The Churn

“Yeah,” Timmy said, straightening. He put a hand into his pocket. “Hang on a minute.” He walked back toward the black doorway as if he were going to check on the other boy, perhaps wake him for his supper.

“Wait,” Lydia said as Timmy reached the doorway.

He looked back at her, twisting at the shoulders, his body and feet still committed.

“Come sit with me.”

“Yeah, I just gotta—”

“First,” she said. “Come sit with me first.”

Timmy hesitated, fluttering like a feather caught between contradictory breezes. Then his shoulders sank a centimeter and his hips turned toward her. He pulled his hand from his pocket. Lydia opened the sacks, unpacked the food, laid the disposable forks beside the plates. Every movement had the precision and beauty of ritual. Timmy sat facing her, his legs crossed. The bulge of the gun stood out from his thigh like a fist. Lydia bowed her head, as if in prayer. Timmy took up his fork and stabbed at the ginger beef. Lydia did the same.

“So you’re going to kill him?” Lydia asked, her voice light.

“Yeah,” Timmy said. “I mean, I ain’t happy about it, but it’s what needs to get done.”

“Needs,” Lydia said, her intonation in the perfect balance point between statement and question.

Timmy ate another bite. “I’m the guy that took a job from Burton. Used to be the job was one thing. Now it’s something else. It’s not like I get to tell him what to do, right?”

“Because he’s Burton.”

“And I’m not. You were the one who said I’d be important to him if I made it through this shitstorm. This is part of that.”

“I said Burton would see you as important,” Lydia said. “There is more to you than what he sees. There’s more to you than what anybody sees.”

“Well,” Timmy said. “You.”

Even I do not know your depths floated at the back of her throat like a cough. She didn’t have it in her to say the words. If it was true, so what? When had truth ever been her friend? Instead she took another bite of the beef. He did the same. She imagined that he was giving her the time to gather herself. It might even have been true. The perfectly straight lightning bolt of a railgun transport lit the black sky, its thunder rolling after it like a wave. The ginger and pepper burned her lips, her throat, her tongue, and she took another bite, welcoming the pain. It was always pleasant when pain was on the outside.

“And who will you be to yourself?” she said at last. “Doesn’t what you think matter more than what he does?”

Timmy’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, I don’t know what you just said.”

“Who are you going to be to yourself, if you do this?” She put down her fork, leaned across the space between them. She lifted his shirt as she had countless times before, and the erotic charge of it was still there. Never absent. She pressed her palm against his breast, her skin against his skin in the place above his heart. “Who will you be in there?”

Timmy’s face went perfectly still in the unnerving way it sometimes did. His eyes were flat as a shark’s, his mouth like a plaster cast mold of himself. Only his voice was the same, bright and amiable.

“You know there ain’t no one in there,” he said.

She let her fingertips stray to the side, brushing through the coarse hair she knew so well. She felt the hardness of his nipple against her thumb. “Then who will you put there? Burton?”

“He’s the guy with the power,” Timmy said.

“Not the power to kill Erich,” she said. “Not the power to make you kill him. That is you and only you. People like us? We aren’t righteous. But we can pretend to be, if we want, and that’s almost the same as if it were true.”

“I get the feeling you’re asking me for something. I don’t know what it is.”

“I am not a good person,” she said.

“Hey. Don’t—”

“If I were, though? If I were that woman? What would I want you to do?”

Timmy took another mouthful of beef, his jaw working slowly. In his concentration, she saw the echoes of all the versions of himself that she had known from baby to toddler to young man to this, now before her. She folded her hands on her lap.

“That’s a long way to say I shouldn’t do it,” he said.

“Is that what I said?” she asked.

Erich’s yawn came from the doorway. Lydia felt the blood rush from her face, tasted the penny-bright flush of fear as if she had been caught doing something illicit. Erich came into the light, scratching his sleep-tousled hair with his good hand. “Hey,” he said. “Did I hear you get back, big guy? What’s the word?”

Timmy was quiet, his gaze fixed on Lydia, his expression empty as a mask.

“Guys?” Erich said, limping forward. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

Timmy’s sigh was so low that Lydia barely heard it. The boy she had loved for so long, and in so many ways, put on his cheerful smile and looked away from her. She felt tears pricking her eyes.

“Yeah, bad news,” Timmy said. “Burton’s not taking the whole thing very well. He’s put out paper on you.”