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Bluebud fascinated himself with staring at the cigarette dangling between Trashman’s lips. It was unlit, like the words that hung between them.
“I can hear you, y’know,” Trashman said.
Bluebud froze. “Hear what.”
Trashman sneered. “Yeah, I can. Sitting over there breathin’ like a fat dog. You on somethin’ since I left?”
“Not on nothing,” Bluebud said. It was true, to an extent. He’d been clean since moving in. As much as Bluebud wanted Trashman to look, he didn’t want to be noticed. He was still reeling from that morning.
Trashman had been working with napkins at the kitchen table, puzzling over the shapes in the cloth, folding, crimping, smoothing, and pretending not to see that Bluebud was awake. Gum wrapper chains and origami swans sprinkled over the edge of the table and across the windowsill, peeking out between potted plants. They felt out of place in the cramped studio. Boxes piled up in the corners, turned away to hide that handwriting. The puppy puffing from the effort of being overfed. Bluebud was doing some puffing of his own looking at the sincerity etched in Trashman’s brows as he worked.
The plastic egg timer shrieked from its nest in a potted aloe and Trashman cursed.
“I’m goin’ out,” he said.
Bluebud feigned a yawn. “What time’s it?”
“Seven.”
“Shit. All day again?”
“Other guys ain’t comin’ in, say they got clients onna other side of town. Guy wants his deck done, he gonna get it if I gotta do it myself.” He pulled off his readers and shrugged on a sweatshirt.
“Those for the kids?”
A crinkled line of newspaper elephants marched along the countertop. Trashman picked one up and turned it over. “Said they wanted funenants,” he said.
Bluebud untangled himself from the sunken couch and approached the little figures. A miniature zoo fashioned from scraps Trashman had scrounged up from street curbs and folded into little treasures. Bluebud flicked the toad taped to the side of the fridge and felt something similar hopping around in his chest.
“Pick me up something?” he asked. Rum’ll drown it.
“Like you got money,” Trashman quipped.
“I can front you.”
“The hell you can. When’s the last time you were good for it? Yeah that’s what I thought. I don’t gotta let you eat out my fridge or sleep on my couch. Don’t mean you gotta pay me back.”
“Let me do something.”
“You can feed Lil’ Lady.”
Bluebud stared down at the mutt drooling at a cornflake under the fridge. “Not so little anymore, are ya?”
Trashman drummed on her belly as he pulled on a pair of work boots. “We’ll get ’er healthy in no time. If you wanna job you can come. You know I’m short.” The laces went tight.
“I don’t know shit about construction,” Bluebud hedged.
“Then what the hell you go to college for?” Trashman mocked.
“High school’s a joke.”
“Joke is gettin’ a degree an’ not a job. I know waste when I see it.” Trashman gave him the most pointed look he’d ever seen, and then left.
You would. He grimaced. Too petty.
He watered the plants methodically. Each one had a name he’d never say aloud, a private ownership that drove his silence. Bluebud felt the ache again; it crept up like quicksand and pressed just as much. The money tree that came back. The boxes turned away. The adoption papers.
He exchanged the jug of water for a can of wet food. Lil’ Lady trampled over when she heard the can opener and waggled and thumped and wuffed until Bluebud poured her out a meal.
He soured at her enthusiasm. He felt shied out of his own head. Names he’d never say aloud. Thoughts he’d never own up to no matter how many opportunities he was given. Feelings he didn’t have words for. He went for the door before he could be swallowed whole.
Trashman was alone on the half-finished deck. He didn’t say anything, just offered a cigarette.
Bluebud was staring. He knew it, but he didn’t stop. Not even with that gut-draining slide of his unnoticed pining.
“I know you starin’ at me.”
Make that unreturned.
“So?” he replied. Brilliant.
“So, that asthma new or ’s it just for me,” Trashman flatlined.
Bluebud’s heart palpitated, a toad shaken in a glass jar. “Bad lungs,” he offered, not wanting to play along but doing so anyway.
“I ain’t even light this yet,” Trashman said, pinching the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “You gonna die if I do?” The bare impression on his ring finger.
“Might,” Bluebud joked, attempting to dissuade himself from reading too much into it.
Trashman scoffed, “Can’t have that,” and tucked the cigarette into his pocket. He leaned back on the deck with both hands tucked behind his head.
Bluebud’s skin boiled. Casual shit. Tease the fat dog with a bone and don’t give it to him? Keep your bone, you ignorant… “Why not?” Shit. Don’t answer that.
For a long time, it seemed like Trashman wouldn’t, staring off into that middle distance he went to so often. It was a place he went to that made Bluebud feel odd and extraneous. Then he asked, “Gonna die before you confess?”
No. “Yes.” Fuck.
Trashman sat upright and pulled the cigarette back out of his pocket, fiddling it between his bony fingers. “Then you don’t mind if I smoke,” he replied.
“Hold on,” Bluebud started, then stopped. Then he started again, “I don’t mean it like that.”
“Like what?”
Bluebud realized he didn’t know. Like that.
Trashman dug through his pockets. “Well, if you’re not gonna say it,” – he said, producing a lighter – “I’m gonna,” and lit the cigarette. For the moment, he had Bluebud in a corner.
Don’t look at me like that.
“I know your candy-ass ten years. I seen you look at me for ten years. I ain’t stupid. But you just can’t take a hint,” Trashman mused, blowing out a column of smoke. “I wish you’d just say what’s been on your mind, but you don’t seem too keen on that. Seem more like you gonna die before you tell me what I already know.”
Bluebud felt the toad in the glass jar die.
“You don’t gotta say it. Just like I don’t gotta say it either.” Trashman took another drag on the cigarette and then pitched it into the ground, stamping it out as quickly as it had been lit.
Bluebud was glad to be alone that night. He tipped back into the couch and disappeared into the textured ceiling. He scratched at the crooks of his arms. The track marks were nearly gone. Ten years of regrets yanked around his guts. Fuck was I supposed to do? How’m I supposed to know anything you don’t tell me? Ah, shit. Finally it hit him. He fuckin’ knew. Bluebud sank inward until Trashman’s mutt felt obligated to comfort him. She did so by sitting on his knees.
“What? You in on it, too? Tell me I’m a dumbass for not sayin’ shit that coulda got me kicked out?”
She squinted in the afternoon glare of the sun.
“You ain’t better than me. You ain’t even his. You get the good parent outta one custody battle and now you think you’re hot shit.”
She began panting lazily, pink tongue lolling.
“Yeah well he don’t love nobody. Not me, not you, not his ex, not himself. So there. Nobody’s happy.”
She snorted in defiance of him and curled up at his feet. He gave up trying to talk to the dog. When Trashman returned that morning, Bluebud feigned like he’d slept.
“I know your dumb ass awake, get in here.”
You really gonna act like nothing happened.
“That lovesick act’s gettin’ real old.”
Please just act like nothing happened.
Trashman was unloading a few bags on the kitchen table. Things he’d been collecting. “Gonna help or what?”
“What you need me for?”
“Company,” Trashman said. It melted the quicksand in Bluebud’s chest to putty, but he sat down anyway. They didn’t talk for a while; Lil’ Lady’s panting filled the silence. Bluebud watched him pick out pieces from the bags and begin to fold them, realizing they weren’t the usual refuse, but colored papers he’d bought. “You still not talking.”
“What do you want me to say?”
Trashman sighed. “I don’t want nothin’ ’cept what’s on your mind.”
“Not a lot goin’ on up there.”
Now he enunciated: “Bull-shit. I know you got a whole ass brain up there, don’t make me drag it out through your mouth. I don’t like seein’ you stuck in your head. Don’t look too good in there.”
“Worse than your ex.” Idiot. Bad topic.
“My ex wasn’t bad, just…didn’t like me,” Trashman admitted. He wrapped the blossoms around wires and set them aside.
Bluebud hadn’t known that. He hadn’t asked. “It’s something like that.”
Trashman hummed. “Gonna see someone ’bout it?”
“Why?”
“’Cause I care ’bout my friends,” he said, bunching together the wires and binding them with tape.
Bluebud bunched his fists together on the table. Names he’d never say. Writing unwritten. An unlit cigarette. He clutched and then released. “I don’t exactly see you as a friend.”
His gut coiled.
“I’d rather you do.”
Oh. It sank.
Trashman finished binding the individual flowers together. He stood up and set the bunch into a glass. “Maybe a friend’s what I need’n a relationship.”
Oh. It swam.
“Not usually what people go for,” Bluebud said through a tight throat.
“Not what I went for neither, look how that turned out. Might be good to be with someone who actually likes me.” He poised the glass of folded flowers on the windowsill like they would need sunlight. Bluebud realized what they were. What they meant.
“Don’t get my hopes up.”
“What you gonna do? Say no? I dare you.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. Bluebud said over and over again, “I’m sorry,” and wondered if Trashman knew what they meant. Hydrangeas, purple and pink. But of course he knew.
He knew all along.
