C.E. Murphy - Thunderbird Falls

It flickered and murmured, responding sluggishly. I wasn’t too sure how to go about repairing a broken heart. Cosmetic changes, like visualizing a new paint job, seemed inadequate, and the patch replacement that I’d used to fix the hole in my own lung struck me as somehow dangerous. I’d been dying at the time. Screwing up would have only finished the job. If I messed up now, Gary, who wasn’t dying, might. My car analogy was turning out to have limitations I didn’t like.

In the end the best I could do was to share my own essence, the way Billy had done with me back in March. I thought it would help, just by giving him more than his own depleted energy to draw from as he healed. It took a while to formulate, but I slipped a small, delicate ball of silver rainbows inside Gary’s chest, and wished it Godspeed and good luck.

Then I stayed until a nurse came to usher me out, and went back to my apartment to sob in the shower.

Routine brought gratifying numbness. I wrote tickets and walked my beat, nodding at locals and stopping to give directions to tourists. I didn’t have to think, which was a godsend. Thinking put me back into that place where it was too hard to breathe. Gary might’ve believed there wasn’t anything I could’ve done, but I wasn’t so sure.

At lunch I went back to the station instead of stopping on my beat to get a bite to eat. I wasn’t hungry, and I needed comfort smells, grease and oil and gasoline. I went down to the garage, even though I didn’t think I was up to watching Nick carefully not look at me.

It was almost a relief that Thor was the only one around, lying on his back beneath a vehicle. I stood there by his feet until he slid out to get a wrench from the toolbox by the car. His eyebrows, grease-smeared, rose a little as he saw me. I looked around, unable to meet his eyes as I mumbled, “Wondered if there was anything I could help out with for a while.”

He frowned at me. I looked somewhere else again. “Please.”

“Yeah.” His answer was so gruff and so long in coming that I flinched, startled out of trying to think of where I was going to go when he said no. “Rodriguez got his wheels out of whack again. Get some coveralls and take a look.” He gave me the faintest smile possible and slid under his work-in-progress again. I was left staring at his legs, stunned.

I’d warned him about Rodriguez’s axle alignment problems six months earlier. Maybe good of Thor wasn’t so bad after all.

Rodriguez didn’t really spend hours beating his vehicle’s axle out of alignment, even if I’d accused him of doing so in the past. I’d never yet checked his vehicle and found the alignment outside of factory tolerances, which didn’t mean he was wrong. Some drivers are more sensitive to the variations in alignment, and Rodriguez was like the princess with the pea. The camber and casting readings on his vehicle were a full degree side to side off, enough to cause a pull.

And that was something I could deal with. Methodical, straight-forward work could fix an alignment problem. It took my mind off everything, and I finished the job with reluctance, not wanting to leave the garage and face the world again.

Thor, still on his back, rolled out from under the car he was working on and pushed up on an elbow, watching me. I wiped my hands down on the cleanest towel I could find and stripped the coveralls off. I’d done it a thousand times—just about literally—with the guys in the shop there. I’d never felt self-conscious before, too aware of Thor watching me. Big and thick and clumsy: that was the Joanne from high school, too tall and too poorly socialized. I fumbled the coveralls as I tried to put them back on their hook and caught a new handful of grease. I closed my eyes, sighed, and shoved my hand back through my hair before my brain caught up with my actions.

Thor’s laughter, deep and out loud, made hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I looked over my shoulder, mouth twisted. Propped up on an elbow, still on the creeper, he looked like a beefcake calendar picture, except in a pinup he’d be in jeans, stripped to the waist, and glistening with baby oil instead of wearing tar-smeared coveralls. “You know where the shampoo is.”

My mouth betrayed me and the corners turned up in a tiny smile. “That bad?” I headed for the washroom, not expecting an answer. Thor’s voice followed me anyway.

“Well, they said you’re Native American, but I think war paint’s supposed to be different colors.”

I stopped. “War paint can be black. They?”

He shrugged the shoulder his weight wasn’t on. “People talk.”

“About me?” I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or alarmed.

He gave a sharp snort. “Don’t sound so surprised. Replacing you’s like trying to replace David Lee Roth.”

“Hagar was better.” For a moment we stared at one another, caught in an unexpected camaraderie. “I gotta wash up,” I said abruptly. Thor slid back under his car. He didn’t come back out when I jogged through the garage a few minutes later, my hair still damp. The summer day was already heavier than the air-conditioning could defeat, and I figured I’d be back outside and dried off before anyone could comment.

Morrison caught me two halls away from the front door and gave me a scathing look. “You smell like a grease pit, Walker. I thought you were on beat.”

The fragile sense of well-being garnered in the garage evaporated and I clenched my fists, fixing my gaze on the floor. Heat prickled at the back of my eyes, and the flutter in my stomach didn’t have anything to do with magic, for once. It was just plain old-fashioned nausea, all knotted up in a ball of misery. “Lunch. On my way back out now.” I knew I sounded sullen, but that was better than bursting into tears.

Morrison stepped aside, surprising me. For a second I didn’t know what to do, stings prickling the inside of my nose, another precursor to embarrassing tears. I hunched my shoulders and flared my nostrils, trying to press the tingle away without being so obvious as to use my hands, and bulled past him.

“You all right, Walker?” There was a note of what sounded like genuine concern in Morrison’s voice, and it pushed me even farther off-balance.

“No.” I hadn’t given my mouth permission to tell the truth, and bit my lower lip hard in admonishment. “I’m fine.”

“Which is it?” He came back around me, frowning, and for a few seconds Captain Michael Morrison clearly didn’t know what to do with his hands. Even with my gaze locked on the floor I could see him reach for my chin, like he’d tilt it up so I had to meet his eyes. Then the sheer inappropriateness of that gesture hit him, even as it made me look up, the knot in my stomach giving a sick thump.

His fingers brushed my jaw because I moved, the contact making his hand drop like a dead weight. The breath in my lungs went with it, my chest beginning to ache because I didn’t seem to be able to remember how to inhale again.

“Walker.” Morrison was not a man I thought of as uncertain or unprepared, but his voice was tight and he held himself in such a way that I thought maybe he’d forgotten how to breathe, too. That began to concern me. Surely we couldn’t just stand there, not breathing at one another, all afternoon. My heart was pounding much too loudly in my ears, like it was determined to drown out whatever Morrison might say next. But he didn’t say anything, only kept watching me as if he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with me. My palms began to ache with the need to do something, but the obvious thing to do with a man in my personal space.

“Joanie!”

I drew in a sharp breath, air startlingly cool in my lungs as guilty color burned my cheeks. Morrison stepped back as if he’d been released from confinement, and Billy came lumbering around the corner with a sticky note in hand, his voice raised. “The reason the department gives you a cell phone is so you can be called on it. The hospital’s been trying to get through to you. They’ve got some paperwork you need to sign. Excuse me, Captain,” he added, perfunctorily.