Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“So somebody else killed him.”

“Well, of course they did. One of those walking trash heaps he was always picking up on the street.”

“Okay,” I said, popping the clip out of the gun and emptying it: seven rounds. I pocketed the bullets and held the gun out to him. “Get out of here.”

He gazed at the gun without taking it. “But wait. You have to help me.”

“Why do I have to do that?”

“Because they’re looking for me.”

“You should have called them in the first place.”

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t.” He shook his head, and the joints in his neck popped. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s just made it worse for you.”

“That means you told them about me.”

“Christopher,” I said, as though to a five-year-old, “I had to explain why I was there.”

He stared up at me, white completely surrounding the irises of his sunken eyes. “You told them everything?”

“I didn’t tell them about the will. I didn’t tell them what you said about the voice-print.”

“Thanks for nothing,” he said. “They’ll find out about the will in fifteen minutes, and that’ll be it. Do you know what those guys are like? About gay people, I mean? They’ll treat me like I’m Typhoid Mary. Gloves and masks and I don’t know what all.”

The kidney Spurrier had slammed sent off a little skyrocket of pain. With the pain came a sudden, overpowering conviction that I was sick and tired of other people’s lives. “I’ve got to sit down,” I said.

“It’s your house.” He was back to a sulk.

“Do you want some water?”

“I already took some.” He leaned over the edge of the couch, and I started fumbling in my pocket for the bullets, but all he came up with was a half-drained bottle of Evian.

“Good,” I said, sitting in the only other chair in the room. “But don’t do that again.”

“Do what?”

“Bend over and pick up anything I can’t see.”

He put a hand to his chest. “Oh, my God, you still think it was me.”

“I.” It was involuntary.

“You? Oh, I see. You’re correcting my grammar. How-”

“Old-fashioned,” I suggested.

“I was going to say how anal-retentive.”

“I’m almost as tired of that,” I said, “as I am about hearing people talk about love.”

“You really must be hurting,” he said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Evian. “Oh, I remember. ‘The fondness comes and goes.’ Gone at the moment?”

I was tired, and my left kidney was sending out painful little pulses, blasts of cold air aimed at my back. “Leave me alone. When I want analysis, I’ll pay for it.”

He drank. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to be detached when you’re peeling off the bucks to a shrink. That’s half the problem with psychiatry, the money.”

“What’s the other half?”

“It doesn’t work.”

“There’s that,” I acknowledged.

He sat back, wedging the bottle between his legs. “I had analysts all over the South. Max was the only one who ever helped me, even a little.”

“Throw me the water.” He tightened the cap and tossed it to me underhand, like a softball, and I drank half of what was left. It tasted like warm plastic. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me how Max helped you.”

He grimaced. “Is this necessary?”

“No. You could just leave.”

The deep eyes fastened on mine and then cruised the room, settling on one of the darkened windows, and he sighed. “We always want to be the hero,” he said.

“We want a lot of things,” I said.

He gathered his lips together and let out another sigh, one with a big P at the beginning of it. “I was just a total waste,” he said. “A mess. I hurt people and stole from them. I told lies day and night. I lied about who I was and what I’d done and when I’d gone to the bathroom last and how tall I was. It didn’t matter what, I lied about it.”

Outside a coyote yowled protest at the heat, and Christopher Nordine sat bolt upright at the sound. “Why?” I asked.

His eyes remained fixed on the window. “Why does anybody lie? Because the truth isn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. I was a nobody. I hadn’t done anything, and I didn’t think I ever would. I was a little ball of fear with legs and arms, so I lied to everybody. Some of them believed me, or wanted to, so I despised them for believing me, and that made it all right to steal from them. And when they caught me stealing, I lied some more, and they believed me again.”

The nakedness of it unsettled me, and I got up and opened the door to the deck. The moon hung white and remote across the canyon, cold and alone and proud of it. “They were lonely,” I suggested.

He shrugged. “They were old.”

I turned to face him. “Max was old, too.”

“Max has been the same age all his life. Max is ageless.” He stopped and put the pale fingers to his eyelids. They shook. “Was. Was ageless.”

“Did you lie to Max?”

“Of course I did. I gave him all the best stuff, right off the bat. He laughed at me. He said it was up to me, I could tell him lies and he could pretend to believe me if I wanted him to, or he could help me lose the fear. Up to me.”

“And you?”

He crossed a leg and then uncrossed it. “You have to understand, this was in the first fifteen minutes we knew each other. We were at some stupid party in the hills, and there we were, standing in a corner, and he’s saying all this stuff to me. So I hesitated, really just trying to think of something plausible, and he laughed and said he’d pretend to believe me on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we’d work on the fear.”

I caught myself starting to grin: “What about weekends?”

He saw my smile and the corners of his mouth went down, but then he relaxed and smiled back. It was a sweet smile, a slightly awkward smile that didn’t look like it had gotten much use. “I asked the same question. He said he read on weekends, and I could go lie to someone else if I liked. To keep in practice.”

“And did he? Read a lot?”

“All weekend long, fourteen hours a day. He’d get up around five and meditate for an hour, and then drink some tea, and the books would come out. Max learned to meditate in India. He went in the early sixties, years before anyone else did.”

“And you decided to let Max work on the fear.”

“No.” He looked around the room, not really seeing it. “I decided to pretend to work on the fear, to let him think I was-” He cleared his throat, and I threw him the bottle of water. He caught it with both hands but didn’t open it. “I said something like when do we start, and he said, ‘Right now.’ And then he whispered in my ear, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. I killed a man. Do you want to come home with me?’”

For some reason, Max Grover’s long slender hand, clutching a lemon, popped into my mind’s eye. “Max killed someone?”

“In India. It was self-defense, a French guy who was going to murder him and take his money. Max had a lot of money in those days. He got away with it, he literally got away with murder. And he told me about it, fifteen minutes after we met. A stranger, and he told me. So we went home, and we talked until two the next afternoon. Except for crying breaks. At the end, I couldn’t stop crying long enough to breathe, and he put his arms around me and held me until I went to sleep. I slept until it was dark again, and when I woke up he was still awake, still holding me. ‘Good start, Christy,’ he said. By then it was almost nine, I mean nine the next evening, and he went into the kitchen and made dinner.” His voice hadn’t changed, but tears were rolling down his cheeks. “And before we went to sleep again, he told me he’d take me in the morning to get an HIV test.”