3. Fire
It wasn't warm. There weren't cool droplets of dying ice dripping from the framework. There weren't any rooms to search, no bodies to burn. There weren't any lanterns to bathe the wooden floors and piles of linen in their cordial glow. Where once there was a fireplace, setting the room alight, there was now a workbench wedged into the wall. Mounds of parchment formed lofty dunes upon the desktop. A faceless monitor lingered in the corner - a derelict piece of yesterday's lifetime.
Moonlight flooded in between two planks nailed to the toll booth window. Cheap boxsprings squealed and the mattress depressed a little in the center. A nasally coo seasoned the air as AJ settled against that evening's bed.
Kenny watched the boy's face disappear beneath the bedsheets, smiling. He reached across the mattress and tucked the fabric in snug about the baby's form. He remembered the framework of a joke he'd heard once - something about a baby and a toll house, taxes on breathing; stuff that might have seemed funnier before. Maybe yesterday. Maybe further. He chuckled demurely under his breath, and stroked a couple of hairs from AJ's face.
Satisfied by his gentle dozing, the man returned his focus to the girl seated in front of him.
Clementine's jacket comprised the light blue heap laying at her feet. Her fingertips pressed against the lip of the mattress beneath her and she pinched a shoulder to her ear. Her lips pursed and she wrinkled her brow, glancing surreptitiously behind her as Kenny unwrapped a fresh pair of medical pads.
"Is it...is it gonna hurt?" she tried to stifle the whine in her voice.
The man's reserved laughter echoed through the forest of metal coils buried inside the mattress. "You want the honest answer or the one that sounds nicest?"
"Nice would be nice." she replied a little too ambitiously.
"It ain't gonna hurt you no more than takin' the bullet in the first place."
The girl frowned. "It's gonna hurt."
"I'm sorry, darlin'."
"Me too."
He set aside the twin cotton pads and raised his hands to her shoulder. He paused a moment, tutting his lip and liberating a hesitant sigh.
"Clem, could you push your collar down? I gotta take these bandages off 'fore I can clean n' dress it new."
She obliged.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome," she replied emptily and out of habit.
Her manners hadn't died with all the world. Not yet.
Kenny grinned thoughtfully as he peeled away at the adhesive pursed against her skin. He soured his eye upon the cotton pad marring her shoulder. It was cumbersome and bloody, encrusted with maroon flecks on the outermost layer. Uneven splotches that once bathed her in red speckled her upper arm and her neck, her back and her hands.
He loathed those old bloodstreaks as much as there were stars in the darkness. For every moment they stained her, he hated even harder. For every ache she ached, he felt a fire in his belly. For every tear she'd hid, for the pint and a half she'd lost, and for the smiles stolen, he hated. He couldn't kill what had happened to her. He knew, and so did she. But she should have been clean. He owed her that much and a trillion kindnesses more.
He tugged gently at a corner of the bandage and tensed as Clementine made a sharp noise of discomfort.
"Sorry," he proffered immediately, "I'm sorry."
Tragedy dripped from the tone of his voice. Clementine curled her fingers against her shoulder and tilted her head a little toward him.
"It's okay."
The girl pitched her shoulders high as he dabbed at the wound with a wet cloth. She raked her teeth against one another and sunk into her chest. A stifled squeak broke through the dam in her throat and filled the cramped space around her. One of her hands imbedded into the mattress.
Kenny exhaled a guilty breath. "...I ain't try'na make this about me or nothin', Clem, but you're makin' me feel like an asshole here, a little bit."
She spoke through tightened teeth. "But it stings."
"I know it does. I'm sorry. I hate to see you hurtin' like this."
They hinged on the sound of a pensive pause. He was searching for the words. She knew.
"You know you don't deserve this, right?" He asked finally, "Clementine, none of this is your fault. If I had any idea, I... Clem, I would give anything to go back and be the one to find them that night. Anything."
"I know," she rasped.
"Ya know that."
"I know," she said again.
They gutted a few minutes with weighted silence.
"Kenny?"
He grunted in acknowledgment as he tore the tape between his teeth.
"Do you remember any stories about Lee?"
The fibers rent asunder and the roll fell into his lap. The man stuck the tape onto the calloused tip of his thumb and pressed the swatch of cotton gingerly against the waiting bullet hole. He smoothed the tape against her back and removed another piece.
"Sure I do," he replied in an almost cordial tone of voice, with the ghost of something sorrowful dotting the i's, slurring his s's. "There was the time he fixed that swing for ya at the dairy. Y'know, when he pushed you real high and told you not to worry and Duck was whinin' for another turn the whole time? The piece a' shit was broken when Lee found it. He sawed some lumber and hoisted the thing up himself when he saw it might let you have a little fun. I don't think he ever told you, but he built that swing just for you kids. That was the same day you tasted that salt lick - Lord knows why. You remember?"
Clementine smiled meekly. "Yeah, I remember. But I meant like a story I don't know."
Kenny pondered a moment as he drew his fingers round to the point of entry. The crisp sound of peeling tape lit up the girl's spine. He winced along with her as her shoulders hiked and she turned her head away.
"Find a point on the wall over there an' just focus on it, okay, darlin'? Ain't no need for you to be seein' this," he advised in a voice like a father from a Christmas special.
His brows fell forlornly as he unveiled the plane of purple, mangled skin. Something complex lurched in his chest. He set to work with a new medicated pad.
The silence imbibed them.
"...You remember how Lee liked to tell ya those stories whenever we had time to kill?"
The toll house ignited with a wholehearted gasp. She had found her grin once more.
"Yes!" The girl exclaimed. "American History Minute! I forgot all about that."
Kenny chuckled and shushed the little body before him. "AJ's sleepin', Clem."
Clementine gazed intently into nothingness, her eyes half-hooded with nostalgia. "I miss those a lot."
"Y'know how he used to tell them to ya before bed, right? He'd talk ya to sleep all night, it seemed like. Walls were so thin at that damn Motor Inn, I'd be up half the night just hearin' the guy secondhand."
"Yeah, those were the only things sometimes that'd help me sleep. I never heard a whole one, before."
"That's 'cause you always fell asleep in the first three minutes. The rest was probably just for him."
Clementine grinned, enraptured by her little memory. "Lee loved history."
Kenny scoffed. "And when Omid joined the group..."
"Teddy and Taft!" The girl effervesced, "American History Minutes were the best when they did it together. Remember that time you were Robert E. Lee, Kenny?"
"When they got to that Civil War bullshit? It went on for weeks, how could I forget?"
Clementine laughed.
"They tried to get me to play Hitler, too. I'unno why I always had to be the racist asshole."
The hardened flesh of his fingers smoothed across the back of his neck. He stroked lightly at the locks of greasy dark hair sprawled across his coat collar, then at the bristles at the seat of his hairline, the strong edge of his jaw. His one exposed eye reeled downcast as he submerged himself in vivid memory. He felt sprier and a little more whole, back when he was somebody's father.
"Then again, might'a been 'cause of the mustache," he muttered gently, the statement concluding with a snicker.
Clementine tugged the collar of her shirt back into place and glanced up at him, inspecting his expression transparently.
"Why don't you get some slee-"
"Now I'll change yours."
Their voices collided and at last his eye found hers. The colors of sorrow and pride bled together behind his pupils and he felt himself smile a little smile. It wasn't big or funny. Wasn't powerful or particularly magnetic. Wasn't even all that nice. But the gentle bow of his mouth, obscured by the thickness of the hair on his upper lip, conveyed all the sincerity of a fire without a forest.
Her little hand brushed his as he traded her the medical equipment. She asked him quietly to lower his head. She couldn't reach.
Kindling.
A/N: Another interesting fact about A Good Man is that each chapters' title is written to fit the phrase "A good man's (blank)", therefore this one would be "A good man's fire," the last would be "a good man's honesty," etc. but that's enough out of me.
this chapter is really rather special to me, although I can't entirely place why. I hope you enjoy it.
Happy holidays!