This is based on a real conversation I had with some random kiddo while I was jogging in my neighborhood.
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When Sal's girls were littleâbefore they entered middle school and immediately turned into gremlins who are way too cool to hang out with Uncle Tommy because he doesn't know who Harper Zilmer is and therefore should hang by the neck until deadâTommy used to take them to the park across the street from their kindergarten. It's the last remaining wooden park in the greater Los Angeles area and has some of the most comfortable benches a human ass has ever sat upon.
Lately he's been trying to fit more cardio into his routine, because Lucy made a comment about him working out so much that his turnouts were starting to look like a wetsuit, and he's taken to running through that particular neighborhood. After he cools down from a run, he gets to catch his breath on one of those comfy-ass benches.
On the second day of his 72-off, he does almost seven miles in under an hourâa personal bestâand then rewards himself by heading over to the wooden park so he can drop onto a bench, close his eyes, and lose himself in The Cactus Album. He's halfway through Steppin' to the A.M. when his skin starts prickling. He's being watched.
He cracks one eye open to find a little boy in a Bluey shirt standing practically on top of Tommy's sneakers, staring with wide, oddly familiar blue eyes.
Tommy opens the other eye, then takes out one of his ear buds.
"Uh, can I help you?"
With a grin that pings as oddly familiar, the boy lifts his hand to proudly show off the massive splint that has consumed his thumb. "I broke it!"
Tommy blinks. "How'd you do that?"
The kid's grin widens until it's practically splitting his face in two. If he were vibrating any harder, Tommy's phone would surely be blaring an earthquake warning.
"I slammed it in a door! Like this: BAM!" To illustrate, the kid lifts his other hand, which is holding some kind of toy, and bashes his palm against it. Then he comically whines and shakes out his hand, hopping from foot to foot. His shoes light up.
"Okay," Tommy says peaceably. "Follow-up question: why'd you do that?"
With a shrug, the boy scratches his nose with the hand holding the toy. "I screamed really loud and-and-and there was blood."
"I bet." Judging by the size of the splint, there was probably a decent amount of wailing too. Arianna, Sal's youngest, once tripped over her own scooter and scraped her knee, and she screeched loud enough to wake the dead. The scrape hadn't even broken the skin. She's definitely got the makings of a theater kid. "Uh, where are your parents?"
"In Heaven with Cap." The boy says it absently, like it's nothing. Probably because all of his attention is on one of those small, white butterflies that seem to be everywhere. It wings by them and goes to inspect some nearby dandelions.
"That sucks. I'm sorry," Tommy murmurs, then scrunches his nose in confusion. "Wait, what's the cap?"
The kid holds up the toy in his hand suddenly. "This is a helicopter! It's mine."
He emphasizes every syllable, even where there shouldn't be any. Hel-i-cop-ter. Muh-ine.
"Your helicopter isn't just any helicopter," Tommy says, taking out his other ear bud and digging out their case from the flipbelt he got in last year's Harbor yankee swap, tucking them in. He sits up a little straighter, then gestures for the kid to hand it over, which the boy does. "That's a Kaman SH-2F Seasprite."
And a pretty accurately designed one, too. Tommy'd ask the kid where he got it, but the answer's probably Santa.
"Whazzat mean?" The kid leans forward, peering at his toy with wide, interested eyes. Seeing it anew.
"These guys were pretty fast." Tommy cuts the Seasprite through the air between them, then swoops it around the kid's head. The boy bursts into giggles and tries to track what is an admittedly insane flightpath. If Tommy were actually flying like this, ATC would think he was having a stroke. "If I remember correctly, they were used for SAR and ASW."
"Whazzat?"
Tommy stifles a laugh. "SAR is search and rescue, and ASW is uh, anti-submarine warfare. So, like, looking for lost people and.... yeah, there's no way to sugarcoat this: blowing up subs."
The kid bounces on his feet. His shoes look like a Berlin electronica festival. "What's a subs?"
"Submarine," Tommy corrects gently. He remembers being that age, learning the lingo, having his world expand a little bit more. Except he learned it all from his Uncle Terry, who fought in Vietnam, had ridiculous PTSD, and ate twelve packs of cigarettes a day. Tommy's hopefully a step or two above that. "It's like aâa submarine is a boat that moves underwater. See this?"
He tilts the helicopter and taps his thumb against one of the Mk 46's hanging off the side. The kid nods, shifting from foot to foot. Blue, red, yellow, purple, green.
"This is a torpedo. I don't think the Seasprites had missiles, but they definitely had these. Now, a torpedo is different from a missile because..."
About 45 minutes later, Tommy's in the middle of the world's worst child-friendly explanation of infrared thermographyâpausing every so often so the kid can scream "DOWN SCOPE!" at a decibel only dogs can hear and run around while pretending he's looking through a periscope on a submarineâwhich he told Tommy wasn't a submarine, but actually some big turtle Pokemon that had guns attached to its backâwhen a familiar pair of eye-wateringly orange Nikes enters his field of vision.Â
He looks up and, yep, there it is: the phantasm that haunts his thoughts whenever he allows himself to be alone with them.
It's been a year since Bobby's funeral, and Tommy's spent that time hoping Evan pissed off another dead cowboy and had been turned into a hideous swamp creature, but the universe seems to have gone in the opposite direction. He's a thousand times more gorgeous than Tommy remembers him being.
"Uh, hey," Tommy says intelligently.
He's definitely making this unexpected reunion more awkward by staring, but sue him. You don't shame someone for admiring a Rembrandt.Â
Evan stares back, eyes wide. "W-Were you just teaching a four-year old about modern warfare?"
After doing a quick mental rewind of the last hour and then glancing at the kid in questionâwho does appear to be that youngâTommy grimaces. "Uh, that... seems to be the case, yeah."
If it were anyone else, they'd probably start screaming at him, maybe throw hands, before calling the cops, because for all intents and purposes, Tommy is a complete and utter stranger who could've been using that toy helicopter to lure this kid into a rickety old van.
But Evan just stares at him for a few moments, then ducks his head and laughs.
"Did it have to be, like, bombing enemy warships?" Evan puts his hands on his hips. "Couldn't you have talked to him about, I don't know, that movie with the dinosaurs on a cross-country trip?"
"You want me to traumatize this kid with The Land Before Time?" Tommy lifts a hand to clutch his invisible pearls. "It's 10:30 in the morning, Evan. Way too early for sad tree stars."
"Corrupting the youth in your off-time, huh?" Evan asks, smiling.
Tommy can't help but tease back, "Just like my father always said I would."
A look of mortified horror washes over Evan's face. "Oh god, Tommy, that's not what Iâ"
"I'm just messing with you, Evan," he says, although he's really not.
Good ol' Jim Kinard believes in precisely two things: 1) Knob Creek bourbon is mankind's greatest invention, and 2) gay people were created by Russia to destroy the fabric of Western society and usher in a new world order. He said the second thing usually while chin-deep in the first, which was often.
Evan still looks like he's wishing for the ground to open up and suck him into hell, which Tommy can't let stand, and he opens his mouth to redirect the conversation to something that doesn't make him want to rip his skin off, but the kid beats him to it.
"SERGEANT TOMMY! FIRE THE MISSILES! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!"
Both he and Evan turn. Somehow in the last two minutes, the kid's managed to cover himself in grass clippings and is holding what looks like a years-old empty bottle of Pepto Bismol.
"Oh jeez, Theo," Evan says with a fond sigh. "Remember what we do with trash that we find on the ground?"
The kidâTheo, apparentlyâshakes his head wildly, but he does at least drop the Pepto. "No no no no no! Sergeant Tommy! Fire!"
Evan turns pleading eyes on Tommy, silently beseeching him for help.
Which Tommy can absolutely provide. "Kid, c'mon, I told you: you fire torpedoes from a submarine, not missiles. And you say "shoot" for torpedoes. Saying "fire" might make someone think there's an actual fire on board."
The pleading melts to reveal daggers, all aimed at Tommy's head.
"SHOOT! SHOOT! SHOOT!" Theo howls, bouncing.
"Aye, aye." Tommy salutes, then swings his arm down in an excellent karate chop. "BOOM!"
Shrieking with laughter, Theo runs in the direction of the imaginary torpedo, and Evan watches him like a hawk.
"I'm gonna kill you for this," Evan says serenely.
Tommy follows Theo's path thanks only to his shoes. He's running so fast that he's basically leaving trails of light behind him, like one of the bikes in Akira. When he looks back at Evan, his heart starts pounding. "I was, uh, thinking about hitting up the sandwich shop around the corner. Their breakfast paninis are supposed to be incredibleâperfect for a last meal. Maybe you and the kid might want to join me? My treat."
At that, Evan's head whips around and the hopeful lilt to his smile makes some hard thing inside Tommy crumble to sand.
"Y-Yeah?"
Tommy smiles. "Yeah. And maybe you can explain how you managed to hide the fact that you have a kid from me for six months."
"T-That's notâI didn'tâit's a very long story," is what Evan settles on, shoulders dropping. His smile, however, doesn't disappear. "He's not my son, but I'm hisâit's complicated."
"It always is," Tommy says, then gets to his feet. "Which is terrifying on a level I don't have words to describe, but my secret therapist says I could use some complicated in my life. We'd been kicking around ideas for exposure therapy; I'm pretty sure this qualifies, so."
The grin that splits Evan's lips is so bright that it could rival the California mid-morning sun. Tommy wants to reach out and press his thumb to it to see if it's just as warm. But not yet. Exposure therapy only works if you deliberately ramp it up over time, according to Dr. Chatterjee. And Tommy has to believe him, because otherwise he's paying this guy an exorbitant amount under the table to be lied to.
He'd happily drain his 401k dry if it meant Evan might keep looking at him like this.
"BUCK! BUCK! LOOK WHAT I FOUND!"
Spell broken, they turn in unison to see Theo about ten feet away, holding up what appears to be a baby doll with a pickle jar for a head. Inside, something dark and crimson sloshes around.
"This park has everything," Tommy marvels, before he and Evan take off after him at a run.
They end up getting tacos for lunch at Guisados because the pickle jar contains a human kidney and the cops don't let them go until well after Wichcraft stops selling breakfast for the day.
Which is fine, because he gets to eat a truly life-changing bistek roja while Evan tucks a sneaker against Tommy's and makes eyes at him across the table, and Theo makes a mess of his quesadilla trying to copy the way Tommy eats.
It's not quite how he expected to end today's run, because Guisados' seats aren't nearly as comfy as the park bench, but Tommy's been shelling out the big bucks all these months to learn how to roll with the punches. Seems like it's finally paying off.
