Slender fingers run lazily through his hair and when he closes his eyes he’s 6 years old again, before it all went wrong – the rot was there, of course (it always was, as far back as he could remember) but it faded into the background, overpowered by the heavy aroma of Tessie’s perfume, eau de cigarette.
Alonzo doesn’t smoke, of course – wouldn’t even if he had the freedom to, or so he claims (disgusting habit, he remarked to Chucky one day, cheerfully cold, and the Sicilian just shrugged and took another drag as he counted his cut), but his scent masks the rot just as well, a bouquet of roses bled of all their beauty, tinged with 4 days’ worth of bitter lockdown sweat.
“What was it this time,” he murmurs, and Ryan’s eyes flutter open, bare gray wall greeting him – he’d started to doze, imagining the tinny sounds of the TV, an old black-and-white Western turned down real low (we don’t want to wake your father, do we?).
“Nothing,” he replies, and his voice surprises him. A man’s voice, not a child’s – he struggles to separate the years, feet planted almost 3 and a half decades apart.
“The same, then.”
“Yeah.”
He can’t remember what Alonzo knows, and what he’s just imagined telling him, biting back the words over and over again. As alluring as confession sometimes seems, it’s never gotten him anything worth having.
Honor thy father.
Life plus 40 years.
His head in a man’s lap, slender fingers running lazily through his hair.
“You want me to tell you mine?” It’s so quiet in the cell, like a physical thing, but Ryan can still hear the cowboys and horses. “It’s a nice one. You were in it.”
He’s in all of Alonzo’s dreams, and they’re always nice.
Whenever Alonzo shows up in Ryan’s head, it’s always just before Ryan loses him.
“Or we could run through the itinerary again –”
“No.” The itinerary stopped being fun a few weeks back, when something on the news had prompted Alonzo to offhandedly mention someone on the outside he was looking forward to seeing again in the new year – Ryan can’t remember what it had been or who it was, Busmalis’ questions drowned out by an intense ringing in his ears that had persisted until the glass doors shut behind them for the night, wouldn’t leave him alone until long after they’d finished their argument and he could hear the steady sound of Alonzo’s breathing in the bunk below, King of the Night calling it early and leaving Ryan alone in the dark once again.
As it always was. As it always would be.
Not yet, he reminds himself, not now (5 things you can see, Sister Pete’s voice tells him, but there’s nothing to see in the Em City midnight, nothing but gray walls closing in).
“I could sing,” voice gentle, touch even more so.
“I want you to stay,” and Ryan feels rather than hears the way the words crack down the middle as they leave his lips, and the wafer never tastes as good on his tongue as they tell you it will.
“I’m not going anywhere, sugar.”
You know what I mean, he thinks but doesn’t say, because as comfortable as he is having the same fight over and over, rewinding the same tapes until snow engulfs the screen, the same cowboys on the same horses in the same desert on the same TV in the same house while his head rests on the same lap, he knows better than anyone that Alonzo doesn’t care for repeats.
Novelty, baby. Innovation – everything shiny and new.
Ryan’s pain is tedious. An unfathomable bore.
“I love you,” Alonzo says, his fingers not faltering in their rhythm. “You know I love you?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you?” and Ryan rolls over to bury his face in Tessie’s thigh, hears Alonzo softly shushing him as her hands continue stroking him (don’t wake your father, pumpkin).
Seamus has been dead for years, but he can still smell the rot.
The rot was never Seamus. It was always you.
“I love you,” he whispers.
Watch after your brother, she’d instructed him in the hospice, her cool withered hand in his, tattooed and scarred. Keep him safe.
I will. I promise.
He won’t make Alonzo promise him anything.
“Always,” and Ryan imagines the parties, the people, the places he’d never see; sunlight white on the water as they walk along a deserted beach, warm strong hand in his, pale and desperate; their bodies intertwined somewhere without cameras, without hacks, without the fear of being found a hissing static corrupting the ecstasy, corroding the film; someone else’s lips tracing the shamrock he’d branded into Alonzo’s hip; the county coroner cataloguing the crown Alonzo had branded onto his.
“I’ll always love you.”
Brother, sister, father, mother – all walked down that dark road into the fog, a road that stretches out before him now; infinite, beckoning.
The dice always falls. The game always ends.
“Forever.”