Smiley sat up, hiccupping, his eyes cups of grease and dirt. Marco leaned down and slapped him across the ear. “You deaf? Answer the man!”
Smiley stared at the movements of the gars, the waves washing through the pilothouse of the sunken boat, the persimmons on the ground that were crawling with ants.
“What’s it take?” Marco said. “You want us to hurt you? I mean really hurt you? I got tools in the trunk you ain’t gonna like.”
“Get him up,” Jerry Gee said.
Marco picked up Smiley and began dusting him
off.
“Against the car,” Jerry Gee said.
Marco held his hands out palms up, as though to say What?
“Do it,” Jerry Gee said.
Marco shoved Smiley over the fender and pushed his face down on the hood, flattening it sideways against the metal, twisting Smiley’s mouth out of shape.
Jerry Gee picked up a broken tree branch. “I heard you had a bad time in an orphanage and you ended up queer-bait on the streets. So how about a trip down Memory Lane? Get in touch with the origins of your problem?”
Jerry Gee nodded at Marco. Marco stared back and mouthed, What the fuck?
“Take his pants down,” Jerry Gee said.
They were elastic-waisted and slid easily over the knees. Even though the weather was warm, Smiley’s buttocks and thighs prickled.
“Last chance, Smiley,” Jerry Gee said, teasing Smiley’s butt with the points of the branch.
“Only my friends call me Smiley. You’re not my friend.”
“You caused all this,” Jerry Gee said. “So shut up.”
Smiley felt a pain like a handsaw piercing his rectum and viscera and climbing up his spine and out his mouth.
When he woke up, he was lying on the ground. The two men were looking down at him; framed against the sun, their faces were lost in shadow.
“You all right, little buddy?” Marco said.
Smiley didn’t answer.
“You gonna be a good boy?” Jerry Gee said.
“Yes,” Smiley said.
“What’d you get for us?” Jerry Gee said.
“The bad man from Texas on my recorder.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“Because he doesn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t want anybody mad at me.”
“You should have popped him,” Jerry Gee said.
“He didn’t kill his family. Someone told me a big fib.”
“You’re a righteous dude,” Marco said, lifting him to his feet. “Clean yourself up and get in the car. We’ll buy you an ice cream on the way back to your car. Hey, act like a man and stop crying.”