Like Arrows With No Targets

Jackson Healy is in his doorway, cutting out a tantalizing spark-plug silhouette in the glare and wearing the ugliest sneakers in the world. You let success go to a guy’s head like that and he goes and buys those shoes – wine-colored suede with white laces all the way up and a great big swoosh that goes all the way around. Healy must catch him staring, because in lieu of saying hello he just jerks his chin up before scanning the living room, presumably for somebody short and blonde and in overalls.

“Thought you fell down a well or something. Where’s Holly?”

There’s a package under his arm, but if it’s not a great big bottle of bourbon March doesn’t want it. It’s wrapped in paper with cartoons on it. Something for Holly – poor kid. Jesus, poor kid.

“She’s at her friend’s house,” Holland says, louder and more harshly than he’d intended because his throat still feels like it’s sticking shut. “The one with the – you know, she’ll be all right. They’re going to the movies. You can come in, just take those fucking shoes off.”

The pieces of a broken glass lie conspicuous on the tile floor. It has to be conspicuous because Jackson Healy is staring. March sweeps them under the table with the side of his foot and hurries to lock the door behind them.

“That was a drinking glass,” Healy says evenly. He pushes off his shoes, toe to heel, and crosses the sticky kitchen floor to set down his box.

“I know what it was. Do you want something, or are you just dropping by to let all the smog in?”

He knows what it was because he got a set of eight of them when he and his wife got married, two little boxes of four with pink painted borders and thick Coke-bottle-glass bottoms, and because he’s already smashed three more since then.

His wife had thought they were ugly. Holly liked those plastic glasses with straws anyway, and when there wasn’t anything left to drink around here except fucking Tab and tap water, frankly they were better off on the floor. All the bottles are in the sink, facedown and undoubtedly reeking – half of them sticky herbal liqueurs left over from when Emma was alive. She liked spicy mixed drinks, tiki drinks, anything with a twirlable garnish, and Holland had too. He just got lazy over the years. If he doesn’t leave the house, he can’t buy more. It’s basic logic. Holland is hugging himself without meaning to.

Jack gives him a marble-eyed look. “I know where Holly is, I drove by on my way over. Scared the bejeesus out of the kid who does their yard work, I can tell you.”

“Him?” Little guy, red hair, sunburn, fancied himself to have an interest in karate. Holly had some opinions about the authenticity of his black belt certification. Fuck, he can’t think about Holly’s opinions without a clear sharp pang of self-loathing.

“The real question is, where the fuck have you been? I left you a message on the answering machine. I thought you were working a case.”

“Yeah, about that. It fell in the bath, through no fault of my own. So unless you gift-wrapped me a new one just simmer down. Hold on, I’ll get you a drink.” Tab and tap water. Maybe there’s orange juice at the back of the fridge. Fuck.

“Oh, you’re drunk.”

“No, I’m sober, and I fucking hate it. Jesus, what is this, Soviet Russia?”

He’s been chain-smoking since six AM, without Holly to tell him to crack a window. All day long he’s been like a fucking ghost, flitting here, flitting there, all with that itch at the back of his head. Might as well start phasing through fucking walls while he’s at it for the level of productivity he’s operating on.

There’s a new kind of surprise on Jackson’s face and it stings. Sober, everything feels sharper around the edges, kind of crunchier.

“March, are you alright?”

“I’m taking a day off. Mark it on your calendar. "

“Does that mean you’ll be back on the clock tomorrow, or am I going to be serving Mr. Philbin his papers with nobody to watch my back?”

That was the kind of job that paid the bills – grindingly unexciting unless you were getting shot at or a door slammed on your hand or somebody skulking around the neighborhood in disguise, head down like if they couldn’t see the guys going after them with a briefcase full of process papers it’d be mutual. Ostriches never get sued, it’s a fact.

Jackson Healy doesn’t need anybody to watch his back in a showdown with an elderly coin collector. Sure, the guy had some shady business practices, and a lot of enemies, but Healy cracks skulls for a living. Holland’s just an adjunct, a vestigial organ. Like an appendix.

Drunk, Holland kind of meanders through life. Moseys, really. He gets the mail and checks the answering machine and maybe when he’s a little more sober he remembers most of what he reads because even drunk, Holland March likes making money. When Holland is drunk, things go a little easier for him. Things are lubricated. Things kind of flow.

Dead drunk, Holland March doesn’t answer his phone. Dead drunk blacked-out Holland March wakes up with no wallet and no gun and no keys in a shitty part of town, and a daughter somewhere in the suburbs with no ride home.

Jack’s close enough to look him in the eye now. Holland screws up his face and tries to keep his voice from turning into a tragic bleat.

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

And… Healy is reaching for him, Healy is bridging the distance between the two of them inch by excruciating inch like a denim-clad iceberg on a collision course for Holland’s neuroses. They’ve done this before, or at least come close, but never like this. Never sober and in broad daylight. Holland experiences a pang of sudden dread that Jackson Healy wants to kiss him.

“Don’t be sorry. I’m just glad you’re not in the hospital, that’s all.” Healy presses his face to a fistful of Holland’s shirt. Any flattering sentimentality is undercut when he says: “You smell like a fucking ashtray.”

“Well, yeah?” March is just beginning to wind up. “Yeah, well, you don’t smell like anything at all, so I hope you’re happy.”

Healy’s weight against him is something familiar. He’s got a big body, thick legs that press comfortably against Holland’s – Jackson’s alluded once or twice to having been a shapely little piece in his younger days but March can’t picture it and more importantly doesn’t give a shit. He’s an attractive pressure that gets the blood going in Holland’s various extremities.

“Holland, are you sure about this?”

“Aw, fuck it. Come on over to the couch, we’re scaring the neighbors.”

Fuck the neighbors, honestly, he’s just dog-tired for no discernible reason and sick of the eyesore that is all the liquor he can no longer drink. Healy being here is the sign he should throw the towel in. There’s being sober, and there’s getting sober, and fuck it, no harm done. Jack’s here to touch base on the case Holland blew and to chew him out over what happened with Holly. Once they’ve got that over with they can get back to assessing the fallout in terms of finance.

Holland jostles the coffee table on his way past it, rattling its contents and making Healy cry out with fleeting dismay – still life with broken lamp and full ashtray. The couch is another rental and even to Holland’s sensibilities it’s a little loud, but it sags satisfyingly under both their weight and nobody has to feel bad about using it to wedge off their shoes before getting down and dirty. They’re too old to neck like teenagers, but luckily enough March is a biter; when they come together it’s all kinds of inconvenient, but you can’t say it’s not dynamic.

Holland slides the jacket off his shoulders, peeling it off down his back and leaving only his print shirt – his hand brushes the welt of scar tissue in Healy’s upper arm and goes back immediately to trace it like Braille. It’s shallow and shiny like an old war wound. It’s pink. He kind of wants to put his mouth on it.

“Jesus, how did that happen?” March tries to inject the necessary tone of awe into his voice while muffled against skin. He knows full well how – hey, aren’t you that guy from that diner and all – but it’s different seeing it, stamped big and ugly on his partner’s skin where some jackass drifter left his mark shortly before the beatdown of his life. It gives Holland a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“I already told you – oh, for Christ’s sake, cut that out, would you? I don’t lick your arm–”

“You broke my arm,” March complains when he breaks away for air, but it occurs to him that maybe Healy means the six-inch suicide gash from punching through a window and he can’t fault him for that. That one was all Holland, start to finish.

Jack squeezes his wrist with utmost affection, mouthing against the upper edge of Holland’s ear. He does that a lot, though again, generally not while Holland is completely sober. It sends a zap straight down to Holland’s crotch.

This is a whole different ride when he’s not buzzed. It’s a different stretch of road with turns in different places and no posted speed limit and nowhere to pull over the car.

March edges off the couch and lands on both knees. (Pretty hard, actually. Thanks for asking.) Healy’s sitting back like a king on his sticky upholstered throne, legs apart and one hand carelessly resting by his crotch like a dare. He’s having a grand old time, probably tied one on before he came over. If you bit him on the mouth he’d probably taste like beer and salt and sandpapery weekend beard. And March is down between his legs, for the first time in memory cautiously optimistic about giving head to an overweight divorcé who broke his fucking arm not six months past. March’s tongue presses against his teeth. He is deliberating on his path of attack here.

Healy’s unit is short and thick, impressively so – he feels the compulsion to span it with his hands, and he can feel Jack’s blood pumping under the skin, hot and ready. The tip of his dick is ruddy and broad and Holland finds himself fascinated – not just by somebody else’s dick but by how much this one is Jack’s, how well it fits against the rest of him. Not to mention his balls. Those are also good.

“Are you going to take all day down there?” Healy’s razzing him, but he’s already starting to flag down here in the hard-on department so Holland gets down to business mouthing at his shaft. The texture of skin catches against the inside of his lower lip. Down here on his knees there’s nothing else.

He can do this, fine. He’s sucked some dick in his time, who the hell hasn’t.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and Healy’s big hand is pushing in his hair, not yanking up fistfuls and not jamming his head down like he’s the second coming of Amber Waves but resting heavy and approving where March can feel the warm arch of his palm.

“Yeah,” Healy says quietly, quiet enough that it’s not for Holland to hear.

The whole rough trade thing is kind of working for him, even though God knows Healy isn’t some dick-swinging young punk in a tight tee shirt. His undershirt is hitched up to his soft navel and it’s so hard not to lose sight of the main objective and press his mouth to the track of hair or the crease of his inner thigh where the folds of his denim jeans have left a shallow mark.

He brings his tongue back in his mouth to take it in, self-conscious of making it good.

He’s being watched – Healy’s leg fits his hand so he can steady himself, as he’s breathing the damp heat of his skin in sharp shallow pulls. With Jackson’s hand pressed to his hollowing cheek – like maybe he can feel himself inside him as Holland works with his tongue and his teeth, he can feel the wet click of Holland’s involuntary sounds around his awful fucking beer-can cock and maybe he likes it. Holland March is liking it very much.

Forget all of it. He wants this, wants heaviness and slippery skin and Healy under him, or on top of him, or whatever the fuck two grown men are supposed to do. All while he’s sucking like his life depends on it, anguished by his own blue balls and aching to do this forever.

Holland’s never been good at breathing through his nose, so he’s panting when he comes up for air like he’s just had to jog down a few flights of stairs after six J&B’s. The taste is thick in his mouth as he wheezes for breath – about the only thing he can taste these days, but not bad, really.

March swipes at the indentations left by his knees in the thick carpet.

“You owe me one. Last time I did this I didn’t fucking swallow.”

“Didn’t know there was a last time.” Healy sounds mildly admiring, or maybe Holland just wants to think that because there’s jizz in his mustache. Jackson’s unit is tucked away now like it never even happened. He’s wiping his hands on his thighs.

“Life’s full of surprises.” Holland wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and starts to get up.

(The last time had been at some company party for a company that would never have hired him and even then he knew all the angles for somebody with a cheap camera and a keen amateur eye. He’d half-wanted to get caught, and if he’d asked the guy’s name he’d forgotten it just as quickly. The guy had snagged his fingers in the chain around March’s neck, the one with a ring on it, and tugged.)

Afterward, Healy’s eyes on him are soft and sardonic. Holland sticks out an arm to steady himself – he’s shaking now, like he shook before – and Healy pats his bicep reassuringly, twice.

“You should’ve told me you were AC/DC. We could’ve put it in the ad.”

“Two bisexuals solving all of LA’s problems.” Maybe Healy doesn’t like the word, but that only pops into his head after he’s said it, and the pleasant fuzziness seeping in around everything right now stifles his concerns.

Jack helps him up with appropriate brusqueness for somebody who just got blown, but coming from him, that’s ambrosia.

“C’mon, then, man. Where do you keep your bed these days?”

It’s down the hall, with zero easily-shattered windows and a big shiny lock on the door. Jesus, the hard part of today had been getting out of bed. Healy is the more robust of the two of them, on account of not needing to hop along all boneless and sticky trying to shimmy out of his pants as he goes.

It might be a lost cause trying to make this place presentable in a hurry. There’s a cluster of Tab cans on the bedside table among the paperbacks and travel alarm clocks– old habits sanitized – and all three of them have been used as an ashtray because the mechanical action of cracking open something cold and chemical hadn’t fucking helped.

The sheets are halfway off the bed, peeling off the mattress from too much restless alkie tossing and turning, and Holland’s halfway across the room to yank them back on again for some semblance of dignity when he realizes Healy’s already doing that for him. Like a maid at a hotel, he thinks, before catching himself – or somebody’s wife. Somebody’s big, hairy, astronomically fucking mean wife.

Holland lies down on the bed and spreads his arms and legs. There’s jizz drying in his boxers, right now. How’d that happen? What a mess. What a fucking disaster. What the fuck is happening to him?

The mattress sinks as Healy lies down next to him. Holland feels himself slip closer without even meaning to.

“You up for round two?”

“Jeez, Healy, I don’t know–”

“Want me to return the favor?”

“No.” Holland presses both his hands to his face and starts kneading. “Fuck, I’m tired. And I feel like shit.”

“I know. You’re doing the right thing.”

Jack’s voice is low. He worries the hem of Holland’s untucked shirt in between two fingers.

It’ll be cheaper once he’s dried out, that’s for sure. Even Jack managed to tie a few on during the miserable conclusion of the whole Detroit fiasco without falling off the wagon entirely; Holland’s never been able to have a drink without wanting six more. It’ll cut down on overhead. Two dry detectives.

Jackson had mentioned off the cuff that he quit drinking because it made him feel like a scumbag. It made him feel like some knuckle-dragging boozehound who couldn’t be a real husband to save his life. Like the kind of guy his zesty blonde ex-wife would fuck around on. A scumbag. The past 48 hours have confirmed Holland March is a scumbag drunk or sober.

Same old shitty story; he’s working a case around the periphery of some big office shindig, he bellies up to the bar and orders a double while he waits, just to be polite, just to sweeten up the bartender and get the two-way street of a dialogue going, and once that one’s done he orders another, and then after that – and then he’s alone in a shitty fern bar with $2 in his wallet and nobody for company but the knockoff Tiffany lamps but Holland March the habitual drunk can’t care at all. His dad was a drunk too, but at least he was an angry drunk. Holland gets happy, and then he gets stupid.

He doesn’t remember when he left the bar. He probably ended up spilling more information than he managed to gather there in the first place. The red-headed lady with the limp they were supposed to be tailing got away. And when he managed to drag his soggy ass back to his home office to sober up under the tap–

Jackson rolls over onto his side and kisses him on the mouth. March sits up or tries to, heels slipping in the sheets for a second like something from a cartoon.

“Don’t do that!”

Healy squints in a way that furrows the bridge of his nose. His breath on Holland’s prickly cheek is warm. “Why, why not?”

And if he didn’t sound so goddamn concerned Holland would break his nose for him. Or more likely Healy would break something else, but at least now he feels bad about it. March can’t stand his pity, but he still wants to lean into it, like one of those cats that’ll rub around your ankles as soon as chomp down on your hand. Holland got cat scratch fever that way back when he and Emma were newlyweds. The glands in his neck swelled up like golf balls and the cat got sent to live with Emma’s old roommate Irene. It was an amicable separation.

“Because I taste like a fucking swimming pool! All right? Would it kill you to lay off me?”

Emma could always tell. She said she could smell it.

“Do I look like I care about that?” Healy’s voice is an abstract rumble.

Jack’s head is heavy against his shoulder, but pleasingly so, like a bowling ball. He’s pretty clean-cut apart from the stubble, which just makes Holland feel worse about inevitably smelling like sweaty balls and fuming anger. Healy’s hand is resting against Holland’s stomach, parallel to his own. He’s not making a move; he’s just watching him. Just watching.

Holland doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve this ass-backwards semblance of normalcy with a partner who watches his back for him, with a kid who pretty much raises herself these days, with clients who want to pay him exorbitant amounts of money to do the stuff he used to say he loved to do.

They lie there for a while, just two objects at rest. Holland runs his tongue over the inside of his teeth and wonders if Healy’s ex-wife liked to go down on him. This probably isn’t the best time to ask.

“You’re not a bad guy, March. Nobody got hurt this time, Holly made it back alright, she’s a tough cookie.” Jackson Healy is calling his daughter, who presses flowers in her Nancy Drew books and cried during fucking Star Wars, a tough cookie. What kid cries during Star Wars?

“Yeah, well. I’m sure she’ll remember that next time when she’s weighing whether she can bank on a ride home from dear old dad.”

There had been boys there. Kids had been drinking. Maybe somebody’s older brother came by with something a little harder than reefer. Maybe somebody brought some pills or chopped up a line on Grandma’s old hand mirror. How bad would a party have to be to make Holly so sure she had to bail out? Her voice on the tape had sounded so young – he forgot she could sound like that, she must have been cupping her hand around the phone so nobody else could hear.

He’d gotten there, sure. One self-administered break-in and several transfusions of cold black coffee later and he’d tear-assed down the highway at breakneck speed, the mark from the spare key still pressed into his sweating palm, still halfway fucked-up – and when he skidded into the driveway, obliterating trash cans and small fuzzy animals in his path, Holly was already long gone. One of her girlfriends could scrape together enough babysitting money on her for a cab or something. She didn’t have to thumb a ride home with some pot-scented kid-toucher. Holly did the smart thing and Holland did the cataclysmically fucking stupid thing.

“I’m thinking about getting her a camera,” Healy says, somberly.

“What the fuck does she need a camera for? I’ve got cameras out the ass around here, cameras for days, she can have any camera she wants–”

“You’ve got cameras designed for nailing guys screwing around with the secretary. She needs something she can use with her friends to take snapshots. Something little and portable.”

Pictorial evidence of infidelity won’t get you what it used to in this business.

“Okay,” Holland says, completely defeated and completely touched by the gesture at the same time. “You’re thinking about it? Then what the fuck did you lug over here?”

*

Holland picks apart the curly purple ribbon bow with a butter knife.

The lid comes off in one piece, but the paper is pretty much intact, so maybe they can tape it back on or something. There’s tape around here somewhere, in one of the drawers full of swizzle sticks and switchblades and broken wooden spoons that jam up if you tug too hard. The inside of the box is lined with striped paper. Fucking roller skates. He got her fucking roller skates.

Holland shoots him a look across the counter. “What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sorry-your-dad-fucked-up gift?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds completely reasonable. Do you think she’ll like it?”

“You can’t buy Holly roller skates every time I fuck up. She doesn’t have that kind of closet space. I should be buying – you know what, fucking forget it, she’ll love them.”

“Well, if you really think so.”

Holland March is nobody’s idea of a great father these days. He blew a case and he broke Holly’s trust all at the same time and that’s what’s sticking to him, stuck up under one rib like a shard of pink glass – what if Holly remembers this for the rest of her life, what if this fucks her up good? What if this is what she remembers him for? For flunking out and fucking up at being there.

“Of course she will. You could have just bought her a book or something. Jesus, she’s just a kid, Jack, she likes typical kid stuff. You know what can happen to kids these days?”

“Holland, you know I do.”

Last week they busted some piece-of-shit guy peeping in on a Mouseketeer’s hotel room – nobody Holly even heard of, just some girl who’s been on TV a few times and wanted to run over her lines in peace and quiet. Not that he thinks Holly’s likely to be in pictures or anything, but if a squeaky-clean kid with a private car and a fat paycheck can’t keep some creep off her back –

Two other girls went missing outside the same bowling alley where Holly had her 13th birthday party. They don’t go there any more. Holland will just have to drive the extra half-hour or something to someplace with a well-lit parking lot.

Jesus, he could have killed her. Holly could be dead now because of him and his piece-of-shit decisionmaking skills.

Healy’s hair is falling across his forehead in a gentle comma, which makes him look like a gay fat Clark Kent. Holland feels a little dizzy when he looks up at him, a little drunk.

“Never mind. Stick the skates anywhere and fucking help me here.”

Holland begins pulling bottles out of the sink, one by one. The tap sluices the runoff down the drain pretty okay, even if the sight of liquor still makes his throat itch.

They’ll drive over and pick up Holly before noon, the sun will be shining and Holland won’t feel like something took a shit inside his skull, and they’ll eat a big lunch and buy milkshakes and take a walk around. Mr. Healy can give her those electric-blue roller skates with the goldenrod stripes for enhanced speed and they’ll hit up one of the rinks. All the more reason not to flub sobriety and go through it all a second time; he’ll feel like a real jackass.

Holland turns his head and Jack is there at his elbow with an empty grocery bag. His closeness doesn’t feel intrusive, just intimate.

“I figure I’ll take those bottles off your hands.”

Holland passes a few off, bottles clinking noisily. “You know we ought to do something with that stuff. Redeem them or recycle them or something. It’s all headed to the same big dump.”

Hell, give it 20 years and Los Angeles will all be one big dump. March and Healy will be stalking around the irradiated periphery getting paid to snap pictures of philandering rats.

“You got any plans before Holly gets home?”

“I might as well tidy up this sinkhole before she sees the incontrovertible visual evidence of her dad’s iniquity. After that you and I are going on a little drive.”

“Are we?”

“You know those two girls they think got picked up outside Sunset Star Lanes?”

“Uh-huh.”

Holland presses his face to the side of Jack’s head and breathes in, sucking in the ghost of something, the phantasmal smell of something sweet. “I’m gonna stop in and ask a couple questions.”