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It’s not like he—
Look, the fact that Eddie hasn’t slept since getting back to Boston isn’t a big deal. That’s just, whatchamacallit, jet lag. It’s three servings of Ma’s pot roast and four bottles of soda burning a hole in his gut. It’s the fact that he’s too awesome to need sleep.
The big deal is that he can’t find his Stoats jersey.
Any other shirt, fine, big whoop. But Number 8 of the St. Sebastian’s Stoats is a one-of-a-kind collector’s item. He’s had it since he was sixteen, and he hit twenty-three home runs in it before getting kicked off the team for being better than everyone else at baseball and also for what he did to the Sacred Heart mascot. Sure, the jersey’s a little ratty these days. The iron-on stoat’s worn off, and the shoulders are too tight on him, but the thing’s all soft from a million washings and it’s good for sleeping in.
“Crap,” Eddie mutters, rubbing at his tired eyes and then glaring at the heap of clothes dumped out from his duffel bag onto the bottom bunk.
He got into town this morning, which feels like it was a month ago. He took one of those red-eye flights out of Albuquerque because Mick was his ride to the airport and you can only fly to Australia in the middle of the night. It was still dark when he landed at Logan, still dark when he left the cab and fished out his old house key, but too close to morning to go to bed. He didn’t want to wake Ma, so he just let himself in the back door and lay on the couch in the living room, listening to the radio on low until the sky started to get lighter and Ma came downstairs and made him pancakes.
“Crap, crap, crap.”
He digs through the pile again, tossing t-shirts and unmatched socks onto the floor. No dice. The jersey’s definitely back in New Mexico. Which—okay, fine. He’ll be back in a week, and it’s not like it’s his freaking security blanket or anything. The problem is he can’t remember if he left it in his room, in which case it’ll probably be okay. Or if he left it in the laundry, in which case there’s a good chance Soldier’s going to find it and set it on fire for being non-regulation civilian gear.
“Crap.”
He sweeps the rest of the heap onto the floor and flings himself onto the mattress. The bed rocks and wheezes under his weight. He draws back one leg and kicks the underside of the top bunk out of habit, even though there’s no one up there.
Whatever. He should put on just about any other t-shirt and get some sleep. It’s past midnight, and the house is quiet except for Ma softly playing records in her room. When she goes to bed, it’s going to be even quieter.
His hand slides into his pocket without him thinking about it. Mick’s phone number is in there, written on a scrap of paper that Eddie unrolled and folded up and squished down and unrolled a hundred times on the plane. He takes it out and unrolls it again, looking at the long line of digits.
He really wants to call him, but it’s not like he’s—
Okay. If you look at it one way, it makes more sense to call Miss Pauling in this situation. She doesn’t get furlough, so she’s already in position to go rescue his jersey from the laundry room.
But.
It’s just.
See, he doesn’t want her to go getting the wrong idea. It would be a real jerk move to let her get her hopes up, what with him calling all the way from Boston. Besides, it’s late here and it’s almost as late in Teufort, but Australia’s upside down, so it’s got to be the middle of the day there, right?
There’s a whole world of difference between calling someone in the middle of the night and calling them in the afternoon. It’s not his fault Mick lives in a backwards country and always keeps track of laundry day.
The bed wheezes again as Eddie gets up. He switches off his lamp and puts his ear to the door. The sound of Peggy Lee asking her man why he won’t do right provides the necessary cover as he sneaks out into the hallway. Everything’s dark except the dim strip under the edge of Ma’s door, and so empty that even the whisper of his socks sliding over the floor seems to echo as he makes his way to the landing.
There isn’t a stair in the house that doesn’t creak if you hit it the wrong way, so he parks his butt on the railing and slides down into the dark living room. He tiptoes along the invisible line of a floor joist into the kitchen like he’s walking a plank across a canyon. He sidesteps the weak spot in the linoleum and reaches the phone without so much as a squeak.
The stupid international number takes forever to dial on the rotary, and even then it doesn’t work. He has to hang up, call the operator, and mumble the number into the receiver.
“Sir, you’re going to have to speak up—”
There’s a long wait to connect the call. He gets stuck on hold. His stomach feels worse, and his mouth's all dry. The line beeps every six seconds on the dot.
beep
Eddie leans against the wall and picks up a pen from the counter.
beep
He starts scribbling on the message pad, getting the ink going.
beep
He draws the hilt of a knife.
beep
He adds a big bent blade and traces over it a bunch of times.
beep
Maybe no one’s going to pick up. Maybe it’s the wrong number. Maybe Mick didn’t even go to Australia. It’s not like Eddie saw him get on the plane. Maybe he took off. Maybe he said screw it and just got in the camper and drove to Mexico, or traded in his tickets and went to Fiji. Maybe he’s in the wind, gone, not coming back.
beep
The pen pushes into the paper hard enough that he feels the tip pop through to the next page.
brrr-ring!
He nearly jumps. There’s only one ring, barely one and half before someone picks up.
“Hello?”
The voice is all groggy and sleep-raspy, but right away he knows it’s Mick. He forgets what he was going to say.
“Hello?” Mick says again, his voice sharpening.
Eddie clears his throat. “Hey. It’s me. Uh, Scout.”
There’s a pause. “Scoutie. You all right?”
“Yeah. What? Why? I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’re still up,” Mick points out.
There’s a muffled sound that makes Eddie think of that thing Mick does when he’s just waking up, dragging his hand over his face and looking at his watch.
And it’s not like he’s—
Listen. You just get to know these things when you live neck and neck with eight other guys. Especially eight other guys who kind of look like eight other other guys who want to kill you. It’s a survival thing, learning pretty quick what they sound like, how they move. It’s not a Mick thing. It’s not a banging Mick thing. It’s not a spending every night in the camper with Mick for three months straight thing.
“Yeah well, you’re still sleeping,” Eddie snaps back. Zing.
He immediately regrets it when he hears a thump from upstairs, like someone getting out of bed. He lowers his voice. “Crap. Hold on a sec.”
Mick shuts up, and Eddie holds still. For a second he thinks he hears a man’s voice, but that’s stupid. It’s got to be the record. He waits, but the door doesn’t open. Ma must have gone back to bed.
He stretches the phone cord into the mud room anyhow and carefully wedges the door shut behind him. There’s no insulation, and the back door lets in the draft something wicked. The room’s cold and smells like thirty years' worth of dirty sneakers, but he knows from experience that you can hardly hear anything from in here upstairs.
“I thought it was supposed to be tomorrow down there,” Eddie says, and it comes out more accusing than he means it to, like Mick might have arranged for it to be the middle of the night in Australia just to make him feel bad for calling.
“It is. I just got in. Bloody flight was twenty-three hours.”
“Oh.” He maybe should have thought of that. “Right.”
His mouth hangs open on that last word, stretching wider in a sudden yawn.
“Long day, mate?” Mick asks.
Eddie yawns a second time, and then sits down, cramming himself into the narrow space between the washing machine and the wall because it's warmer.
“I guess. I mean, it’s a pretty big deal, me being back. I had to go around and see all my buddies. Everyone was lining up to buy me drinks. I’m kind of a local hero, you know?”
Except that he hadn’t really found anyone he knew at his old hangouts. They all either got drafted or arrested, or they were busy working. A couple even went to college. The only familiar face that turned up was Frank McCallister, who was a rat fink in high school and had the nerve to pitch a fit over Eddie offering to get him a beer. Accused him of thinking he was some kind of big shot, flashing cash around the neighborhood. Like it was his fault he was making money.
“Your mum must be glad to see you.”
Eddie nods without thinking and accidentally hits the phone on the side of the washing machine. He winces at the clang.
“Crap. Sorry. But yeah. She’s gonna throw a party, just as soon as my stupid brothers grow a pair.” He rolls his eyes. “Gotta clear everything with the wives now. I mean, I walk down the street here, I got dozens of girls throwing themselves at me, but I ain’t looking for a ball and chain, you know? You get that ring on your finger, all of a sudden you can’t even come home and see your own brother 'cause you gotta clean the gutters or something...”
There’s times when he thinks a guy’s better off just having a pal like Mick.
But it’s not like—
See, he didn’t used to know you could fool around with a guy without being a fruit. Mick was in the army, though, and he clued him into what guys do when there’s only one girl around who’s always busy and one old lady who just screams at you over the radio.
And it’s been good.
Kind of really good.
Good enough that he wishes Mick was here. It would be cool to show him around the neighborhood, buy him a beer, maybe take him to the diner. They could have driven up to Boston together, and they could have gone and parked the camper by the river somewhere and banged all night. Maybe then he would be sleeping right now.
“Just you and your mum?”
“Yeah.” He pauses. “It’s fine. Good. Lots of room. Don’t gotta line up for the bathroom anymore.”
“Ed,” Mick says.
Eddie tucks the phone against his shoulder and rests his head against the cold steel. It feels nice against his temple.
“It’s fine,” he says again. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s weird. Real quiet.”
He could probably count on his fingers the number of times he’d been the only kid in the house. It was never for more than a couple of hours at a time, usually when he was home sick from school or grounded while his brothers were out playing. It was never overnight.
But now it’s just Ma. Just him.
Pete and Mike and Jack went and got married. They’ve got kids now, and Jack’s on the wrong side of the bridge and Mike’s all the way on the wrong side of the city limits. They’re acting like it’s some big chore to come out here to see him, like Eddie didn’t come all the way from freaking New Mexico.
Like Pat and Denny wouldn’t come back from Vietnam in a heartbeat if they were still alive.
His fists clench up tight when he thinks about Bobby, up in Canada like a coward. Marty, who made it back from the jungle only to go and decide he’d rather live on the street in New York like some kind of crazy person and break Ma’s heart instead of coming home.
So yeah. It’s weird. Real quiet. There aren’t enough shoes in the mud room. Not enough coats. There’s no one on the top bunk. There’s no one in the next room. There’s no one snoring or jerking off or getting up in the middle of the night to take a leak.
Mick doesn’t say anything, and neither does Eddie. He opens his mouth a couple of times, figuring he should ask how Mick’s folks are doing, but his throat’s all itchy on account of the air being cold, and so he doesn’t. It’s funny, but the sound of Mick’s breathing makes him feel a little better. It’s slow and soft, like when he’s up on a perch somewhere with his rifle, or sitting outside the camper in his lawn chair with his arms crossed and his hat tipped down to shade his eyes.
In and out.
In and out.
Eddie listens to the sound of it for a long time. Like, a really long time, to the point where seconds are threatening to become a minute. He freezes, trying to remember how words work. Because if he leaves enough space, Mick's going to say that it was nice of Eddie to call but that he should probably get back to his nap.
“Uh...” He thinks fast. “So...you got any...kangaroos there?”
“Saw a few reds on the drive in. Two boomers and four flyers. Nearly knocked one down when he tried to race the truck.”
Eddie yawns again, managing to do it silently this time. He figures the connection’s not good enough for Mick to hear his jaw cracking. “What’s the speed on one of those things?”
“Reckon forty-five miles an hour at a sprint. Twenty-five long distance.”
“Psh,” Eddie scoffs, “I can run faster than that.”
“Any day,” Mick agrees, like it’s a fact in the Official Guide to Australian Animals That Can Run Fast.
“What other freaky things you got there?”
The line crackles with static, and then he hears a vague shifting sound, like Mick settling in and getting comfortable. “Looking at a thorny devil on the windowsill right now. Ha. Heard me, didn’t you, you spiny little bugger...”
Eddie's eyelids start getting heavy. He fights to keep them open for a while, but eventually they settle shut as he listens to Mick talk about camouflage and drinking dew, and then about crocodiles, and then about maybe “going walkabout” to look at dingoes. He’s thinking about asking whether those are the spotted ones that laugh like Woody Woodpecker...
But his whole head feels heavy now.
And everything sounds far away.
When he opens his eyes again, his neck’s bent at a funny angle and there’s a dark spot of drool on his shirt. The phone is still wedged between his ear and shoulder, and he barely manages not to drop it as he straightens up. He looks around the mud room. Something’s weird.
Mick is still breathing softly in his ear.
“Uh.” His voice comes out scratchy with sleep, and he has to peel his tongue off the roof of his mouth. “Did I, uh...?”
“You were out for a while.”
His face goes hot. Jeeze. Between that and the drool, they’ve got to be talking minutes, not seconds. He thinks about denying it and blaming any snoring Mick might have heard on static, but the thing that struck him as weird when he first woke up pokes at his brain again. Look around, dumbass. It was pitch-black and streetlight-yellow in the mud room when he closed his eyes. Now it’s that kind of gray that happens before the sun comes up.
“Hold on,” he says, rubbing crud from his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Mine or yours?”
“Mine, wise guy.”
“Three minutes to four.”
The whatchmacallits eventually make it through the fog in his head. Ramifi-something. You know. The pointy end of a thing that happened. Like the picture in his head of Mick staying on the line for three hours instead of hanging up on him like a normal person.
And sure, the guy’s used to sitting in one place for a long time, but—
It’s not like—
Okay, yeah. Never mind. Eddie’s officially having some feelings here.
He can barely hear his own voice when he says: “Oh.”
“Would’ve woken you up, but I reckoned you needed the sleep. Feel better?”
He does, actually. The soda’s stopped fizzing in his belly, and the pot roast isn’t sitting like a lump. The pressure in his eyeballs has ratcheted down a notch, and besides the crick in his neck, his back isn’t all stiff any more. He’s still tired, but it’s the good kind. The kind that makes him feel like he just needs to go upstairs and crawl under the covers and close his eyes again.
“Yeah,” he says. “I—hey, you know. Thanks. I could probably use a couple more hours of shut-eye. And you should too. Or have dinner, or—hell if I know what time it is there.”
“Dinner’s about right.” Mick sounds like he’s smiling a little.
Eddie stands on stiff legs. The sudden upward motion makes a thought pop into his head. “Hey, wait. I was gonna ask you, was it laundry day when we left?”
“Yeah,” Mick said. “Special one on account of us clearing out. Don’t you remember the memo Miss Pauling sent around?”
“Crap,” Eddie groans. “My jersey.”
Mick pauses. “That Stoats t-shirt?”
“Yeah.” Eddie rubs his eyes again, then runs a hand to his hair. “I swear to God, I am gonna feed Soldier to his raccoons if he—”
“It’s in the camper.”
“—torches my--wait. It is?”
“Went flying off the bunk last time we were, ah, in back. It ended up under the table again.”
“Oh,” Eddie says. His lower lip does something funny that he blames on using a washing machine for a pillow. “Huh. Well, good.”
“Is that what you were calling about at one o’clock in the morning?”
“It’s my favourite shirt. I just...you know. Wanted to make sure it was safe.”
The cord is all stretched to hell as Eddie brings the phone back into the warmth of the kitchen. He squints. There’s a glass sitting on the table that wasn’t there before. He picks it up, the piece of paper stuck underneath it coming along for the ride. He takes a sip to see if it’s something he should be drinking. Whatever it is burns his tongue. Scotch, maybe, or whisky, or some other kind of brown booze that he didn’t think Ma would keep in the house.
He peels the piece of paper off and looks at it. Under the kukri he drew, someone’s written in skinny, fancy-pants writing: Give your mother money for your ludicrous telephone bill, s-v-p.
“You heading to bed?” Mick asks in his ear.
“Yeah.” Eddie sticks the note in his pocket along with Mick’s number. “Just as soon as I knock all of Spy’s teeth out.”
“Fair play,” Mick says. “Call me later, if you want. I’ll be around.”