The Lazarus Heart

Read The Lazarus Heart for Free Online Page B

Book: Read The Lazarus Heart for Free Online
Authors: Poppy Z. Brite
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Collections & Anthologies
twenty-one, and Frank knew it was a lie but didn't push the issue. He'd gone into the bar after his shift for a beer, the first drink on his way down into the long drunk of the weekend. It was a nameless place on Magazine Street, just a sign that read bar and a neon four-leaf clover over the door, neon beer signs in the dark windows, Patsy Cline on the jukebox. Frank ordered a Bud and was sipping it at the bar when he noticed the kid watching him from a corner booth, sitting there alone, an army surplus duffel bag occupying the seat across from him. When he looked back a few minutes later the kid was still there, still watching him. There was a bottle on the table, though he didn't seem to be actually drinking from it.
    And then the kid smiled at him, a practiced shy smile, and looked back down at the table, picked at the label of his beer bottle.
    The pushy, nervous voice in his head said, No, Frank. We don't shit where we eat, man, but he'd learned a long time ago how to keep that voice in its place. It was only another minute or two before he went over to the kid's booth.
    Up close the kid looked a little bit older than he had from the bar. Blond hair shaved down to his scalp, Huck Finn freckles under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were the vacant blue of an October sky.
    "Hi," Frank said. The boy said hi back to him, looked up for just a second, a quick smile for Frank before he went back to picking the label off the half-empty bottle of PBR. Frank pointed at the duffel bag and asked, "Coming or going?"
    "Coming," the kid answered. "I just got in from Memphis this afternoon. On the bus." "Memphis, huh," Frank said, and before he could say anything else the kid
    whispered, "So, you want a blow job, mister? I'll blow you for twenty bucks."
    Frank glanced over his shoulder, automatic caution. The place was empty except for the two of them and an old woman sipping a Bloody Mary at the far end of the bar. The bartender was on the phone and had his back to them.
    "Jesus, kid, you don't waste any time, do you?"
    The kid shrugged, pulled the rest of the label off the brown beer bottle. "What's the point in beating around the bush?"
    "I might be a cop," Frank said.
    The boy smiled, smoothed the ragged label on the tabletop. "Oh, you're not a cop. You don't even look like a cop. I've given cops head before, and you don't look like a cop to me."
    "Really?" Frank sipped at his own beer, glanced over his shoulder again. The old woman was saying something he couldn't understand to the bartender, who was still on the phone and ignoring her. "Maybe you should be a little more cautious."
    The boy sighed then, looked up at Frank, and all the flirt and pretense was gone from his face, a hint of annoyed impatience at the corners of his mouth.
    "Look, man. I gotta take a piss. If you want a blow, I'll be waiting for you in the John, okay?"
    As the boy stood up and pushed past him Frank stammered, "Yeah, uh, sure," but the kid was already halfway to the rest room door.
    If asked, Frank Gray would be hard put to think of anything he had ever wanted but to be a cop. He spent his childhood on a steady diet of television police dramas, everything from syndicated episodes of Hawaii Five-O and Dragnet to Starsky and Hutch and Baretta, Police Story, Mod Squad. These were his cowboys, his heroes, his models of what was good and what was masculine.
    And, if asked, he would also be hard put to remember a time when he was not attracted to men: these men in particular, with their navy blue uniforms and shining badges and forceful self-assurance. He never passed through a time of sexual confusion, the tentative courting of girls he wasn't actually attracted to, the belated discovery that men and only men were the proper object of his sexuality. Everything was clear from the beginning, and he never saw any conflict between the objects of his lust and his desire to be a cop.
    But this naivete did not even survive his academy training. He

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