coffin tack

“Give me your hand,” Peter says, with a cigarette perched between his fingers.

“What for?”

“I want to give you something.”

Beneath the cuff of his shirt Phil’s wrist is sun-brown and broad with jutting bone; the familiar patina of dirt is there, ground into the creases of his skin. Peter rubs his thumb down the green tangle of veins — Boston blue blood, that’s what people call it. If the Gordons had never left Chicago, this man would never have looked twice at him, not even to grin and call him a sissy — but if they’d never left Chicago Peter’s father would not be dead. John Gordon had taken his wife and gone West to make a way for himself, and he had failed.

Rose worries that her son is growing cruel, like those boys who pull the wings off flies, and like those men who do worse things to any creature too small to defend itself— there’s no use in being cruel to an animal, when no animal has ever been as brutal as any man.

He isn’t cruel, only observant. When he looks at Phil, he sees.

Phil’s dirtiness is his armor, worn as close to his body as his weathered hide. Phil’s dirtiness is a provocation and an insult to the world. Every blister and scar on his long clever hands is a badge of the inferiority of other men — men of lesser mettle, men who wore two-dollar buckskin gloves bought at Green’s department store, whose owner, Phil assures him with the suggestion of a private joke, is a Jew.

(Peter’s professor is one too, his friend, the sweet-faced humorous boy who taught him the game of chess; like Peter, he has been friendless, and like Peter he is different even among his own tribe and kind. When Phil sleeps beside him, Peter thinks of his friend: what he would do for him, what he would do if anyone were to stand in his way.)

With careful gestures and the furled cigarette fixed in his lips, Peter folds the sleeve of Phil’s shirt back to bare the forearm — brachialis, brachioradialis, flexor and palmaris. He rests the heel of his hand there for stability — a doctor cannot have hands that tremble, his gestures cannot be uncertain.

Peter smokes, and considers.

Inscribing a geometric point there with the cherry-end and feeling the twitch of pain run through Phil’s body like electricity — breathing on the ember of his cigarette to keep it burning hot enough for the job, and watching the dark hairs of Phil’s forearm shiver with movement. His leg is steadied against Phil’s own, thigh against thigh, and Peter feels him lift slightly as if he might get up from his place, but instead he settles in closer.

Phil makes the faintest sound as the tip touches skin, more like a sigh than a whimper, and the white ash falls away. The blue smoke rises and the flesh beneath his cigarette sears to an angry red — why doesn’t he stop him? Why doesn’t he jerk away and curse him?

He could stop him any way he liked — he could simply turn away, with all the force of his derision, or knock him down flat on the ground. He allows it because he likes it and because he wants it. What use is there in understanding why a man likes what he likes?

Phil’s face has the hungry, set look he gets when his mind is elsewhere, and something in Peter aches like a struck chord in sympathy. The man is more comfortable with cruelty than kindness.

He can hear Phil’s breathing hitch and falter. This close he can smell him, heavy and rank — the fever heat of his skin and the stinking animality of his shaggy-haired chaps that make him half a beast and half a man, cut in two at the waist. Peter has no such barrier to guard him against the outside. Every morning when he washes his face and his hands and his chest Phil laughs at him. He’d teased him for being too precious with himself, until he’d watched him fire a gun. He’d brought him here to teach him how to shoot, but he hadn’t thought Peter would be any good at it.

At night, here in the hills, there is no human sound but the sound of their own voices and the clatter of their accouterments. Phil is under some compulsion to make conversation, as much to amuse himself as to engage Peter, but for now he is silent and raises no objection.

Peter lifts the cigarette to his lips and draws on it, considering his work; Phil is looking at him with strange patience.

Four circles in deep red, ringed in faint ash — they will blister and well up with wetness, and if Phil neglects them they will fester. Like every other mark on his hide they will heal, but even if they heal cleanly Phil will always know who left them there.

“You never used to smoke, did you, Pete.” Burbank speaks as though from a dry throat, cracked a little with something like pain.

“I picked it up from you.”

He’d practiced it, too, just as he practices now — drawing the smoke into the chamber of his mouth and letting it coil and cool there without breathing it down into his lungs and coughing himself sick. A man should be able to do all sorts of things without being squeamish. A gentleman should never ask another to do anything he wouldn’t do himself — that’s the other Burbank’s credo.

Leaning forward, Peter bridges the distance between them with a kiss — Phil’s mouth is clumsy against his own but it always opens to him. He breathes smoke into Phil’s obedient mouth, feeling him slacken with pitiful pleasure and clinch against him.

To be loved is to be hurt and maimed, to lose and lose again, to suffer, and to remember. Peter stubs the cigarette against the roughened skin of Phil’s throat.