Luau Fic for zelda_zee
Yeah, I wrote Keamy/Gault again. This one could get out of hand in length, but I'm optimistically calling it at four five chapters.
I need to catalog all the fic I've written for the Luau and all of the great gifts I've received, but I have some more Luau ideas I want to finish first.
Title: The Likes of You Again, 1/5
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Captain Gault/Keamy
Summary: Gault and Keamy knew each other before Widmore hired them.
Notes: This is the "other" Gault/Keamy story I've been considering writing for awhile, for Queen zelda_zee, who requested the slashing of Captain Hotass. I considered somehow not involving Keamy in fulfilling her request, but ultimately couldn't resist. I hope she'll enjoy it!
The Kahana leaves port on a cloudless afternoon, headed southwest toward an unnamed island that most of the crew will never see from less than eighty miles out. Huston Gault is grateful for the work but full of trepidation. He's never been offered this kind of money for such a straightforward journey, and very little has been asked of him outside of discretion, but the farther they get from familiar shores, the less straightforward the journey seems. He hasn't even met half of his crew, a scattered group of scientists, soldiers and scowling deck hands, most hand-picked by Widmore. They've got twenty days until they reach their coordinates, and he's not used to policing strangers who are working for someone else.
For the past ten years he worked out of Elliston, running a small-time commercial fishing operation. He didn't make much, but he made his own rules and picked his own crew. It wasn't a bad life when he could hold together a good group of guys, but he's getting too old for that sort of work. Widmore's money won't set him up for the rest of his life, but it will give him a head start. He scoffs, thinking of himself as an investor. He's worked with his hands all his life, and even playing Captain to a corporate vessel such as this one feels like deceptively easy money. He doesn't trust the situation, but he thinks he can still get away with the payoff, until he sees Martin Keamy standing across the deck and leering at him.
He shakes his head, blinks a clean slate across his eyes and looks again. A trick of the light -- the man who is looking at him, sleekly mountainous and clearly one of the soldiers, can't be that goddamn kid from Rockhampton. There is no way Martin Keamy could have survived to adulthood, let alone have the nerve to cross paths with Gault again. He's walking across the deck, carrying a gun. The way he wields the weapon is a subtle threat, not overt, quite artful, and fuck all, it is him.
"I know you," he says to Gault, as if he's still trying to work out how, as if those six months when they both lived in Keamy's mother's house weren't memorable by his standards. If not, he must have had a hell of a life so far.
"Yeah," Gault says, then realizes he should admit to nothing. "How's that?"
Keamy's grin splits across his face like a knife unsheathed. He knows Gault is bluffing, always could see right through him.
"Rockhampton," Keamy says, with the condescending lilt of someone who has decided they don't need the satisfaction of calling attention to their companion's lie. "You and my mother."
Gault almost winces but catches himself, swallows the impulse with an audible click. He feels cornered, wishes he were taller.
"Right, right." He laughs, sort of. "Fuck, mate." He can't really look at Keamy, now. "How about that?"
"Yeah." Keamy stares until Gault looks back. He's got the same eyes he had back then, which seems illegal, almost perverse. "Are you on the crew?" he asks.
"I'm the Captain, actually."
Keamy laughs uproariously in a way that is somehow only unkind after he stops himself.
Gault walks away like he's lost a bar fight, stunned as if pummeled. He doesn't stop walking until he reaches his quarters, ignoring several crew members who try to speak to him on the way there. His stateroom seemed comfortable and impressive when he boarded just a few hours ago, but now it feels like a broom closet, someplace he ducked into in a panic, not really safe or intended to house anything significant.
He sits on his small bed and rubs his hands together, tries to recapture his sense of gravity. The weight of what is happening has not fully settled on him yet, and he ducks it, squints around the room in willful confusion. He thought he was in love with that bloke, once. He was out twenty thousand dollars for it last time, and now Keamy is bigger than him, landscaped with guns and almost certainly more criminally insane than he was at seventeen.
Gault would laugh at the circumstances, but in fifteen years he still hasn't developed a sense of humor about what happened in Rockhampton.
*
Gault met Crystal Keamy in a bar called Mr. C's. He was thirty years old and had been stumbling around Rockhampton for a little over a year, drinking and getting fired a lot. He was then still making a career of mourning his divorce, not because he missed his ex-wife but because he felt she had beaten him at a belittling game he hadn't meant to participate in, and had proved him worthless in the meantime.
Crystal was American, blond, and seven years older than him. She looked just mean enough to be good in bed.
"I needed a change," Crystal said when Gault asked how she'd ended up in Australia. "Like, a new country. Like, that kind of change."
"Right." She seemed like the kind of uneducated woman who had chronically bad taste in men and was always running away from one or another of them, but maybe Gault only thought so because she was interested in him.
They went back to the house she was renting near the steak restaurant where she waitressed, had sex and fell asleep at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a Sunday, and neither of them had anyplace to be. When they woke up, Gault grilled a rib-eye on her back porch and she kept the beers coming. The invitation to stay indefinitely was clear from the beginning; she was humming with happiness as she moved around the kitchen fetching ingredients for the marinade, glad for his continued company. Normally he'd be very put off by this, but he wasn't a kid anymore, and it had been awhile since anybody had shown an interest in taking care of him.
"You're not married, are you?" she asked him while they ate on her back porch, sitting on the top stair with their plates in their laps.
"Not for five years," he said. "You?"
"Hell no. I've got a kid around here somewhere. Good for about as much as his pop was."
"A kid?" Gault turned around, expecting to see a dour eight-year-old watching them through the sliding glass door.
"Don't worry." She grinned. "He's on his way out of here. Soon as he turns eighteen he wants to go back to the States and join the army. That'll be next year, in February. Until then he's stuck with me. I don't know where he's sleeping lately, haven't seen him in two weeks."
"But he lives here?" Gault asked, disliking this.
"Yeah. Doesn't hang around much, though. Not what you'd call a mama's boy, that one."
"What about his dad?"
"What about him? He's a con artist, stole three thousand dollars from me and left me pregnant. Told me his name was Richie Arnold but hell if I believe that now."
She went quiet then, like she was afraid she's said too much. Gault felt oddly protective of her, and slung an arm around her shoulders, chewed steak near her ear. She smiled at him, put her plate down and hugged her knees.
"You're not a creep, are you?" she asked.
"I don't think so."
"I know." She kissed his chin. "I can tell just by looking at you."
*
Gault had been living with Crystal for a little over a month, working for a house painting operation and generally laying low, when he drove home to find a crusty pickup truck in the driveway. He was startled, thought maybe one of Crystal's various violent ex-boyfriends had come after her, but by her account they were all in America. It didn't occur to him until he walked into the kitchen and saw a teenage boy standing at the sink in his underwear, eating leftovers out of a tupperware container, that the truck might belong to Crystal's prodigal son.
"Jesus, sorry," he said, turning around as if he'd walked unannounced into the bathroom. "You must be Martin," he called back when he was safely in the living room.
"Whoa," Martin said. He followed Gault into the living room, still wearing only gray boxer briefs and still eating two day old pork tenderloin with his fingers. "She told you my name? Fuck, are you engaged?"
Gault laughed, then realized it was a serious question.
"No."
Martin shrugged and walked back into the kitchen, chewing with his mouth open, loud enough to hear throughout most of the house. He was tall, with hair buzzed short enough to be mostly colorless. He had Crystal's sharp features, but his eyes were blue.
Gault left the house, felt evicted. He went to Mr. C's and did a few shots, had a few beers, and hoped that when he got back Martin would be gone. He returned after dinner time to find his truck still parked in the driveway, now alongside Crystal's car. He let out his breath, drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and thought about what Crystal had told him. The kid was moving out soon, anyway. Maybe he was only here for a night or two.
"There you are!" Crystal said when he got inside. She was clearly a bit panicked by the timing of his late arrival, and popped up from the bar that looked into the kitchen when Gault walked in. Martin, who was dressed now, was asleep on the living room couch, a fishing show muted on TV.
"He's just back for a few days," Crystal assured Gault at once. He smiled and pretended not to mind.
"Do you think he hates me being here?" he asked Crystal later, when they were climbing into bed. Martin hadn't moved from the couch all evening, as if instead of sleeping elsewhere he hadn't slept at all since he'd been gone.
"He's indifferent," Crystal said. "He used to be all kinds of mean, but now he's too cool for that. I've never known what to do with him. He's his father's child."
"How do you mean?"
"Totally inscrutable. I've known him all his life and he might as well be a stranger."
Gault felt sorry for the kid, hearing Crystal admit defeat. Martin seemed like a fairly average teenager. He wondered if Crystal associated him too deeply with the con man who'd abandoned her.
"So he's not here to make my life miserable?" Gault asked, mostly joking.
"There's no telling why he's here. But it won't be for long. Trust me."
She was wrong about that. Martin stayed mostly on the living room couch for the next two weeks, as if he was recovering from a flu. Sometimes Gault sat in an armchair to watch TV with him, and Martin did not protest or attempt to speak to him. Crystal seemed to think that if she ignored the boy he would leave sooner, and in fact there was very little talking in the Keamy household at all during this period.
"What's your name?" Martin asked Gault one night when they were puttering around the kitchen at the same time, Gault going for another drink and Martin eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.
"Hasn't your mother told you?"
"She told me, but I forgot."
Gault laughed and cracked open a beer. Martin started at him, waiting.
"Huston," Gault said, raising the beer as if to toast him. It was close to nine o'clock, Crystal was closing at the restaurant and Gault was pretty drunk.
"Like the city?" Martin asked.
"Sort of."
"Is that what you're named after?"
"No. I was named after my dad's brother. He fought in World War II and then he killed himself. How about you?"
"How about me what?"
"Who're you named after?"
"Some fucking actor."
Gault smiled, and Martin scoffed, bit his own grin away. Gault walked back out to the living room with his beer, feeling proud of himself. He didn't understand why Crystal didn't make more of an effort with the kid. He was clearly bored, probably lonely -- Gault hadn't seen any evidence that he had friends here -- and not so bad.
The following week, Gault fell off of a ladder at work, broke his ankle and cracked a rib. The house painting company was decent enough to provide insurance, and for the three months required for his ankle to heal he was paid to do nothing but sit at home and watch TV. At first he resented Martin always being there, but eventually he grew to appreciate the company, and he got the impression that Martin did, too.
"You're not in school?" he asked Martin one afternoon when they were putting sandwiches together in silent tandem.
"It's summer." Martin looked at him like he was an idiot, and Gault felt ridiculously wounded by the gesture, almost laughed out loud at himself. He'd gotten used to the fact that he'd probably never have his own children, and maybe he'd grown fond of the idea that Martin was someone who might look up to him.
"Your mom told me you want to join the army?"
Martin made a disgusted face. "The Marines," he said.
"Oh, right, maybe that's what she said --"
"No. It's okay. She's an idiot."
"Jesus, mate." Gault couldn't bring himself to say anything further. In some sense he was probably right, but it wasn't on to talk about your mother like that. Still, Gault had nowhere near the authority to tell Crystal's kid what to do.
"Mate," Martin mimicked. "You know, when I first moved here, it was like, 'fuck, people really say that here?' It seemed made up, you know what I mean?"
"No." Gault laughed. "You miss America?"
"Whatever. Not really. Every place is the same."
"You'd know, eh? A real world traveler, are you?"
"No. I just mean any place that has people in it." He watched Gault for a reaction, checked to see if this resonated. Gault had to look down at his sandwich. For a moment, he suspected he was being conned. At any rate, he knew exactly what the kid meant now.
*
Two weeks into his rehabilitation period, Gault was dozing on the couch around three o'clock in the afternoon when someone pounded on the front door. He sat up groggily and saw Martin hurrying to answer it. When he pulled the door open a surly-looking Maori man stood there glaring at him.
"Calm down," Martin said. "I'm coming." He walked back off toward his room, and the Kiwi stayed in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest.
"You're a friend of Martin's?" Gault asked, a nervous alarm pulsing at the back of his head. The man started at Gault for a moment, then looked away without answering. Martin came jogging out of the back hallway with a paper bag curled in his fist. He left with the man without looking back at Gault, and slammed the door behind him.
"Martin went off with a Maori bloke today," Gault told Crystal at dinner. She'd microwaved some half-dead bubble and squeak, lit candles. They were working on a bottle of wine.
"That right?" She barely looked up from her plate.
"Yeah, he had a bag with him. Sort of urgently went off, didn't say a word to me." Gault tried not to show that he'd been offended by this. "You don't think he's fooling about with drugs, do you?"
"Could be, but I doubt it. He's obsessed with getting into the army. He tries to stay out of trouble, these days."
"The Marines."
"Huh?"
"Isn't it the Marines he wants to join up with?"
"Sure, the Marines. What's the difference?"
Martin was gone for ten days. Being alone in the house made Gault antsy, and he missed having someone to eat lunch with. Crystal came home sometimes to join him, but it wasn't quite the same with her chattering about the people she hated at work. He longed for the emptiness of Martin's companionship, the contented silence of being with someone who expected nothing from him.
"Aren't you worried?" Gault asked Crystal one night after they'd had sex. She was rubbing the lotion that Gault hated on her legs. It made her smell like an old lady.
"Worried about what?" Sometimes the irritated way she returned his questions reminded him very much of Martin.
"Is it normal that you don't hear from Martin for ten days?"
"Has it been ten days already? Of course I'm not worried -- when he leaves for America, do you think he'll say goodbye? No, I'll just go into that pig sty room of his one morning and all his clothes will be gone."
Gault hadn't considered looking in Martin's room, but for some reason the idea was immediately appealing. When Crystal left for work the following evening, he hobbled down the hall and opened the door. The room was messy, but also weirdly impersonal. Martin hadn't hung any posters on the yellowing walls, there were no pictures of friends or pin-up girls scattered about, no action figures lined up on his desk. Clothes were crumpled all over the floor, and a collection still-damp towels hanging over the closet door gave the room a musty scent. Gault peeked into the closet and saw old board games and other toys stacked up and gathering dust. He got down on the floor to look under the bed, wincing as he manipulated his ankle and tested his still-healing rib, but found only empty shoe boxes and a bicycle pump.
Disappointed, he left the room and went to look out the front window, peered up and down the street as if expecting Martin to be on his way back now. A couple of weeks ago, he never would have thought he'd actually want the kid around. He wasn't sure why he did, but he let the ache for the sight of him open in his chest like something poisonous, breathed it in and liked the feeling even as it worried him.
He fell asleep on the couch that night, waiting for Crystal to return from her shift. When he woke up in the middle of the night he found that she'd pulled a blanket over him. The kitchen light was on, and he rolled over to see what she was fussing with in there.
Instead of Crystal he saw Martin, standing near the stove and unwrapping something -- cellophane? He sat up and realized that it was a roll of bandages, and that Martin was standing in a puddle of blood.
"Christ!" Gault said, shooting off the couch, and Martin turned to give him a look of hellfire.
"Shut up!" he hissed.
"What happened?" Gault asked, not even registering the request. When he came close, Martin shoved him in a light sort of way that Gault found endearing.
"Keep it down, alright?" Martin's arm was sliced open, and he was doing a bad job of trying to dress the wound himself.
"Did you clean it?" Gault asked, and Martin shoved him again, harder this time. He had bags under his eyes like he hadn't slept in days. Suddenly Gault didn't want Crystal to wake up, either. She would not be horrified enough by the sight of Martin painted in his own blood.
Gault took the gauze from Martin and wrapped his arm in a clean dishtowel, then wound the bandage around it. Martin watched him work with relative disinterest, sniffing occasionally.
"Are you on drugs?" Gault asked when he was finished. Martin snapped his hard blue eyes up to Gault's.
"I wish," he said.
Gault wanted to kiss him, and that was definitely odd.
*
Gault doesn't see Keamy for the first two days of the voyage, mostly on purpose. He hides in his stateroom, though he knows this will undermine his ability to lead the crew. He's beginning to doubt himself anyway, wonders how he got this job. It's all lining up like some kind of joke, and he wouldn't be surprised if Keamy was the one who arranged it, though Gault can't imagine what he'd get out of it except a laugh, and Keamy was never big on doing anything unless he could turn a more tangible profit.
When he finally goes up to the deck around midnight to get some air, he knows Keamy will ambush him, and is almost disappointed when he's left waiting at the stern, shaking like he just went off drinking yesterday and won't make it through the night. He's lucky, actually, that he's stuck out here in the middle of the ocean. If there's liquor on board he doesn't know how to get it.
"Jesus, your hair is gray."
Gault jumps out of his skin when Keamy appears suddenly behind him. It was not the reaction he hoped to have at their inevitable meeting, and he pulls a hand self-consciously through his hair.
"You stole my money," he says. It was supposed to be, maybe, an insult to match Keamy's, though Keamy was probably not intentionally insulting him, only making a blank observation, as ever, but when he hears himself say it he knows that Keamy will take it as a compliment.
"Okay, prove it." Keamy looks wistful and content. On him, it's a disturbing combination.
"Did you sign on to this -- mission -- knowing I'd be here? Is that why you've come?"
Keamy laughs. "Why would I do that, Captain? I don't need your money anymore, and you haven't got anything else I want."
Gault turns back toward the ocean as if to dismiss him. Keamy doesn't move for a few moments, then Gault hears his boots stomping heavily across the deck as he goes. He hopes to God that Keamy really thinks that he's got nothing left worth taking. He can't know that Gault is already feeling painfully charitable, like he would give up a lot just to hear Keamy admit that he wanted it all along.
Part Two
I need to catalog all the fic I've written for the Luau and all of the great gifts I've received, but I have some more Luau ideas I want to finish first.
Title: The Likes of You Again, 1/5
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Captain Gault/Keamy
Summary: Gault and Keamy knew each other before Widmore hired them.
Notes: This is the "other" Gault/Keamy story I've been considering writing for awhile, for Queen zelda_zee, who requested the slashing of Captain Hotass. I considered somehow not involving Keamy in fulfilling her request, but ultimately couldn't resist. I hope she'll enjoy it!
The Kahana leaves port on a cloudless afternoon, headed southwest toward an unnamed island that most of the crew will never see from less than eighty miles out. Huston Gault is grateful for the work but full of trepidation. He's never been offered this kind of money for such a straightforward journey, and very little has been asked of him outside of discretion, but the farther they get from familiar shores, the less straightforward the journey seems. He hasn't even met half of his crew, a scattered group of scientists, soldiers and scowling deck hands, most hand-picked by Widmore. They've got twenty days until they reach their coordinates, and he's not used to policing strangers who are working for someone else.
For the past ten years he worked out of Elliston, running a small-time commercial fishing operation. He didn't make much, but he made his own rules and picked his own crew. It wasn't a bad life when he could hold together a good group of guys, but he's getting too old for that sort of work. Widmore's money won't set him up for the rest of his life, but it will give him a head start. He scoffs, thinking of himself as an investor. He's worked with his hands all his life, and even playing Captain to a corporate vessel such as this one feels like deceptively easy money. He doesn't trust the situation, but he thinks he can still get away with the payoff, until he sees Martin Keamy standing across the deck and leering at him.
He shakes his head, blinks a clean slate across his eyes and looks again. A trick of the light -- the man who is looking at him, sleekly mountainous and clearly one of the soldiers, can't be that goddamn kid from Rockhampton. There is no way Martin Keamy could have survived to adulthood, let alone have the nerve to cross paths with Gault again. He's walking across the deck, carrying a gun. The way he wields the weapon is a subtle threat, not overt, quite artful, and fuck all, it is him.
"I know you," he says to Gault, as if he's still trying to work out how, as if those six months when they both lived in Keamy's mother's house weren't memorable by his standards. If not, he must have had a hell of a life so far.
"Yeah," Gault says, then realizes he should admit to nothing. "How's that?"
Keamy's grin splits across his face like a knife unsheathed. He knows Gault is bluffing, always could see right through him.
"Rockhampton," Keamy says, with the condescending lilt of someone who has decided they don't need the satisfaction of calling attention to their companion's lie. "You and my mother."
Gault almost winces but catches himself, swallows the impulse with an audible click. He feels cornered, wishes he were taller.
"Right, right." He laughs, sort of. "Fuck, mate." He can't really look at Keamy, now. "How about that?"
"Yeah." Keamy stares until Gault looks back. He's got the same eyes he had back then, which seems illegal, almost perverse. "Are you on the crew?" he asks.
"I'm the Captain, actually."
Keamy laughs uproariously in a way that is somehow only unkind after he stops himself.
Gault walks away like he's lost a bar fight, stunned as if pummeled. He doesn't stop walking until he reaches his quarters, ignoring several crew members who try to speak to him on the way there. His stateroom seemed comfortable and impressive when he boarded just a few hours ago, but now it feels like a broom closet, someplace he ducked into in a panic, not really safe or intended to house anything significant.
He sits on his small bed and rubs his hands together, tries to recapture his sense of gravity. The weight of what is happening has not fully settled on him yet, and he ducks it, squints around the room in willful confusion. He thought he was in love with that bloke, once. He was out twenty thousand dollars for it last time, and now Keamy is bigger than him, landscaped with guns and almost certainly more criminally insane than he was at seventeen.
Gault would laugh at the circumstances, but in fifteen years he still hasn't developed a sense of humor about what happened in Rockhampton.
*
Gault met Crystal Keamy in a bar called Mr. C's. He was thirty years old and had been stumbling around Rockhampton for a little over a year, drinking and getting fired a lot. He was then still making a career of mourning his divorce, not because he missed his ex-wife but because he felt she had beaten him at a belittling game he hadn't meant to participate in, and had proved him worthless in the meantime.
Crystal was American, blond, and seven years older than him. She looked just mean enough to be good in bed.
"I needed a change," Crystal said when Gault asked how she'd ended up in Australia. "Like, a new country. Like, that kind of change."
"Right." She seemed like the kind of uneducated woman who had chronically bad taste in men and was always running away from one or another of them, but maybe Gault only thought so because she was interested in him.
They went back to the house she was renting near the steak restaurant where she waitressed, had sex and fell asleep at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a Sunday, and neither of them had anyplace to be. When they woke up, Gault grilled a rib-eye on her back porch and she kept the beers coming. The invitation to stay indefinitely was clear from the beginning; she was humming with happiness as she moved around the kitchen fetching ingredients for the marinade, glad for his continued company. Normally he'd be very put off by this, but he wasn't a kid anymore, and it had been awhile since anybody had shown an interest in taking care of him.
"You're not married, are you?" she asked him while they ate on her back porch, sitting on the top stair with their plates in their laps.
"Not for five years," he said. "You?"
"Hell no. I've got a kid around here somewhere. Good for about as much as his pop was."
"A kid?" Gault turned around, expecting to see a dour eight-year-old watching them through the sliding glass door.
"Don't worry." She grinned. "He's on his way out of here. Soon as he turns eighteen he wants to go back to the States and join the army. That'll be next year, in February. Until then he's stuck with me. I don't know where he's sleeping lately, haven't seen him in two weeks."
"But he lives here?" Gault asked, disliking this.
"Yeah. Doesn't hang around much, though. Not what you'd call a mama's boy, that one."
"What about his dad?"
"What about him? He's a con artist, stole three thousand dollars from me and left me pregnant. Told me his name was Richie Arnold but hell if I believe that now."
She went quiet then, like she was afraid she's said too much. Gault felt oddly protective of her, and slung an arm around her shoulders, chewed steak near her ear. She smiled at him, put her plate down and hugged her knees.
"You're not a creep, are you?" she asked.
"I don't think so."
"I know." She kissed his chin. "I can tell just by looking at you."
*
Gault had been living with Crystal for a little over a month, working for a house painting operation and generally laying low, when he drove home to find a crusty pickup truck in the driveway. He was startled, thought maybe one of Crystal's various violent ex-boyfriends had come after her, but by her account they were all in America. It didn't occur to him until he walked into the kitchen and saw a teenage boy standing at the sink in his underwear, eating leftovers out of a tupperware container, that the truck might belong to Crystal's prodigal son.
"Jesus, sorry," he said, turning around as if he'd walked unannounced into the bathroom. "You must be Martin," he called back when he was safely in the living room.
"Whoa," Martin said. He followed Gault into the living room, still wearing only gray boxer briefs and still eating two day old pork tenderloin with his fingers. "She told you my name? Fuck, are you engaged?"
Gault laughed, then realized it was a serious question.
"No."
Martin shrugged and walked back into the kitchen, chewing with his mouth open, loud enough to hear throughout most of the house. He was tall, with hair buzzed short enough to be mostly colorless. He had Crystal's sharp features, but his eyes were blue.
Gault left the house, felt evicted. He went to Mr. C's and did a few shots, had a few beers, and hoped that when he got back Martin would be gone. He returned after dinner time to find his truck still parked in the driveway, now alongside Crystal's car. He let out his breath, drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and thought about what Crystal had told him. The kid was moving out soon, anyway. Maybe he was only here for a night or two.
"There you are!" Crystal said when he got inside. She was clearly a bit panicked by the timing of his late arrival, and popped up from the bar that looked into the kitchen when Gault walked in. Martin, who was dressed now, was asleep on the living room couch, a fishing show muted on TV.
"He's just back for a few days," Crystal assured Gault at once. He smiled and pretended not to mind.
"Do you think he hates me being here?" he asked Crystal later, when they were climbing into bed. Martin hadn't moved from the couch all evening, as if instead of sleeping elsewhere he hadn't slept at all since he'd been gone.
"He's indifferent," Crystal said. "He used to be all kinds of mean, but now he's too cool for that. I've never known what to do with him. He's his father's child."
"How do you mean?"
"Totally inscrutable. I've known him all his life and he might as well be a stranger."
Gault felt sorry for the kid, hearing Crystal admit defeat. Martin seemed like a fairly average teenager. He wondered if Crystal associated him too deeply with the con man who'd abandoned her.
"So he's not here to make my life miserable?" Gault asked, mostly joking.
"There's no telling why he's here. But it won't be for long. Trust me."
She was wrong about that. Martin stayed mostly on the living room couch for the next two weeks, as if he was recovering from a flu. Sometimes Gault sat in an armchair to watch TV with him, and Martin did not protest or attempt to speak to him. Crystal seemed to think that if she ignored the boy he would leave sooner, and in fact there was very little talking in the Keamy household at all during this period.
"What's your name?" Martin asked Gault one night when they were puttering around the kitchen at the same time, Gault going for another drink and Martin eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.
"Hasn't your mother told you?"
"She told me, but I forgot."
Gault laughed and cracked open a beer. Martin started at him, waiting.
"Huston," Gault said, raising the beer as if to toast him. It was close to nine o'clock, Crystal was closing at the restaurant and Gault was pretty drunk.
"Like the city?" Martin asked.
"Sort of."
"Is that what you're named after?"
"No. I was named after my dad's brother. He fought in World War II and then he killed himself. How about you?"
"How about me what?"
"Who're you named after?"
"Some fucking actor."
Gault smiled, and Martin scoffed, bit his own grin away. Gault walked back out to the living room with his beer, feeling proud of himself. He didn't understand why Crystal didn't make more of an effort with the kid. He was clearly bored, probably lonely -- Gault hadn't seen any evidence that he had friends here -- and not so bad.
The following week, Gault fell off of a ladder at work, broke his ankle and cracked a rib. The house painting company was decent enough to provide insurance, and for the three months required for his ankle to heal he was paid to do nothing but sit at home and watch TV. At first he resented Martin always being there, but eventually he grew to appreciate the company, and he got the impression that Martin did, too.
"You're not in school?" he asked Martin one afternoon when they were putting sandwiches together in silent tandem.
"It's summer." Martin looked at him like he was an idiot, and Gault felt ridiculously wounded by the gesture, almost laughed out loud at himself. He'd gotten used to the fact that he'd probably never have his own children, and maybe he'd grown fond of the idea that Martin was someone who might look up to him.
"Your mom told me you want to join the army?"
Martin made a disgusted face. "The Marines," he said.
"Oh, right, maybe that's what she said --"
"No. It's okay. She's an idiot."
"Jesus, mate." Gault couldn't bring himself to say anything further. In some sense he was probably right, but it wasn't on to talk about your mother like that. Still, Gault had nowhere near the authority to tell Crystal's kid what to do.
"Mate," Martin mimicked. "You know, when I first moved here, it was like, 'fuck, people really say that here?' It seemed made up, you know what I mean?"
"No." Gault laughed. "You miss America?"
"Whatever. Not really. Every place is the same."
"You'd know, eh? A real world traveler, are you?"
"No. I just mean any place that has people in it." He watched Gault for a reaction, checked to see if this resonated. Gault had to look down at his sandwich. For a moment, he suspected he was being conned. At any rate, he knew exactly what the kid meant now.
*
Two weeks into his rehabilitation period, Gault was dozing on the couch around three o'clock in the afternoon when someone pounded on the front door. He sat up groggily and saw Martin hurrying to answer it. When he pulled the door open a surly-looking Maori man stood there glaring at him.
"Calm down," Martin said. "I'm coming." He walked back off toward his room, and the Kiwi stayed in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest.
"You're a friend of Martin's?" Gault asked, a nervous alarm pulsing at the back of his head. The man started at Gault for a moment, then looked away without answering. Martin came jogging out of the back hallway with a paper bag curled in his fist. He left with the man without looking back at Gault, and slammed the door behind him.
"Martin went off with a Maori bloke today," Gault told Crystal at dinner. She'd microwaved some half-dead bubble and squeak, lit candles. They were working on a bottle of wine.
"That right?" She barely looked up from her plate.
"Yeah, he had a bag with him. Sort of urgently went off, didn't say a word to me." Gault tried not to show that he'd been offended by this. "You don't think he's fooling about with drugs, do you?"
"Could be, but I doubt it. He's obsessed with getting into the army. He tries to stay out of trouble, these days."
"The Marines."
"Huh?"
"Isn't it the Marines he wants to join up with?"
"Sure, the Marines. What's the difference?"
Martin was gone for ten days. Being alone in the house made Gault antsy, and he missed having someone to eat lunch with. Crystal came home sometimes to join him, but it wasn't quite the same with her chattering about the people she hated at work. He longed for the emptiness of Martin's companionship, the contented silence of being with someone who expected nothing from him.
"Aren't you worried?" Gault asked Crystal one night after they'd had sex. She was rubbing the lotion that Gault hated on her legs. It made her smell like an old lady.
"Worried about what?" Sometimes the irritated way she returned his questions reminded him very much of Martin.
"Is it normal that you don't hear from Martin for ten days?"
"Has it been ten days already? Of course I'm not worried -- when he leaves for America, do you think he'll say goodbye? No, I'll just go into that pig sty room of his one morning and all his clothes will be gone."
Gault hadn't considered looking in Martin's room, but for some reason the idea was immediately appealing. When Crystal left for work the following evening, he hobbled down the hall and opened the door. The room was messy, but also weirdly impersonal. Martin hadn't hung any posters on the yellowing walls, there were no pictures of friends or pin-up girls scattered about, no action figures lined up on his desk. Clothes were crumpled all over the floor, and a collection still-damp towels hanging over the closet door gave the room a musty scent. Gault peeked into the closet and saw old board games and other toys stacked up and gathering dust. He got down on the floor to look under the bed, wincing as he manipulated his ankle and tested his still-healing rib, but found only empty shoe boxes and a bicycle pump.
Disappointed, he left the room and went to look out the front window, peered up and down the street as if expecting Martin to be on his way back now. A couple of weeks ago, he never would have thought he'd actually want the kid around. He wasn't sure why he did, but he let the ache for the sight of him open in his chest like something poisonous, breathed it in and liked the feeling even as it worried him.
He fell asleep on the couch that night, waiting for Crystal to return from her shift. When he woke up in the middle of the night he found that she'd pulled a blanket over him. The kitchen light was on, and he rolled over to see what she was fussing with in there.
Instead of Crystal he saw Martin, standing near the stove and unwrapping something -- cellophane? He sat up and realized that it was a roll of bandages, and that Martin was standing in a puddle of blood.
"Christ!" Gault said, shooting off the couch, and Martin turned to give him a look of hellfire.
"Shut up!" he hissed.
"What happened?" Gault asked, not even registering the request. When he came close, Martin shoved him in a light sort of way that Gault found endearing.
"Keep it down, alright?" Martin's arm was sliced open, and he was doing a bad job of trying to dress the wound himself.
"Did you clean it?" Gault asked, and Martin shoved him again, harder this time. He had bags under his eyes like he hadn't slept in days. Suddenly Gault didn't want Crystal to wake up, either. She would not be horrified enough by the sight of Martin painted in his own blood.
Gault took the gauze from Martin and wrapped his arm in a clean dishtowel, then wound the bandage around it. Martin watched him work with relative disinterest, sniffing occasionally.
"Are you on drugs?" Gault asked when he was finished. Martin snapped his hard blue eyes up to Gault's.
"I wish," he said.
Gault wanted to kiss him, and that was definitely odd.
*
Gault doesn't see Keamy for the first two days of the voyage, mostly on purpose. He hides in his stateroom, though he knows this will undermine his ability to lead the crew. He's beginning to doubt himself anyway, wonders how he got this job. It's all lining up like some kind of joke, and he wouldn't be surprised if Keamy was the one who arranged it, though Gault can't imagine what he'd get out of it except a laugh, and Keamy was never big on doing anything unless he could turn a more tangible profit.
When he finally goes up to the deck around midnight to get some air, he knows Keamy will ambush him, and is almost disappointed when he's left waiting at the stern, shaking like he just went off drinking yesterday and won't make it through the night. He's lucky, actually, that he's stuck out here in the middle of the ocean. If there's liquor on board he doesn't know how to get it.
"Jesus, your hair is gray."
Gault jumps out of his skin when Keamy appears suddenly behind him. It was not the reaction he hoped to have at their inevitable meeting, and he pulls a hand self-consciously through his hair.
"You stole my money," he says. It was supposed to be, maybe, an insult to match Keamy's, though Keamy was probably not intentionally insulting him, only making a blank observation, as ever, but when he hears himself say it he knows that Keamy will take it as a compliment.
"Okay, prove it." Keamy looks wistful and content. On him, it's a disturbing combination.
"Did you sign on to this -- mission -- knowing I'd be here? Is that why you've come?"
Keamy laughs. "Why would I do that, Captain? I don't need your money anymore, and you haven't got anything else I want."
Gault turns back toward the ocean as if to dismiss him. Keamy doesn't move for a few moments, then Gault hears his boots stomping heavily across the deck as he goes. He hopes to God that Keamy really thinks that he's got nothing left worth taking. He can't know that Gault is already feeling painfully charitable, like he would give up a lot just to hear Keamy admit that he wanted it all along.
Part Two