The Corsicans

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At the Academy, with and then without John Colby.

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They’d seen each other in the john, and in the showers, checked each other out in that sidelong way any two guys might: Is he bigger? Starsky looked bigger to Hutchinson, though he knew his own cock got bigger, a respectable amount, and he didn’t know how much Starsky’s did. Naturally not. Bad train of thought, there. I don’t know him well enough to even wonder … guess wrong, and I’ll miss those teeth later.

For no reason at all, while he was filling out a class evaluation, Hutchinson remembered not wondering about it, and then looked up and caught Starsky’s dark gaze on him. The long eyebrows lifted and the long mouth widened, not quite a smile. Hutchinson smirked back and looked down again, hoping the slight warmth in his cheeks was not visible.

The weird thing was that Starsky didn’t feel like a stranger. It was more than weird, really. Hutchinson knew that he’d been fairly sheltered; he hoped he was open-minded and he hadn’t actually lived in a gilded cage, but there was no question that Starsky knew more about big-city streets. And Starsky was a veteran. Previous experience had not led Hutchinson to believe that anyone who had been through that trial of fire would feel much in common with someone who’d been sitting on his butt in a classroom the whole time.

Yet somehow, inexplicably, it wasn’t like that. Ever.

After the evals, several guys from this class went out to a nearby pizza and hamburger joint, and as usual –already they had an ‘as usual’!– Starsky and Hutchinson and Colby automatically gravitated to the same table. Colby had gestured toward it and glanced from Hutchinson to Starsky, but the other two were already passing between the intervening tables as if they’d had the place mapped and the whole maneuver planned out beforehand. They had been there before; still, when Hutchinson stopped to think it was almost spooky.

He and Colby talked more, also as usual. Starsky was easily outgunned in anything resembling academic debate, and Hutchinson took casual advantage of that from time to time. But while he and Colby joked and wrangled and batted the odd bit of jargon back and forth, Starsky would occasionally drop in a fact, or a swift short jibe, that pierced the other men’s verbiage like the hollow bladder it was. Colby’s face tensed up whenever it happened, and Hutchinson put on a frown too, but felt secretly grateful–grounded.

Their burgers, fries, and beers came–and Hutchinson forced his gaze to the plate that appeared in front of him, thinking, Jesus, what a beauty, and not meaning the food. The waiter was one of the most flagrantly gorgeous creatures Hutchinson had ever seen. Couldn’t be more than twenty, with eyelashes and lips a girl would kill for and skin like the shell of a brown egg, tanned and smooth. It was a lucky thing they didn’t come here often. Hutchinson was definitely concentrating on girls at the moment, but this boy shook his resolve.

At last the hamburger geisha turned away and Hutchinson couldn’t resist a long look at his retreating ass, and then a swift one around the table to make sure he hadn’t blown it. No, the others were talking and eating and–Starsky turned from his own lingering stare at the waiter, and the dark eyes flashed in panic as he saw Hutchinson see him. And then Starsky relaxed, and a wide, slow grin spread across his face, teeth showing and all. A rare expression, in Hutchinson’s experience of the man. Hutchinson grinned too, and shook his head in sheer wonder.

“What?” asked Colby, who was straight but not stupid. “What? Fuck, you guys are always doing that!”

“No, we’re not,” Starsky said right away in a mock-soothing tone. “You just think we are. It’s a something complex, you know … ” and then he seemed impatient when Colby didn’t get it. “Come on, you’re a college boy. Hutch, help me out here.”

“Inferiority?” Hutchinson tried.

“Is that where you are and you know it, or where you just think you are?”

“Either, as far as I know.”

“Good, that was what I meant.”

Colby looked back and forth between them as if he were following a tennis match, and Hutchinson realized that so far John had rarely if ever been on the narrow end of this triangle. They’d had Colby and Hutchinson as erstwhile college students vs. Starsky, and Colby and Starsky as big-city natives vs. Hutchinson. It felt good to have Starsky and Hutchinson vs. Colby, for once. And over this, even though John didn’t know it. And he wouldn’t learn from Kenneth Hutchinson, who knew the signs of somebody so straight that even the Sexual Revolution just meant pussy.

“Fuckers,” Colby said with an amused tilt to his mouth, and turned to jump into the football conversation going on at the other side of the table.

The other two ate for a while in silence, their mutual discovery too delicate a new growth for even coded discussion. Or so Hutchinson thought.

“You don’t mind?” asked Starsky, dumping catsup on his fries, rapping and shaking the bottle.

“Mind?”

Starsky looked up, grinned again, and with transparent prevarication said, “Me callin’ you Hutch, for short?”

“No.” And he didn’t mind that. Finding another guy at the Police Academy who knew what it was like to swing both ways, or want to, not to mention somebody he already felt comfortable with–that feeling went beyond not minding. “I’ll have to find something to call you.”

“You’re scarin’ me, blondie.”

“Good,” he echoed Starsky’s earlier comment, “that’s what I meant to do.”

~~~

On the shooting range all three of them distinguished themselves. Of course, Starsky had trained with larger firearms, but Hutchinson had been deer hunting every autumn almost as far back as he could remember, and he had done skeet shooting as well. Targets that didn’t move were much easier, even though the handguns were unfamiliar. What background if any Colby had, Hutchinson didn’t know, but he seemed to have a gift for shooting. Or maybe it was just teeth-grinding macho competitiveness, because Colby was never better than when he’d just seen one of his friends set a new class record.

The instructor, a graying cop with a truly silly Groucho-Marx-style mustache, encouraged the competition. He posted day’s-best scores; he ridiculed and roared at students who fell behind their own benchmarks. Hutchinson grumbled about it, not because he was bothered on his own account–Sergeant Hanson gave him only praise–but because it seemed an inefficient, if not counter-productive, way to teach.

Another night at the burger joint–which was a lot easier to go to, somehow, once he knew he wasn’t the only one tantalized by Little Boy Beautiful–Hutchinson was holding forth about it, and Colby was arguing with him, and Starsky was watching, a small smile on his face and who knew what thoughts in his head.

“Will you tell me,” Hutchinson said, probably repeating himself, “what good it does to reduce anybody to the state Williams was in today? It’s a wonder he could find the trigger, for god’s sake. I saw his hands shaking. Fine, that’s what I want to see on the range, somebody on the edge of losing control completely. Another ten minutes, I swear the guy would’ve been bawling.”

“If he can’t handle the heat … ” Colby said, and he was definitely repeating himself, for maybe the tenth time, his voice hard and high in its range. “Do you want to work with a … a … nancy-pants like that?”

“‘Nancy-pants‘?” said Starsky and Hutchinson simultaneously, and then they all started to laugh.

“Holy shit,” said Starsky after a while, his voice still uneven with laughter, “I haven’t heard that since my grandmother used to say it.”

“Your grandmother used to say ‘holy shit’?” Hutchinson asked, and Starsky snorted again.

Colby had had several beers, and couldn’t seem to let the conversation go. “You guys, you guys don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. He fixed his eyes solemnly on Starsky, looking like a bewildered child. “And I don’t get that. Him I understand, he’s some kin’a college-hippie idealist, got a golden rule for everything. But you were in the Army.”

“Yeah,” said Starsky, all humor gone, “I was.”

“You’re not gonna tell me your Basic Training sergeants handled you with kid gloves and cared about your feelings.”

“No, I’m not gonna tell you that,” Starsky said.

“So why aren’t you agreeing with me?”

Starsky’s shoulders lifted with a long breath, and he turned from Colby to Hutchinson and back. “I can’t say I’d want Williams as a partner myself. Maybe the guy isn’t cut out to be a cop, and if that’s so, he’d better find out now. A man oughta do what he’s good at. But on the other hand, I don’t like seeing anybody bullied. I felt for the guy. And anyway,” he grinned, “I love to see the big blintz here show all that soft cheese he’s got inside.”

Hutchinson rolled his eyes but felt gratified. “Colby calls me a hippie and you call me cheesy–with friends like you … ”

“With friends like us you can forget about getting big-head disease,” said Starsky, reaching for the tab.

~~~

It was certainly true that with friends like Colby and Starsky, Kenneth Hutchinson was in no danger of taking his own strengths for granted. They tested him, competed with him–and, of course, he tested and competed and pushed right back. It was the style of male companionship he knew best.

They played cards. As card games for three players often didn’t work all that well, they traded off choosing what to play. Colby always chose some form of poker. Hutchinson traded off between sheepshead and rummy. Starsky, who seemed to know every game ever invented, if not to make up games as he went along, chose a new one almost every time, taught it to the other two, and then beat them.

“Okay,” said Colby one evening, surrendering the pack to Starsky with that small-mouthed grin that threatened to split the tight skin across his high cheekbones, “what weird new thing are we in for this time?”

“Been thinkin’ about a game I used to play,” said Starsky, and Hutchinson thought he was telling the simple, and rather melancholy, truth.

“Crazy Eights? Again? Or Go Fish, or what?” asked Colby. They had played Crazy Eights, at Starsky’s prompting, and actually Hutchinson had enjoyed it though he hadn’t said so.

Starsky shook his head and looked down at the cards he was shuffling. He shuffled and bridged and shuffled again, and Colby got restless, and Hutchinson began to feel that the strong sun-browned hands were reaching into the past to capture that lost game again.

“Well?” he asked, as much to see Starsky’s eyes as to find out the name of the game he was destined to lose.

“It’s called Egyptian Ratscrew,” Starsky said in a surprisingly soft and ruminative voice.

“It’s called what?” asked Hutchinson.

“You are shitting us,” said Colby.

“No,” said Starsky, “I learned it in the Army, and that’s its name. ‘Course,” he went on with regret, “we don’t have lighter fluid or nothin’, but I think we can make do.”

“Lighter fluid,” said Hutchinson. “Lighter. Fluid.”

“Yeah, and I don’t smoke no more, so I don’t even have matches. But maybe,” he brightened, “maybe nobody’ll slap three sixes.”

“I think I’d better take notes,” said Colby.

It wasn’t really that complicated, but it was wild to play, a lot of yelling and slapping the cards and swearing. Hutchinson couldn’t really see soldiers playing it, despite the name–but then he could see that Starsky loved it, so maybe he just had to let go of the little war-movie image of the soldier that he still had in the back of his head. So John Wayne wouldn’t play this. So what?

Anyway, Hutchinson couldn’t let himself get distracted. Already he’d slapped an 8 and a 9, thinking it was a pair, and lost the pile to Colby; then later he’d slapped first, and correctly, but let his hand get caught under the edge of Starsky’s fist. Shit, that had hurt. Okay, maybe this was a game for the macho and the bored.

At last Starsky had won, collecting all the cards in his hand again and shuffling them one last time. At least he never mentioned setting anything on fire.

Hutchinson was still curious about it, though. “What was the lighter fluid thing?” he asked, leaning forward from the back seat of Colby’s car on the way to be dropped off at his tiny rented room.

To add insult to the injury of beating them, Starsky had downed beer after beer while they played, and now wasn’t even trying to keep up his end of the conversation. He just rested his head on the high seat-back and, now, laughed quietly.

“He’s too high to answer,” said Colby rather sourly. “I’m taking him home first.”

Hutchinson, fairly relaxed himself, only minded because he liked looking at Starsky’s denim-clad, bowed legs and feeling the warm curls that brushed his arm when he leaned on the top of the front seat. He reached over, grasped Starsky’s shoulder and waggled it. “Come on, what was the lighter fluid for?”

“Used gas’line,” he responded sleepily. “Threw the pack in the gutter an’ doused it … went up like a, dunno. Flare. Damn.” He sighed. “Feels better when it’s a game, when ya do it y’rself. Don’ it?”

“I don’t know,” said Hutchinson, feeling sad that he didn’t, though in his sober mind he would never regret missing Vietnam.

“None ‘f ‘s got laid for a month,” Starsky mumbled, grinning with his eyes closed. “‘S what happens, you lose Ratscrew.”

“Now you tell us,” Hutchinson said.

“That’s such bullshit,” said Colby, and Starsky began to laugh helplessly again. Hutchinson tousled his hair.

“You are a little shit,” he said affectionately.

“Little?” asked Starsky, but Hutchinson wasn’t getting pulled in. Not when he could see perfectly well over the seat that what was barely crammed into those tight jeans looked even less little than usual.

They reached the apartment building, a two-story cinderblock thing with small, square windows that looked like a cheap dorm or perhaps a barracks. Starsky just looked out the window at it, not making any effort to leave the car. Colby frowned, and Hutchinson twisted and wrenched at his own door handle in an effort to get out and help Starsky out before Colby said anything. But while Hutchinson was still trying to remind himself how the handle worked, Colby seemed to get over it, sort of, and just stared out the windshield with that taut look on his face.

“I’ll do it,” said Hutchinson, finally wrestling the handle into submission. The door popped open meekly.

“Can you?” asked Colby.

Ah, another challenge. “Sure I can,” Hutchinson boasted, got out of the car in one smooth move, and then hung onto the car and the door while his head swam.

“You can’t,” said Colby.

“Sure,” said Hutchinson again, “I can.” He wasn’t really drunk. He opened Starsky’s door much more easily than his own and grabbed onto his arm. “C’mon, Starsk,” he said, not really meaning to shorten the name but liking the sound of it once he’d done it.

Starsky lurched upward, and Hutchinson pulled and guided and braced him until they were both leaning against each other and the car door.

“Jesus, you’ll kill yourselves,” Colby’s voice said from inside the car.

“We’ll be fine,” said Hutchinson. I can do this. He needs help. I’m fine, almost fine. “Starsk?”

“Yeah?” Starsky answered immediately. He stirred, and Hutchinson thought about how warm and heavy he felt, and then Starsky put his hands on Hutchinson’s waist and pushed away. “I can walk,” he said carefully.

“Sure, you only drank beer.” Hutchinson closed both car doors as Starsky stood, wavering but basically okay. “Should I come up with you?” Hutchinson asked, thinking he might not have to.

Starsky reached back without looking, and that made him sway again, so Hutchinson put an arm out and Starsky clutched at his sleeve.

“Got you,” said Hutchinson, and put his other arm around the shorter man. They walked up the sloping grass to the sidewalk. At least Hutchinson thought the grass was sloping; he decided not to look down and check.

They got to the door, and Starsky, leaning against Hutchinson, managed to get his keys out of his jeans pocket. He unlocked the door, pushed off with a hand against Hutchinson’s stomach, and they went in.

“Upstairs?” asked Hutchinson. Starsky shook his head, which was an immediate relief but not a long-term one. “It’s safer,” Hutchinson said. “Y’know? Like in class?”

“Want I sh’d sleep on the roof?” asked Starsky, fiddling with his keys as they walked, fairly steadily. Okay, that was the wall, be steadier than that. “Had one vacancy, I got it, ‘s on the first floor.” He seemed to be talking more clearly. Maybe he really had been falling asleep before, in the car. Or maybe Hutchinson was just getting used to listening to Starsky drunk.

Starsky stopped, and so did Hutchinson, and they both stared as Starsky got the key almost in and then really in the lock. Opened the door, stepped in, looked back where Hutchinson was still just standing there.

“You’re okay now,” Hutchinson said, in between statement and question. Starsky said nothing, so the answer seemed to be yes. “I won’t stay, then.”

Starsky grasped his arm again, and his other hand came up waveringly and settled against Hutchinson’s cheek. His eyes looked impossibly large and dark. “Some,” he said, “day. Some day we will.” His thumb brushed the edge of Hutchinson’s lower lip.

“Yes,” Hutchinson said. No point in pretending he didn’t want to. “But not while Colby’s waiting in the car.”

Starsky shook his head, and his hands, moving, left cool spots on Hutchinson’s body. Without really thinking at all, Hutchinson reached out and hugged Starsky to him. Tightly. Starsky returned the hug, but after a few moments pushed away. “G’night,” he said.

“Night,” said Hutchinson, and turned. And was briefly disoriented, as he saw only the unfamiliar hall and the faceless repetition of apartment doors.

“Other way,” said Starsky’s voice, and Hutchinson looked over his shoulder and found the front entrance. He sketched a salute and glanced over to catch Starsky’s grin, and then went back out to the car, walking almost straight.

As soon as Hutchinson got in the front seat, Colby asked, “He okay?”

“Sure,” Hutchinson smiled, liking Colby better than he had for a while, lately. “You’re a good guy, John.”

But Colby picked Hutchinson’s hand off his arm and dropped it, saying in a cool voice, “Don’t start with me now.”

“What?”

“You two are all over each other. You’re fine with it, okay, your business. But count me out.” Colby never looked at him, and the broad thin shoulders were stiff.

Hutchinson told himself, He’s driving, that’s why. He’s watching the road. “Starsky was drunk. You saw.”

“Yeah, tonight. I’m not talking about just tonight.”

Hutchinson had to really think about it. He’d always horsed around with his friends, the other college wrestlers especially. Punched arms, grabbed each other into headlocks, carried each other, all that stuff. He didn’t do more with Starsky, did he? No, he knew he did less. He thought it must be less.

“My dad never touched me that much,” said Colby, sounding like the boy he often looked.

Oh, well, if we start talking about fathers— Hutchinson almost said it, and almost laughed even when he didn’t at the vision of Richard Hutchinson knuckling the top of his head or swatting his rear. Not in a million years. His father had never even spanked him, not with his hand. “That how you measure? Never do anything with your buddies you wouldn’t with your dad?”

Colby jerked his shoulders up and dropped them, a movement so awkward Hutchinson had to replay it in his mind to see that it was a shrug.

“Well … ” Hutchinson wasn’t up to a long discussion. “I don’t. Don’t think that way. But don’t worry, John. I’m not after your ass.” And it was completely true, pretty though John’s ass was. But perhaps if Hutchinson had been sober he would have been more tactful. Straight guys didn’t like being reminded that was what they were nervous about.

“Shut the fuck up, Hutchinson.”

Yup, made a mistake. If he’d offended Starsky he would have ruffled his hair or grabbed his shoulder, but that was the point, wasn’t it? He couldn’t touch Colby at all now. “You’re surly when you’re not drunk, Colby,” he said mildly, and looked out the passenger window for the rest of the ride.

~~~

Then at last came the class none of them was very good at. Hutchinson knew there had to be something–they weren’t supermen–still, it was an unpleasant surprise when they found themselves fumbling in custody control, losing hold of the cuffs or even the ‘suspect,’ bumping into each other. Hutchinson hadn’t felt so klutzy since he was fifteen. Odd how the other two, who seemed so graceful in their normal movements, were having just as much trouble as he was, as if awkwardness were contagious.

They’d stayed behind for more work on Friday afternoon and had at last, each of them, wrestled one of the others to the floor and cuffed him without making any major mistakes. Now the locker room was almost deserted, except for a few guys who might be instructors or cops coming to use the gym. None of the cadets they knew. Colby was still in the showers. Starsky and Hutchinson were finished; Hutchinson, nearly dressed, glanced again at Starsky who seemed lost in thought on the bench, towel in a lump on one side and shoes and a sock waiting on the other. He had one sock on, and was staring at it as though he’d never seen his own unshod foot before.

“Starsk?” Hutchinson said softly. He’d taken to using the shorter form of his friend’s name when he most wanted to get through to him.

“Huh?” The dark head, odd-looking with the hair wet and combed back, lifted and the pensive eyes fixed on him.

“You okay? Hurting anywhere?”

“Nah.” This was unlikely. Hutchinson knew he’d taken a couple of hard knocks and could see a bruise or two. But he knew what Starsky meant: that wasn’t the real problem. “‘S just … ”

“Just?”

“I don’t like having to go so close in,” Starsky admitted. “Rather be back a ways with a gun, y’know? Stupid, I know. This is the real bust part, the success part.”

“We’ll get used to it,” Hutchinson said. “We’re getting better. Just takes practice.”

Starsky nodded, put on his other sock and stood up to get his uniform pants out of the locker. But he was still preoccupied, and Hutchinson hated to see it. He might have reached for Starsky, patted his back or something, but just then Colby reappeared from the shower and Hutchinson felt self-conscious. So he did a locker-room thing instead: picked up Starsky’s towel and twirled it between his hands, snapped his friend with the damp whip of it and then turned and snapped John too, just for good measure.

“Hey!” Starsky yelped, and then, “Gimme that!” and chased Hutchinson clear out of the row of lockers and down the next aisle, hopping onto the bench and running there, then down again, swinging on the edge of a locker door. They rounded the other end of the lockers and found Colby sitting on the bench, his own towel half off, laughing hard, more relaxed than he’d looked for days. And suddenly Hutchinson felt his own tension drain out–and when he looked at Starsky, he looked better too. Something to this horsing-around thing.

“O-kay,” he said, swaggering a little on his way back to his own locker, so he was caught completely off-guard when Starsky snapped him right in the rear, cracking Colby up all over again.

They could move like cats in the locker room. Hutchinson shook his head over it and finished buttoning his shirt.

None of them had dates tonight. Hutchinson thought he’d go looking over the weekend, at least for a bar or club he’d enjoy. He was going to live here a while and needed to start getting his social bearings. Starsky had a date Saturday with the young woman who’d come to speak to the cadets about dispatching. If Colby didn’t score soon, Hutchinson thought he was going to start blaming Starsky for that joke about the card game, Rat’s-ass or whatever it was called. But tonight they were going to play some pool.

Starsky hefted a cue, letting go and catching it again. Colby pulled another one out of the wall-rack and tilted it toward the table like a rifle, then lowered it. Hutchinson settled back to watch them, not wanting to argue even in a friendly way about who was playing first. He’d wait and play the winner. Starsky tossed a ball to Colby and walked around the corner of the table to meet him for the lag. Together they drew back their cues and shot. Colby’s ball sped straight to the end of the table and back; Starsky’s rolled to the edge of the corner pocket and stopped. Colby grinned and Starsky said, “It’s just an instinct: straight for the pocket.”

“Right,” Colby said. “Curb your instinct. I’m breaking, and you probably won’t get a chance to exercise it again.”

Starsky winked at Hutchinson as he walked around the table again to rack the balls. Hutchinson wasn’t sure what the wink conveyed: Starsky had deliberately lost the lag? Starsky would rather have played with him? Starsky was certain he’d win even though Colby had the first turn?

Oh, shut it off, Hutch, he told himself, hardly aware that he had begun to call himself by the nickname Starsky had invented. Just watch the game. It was certainly no strain to play the audience as the other two prowled around the table. Hutchinson’s memory was full of other games he’d watched, especially at the little bar near the family cabin, which had sometimes seemed the only air-conditioned spot on the whole northern Mississippi River. He’d been surrounded by girls in halters and boys without shirts, watching local kids who knew the bar’s old quirky table as if it were their own, playing as long as the bar’s owner would let them stay, skins and hair gleaming under the hanging light.

Starsky and Colby, of course, kept their shirts on, Starsky’s open over a dark tee and Colby’s buttoned up under a pullover knit vest. And Colby was playing well, intensely focused, as if success here would make up for their difficulties in class. Starsky kept the table between them as Colby moved, his eyes also intent. At last Colby missed a pocket and Starsky chalked his cue and began his own turn.

They seemed so serious about it that Hutchinson began to wish he had a squirt gun or a noisemaker. “Is something riding on this?” he asked in case he’d missed a bet.

“Should there be?” asked Starsky in the midst of his shot. The cue-ball banked, hit the twelve ball, sent it glancing off the five and into the side pocket. “Except who’s the real pool player around here. Thirteen in the corner, there.” He gestured with the stick.

Colby snorted. “Dream on.” Hutchinson was a little surprised. It was going to be a difficult shot, but the one Starsky had just sunk wasn’t easy either.

When Colby said, “Pass me the chalk, I’ll need it in a second,” Starsky flicked the cube at him, seeming not to look, and then took a few steps sideways. Hutchinson couldn’t see the table, so he slipped off the barstool he’d appropriated and went to stand behind the pocket for a better view. Starsky glanced up and grinned; then down and shot.

The cue ball hit the five squarely; the five passed a hair’s-breadth away from the thirteen but didn’t touch it. While Colby was opening his mouth to speak, the five bounced off the side of the table and connected with the thirteen, which seemed to jump sideways and went straight into the pocket.

Colby shut his mouth. Starsky smiled quietly at the table.

“There’s still time to lay bets,” Hutchinson suggested, deadpan.

“Save your money,” said Starsky, “for the next game. Me and you, Hutch.”

But when he shot this time, the ball rebounded from the very edge of the pocket.

“Hutch, you should’ve put that money down,” said Colby. Starsky swung his cue around in a slow arc and hit Colby across the shoulders with it. “Hey!” Colby exclaimed, though he had to have seen it coming.

Half of Starsky’s mouth canted up, the other stayed level. “Take your best shot,” he drawled.

Colby’s jaw clenched tight. Then he miscued. Starsky reached for Colby’s shoulder as he was going to walk past him, and Colby moved away but said, “You’re such a good winner,” in a tone Hutchinson couldn’t quite identify.

It went on like that, a close game filled with the teasing of friends and the tension of antagonists, intertwined so closely it was hard to tell which was which, even for Hutchinson, even knowing both men so well–even, he suspected, for Colby and Starsky themselves. It was tiring to watch. When Starsky sunk the last ball, Hutchinson said, “Rain check on the next game? Sometime when we’re both fresh,” and Starsky just nodded. Hutchinson grabbed the back of Starsky’s neck and shook him a little, then let go. Colby looked back and forth between them, the wayward lock of hair that made him look ten years old shadowing his eyes, and didn’t speak.

~~~

After a couple of drinks and not much talk, they went out the back door into the parking lot. Hutchinson wasn’t sure where they’d parked and didn’t immediately see the cars, so he looked back at Colby pausing on the threshold, presumably thinking the same thing. Starsky appeared behind Colby and slapped his shoulder, mouth opening to speak, but Colby jumped as if shot and whirled, almost bumping into Hutchinson.

Starsky raised both hands, palms out. “Sorry,” and he laughed a little, “didn’t mean to surprise you.”

Colby didn’t stir. Starsky tilted his head and dropped his hands. When the other man still didn’t move, Starsky took a step around him–only to be grabbed and shoved face-first into the wall.

“Hey!” Hutchinson went after Colby, reaching for the arm that held Starsky while Colby’s other hand reached into his back pocket and pulled out–what? cuffs?

Colby was grinning and his voice was heavy with laughter and rough with menace, both at once. “How’s this for a surprise?” Could he think he was horsing around?

Hutchinson tugged on the forearm and shoulder he held, and Colby turned his head, but froze again, staring out into the parking lot. In that instant, Hutchinson pulled him off and Starsky pushed away from the wall, and then all three of them heard the sounds of another struggle, a woman crying out, “No … no!”

They ran in the direction of her voice. She stood pinned to her car as Starsky had been to the wall, long dark hair fallen forward, the man behind leaning his whole weight on her and reaching for the keys she had tossed onto the roof of the car. One of her arms lay stretched up there, splayed fingers not far from the wild furry top of the little troll doll on her key chain, the mugger’s hand already groping past her wrist. She twisted her shoulders, and he grabbed her jaw through her hair and banged her head against the metal, yelling something covered by Colby’s “Stop!” and Starsky’s “Police!” and Hutchinson’s own “You’re under arrest!”

Starsky slammed into the mugger and they both went down. Colby grabbed the woman and pulled her around the car’s front end. Hutchinson reached out without a word and Colby put the cuffs into his hand as if they had rehearsed it. Starsky, too, hardly glanced up as he moved aside to let Hutchinson get to the mugger’s arms and cuff them.

“Miss,” Colby was saying, “What’s going on here? Do you know this man?”

“No,” she gasped, then sobbed, her hands and hair covering her face. “Just–he just–grabbed–”

Hutchinson got to his feet and turned toward her as she leaned into Colby’s arms. “Miss, we need to call the police. Let’s go back in the bar.”

“Call?” She raised her head unsteadily. “Aren’t you–I thought I heard–”

“We got a little carried away,” said Hutchinson, and looked over his shoulder to frown down what he knew Starsky was about to say. Then smiled at the woman as reassuringly as he could. “We’re, uh, in training. Anyway, John, could you help the lady?”

“Yeah,” said Colby, “sure,” and he cupped her shoulders in his hands as gently as if he’d just been playing with kittens instead of slamming a friend of his–Hutchinson still could hardly take it in. He turned back to Starsky, who was astride the mugger as he bucked and kicked and yelled.

“Not cops? If you’re not fucking cops then get these fucking cuffs the fuck off me!”

“Fuck, no,” said Starsky.

Hutchinson held down the flailing ankles, and Starsky knelt on the mugger’s shoulder as he turned to face Hutchinson. Starsky was practically giving off sparks and every tooth in his head showed as he smiled.

“Wild,” he said, and Hutchinson grinned back, nodding, even as he checked for bruises that hadn’t had time to darken yet.

“I’ll sue your asses,” their prisoner said, struggling.

“Ain’t you ever heard of a citizen’s arrest?” asked Starsky.

Hutchinson doubted this was quite what the framers of the law had in mind, and definitely knew that these cuffs were not at the Academy to be borrowed like this. Why the hell did Colby take them to begin with?

“Maybe he’s into restraints,” Starsky said, and for a moment Hutchinson thought he’d been speaking his thoughts aloud. He must have looked startled, because Starsky explained, “Colby.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Unsuspected depths, John’s got, that’s for sure.”

Starsky nodded, eyes dropping as if to check the prisoner. “Sore loser, anyway.”

“Think that’s it?” asked Hutchinson, but the mugger started swearing at them again and then a black-and-white pulled into the parking lot and there was no time for character analysis.

Colby bounced out of the bar some time later, as wired and happy as Starsky. “Jesus, how about that? We were fucking reading each others’ minds, like, like telepathy or something! Like, I don’t know, the Three Musketeers with ESP. No, like those other guys, the, um, help me out.”

“I don’t know,” said Hutchinson, who thought he did but didn’t want to get into it. Dammit, he was still angry with John.

“Same guy, I mean the same writer, god, I read it in school or something. There was a movie too. Huh.”

“These guys, they push each other into walls much?” Hutchinson asked.

“Huh? Oh, that. You still mad, Starsky?”

Starsky rubbed his chin, probably at the point of impact. “I’ll get over it. But what was it about?”

“About?” Colby looked from one to the other. “I was goofing around, you know.”

“Head-knuckling is goofing around,” said Hutchinson. “Stealing my uniform while I was in the shower was goofing around.”

“We didn’t steal it, Hutch, we just gave you mine,” said Starsky.

Hutchinson turned on him. “What side are you on, here?”

“There isn’t a side. I’m okay, and Colby says he didn’t mean nothing by it. Now I’m bushed and I got plans tomorrow, so I’m goin’ home. You pick a fight if you want,” and he walked away.

Colby started to follow, but Hutchinson grabbed his arm, hard. “No more cuffs, brother, or I’ll show you how the Corsicans did payback.”

Colby stared back until Hutchinson let go, wondering what exactly he had just done. Then John nodded. “Right, The Corsican Brothers, that’s the book I meant,” was all he said.

Hutchinson was left alone in the parking lot, shaking his head. A very strange evening.

~~~

The Corsican nickname gradually became commonplace. Hutchinson didn’t know for sure that it was Colby’s own doing, but the novel certainly wasn’t on the top-ten bestseller list.

Eventually Starsky asked about it. Hutchinson noticed that he chose a time Colby wasn’t present–the man had finally lined up a date and had gone off walking on air. Now, Starsky said, “What’s this corkscrew-brothers thing people keep saying? Like it means you and me and Colby?”

They were eating pizza. Hutchinson put his slice down, wiped off his hand, and picked up his beer mug before he answered. “Corsican,” he said, “as in Corsica, the place?”

Starsky shook his head and shrugged, quite a sight as he was also taking a bite of pizza with everything, and the everything was trying to slide off the end while Starsky was trying to stuff the whole square slice into his mouth.

“For god’s sake,” said Hutchinson, “can’t you eat like a normal person?”

“u’m eetnlk unnuml–”

“Stop!” Hutchinson put up his hands as if he were directing traffic. “Stop! I can’t stand it! Just chew it and swallow it and then we’ll talk.” He drank some beer in the interim, and couldn’t help a reluctant quirk of his lips at Starsky’s contortions as he tried to chew the whole wad in his mouth.

“Look,” Starsky said when he’d swallowed, “pizza is just not the kind of thing you eat with three forks and linen napkins, okay? A normal person picks up the slice and sticks it in their mouth–”

“–and bites off a moderate-sized bite,” Hutchinson interrupted. “And doesn’t try to talk at the same time. That was gross, buddy.”

“All right, Miss Post, can we get back to the cuskin brothers?” Starsky picked up another slice, glanced at Hutchinson, and nibbled elaborately on one corner of it, wagging his eyebrows up and down and rolling his eyes.

Hutchinson cracked up. Put one hand over his eyes and stared down at the beige edge of the soft fiber coaster under his beer and tried to stop snickering. Not really that funny, what am I laughing for? “Okay,” he said unsteadily, not looking up, “um, have you heard of the Three Musketeers?”

“Sure,” Starsky answered. “‘Course.” His voice was fairly clear, so Hutchinson risked a look, and except for the mischievous tilt to half his mouth, things seemed back to normal on the Starsky side of the table. Hutchinson put his hand down.

“It’s a book,” Hutchinson said.

“Oh, did they make a book out of it?” Starsky picked up the pizza slice again, this time with his pinkies sticking out, and his elbows, too. Even without the gesture it wouldn’t have been easy to figure out whether the ignorance was put on or real.

Not trying to decide, Hutchinson snorted at the slapstick and went on, “It started out as a book. By a French author named Alexandre Dumas.”

“‘S he good?”

“That’s a matter of opinion. Anyway he was popular, and the stories have gone on being popular.”

“Then he was good.” Starsky now seemed to have settled down to eat in a fairly unremarkable fashion. “But Hutch, you got the wrong book, don’tcha? Or are these cuckisan brothers in the Three Musketeers book?”

“No, it was a different one, but by the same author. In that book, Dumas says he was travelling in Corsica, which is in Italy, and met a pair of twin brothers. They looked exactly alike but their personalities were opposite. One of them was a scholar, and the other a fighter. One loved the city, and the other loved the country.”

“Twins are that way, sometimes,” said Starsky. “You know any?”

“A couple,” said Hutchinson, and Starsky rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. Anyway, there’s a complicated plot, and the ghost of the twins’ father appears, and a lot of other nonsense. Oh, and there are at least two vendettas. I hardly remember.”

“You remember a lot. I don’t remember books I read that way.”

“And a good thing too,” said Hutchinson. “You’ve got more room in your brain for useful stuff.”

“No, Hutch, you’re just smart about things like that.” Starsky frowned. “And boy, I must be dumber than I thought, because I sure can’t figure out what all that has to do with you and me and Colby.”

“Me either, buddy. The only thing I can think of is what Colby said, you remember, about ESP?”

“I remember but I don’t see–”

“No, ’cause I didn’t tell you just now. But the twins in the book can sense each other. When something’s wrong, when one is unhappy or physically hurt.”

Starsky frowned, his eyes on the middle distance, and ate some pizza, looking lost in thought. “Twins. That’s still only two.”

Now it was Hutchinson’s turn to shrug and shake his head.

“What happened to ’em, Hutch?”

“One twin challenges a man to a duel and is killed. The other avenges him and then dies too.”

“I’m not likin’ this,” Starsky said. “I’m sorry I asked.”

They ate in silence for a little while. “Sometimes,” Hutchinson said, “I wonder about John. I can’t understand him.”

“He’s hurting about something,” said Starsky with conviction.

“But what?” Hutchinson asked, but Starsky shook his head. “And anyway, isn’t everybody hurting about something? Aren’t you?”

“Are you?”

It took Hutchinson off-guard somehow, though he should have expected it. “Oh, s’pose so,” he said, “I’m no different from other people.”

“Up to now,” said Starsky, pensive again. “We’ve got each other, now, that makes a difference. And John.”

“Maybe John.”

They ate some more. Hutchinson licked his fingers and Starsky laughed at him. “I’m corrupting you.”

“No, you’re right. Pizza has to be eaten this way.”

Starsky put his half-wiped fingers to his forehead like Johnny Carson in his Carnac the Magnificent skit. “I’m reading your mind–no, I’m reading your stomach … you are feeling full.”

“Do you read my mind that it’s your turn to pay the tab?”

“No way, Josa33;! It’s yours.”

“Oh no!”

“Well …” Starsky pulled down his chin and looked out through his lashes and the edges of his eyebrows. “Really it’s Colby’s turn.”

“Ah. Well, unfortunately, he’s not here, so one of us will have to pay it.”

They kept wrangling. They flipped a coin and Starsky lost it off the side of the table. Hutchinson spotted it but let Starsky keep hunting for a while, suspecting that he had deliberately let it get away. Then Hutchinson paid the bill and they left.

~~~

The car was full of darkness. Comfortable and yet strange. They were parked in front of Hutchinson’s apartment building and had been talking for a while, nothing of importance to say, but neither seeming able to say goodnight. Starsky drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, looking out the windshield, and sighed. Hutchinson thought he’d outstayed his welcome.

“Well, sweet dreams,” he said, and reached for the door handle.

“Wait,” said Starsky. His hand reached out, fell, landed perhaps by chance on Hutchinson’s leg above the knee. The fingers curved to fit and the whole hand moved back and forth. Once, twice, again. Hutchinson watched, felt the pull and push of the cloth against his skin, his mind full of silence, the touch all he knew.

Then Starsky took his hand back.

“No,” Hutchinson said, “don’t, Starsk,” and he caught at the retreating hand and held it.

“Don’t?”

“Don’t pull away.”

But they sat for a long moment with just a gaze and that contact of hands between them.

“Colby’s not waiting this time,” said Hutchinson. “But is this really a good idea?”

“I don’t know,” Starsky said. “What’s the down side?”

Hutchinson shook his head. Swallowed. Looked at the shadowy curve of Starsky’s cheek, his hair, his shoulder; then the invisible lap and the dark smudges of his thighs. “Too involved? Emotional?”

“I ain’t gonna burst into tears, Hutch. You, um, you in love? With anybody?”

“No.”

“Me either.” Another deep breath. “You’re my pal. And you look so good. I want to.”

“Sweet-talker,” said Hutchinson, smiling. “I’ve never,” wagging their joined hands up and down for emphasis, “never had a friend I feel so close to. And you know damn well who the sex symbol in this car is.”

“Well, for fuck sake then, what are we waiting for? I never had to talk so much to a fuck buddy before.”

He wants to see action? Hutchinson moved all at once, surging across the space between them, one knee bumping the shift, one hand on Starsky’s shoulder, the other diving straight for the bulge he’d eyed so often. He bent his head past the white-edged eye so near him, and sucked the lobe of Starsky’s ear between his teeth. Stroked up to hold the other side of his head, and what a feast of texture it was, the beard-shadow scraping his palm, the lips parting at the end of his thumb, his fingers on the short-cut sideburn and into the springy hair.

Starsky’s breath hissed and there was a thump, perhaps his arm against the steering wheel because the next moment he was rubbing up and down Hutchinson’s side while the other hand reached for Hutchinson’s crotch.

Hutchinson jerked and his elbow hit the wheel. He let go Starsky’s ear and pressed the side of his head against those curls, kneading the handful of cock that heated and grew in his palm and reaching down the neck of Starsky’s shirt, fingers thrusting into the warm chest hair. “Horn’ll go off any minute,” said Hutchinson, trying to stop the movement of his own hands and not having much success. “Let’s move this inside.”

“‘S right,” Starsky agreed, “before a patrol checks us out,” but his hands didn’t stop either.

Blp! said the horn under Hutchinson’s elbow, and they both jumped. Away from each other.

Backing up along the car seat was hard enough without trying to look at Starsky at the same time, so Hutchinson dropped his eyes only to find Starsky’s leg beneath him, and he couldn’t resist drawing his hands down its muscled length as he retreated. He’d meant to say that getting a ticket would be a down side, but joking seemed too much of a distraction when touch was speaking so much more urgently and truly.

“Shit,” said Starsky, slumping more and pushing his leg farther along the seat.

Hutchinson knocked into the window handle with his tailbone and then into the roof with his head. This really was ridiculous. He slapped Starsky’s knee. “Get out, get out,” he said.

They both did, and walked quickly up to the apartment entrance, neither looking at each other nor coming close enough to touch. Hutchinson opened the outer door and led the way into the tiny lobby space, and while he was getting his key into the lock, Starsky bumped into him from behind, the whole length of his body resting there, and the jolt ran through both of them. The key skittered uselessly across the lockplate.

“If you don’t back off,” said Hutchinson in the voice of a desperate stranger, “we’ll never get inside.”

Starsky stepped away but it wasn’t much help: Hutchinson’s nerves were still singing and he could swear he still felt the warm pressure against his back, ass, thighs. “Come on,” said Starsky, and his voice was as hoarse and strange as Hutchinson’s had just been.

On the third try, the door unlocked. Hutchinson led the way up the two flights of stairs and down the corridor, opened his own door without trouble, and turned to take Starsky in his arms, pulling him inside and slamming the door after him. Starsky pushed closer still and reached around to grasp the cheeks of Hutchinson’s ass, rubbing his face into Hutchinson’s throat.

“God,” said Hutchinson, his head tilting back and the pulse beating in his ears like stormy surf.

“How long has it been for you?” asked Starsky, then turned his face again into Hutchinson’s skin and licked his neck.

“Don’t talk,” Hutchinson said, pulling on Starsky’s collar, the sleeve, the buttons. So while their eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room they undressed each other and themselves by touch, a whirlwind of textures, skin and linen and cotton and denim, smooth and thready and soft and slick with sweat. Starsky pulled fiercely at the tails of Hutchinson’s shirt, and when it was off, bit the newly-bare shoulder. Hutchinson pushed him back.

Darkness was so magical that he almost didn’t miss the difference between Starsky’s normal dark-blue eyes and the black dilated pupils: right now Hutchinson could only see two darker patches on the dim shape of his face. Hands on Starsky’s shoulders, Hutchinson dropped to his knees and stroked down the tense body he could barely see, took Starsky by the waist and leaned in to find his erection with a hungry mouth. At the first contact, Starsky’s crown against Hutchinson’s chin, Starsky made a small sound, barely louder than a breath. Hutchinson looked up the chest the color of clouds near the moon, darker where his hair grew, saw the strain in the neck and imagined it in the shadowed face. Slid one hand up into the dark and felt the crisp/soft curls, circled the base of the cock he had wondered about. He couldn’t tell to the inch but it was certainly filling his mouth. Starsky had one hand over Hutchinson’s where it clutched his hip, the other in Hutchinson’s hair, holding his scalp, pushing and kneading, trying to move his head. Starsky’s hips moved almost as if he were dancing, and Hutchinson followed them everywhere. He opened his eyes and saw the same stars that spangled in his eyelids. He heard Starsky’s voice, louder this time but no more articulate, and felt its vibration through his hands and lips. He breathed in and tasted the same wine-sweet musk.

He was so absorbed in the merging of his senses that Starsky’s orgasm took him almost by surprise, bursting into his mouth with more force than he remembered from his last blow job, sharper and better on his tongue, hotter. “Starsky,” he tried to say, but it came out all smothered vowels, and he throbbed helplessly and drank what was in his throat and held up the other man when his knees buckled.

“Yessss, yesss, yes, yes,” Starsky was saying, somehow down on the floor now, holding Hutchinson tightly against him, rubbing firmly wherever he could reach. “Come on, here’s the wall, sit there, where is it? Come on, Hutch, babe, come on, give me a chance.” And the seeking stroking hands found Hutchinson’s cock, spread his knees and then were back on the shaft, and Hutchinson leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes to keep the wonderful dark inside himself. Wild, it was like riding the wind, like the dreams when he could fly or breathe underwater; he wasn’t sure which direction was up or who was sucking him. The mouth felt like his own, it seemed to know him so perfectly. That thought pushed him over the edge and he came, calling for Starsky as if he were far away, not crouched glimmering in front of him.

Starsky lay with his head on Hutchinson’s thigh, an arm around Hutchinson’s waist. Hutchinson began, slowly, to feel cold, seeping from the smooth paint behind his shoulders. He moved his hand into Starsky’s hair, rubbing the scalp through it, copying Starsky’s earlier gesture. “Uh,” said Starsky, “what.”

“There’s not much bed,” Hutchinson said carefully, “but I’d rather be in it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Starsky agreed, not moving.

“Really. Come on.” Hutchinson rocked the curly head back and forth.

“Hey,” Starsky protested. But he did roll to his side, get up to hands and knees; then he stood. And then bent to grab Hutchinson’s arms. “I don’t even know where the fucking light-switch is, so get up,” he said, but when Hutchinson scrambled to his feet, Starsky pulled him close for a moment and hugged him–then, as he had the night they played Ratscrew, let go abruptly.

Let go. Hutchinson stepped away, groped along the wall, said, “Okay, here comes the light,” and turned it on.

It battered their eyes and they stood motionless under the onslaught for several seconds. Then Hutchinson looked at Starsky as Starsky looked at the room, its streaked paint and weird little kitchenette inside a cabinet, an armchair in one corner and a narrow single bed in the other, the end-table between them.

“Jesus, Hutch, this is … I mean … ”

Hutchinson knew exactly what Starsky thought of the apartment, exactly how he was wishing they had fucked at Starsky’s place, even if Colby had been waiting in the car that night, how Starsky wasn’t sure if Hutchinson couldn’t afford anything better or actually liked living in a walk-in closet. He couldn’t help but smile as Starsky tried to be tactful, buck naked in an ugly rented studio-apartment. And then Starsky looked at Hutchinson again, and smiled back.

“Here I thought you were just too hot for me, and that was why we were on the floor,” he said, taking the few steps that separated them and putting his hands on Hutchinson’s waist. “But there’s not enough room anywhere else.”

“Buddy,” Hutchinson said, “it’s a long story. I’ll tell you, but I’m too wiped now. You want to stay, now you see it? Or go?”

“I’m not an interior decorator. I didn’t come up here to see the room.”

They dumped their clothes in an indiscriminate pile on the armchair, and Hutchinson turned on the lamp on the end-table so they could turn off the overhead and still find the bed. Starsky lay next to the wall and Hutchinson put his head on the hard shoulder, draped his arm and leg over Starsky’s body and was asleep almost before Starsky had reached across to shut off the lamp.

~~~

Hutchinson’s kitchenette didn’t have two of anything, so they went out for breakfast. Neither had slept well, waking each other every time they shifted position, and twisting the covers into useless tangles. Hutchinson had fallen out once. Starsky had been too warm and Hutchinson too cold. Neither had been in any mood for sex when they finally gave up trying to sleep. Now, at the IHoP, they hunched over their coffee and wrestled their tempers in silence.

They needed a distraction and Hutchinson remembered that he had promised to explain his choice of living arrangement. He wasn’t sure how to start, though.

“You, uh, you get along with your father?” he blurted.

Starsky raised baffled and irritated eyes from his cup. “What brought that on?” But before Hutchinson could try to explain, Starsky looked back down, saying, “My father’s dead.”

Oh, brilliant lead-in, Hutchinson scolded himself. “God, Starsk, I’m sorry.”

Starsky’s eyebrows went up, then leveled, and he sighed, but didn’t meet Hutchinson’s eyes. “Long time ago.” He sipped, set the cup down, reached without looking and Hutchinson nudged the sugar bowl into his hand. Then Starsky did look up, while he was still dumping sugar in, spraying some over the edge of the cup onto the table, stirring with the serving spoon. “I’ll tell you sometime, huh? What were you going to say?”

“I told you I’d explain the room, that it was a long story.” Hutchinson rubbed the lower half of his face, noting a spot he’d missed when shaving. He stirred his own coffee though he hadn’t put anything in it.

“Oh. You don’t, then. Get along.”

“No. Not now. When I applied to the Police Academy here, got in, he said … well, anyway, I didn’t want to take his money. And there wasn’t much that wasn’t his money, or family money. And he’s the trustee. So I just grabbed the first space I could find that I had the deposit for. Figured I’d really look later.”

When Starsky didn’t say anything, Hutchinson finally looked at him again, and saw that all the irritation had gone from the oval face. Starsky smiled, slowly, eyes warm. “That wasn’t a long story,” he said when the smile was about halfway. “But then, you left a lot out.”

Hutchinson looked down again, shaking his head.

“Hey, Hutch, it’s okay. I wish you had a bigger bed–” Starsky was rubbing his neck, turning his head, in illustration, “but never mind. Hey, where are those pancakes?” But the waitress wasn’t in sight.

“In the mail,” said Hutchinson. Starsky had ordered the French ones, fake crepes, and turned with a face of such pure and comic outrage that Hutchinson couldn’t help but laugh. “Air mail, air mail, keep your shirt on,” he said.

“They’ll be cold,” Starsky groused. “And what are they doing with your stuff, laying the eggs fresh? Digging the potatoes?”

Hutchinson wouldn’t have thought Starsky would know how potatoes were harvested, not that it mattered. “Planting them,” he said, and won a little snort from Starsky. “Pal.” That got Starsky’s attention. “Thanks.”

Starsky didn’t ask what Hutchinson was thanking him for. Hutchinson couldn’t have said, there were so many things mixing in his mind by now, so it was a good thing Starsky knew.

Later the same afternoon they were down at the park playing basketball with Colby. He was energized and grinning–his date must have gone well. Hutchinson hooked the ball away from him in mid-dribble and ran for the other end of the court for the sheer hell of it, Starsky yelling behind him as the other two followed. It felt good to run just for the sake of free movement, to play because the sun was out and they enjoyed it, without any of the verbal sniping he knew he did too much of himself. He whooped as he tried a jump shot, and laughed when it skirted the rim and bounced right into Starsky’s hands. Starsky just held it a moment, and then dribbled into Hutchinson’s guard, dodging his outstretched arms and saying something not really audible, though “buddy” and “hoop” were in it somewhere. They danced back and forth and then their legs collided and must have hit the ball, which bounced sideways and Colby went after it, and then they were off down the court again. Starsky could run like a bat out of hell when he tried, and he reached the other end before Colby. Now it was Starsky guarding and Colby weaving back and forth, and Hutchinson paused to watch, breathing hard.

A movement at the edge of the court caught his eye and he saw an older man sliding along a bench. He was rumpled and unshaven, and after only a second or two Hutchinson was sure he was either drunk or very hung over. He leaned toward another, white-haired man in a tidy suit, whom Hutchinson had noticed watching them earlier, and the white-haired man stood up and said something, and then walked away. Then the whirlwind of Starsky and Colby swept near Hutchinson again, and he ran after them, forgetting the two old men.

They played until they practically couldn’t stagger, and then sank onto a bench and waved a group of teenaged boys onto the court. Starsky bounced the ball between his legs and Colby leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rubbed his face. Hutchinson leaned back and stretched one arm along the top of the bench. “That was fun,” he said, and patted Colby between the shoulder-blades. For once John didn’t pull away or even stiffen up. Maybe his father had patted his back.

“Oh, man, oh man,” Colby said. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah,” said Starsky. “Let’s not wait so long again, maybe we’ll even make some baskets.”

“Yeah, that was embarrassing,” Hutchinson said, completely without embarrassment.

They watched the boys play for some time. There were five of them, trying some Harlem Globetrotter moves that, frankly, weren’t working, but Hutchinson saw that the boys were having as much fun as he’d just had and that was the entertaining part.

Then they strolled through the park for a while, keeping their muscles loose and watching girls and roller-skaters and a busker with an out-of-tune guitar. It was while they were hearing the end of that song that Hutchinson felt rather than saw Colby jerk beside him. He turned and found the old drunk with his hand on Colby’s arm.

“–few dollars?” the man was saying in a rasping voice.

Colby was like stone. Hutchinson said to the drunk, “No, man, go on,” but the old man was staring into Colby’s blank face.

Suddenly the drunk began to laugh, a choking, painful sound, and gasped, “It is! It is me!” and Colby wrenched back, took one step, two, and bumped into Starsky, who held his arms and said, “John?”

Colby opened his mouth and nothing came out. He pulled violently away from Starsky, dug in his back pocket and threw his wallet at the old man, who was still making that terrible sound. Then he turned and bolted. Starsky looked at Hutchinson and then went after Colby. Turning back to the man, Hutchinson saw him bending stiffly for the wallet, and beat him to it. He tapped the curved leather against his other palm and said, “Suppose you tell me what’s going on.”

“Gimme, son, gimme that.”

“Nope, tell me what this is all about.”

“He gave it to me. It’s mine.” The man lunged for the wallet but Hutchinson held it away, evading the shaking hands easily. “Come on, what’s the matter with you? Can’t a boy give his own father money without–”

“His father? You’re his father?”

The old man grinned weakly and dropped his hands. Hutchinson stared, trying to trace his friend’s sharp features in this ruined face, but really it was John’s own reaction that made the claim believable. Slowly, thinking hard, Hutchinson opened the wallet in his hands and pulled out the money. He gave the man the largest bill, a fifty, but couldn’t bring himself to clean John out completely, much less leave this wreck of a man with his son’s driver’s license and gas card and everything. Stuffing the wallet and the other cash in his own pocket, Hutchinson said, “Look, where are you staying? Anywhere?”

“Mission,” said the man.

“Which one?”

“Uh, Malley Street.”

Hutchinson nodded, though he didn’t know where it was. “Okay. Don’t drink it all at once. He’ll want to talk to you.”

The man laughed again. “You think so?”

Hutchinson couldn’t answer. The man turned and walked unsteadily away, in the opposite direction from the one Colby had gone.

When Hutchinson found the other two, Colby was sitting on a large rock at a fork in the path, and Starsky was crouched in front of him, forearms braced on his knees but hands hanging. Colby sat so straight he seemed to be leaning backward and his arms were folded; he was looking down at Starsky with a face so shuttered it could have meant anything. Hutchinson walked up carefully.

“And that was the last time?” Starsky was saying. “Three years ago?”

“Until today,” Colby’s voice grated on the words. “Surprise. Trick or treat. Jesus.”

“I’ve got your wallet, John,” Hutchinson said as calmly as he could.

“Anything left in it?”

Hutchinson took out the handful of stuff, put the bills back into the leather pocket and handed it back to Colby, who looked bemused.

“I gave him fifty,” said Hutchinson.

“He’ll be drunk for two weeks,” Colby answered. He put the wallet away, rubbed his face absently, then looked back up at Hutchinson. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, John.”

Colby shook his head. “Sorry you saw him. Sorry you know.”

“John,” Hutchinson said; his hand hovered above the man’s shoulder and then he thought hell with it and grasped the sharp bone, the not-quite-shaking flesh. “It doesn’t matter. Not to us. Except because it matters to you.”

Starsky leaned forward and took Colby’s arm above the wrist; his fingers tightened visibly. “You’re the same,” he said.

Colby didn’t respond, but he didn’t pull away either. They all held still for what seemed a long time. “He,” Colby said slowly, “when he was gone, I remembered him, I felt … but now I have seen him it’s like he’s dead. It wasn’t him at all, that’s what it’s like, isn’t that crazy?”

“No,” said Starsky.

“He was in the Army too,” said Colby, focusing on Starsky’s face. “Occupation.”

“Yeah?”

Colby just stared for a while. “Yeah,” he said so much later that it didn’t seem an answer. And then, after another long pause, “It made a man out of him. He always said.”

If there was a response to that, Hutchinson didn’t know it, and it seemed Starsky didn’t either.

~~~

It was a long evening with Colby. Anything else with a similarly devastating emotional effect, and Hutchinson would have thought getting drunk would help, but as alcohol was the problem, in a way, there wasn’t much any of them could do but tough it out. They walked more in the park, talking a little; they played more basketball, though the fun had gone out of it; they went to the beach and horsed around, wrestling in the sand as the sun set, but eventually it got too dark. They went back to Colby’s place. He opened all the windows, letting in the traffic sounds and surprisingly clear fragments of conversation from passersby, and moved the chairs around to make room for a card table; they played a few hands of poker, but none of them could really keep track of the game. Colby boasted about his date. Starsky and Hutchinson played along with reminiscences of sex they’d had with women. At one point Hutchinson blurted out the half-address he’d gotten from John’s father, and nothing would do but that they track down exactly where it was. The Yellow Pages didn’t seem to list it, so they ended up calling the operator, and when Colby yelled at her, Starsky took the phone and flattered her back into a helpful mood.

“What are you going to do with the street address when you get it, Colby?” Hutchinson asked, disgusted more with himself than with John.

“I … I’ll decide when I have it,” Colby admitted.

“What options are you considering?”

“I don’t know!”

“Lay off him, Hutch,” said Starsky, wearily, hand covering the phone.

“I just want to know … ” Hutchinson broke off. He was tired too. “That I didn’t make a mistake, telling you.”

Colby seemed to really see him, Hutchinson, a person separate from himself, for the first time in hours. “No,” he said, “a man ought to know where his father lives, at least. It was the right thing to do.” A small smile on the small mouth. “I know that matters to you. Doing the right thing.”

“Doesn’t it to you, John?”

A long pause. Someone laughed outside somewhere, and a motorcycle went by. “Don’t think we’d always agree. What the right thing is.”

“Maybe not,” Hutchinson said.

Starsky tucked the phone tight under his chin and began to write something down. “Uh-huh, yes–what a sweetheart you are! Thank you. Now, one more thing, Nessa honey …. ” His voice dropped even further and his lips were almost on the surface of the phone.

There was a reason Starsky had dates when the other two didn’t, Hutchinson reflected irrelevantly, and it had nothing to do with that card game of his.

“Hutch,” said Colby. “What if, I mean, if I …. ”

“What is it, John?”

“If he’s in town and I’m in town, I mean, I don’t know where my beat will be.” Colby’s hazel eyes were wide, but all Hutchinson could do was shrug. “Well,” said Colby, “could you arrest your own father?”

Hutchinson had a flash of his father in those unkempt clothes, on that park bench beside the basketball court, and he almost snorted, but coughed instead. And then again. He really needed not to give in just now to the weird images or irritations or snickers of fatigue. Starsky, who had hung up, came to perch on the arm of the chair Hutchinson was in, the strong solid thigh pushing his elbow into his lap, the warmth and scent of Starsky’s body suddenly all around him. No, he hadn’t needed that either.

“Frog in your throat?” asked Starsky, patting his back, and Hutchinson frowned at him, unsure whether he was flirting on purpose. But Starsky seemed not to notice anything. He leaned against Hutchinson’s shoulder and tore the bottom third off the paper he’d been writing on. “There,” he tilted crazily over the seat, low over Hutchinson’s knees, to give the larger piece to John, “the church-mission address for you,” and he folded the other and tucked it into his shirt pocket with a flourish, “and a pretty girl’s phone number for me.”

“How do you know she’s pretty?” Hutchinson asked before he could stop himself.

“Well, if she’s not I’ll just close my eyes and listen. She’s got this great, sexy voice, I’ll tell you.”

“Didn’t notice,” said Colby dully.

“Didn’t think you had,” Starsky answered, and though the words were flippant the tone was gentle.

Hutchinson didn’t know whether it was somehow the very distraction of Starsky’s nearness or Starsky’s own compassionate focus on Colby, but now it was easy to say without backtalk from his imagination, “John’s worried that sooner or later he’ll run into his father once he’s on the force.” He watched Starsky take it in, think it through.

“What are you gonna do if that happens?” Starsky asked, direct as ever.

“I don’t know,” said Colby, as he had about the address.

“Yes, you do,” said Starsky. “Think. You’d be there, your partner would be there, your dad … ” even Starsky’s fearless honesty had limits, Hutchinson saw as he paused.

“It’d be ugly,” Hutchinson took the ball. “But if you had to arrest him you’d do it.”

“You’re so sure,” Colby said. “I’m not.”

“Well, what’s the alternative?” Starsky asked. “You gonna bug out? Drop out?”

“Maybe,” and Colby’s voice was desperate.

“Don’t,” Hutchinson said, “decide now. Okay? Really, John. Don’t. It’s been a long day, everything’s running in your head, you haven’t had any time.” There was a long pause, and Colby wasn’t looking at either of them. “Get some sleep.” Hutchinson’s eyelids burned, just thinking about sleep. “We all need it.”

“Yeah.” Colby still wasn’t looking anywhere but the carpet.

After a minute, Hutchinson sat back in the chair, leaned his head into the cushion. Starsky propped an elbow beside Hutchinson’s ear and settled in himself. John folded his arms across his knees. Again they sat.

A horn sounded through the window. A car door opened, and the radio playing inside sounded for a moment as if it were on the windowsill. “Come on!” shouted a young man’s voice. “Come on, man, move that ass of yours!” The car door slammed. “Fuckin’ jerk,” said the youngster, evidently not realizing how the sound carried.

Starsky suddenly yawned, which made Hutchinson do the same, and then Colby. “What time is it?” asked Starsky afterward.

Hutchinson reached for the dark-haired wrist hovering near his face, turned it so he could see the watch. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t that late: 11:34 or so. Without speaking, he pulled the wrist into Starsky’s own line of sight. This dislodged his elbow and Starsky nearly fell, then sat up straight, pulling his wrist out of Hutchinson’s hand. “Yeah, all right,” he said, and looked at the watch.

“So what time is it?” Colby asked.

“Gettin’ on for midnight.”

“Oh.” Colby rubbed his face, chin to forehead and down again, then stood up. “Guys, you know, I don’t need babysitting. You’re bushed, and I want to crash too. Okay? Tomorrow? Whatever?”

So they got up too. “Sure,” said Hutchinson, not feeling sure at all.

Starsky gripped Colby’s arm. “Have a good night,” he said. “You need anything, just call.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He saw them to the door, and when Hutchinson looked back, Colby was still standing there, watching them walk down the hallway. Hutchinson didn’t quite like the look of that but was too tired to think why.

In the elevator, Starsky stroked up and down Hutchinson’s arm. “You’re about dead, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t you?”

Starsky shrugged, gazing full into Hutchinson’s eyes. “Those baby blues look like the Fourth of July right now,” he said, and patted Hutchinson’s cheek. “Here I thought you got some sleep. You snored enough.”

“Maybe that’s it. I don’t usually. Snore.” He put an arm around his friend’s shoulders, and squeezed. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, what I’d like to do–” The elevator opened on the first floor. They separated, crossed the empty little lobby, and went out the doors onto the street. Hutchinson’s car was around the corner, but Starsky had snagged a parking space right in front of the entrance. They walked the few steps to stand beside the car. “What I’d like to do,” Starsky repeated, “is take you home and see you in a bed that isn’t stuffed with rocks and the size of a bucket seat.”

“Starsk, I’m beat. It’ll be all I can do to drive.” Hutchinson cupped the back of Starsky’s neck in one hand, rubbed the tendons. “But thanks. You’re just taking care of everybody today, aren’t you?”

Starsky looked down, embarrassed, which made Hutchinson grin. “Yeah, well,” Starsky’s voice was gruff, “I ain’t no plaster saint, don’t forget it.”

Hutchinson thought of Starsky in the dark of the previous night, above him, all his muscles taut and his neck stretched out, moaning. “I think I’ll remember,” he said, and Starsky lifted his chin with a look that said he knew exactly what Hutchinson remembered.

“I hate,” he said, “the way we keep endin’ up puttin’ it off.”

“I didn’t notice any ill effects last night,” said Hutchinson wickedly. “Maybe putting off isn’t so bad. Anyway,” he sobered somewhat, “you’ve got the pretty girl’s number.”

Starsky moved in still closer. “Now don’t start,” he said. “This isn’t that. You’re my buddy.”

Fuck-buddy, Hutchinson thought, but this was a dangerous conversation anyway, right here on the street. He lowered his hand to his side. “Yeah,” he said, because he did agree this wasn’t really a love affair, and because his head was foggy with fatigue again and he just wanted to get into a bed, any bed, and sleep. “Yeah, maybe we’ll double date sometime.”

Starsky slapped his shoulder, not hard, but it startled him, and Starsky huffed with amusement. “You are out,” he said. “Go home. I’ll give y’a call.”

“Yeah. Okay. Good night.” Hutchinson walked off. Above him somewhere the sash of a window banged as it closed. He got into his car and rolled the window all the way down, turned on the radio and cranked up the volume. Once he was driving it was okay. But when he got home he didn’t even turn on the light, stripped and fell into bed almost without noticing the faint, lingering smell of sex in the room.

~~~

On Monday, John Colby went missing, and a pod person using the same name replaced him. At least that was how it felt to Hutchinson. The man he saw in the morning class, with John’s face and body, didn’t have John’s movements, or even quite the same eyes. The way he stood made him look like a random assembly of body parts. Awkward. Awkward at everything. And not seeming to care about it, which also wasn’t Colby-like at all.

“Is it just me, or is Colby weird today?” Starsky asked while they were in line for lunch.

“It’s not just you.” Hutchinson, turning to answer, saw Colby greet someone near the end of the line, gesturing, much more like himself. “Maybe it’s just you and me.”

Starsky looked over his shoulder, then back at Hutchinson. “Oh. Well.” He shrugged. “Okay. Hey, buddy, move up.”

Hutchinson closed the gap in the line and picked up a tray, handed it to Starsky, picked up another one for himself. “What do you think is going on?”

Starsky was shaking the tray to one side. “I think they’re not letting the dishwasher stuff dry long enough,” he said.

“No, dummy,” said Hutchinson, “I mean with Colby. You want a soup spoon?”

“No.” Starsky took the silverware Hutchinson gave him. “Hutch, you ever have to tell a secret you really didn’t want to? I mean the kind a person has never told another person, and they really don’t want the other person to know, but they found out and there’s like nothing they can do about the other–”

“Stop,” said Hutchinson, picking up a little bowl of green beans and another of creamed corn. “I think I get it, but the more you talk the more confused I am.”

“Those beans look gross.”

“So leave them.”

“Creamed corn is grosser.”

“Starsky,” Hutchinson said, irritated, “Your mother isn’t here. You can go without a vegetable if you don’t like any of them. What are you playing at?”

Starsky didn’t answer. Hutchinson looked back again and found the dark head bent over his tray, contemplating a dish of ‘new’ potatoes that seemed pretty old and dry. But no potatoes deserved that expression, a suppressed amusement that dented Starsky’s cheeks and quirked his eyebrows, a warmth as intense as the lights and hot-water tables.

The only person on earth who flirts with cafeteria food, Hutchinson thought. Then Starsky looked up, and it wasn’t the potatoes he was flirting with. He took a step toward Hutchinson, who didn’t stir, waiting for him.

“Move up, Hutch,” Starsky said. “You’re holding up the whole line.”

A down side. A definite down side. Need to work on that. Hutchinson picked up an entree without really registering what it was, and found himself at a table with a plate full of turkey roll a little dry at the edges, congealing brown gravy, and some rather grayish and gravelly-looking stuffing. Starsky began to eat from a twin plate, ravenously. Hutchinson pushed some stuffing out of the gravy with his fork and examined it. “Okay, I got the secret part,” he said, “but the reaction still seems pretty extreme.”

Starsky shrugged. Kept eating for a few seconds. Then said, “You really never had that happen to you.”

Presuming it was a question, Hutchinson answered honestly. “Not anything important. Not a lot of people knew me that well.” Nobody, if he’d been completely honest. Nobody but the man across this table knew both the surface and the secrets; he’d never told anyone something about himself–like the rented-room story–simply because he felt he owed them the knowledge.

Nobody else would have simply known the part he hadn’t said, the way Starsky seemed to now, if his blinding smile was anything to go by.

“You have? Had that happen?” Hutchinson thought he knew but asked anyway.

“Yeah.” The smile faded. “Seen it too. Don’ know what to do this time, though.”

Hutchinson thought about it. “Nothing, I guess. Ignore it. Maybe he’ll get over it.”

“Maybe.”

Afterwards, Hutchinson would often wonder whether Colby would have gotten over it if they hadn’t been paired for defensive tactics that afternoon. Hutchinson was playing the perp, with a rubber-bladed knife, and Colby the cop. Aware of his greater weight and longer reach, Hutchinson groaned inside, but there was nothing to do but smile at John and hope it wouldn’t go too badly.

They circled each other on one exercise mat while their classmates did the same on others around the gym. Hutchinson feinted with the knife and Colby dodged it. Then Colby kicked at Hutchinson’s knee and missed by less than an inch. Jumping back created momentum that Hutchinson couldn’t instantly alter–Colby’s own momentum was on his side as he drove one fist into Hutchinson’s stomach and followed up with another aimed at his jaw. Hutchinson batted that one away with the knuckles of his knife hand and swung his own left but made only glancing contact. Then they were suddenly a yard apart, moving around each other again.

“Remember the knife! Focus on the knife!” Sergeant Gower was shouting on the other side of the room.

Hutchinson took this to heart although it hadn’t been meant for him. He moved the knife in a circle in front of him, as if drawing a shield in the air, and Colby was looking at the rubber tip.

When it was farthest to one side–in fact, farther than on previous circles, drawing Colby’s eye away–Hutchinson struck out with his left hand and Colby reacted too late, stumbling back, falling onto one elbow as he twisted away from the rubber blade. Hutchinson stabbed down at the unprotected stomach, but Colby reached out and grabbed his wrist, pulling him down where they rolled and grappled for the knife.

Colby clawed it out of Hutchinson’s hand and threw it savagely away, but Hutchinson wasn’t done yet. They wrestled and punched their way to the edge of the mat, and suddenly Colby lay flat on his back with his head on the hardwood gym floor, Hutchinson pinning him down to the mat, one knee on John’s thigh, shin holding down both legs, and Hutchinson’s hands clamped above Colby’s elbows. Hutchinson could see the toy knife not two feet away from Colby’s left shoulder.

“Colby, you’re dead!” Gower was nearer now, on his way to them.

Colby glared for a moment, and then his expression shifted in a way Hutchinson didn’t understand. “You got me,” he said, and relaxed, head to toe, arms dropping and the muscles of his thighs and neck slackening. Even his mouth softened, and he stared hard at Hutchinson as if to say something with his silence that he had no words for.

Hutchinson recoiled so violently that he found himself on his feet while John still lay on the floor and before Hutchinson consciously knew what he’d seen.

And John lay without moving except to turn his face half away, until Gower was beside their mat, saying, “Come on, what are you doing? Get up.” Then Colby slapped the mat with both hands, bounced upright and stalked off.

The sergeant raised an eyebrow at Hutchinson, who shrugged, and then said with some reluctance, “Let me go after him.” The older man nodded.

Colby wasn’t in the locker room, or the showers, or the men’s room. Hutchinson stood in the hallway trying to think of the next most likely place when a movement caught the corner of his eye, and when he looked again he saw a blurred shape cross the frosted window on the left of the front doors.

He was at the right-hand door in a moment and pushed down on the long bar handle with both hands, slowly, almost hoping to catch Colby, or whoever it was, off-guard. But of course that was impossible, as the latch proved with a sudden, loud kachock!–so Hutchinson simply pushed the door open and stepped out.

Colby was leaning against the wall watching the door, but when he saw Hutchinson he looked out into the street. He had been smoking, and now his right hand held the cigarette at about waist height and his other hand rested in the bend of his arm.

Hutchinson had no idea what to say.

He found himself wanting to ask for a smoke, though he hadn’t had one since his sophomore year in college and didn’t even like the smell any more.

Colby took a drag on his cigarette and looked at Hutchinson, his expression tough and blank and untrue. And then that pod-person stare was turned back out at the street.

“You left class,” Hutchinson said, knowing it was a stupid remark.

“I don’t think,” said Colby, “that I’ll be able to do this any more.”

“No, John?”

“‘No, John’?” Colby stepped away from the wall, throwing the cigarette away as if it had been the rubber knife, suddenly furious. “‘No, John‘? What do you fucking want from me, Hutch?”

A little consistency would be pleasant, Hutchinson thought, a little more sanity. No fucking, definitely not. He searched for more acceptable words, but could only echo, “What do I want?”

Kachock! The door behind him opened and Starsky stepped out.

“Oh, fine, there’s the other one.” Colby sneered. Starsky glanced at Hutchinson, who could only shrug. Colby went on, “You guys are goddamn Siamese twins. The same person. Starskyhutch. Hutcharsky. Husky and Starch. You have no. Fucking. Idea. What it’s like.”

He seemed suddenly out of energy, like a balloon that had deflated with a screech and was now empty. The other two waited for several seconds as if to make sure no more explosions were imminent. Then Starsky said, “I’m comin’ in late here. Care to tell me what it’s about? What’s the trouble, John?”

“Still taking care of everyone, Starsky? Decided to try for that plaster-saint status?” Colby asked, voice low and deadly.

Hutchinson looked at Starsky. Oh, buddy, here’s the real down side. Starsky’s face was still, calm, blank. So it was to take that look away, to give his friend time, that Hutchinson said to Colby, “I heard your window close. I didn’t realize it was yours.”

“Whatcha gonna do about it, Colby?” Trust Starsky to cut to the chase. Draw a line and dare.

“What can I do about it?” Colby asked. “I’m not a shrink.”

A wave of outrage hit Hutchinson with such force that he didn’t even notice he had taken a step forward until he felt Starsky’s hand on his arm stopping him. And then he wanted, badly, to say, Shrink, John? Was that a little aversion therapy you were trying out in the gym just now? And it worked so well you ran clear out here? And I need a shrink, Starsky needs one? The words filled his throat, and he knew that if he spoke them he wouldn’t stop at words. His jaw was clenched so hard it hurt. Starsky’s grip was going to leave a bruise.

And yet Starsky’s voice, when he spoke, was as calm as ever, the words for him as much as for Colby. “John’s telling us that he’s not going to do anything. That he’s still our friend. Hear me?”

Hutchinson nodded, because he had heard, though he didn’t interpret it the way Starsky apparently did. Colby didn’t say anything, but on his face was the baffled apprehension of a child–he was having one of those moments when he looked perhaps twelve years old and overwhelmed by the world. Hutchinson felt his breathing calm and his jaw and fists relax; he saw Colby and the wall and the pavement and the street more clearly, and he wondered whether Colby had any idea how disarming that expression was.

Probably, he thought, still angry enough to be uncharitable.

“Okay,” said Starsky, “now what?”

Nobody seemed to have any ideas for a minute or so. Then Colby shifted his weight from one foot to the other, dug in his pocket for his cigarette pack, and probed in it with one finger. It was apparently empty, because he crunched it into a ball and rolled it between his hands. “Well,” he said as if driven to it by the lack of cigarettes, “you guys can go back in there and go on training to be the perfect cops. And I should find somebody to do the paperwork I need to get the hell out of it.”

It was a pity. Hutchinson thought of better times, of Colby on the gun-range and in the classroom, of the three of them shooting the breeze or playing basketball. “You’re sure,” he said.

Colby looked at him, startled. “Yeah.” He kept looking, and Hutchinson returned the gaze. Whatever weird fugue Colby had been in before seemed to be over.

“Okay,” Hutchinson said, and he meant that he forgave Colby both the half-assed come-on and the shrink comment.

And for once, Colby seemed to understand the way Starsky would–the way Starsky did, Hutchinson knew by the new touch on his arm, the same spot but now just a brief, warm clasp. Starsky reached out for Colby too, and tapped his shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger.”

“At least,” Hutchinson joked, “don’t be much stranger,” and Colby actually grinned. They went inside together, this one last time.

~~~

It felt strange, to come to the end of the day and not have Colby around to ask for his evening plans. And it was even stranger the next day, to find themselves unconsciously leaving space for him at tables and desks and lockers, wherever they went. And of course their classmates left the seats and desks empty too; they didn’t even know there was any reason not to. For the rest of the week, Hutchinson and Starsky told people. Over and over. Yes, John dropped out. Personal reasons. His decision. Yes, a pity. He was going to be a good cop. Sometimes it’s that way. We’ll tell him you said so. Yes, it was sudden. Colby? He’s not coming back. We’re sorry too.

“Where’s that other guy?” asked the waitress at the bar and grill where they’d played pool, and Starsky folded his arms on the table and dropped his head down onto them, hiding from the question.

It wasn’t the waitress’ fault they’d answered it a million times already. “Don’t mind him,” said Hutchinson to the puzzled woman. “He gets non-verbal when he’s hungry. In fact, we’d better hurry and get food into him. You don’t want to hear him once he gets to the growling stage.”

Starsky shook his head without raising it from his arms, rubbing his forehead against his sleeve.

“Growling, huh?” The waitress looked speculatively at Starsky as Hutchinson gave their order. He only hoped she could remember it: she certainly hadn’t written any of it down.

When she was gone, Starsky lifted his head, glaring at Hutchinson. “Wha’d you have to say that for? Made me sound like some kinda animal.”

“Actually, I think you’ve got a conquest there, buddy. She thought it was sexy.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t be the only one, either.” Hutchinson leaned his head back against the side of the booth, let his eyes close. “Maybe you should practice it.”

Starsky was silent long enough for Hutchinson to open his eyes again, a little worried. He met a level dark-blue stare, chin tucked slightly down, the black lashes somehow more noticeable under the lowered brows, the face hard and intent. Starsky lifted his upper lip just enough for Hutchinson to see the tips of his teeth. “Grrrrrr.”

Hutchinson swallowed. Yeah, that works. But he didn’t want to admit it. At least, not right away.

He wondered whether he’d ever get to start anything with Starsky. The other man was so quick to flirt, and lived so dangerously, that Hutchinson felt outclassed, and was surprised to realize how little he liked that. I’ll have to win at other things, he thought, and found himself asking after the food arrived, “Want to play darts after?” There was a board at one end of the bar, and he could see it from where he sat.

“Sure,” answered Starsky, surprise in his voice. “Thought we were here for pool.”

“No,” Hutchinson said, not liking that symbolism though he couldn’t have said why.

“You still owe me a game,” Starsky said, though it sounded like he was just explaining.

“Later,” said Hutchinson.

“Okay.” Starsky grinned. “‘Til you brush up, huh?”

“Very funny.”

They ate and then started the game. Hutchinson fingered one of the darts and thought of symbols, and when Starsky said “Hey, weren’t you watching? Your turn,” Hutchinson looked up to find another patented Starsky look fixed on him. “Whatcha doin’ with that dart? What’re ya thinking so hard about?”

It was so rare for either of them to have to ask that. “Sometimes,” Hutchinson said, covering, “a dart is only a dart.”

“Huh?” asked Starsky, and Hutchinson realized that was a tell-to-Colby joke.

He opened his mouth to say ‘Sorry,’ and instead heard his own voice: “Starsk, I don’t really want to do this either.”

“I made a good score,” Starsky protested. Hutchinson glanced over but didn’t really take in the positions of the darts. After a moment, Starsky said, “Oh, well, okay. Then what?”

Hutchinson looked at his watch and found it was barely 6:30. So he suggested, “It’s still light, want to shoot some baskets? Still got the ball in your car?”

“Yeah,” Starsky said to both questions.

They went down to the same court they’d played on with Colby. Hutchinson scoped out the benches and surrounding area, but there was nobody but a skinny girl with braids and a spotted dog, chasing a tennis ball.

“This was easy,” Hutchinson said, as they walked onto the empty court.

“Yeah,” said Starsky, bouncing the ball, “but it stops … ” now he was definitely dribbling, ” … being … easy ….” and now he was on the way to the near-end basket and Hutchinson grasped that the game had already begun, and ran after him, “… right …” and Hutchinson got between Starsky and the basket but just barely, as Starsky lifted the ball to shoot, “… now!”

Hutchinson’s hand struck the ball a glancing blow in the air, sending it sideways, and they both went after it. Starsky turned his head toward Hutchinson, who was bending to dive past him, and Starsky’s foot grazed the ball, which bounced in a new direction. Both their hands were stretched out for it, but now Hutchinson was closer and scooped it to him in mid-air.

Now he was dribbling and turning in place as Starsky circled him. “Run harder.” Hutchinson grinned as he said it and, looking back, caught a flash of Starsky’s teeth; then Starsky vanished–Hutchinson just had time to realize where he’d gone and turn his head when Starsky’s hand rapped hard against the ball and then Hutchinson was chasing him.

Starsky shot again, Hutchinson’s hand over his head but not close enough, and the ball went up and down in a sweet arc. “Hah!” Starsky cried as it went through the hoop. And was right where he needed to be to catch it.

This was not at all how Hutchinson had imagined the game would go. Now Starsky was the one turning, back bent protectively, and Hutchinson circled, watching the ball over Starsky’s shoulder and bumped softly over and over by Starsky’s ass.

“Foul, foul,” said Starsky.

“How can anybody stay out of the way?” asked Hutchinson as he tried reversing direction, just got another bump for his efforts, and dodged the other way again. “Y’damn ass’s all over the court.”

“Hardly,” Starsky gasped, darting to one side, but Hutchinson reached a long arm around the other and hit the ball.

“Hah!” and Hutchinson dribbled back to the hoop. He wanted badly to make a good clear shot. He focused so hard he felt his vision tunnel, lifted the ball, let it go … it seemed to fly in slow motion, up, pausing impossibly at the top of the arc, down … it struck the rim and Hutchinson thought, oh no. Then it sat for a second, balanced on the thin metal, then wobbled, then dropped. Through.

Starsky caught it. “Come on, Hutch, don’t just stand there, we’re tied!” He dribbled around Hutchinson, within reach, and as Hutchinson turned he saw that the girl and her dog were out of sight. No one was nearby.

Starsky spun away to face the hoop and Hutchinson grabbed his hips and pulled him back, off balance, into the curve of Hutchinson’s body. The ball bounced away and Hutchinson said into Starsky’s ear, “Don’t just stand here?”

“‘S what I said.” Starsky was breathless.

Hutchinson smiled: he didn’t think it was the basketball that had affected Starsky’s breathing, but to make sure he turned his face farther into Starsky’s hair and said, “I think this is a foul,” right into Starsky’s ear. “What’s the penalty?” His nose was nudging cartilage and his lungs were filled with the smell of Starsky’s sweat-damp hair.

And then an elbow jabbed hard under his ribs and Starsky was a yard away, facing him, as dangerous as Hutchinson had yet seen him. “You–” he said, eyes steely even while his cock bulged in his jeans. “You’ve been jerking me around since we left the Academy today. You will, you won’t, you’ll play, you’ll stop, hot and cold …. don’t know what the fuck’s your problem but you’re not working it out on my back.” Hutchinson’s eyes flicked down his body again–yes, still hard–and Starsky tilted his head and glared harder. “You with me?” Starsky’s hands grasped his waistband as if to adjust his pants and then, instead, made fists and rested on his hips. “Okay. I’m going home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Starsky,” Hutchinson began, with no idea of what to say next.

Starsky had already turned away, and didn’t look back. “Tomorrow, Hutch. We’re still goin’ to the game.” He bent to pick up the basketball and Hutchinson gazed at his strong legs and round ass and wondered how badly he had messed this up. He stood very still as Starsky walked off the court.

~~~

Hutchinson left the basketball court not quite knowing what to do next. It wasn’t like he was stranded at the park; he’d brought his own car. Not physically stranded.

Stupid to feel like he had nowhere to go. He dug his hands in his pockets and watched his feet walking. The asphalt of the court, the concrete of the curb, gravel, grass, more asphalt passed under the toes of his shoes. He heard the remote sounds of kids playing, a dog barking, cars driving. Some sort of music, a note here and there, so scattered by distance that Hutchinson didn’t know what the instrument was. If he concentrated, he could hear the surf a little. Wind. His own footsteps–his breathing.

A bench registered in his peripheral vision and he stopped and looked at it. Then sat on it.

In front of him, across the path he’d been walking on, was a dip in the ground, a hollow where the park landscapers had planted bushes and flowerbeds and scattered picnic tables and grills. Nobody was there but a seagull trying to pull something through the mesh of a wire trash basket. Still, the view was pleasant, and Hutchinson sat gazing at it for a while. Petunias and zinnias made yellow and purple and red and white lines. Long shadows fell across the picnic tables. The seagull flapped its wings in frustration, twisting its head one way and then the other.

The bench jumped under him and, jarred, he looked over to find an old man sitting on the other end, rubbing his hands and glancing nervously at Hutchinson and then away, back at him, away again. It was John’s father.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Hutchinson said.

Old Colby passed both hands over his face and made a harsh sound that Hutchinson thought was probably laughter. “You’re the, the guy who took my wallet.”

“Interesting way to put that.” Hutchinson watched the man fidget. He stroked one forearm, then his shoulder, then his cheek. Next he rubbed his knees; he pulled his ear; he smoothed his hair. “Gonna call a cop about it?”

“I thought you were a cop,” the man answered. “Johnny said.”

“Getting there. So you’ve spoken to John?”

The older Colby’s eyes narrowed. “You’re the one told him where I was.”

“Yeah.” There was no point in telling the old man about John’s misgivings or Hutchinson’s own doubts that John would ever use the address.

“He came,” said the old man, “he came looking for me. He took me out to lunch. He said to the waiter, ‘This is my dad.'” Colby shook his head, smiling, but still rubbing the back of one hand and darting his eyes everywhere.

“He wants to know you,” Hutchinson said gently.

“Yeah, he asked me alla these questions. ‘Bout when I was young. And he told me. About you guys, you and the other one, his friends.”

Hutchinson shook his head, not sure how he felt about the picture of that lunch in his imagination.

“You’re gonna be cops,” the old man said, mostly to himself, “and he’s gonna be a Marine.”

“Really?” Hutchinson knew that was a foolish response but didn’t have a better one.

“Yeah. My boy. A Marine.” John’s father sounded like he was convincing himself, and he scratched the back of his head, rubbed his neck, reached under his shirt collar to scratch some more. Hutchinson looked away, to the picnic area, where the seagull suddenly gave up its struggle with the trash, screeched, and flew away.

For some reason that was the last straw. Hutchinson stood up in a rush.

“Hey,” said the old man. When Hutchinson looked around, Colby was hanging onto the edge of the bench as if he’d almost been dumped off.

“Sorry. I’ve got to go.” Hutchinson extended his hand, and John’s father put his ropy, unsteady one in it as though he hardly remembered how this ritual was performed. They shook, and Hutchinson turned away, fairly sure he wouldn’t see the old man again.

When he got back to his room, he called Minnesota, something he hadn’t done for weeks.

“Mom?” He hardly needed to ask: his father rarely answered the phone.

“Kenny! Um, Ken. Hello. It’s good to hear from you.”

He’d made such a fuss about his nickname as a teen; now that he didn’t care, had realized that when he was eighty his mother would still call him Kenny if she were alive to do so, it was too late to get her to stop correcting herself. If she could, or even would, stop. Hutchinson had never figured out whether the correction was honestly a habit. “How are you, Mom?”

“I’m good, I’m good. You nicked the nick o’ time, sweetie–I’m just going on a trip tomorrow. There’s a weaving seminar in Madison, beautiful place, right on one of the lakes, and all week your sister Katie and I are going to weave up a storm.”

Katie was back in favor, then. “What’s she doing these days?” he asked. “Besides weaving?”

“She’s back home, didn’t I tell you?” A light laugh. “Oh, I guess it happened since the last time you called. It’s hard to keep track. Yes, she’s definitely moved out of St. Paul, and she’s looking around for a nice apartment.”

And a job, his mother didn’t say. He hoped for Katie’s sake she found one soon. “How’s Dad?” he ventured.

His mother’s voice was lower, almost conspiratorial. “Oh, about as well as can be expected. He’s taking his heart medicine, and I’m giving him the diet the doctor recommended. I hope he’s good while I’m gone. Renie’s going to come by and make dinner, you know, and clean house.”

“Irene?” he said, and then wished he could take it back. Not his arrangement, not his problem.

“Of course Irene, silly. Your sister. How many Renies do you know? She’s going to drop by on her way home from school.”

A good forty-five minute drive, he thought. After a long day teaching spoiled fourteen-year-olds at a private school. So she could make dinner for a grown-up who knew where the refrigerator and the stove were, and who even could cook fairly well. “It’s a complicated diet?”

“Not so bad. Low fat, you know, low salt, that kind of thing. I got some nice recipes. He said he liked what we had tonight.”

“That’s good, Mom,” he said, the memory of some past family meals making him gentle. “So you’re eating it too?”

“Oh, we all are. Katie too.”

Hutchinson smiled to think of his junk-food-loving baby sister eating his father’s diet. “Bet she loves that.”

“Well, you know, while she’s living here she’s got to follow our rules. She hasn’t actually complained.”

He could believe it.

“She and your father had such a nice day together yesterday. They looked for a car for her. She really has to have a new one. She can’t afford it now, but your Dad’s taking care of it until she gets a job.”

“So what kind of car is she looking for?”

“She’ll get a Ford. She was talking about one of those ugly little round German cars, but you know, Kenny, your father would never buy one of those.”

He didn’t remind her whose car it would eventually be. He hoped Katie could keep from mentioning it too. “It’s good of him to help her look,” he said dutifully.

“She’s his favorite child, always was.”

This, while usually untrue, was a familiar remark, so he didn’t reply. Instead, he asked, “So is Dad home?”

“Ah, well, Kenny–Ken,” she said, “he’s really busy. Doing some tax work. He’s just getting the papers all organized, so I hate to disturb him.”

“He’s doing tax work and he doesn’t want to talk to me? That’s a first.”

“In a few days, maybe.” She said it as though to console him. “He’ll have some questions about the trust fund.”

“Mom, come on, what can I tell him about that? I send him the paperwork as I get it.”

“It’s your money, Kenny.”

“It’s more his than mine. I haven’t spent a penny of it all year and you both know it.”

“It’s yours, sweetie.”

He took a deep breath, held it, then let it blow out his pursed lips, concentrating on the sensation. This kind of talk did no good. Never did any good. “Katie there? I’d like to say hello.”

“She’s gone out,” his mother said with the patience of one who thought going out was rather rude.

Hutchinson thought that Katie’s tenure as top child was not destined to be long this time. “Well, be sure to tell her I said hello. And Renie too, of course.”

Silence fell for a few seconds, and then his mother said, “Is that it, sweetie? Because I do have packing to do.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said. “Well, goodbye, Mom.”

“Love you, Kenny. Goodbye now.” She’d hung up before he had a chance to return the sentiment. He put the receiver into the cradle with exaggerated care and looked at it for a while. After that, he got out his old mail and searched through it to make sure he really didn’t have anything about the trust fund that he’d forgotten to send to his father.

Then he tried calling Starsky, still not knowing what he wanted to say, but the phone just rang and rang.

~~~

He felt a little shy when they met the next day, but Starsky clapped him on the shoulder as if nothing had happened, and handed him his ticket. They stood in line together to get into the Coliseum, talking about football. Starsky had played in high school, and had opinions about which of the Fearsome Foursome was really the most valuable player. Hutchinson, who chiefly thought of the Rams as the team that had mopped up the field with the Vikings the previous year, nodded and listened.

They had good seats and the game was absorbing–Hutchinson found himself pounding Starsky’s leg and grabbing the armrests or Starsky’s arm and shouting as if he’d been a Rams fan for years–but part of his mind kept coming back to the previous day. At half-time, Hutchinson finally asked one question, as they sat back down after a concessions run, arms full of beer cans and hot dogs and napkins and little bags of potato chips. “Called you last night,” his voice very casual, “what’d you end up doing?”

Starsky glanced over, then back to the food he was distributing across his lap and between his feet. “I went out with Nessa. Remember? The girl at directory assistance?”

“Yeah? She live up to her voice?”

“Oh yeah. Beautiful. You’d flip.”

Hutchinson looked out at the cheerleaders bouncing on the field, and briefly fantasized those ample breasts and round hips bouncing above him. Sex for fun. Sex because it felt good. Casual sex. Someone whose name he wasn’t sure of, whose face he wouldn’t remember. Just now the idea was appealing.

Starsky was saying something about meeting Nessa …. Hutchinson heard it belatedly, and turned to look into the nonchalant dark-blue eyes. “What, are you that serious already? Introducing her to your friends?”

“No, dummy, I think you’d like each other. She’s really more your kind of girl than mine.” Starsky shrugged. “Nice and all, but … I don’t know, a little full of herself for me.”

“Thanks,” said Hutchinson.

“She went to college, y’know, and now she’s going for some high-toned modeling or acting job.”

“Uh huh.” Hutchinson’s eyes were back on the field.

“Well, don’t fall all over yourself with enthusiasm.” Starsky sounded irritated. Hutchinson’s peripheral vision caught the force with which Starsky shoved his hot-dog into his mouth and gnawed it. Then they had to stand so some other people could get past their legs; Starsky left the hot dog hanging, dripping relish and catsup into the other food that he scooped up in both hands. Katie used to do that, Hutchinson remembered, in her tomboy youth when she never seemed to be the favored child.

When they sat down again, Hutchinson turned and took the hot dog out of Starsky’s mouth, looking for a second at the rosy length of meat streaked with condiments against the pale bun. “Treat this more gently,” he said, “you’re making me nervous.” With one finger, he brushed a crumb off the skin near Starsky’s lower lip. Glanced up at his eyes and then down again at his mouth.

“All right,” said Starsky, lips twitching into a smile, taking back the hot dog.

Hutchinson thought that, on the whole, it was all right.

~~~

Yes, he thought some time later, all right, nibbling at Starsky’s shoulder and then at a rib, sliding down his body to find the arch of muscle above his hip, the soft downslope of skin into pubic hair, the edge of his sac where Hutchinson pushed his tongue and dragged it along through wiry tangles, relishing the salt roughness and Starsky’s helpless sounds. He couldn’t get the whole mass into his mouth but he sucked in as much as he could, most of one testicle, and rubbed the middle of his tongue against it. The thigh under his cheek jerked and lifted, and his forehead bumped Starsky’s cock. “Hutch,” Starsky said clearly. Hutchinson petted the sides of Starsky’s ass, his flanks, reached around to stroke the other side of his sac and up the hot erect skin, just fingertips up to the swollen head. Starsky squirmed, his stomach hollowing and knees lifting. Hutchinson felt his hair grabbed, then pulled, and grunted around his mouthful. He did lift his head, met Starsky’s blurred gaze, and ducked down again to suck the other testicle, hands cupping the working buttocks.

The trick was to be now with Starsky. It wasn’t difficult, not at the moment, when he was so passionate and tasted so good. It had been easy at the football game, too, wandering from palling around to flirtation and back. This relationship was like being top child, a shifting position that was a little like a reward and a little like a gift of fate.

Hutchinson ran his lips up and down the gift of his fate, drank from its tip, brushed one cheekbone and then the other against it. Starsky’s fingers pushed in, pulled out of his hair. Hutchinson took his friend’s cock into his mouth and got serious about this blow job. Starsky rocked up to a sitting position, hands roving down and up Hutchinson’s back, grabbing and massaging and toying with the tufts of armpit hair exposed when Hutchinson wrapped both arms around his waist.

So good that Hutchinson thrust into the bedclothes and rubbed his head against Starsky’s stomach and made wordless noises of his own. So good that it no longer mattered where Starsky spent the rest of his nights. Or where Hutchinson did. Now they were together, and there was no room in Starsky’s bed for the future or the past.

Starsky leaned back, bracing his arms against the mattress, and Hutchinson got his elbows under him to ride the thrusts he knew were about to happen. And they did, and Starsky’s cock grew and pumped into his mouth.

So good that he came too.

~~~

Colby didn’t completely vanish. Starsky called him; he called Hutchinson; they arranged to meet just before Colby was due to enter the ten-week OCC officer’s training.

They went to the pizza and burger joint with the gorgeous waiter, who didn’t seem to be there that night. Starsky was with a police cadet named Jennie, Hutchinson with the phone girl, Nessa, and Colby with a blonde whose name Hutchinson hadn’t managed to catch. Golda? Glinda? Something like that. Nessa tossed her black mane of perfumed hair over one shoulder; it brushed Hutchinson’s cheek and shoulder and upper arm, and even through his shirt he felt the soft sweep of it and knew he’d do his very best to feel that again, against his bare skin.

She was beautiful as a goddess, lively as a mink, and as sexy as Starsky had promised. He didn’t think Starsky had had her, though the thought that he might have wasn’t troublesome. Hutchinson let himself be held by her dark eyes as she told him about the difficulties of choosing a stage name. Not her own–“there’s already a Vanessa Redgrave!” she laughed–and nothing that sounded ethnic, and nothing that sounded fake. “Could you believe my name was Nancy?”

“Not easily,” he said, remembering the only Nancy he’d met, a chunky sandy-haired girl at summer camp, years ago. She’d had a voice like a hunting hawk and had thrown things when she got angry.

Nessa pouted, which was pretty enough to be only slightly annoying. Hutchinson’s eyes slid past her and met Colby’s examining stare. Partly in the interests of screwing with Colby’s mind and partly because he wanted to, he picked up Nessa’s hand from the table and kissed the back of it. “Don’t be mad,” he said, voice low.

Her plump lips smiled as he turned her hand to mouth the inside of her wrist. “No, I’m not,” she said.

“Nancy.” He gave it a try, though the vision of the screeching tantrum-throwing girl still flickered in his mind. Of course, he didn’t know what this girl did when she got angry.

Across the table, Starsky had persuaded Jennie to feed him french fries. He already had lost a drop of catsup, dark red against his crimson sweater, but Hutchinson thought his friend would think it a good exchange for the dribble on his chin that Jennie was gravely wiping off with the side of her hand. With luck, Hutchinson thought, she’d be licking drops off soon. He realized he’d like to watch that.

He turned his attention, or anyway his eyes, back to Nancy/Vanessa, and as she spoke he wondered in the back of his mind whether she was likely to find the idea of a threesome, or maybe a foursome, exciting. He suspected it would shock her, and that being shocked would make her defensively angry. He took a deeper breath, not quite a sigh, of disappointment.

Starsky picked up a fry, scooped up some extra catsup, and moved it toward Jennie’s mouth, but she leaned away, then close again to whisper something, then away again, standing up with an apologetic smile. She picked up her purse and walked off between the tables, and Hutchinson watched Starsky look after her. Then Starsky caught his eye, smiled with half his mouth, and shrugged a little with his eyebrows before bending his head to eat the french fry himself.

Hutchinson reached across the table and stopped him with a hand on his wrist, just where the sweater and the white edge of his shirt-cuff ended. “They still as good, Starsk?” asked Hutchinson, and took the french fry. His own sandwich had come with potato chips, which presumably explained his action to the others.

“The best,” answered Starsky with amusement, “you’re welcome,” watching while Hutchinson ate it. Then, absently, Starsky licked the catsup off his own fingers.

This isn’t that, Hutchinson reminded himself. Nancy’s hand on his arm helped too. He wondered why she’d put it there just then.

“Want any, Colby? Glenda? There’s plenty,” said Starsky.

“No,” Colby answered, “I’m full,” and Glenda opened her mouth and then shut it without saying anything.

“So tell us about this officer’s training course,” Hutchinson said, and Colby did, warming to the topic as he went on, his face mobile and his hands gesturing. It had been a long time since Hutchinson had seen him so enthusiastic. So being a Marine wasn’t just a stopgap. Colby rhapsodized about the oath, the history, the importance of the Marines. And he seemed pleased at the prospect of more training with a rifle.

Hutchinson didn’t know why he felt such an impulse to needle Colby tonight, but he joked, “A bigger gun, huh? You know what they say about the guys who prefer the big guns.”

“This,” said Starsky as Colby frowned, “from the cadet who always chooses a Magnum.”

“Fits in my hand!” Hutchinson protested.

“Uh-huh. And you know what they say about ….”

“Starsky, there are ladies present,” said Hutchinson with dignity.

Starsky opened his mouth to make some protest, but then Jennie said, “That’s like the nose rule, right? If a guy has a long nose?” And she ran her finger down the bridge of Starsky’s.

Hutchinson had never seen Starsky blush, but now there was red in his cheeks that didn’t seem to be reflected from his sweater.

Glenda leaned forward and snagged one of the last fries from Starsky’s plate. She scraped off some of the catsup on the edge of the plate and then ate it. Colby folded his arms and watched her. In fact, silence had fallen and all five of the others watched Glenda finish the fry, suck the end of her finger, and reach out for another one.

“See, didn’t I say they were good?” Starsky asked.

“They are,” Glenda said. She glanced at Colby, who hadn’t moved. “Want one, John?” She held it out to him, but he looked at her for a moment before he took it. “For heaven’s sake,” she said irritably, “it won’t bite back.”

His face softened, and he swallowed quickly and reached for the crumpled paper napkin on the table, then for Glenda. He brushed his fingers across her cheek and back into her hair. “Hey,” he said, and she smiled back, mollified.

Hutchinson felt a warm soft pressure on his shoulder and realized Nancy had leaned her face there.

John and Glenda didn’t stay much longer. They all went into the parking lot to say goodbye; then Jennie and Nancy went back into the restaurant and Glenda got into John’s car, and the three men stood uncertainly on the driver’s side, looking at each other.

“I’ll, uh, give you a call,” said Colby. “One of you.”

“Sure.” Starsky grinned, then reached out, awkwardly for him, and slapped Colby’s upper arm.

“I mean,” said Colby, “I won’t be in town all that often, but sometimes, like to see ….”

“Your dad?” asked Hutchinson, voice low enough that he thought Glenda wouldn’t necessarily hear.

“Sometimes,” Colby said. “Probably.” But he looked more haunted than anything else.

“Come see us,” said Starsky.

“Yeah,” Colby answered.

Starsky tried again. “We’ll still be the … the Cursecans, you know.”

“Yeah. You guys, you’ve been,” Colby paused, then shrugged. “I won’t forget.”

“We won’t either,” said Hutchinson.

Colby flashed his teeth in an unconvincing smile, shook their hands again, gripping hard, and then got into the car. “Okay,” he said through the window, and then started the engine.

Hutchinson stepped back, and so did Starsky, as the car backed up and then swung around. The taillights flashed red. The engine revved as if Colby were racing, but the car drove off at a normal speed.

The other two stood for a few seconds in silence. Hutchinson took a long breath of exhaust-laced air and felt like he’d done something wrong, but he wasn’t sure what. He made an exasperated sound, blowing out his lips.

“What?” asked Starsky.

“What?” Hutchinson echoed. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking something.”

“I think things all the time,” Hutchinson said, “you ought to try it,” and Starsky shoved him as if they were both still in grade school.

“Come on,” said Starsky, “the girls are waiting. I think we’re both gettin’ lucky tonight, buddy.”

I think we’re both lucky already, Hutchinson thought as they walked back into the restaurant, but didn’t feel he needed to say it.

~~~

It was years before he read Dumas again, and then it was no pleasure.

In between there’d been his graduation from the Academy, his marriage and divorce from Vanessa-Nancy-Vanessa-again, working in uniform with Luke Huntley and with Starsky, making detective … what seemed sometimes like a lifetime of police work. Seven years.

And on an ordinary day, when Starsky was being his ordinary flirting self and Hutch was grinning at the way his partner and Maggie Macmillan were playing a game as complicated as Ratscrew, Hutch answered the phone and heard John Colby’s name.

So easy to get caught up again in John’s pain, his desperation. It didn’t seem odd at all that he might have married and lost a wife–Hutch had, after all–and the old man in the park walked in Hutch’s mind again when Colby said, “All I want to do is see my son.”

Easy to believe.

Easy to doubt again, his head pounding from John’s blow, Karen Karpel and John vanished, and Dobey’s voice flat and tinny from the radio in Starsky’s hand: “…and we think your friend Colby is the hit man imported to kill Harvey Russo and Karpel.”

Not really a surprise, somehow, though by rights he shouldn’t have given the claim any credence against a friend. If it had been Huggy, if it had been, oh, Jack Mitchell from high school, if it had been Starsky … but no, not for a moment could he believe that Starsky could change enough to kill just because he was good at it. Not in seven years, not in a hundred.

John had. He lay in the sand, on one side, his arm moving in a gesture as fluid as a lie and his eyes blank and reflective, like empty windows. “Hey, Hutch, you migh’s well shoot me right now, man.”

But that had never been why Hutch chose the bigger gun.

The Feds took John Colby away, still wearing the cuffs Starsky had taken from Hutch’s belt. Their taillights blinked and the gulls cried out, and Starsky said, “I’m buyin’ you a beer.”

“It’s my turn to buy,” Hutch said absently, “isn’t it?” and Starsky took him by the arm, spun him helplessly around, clutched the other shoulder.

“It’s Colby’s fucking turn to buy,” Starsky said, eyes fiercer than the lights. “But he ain’t gonna.”

Hutch looked into that hot blue gaze and was perversely comforted. “Lemonade,” he said, conscious of sand somewhere in his mouth, and a taste like ashes.

Starsky smiled, relaxed, said, “Yeah, okay,” and let go. The nearest uniformed cop was shaking his head, but Hutch was used to that by now. As Starsky began to walk away, Hutch grabbed the back of his friend’s neck just above the collar of his leather jacket and shook him like a kitten. The cop in uniform grinned. Starsky said, “Hey!” and twisted free, but hardly glanced back as he pulled down his jacket and then turned up the collar.

Later, at Huggy’s, it was Starsky who fell silent, and Hutch who prompted him, “What’re you thinking about?” They did have to ask sometimes.

“It’s dumb,” Starsky warned. “It’s that book.” A glance up, as if to say, ‘don’t make me explain.’

But Hutch knew just what he meant. “Me too,” he said, “I reread it, actually. And you know what? All these years I’ve remembered it wrong.”

“Yeah?” asked Starsky, beginning to smile. “I never did read it.”

“I thought they both died, the twins. But the second brother doesn’t. He thinks he will, in the duel, but he doesn’t. The book ends when he’s just killed the other guy, the one who killed his twin, and he just stands there.”

After a pause, Starsky asked, “And?”

“And he says,” Hutch hesitated a little, thinking Starsky would think it was soapy and not wanting to either agree or defend the book. “He just says, ‘Oh, my poor brother.'”

Starsky didn’t say anything for a long while. He turned his beer glass, looked at it, drew lines in the condensation with his finger.

“Yeah, that about covers it,” he said.

Hutch, watching, had no words to cover how he felt, only brief flashes of memory. Starsky’s fingers touched the glass as lightly as they’d brushed his skin, when Starsky hooked the cuffs from Hutch’s belt, or when he’d put his arm on the back of the Torino’s seat and his hand had just barely rested against Hutch’s neck. Or other times, more intimate touches. Starsky’s eyes that so often teased and flirted were now lowered, dismal.

“Hey,” Hutch said, and waited for Starsky to look up before going on, “the evening’s young. Want to … want to shoot some baskets?”

“With you, Mister Foul?” But Starsky’s mouth had lost its unhappy line.

“Mister Foul? Who gets in whose way?”

“Who can’t dodge fast enough?”

“Whose ass is all over the court?”

“Who,” Starsky leaned closer, “can’t keep his hands off it?”

“I don’t know,” said Hutch, “who?”

Then Starsky really smiled. “I’ll remind you later,” he said. “Right now I remember you still owe me a game of pool.”

After seven years, Hutch couldn’t really believe Starsky was still counting that game as unplayed. Still, “Rack it up,” Hutch told him. “I’ll get a real drink and join you.” As he stood, Starsky reached out, catching his arm above the elbow. Hutch returned the grip just as tightly.

When they let go he could still feel it, truth, now, solid as bedrock under his feet.

*End*