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Pete wants so badly to hate this boy, who looks at him with abandoned adoration, heart on his creased sleeves, looks at him head-on and desperate.
The tenderfoot boy with the polished badge and the weight of the gun at his slim hip, bright blue eyes wanting so bad, so bad to be a hero.
Pete wants to hate him. Pete does hate him. A grinding, nauseating sort of fury, ancient and dyspeptic. Shining-eyed boy, stupid boy, going to get himself killed, it'll be his own fault, won't it?
Not the fault of the man meant to be looking after him, no.
When the Lieutenant tells him he's getting a rookie, when he's already written his resignation, when it's typed and creased and signed, he sucks a breath in his teeth but knows better than to argue. He'll hold his tongue for the lieutenant, he'll hold his tongue for the watch, he'll grit his teeth and get through this by the tick of the watch or the skin of his knuckles.
So the boy looks at him, yes sir, no sir, boy hardly dares to blink, like he's scared.
Good. Let him be scared. There's a whole lot to be scared of, and not enough time to do it in, even if you're lucky. Scared'll keep you alive cause the dead, near so he can tell, have no heed for fear.
The boy is scared of him, wide eyes, damp brow, palms on his uniform pants. Let him be scared, good, go on.
But when Pete looks out the window at the dwindling sky he doesn't want the boy to be scared of him. He's no monster, he's no wolf, he's no Akela howling at the moon.
(oh, he could be. he could've torn the bastard who shot Tom Parker to skins and shreds with his bare hands, he would've taken him in his teeth, gone knuckles-deep in his eye sockets, would've gone to the mad-house over it, let them strip his badge and gun and drag him off to Norwalk and lock him in the rubber room, it wouldn't have mattered because Tommy's blood was never coming off his hands, never coming out of his shirt, and the smell of it like a Cadillac in the desert dusk would've never come off his tongue.
he could be a monster.
for the sake of a boy.)
He's not the one who's gonna hurt this kid, and he doesn't want to be.
But he looks out the window and catches his tongue on his stubborn teeth.
For three weeks he's felt like his soul's been hanging on a closet door waiting for his body to come and pick it back up, but he can't. Every time he touches the bare skin of his heart he jumps. He would've eaten the bastard alive, if only they'd let him, but by the time they did, the hide of his heart was stripped and he was tired, so tired, they were asking him all the routine questions as if it was routine at all and he just sat and the answers rolled out of him in neutral, his soul off in the dust and his body set just behind his voice.
He told them all what he remembered. What he had done and said, to the best of his recollection.
He didn't tell them how it felt, hunched over Tommy Parker's broken body like an animal, cradling him like a carcass, how the scream felt sitting in his chest with his heart banging against it, how he knew he needed to get to the radio but he couldn't leave Tommy, and how foolish that sounded because Tommy was dead, and he knew Tommy was dead, even if there had been a doctor right then and there on the loam and the lawn Tommy was dead, Tommy was dead in the breath it took for the shotgun sound to reach his ears.
They didn't need to know that.
They'd sent him to a department shrink, a small, sallow man behind a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses who asked him a hand of questions, and sat slouched in his chair waiting for Pete to tell him about it.
Pete did not. And the shrink signed a form and sent him back. And Mac and the Lieutenant said no, take a few days.
And three weeks passed and he passed between units and he passed between assignments and put on the uniform each day and took it off again. Jane Lowry, who was very beautiful and he had told her so many times, left messages with his landlord. Mary, the girl at the deli counter, looked at him and then away, at him and then away.
And the Lieutenant gave him this boy to look after. Who stares at him with dumbfounded eyes. Who runs off into the dark and pulls the threads of his soul til it unravels and sprawls itself in dust and blood and the smell of hot metal.
The boy's afraid of him, somehow, when it's the whole rest of the world he oughta be catching his eyes on. And he's tired, God, so tired, and his letter's all written up and dated and signed and carbon-copied and he went over it three times for typos and he'll leave tonight for something else, something clean and new, but he just can't let the stupid boy go on afraid of him.
Pete wants to hate him. But he can't.
Wants to end him, in the park, when he runs off.
But he can't.
"Reed," he says, because Jim that catches, there, on his lips and hangs, but Reed, he can say that, and the boy looks so damn hopeful. His hideless heart catches that hope and drinks it in.
It's not the Lieutenant who changes his mind. It's the hope.
"Reed," he says, later, in the locker room, winding his soul back up to take home, "I'll see you tomorrow."
"Yessir," the boy says, grateful like water, but his eyes soft, like he's already known.