Old Love/New Love

They were lovers, although Thomas would never admit it.  He put it in other terms- Liam was easy and available.  Liam was a slut and Thomas was a drunk and things progressed in the normal way of the world.  There was something like love, enough to call them lovers.  

There were ten good years on the road before Thomas knocked up a stripper and decided to play house.  Ten years of holding up gas stations and cocaine in motel rooms and each other’s dizzy sweaty sticky skin.  Ten years of moving over Liam’s bony body in an adrenaline haze.  Ten years where his gun was just another part of his hand.

When Maggie is in his bed, he imagines her as Liam.  In bed with Liam, he imagines Maggie.  In bed with Maggie he is soft and tender, but with Liam in his bed he does everything he doesn't dare with Maggie; slaps and knives and snuffed cigarettes on scarred, emaciated flesh.  He wonders if this means that he loves Liam more.  

In his mansion, he misses motel rooms.  In motel rooms, he dreams that a bigger mansion will finally make him happier.  The American Dream, A wife and two kids and a dirty lover and a list of felonies that have not caught up to him yet.

When they do catch up, it is in the form of a calm FBI informant named Walter who has the perpetually runny nose of a kindergartener.  He talks, very civil, in terms of decades in jail and murder charges.  He offers a deal; your partner for your freedom.  One of them could go down, the other go free.  If he refused he guessed they would have offered the same deal to Liam, he justifies that fate brought them to him first.

He reasons that Liam is a liability.  He has an itchy trigger finger and the veins in his arms are blown from shooting crank and he might just up and die any day anyway, so what is his life worth?  He imagines finally feeling free of that rope around his neck, Liam the stool he so precariously perches on,  always waiting for the moment he slips and the noose tightens.

The day before is one of the hardest days that Thomas ever lived.  He treats Liam like a cancer kid at a charity event, avoiding the subject of his approaching death and Liam so blissfully unaware.  They fuck on every surface of the motel like honeymooners.  They lounge by the dingy motel pool and watch a big white duck float across the filthy water.  They get so high that the repeating “sights to see” channel on the fuzzy TV sounds like music. They blow money on room service and eat chocolate pancakes, which Liam says is the only food that still tastes good on meth. 

The sting goes as predicted, minus the death of one guard at the bank.  They are running through an open field when the sniper fires.  It hits Thomas in his vest as planned.  The blow is still agonizing, driving all of the air out of his lungs.  Liam stops running and it takes everything in him not to scream “It’s a setup!” because Liam, crouched for cover behind some crates, only promises not to leave.

“Hang in there, Tommy!”

He is bleeding through the vest, staining the white snow.

“Hang in there, Tommy, I'm right here with you.”

Then there is another shot and Liam curses quietly.

“T-Tommy” He whimpers when the bullet enters him.  It’s a gut wound, pink ropes of intestine threatening to spill out.  It reminds Thomas of his childhood dog being hit by a car when he was six, that image still so vivid of Sparky with his insides turned outside crawling toward the curb.  

‘We’re really gonna die together, huh?” Liam’s voice is thread thin but carries no regret.  

“Yeah,” Thomas pulls him in close, and leaves a red trail in the snow. “Together.  We’re gonna die together.”  He feels Liam slip away in his arm, and the spot where the bullet hit his vest is swelling like a pregnant cat’s tits.  In that cold snow, the FBI gave Liam the peace of dying in the arms of the only person he ever cared about, certainly the only person who might have cared back a little bit.  The color drains from his face and the ghastly white seeps past his receding hairline.  Frost forms on his still, pouting lips and Thomas kisses the little frozen crystals away.  Snowflakes weigh on his eyelashes as his eyes half-close and he is gone.

Thomas, now a free man, is unprepared for the aftermath of his Judas kiss.  He dreams of Liam almost every night.  He dreams of the scrappy boys they were, living gas station to gas station and measuring the hours in bumps of powder.  He sleeps with his gun in bed next to him, loaded, like he might have to shoot through Liam’s ghost.  Some nights he wakes up with his mattress soaked in piss.  Some nights he wakes up on his feet, gun drawn.  Some nights he screams curses unconscious until Maggie demands he moves to the couch.  He cannot close his eyes without seeing Liam in those final moments, the maniac docile and dreamy with blood loss and as pale as his own ghost.  

He dreams of better days, of liquor stores and gunshots and joints that don’t ache with every movement.  In bed with Maggie, feeling her curves, he can only thing of how Liam’s body had no give to it al all, no softness, all sharp edges and protruding bones and he finds himself repulsed by her.  She asks him one night when he cannot make love to her, accusing, “Are you gay or something?”  

Gay meant happy.  No, he wasn’t gay, Liam wasn’t the only one to die that night and he was in mourning for the self that he killed to be with her.  So he turns back to the bottle, where in his reflection in the surface of the liquor he can see Liam standing behind him, a wife and two kids and a white fence, his American dream.