Spirit of the Code

by trill_gutterbug

Summary:

Wayne breaks his leg in February. It's a whole To Do.

Notes:

Disclaimer: I’m from the farthest possible western edge of British Columbia, not back east, so most of the vernacular I’ve thrown into this fic is regionally inaccurate. Which is, ironically, about as canonical as you can get!

Wayne breaks his leg in February. It's a whole To Do.

~*~

He moves into the living room, set up between the tv and the window on a little rattletrap cot out of the attic. Doc says eight weeks for sure and more if he fucks with it. Wayne's vicious as a wolverine about it, bellowing at Katy when she’s only trying to do right and bring him dinner, cursin at the dogs when they get under his crutch, hollerin when Squirrelly Dan leaves the front door open a quarter minute too long and the cold gets in.

He shouts, from the cot where he’s propped up with his casted leg on a heap of pillows and his mostly empty dinner tray on his lap, “I ain't payin no arm and a goddamn leg for the goddamn firewood them goddamn pisstanks at the goddamn mill charge for you to be standin jawin in the goddamn fuckin doorway without the sense the fuckin lord gave a fuckin goose, Dan!” and Dan says, “Sure’m sorry, Wayne,” and shuts the door after himself real gentle with a smile between his beard and his mustache like Wayne's his little niece who's mad her stuffed pony came out the wash the wrong colour.

Darry, crumpled into the corner of the couch with a knee up on the arm, a beer wedged into the crook of his hip and thigh, says, “You're a real treat today, aren'tcha bud.”

Wayne gives him a look so sour with being exhausted and sore and pissed off that Darry tastes it like a lemon in the centre of his mouth. He takes it all back with a quick never-you-mind wave and hops up to fetch Wayne another chilly one. On the way, he says, “Nother pill?”

Wayne gives him a mouth like an upside down parenthese. “Please and thank.”

The pills are in Katy's purse where she'd jammed them after they left the pharmacy in the city. Darry stands looking at it lyin on the table like an alligator with its yellow denim mouth open.

Wayne shouts at him from all four feet distant, “Ain't gonna melt your hand off if you touch some ladies' things!”

Darry glares over his shoulder. “I'm not fuckin scared of ladies' things , I'm trying to be fuckin polite about reachin around in other people's possessions, Wayne. ”

“Oh,” says Wayne, normal volume.

“Guess she won't mind none.” He puts his hand in.

The front door flies open and smacks into the wall and the dog barks loud like she scared herself. Katy cranes past Dan’s wide-eyed startled face with a dart hanging outta it and says, “Whatcha think you're about there, Darry?”

Darry yanks back, heart kicking up his throat like a deer running out in front of the truck at 3am when he’s doing a buck twenty when he should be doing ninety. “Lookin for Wayne's pills.”

“Wrong pocket,” Katy says. “Front one.”

Darry reaches.

“Wrong front, fucknugget.”

He switches directions.

“There y’are.”

He holds up the bottle and shakes it to show he's being truthful. She smiles like her lips are speed-sewed to her teeth and swings the door shut slow. Dan waves before it closes.

“Sheesh,” Darry says. He reads the label. “Says don’t take with alcohol.”

Wayne snaps his fingers. “Give em here.”

Darry does. Wayne washes down two with his beer, clapping them into his mouth with a sharp flat palm. He puts the pill bottle on the windowsill and makes a face like there’s sand under his tongue. “Nasty fuckers.”

“Do you right up.” Darry sits back down. He swings his beer between his first two fingers, stirring it up to get a little head on it like he likes when it’s dark and chewy and bitter. “Gotta pee?”

Wayne swings his head around from the pill bottle. “What’s it t’ya.”

“Bring you a bucket.” Darry grins. “Bring you a funnel.”

“Get fucked,” Wayne growls. He shoves his dinner tray off his lap.

~*~

Darry comes downstairs yawning and scrubbing his eye with the heel of his palm in the morning. Wayne's already at the kitchen counter, folded up against his crutches and the back of a chair, the crutches slipped between the chair legs and the chair unbalanced. He's listing with one elbow on the counter, rigid as a corpse in a snowbank, bare foot and casted foot both splayed out like a lamb slippin on a froze-over lake.

“Stuck, bud?” says Darry, edging in to reach the kettle off the stove.

“No…” Wayne lies.

“Alright.” Darry gets the kettle full and back on the burner and tries to figure how to turn it on without pushing Wayne over backwards on account of how his bum’s riding the stove rail. “Scooch,” he says.

Wayne squints. “I might be stuck.”

“Stunned cunt.” Darry shakes his head so Wayne won't see the thousand thread count edge of his smile. He gets his hands under Wayne's armpits to shuffle him aright. He kicks the chair over and loses a crutch in the kerfuffle, but he gets Wayne sat down and the kettle on. When he turns around, Wayne's got his elbow on the table and his jaw in his hand and a tragic expression on his face.

“What,” says Darry.

“Really puts a man in mind,” Wayne says, “of the inherent fragility of his worth, succumbing to the cruel lash of natural disaster in this humiliating goddamn manner. One awkward fuckin misstep and here I am, a redundant failure of a human being, rendered a burden and a misery. Useless as a six-dicked sea anemone. As ejection seats on a helicopter. As a crocheted rubber. As a concrete parachute. As a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. A grim and pitiless reminder of the senselessness of life and happiness, of the futility of striving for success or purpose.”

He glowers down at the cast. “Assuming, of course, that one subscribes to the social phenomenon, the ongoing and pervasive zeitgeist, if you will, of Protestantism’s cultural influence on the ethics of labour and the arbitrary economic value assigned to the production of the individual by the capitalist hegemony, which I do find myself at odds with as a matter of course, and increasingly so since this most recent and egregious misfortune. Just goes to show, don’t it, that unbiased social commentary is by nature an impossible feat. No one man has all the answers, do he?”

“Nope,” Darry says.

The kettle whistles.

~*~

Darry with his coverall arms knotted around his waist, sweating through his white henley. Tasting his own sweat and feeling it sting in his eyes, his boots slippin in the mud.

“Naw, you’re way off to the left!” Wayne bellows from his lawnchair. “Turn round and smack it t’other way, it’ll bust right through!”

Darry ignores him and swings the maul again. It bounces off the snarl of roots, the shock of it jittering up his arms, numbing his elbows.

“Ain’t even dentin it!” Wayne shouts.

“I’m fuckin dentin it!” Darry shouts back. The roots are bleeding red and clear, yellow fibre oozing, pink bark flaking. Just not denting it much.

“It’s been sixty nine goddamn years, Darry! Put your fuckin back into it!”

Darry straightens. He throws the maul into the pit. “Why don’t you come over here and do it yourself?” He has to shade his eyes to see Wayne, the sun bright behind him, which is a pissoff. He wants to glare proper.

“I’m an invalid, Daryl. A disabled man.” Pissy enunciation, leaning forward, lips pinched. “I’m supervising, so do as I say. You’d struggle to pour water out of a boot with the instructions stamped on the goddamn heel.”

“Aw, alright,” Darry mutters. He scrabbles up the bank of the pit, dirt on his palms, mud on his knees. “You want supervisin, I’ll fuckin give it to you.”

Wayne squints at him, suspicious, already leaning back. “Now just what do you think--”

Darry grabs the arm of his lawnchair and yanks. Wayne bails onto his ass, casted leg straight up in the air like a broken chicken wing. He takes a swing at Darry on the way down, but Darry ducks out of the way, grinning, grinning like a shiteater.

“Supervise that, nimrod.”

~*~

Hurts to both emotions and bodies soothed, they fetch up on the couch to watch some tv after sundown.

Turned out Wayne couldn’t reach Darry lying on the ground, but he could kick Darry in the ankle with his good foot and get them both on a level. And then Darry was screwed. Leg or no leg, Wayne could punch like a mule and still give Darry a purple nurple that needed ice.

“Screamin like a raped ape,” Wayne grumbled on the truckride back to the house, Darry driving with one hand still clamped over his nipple and blinking dirt out of his swelling left eye.

“Go fuck your hat,” Darry grumbled back, shifting savagely into fourth to take the last corner pritner on two wheels.

Wayne scowled out the window, but it was his happy scowl. Without looking, he reached over and touched Darry’s wrist where it was balanced on the gearstick. Without looking, Darry turned his hand over and touched Wayne’s wrist right back. No one saw, because no one was looking, so it was alright.

They switch channels a bunch to find something they can both make fun of ( Ice Truckers ) and drink three beer apiece and go to bed.

~*~

Darry gets up in the night for a pee and finds the bathroom light on, the door ajar, a blue streak leaking out under it. He pushes it open with a knuckle, wincing, eyes stinging from the dark and Wayne’s mostly half-hearted punch earlier.

“Wayne?”

Wayne's swearing cuts off. “Oh, that’s just perfect.” He says this to the wall above the toilet, head knocked back on his shoulders.

“Doin alright?” Darry scratches his belly under his tshirt, looking at how Wayne’s standing there with his casted foot braced against the base of the tub and his other foot against the cupboard. Spread out like a pair of stilts tossed in a corner.

“Get. Out.”

Darry backs out. He waits in the hall for the banging and scuffling and cussing to stop. The door opens and Wayne slaps the light off, crutch braced under his arm.

“Can’t a man get some privacy,” he growls, dark against dark, Darry’s eyes popping with colour from the bulb.

Darry shrugs. “Gotta pee.”

“Well fuckin go outside!” It’s whiny, exhausted, midnight-sore.

Darry grins soft, glad it’s dark. “Alright.” He turns, but then he hears Wayne fumble into the wall and turns right back. “Need a hand?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

He gives a hand. Wayne flinches at it, belly muscles jumping where Darry touches them on accident. They shuffle back to the living room. The moon’s only half bright, cloudy, God’s fingernail hanging over the fields. Darry gets Wayne situated on the cot.

“Need pills?”

Wayne groans.

“I’ll get em.”

Darry finds the pills in the kitchen and brings them back with water. Wayne swallows one without complaining, which don’t say anything good.

Darry crouches in front of him. “You good?”

Wayne says, “No,” but then he nods. “Choked,” he says a second later.

“I bet.” Darry pats his thigh above the cast, the soft ratty edge of Wayne’s PJs where Katy’d hacked them off with the kitchen scissors. “It’ll be off soon enough.” Then he doesn’t take his hand back.

Wayne breathes in real deep once, until it shudders in his throat. “Listen--” he says.

“Nah.” Darry slides his hand away. But he’s lit up all the way through, brighter than the moon outside.

Wayne grabs his wrist. He doesn’t do anything with it. They sit real quiet in the dark, breathing. Darry turns his hand over and runs his thumb up the centre of Wayne’s rough palm, real slow.

“Gotta pee, Wayne,” he whispers.

Wayne lets him go. “Well then go, you fuckin fool,” he says.

Darry goes.

It’s hard to pee with a boner.

~*~

Days later:

Darry wakes up because Katy and Wayne are screaming at each other in the kitchen. Sounds like a gooder. Stuff’s breakin. Stormy’s barkin.

Darry puts on his pants and his plaid before he goes downstairs because he might need to beat a hasty and judicious retreat.

It’s an ugly one, but no worse than he’s ever seen. Katy and Wayne don’t squabble much, but when they do…

“--sit fuckin still for longer than twelve seconds--!”

“--been doin is sittin--!”

“--like your balls are cast in goddamn brass you inflated--!”

“--ain’t even what the--!”

Darry edges around the kitchen and goes out on the front porch. Squirrelly Dan’s there, leaning back in a chair against the side of the house, dart curling smoke out the corner of his mouth. He nods up at Darry.

“Mornin,” he says.

“Mornin,” Darry says.

He sits in the second chair. Dan fishes in his coat pocket and pulls out a crumpled pack. He hands it to Darry and then a blue lighter from his other pocket. Darry says thanks with his eyebrows and lights up. They sit quiet for a while breathing smoke out their nostrils until the hollerin tapers off.

The front door smacks open and bounces on its hinges. Stormy scrambles out around Wayne’s legs and takes off down the stairs, her tail tucked.

“Sorry,” Wayne says after her, face fuming.

“Mornin,” Dan says.

Wayne doesn’t answer. He hobbles to the railing and leans against it. He regards them both, eyebrows pulled down so his eyes are tiny slits. A silence goes by. He opens his mouth. “Women--” he begins.

Darry lifts his hand. “I’ll stop you there, bud.” He plucks the dart out of his mouth and blows smoke. “What say we get outta here.”

Dan perks up. “Wanter go shootsin?”

Darry looks between him and Wayne. He’s gotta be the responsible one here. “You too mad, Wayne?”

Wayne’s mouth turns down. “No.”

He is, but he won’t be by the time they get there.

Darry nods. He pinches out his dart and tucks it in his front pocket. “I’ll get the guns.”

On his way upstairs to the locker, he shouts in the general direction of where Katy might be, cuz he ain’t dumb enough to find her face to face, “Takin your brother for a rip, Kate!”

“Don’t fuckin bring him back!” she shouts.

~*~

They plink beer cans for a while, an old shoe Darry dug out the bed of the truck, the disfigured rubber snowman Dan found in a ditch a few months back and drew a big lopsided dick and balls on for a target. Poor bastard’s johnny’s full of .22 holes and he lost his right nut to the .303 one day when Katy had a chip on her shoulder, but he still stands up and does his duty.

Wayne shoots from his dirty lawnchair with his bad leg stretched out and his good one bent up so he can steady the barrel on his knee. He’s outshooting both Darry and Dan, which he usually can’t do on a good day with no sun in his eyes or even a breeze in his ear.

“Jeeeesus,” Darry sighs, watching the last can in the row go up in a puff of dirt. “Give a fella a chance.”

Wayne grunts and opens the breach to show Darry it’s empty. “If you’d be so kind.”

Darry hands his .22 off to Dan and does as he’s told, jogging down the field to refill the cans with gravel. When he gets back, Wayne’s sitting up straight and stern. His jaw’s working a little at the corners. His fingers are tapping the arm of the chair.

He’s gonna speech.

Darry sits down.

“It has come to my attention,” begins Wayne like he’s chewing rocks. “That I ain’t been what one might call a real fuckin joy to be around recently.”

A beat. Too late, Dan says, “Aww, um, no...”

“You’re worse’n a bear with a burnt ass,” Darry agrees. “That what Katy was screamin bout?”

Wayne nods once. A man sizing up the gallows. “Surely was.”

“She right?”

Another nod. “Her criticism was customarily succinct.”

“Gonna say you’re sorry?”

Wayne’s head snaps around, face like a gargoyle’s fist. “What for?”

Darry shrugs. He takes his cigarette butt out of his pocket and rolls it back into shape. He balances it between his lips. “Polite thing to do, ain’t it?”

Wayne looks back down the range. “Polite’s for fuckwits,” he mutters.

~*~

He doesn’t apologise. Neither does Katy. They look at each other when Wayne hobbles back through the front door, Darry holding it open for him, and there’s a pause that’s all eyebrows and silent shut-mouth jaw movement, and then Katy nods and Wayne nods and that’s that.

Darry cooks dinner for them all later, lasagne. It’s gnarly.

~*~

Darry goes back to his own place. The spirit moved him, as it were. Drifting, annoyed with Wayne, bitchin at Katy, out of beer. He goes home to his mum’s old trailer and sits on the couch with a faded blue afghan around his shoulders, drinking coffee.

He does that for a couple days. He cleans the gutters and whacks the lawn down to a reasonable height and fixes the toilet that won’t stop running. He jerks off a lot, then he’s too lonely to do even that, cold in his narrow thin bed with the musty smell of unwashed laundry all around.

He goes back to the produce stand.

Wayne’s there, Friday morning, in his lawn chair, having a dart.

“The prodigal returns,” he says, looking into the distance past Darry’s shoulder.

Darry grunts and pulls another chair from behind the stand. “You’re my dad, eh?”

Wayne shifts his eyes sideways. “Do I look like your fuckin father.”

Darry shrugs. He settles into the chair, feet kicked out, hands crossed on his belly. “Wouldn’t know.”

Wayne gives him that one with a tilt of the head.

A moment.

“You look--” Wayne says, just as Darry says, “Have you--”

They both stop.

Wayne looks away. “This is awkward,” he tells the horizon.

Darry sighs.

~*~

Dan shows up and it’s not awkward anymore. It wasn’t awkward to begin with. Wayne’s too sensitive about these things. Gets his words all rattled up and wound around and frayed in his head, starts seeing things ain’t there, too trusting and too suspicious all at once.

Darry slouches in his chair and listens to Dan talk about fishing for eels. Watches the line of Wayne’s shoulders. Tight. Tight as a clenched hand, as grit teeth. Must be sore all the time. Shirt on him like a box made to fit. Neck…

“--ain’t it, Darry,” Dan says.

“Yep,” says Darry. He doesn’t know.

~*~

Wayne isn’t much for going to the bar on his own but even if he were, he can’t drive.

They all three of them and Katy roll into Gail’s on Saturday night. Half price Caesars. Don’t make a difference, it’s just a thing to say. Good excuse. Darry, he gets super sick if he drinks anything but beer and brown liquor. If he sticks to beer and brown liquor he just gets regular sick. And Wayne ain’t drunk anything without a dog on the label since they were seventeen.

Wayne’s peppy tonight, downright blankfaced with cheer. He hands Katy a stack of quarters for the jukebox and tells her to pick her poison. What he actually says is, “Manly moody misery’s making this motherfucker mighty melancholy. Make a marvelous melody materialise?”

Katy takes the quarters. She narrows her eyes.

“Please,” Wayne says.

“Anything I want?”

“Anything you want.”

She goes. Something that sounds like a car crash comes out of the speakers a second later. Wayne sighs.

Gail sidles along the bar, her eyebrows goin a mile a minute. “Hiya champ.” She leans over so they can see down her shirt, except she’s wearing a zipped up jacket. “Been a while.”

Wayne salutes her with his beer bottle. “Gotta get back on the horse sometime.”

Gail licks her lips with her whole tongue. She puts one knee up on the bar. “Even a three legged pony can still be ridden.”

“Ain’t so sure that’s true, Gail,” Dan says, frowning. He’s really thinking about it. “Course, if he had a prosthetic leg--”

~*~

They stagger back to the truck. Katy climbs up in the bed and lies down flat on her back so she can watch the stars while they go.

Darry drives, real careful since he’s half cut. Dan sings the whole way to his house, something off the jukebox, hollerin out the window. Darry sings along sort of, arm out his own window, tapping the door to the off-kilter beat.

Dan gets out in his driveway and salutes them with a tip of his hat. “I’ll’s be seeins ya,” he calls. He trundles away toward the house, listing side to side. Wayne has to reach over and pull the door shut after him, the warning dinger dinging away.

“Ain’t got the sense…” he mutters.

“Right goobered,” Darry agrees. He shifts back into drive and does an eleven point turn to get them out the driveway. Wayne keeps his trap shut but Darry knows his foot’s flexing on the floor in sympathy with the brake. Katy hollers some kind of complaint from the bed. Darry pounds on the window and gives her the finger. He’d know better if he weren’t sauced.

On the road, he hums the song Dan’d been singing. He doesn’t know the words. He turns on the radio. This one he knows. He sings along, real obnoxious, so that Wayne’ll glower at him. He knows Wayne’s as lit as he is, just don’t make as big a fuss about it. He slaps Wayne’s hand away from the volume and pins it on the seat between them.

“You’re the rock in my roll,” Darry warbles, loud, “you’re good for my soul…”

Wayne’s hand clenches under his, hard. It makes Darry jerk the wheel, turning to look. Wayne’s staring straight ahead out the windshield. His face is flat.

“I’m head over boots for you,” Darry says, quieter.

“Pull this goddamn vehicle over right now,” Wayne says.

~*~

Wayne kicks him out on the side of the road and leaves him there. Katy climbs down from the box when Wayne pounds on the window, confused, looking between him and Darry. “What, what the fuck?” she says, but Wayne only drags her into the driver's seat and slams the door.

Darry stands there looking at the brake lights for a long couple seconds until Katy pulls away. She looks out the window back at him, apology and anger on her face, but she keeps driving.

It’s a long goddamn walk home.

~*~

He knows he deserved it. Don’t make it more pleasant.

~*~

“Don’t think I’m speakin to you, Wayne,” he says, when he answers the door two days later.

Wayne regards him grimly. “That’s fair.” His crutches creak against Darry’s shitty half-rotted porch.

Darry looks at him for a long while. It’s cloudy out, threatening rain. Birds on the lawn, pecking for worms. Katy at the end of the driveway in the idling truck, staring down the sky. Wayne is scruffy, unshaved. The smell of him is…

“It was a song on the fuckin radio, you daft cunt,” Darry says at last. “To be perfectly frank, the fact that your knickers got all twisted up about it says a helluva lot more than--”

“It does.”

Darry stops. He hadn’t expected that. “Oh,” he says. “Well.”

Wayne’s jaw works and works. His eyes are nearly shut. “I’m here to extend a formal apology.”

“That right.”

“Just said so, didn’t I.”

Darry adjusts so he’s leaning on the doorframe with his hip. He stuffs his hand in his pocket. “Didn’t quite hear it.”

The breath goes out of Wayne like utter defeat. “I formally apologise,” he says.

“And promise not to do it again?”

“And promise not to do it again.”

Darry sticks out his pinky finger. Wayne gives him an eyeball hairy enough to peel paint. Darry wiggles his finger. Wayne hooks it with his. They pull their hands apart quick.

“Accepted,” says Darry.

~*~

Darry’s forking hay down out of the loft, shirtless. It’s April, it’s not hot out, but he’s working up a lather. He stops to lean on the pitchfork and peer over the edge. Wayne’s shuffling around with one crutch down there, piling up the hay by the wheelbarrow. He’s talking to himself. No, he’s talking to Stormy. Wayne says talking to yourself is a critical personal defect that renders one unfit for human compassion or consideration. Talking to dogs is just polite. Darry can’t hear what he’s saying. Probably nothing important.

“Drive you to town tomorrow?” he calls.

Wayne turns to squint up at him. His eyebrows are pale blonde, the bend to his nose sharp from this angle. “What for.”

Darry laughs. “Get your cast off, dipshit.”

“Oh.” Wayne looks down at himself. “Already?”

Darry wipes his arm down his sweaty face. “Eight weeks. Eight long shitty fucking weeks.”

“C’mon now,” Wayne mutters. He smooths his hand over Stormy’s head where she butts it up against him.

Darry grins. He’s been sleeping up at the house for the past while again. Sometimes he sleeps on the couch by Wayne’s cot when they’ve been up late watching tv. Sometimes Wayne sits on the couch next to him after Katy’s gone to bed. Sometimes Wayne’s hand slips into his when neither of them are looking.

Darry turns around and climbs down out of the loft. “Lunch?” he says. What he means is Chef Boyardee heated up everywhere but the middle in the microwave. Wayne knows that’s what he means. He looks unimpressed.

“Hard pass,” he says. His eyes do this thing, real quick, a back and forth over Darry’s chest, down to his waist, back up. It’s subtle. Darry sees it.

“Wayne,” he says.

“What.”

Darry steps in close to him. “Shut your eyes.”

Wayne stares at him. He’s breathing hard. He shuts his eyes.

Darry shuts his.

It’s alright. No one’s looking.

Notes:

The Spirit of the Code:
Don’t hurt the dirt
Don’t squish the fish
Don’t crush the brush
Don’t leak in the creek