The Dogs: Not Exactly Night - Episode I
The night before everything changed, Andrew Lightfoot once again could not sleep - he sat, curled against the arm of his couch in his living room, staring into the dark half-mirror of his flatscreen television. It was some ungodly hour of the morning, when the streetlights shone gauzy and febrile - Andrew had become a ghost, floating in a phantom world, a soft place between waking and dreaming.
His insomnia had won tonight, and he had nothing to do but think - and when he thought too hard, all his life, forward and backward, would stretch before him, and he would feel the need to recount how he got here, how he, a West Virginia boy whose accent faded inexorably day by day as it was swallowed by the American Standard din and noise of the East Coast wastelands, had gotten here...how he had ever gotten a boy like Cody Tyree.
It was coming up on a year that he and Cody had first met - at a Circle K, when his Grand Wagoneer had stalled out from a transmission leak and, frustrated and tired, he had looked up from his engine...to spot a single boy with tawny-brown shaggy hair spilling near to his neck, looking into the Sun. He was shirtless, a skateboard in his hand - Andrew had stopped to stare for some seconds before the boy, perhaps noticing someone was looking, turned around, his face framed by the sunset like a seraphim from the hallucination of a dead Christian mystic. And Andrew was rendered speechless - speechless at this sight of heavenly beauty.
That was barely a year ago - only a year. Four years since he had moved from West Virginia - Tempest, a tiny town no one had ever heard of and would never hear about again - but only a year that he was truly happy, that he did not think that moving to Florida was a mistake as he has spent so long there in a haze of alcohol and boys, crawling along to get his degree, too focused on the poison that he used to guzzle until he blacked out, or the school that was paying for his education, never managing to make lasting friends.
There was a nagging sensation that no matter how he dressed, how he acted, or where he went he was not, nor could ever be, made for Florida - although year by year he did end up looking the part, his genetics were entirely Appalachian, and older than that, entirely Virginian.
Through his veins ran the blood of Revolutionary War heroes, of the First Families of Virginia who stamped their diseased European boots on the fair, untainted virgin face of America. Their legacy of conquest and rape and pillage was as forest-dark as the names of the rivers in the then-wilds of Tidewater...but were America an aristocratic culture, people would bow to him, the memory of worthy white man's burden still fresh on a splashed coat-of-arms next to his name. Untainted through the ages, pumped the blood, out of his fragile heart, of a Virginian noblesse d'épée.
It was only dimly remembered by the people in his town that his family was extremely old and worthy of such respect amidst a sea of later immigrants - they still paid him deference, his family's wealth (inherited, the old-fashioned way to get rich) having more to do with it than higher breeding. They owned the largest house in town and owned the most property; both of his parents were college-educated - a complete novelty in a state where barely anyone had a college degree - his mother at Bethany College and his father at the flagship university of WVU. In everything his family ever did, or sought to do, or owned, they were, effortlessly it seemed, just plain better than the plebeians that dwelt alongside them. Andrew and his younger brother Stephen had grown up never, not once, wanting for anything.
It was a terrifying legacy for a boy to have, and it terrified him even still now, letting the relentless sunlight of Florida burn away the roots that bound him to the mountains and the forests. He had gone through a Marxist stage at the University of South Florida - self-consciously stereotypical of all college sophomores - and the thought of him being part of an ancient aristocracy, a self-serving and self-feeding upper class, repulsed him. It repulsed him still. When he had turned twenty, and he had received the check in the mail from the estate of his dead grandfather - an ancient document, so old that the ink was flaking off, he thought the bank was joking when they agreed to honor it - he tried to pass the money off to charity, to a Beagle rescue outfit to honor his brother's deceased dog...but his father, in one of the last conversations he had with the man where it seemed like he still loved him as a son, before he cut him off for good after he had come out as bisexual, convinced him to keep it. He cashed it with extreme reluctance, considering every cent to be sin-choked blood money - but if it was really his, and it was really meant for him, then, he decided, he would use it on his own terms. The check, and the sum it was marked for, paid for the apartment he was living in; it meant that he could, if he so desired, cease working for the next several years and live off of the share of the family fortune that, his father had asserted, was rightfully his. But he worked, still - he refused to do what his father probably expected of him, and live as an idle rich nobody who never earned anything, resting instead on what was given to him, what was _expected_to be given to him, passed down through rotting, skeletal hands that once clenched the throat to choke the life out of wooded Elysian wilderness. It proved to him that the way his parents raised he and his brother was untenable, and that the only solution was to break the cycle, and put down roots somewhere else anew, where the ghosts of a centuries-old privilege no longer haunted.
Only because of Cody could he say he left everything behind and regretted nothing - even when he really did, even when he missed seeing his best friend whom he had known practically all his life, Bligh Lynch, and his brother Stephen who had just been accepted to Virginia Tech and would, probably, never come back to their hometown. Cody - the shirtless skater boy who had asked for a ride home that day at the gas station but had (an hour later, when Andrew had finally fixed his car) tearfully admitted he had, in no fact, no real home at all - was the savior of the idea of Florida. He saw in Cody something transcendently precious as a human being - the monolithic key to his own mortal happiness. It was a dangerous thing to do, to make another person a living symbol, so afflicted as he probably was with the same fragilities as everyone else - but Cody had told him more than once that he had saved his life, in a very literal way, and Andrew suspected that he was a living symbol, to him, of a new, at last stable, life.
When Andrew had sent a picture to Bligh, back home, the latter's noted how he seemed to look like a puppy. It was fairly apt: Cody was a head shorter than Andrew, with luscious tawny shaggy hair. His face made nearly everyone who saw him, male and female, do a doubletake - he was serenely real-life bish?nen, what Dorian Gray must have looked like at Eton. A Florida native, his mother had gone into labor and given birth to him in a strawberry field somewhere near Plant City - his first breaths of life were smeared with the soil of his homeland - but when Andrew had met him he was an orphan, shiftlessly finding shelter at this or that odd place, his life a series of dangerous misadventures.
Andrew certainly looked the role of protector and guardian that he was, after all, to Cody: four years the boy's elder, Andrew was taller, still residually muscular from his days as a football player for his high school. He was physically bigger than, and visually not at all a match for, Cody, so lithe and boyish. Cody's shaggy hair was a contrast to Andrew's sandy close-cropped near-buzz, which, in the Florida sun, had turned the color of harvest wheat.
He shifted on the couch, stretching to lay end to end, now directing his gaze to the ceiling. He frowned. Where would Cody be without him? Still at that flophouse on Nebraska Avenue...he shuddered. He had saved Cody - Cody had saved him. Everything hinged on him, and Andrew jealously guarded him because he knew it.
At last the enveloping cloak of drowsiness returned to him and he sighed heavily, arising from the couch to make his way back to the bedroom.
When he returned, he found the room as he left it -the cramped bookshelf that groaned with too many tomes on too many subjects, the Carl Sagan poster, the framed, lush limited edition wall-hanging for Skyward Sword that he had bought for Cody, the clothes on the floor...the echoes, the strange mingling, of their combined life together. Cody was fumbling around the mattress amongst the blue and brown sheets Andrew had let him pick out, half-asleep and in vain, for the familiar body to be there - Andrew paused to watch him, both bemused and moved, as one does when seeing a dog who is deep in a running dream. At length, Cody opened his eyes to see Andrew standing there in the darkness.
"Where were you...?"
"I'm right here," Andrew said softly. He hesitated, remembering the heavy thoughts that had preceded this moment and knowing the full weight of what he was about to say: "I'll always be here."
Andrew finally went back to sleep, with the boy he knew with as much certainty as that he was living and breathing was his one true destiny, wrapped in his arms.