Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison

Author:John Larison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

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I was laying on my bed too dizzy with drink to sleep when Greenie come in and kicked off his boots. But instead of his bed he fell into mine, right on top of me though he caught his own weight.

A bead of his sweat hit me between the eyes. Our noses was touching. All at once the liquor was gone from me and I felt clean sober. There wasn’t no missing his hardness.

How many moments was we locked together? For all of them I took in his breaths and he took in mine. All I had to do was welcome him. He was waiting on me to welcome him. But I just lay there unmoving.

I had come to love Greenie in that manner of young, lonesome men who see in the eyes of another no judgment. But no man ever moved me toward lust, even this one whose mood I knew by nothing more than the force of his spat.

Soon enough he pushed off me and moved onto his own bed. He rolled to the wall and was silent.

Greenie’s voice come in flat and low. “You gonna tell?” His back was still to me.

“About what?”

“Promise you won’t say.”

“I swear to you.”

“I ain’t a fish,” he said.

“Don’t matter to me if you is.”

“I just really thought you was part of this.” His voice was shaking. “Don’t be queer about it or nothing, I beg you. Let’s just go on as we was. I’m just drunk is all, can’t hardly see straight. Just fell on the wrong bed is all. Thought I saw Miss Aberdeen.”

I laid there seeing everything between me and Greenie with new eyes. The only man I knew better was my brother. To tell it straight, Greenie was my first friend in this life.

The longer I thought it over, the more I dwelled on that terrible story Greenie had told of his friend Bern who died in the snow with his parts cut free. Greenie was the other man with Bern that night, I was sure of it now. My blood quickened at the thought. How could Bern have been killed like that and not Greenie?

All Greenie had to do was tell Drum it was me who’d made the move. I was the fish. The first one to tell would be the one trusted.

Looking back, I’m sure he considered hanging me to dry. Greenie feared one thing worse than death and that was being cast out of the crew. And so he must’ve weighed his belief in me, in my loyalty to him.

No other way but he come to decide he could safekeep his trust in me, in Jesse Straight.

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