and at the last
strays
for smallpea
Zito moved into Mulder’s apartment three days after getting out of jail. Danny’s money was enough to keep them in liquor and gasoline for a week, and then they were broke.
Mulder’s boys had scattered like shards of glass. He had to sell most of his stuff to make rent. He wanted Zito to go back on the streets, but Zito wouldn’t unless Mulder did too. He said, “I am not supporting this fucked-up little household all by myself,” and Mulder sneered, got out an old pair of jeans with rips across the back pockets.
There was a road map of California stuck with gum to the wall in Zito and Harden’s old apartment. Zito studied it for hours, tracing his fingers over the creases and the mountains. Richie was somewhere north, wearing Zito’s coat, carrying Zito with him like a hostage, blind and bound and gagged. Zito took the map down off the wall when it was time to leave, folded it up and put it in his back pocket.
They drove up the coast when they could afford it, following rumors of blue-eyed hitchhikers, kids with buzz-cuts and stick-out ears. Zito had a picture of Harden that they’d gotten at the photo booth in Nicky’s, grainy black and white, Harden grinning with Zito’s chin on his shoulder. Mulder had nothing of Crosby’s, unable to accurately describe him to waitresses and bartenders, “He’s like twenty or twenty-one, he’s got brown hair cut real short, he might have said his name was Tom, he might be wearing this green shirt I bought him, he lies, he steals,” and Mulder’s voice was breaking.
Zito pulled him out of there before he could do any real damage. He propped Mulder up on the wall and gave him a piece of gum, not commenting on the way Mulder was shaking.
They blew truckers for gas money and slept in the car. Mulder wrote a bad check to pay for breakfast, and they rode back to Hollywood in the morning, not speaking.
In a bus station in San Pedro, Zito found a ticket rolled up into a straw on the bathroom floor. Mulder went looking for him ten minutes later, discovered him sitting on the dirty floor with the ticket between his fingers like a cigarette.
Zito had deep circles gouged under his eyes, and if you knew to look for it, you could see that his nose was still a little crooked.
Mulder said hey, and Zito looked up at him, his face drawn and desolate. His throat moved as he swallowed, shipwrecked.
“I found him in a place like this,” Zito said haltingly. “He was. He didn’t have a coat. These track marks, these bruises on his face. Cuts on his fingers. Passed out in a bus station bathroom, and I thought if I, I thought I could-”
Zito stopped, choked off. He bent the straw in half, flicked it away and covered up his face with his hands for a moment before he stood. Mulder watched as Zito splashed frozen water on his face, leaking down the angles of his cheekbones.
“This is a lost cause,” Zito said without looking at him. “They don’t want to be found, so what’s the good of looking?”
Mulder took him home. On the highway, in the desert, Zito threw the road map out the window, watched it flap open and take flight like a bird.
Thursday nights were still reserved for Danny, but he was the only regular between the two of them. Zito tried to hide and smile, because they badly needed the three hundred dollars. It didn’t really work. Danny pushed the hair off Zito’s forehead, asked with his expression pinched, “What happened?”
Zito rolled over, burying his face in the pillow. He felt Danny’s hand on his back, trails of his fingers lined perpendicular to his spine. Harden’s absence had reopened the hole in his chest, and now it was like he was bleeding all the time.
Mulder hadn’t worked the streets in three years. He was furious at the necessity of it, cold smiling, cocking his hip. He felt seventeen again, running away across the country on anger and fumes, fisting his hands into some trick’s stomach, his knees aching. Crosby had thrown him right back to square one, but it was his own fault.
At their place, Zito slept on his old mattress, in the spot where the couch had been before it’d been sold. Mulder sat up drinking, learning the way that Zito curled up around himself, taking up as little space as possible. Zito awoke, chewing on the denim of his jeans, to find Mulder sprawled like a cross on the kitchen floor.
He dragged Mulder into the bedroom, parallel tracks of grit following Mulder’s heels. The stale California sun filtered through the windows in patches and graphs, attaching itself to Mulder’s long arms and the slant of his throat.
They didn’t look for Rich or Bobby anymore. Mulder told Zito stories when drunk, “Bobby wanted to go to Paris, Bobby liked that I was legally dead,” and Zito stared at him, asked, “You seriously didn’t see this coming?”
Zito never told Mulder anything.
In crowds, on the bus, in the backroom, Zito felt his control shredding, dreaming of fire and bats. Fucking club kids with money to spend on his mouth, neon light, the streets and alleys of Hollywood shrank around him, boxing him in like when he was six and had been locked in a closet for three days.
Mulder hated living with Zito. Zito could tell; Mulder didn’t really bother to hide it. Mulder kicked him awake when it was time to go out. He never wanted to know how Zito’s night had gone, never worried over the rope burns on Zito’s wrists or the blood dried to black on Zito’s shoulder. Zito still gave him thirty percent, but that was only for the rent. They fought daily, awful crippling fights like dirt ground into an open wound.
Six months passed like that, brought them over into the new year like refugees.
Zito saw Richie’s pretty high school boy down at the beach one day, sitting on the sand with a scruffy-looking dog beside him, staring at the ocean. Zito was ripped on cocaine that must have been cut with drain cleaner, his head ringing with pain, and he wanted to kill the kid, slam his face into the sand. The sun was setting over the water, perfect time to murder someone.
Mulder was waiting for him at Nicky’s. Zito couldn’t look at the boy on the sand, thinking sickly that Richie had been in love with him, honestly in love. Richie had gone clean for this kid, disappeared by inches and minutes from Zito’s life. Richie was a hustler and a drug addict, and this beautiful kid had loved him back just as strong, and it was really just one more happy ending that Zito had wrecked.
Story of his fucking life.
He went to Nicky’s feeling like he’d been shot. Mulder was in the alley, on his knees before some guy with his fingernails painted black and scratching through Mulder’s hair. Zito leaned against the brick wall, watching for awhile.
It had taken Mulder five years to save up enough money and employ enough boys that he didn’t have to do this anymore. Zito had been mostly doing appointments, so this was a step down for both of them. Mulder kept shooting his mouth off to tricks, sneering retorts, and he got roughed up a bit. Zito shoplifted a bottle of iodine and cleaned the cuts on Mulder’s face, a Kit-Kat sticking out of the side of his mouth.
Zito told him, “Not everybody gets turned on by you being an asshole.” Mulder grinned meanly, blood on his mouth.
This was the fifth part, Zito thought. The first was foster homes, the second was Cesar and Eric, the third was just Eric, the fourth was Richie, and this was the fifth. His life was all chopped up. Mulder thought he was devolving, reverting back to when they’d first met and Zito had been walking dead, uncaring of the danger that he put himself in.
But this was different. Eric was one thing and Richie was something else, and you couldn’t kill the same thing twice.
Mulder was high on something one night, his eyes skittering and his hands untrustworthy. He flashed, tall in the crowd, and Zito had money in his pockets, adrenaline coursing through him. He caught Mulder near the bar, holding onto his hips, feeling the way Mulder jerked and stumbled.
“Hey, hey.”
Mulder showed his teeth, leaned against Zito all flushed and hot. “They’re never coming back.”
Zito flinched, shook his head. “I know.”
Putting his mouth right next to Zito’s ear, Mulder said again, “They’re never, never coming back. They left. They’re gone.”
Zito pushed him, wild pain in his heart, no worse than usual. “I know, Mark.”
“It’s just you and me now.”
Mulder was grinning at him. Zito put his hand up over his eyes, shaking his head again and again.
“We’re not. It’s just temporary.”
It had to be. They couldn’t live like this forever. Mulder would reform connections until he could put boys to work again, kick Zito out of the apartment. Zito would save and spend his nights in the backroom and at the Glass Slipper until he wasn’t cute enough to pay rent anymore, and then, then. Then he would figure out something else.
Mulder’s hands slid around the back of Zito’s neck, Zito shivering. Mulder’s eyes were blacked-out, thin scrim of blue, and Zito thought he would taste like speed, like that caved place on Richie’s hand. Zito suddenly couldn’t breathe for missing him.
“Not temporary. It’s never gonna get any better,” Mulder told him, and bent his head, pressed his mouth to Zito’s cheekbone. Zito closed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, put his arms around Mulder’s waist.
Mulder bit his lip then, and kissed him in the neon light, with the blue-eyed boys and thieves around them, and Zito wished hopelessly that this fifth part of his life would be the last.