Night’s the Only Time of Day

Starsky is in a melancholy mood.

Written for my dear friend Kaye Austen Michaels.

“When there’s hardly no day and hardly no night, things half in shadow and halfway in light–” Chim Chim Chiree

Starsky came out of sleep, lingering in a dream of red cars and screeching tires. That was not this place.

He opened his eyes lazily, staring up at the chiaroscuro overhead, leaves stolen of color by the setting sun, layered black on charcoal. The light had gone a pale blue gray, exactly the shade of dove’s wings, the lingering July heat like a feather weight against Starsky’s aching chest.

Water pattered softly against the parched ground. Not rain, Starsky knew that, just the sprinkler completing its prescribed rounds. Hutch only turned on the sprinkler after sunset, to water the grass at night. He called the lawn Starsky’s folly, a waste of natural resources in a county where there wasn’t enough water to come by. But Starsky had always wanted a lawn, an expanse of grass to lay back on and watch the clouds scuttle by. Such a thing had been a luxury when he was ten and living in a four story walk-up in New York. It had even been a dream when he was fifteen and living with Aunt Rose in one of the ubiquitous apartment complexes that littered the LA basin.

Until now. He watched in languid fascination as the water arced in wide swathes across the expanse of grass, protected from a dousing by mere inches. He lay in his hammock, just outside the perimeter of the sprinkler, cocooned like a mutant caterpillar unable to turn into a butterfly. What if that water suddenly changed course, splashed across his feet, then his legs, soaking him? Would he float now, or sink from the shrapnel, the traces of lead still left in his body? Could those tiny slivers, no bigger than grains of rice, be enough to erase what he had accomplished in life?

“Hey,” Hutch said softly, leaning against the oak tree beyond Starsky’s head. “No more of the morbid thoughts.”

“How did you know?”

“You get this way, when the day’s betwixt and between,” Hutch said softly, setting the hammock to a gentle sway.

Starsky craned his neck as Hutch receded and came nearer with each swing of the woven cradle. Even that little movement brought pain and he stilled, obliged to accept forces beyond himself. Behind Hutch, the water was a counterpoint, sweeping north and south to Starsky’s easterly/westerly motion. Like drifting on the sea.

“That sounds like a quote-Grandma Hutchinson?”

“Mormor Matiasson,” Hutch corrected. “She liked nightfall–when there was no day and night, and the world just slowed down–”

“Betwixt and between,” Starsky finished. “That’d be me. Not one thing or the other–not a cop, not a…”

“Starsk.” The way Hutch said his name, reproof, love, pride, and fear all mingled into one. “You are whole, you survived and you are here, with me.”

Once upon a time, Starsky would have bounded up, bristling with defiance and unbridled energy to prove his worth, but he couldn’t anymore. Couldn’t catch his breath to climb out of the hammock on his own. Couldn’t walk across the wet grass because his weak muscles barely held him up. Needed help–needed Hutch.

He’d survived, but for what? To be cosseted like old cat, to nap away the heat of the day shielded under hundred year old oak trees outside of the house Hutch had bought for him?

He wanted to be grateful, to be happy–and he was for whole minutes at a time most days. Sometimes even hours, especially when Hutch was beside him, preserving the promise that he could conquer the indignities of his body.

Recovery. A joke or a prayer?

There was so much work to be done–like watering the grass, over and over, every single day to force a lush green where it didn’t rain from May to October. He would have chuckled, except even that hurt his healing chest.

He’d had one of the bad moments, and on the upswing, came one of the good ones. He opened his eyes wide, staring up through the black on charcoal leaves into the deep purple blue of the evening sky. The moon rode low in the west, on his left, a ship starting out on a nightly journey through the heavens. The first glint of stars trailed in the wake of the celestial traveler.

“I thought you were going to climb in here,” Starsky said, grasping the lightness of being for as long as he could.

“I thought you’d never ask.” Hutch stilled the sway with one hand and clamored in as easily as climbing onto the waterbed they’d installed in their new bedroom.

Starsky envied his lithe grace. Hutch slid down the curve of the rigging, tucking in against Starsky with a grin of white teeth in the gathering dark. Two peas in a pod.

“Rock a bye, babe.” Starsky closed his eyes so Hutch didn’t see a glint of the tears, well aware that when Hutch kissed him, he would be able to taste them on his cheeks.

Starsky clutched that proof of life close to his heart and felt night fold around them both.

FIN