by Pares
Joe balked at rehab, so Billy borrowed Pruitt's house on Ferris Beach. Pruitt toured, Joe shaved his head and Billy stayed out of Joe's way.Billy kept the stationwagon's key on a string around his neck, and Joe slept long hours, snoring when Billy left for sessions and still drooling on the couch when he dragged back in.
Phonecalls to the house on breaks were mostly Joe trying to wheedle or strongarm Billy into bringing home cigarettes and extra beer. Billy finally got good at saying no; Joe eventually dropped the pretense that he'd kick Pruitt's piebald pointer bitch, Vera.
On Tuesday afternoons, Billy brought home sardines, Premium crackers, bologna, yellow mustard, two loaves of Wonderbread rounded out with whatever vegetables he thought Joe might get bored enough to eat, and Joe's weekly six of Guinness.
Most days, Joe paced the beach, trailing smoke like a fucking locomotive, Vera on his heels. There was the occasional toss of a warped orange frisbee for the dog's amusement.
The light was usually bad when he got in, but it seemed to Billy that Joe was actually tanning after five or six bad sunburns and ten tubes of Aloe Vera.
"It's like purgatory. Like I'm payin' for all my sins."
It had been almost a month since he'd spoken to Joe in person. Without the buffer of phone static and chainsmoking (Joe was down to six smokes a day) Joe's voice was lighter, smoother than he remembered it.
Dog-brown stubble fuzzed Joe's head and his eyes were a weird, opaque blue in the slanting afternoon sun. He rolled an unlit cigarette in his stubby fingers that he tapped intermittently against the glass tabletop. He'd straddled one of the dinette chairs. Vera rested her chin on his knee, wagging her plumed tail.
"Joe," he answered, a too long pause, like a satellite delay.
"How long has it been anyway? I kinda lost count. I been by the ocean so long I can't hear the surf no more."
Joe had kicked the television in on his third day, and tried to barter cab fare with the stereo around day eight, but it wasn't such a long walk to the highway that he couldn't have hitched his way back to Saskatoon or Edmonton. And he was keeping the guitar in tune.
"I'd say, maybe, thirty-three days?"
Joe looked vaguely amused and crooked a finger, one eye squinted, his mouth tipped into a curve. Billy set the groceries down and, scraping his sweaty palms along his frayed jeans, shuffled closer to the man in the dinette chair.
"You need anything?"
Joe's hand, callused from three hundred and thirty hours of guitar practice, closed on Billy's scrawny wrist, holding it palm side up to scrape the fingernails of his free hand against the callused pads of Billy's fingertips. Resting Billy's hand on his own furred skull, Joe nodded, his hair a plush, ticklish frisson against Billy's palm.
"A set of clippers. It's time I buzzed it again, eh?"
END
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