Free Sleeping Policemen by Dale Bailey Page B

selling tests he’d mimeographed for a hundred pops a page. Dr. Gillespie asked if Nick could stand in Danny’s stead for the summer, and before he’d really thought about it, Nick agreed.
    The job was simple: two hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, copying and filing tests, sorting the mail, retrieving the chair’s dry cleaning. Nothing compared to the summer of unloading crates Nick had planned.
    He’d just left work that July afternoon when he’d spotted Finney sunning himself in the Quad, a battered copy of The Golden Ass facedown on the bench beside him.
    They chatted, nothing that Nick could remember, then Finney said, “Tuck and I are headed for Knoxville. Got any plans tonight?”
    â€œTaking Sue over to Ashland, we’re eating at some place called Mallory’s.”
    Finney laughed. “She used to make me take her over there all the time. Watch, she’ll order the stuffed lobster and a bottle of—”
    The world slid from under Nick. He felt dizzy, nauseated, like someone had hit him in the heart with a hammer. He collapsed heavily beside Finney. The heat from the bench crawled into him.
    â€œAw, shit, Nick, I didn’t know—I mean, you know, it wasn’t—”
    Nick held up his hand. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t already suspected. He’d seen them together often enough during their freshman year, huddled together in Donner’s. But he hadn’t been a part of their clique, one of $100 T-shirts and sleek new cars. Finney and Sue and all the rest of them had been as distant as coastal islands, smudges on the horizon. He’d known—but had not allowed himself to consider what might have gone on before he came along.
    Sue occasionally said something about Finney—his passion for Dairy Queen Blizzards, his intense hatred of public radio—that belied more than a base familiarity. Doubts whispered at the back of his head; jealousy cackled just over his shoulder. He’d often caught himself on the verge of asking, stopping himself because he knew it was not something you would ask Sue Thompson. If she wanted him to know—if there had really been anything worth mentioning about Finney, Nick convinced himself—Sue would have told him, laughing it off as a mistake, an experiment between friends.
    But she’d said nothing, leaving Nick to steep in his own suspicions.
    â€œHey, Nicky.” Finney again.
    In that quiet instant, the image was born. He saw it as clearly as memory, Finney laboring arduously over Sue, her head thrown back, her lips working in a silent plea for more, more. Then the sharp, feral cry as Finney poured himself into her.
    Finney touched him on the shoulder and Nick flinched.
    â€œHey, you all right?”
    Nick looked at Finney, remembering that night at the Torkelsons, Finney reciting in Latin, that current of energy leaping between them, connecting them.
    He choked the image, hoping to kill it.
    â€œNothing,” he said. “I mean, I know it was nothing. Sue told me about it and I know, I mean, it’s cool.”
    Finney clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. Because it was nothing. Can you imagine? Me and Sue?” Laughing, he turned his face to the sun.
    Nick grinned weakly and, for just a second, considered asking—
    â€” more Finney more —
    â€”and knew that he could not. If he did, he would lose one of them. And Nick realized, sitting there in the heat of a late July afternoon, that he could not bear that. They completed him, the one as much as the other.
    He struggled with the image, wrestling it into a trunk somewhere far in the back of his mind.
    â€œWe’re cool, Nicky?”
    â€œYeah, we’re cool.”
    â€œSo where are we, Nick?”
    Nick looked up, startled, the vision of Finney’s heaving back as real as the dead man’s ghostly weight.
    It took a second, but then he said, “In some deep shit—deeper