gate to harvest a fresh crop of little monsters, noting the blank expression that comes over Jack's face as he collects the five cent fare from the waiting parents.
“Didn't you just get through tellin' me all about how smart you are?” Sawyer says, grinning so hard he's sure his damn dimples are showing. He hates those, hates showing them, but sometimes you just can't help it.
Jack's turning a little bit red, and not from the sunlight. He gets this hard look to him, and he says, “So how long have you been doing this?” as if he's hoping the answer will be painful. Then he drops his handful of nickels into the locked cash box at his feet, making a series of jingling sounds.
“Just about since I was one of these damn things,” Sawyer says, hoisting up a fat little kid in a pristine white sailor suit.
“No!” the boy yelps. “No! No! No!”
“It's all right, Benjamin,” the kid's dad says. “Go with the nice man!” The man's buttoned-up appearance screams privilege, and his eyes have a kind of glazed over, absent quality. Sawyer hates him on principle. What kind of a person forces their kid into that kind of getup?
“No! Nooo!” the kid cries, wriggling in Sawyer's arms until he almost gets his sailor ass dropped.
“Yes, yes,” Sawyer growls.
He nearly pulls a muscle lifting the kid onto a particularly small, cream-coloured pony, and he's almost off scott free when the little squirming beast bites him right on the wrist, his jaw clamping down like a vise.
“Ow, goddammit!” Sawyer cries, but the kid seems to take that as a cue to dig in harder, his sharp little teeth drawing blood. “Argh!!”
Jack puts down the drooling, jumper-clad girl he's been lifting and rushes over to help pry the kid off of Sawyer. But he's also got a glint of laughter in his eyes, and Sawyer feels like using his good hand to break Jack's nose a little.
“Wow, he's really in there,” Jack says, twisting Sawyer's right arm at an unusual angle so he can get a better look.
“Benji,” Sawyer hisses through his clenched jaw, “Hand to God, I'm gonna find a way to make you pay for this. You just wait til ol' daddy goes away on business...”
Jack gives him a stern look, warning him silently to shut up before he makes things worse. A trickle of blood is actually running down his arm and pooling in the crease of his elbow.
“Benjamin,” Jack says, gingerly putting a hand on the kid's back. “Why don't you take a nice deep breath and calm down? That's it, calm... Now, just open your mouth... slowly... open...”
If anything, the kid's jaw closes tighter around Sawyer's flesh.
“Ow, ow, fuckin' ow,” Sawyer's muttering. The kid's dad is mercifully still out of earshot, but the kid himself seems to perk up at the sound of the bad word.
“Here,” Jack says, “I'm gonna try something.”
He turns Sawyer's arm even further in the wrong direction, wrenching his elbow nearly out of the socket, and then attempts to push the kid's chin down, kneading his chubby little cheeks to loosen the muscles. Nothing helps, and the weird angle makes it feel like a chunk of meat is being ripped right out of Sawyer.
“Son of a bitch, Benji!” Sawyer cries. “What the hell are you, a fuckin' vampire?”
The bastard kid lets out a little giggle. His dad, however, has suddenly tuned in and isn't appreciating Sawyer's vocabulary.
“Hey! Who the hell do you think you are?” he says, stomping up to the gate. “You are not to talk to my son that way!”
Sawyer turns, yanking the little punk's head forward with the movement, feeling the gash in his arm widen.
“Hey, asshole! I'd say your son is not to bite the livin' shit outta me, but it's a little late for that one.” He looks back at Jack, who is reassessing the situation. “See, I told you. Fuckers are always biting me. If it ain't the kids, it's the ponies.”
Jack's eyes flicker quickly up to meet Sawyer's, and along with the humour there's a complicity there he hadn't counted on seeing.
“I've got it,” he says, then awkwardly adds, “I'm sorry, Benjamin. I have to do this.”
The kid's Adam's apple bobs up and down and Sawyer's sure he hears a crunch.
“Owww! So do it already! Fuck!” Sawyer yells.
Jack grabs Sawyer's forearm with one hand, his long, thin fingers reaching most of the way around. He pinches the kid's nose shut with the other. For about half a minute it looks like Benji really is a vampire. The lack of air isn't bothering him in the slightest and if anything, he's clamping down harder than before. But then he gets this panicked expression and a strange slurping sound comes out of him. And finally, the vise loosens and the little bastard sits back, gasping, drool and swirls of Sawyer's blood staining the front of his sailor bib.
Jack quickly snatches him up, keeping him a full arm's length away and hurrying him off to his dad.
“Yeah, you better run, Popeye!” Sawyer howls after him, “I ever see you in here again, I'll make your tiny sailor life a living fuckin' hell!”
It seems that the other riders' parents gathered their kids and disappeared during the standoff. His outburst of anger has chased everyone else off; the few people still waiting in line now walk away in disgust or confusion. Sawyer doesn't care, just cradles his chewed-up arm, a fair amount of blood still dribbling down and dripping in the dirt.
“Show me,” Jack says, suddenly right next to him and tugging at his sleeve. He's got this look on his face, a mix of concern and authority, that sort of mesmerizes Sawyer. “And don't touch it, your hands are covered in dirt. Here.”
Jack rotates Sawyer's arm slowly, supporting his wrist, wincing when he sees the sum of the damage.
“Son of a bitch!” Sawyer says, rage mounting again when he catches sight of the two curved rows of tooth marks in the soft flesh of his inner wrist.
“You're lucky, you know, there's an artery right here,” Jack says, his finger ghosting over Sawyer's skin.
“And?” Sawyer says. He pulls away from Jack and, ignoring the open wound, locks the gate and flips the pony ride sign over to the side that reads Operator will return in 30 minutes.
“And if you rupture one of those, you could bleed to death very quickly.”
“Good to know,” Sawyer says. “Fuckin' punk rides. Help me give these boys some water. Then I'm gonna find someone else to babysit.”
“You need stitches,” Jack says, but he's following Sawyer, squeezing between the fence and the canvas tent next door. “At least let me disinfect it! Bites can be especially prone to infection.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sawyer says, heading towards the water station. There are a few buckets and large pots here, but before doing anything else, he sticks his head under the tap and takes a long drink. The water slides down his throat, spreading a cool sensation through his belly. He hadn't realized how hot and thirsty he was.
He fills up two buckets, handing one to Jack. That's when he feels himself finally giving in to the question that's been on his lips all day.
“You actually gonna work here while your daddy peddles the juice? Lug equipment, work the game joints?”
“Do whatever needs doing?” Jack says with a smirk, already walking away. “Yeah, that's the plan.”
Sawyer stands there for a second and watches Jack head back the way they came. He's got a strappy sort of gait, like he could go on for days, even with the sun pounding down the way it has been for hours. His white shirt is soaked through with sweat, nearly transparent in spots, and his skin is getting a slow-cooked pink glow. Sawyer follows him, struggling with the large bucket and his mangled arm.
**
“I can't believe I let you talk me into this.”
The top step of his trailer pokes uncomfortably into Sawyer's back as he sits there, waiting for Jack to do his thing.
“You'll thank me later. These things can get very nasty very quickly.”
Jack is leaning over him, the sun behind him, obscuring his features. He positions Sawyer's arm so that the light hits it at an angle and reaches for the big black doctor's bag at his side.
“So, what happens if your daddy notices his sack of cutlery's missing?”
“I get spanked,” Jack deadpans. He pulls a half-empty bottle of whiskey from the bag and hands it to Sawyer. “Here, drink.”
Sawyer smiles, again with the dimples that he can't seem to hide today no matter how hard he tries.
“So he's got the good stuff squirrelled away for medicinal purposes, does he?” Sawyer says, awkwardly unscrewing the cap with one hand while Jack goes back to digging through the bag.
“No, that's his. It just happened to be in here and I thought we ought to finish it off.” He pulls out a curved needle and a pair of gleaming scissors, and looks back up at Sawyer. “Drink,” he says again. “This is gonna hurt, and I don't have any anesthetic in here.”
Sawyer, never one to pass up a free drink, takes a good long swig and comes up coughing.
“Goddamn, that's nice.”
“Now hold still,” Jack says, and he pours a carefully measured amount of alcohol from a much smaller bottle onto a clean white cloth and dabs at the bloody gash in Sawyer's arm, then looks up at him for a reaction.
“Don't hurt,” Sawyer says, although it stings like a bitch. He takes another gulp of whiskey and winces at the first poke of the needle.
“I can't believe how deep this is,” Jack marvels, his face so close to his work that Sawyer wonders if he needs glasses.
“Little fucker's gonna be pickin' my arm hair out of his teeth for weeks,” Sawyer says.
Jack bites his lip in concentration. He's so close, Sawyer can see that his lower lip is chapped, presumably from a repeated instance of the unconscious gesture. His eyes follow the slim thread as he pulls it taut. To Sawyer, it feels like a lady's sharp fingernails pinching his sensitive inner wrist.
“Damned if I'm goin' back to work after that shit,” Sawyer mutters.
Jack's eyes flit up to meet his. “What happens if you don't go back to work?”
“I don't get paid,” Sawyer says, grinning.
Jack reddens, focused intensely on tying off the first set of sutures. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer, that's what Sawyer always says.
Then Jack asks a really stupid question.
“Have you really been with the carnival since you were a child?”
Sawyer's breath leaves him, and Jack is leaning so near to him that he looks up when he senses the silent hesitation. Somehow it irks Sawyer even more when Jack changes the subject.
“Can you move your fingers?”
“I'm fine,” Sawyer says. “Just close that shit up and get it over with.”
He's getting tired of Jack's company, which surprises him, because it means Jack's company has been fairly pleasant until now. So now, of course, it's necessary to act like an asshole.
“So, Shep, your daddy slaughter some poor patient of his?”
He feels Jack stiffen, feels the fingers around his arm tighten. But Jack actually gives him an answer.
“More or less,” he mutters, completing the last stitch and tying off the thread.
“Yeah, I could tell it was something like that,” Sawyer says smugly. “You both got that stench of shame all over you. We can all smell it.”
He watches as Jack's jaw muscles twitch, the only sign at all that Jack has even heard him. Jack's voice is even when he replies, although he doesn't look at Sawyer again.
“Well, you all smell like old sweat and horse manure to me.”
“Don't forget diesel fuel,” Sawyer says, sniffing the back of his good hand. He takes another drink of whiskey while Jack quickly cuts the thread and then starts to stuff objects back into his father's bag any which way. He yanks the bottle away from Sawyer a bit too forcefully, as Sawyer's grip wasn't all that tight to begin with, and the bottle neck thumps him hard in the chin.
“Stay back here if you want, Sawyer,” he says with that same steady tone, still not meeting Sawyer's eyes. “Some of us can't afford to lose a day's pay.”
He walks away, carelessly tossing the black leather bag into his dad's truck. His slouching form recedes quickly. After a moment, Sawyer sees him slip between the Wheel and a red canvas tent housing a ring toss game and re-enter the midway.
Summary: Further carnival silliness. Sawyer doesn't like ponies. Or kids.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Prompts: Hey, it fits into psych_30's "19. Separation Anxiety" and fanfic100's "028. Children".
As usual, I couldn't do this without arabella_hope. She even found a recording of the song for me! :)
Part one
Stardust (and other possible impossibilities)
Part 2: I'm An Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)
He hears her giggle before he even sets foot outside.
It's so unlike Kate to giggle at all that Sawyer doesn't quite believe it, but there she is, green eyes shining, smile easy on her lips. And next to her, leaning back against a picnic table, sits none other than Jack Shephard. It's almost as if they've been waiting for Sawyer to come out of his half of the trailer.
He already isn't much of a morning person, but today he's looking at the world through the haze of a flowery-scented gin hangover, so it's just that much worse. And to top it off, half of the duo responsible seems to be putting the moves on Kate.
“See?” Jack is saying, holding a fanned-out deck of cards between his precious little fingers. “It's so easy, you just have to set them up ahead of time. It's what you do in the meantime that's important. For instance, I could be playing with my pocket, so you think I'm hiding a card in there or something...”
As if Kate's never heard of misdirection. As if Kate's never seen a card trick before. But she's laughing and nodding like an idiot.
“I got a card trick for ya,” Sawyer says, the smell of charred coffee and bacon grease assaulting his senses. He snatches the deck from the unsuspecting newcomer and bends it lengthwise, cards flying right into Jack's face and fluttering under the picnic table. “Fifty-two pickup. Heard of it?”
“Hey!” Jack says.
Sawyer thinks he hears Kate join in the protest, but strangely it gives him little satisfaction as he hurries right past the two of them, heading towards the small, smoky fire where someone is warming up a fresh pot of coffee. He's just about to help himself to a cup without asking when Charlie shows up and starts pouring the stuff into his own tin mug. Sawyer looks down at the sunburned top of his head.
“You really need to drink that much? Don't you know that shit stunts your growth?”
The dwarf's messy blond head snaps up. “Oh, that must by why I'm so small,” he says. “Problem solved. Why couldn't you have come around and blessed me with your wisdom when I was younger?”
Sawyer hunkers down close to the fire, rubbing his eyes. The nights are getting colder - he's going to have to rustle himself up another blanket or a nice warm body soon. Charlie passes him the small metal coffee pot, and Sawyer flips the top open and tips it to his lips, drinking in the bitter remnants.
“Rough night?” Charlie says, and Sawyer gives the Englishman a thorough glare before not answering.
“These Shephard people. You hear anything?”
Charlie looks amused. “What, like criminal records? Family history? Curses? Hexes?”
Sawyer looks over his shoulder. Jack is half under the picnic table, plucking playing cards out of the dry grass, while Kate talks to his backside. Her long brown hair, usually pulled back in some sort of ponytail, flows freely around her shoulders today.
“Like how do a couple of guys like that end up in a place like this? And what's the word on how long they're stayin'?”
“I assume you mean rich,” Charlie says, and Sawyer feels a flush creep over his neck, but can't stop himself from making a comment anyway.
“You seen the shoes on 'em?”
Charlie snorts. “The shoes are about all I've seen, mate.” He turns, looking over at the younger Shephard much less subtly than Sawyer has been. Then he shrugs. “There's a depression on. I doubt there's much more to it than that. It's a great equalizer, you know? Fantastic. Rock bottom's never felt so crowded, and I should know. Lived there my whole life.”
“You and me both,” Sawyer says, although it's not entirely true. He takes another long drink. Muddy sludge from the bottom of the coffee pot coats his throat, but he doesn't care.
“Morning, gentlemen.”
Sawyer squints up into bright sunlight, wondering how much the owner of the voice heard of their conversation. Christian Shephard smiles when their eyes meet, the cordial, tolerant smile of someone dealing with an annoying customer. “Would you happen to know where I can get some water?”
“Creek,” Charlie cuts in before Sawyer can say anything. He points to the thicket behind their cluster of trailers. “There's a trail through the woods, leads you right down to it. Better hurry, though, it's quite a trek, and you have to cross down through a bit of a crevasse to reach it.”
“Yeah,” Sawyer says, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. “And watch out for brown bears this time of year. They get kinda lonely right before they hibernate.”
Jack's father just stares blankly at them both and then turns tail, probably to find someone who'll direct him to the water line in the northwest corner of the field they're camped in. Sawyer would have paid good money to watch Christian Shephard hike through those woods, though.
“I pushed it too far with the bears,” he says sadly.
Charlie nods. “Oh, well. Next time.”
“Next time you'll act like human beings?”
Kate has moved in behind Sawyer, towering over them both, so close that Sawyer feels her knobby little knee jabbing into his back. He cranes his neck until she enters his field of vision, hands clamped firmly to her hips in a perfect imitation of an angry housewife.
“Him, maybe,” Charlie says. “I personally have never made any claims to the effect that I belong to the human race.”
Sawyer shoots him a death glare, but he seems too busy staring up along the planes of Kate's body to notice.
“I'm pretty sure you gotta be human to be considered a freak, Tom Thumb. And in light of your present occupation...”
Charlie waves a hand at him dismissively, still wide-eyed with appreciation as he tips his head even further back.
With a sudden demonstration of brute strength, Kate grabs Sawyer by one shoulder and hauls him back toward his trailer, her strong hands digging into his arm while his legs reel wildly under him, his balance thrown completely off for a minute before he gets his footing back. He can hear Charlie's full-throated laughter fading behind them.
“Goddamn, woman!” he yelps, struggling against her iron grip. “You auditioning for your new career as a weight lifter?”
“This way,” she says, and yanks him hard toward where Jack is standing, idly kicking one toe into the soft earth. He's examining the peeling paint on Sawyer's trailer the way only someone who was intensely bored would bother. The deck of cards is nowhere to be found, so at least he's learned a lesson on that front.
Kate, nearly twisting Sawyer's arm out of the socket, marches him right up to Jack and stands him there like a little kid forced to apologize, which is... well, she wouldn't really do that, would she?
“Hey,” Sawyer says without meeting Jack's eyes.
“Hello again.” Jack's voice is all forced nonchalance.
“Boys,” Kate says with a roll of her eyes. “Sawyer, you are about to show Jack around, make some introductions, and answer all his questions.”
Sawyer opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He wonders if maybe his vocal chords are suddenly defective. He wasn't expecting that - Shephard Junior working on the lot? He and his father must be really strapped for cash if he's sinking this low.
“Jack,” Kate continues, patting Sawyer hard on the back as she speaks, ”Sawyer's got, what is it... twenty? Thirty years' experience on this wagon ride?”
Sawyer feels a flash of heat pass through him. “Well, now, Freckles,” he mumbles, trying to look hurt. “Just how old do you think I am?”
“Old enough to know better,” she mumbles back, and he can't argue there. “Don't let his apalling behaviour fool you,” she tells Jack. “He's not all bad. Although I am fairly convinced he was, in fact, raised in a barn.”
Sawyer is about one flip remark away from pulling her metaphorical pigtails and knocking her to the ground. Jack's glance bounces between the two of them, his cheeks tightening in a hint of a smile.
“Don't knock it till you've tried it, sweetheart,” Sawyer says finally. “Them horses can get mighty warm at night.”
Kate grabs him by the shoulders once again and turns him toward the fairground, shoving him hard with both hands as she speaks. “Well, that's good, because Hurley needs someone to run the pony ride for a while, and I volunteered you and Jack. You oughta feel right at home.”
“You gotta be kiddin' me, Freckles,” Sawyer says, turning around. She just keeps shoving him, now thumping her hands against his chest as he whines. “You know all the little punks hate me. Last time I did that I got bit three times. And only once was by a pony.”
“I know no such thing,” Kate says with an evil grin. She grabs Jack by the hand and leads him forward. He just lets her, obviously disoriented by such playful behaviour. Maybe the guy was a banker in his former life.
Then she lifts up Sawyer's hand and presses his palm to Jack's. It's hot and a bit sweaty, and it feels jumpy, like a caught fish.
“There,” she says. “Have fun, boys.”
**
A couple of hours, and Sawyer is convinced that his banker theory is accurate, or at least some variation on the theme. An accountant, maybe. He watches as Jack stiffens, lifting a sticky-fingered, chocolate-faced toddler onto a pure white pony. Within seconds, the poor creature's mane is a clumped mess of fudge and grime as the kid clings on for dear life. Jack tries desperately to untangle the disaster before it gets any worse. The clueless little boy just stares off into space.
Sawyer would help him, he really would, if he wasn't currently preoccupied with his own bundle of joy, a blonde girl in a pink pinafore whose distinguishing feature seems to be the ability to make liquid ooze out of every orifice on her body. Her eyes, nose and mouth are streaming as she howls for her mother, and Sawyer could swear something's running out of her ears as well. He doesn't even want to think about down below.
The girl's mother, a plump woman in a hideous pink dress made from the same cloth as her daughter's getup, waves cheerfully from behind the fence, as if her offspring wasn't turning to goo in Sawyer's hands. So Sawyer plops the kid down unceremoniously on the grey animal they call Jess, makes sure she can stay upright for more than a couple of seconds and then he backs the hell off, wiping his hands on the front of his denims. He gives silent thanks that her crying doesn't seem to be setting the other three kids off, which is the way it normally goes.
“You lead 'em this time,” Sawyer calls to Jack. He leans back against a fence spike that he's pretty sure he put in the ground himself just yesterday, and wipes the sweat off his face with a rag. “You bein' a Shephard, after all.”
“Even if I were a real shepherd,” Jack says, looking tired, “I fail to see how walking four sad little tied-up horses around in a circle counts as shepherding. Or even as herding.”
“I ain't even gonna attempt to justify that for ya. Just walk, alright?”
Jack grabs the white pony's lead, close to the bit like Sawyer showed him, and starts walking the animals in a slow circle. The pink woman clutches her hands to her chest in adoration of her increasingly dehydrated daughter.
“There ya go,” Sawyer says, addressing Jack as if he's one of the dumb kids. “Nice and slow. Three times and then the ride's all done.”
Jack recognizes the patronizing tone and scowls.
“You seem to think I'm some kind of half-wit,” he says, passing by Sawyer and looping around again. He turns around just in time to reach out and keep the chocolate-covered kid from tipping ass over teakettle.
Sawyer doesn't know quite what to say to the accusation. He doesn't think Jack is stupid, exactly. Naïve, maybe, and a bit ridiculous, but not stupid. He's about to tell him so when Jack says, “You know, I'm a surgeon, too. It's not on the signs or anything... well, I'm not on the signs, but...”
Well. He'd been a little off with his appraisal. Go figure. Sawyer has no time to mull the information over, though, because Jack has finished his third trip around the circle, and the squirming little balls of piss and vomit have to come off the ponies so that others can take their places. Sawyer lifts the crying girl off, once again wiping his soggy hands on his thighs after he's handed her back to her mother. Then he practically tosses the two other kids to their parents, and goes to help Jack with the sticky chocolate mess. It's hardened into a kind of a crust by this point, both the toddler's hands irretrievably lost to the giant tangle of the poor creature's mane. The little guy is starting to do that about-to-cry chin-tremble as Jack tries in vain to peel the hairs off strand by strand.
“Here.”
Sawyer pulls out a pocket knife and begins to saw crudely through the clump.
“There ya go, Dodger,” he says as the kid finally comes free, hands in the air, looking like some sort of yeti. He grins up at Sawyer like he's some kind of hero.
“Dodger?” Jack says.
Sawyer lifts the kid up over the fence to his dad.
“Yeah, as in Artful. Sticky fingers, you know.”
He goes to the gate to harvest a fresh crop of little monsters, noting the blank expression that comes over Jack's face as he collects the five cent fare from the waiting parents.
“Didn't you just get through tellin' me all about how smart you are?” Sawyer says, grinning so hard he's sure his damn dimples are showing. He hates those, hates showing them, but sometimes you just can't help it.
Jack's turning a little bit red, and not from the sunlight. He gets this hard look to him, and he says, “So how long have you been doing this?” as if he's hoping the answer will be painful. Then he drops his handful of nickels into the locked cash box at his feet, making a series of jingling sounds.
“Just about since I was one of these damn things,” Sawyer says, hoisting up a fat little kid in a pristine white sailor suit.
“No!” the boy yelps. “No! No! No!”
“It's all right, Benjamin,” the kid's dad says. “Go with the nice man!” The man's buttoned-up appearance screams privilege, and his eyes have a kind of glazed over, absent quality. Sawyer hates him on principle. What kind of a person forces their kid into that kind of getup?
“No! Nooo!” the kid cries, wriggling in Sawyer's arms until he almost gets his sailor ass dropped.
“Yes, yes,” Sawyer growls.
He nearly pulls a muscle lifting the kid onto a particularly small, cream-coloured pony, and he's almost off scott free when the little squirming beast bites him right on the wrist, his jaw clamping down like a vise.
“Ow, goddammit!” Sawyer cries, but the kid seems to take that as a cue to dig in harder, his sharp little teeth drawing blood. “Argh!!”
Jack puts down the drooling, jumper-clad girl he's been lifting and rushes over to help pry the kid off of Sawyer. But he's also got a glint of laughter in his eyes, and Sawyer feels like using his good hand to break Jack's nose a little.
“Wow, he's really in there,” Jack says, twisting Sawyer's right arm at an unusual angle so he can get a better look.
“Benji,” Sawyer hisses through his clenched jaw, “Hand to God, I'm gonna find a way to make you pay for this. You just wait til ol' daddy goes away on business...”
Jack gives him a stern look, warning him silently to shut up before he makes things worse. A trickle of blood is actually running down his arm and pooling in the crease of his elbow.
“Benjamin,” Jack says, gingerly putting a hand on the kid's back. “Why don't you take a nice deep breath and calm down? That's it, calm... Now, just open your mouth... slowly... open...”
If anything, the kid's jaw closes tighter around Sawyer's flesh.
“Ow, ow, fuckin' ow,” Sawyer's muttering. The kid's dad is mercifully still out of earshot, but the kid himself seems to perk up at the sound of the bad word.
“Here,” Jack says, “I'm gonna try something.”
He turns Sawyer's arm even further in the wrong direction, wrenching his elbow nearly out of the socket, and then attempts to push the kid's chin down, kneading his chubby little cheeks to loosen the muscles. Nothing helps, and the weird angle makes it feel like a chunk of meat is being ripped right out of Sawyer.
“Son of a bitch, Benji!” Sawyer cries. “What the hell are you, a fuckin' vampire?”
The bastard kid lets out a little giggle. His dad, however, has suddenly tuned in and isn't appreciating Sawyer's vocabulary.
“Hey! Who the hell do you think you are?” he says, stomping up to the gate. “You are not to talk to my son that way!”
Sawyer turns, yanking the little punk's head forward with the movement, feeling the gash in his arm widen.
“Hey, asshole! I'd say your son is not to bite the livin' shit outta me, but it's a little late for that one.” He looks back at Jack, who is reassessing the situation. “See, I told you. Fuckers are always biting me. If it ain't the kids, it's the ponies.”
Jack's eyes flicker quickly up to meet Sawyer's, and along with the humour there's a complicity there he hadn't counted on seeing.
“I've got it,” he says, then awkwardly adds, “I'm sorry, Benjamin. I have to do this.”
The kid's Adam's apple bobs up and down and Sawyer's sure he hears a crunch.
“Owww! So do it already! Fuck!” Sawyer yells.
Jack grabs Sawyer's forearm with one hand, his long, thin fingers reaching most of the way around. He pinches the kid's nose shut with the other. For about half a minute it looks like Benji really is a vampire. The lack of air isn't bothering him in the slightest and if anything, he's clamping down harder than before. But then he gets this panicked expression and a strange slurping sound comes out of him. And finally, the vise loosens and the little bastard sits back, gasping, drool and swirls of Sawyer's blood staining the front of his sailor bib.
Jack quickly snatches him up, keeping him a full arm's length away and hurrying him off to his dad.
“Yeah, you better run, Popeye!” Sawyer howls after him, “I ever see you in here again, I'll make your tiny sailor life a living fuckin' hell!”
It seems that the other riders' parents gathered their kids and disappeared during the standoff. His outburst of anger has chased everyone else off; the few people still waiting in line now walk away in disgust or confusion. Sawyer doesn't care, just cradles his chewed-up arm, a fair amount of blood still dribbling down and dripping in the dirt.
“Show me,” Jack says, suddenly right next to him and tugging at his sleeve. He's got this look on his face, a mix of concern and authority, that sort of mesmerizes Sawyer. “And don't touch it, your hands are covered in dirt. Here.”
Jack rotates Sawyer's arm slowly, supporting his wrist, wincing when he sees the sum of the damage.
“Son of a bitch!” Sawyer says, rage mounting again when he catches sight of the two curved rows of tooth marks in the soft flesh of his inner wrist.
“You're lucky, you know, there's an artery right here,” Jack says, his finger ghosting over Sawyer's skin.
“And?” Sawyer says. He pulls away from Jack and, ignoring the open wound, locks the gate and flips the pony ride sign over to the side that reads Operator will return in 30 minutes.
“And if you rupture one of those, you could bleed to death very quickly.”
“Good to know,” Sawyer says. “Fuckin' punk rides. Help me give these boys some water. Then I'm gonna find someone else to babysit.”
“You need stitches,” Jack says, but he's following Sawyer, squeezing between the fence and the canvas tent next door. “At least let me disinfect it! Bites can be especially prone to infection.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sawyer says, heading towards the water station. There are a few buckets and large pots here, but before doing anything else, he sticks his head under the tap and takes a long drink. The water slides down his throat, spreading a cool sensation through his belly. He hadn't realized how hot and thirsty he was.
He fills up two buckets, handing one to Jack. That's when he feels himself finally giving in to the question that's been on his lips all day.
“You actually gonna work here while your daddy peddles the juice? Lug equipment, work the game joints?”
“Do whatever needs doing?” Jack says with a smirk, already walking away. “Yeah, that's the plan.”
Sawyer stands there for a second and watches Jack head back the way they came. He's got a strappy sort of gait, like he could go on for days, even with the sun pounding down the way it has been for hours. His white shirt is soaked through with sweat, nearly transparent in spots, and his skin is getting a slow-cooked pink glow. Sawyer follows him, struggling with the large bucket and his mangled arm.
**
“I can't believe I let you talk me into this.”
The top step of his trailer pokes uncomfortably into Sawyer's back as he sits there, waiting for Jack to do his thing.
“You'll thank me later. These things can get very nasty very quickly.”
Jack is leaning over him, the sun behind him, obscuring his features. He positions Sawyer's arm so that the light hits it at an angle and reaches for the big black doctor's bag at his side.
“So, what happens if your daddy notices his sack of cutlery's missing?”
“I get spanked,” Jack deadpans. He pulls a half-empty bottle of whiskey from the bag and hands it to Sawyer. “Here, drink.”
Sawyer smiles, again with the dimples that he can't seem to hide today no matter how hard he tries.
“So he's got the good stuff squirrelled away for medicinal purposes, does he?” Sawyer says, awkwardly unscrewing the cap with one hand while Jack goes back to digging through the bag.
“No, that's his. It just happened to be in here and I thought we ought to finish it off.” He pulls out a curved needle and a pair of gleaming scissors, and looks back up at Sawyer. “Drink,” he says again. “This is gonna hurt, and I don't have any anesthetic in here.”
Sawyer, never one to pass up a free drink, takes a good long swig and comes up coughing.
“Goddamn, that's nice.”
“Now hold still,” Jack says, and he pours a carefully measured amount of alcohol from a much smaller bottle onto a clean white cloth and dabs at the bloody gash in Sawyer's arm, then looks up at him for a reaction.
“Don't hurt,” Sawyer says, although it stings like a bitch. He takes another gulp of whiskey and winces at the first poke of the needle.
“I can't believe how deep this is,” Jack marvels, his face so close to his work that Sawyer wonders if he needs glasses.
“Little fucker's gonna be pickin' my arm hair out of his teeth for weeks,” Sawyer says.
Jack bites his lip in concentration. He's so close, Sawyer can see that his lower lip is chapped, presumably from a repeated instance of the unconscious gesture. His eyes follow the slim thread as he pulls it taut. To Sawyer, it feels like a lady's sharp fingernails pinching his sensitive inner wrist.
“Damned if I'm goin' back to work after that shit,” Sawyer mutters.
Jack's eyes flit up to meet his. “What happens if you don't go back to work?”
“I don't get paid,” Sawyer says, grinning.
Jack reddens, focused intensely on tying off the first set of sutures. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer, that's what Sawyer always says.
Then Jack asks a really stupid question.
“Have you really been with the carnival since you were a child?”
Sawyer's breath leaves him, and Jack is leaning so near to him that he looks up when he senses the silent hesitation. Somehow it irks Sawyer even more when Jack changes the subject.
“Can you move your fingers?”
“I'm fine,” Sawyer says. “Just close that shit up and get it over with.”
He's getting tired of Jack's company, which surprises him, because it means Jack's company has been fairly pleasant until now. So now, of course, it's necessary to act like an asshole.
“So, Shep, your daddy slaughter some poor patient of his?”
He feels Jack stiffen, feels the fingers around his arm tighten. But Jack actually gives him an answer.
“More or less,” he mutters, completing the last stitch and tying off the thread.
“Yeah, I could tell it was something like that,” Sawyer says smugly. “You both got that stench of shame all over you. We can all smell it.”
He watches as Jack's jaw muscles twitch, the only sign at all that Jack has even heard him. Jack's voice is even when he replies, although he doesn't look at Sawyer again.
“Well, you all smell like old sweat and horse manure to me.”
“Don't forget diesel fuel,” Sawyer says, sniffing the back of his good hand. He takes another drink of whiskey while Jack quickly cuts the thread and then starts to stuff objects back into his father's bag any which way. He yanks the bottle away from Sawyer a bit too forcefully, as Sawyer's grip wasn't all that tight to begin with, and the bottle neck thumps him hard in the chin.
“Stay back here if you want, Sawyer,” he says with that same steady tone, still not meeting Sawyer's eyes. “Some of us can't afford to lose a day's pay.”
He walks away, carelessly tossing the black leather bag into his dad's truck. His slouching form recedes quickly. After a moment, Sawyer sees him slip between the Wheel and a red canvas tent housing a ring toss game and re-enter the midway.