Escape (11 page)

Luka didn't know if he was on the verge of laughing, or crying. He'd never gotten over the hurt and shame of his parents making him quit school at twelve to work in his dad's shop, of feeling barely one rung above illiteracy. But he'd been so fucking happy that just as his weirdness seemed to be taking over his brain and body and he felt like an alien creature accidentally hatched on the wrong planet, he'd been spared having to expose his body and freakish impulses to a whole class of boys in the locker room and showers of the high school. He hated being naked. Even alone in his room at home. But it was always worse with an object of comparison in view or memory. His own stunted, underdeveloped body next to Tarik's wiry, manly body. And even worse, unbearably awful, with Tarik still there, watching.

But Tarik went to the window and stared out. “It's like a ghost town. Probably like this everywhere. My village. Your village. Everyone who's not at the front, left behind, cowering around one little candle praying they're not about to be bombed to pieces. Or overrun by invading hordes.”

Fast as he could, hoping to finish before Tarik turned away from the window, Luka yanked off his pants and underwear and pulled on the discarded clothes of some stranger. When he had the shorts on, it got a little easier to breathe, and his hands started working better. The pants were too big around his hips, but the length was okay. He was swimming in the shirt, but the sweater was wool and the chills shaking him started to subside.

Luka gasped and almost jumped, because he hadn't heard Tarik move, but he was right there, so close Luka felt his breath on his neck. “It's good that they see you're scared. It sells the prisoner angle.”

Angle? How was it an angle, when Tarik had tackled and shackled him half an hour earlier?

“But don't let your imagination run wild, kid. You're going to walk out of here safe and sound tomorrow morning.”

Whatever you say, asshole.

“Just try to put up with their name calling, and keep quiet. The less riled up they are, the better I can handle them. Okay?”

Tarik patted him on the back, then opened the door and steered him back toward the living room.

Calvin aimed his gun at Luka the moment he saw him. “Tie your pet cockroach back up, if you don't want me to put him to sleep for you.”

“I've got this under control.” Tarik planted Luka in a chair at the dining table, and sat down next to him. “How about burning the uniforms and showing me the papers.”

“You get your papers when he's tied up. And not putting his filthy hands where I eat my food.”

Tarik laughed.

“What's funny?” Skinny was drinking something brown straight from a bottle.

“How frightened two tough Eršbans are of my little cockroach.”

Sitting there, shaking with fear, Luka wondered how it could hurt his feelings, the enemy soldier holding him hostage, saying that. But it stung. Worse, for some reason, than the clerk who'd joked and sold him his pens and paper since he was a kid calling him
Bokan
and making him go to the back of the line. Of course, the guys from the refugee camp had called him things, too, but the thick hide he'd grown during adolescence made him impervious to their shitty remarks. He'd forgotten words could hurt as badly as bruised ribs and broken fingers. Luka told himself Tarik had only said it to appease their ungracious hosts.

“Are you sharing?” Tarik gestured toward Skinny's bottle. Skinny frowned, but handed the bottle over. Even with guns drawn, the Eršbans seemed as nailed to their laws of hospitality as any Bokan would be. Tarik took a long pull, and let out a satisfied sigh. “Here we are, the three of us, with guns and knives. Unless he's got some kind of superpower he hasn't revealed to me yet, I think we're safe, friends.”

Skinny went over and took his bottle out of Tarik's hand. “I'm not scared of your little cockroach, friend. I'm just feeling concerned as to why you're so fond of him, it makes you sad to keep him on his leash.” He gulped down a quarter of the bottle in a go. An old trick Luka had seen a dozen times back home. Pass the bottle around like a good host, but drink the lion's share every time in comes to hand so the neighbors don't enjoy too much hospitality.

“He's here to fill a role. How's it going to look if his wrists are rubbed raw from restraints and his shoulders are half dislocated from having his arms pulled behind his back for days on end?”

“As you're so fond of saying, that's your problem.” Skinny took another deep pull on the bottle before handing it off to Calvin.

“Yes, it is.
My
problem. And this,” Tarik gestured like a magician showing off his best trick, “is my solution.”

“Fine. But if he so much as stands up to stretch his back after we've gone to bed, your problem's going to have a bullet in his head.”

“And our deal will be moot.” Tarik got to his feet. “This the way to the toilet, friends?”

Luka focused on breathing and not looking at Skinny and Calvin as Tarik slipped through a door, and then shut it.

“Maybe you're feeling a little stiff right now.” Skinny snatched the bottle back from Calvin and finished off the last of the brown liquid. “Do you need to stand up and stretch?” He looked at Calvin and gave him a smug, drunken grin. “Don't you want him to, Armin? I'm not cut out for military life. Too much routine. Too many rules. I'm not the kind of man to take orders from anyone. But I'm jealous of our boys in uniform getting to shoot down these ugly cockroaches every day. Aren't you, Armin?”

Armin laughed. “Yeah. No shit.”

“Go on, little cockroach. Wiggle an antenna. Let's see if I can shoot it off.”

Luka wanted to slide off his chair and hide under the table, but was terrified that if he moved at all, they'd kill him. He didn't even hear the bathroom door open.

“Hey. Begović.” Tarik was still doing up his fly.

Skinny laughed, still feeding on the terror in Luka's eyes. “Yeah?”

“Look at me, Begović.”

He looked.

“Put your gun down. Because if you so much as scratch an antenna or anything else of his, I'll gut you alive.” He shifted his glowering gaze to Calvin. “Both of you.”

They burned their uniforms and Tarik's old papers in the fireplace. What had the people back at the refugee camp done with his documents? His belonging? It surprised Luka, how indifferent he was to that sudden erasure of his identity. He should have felt diminished or sad, or at least relieved. But he didn't feel anything. Maybe because he still felt sure he'd be dead soon.

When Skinny stumbled upstairs and Calvin started to follow him like a loyal puppy, Tarik asked where he and Luka would sleep.

“He stays down here. Not one step off the ground floor. There's a bed for you upstairs, if you want it.”

Tarik rose from the armchair he'd planted himself in an hour earlier. “Come on.” Shepherding Luka ahead of him, Tarik headed back to the child's bedroom. “Just give me the bedspread. I'll sleep on the floor.”

The bed was too small for Tarik, anyway. Luka handed him the bedspread. “Why don't you just sleep out there, on the couch?”

Tarik closed the door and said quietly, “I don't think it's a good idea to leave you alone with them around. This is fine. Still the best bed I've had in weeks.”

Tarik stripped down to his thrift shop underwear. Luka went to bed in all his clothes, curled up under the sheet and blanket, and stared at the door, listening to Tarik snore.

As it was starting to get light out, Tarik woke, shuffled down the hall to the bathroom without getting dressed, then returned. “Good, you're awake. Come on. Take a hot shower.”

Hot water. A shower. It sounded so good, Luka decided it was almost worth risking the abuse of those two clowns upstairs.

When he threw back the covers and got up, Tarik grinned. “Were you that cold? I should have let you keep the bedspread.”

“I was fine. This sweater's really warm.”

“Don't take too long. Save me some hot water.”

Feeling warm, feeling clean was the most delicious sensation in memory, except that slow, soft kiss that had tasted of cigarettes. But Luka forced himself to cut the water and dry off, even though he wished he could stay there, clean and alone forever. When he opened the door, Tarik was sitting at the foot of the child's bed, keeping watch. For a second, that protective vigilance almost made Luka forgive him for calling him his little cockroach, but then he remembered Tarik was only keeping him safe because he needed him for something.

While Tarik was in the shower, Luka laid on the bed and closed his eyes. How was all this going to end? They'd stay in that horrible house with those horrible men for a few more hours or a few more nights. Then what? Maybe Armin would shoot him. Or maybe he and Begović would let Luka leave with Tarik. Then Tarik would get tired of sharing his food and being slowed down, and leave him behind, in the middle of a part of the country he didn't know, surrounded by men with guns who hated him.

Sinking fast in the quicksand of his thoughts, he got up and started poking around in the drawers and cupboards of the little dresser, and the armoire opposite the foot of the bed, just to keep his hands and brain occupied. When he came across an old can labeled for stewed tomatoes but jammed full of colored markers, a delicate dusting of calm sifted through the turbulent tumult of his anxiety. He rooted around under children's books with broken spines and tattered corners until he found a stack of paper. On top, sheets of construction paper in vivid yellows, reds, greens and blues with sun-faded margins, but underneath, two precious pages of pristine white.

Lashed by impulse, Luka plunked down on the rickety little wooden chair at the tiny desk in the corner, and in small, brisk motions sketched the nautical nucleus of Remdios Varo's mad world, a familiar, intrepid clockwork ship propelled by waterwheel and windmill in lieu of unfurled sails. The disembodied shadow emerging from the cabin had always struck him as sinister, but now he thought maybe that was him. Not the man out of sight, who's shape was cast onto the deck, but the shadow itself, cast in whatever direction larger forces dictated. Or was he the headless body seated aft of the windmill? Nameless, homeless, faceless. And all around him, the sun-yellowed, mist-kissed sea collapsing, falling away in a swirl of bottomless sinkholes.

The hum of water in the pipes went silent. Luka jumped up and hid the drawing under the stack of books among the other scraps of abandoned paper, and put the can of pens away before Tarik came through the door. His mop of dark hair momentarily subdued, wet and clinging to his head, Tarik had his clothes in a bundle under his arm, and wore nothing but a towel around his hips. Before he made himself look away, Luka took in Tarik's broad, muscled shoulders, the sculpted contours of his upper arms, the trail of dark hair running between his pecs, down his lean abdomen. Down. Down. Just a glance, but by the time he'd turned his gaze toward the window, his face was burning.

“Any sign of
our friends
?”

“No.”

Furtive sideways glance. As if modesty had never occurred to him in his life, Tarik tugged the towel from his waist, tossing it over the back of a chair. Luka turned away, looking for something to pretend to occupy himself with, as he listened to the rustle of fabric, the buzz of a zipper, willing his face to cool and trying to divine when it would be safe to un-glue his gaze from the arbitrary spot on the wall.

“Mind changing my bandage?”

Now?
He'd hoped Tarik was about to go out to the living room, hoped he'd leave him alone long enough for the thrum of hot blood rushing through his veins to slow. Why couldn't he think of an excuse to delay that small daily intimacy that forced him to get so close to Tarik? To touch him?

“Sure.”

Tarik fished the first aid kit from his pack and gave it to Luka, then flopped onto the bed, face down, and let out a relaxed sigh. A pang of guilt struck Luka's chest. How long had it been since Tarik had slept on anything softer than the hard ground? As much as he hated being trapped in that cage pretending to be a house, lying down on that soft mattress the night before, Luka's body had felt real comfort for the first time since fleeing his room above the shop almost a month earlier. And Tarik had slept on the cold, hard floor.

Luka arranged everything he'd need on the little table beside the bed. “Okay.”

“Do you need me to sit up? Or can you do it like this?”

Every morning, every night, Luka wished he wasn't so twitchy about changing Tarik's bandage. The raw wounds, stitched and scabby with mottled halos in Byzantium bleeding into Prussian blue and golden green, didn't bother him. Getting so close, though, coming in contact with the man holding him hostage made him queasy and jumpy each time.

“It's okay. You don't have to get up.”

Luka perched on the very edge of the bed, as far from Tarik as he could without falling off. Before he'd even started to pull up the tape, heat rushed up his chest and neck and face. The pants Skinny and Calvin had given Tarik were a size or two too big, and they were sitting so low on Tarik's hips, Luka could see the smooth, rounded hills of his ass rising up beyond the two shallow dimples just beyond the dip of his spine at the small of his back, and two or three centimeters of the shadowed valley between those taut curves. Because the underwear they'd given him were too big, too? Slipping down off his hips, too? Or too small? Or was he not wearing any?