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The party upstairs went late again, and the laughter came down through the tarp in pieces.
Jesse had got good at sorting the pieces. Kenny's laugh he could track by the thump of boots after it. Laugh, stomp, stomp, on his way to a cooler for another beer. Lester's was a wheeze that arrived already dying, and middle part of every laugh, the part that carried the words, got swallowed by the plywood, so he never got the joke.
Once, he caught the word hose.
It was unmistakable. Somebody said something about the hose, and then the laugh went long, and Jesse lay on the cot with his eyes wide and his teeth clenched while the rest of him stayed still. That was him, the joke, lying there in fear of their laughing. Somebody up there did a voice. His voice, he thought. More laughs followed.
He had been up under the sky with his clothes off. The water had hit him cold and Todd kept saying sorry, sorry about that, holding the rope so he wouldn't fall. Every one of those guys had watched, and now they were stood upstairs, eating sandwiches and laughing about it.
The hatch went. Light down the ladder, and boots.
It was Uncle Jack and Todd together, which was new. They came down and stood a way off.
Uncle Jack looked at Jesse like yesterday's lunch. "So this one," he said, not to him. "Still giving you trouble?"
"No, sir. He's been tame all this week."
"I'm just saying." Uncle Jack's thumb went into his belt. "You keep a animal, you gotta break it in. Way I hear it, he don't hardly look at you when you talk to him. My old man had a way with that." He shrugged with half his face. "Maybe someone gotta show him who he belongs to. Properly, is what I'm getting at. One time, so he knows."
Jesse's stomach dropped somewhere with no floor to it. Hell, probably. He kept his eyes straight ahead, fixed on nothing.
"Don't bother yourself, Uncle Jack," Todd said. "I'll see to it."
"Good man." And Uncle Jack went up the ladder, taking the good mood with him.
Todd waited till the hatch had gone. Then he came and sat down at the end of the cot, folding his hands on his knees, and stared down at Jesse.
"So," he said quietly. "Hey. I got kind of a situation, and I wanted to talk to you about it first, 'cause I think you're basically a smart guy and we can figure this out."
Jesse didn't say anything. It worked better not to.
"Uncle Jack thinks you need to be punished for how it's been going. And I could tell him no, but then he'd do it his way, and I seen his way." A pause. "Way I see it, I got two options. Neither one's great, but one of 'em's better and the other's over quicker."
He gave Jesse a second before carrying on. “I could have relations with you. You'd be good and let me.” That was how he put it, relations, like something contractual and family tree'd, and Jesse was already shaking his head before he'd got all the way through it, already pulling in tighter on himself on the cot, his voice going, “no, no, no," quietly.
"Okay," Todd said. "That's okay. So the other one is the same thing, but rough. It happens tonight, once. Probably quick. And then it's done, and Uncle Jack's happy, and things go back to normal."
The rope on his ankle was long enough to reach the bucket and short enough to reach nothing else, and upstairs a room full of guys could still say hose, or worse. There was no way out. There was just this. Jesse finally looked at him. Todd had his chin down and his eyes up, waiting.
"The second one," Jesse said.
"You sure? 'Cause, like… I could make the first one okay for you. I got lube upstairs, and I'd go slow, and I'd be real careful. I read up on it some, on giving it. And some guys like taking it, y'know." He said all of that sincere as anything, and scrubbed at his eyebrow. "I think you'd like it okay if you let yourself. Could be nice."
Jesse stared at the plane of Todd's face for a second and hated him with everything he had left, and the worst part was that the offer didn't even sound like a lie.
"The second one,” he muttered. “Just get it done."
Todd thought it through. Jesse watched him do it, watched the little flicker of his eyes as it all settled in his head.
"That's good enough for me," he said, and got up. "I gotta get some stuff together. I'll be back tonight, so, uh. You might not want to eat a big dinner or anything. I'm no expert, but I heard that helps."
"Okay."
"‘Preciate you being cool about this, Jesse." And he went up the ladder and took the light with him.
He came back hours later, when the party had gone down to two voices and a TV, and he had a canvas bag which he put down by the cot. “Okay,” he said. “If you could just…”
And Jesse got his own clothes off himself, all of them, left them on the floor, and stood there shivering.
Todd checked him over first. That was in no version Jesse had run in his head, and it took him most of the inspection to work out why: Todd was nervous. He was looking at Jesse's shoulders and his arms and his sides, hands light and hovering and professional, and his mouth was doing the thing it did when Uncle Jack was talking, one corner tucked in.
Jesse had tried to wipe himself clean. The hose had been days back, but he'd done the best he could with his pillow. Now he stood there while Todd looked at his nails and his feet and the backs of his knees, cataloguing how dirty he was.
"You know what," Todd said after considering his catalogue for a long moment. "Never mind."
"What?"
"Nothing. I just…" His hand came up and scrubbed through his hair, scrubbed hard, and Jesse had never once seen him do that. "It's a lot, is all. Pressure-wise. I thought I'd be better at this. Thought I wouldn't mind." He laughed a tiny laugh. "It'd be over quicker my regular way anyhow."
"You can't!" Jesse heard his own voice climbing. "We had a deal, yo! You can't just go changing it. Just do it. Do the thing you said."
"It's basically the same thing," Todd said, apologetic, getting to his feet, and Jesse was still arguing with it, still saying no, wait, as Todd took his belt off and looped it in his hand.
“Turn around, Jesse. Be cool.”
He was right, Jesse thought later. It did amount to basically the same thing in the end. Todd was calm about everything, thorough, even methodical. A belt across the back caught him in carefully striped rows. His fists drove two or three times into the meat of Jesse's sides and once in the middle while Jesse bent and folded around them and made the sounds the pit had heard plenty of before. After that, he was down, and the new thing came in. The nails, short but long enough, dug into his hips, his thighs, his upper arms, scraping at his flesh and drawing blood. Finally, a hand on the throat held down true until the world flapped its edges and not a second longer.
Jesse came out the other side of it flat on his stomach on the cot with everything ringing, eyes streaming, half off the thin mattress, his jaw clenched and the edge of the stained pillow in his mouth so he wouldn't bite down on anything important.
The bag had antiseptic in it too. Of course it did. Todd did his back and talked while he did it, soft and friendly, about a guy he'd known at the cable company, about a movie quote Uncle Jack liked, about the weather in Albuquerque being nicer than Ohio, which is where he was from, did Jesse know that, and the sting came in bright under every sentence and was easier to hold on to than the sentences were. A big warm hand between the shoulder blades, steadying, while the other one worked. This was the only good part every time. His body didn't know what to do with that, and he ended up pressing his legs together and staying put.
That was when he put it all together. The throat. The rows on his back. The marks low on his sides, on his thighs, on his arms. He was lying there reading his own body like a picture of a different guy, a guy it had happened to the other way, option two, and the guy who would have done it to him was kneeling behind him on the cot, finishing up his last strip of antiseptic with a tent in his pants you could have hung laundry on.
Jesse shut his eyes and breathed slow and even, asleep, he was asleep. Long lashes or whatever, still as the dead. He had never worked so hard at anything in his life.
For a while it was just the noise of the cap going on the bottle.
"Jesse?" A pause, a small one. "You asleep?"
He kept still. He was a whole graveyard now. Let him rest in peace.
The hand came off his back. It didn't go away. It hovered, and he could feel it there, feel the sunset heat hanging over him, and then it landed, real soft, on his hip again, and stayed, and Jesse's mind went white and stayed white. Unwittingly, he pressed his legs together harder.
"Okay," Todd said, hardly a voice at all. "Okay."
And Jesse, between one breath and the next, got moved. He was gathered up, weightless, and set back against Todd's chest with Todd's legs coming round outside his, his whole frame arranged around Jesse like an electric chair, and there was no strength anywhere that was going to argue with any of it, so Jesse let his head lie back where it wanted to lie, which was against a shoulder, and let his arms lie where they were put, which was at his sides.
The hand on him was gentler than it had been with the antiseptic. That was the thing he'd come back to, after, whenever the memory came back. It was gentle and sure of itself, slow like the whole night was happening at somebody's house, on the couch between the last two guys left awake. It didn't jack him exactly. Todd must've read up on this part too. He knew you went slow and tightened your grip some at the top and used your thumb. Warm spit in the palm from a guy who spat in it neat and quiet over Jesse's shoulder first. Fuck, it was good. It was like he'd done it before, not just to himself but someone else, some other dead guy in some other dark pit.
Jesse kept his eyes shut the whole way through, and his breathing deep and even, and it worked, it worked.
It worked so well that he felt it rising in himself, like necromancy, up through all the hurting, past the wreck of his back and the bell-tone in his ears, and there was a minute (and he never told anybody about that minute, ever) where it was just a hand on him in the dark and the low voice saying, at intervals, "that's right" and "you're doing real good," and Jesse wasn't anywhere, wasn't in a pit, wasn't named, and his body took the whole of what was on offer and came all over a stranger's careful wrist, without waking up, and lay in it. A little death.
Todd said "wow," very quietly, like a boy at a window.
Then Todd's arm went round his chest, holding him close, still gentle but more insistent. The button went, the zip went, and Todd pushed against the small of his back, once, twice, three times, more. His forehead came down onto the back of Jesse's neck. Jesse felt the shudder go all through the frame all around him, felt it go hot and wet up his lower back.
Then the breathing behind him slowed, returning to normal as what was left rolled down between his legs and onto the floor.
"You're a good guy, Jesse," Todd said, breath heavy, right into his hair.
He got laid back down on the cot and his back and crack were wiped down, and the tarp-door went, and the lock did its job, and the dark settled around him again.
Jesse lay there a long time breathing deep and even and asleep-like, wide awake.