Timothy Hallinan: The Bone Polisher

Beneath the baggy expensive clothes, the young man on my couch, who had identified himself as Christopher Nordine, was the kind of thin you don’t want to be. I could have closed my fingers around his wrists, and his knuckles bulged like walnuts beneath the pale, papery skin of his hands.

“I don’t understand,” I said, giving patience back. “You just want me to talk to him?”

A hand went to his slicked-back brown hair, touched it, and then left it alone. “Well, he won’t listen to me. We’ve been fighting night and day.”

“About something he should be able to see in the future.”

He made a soft sound, like “peh,” dismissing the future. “Maybe he’s right,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t need anything.”

Nordine lifted his hands slowly, as though the gesture hurt the muscles in his back, and rubbed long bony fingers over his eyelids. “Let’s say he is,” he said from behind his fingers. “Still, it’ll make me feel better.”

He’d placed a bottle of Evian water on the table-my table, in my living room-and he took his hands from his face and raised the bottle to drink. The October heat was beating its wings against the uninsulated walls of my little wooden house in Topanga Canyon, and the temperature indoors had to be ninety-five, although Christopher seemed to have cooled it somewhat. The growing stack of very odd mail on the table-mail sent to me by dozens of companies whose computers had inexplicably decided I was about to be married-was curling at the corners. A bright brochure advertising HONEYMOON HEAVEN had slipped limply to the floor, belly-up, and gone flat. Even the rug was hot underfoot.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take off your jacket?” I was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, and I was pouring.

“It’s wool,” he said, giving it a tug. “It breathes.”

“I’d have to hear that from a sheep. It looks hotter than hell to me.”

“I haven’t been hot in more than a year. I’m too skinny to get hot.”

I didn’t say anything.

He shook the bottle-only an inch or so left-and looked irritated. “So,” he said, gathering his calm around him again, “will you do it? I’ll pay you five hundred.”

“Money’s not the issue. And if it were, it’d be because five hundred is too much.”

“You don’t know Max,” he said. Christopher Nordine looked to be in his middle thirties, with thinning straight coffee-brown hair and odd pale eyes that had heavy rings under them. There was a crustiness over the skin of his eyelids, as though he hadn’t washed them when he woke up. His eyes, oddly deep set and restless, skimmed the room, my face, the room again, failing to find anything to hold them. He had a high-ridged, narrow nose and a sharp, wide mouth. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the whiskers had come in patchily, heavy at the tip of his cleft chin and lighter on his cheeks. Some sort of heavy cologne rolled off him in waves. Thirty pounds ago, he would have been handsome.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “More water?”

His sparse eyebrows went up inquiringly. “Have you got Evian?”

“I’ve got more Evian than the source,” I said. “Someone brought me three cases of it.”

“He must be fond of you.”

“It’s a she,” I said, “and the fondness comes and goes.”

“Ah.” He didn’t sound very interested. “And whose fault is that?”

When I don’t expect a question, I’m usually stranded with the truth. “Mine.”

“I know all about that,” Nordine said with sudden bitterness. “I could write the book.”

“ ‘The Book of Love,’ maybe. Remember that?” I got up and went to the kitchen, a depressingly short walk, and threw open a cabinet. I had half a loaf of stale bread, two dusty cans of tuna, and thirty-six bottles of Evian, courtesy of my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, who had recently been trying to get me healthy. Again. “ ‘Chapter One says you love her, love her with all your heart.’ ”

“ ‘Chapter Two, you break up,’ ” Christopher Nordine sang with perfect pitch, “ ‘but you give him just one more start.’ ”

“I don’t think that’s it,” I said, toting a full bottle back into the living room and trying to stay upwind of myself. I needed a shower. He took the bottle eagerly.

“I hate oldies anyway. I’m getting to be too much of an oldie myself.” He drank.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re what, thirty-three, thirty-four?”

He took the bottle from his lips and smiled, not a pleasant smile. “I’m twenty-seven,” he said.

As hot as it was, I could still feel my face burn. “Oh,” I said.

“Twenty-seven, going on dead,” he said.

It was terrible, and it was probably true, but it was also self-consciously dramatic, and I realized that one of the reasons I was resisting Christopher Nordine was that I didn’t like him very much. But it wasn’t the only reason.

“I still don’t really understand what you want me to do.”

His eyes gleamed, and I saw what was wrong with them; he’d lost the fat that cushioned the eyeballs, and they’d sunk back into his head, too far back for normal eyes, where they glittered like water down a well. He was burning his own body for fuel.

“I live with the man,” he said fiercely. “He’s seventy-seven years old, and he’s living like a fool. He’s going to get himself hurt or killed.”

“Living like a fool,” I repeated.

“Picking up street boys and taking them in. Haunting AA meetings and adopting heroin addicts. Turning the house into the gay pound or something. They get food and clothes and, and support, and clean sheets, and he doesn’t really care if they steal his stuff. He sleeps with them in the house, for God’s sake. And he fights with me when I try to tell him he’s going to get hurt some day.”

“Maybe he likes heroin addicts,” I said. “You know, they sit still. They’re like furniture most of the time, not much trouble as long as they can-

“They’re trash,” he said, and he said it in two syllables: “trayush.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the extrasyllabic extravagance of the South in his speech. “He thinks he can save them. He thinks he can”-he lifted the bottle to his lips again and drank, the knobby Adam’s apple bobbing up and down-“save everybody.”

What the hell. “And you’re jealous.”

He threw me a scornful look over the edge of the bottle. “Give me a break,” he said. “I’m the only one he loves. He’s already told me that I’ll inherit everything.”

“But he won’t listen to you. Why?”

“He’s seventy-seven. He won’t listen to anybody.”

“But if he knows it pains you-”

“You bet it pains me. He takes them in, he pours money over their dirty little heads, he tries to get them off the dope, find them jobs, give them a future. They take his credit cards, they use his ATM cards for booze and drugs. They steal his jewelry, his furniture, and when they’ve gotten everything they can, they split. They rob him blind. They break his heart.”

It was actorish, but the rage behind it was real. I cleared some of my extremely peculiar mail away from the middle of the table to make room for him to put down the bottle and to let a few neutral moments ground the electrical charge in the room. “Hearts aren’t that breakable.”

“There are hearts and hearts,” he said, drinking. He put the bottle on the table and picked up a flyer. INSURE YOUR LOVE, it suggested in magenta letters.

“Seventy-seven’s old for you,” I said neutrally.

He raised his eyes from the flier, sat back on the couch, and gave me the cave-dwelling stare. The suppressed rage blossomed behind it, like a campfire. “And?”

“And you’re the legatee.”