NS: What Doesn't Kill You (S/H)

[sjames_centre]

Thanks to duluthgirl for her beautiful drawing of Hutch and to peg22 for the edit.
It's post-SR, 3000 words, S/H.

What Doesn’t Kill You

“Two weeks away, Starsk. A real vacation. What do you say?”

Hutch rubbed his thumb back and forth against my wrist. He started doing that after I got shot, when my wrist was the one place that didn’t hurt, and he couldn’t stand not being able to touch me at all. Now he did it out of habit.

I caught his thumb between my fingers. Home was the only place I wanted to go. I wondered what three months away did to an apartment. I realized I’d never asked if anyone had cleaned the fridge, thrown out the trash. I had an image of three months of newspapers stacked against my front door like firewood. I wondered if my picture was still on the front page of any of them. The only living thing I owned – an angelfish named Coco – had thoughtfully died a week before I did. Her death was more permanent than mine, though just as dramatic. She’d thrown herself out of the bowl and onto the bedroom carpet. Hutch had called it suicide, but I liked to think of it more like death by misadventure.

Hutch was still talking. “I thought maybe I – we – could rent a house in Carmel when they release you. Not far from the beach. Get some color back into you.”

He sounded like my mother. Lately, everyone sounded like my mother. Let’s just get that bandage changed, David. You need to eat something, David. Take your medicine, David. The result of all this mothering was that I ended up feeling – and sounding – like a ten-year-old.

“There’s nothing wrong with my color. I’m naturally pale.” I crossed my arms. Winced. Uncrossed them when I realized how childish I looked. Guess I sounded pretty childish too.

Hutch ran his hand through his hair, then turned to the window and stared outside. He did that every time he wanted to snipe at me but wouldn’t. Apparently getting shot gave me a free pass to say anything I wanted. Who knew that getting yelled at by Hutch would turn out to be one of the things I missed most? There were a lot of other things I missed, like driving and eating pizza and fucking Hutch.

Fucking Hutch.

I threw a paper cup at him. Or at least I tried to –it made it halfway across the room before landing on a square of faded gray linoleum. “I guess we could go somewhere when I get out of here. . . ”

He turned and smiled at me like a kid who’d just found a dollar stuck to the bottom of his sneaker. “That’s great. Doc says we’ll be good to go by the end of the week. I’ll call and confirm with the rental place.”

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. “No stairs?”

He held up two fingers, still smiling. “Small ones. Up to the porch.”

“Beds?”

He grinned. “Bed. But it’s huge.”

“TV?” I’d developed an embarrassing addiction to General Hospital.

“Color.”

“Closest hospital?”

“Five miles. Doctor Jennings gave me the name of a friend of his who practices out of Pacific Grove – he knows we’re coming and said we could call his service if there were any problems.”

It was my turn to smile. “You have this all figured out, don’t you?”

“Yep. You deserve this, Starsk.”

You deserve it, I wanted to tell him. I’m just going along for the ride.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

He leaned over and kissed me. Harder and longer than he had in months. It left me breathless and more than a little hard. Guess maybe I wasn’t so breakable after all.

I was pretty cocky for a guy who couldn’t pick his own nose without crying.

We planned to leave the hospital that Friday morning. “Eleven sharp,” Hutch had promised. I’d said all my good-byes the night before, so there was nothing to do but wait for my ride. I’d thought about making a fuss and insisting on walking out the front door on my own three feet (two legs and a cane), but decided the wheelchair ride would be a lot less embarrassing than falling on my face.

I sat in the wheelchair in my room and stared at the clock above the doorway. Five past eleven. Hutch was late. He was never late anymore. Up in ICU, if the doctors said he could come see me at noon, I’d hear him pacing outside my door fifteen minutes before. If he said he’d be back at eight after his shift was over, he’d be there at eight sharp, a little winded from taking the stairs up to the fourth floor. I never said anything to him about it, but I think punctuality was his way of putting some order back into his life. I’d seen something like it after Forest – when we had to drive home the same way every night from the station, no matter how much traffic there was. The first night he let me turn left instead of right on La Cienega I knew we’d be okay. The guy has what my Aunt Rose likes to call quirks.

Eleven fifteen. The clock and I were old friends. I’d been in this room almost two months now. I’d counted the floor tiles, the cracks in the ceiling and the leaves on the tree outside the window. Mostly, though, I stared at the clock. First few weeks I counted down the minutes to my next pain meds. Later, I counted down until visiting hours were over and I could stop acting like everything was fine and the future was rosy. Hutch was the biggest liar of all. But I forgave him every lie, because he needed to hear them as much as I did.

The scars aren’t that bad, Starsk. Really.

I just got off the phone with the DA. The case is looking solid.

I’m fine, Starsk. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix.

I learned to nod and smile and keep the scream locked inside. Only thing neither one of us pretended was that I’d be back on the job anytime soon. We’d both been through too much for that.

At eleven thirty, Debbie (day nurse, twenty-three, born and raised in Ames, Iowa, likes macramé and white nail polish – I figured if you were going to let a girl sponge bath your privates every day, you should know a little something about her) asked me if I wanted lunch while I was waiting. “It’s your favorite – meatloaf.” Guess she knew a little something about me too.

I shook my head. “Hutch should be here any minute.”

“OK, but if you change your mind, just let me know. I’ll save you a tray.”

At 11:35, I gave in and phoned his place. No answer.

At 11:45, I called Dobey. He humored me and said he’d send a car over to Hutch’s. Said he’d call back if anything was wrong.

For once the pain in my gut was Hutch’s fault, not Gunther’s.

XXXXXXXXX

Hutch woke to a flood of light. The apartment was quiet, the hot water heater ticking. He walked barefoot into the kitchen, opened the fridge and ate leftover tuna casserole with his fingers. Edith Dobey still brought him food every Sunday, casseroles and cupcakes and homemade cherry pie. He studied the shelves. Nothing much. Some cheese, orange juice, milk. In the freezer he found four boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and he ate a handful, rinsing them down with milk straight from the bottle.

He glanced at the kitchen clock – 9:30. He had an hour and a half to shave, dress, pack and make the twenty minute drive to the hospital. He could do the drive in less than fifteen if traffic was light – he’d done it in six minutes once – a middle of the night race to the hospital after Starsky suffered what the doctors had optimistically called a “setback.”

But that was over. Starsky had recovered. And starting at eleven, he’d have two weeks alone with him – no doctors or nurses or physical therapists, with nothing to do but sit in the sun and watch Starsky get stronger. Maybe he’d finally finish that John Updike novel he’d started months before. He pulled it from the bookshelf and stuck in the side pocket of the suitcase next to the travel chess set. He wrapped an unopened bottle of Jameson whiskey in a sweater and laid it beneath the two new pairs of jeans.

What else? He’d picked up Starsky’s cameras the night before and bought a ridiculous amount of film at the photo shop on Vine on the way home – color and black and white, fast and slow, everything the salesman recommended, he even splurged on a new zoom lens. Because the cottage had a front porch facing the ocean and even if Starsky wasn’t up to walking on the beach yet –

He felt the familiar pain pulse behind his eyes. He reached for the half-empty bottle of aspirin on the kitchen table and dry swallowed four.

Starsky was going to be fine. Starsky was fine.

They were going to live happily ever after, dammit.

He heard the knock from the bathroom. He wiped the shaving cream from his face, wrapped a towel around his waist and went to the door. Everything that had happened made him cautious and he hesitated before opening the door.

“Oh fuck . . .” Hutch managed in the seconds before the man was on him – the tire iron slamming into the side of his face, pushing him into the bookshelf and onto his knees. He braced himself against a shelf, trying to stand, looking up to get a brief glimpse of the man’s gray, impassive face before a foot lashed out, burying a shoe in Hutch’s side. The guy had at least a hundred pounds on him, a hundred and two if you counted the tire iron.

Once, twice more, Hutch felt his ribs being driven into his lungs. He held on to the hope that if the man wanted him dead, he’d have brought a gun. He stayed curled on the floor, consciousness slipping in and out as the man beat him, sometimes seeing shoes, fists, a tire iron coming at him. Then nothing at all.

XXXXXXX

I knew it was serious when Dobey showed up in my room half an hour later.

“Starsky . . .” Dobey started.

I breathed a sigh of relief- Hutch was alive. Otherwise, Dobey would’ve called me David.

“He took a pretty good beating, but he’ll be fine.”

“Where?”

“He’s in the ER getting checked out by the docs. He’s going to be pretty bruised up and have a hell of a headache, but he’ll be okay.”

“Why?”

Dobey sighed. “We don’t know. Hutch said he’d never seen the guy before. Someone was sending a message, I guess.”

“Who?” Apparently I had been reduced to one word sentences.

“We’re looking into it.”

I stood up and leaned on the cane. “Take me downstairs. I need to see him.” Dobey hesitated. “Please.”

They gave me ten minutes alone with him before they took him up to X-ray. He looked like shit – like a welterweight who’d gone a few too many rounds with Joe Frazier. But he smiled when he saw me and he motioned to the chair beside the bed. I sat with the cane between my knees and he reached out his hand and I held it between mine and we sat like that without talking for a few minutes. I’m sure we looked ridiculous.

“Gunther?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Probably.”   Neither one of us wanted to think what that meant. At least not yet.

“We’re still going,” he finally said.

“OK.”

“Maybe not for a couple days, but we’re still going. We’re going to walk on the beach and swim and read long novels and I’m going to grill steaks every night and take you to bed after and . . .” He rubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand.

I felt like someone had tied a string around my heart and was tightening it. “Hutch . . .”

“No, we’re going. Fuck Gunther.”

XXXXXXX

We left two days later. Hutch was still too sore so Huggy drove us to Carmel in Hutch’s car. A couple friends of his (large wrestler types I suspected he was paying by the hour) followed us in Huggy’s white Cadillac.

“You ladies best not get used to being chauffeured everywhere,” Huggy said. “I got better things to do than drive this pile of shit halfway around the state. And Carmel? Who the fuck goes to Carmel? Old people vacation in Carmel. You got something against Vegas?”

“Hutch is a romantic,” I said. “He wants to collect seashells and paint watercolors of my dick.”

“Very funny,” Hutch grumbled. But he squeezed my leg and smiled and I could feel the string around my heart begin to loosen.

We planned to stay two weeks. Every morning we’d sit on the porch, drink coffee and wave to the neighbors – the same two men who drove Huggy’s car. Hutch claimed it was purely coincidence, so I did my best to ignore them when they followed a few hundred feet behind us on the beach or showed up at the same restaurants. One afternoon, I spotted them in the produce section of the grocery story, squeezing melons while Hutch complained about the lack of arugula for that night’s salad.

“Iceberg, for God’s sake, Hutch, just buy iceberg.”

Hutch said he’d arranged to extend his leave. He’d borrowed some money from his father and so the two weeks turned into three and then four.

Hutch made two apple pies one afternoon and took one next door. In the morning the pie dish, scrubbed clean, sat on the porch railing. Hutch still claimed he didn’t know their names, so I took to calling them Frick and Frack.

He’d lied about the TV. Not that I minded, really. Though I did wonder what was up with Luke and Laura and the Cassadines.

It wasn’t all domestic bliss, of course. I still took more pills than your average junkie and then took a bunch more to fight the side effects. I had to watch what I ate, watch what I drank, take my temperature twice a day in case of infection, and measure my pee to make sure my kidney (the only one Gunther left me) was still working. Just walking to the beach the first couple weeks was a marathon, and walking back was next to impossible. So yeah, Carmel, the vacation spot for old people, was just what the doctor ordered.

Mostly though, I took pictures. Hutch walking on the beach. Hutch peeling potatoes. Hutch playing guitar. Hutch sleeping. I admit the last one sounds a bit creepy, but I didn’t sleep well despite the pills, and he just looked so damned fuckable sometimes.

I got an A for effort in that department. No homeruns maybe, but at least I managed to hit a few balls. So to speak.

Hutch spent a lot of time on the phone when he thought I was sleeping. Sometimes I’d hear him swear and slam it down, but he never spoke loud enough for me to know what was going on. I supposed I should’ve asked, but I didn’t. To tell the truth, I didn’t have the heart for any more drama. In Carmel, I ‘d found a kind of no man’s land between my old life and whatever was going to happen next. I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but I planned to enjoy it as long as I could.

Halfway through our fourth week, Hutch came back from his morning run on the beach with a folded newspaper tucked under one arm and a strange look on his face.

“I thought we said no newspapers,” I reminded him.

“I think you’ll make an exception for this one.” He tossed the paper at me. “Read the headline.”

I read it once, and then read it again to be sure. Gunther was dead, knifed by another inmate in the exercise yard. The string around my heart fell away.

And just like that, it was over.

We went home the next day. Back to Bay City and the rest of our lives. It took a few more months, but I made it back to the job. A little slower than before, but a little smarter too.

The inmate who killed Gunther – a lifer named Eddie Schultz – always claimed it was because Gunther pushed him in the yard. Everyone from the warden to the FBI said it smelled like a hit, but no one could ever prove it.

I still have the pictures I took that month in Carmel. The best ones are framed and hang in the den. The rest fill half a dozen photo albums.

But there were a few I threw away. The ones taken with my new zoom lens two days before Gunther’s murder. Frick and Frack packing up their car. Hutch talking to them in the driveway. Handing one of them a thick envelope. Shaking hands.

No one needed to see those.