2020-08-26 - Did You Lose a Hand? (I Found It On My Ass)

This is the height of tourist season for Gray Harbor, which means carnival games are open on the Boardwalk. Throw a ring on a bottle, knock down milk cans with a softball, toss a quarter on a plate, climb this spinny rope ladder thing that whips around in lateral 360s whenever any weight is applied. At night, the Boardwalk could almost be somewhere much more fabulous, its lights glittering over the sand and surf, offering a tawdry sort of glamor. From a distance.

From up close, it's yet another struggling, shabby seaside attempt to make a few bucks. But there's still enough drunk tourists to accomplish that.

Ravn gets to ride in Itzhak's Stingray to get there. It's not far, and he doesn't dare open the throttle too much at night, with all the deer that wander into the road. But it's a better ride than any the Boardwalk has to boast, an awful lot of power rumbling under the elongated hood. Heartbreaker reads a plaque on the glove box.

"I won my niece a huge stuffed unicorn here," Itzhak's saying as he pays for tickets. Ravn doesn't even get a chance to insist he go Dutch--maybe that's why Itzhak isn't asking him, he can't figure out how to say it without making it weird.

Ravn decides not to argue about the cost of tickets. If he's learned a few things about Americans by now it is that for all you'd think Western hemisphere culture to be fairly homogenous it really isn't. Take the tipping thing, for example. Ravn can lecture on the tipping thing, or more precisely, on how much bloody sense it does in fact not make, and why the hell aren't service workers just paid a decent wage in which the tipping is included. Americans. Instead, he takes in the sights; boardwalks like this are something he associates with movies set in Los Angeles; there's this boardwalk with the glittery ferris wheel that's in every movie ever, and there will inevitably be a scene that takes place under it, where apparently all the city's junkies and homeless people spend their nights fighting punks who look like they escaped from a Mad Max the Road Warrior movie from the 1980s. Americans.

Tourists throb and crowd in the fashion of tourists anywhere, ever. Flashes go off every so often as someone takes a selfie. "I wonder if there's someone doing the three cups game," Ravn murmurs. "I almost hope there isn't. Always makes my fingers itch when someone does. You can't win that game though, so if you do -- the carnie tends to get kind of pissed off."

Americans, man. Like this one standing next to Ravn like he owns the place, grinning in one corner of his mouth, having driven Ravn here in a car far too overpowered for any actual purpose. How is this Russian-spy thing getting any traction? Itzhak could only be more offensively American if he was Texan. "They don't do that one officially," he says, swaggering along, enormous boots almost silent on the weathered boards. "Don't ask me why, when they get away with the rest of this bunk. You hungry?"

"Because you can't enforce regulations on it," Ravn supplies in the tone of someone who may actually have spent time working for carnies every now and then. "Group like this, they'll have some kind of arrangement. Patrons win one in twenty, whatever is enough that they bring in money but don't scare away the customers. There'll be pins keeping the bottles upright, the rifle barrels are slightly crooked, you name it, but it'll all be within their own regulations. You can't regulate three empty paper cups and a nut and it takes almost no effort to set it up either, so anyone can. Whoever runs this operation wants a specific ratio of loss to win, and they don't want any outsider just wandering in and stealing their patrons."

You're not in a classroom, stop lecturing. Ravn stops himself and nods. "Let's find something so horrifically greasy and disgusting and American that a photo of it will clog my Aunt Amalie's veins just looking at it." His boots, in comparison, are near-silent; simple men's boots of good quality, and the man wearing them someone to whom moving unseen and unnoticed through life is almost second nature.

Itzhak seems interested, actually--he tilts his head a little in that way that means he's listening, while he cruises along as easy and cocky as he drove that Stingray of his. "Yeah, of course," he says, surprised he didn't realize it before. "It's all just a racket, 'course it's organized. Pins in the cans, huh? No wonder that guy was so fuckin' mad when I knocked 'em down." The memory makes him smile big. "Won a giant stuffed frog for my ex-girlfriend. She was obsessed with frogs." His smile transforms to something more pensive, but he just sighs, shaking it off. "Anyway, you sure got your pick of horrifically greasy. My treat, yeah? So's it's a real date." Then he teases Ravn immediately, also of course. Sure, he gets all flustered and crabby if Ravn teases him!

Meanwhile the Ferris wheel turns and the bumper cars clunk, the tilt-a-whirl flashes to the sound of gleeful shrieks. Kids roam around in packs while their parents have a beer or three. A trio of high school girls giggle together, daring each other to flirt with the couple of hot guys.

"If those three keep following us I may start talking loudly about dates," Ravn murmurs under his breath. "Don't know about you, but I like my girlfriends legal. Not to mention, old enough to have an actual conversation that's not about shopping or that teacher who's a meanie. Coming to think of it, I used to be the meanie teacher. Think they want a lecture on the possible interpretations of human and faerie world bartering and trade tales from the early seventeen hundreds?" He pointedly does not make eye contact. Maybe his failure to enjoy boob signings isn't just humble bragging.

He nods at the observation about the pins though. "Yeah. Like, in the shooting stall, there'll be one rifle that shoots straight. They move the rifles around all the time, getting them back, reloading them and putting them up again for the next tourist. Every so often, the straight rifle goes into the cycle, just enough that every now and then, someone scores a good few shots. Of course you can still cheat at that if you can work out how crooked the rifle in your hand is, and then aim accordingly. I mean, I used to do that for fun, just to tick off the carnies."

"One a these days I'm taking you to Coney Island, you're gonna have a ball." Itzhak glances over his shoulder, which is just what the girls wanted and they erupt in a chorus of giggles and shimmying and catcalling ("ay papi!" one yells to the shrieks of her friends). "Oh, Christ," he mutters, wry, and turns back around. While blushing. Definitely blushing. "I could tell which rifle shoots straight. Bet you could too." Trying, with mixed success, to get back to talking about what they're here for, Itzhak clears his throat. "Or how crooked the barrels are, in which direction. Oh my God they're not going to keep following us are they?"

But the girls have tasted blood and they're not about to give up now. Itzhak's shoulders hunch. "I'm about to spill somethin' on 'em," he mutters.

"I suppose we could just tell them we're gay. I mean, for you it'd even be true," Ravn muses and very deliberately refrains from looking back at them as well. "And pray really hard that they're not fan fiction writers on the side, because then we'd be in no end of trouble for that." He clears his throat too, trying to not remember that very special handwritten story a student once turned in by accident; it was supposed to be an essay on how the early Christian missionaries to Scandinavia initiated a taboo on the eating of horse flesh in order to quell a popular pre-Christian sacrificial rite. What it turned out to be, however accidentally, was a rather, shall we say, wordy and detailed narrative detailing the very private lives of one Sherlock Holmes and one Doctor Moriarty, set in a contemporary canon which Ravn has never in fact found the time to watch on TV. He returned it to the student without comment.

"It's not that hard to tell." Much safer subject. "If the carnie will let you shoot the same rifle a few times, then reload and let you shoot it again. If they think you've figured it out, though, they'll say something about saving time and just hand you the next loaded gun and you'll have to start over, so you need to be quick about it. What did you do with the pins, just apply enough bloody force to the ball for it not to be able to stop the bucket from falling?"

"I'm queer." Itzhak keeps walking with the tension of a guy trying not to look behind him. Makes him go kinda stilted. "I like everybody. As long as they're over twenty-five, for God's sake." Back to the safer topic of bilking carnies! The clever methods the fuckers use to keep marks from landing too many shots makes him snort in appreciation. "But I could land every shot, out of whatevah rifle, that's my point. And yeah," with a laugh, "that's exactly what I did. Though I think they were just weighted, not pinned. Still, the look on they guy's face! Then he wanted to give me shit about handin' the prize over, I told him just gimme my fuckin' unicorn, pal. C'mon, whaddaya wanna eat, I'm starving."

Itzhak is always starving. He needs a lot of calories for all that 'being tall' and 'getting worked up about nothing'.

"Fair," Ravn acknowledges with the easy air of someone who is absolutely not up to speed on what terminology is used for what sexuality, but who doesn't care one bit either, as long as everyone getting laid is a consenting adult.

He glances in the direction of the bacon wrapped pork; deep frying pig with pig is nothing short of genius -- possibly a very evil genius intending to increase circulatory problems in tourists everywhere -- but there's the other little thing; Jewish people don't eat that sort of thing, do they? Is it rude to eat stuff like that in front of a Jewish person? Itzhak's not the only person present perfectly capable of being all the shades of awkward. "How about those cheese fries?" Ravn suggests instead, nodding towards a stall that does admittedly emit absolutely mouth-watering smells. "There's something to be said for a food that's so sticky those girls will probably run away lest they end up glued to us in a decidedly unerotic fashion."

Magnificently unaware of Ravn's awkward kosher dilemma, Itzhak agrees to the cheese fries. Also a hilariously enormous mountain of funnel cake, Mexican-style, covered in cinnamon sugar and whipped cream. The many forms of pig fried with pig and impaled on a stick don't seem to bother him, at least? The girls are disappointed their chase is interrupted so anticlimactically, and fall to taking selfies with Itzhak and Ravn in the background, making heart hands.

An older guy shuffles past while they eat and says to Ravn, "Chef, why are you eating that garbage?" in offended tones.

"Know your enemy," Ravn calls back, having decided against ruining the man's evening by getting in his face about his nationality and career choice. More quietly he mumbles, "If I ever find the person who came up with this rumour... I'll learn how to make shish-kebab, just for them. It's one hell of a practical joke. Guy bought me coffee yesterday, hoping to get an autograph I think."

Maybe the little invisible devil on his shoulder does get a say after all because the Dane decides to also pick up the largest ball of fluffy cotton candy on a stick that has ever existed outside of an eight-year-old's fantasies. The perfect cotton candy. The perfect weapon in case those girls decide to proceed in the hope of more, shall we say, personal selfies.

"Look on the bright side," Itzhak ventures. He gets cotton candy too. His is rainbow-colored and studded with a rainbow of sugar crystals. This, the vendor claims, is unicorn cotton candy. Itzhak is going to be so sugared up. "At least he didn't ask you to sign his tits."

He doesn't say that too loud in case certain teenage girls get ideas.

There's buskers, too, a few of them scattered around. One plays guitar while a pretty girl sings, one old guy has a saxophone. The guitarist is fine, but the saxophone guy is good. On the way to the games, Itzhak tips them both, because busking sucks.

"Yet," Ravn murmurs with mock dejection. He too tips generously because while he actually enjoyed the life of a travelling busker quite a bit, he has no illusions that most people aren't stingy jackasses who'll stand and enjoy the music and then walk on mumbling about how you weren't too bad, put a little more effort into it and maybe you'll be worth my dime next time, or get a real job you lazy, foreign fuck.

Juggling cheese fries and cotton candy requires more than two hands to be done properly, and Ravn at least looks around for a place to sit. There's a table free over there, conveniently close to a stall offering a game of throw the ball and duck the duck into the plastic lake below. He glances at both and heads that way. "Bet you could sit, back turned towards that, and make some tourist's day, knocking down three ducks with one ball." He's either got a high opinion of Itzhak's abilities -- which is not impossible, considering his own introduction to the man's power level back on the Vagabond -- or it's a dare. Double dare you, man.

Itzhak snort-laughs, taken unawares. "I guess I set you up for that one!"

As they find a table, Itzhak, who has to be cheating already to gracefully manage the plates of food plus cotton candy, gets a look in his eye. A dare you say? He sits, keeping his back to the duck game. "Yeah? You'd lose that bet." One boot tapping along under the table with the Bob Seger song playing over the loudspeakers, Itzhak sings along. "Glory days - they'll pass you by - glory days - in the wink of a young girl's eye--"

Inauspicious lyrics, but behind him, a plump woman tosses the ball hopefully. The ball lands squarely on a duck. Then, improbably, it boings off that duck and ducks another one and from that one to yet a third, k-sploosh! There's a startled lift of voices for each extra duck. After the third, the booth lights up with whirling lights and tinny electronic fanfare, to the delight of the woman and the dismay of the carnie. Itzhak licks cheese sauce from his thumb. "I shoulda made you ante up."

"Plenty of time still," Ravn cedes, looking more amused than impressed; he rather did expect the other man to be able to pull the stunt off but actually seing it done is still entertaining -- as is the expression on the carnie's face as the plump woman tries to decide on the best plushy prize. She's convinced that it was pure luck or maybe some angel smiled on her; Ravn certainly isn't going to tell her otherwise, and with all the manure that goes down regularly in this town, he's really rather okay with the idea of someone leaving happy. The world needs more happy.

He nibbles on a fry that's covered in yellow greasy goodness, held in his right hand; from the looks of it, Ravn's a picky eater -- maybe that's why he's on the lean side. "I don't think I can do something like that. One ball, sure. Not bouncing it around three, and definitely not from over here." Casual conversation, keeping the other man's attention on the grumpy carnie and the happily smiling woman who is currently in the process of debating whether she wants the giant plush Simba or the giant plush Pumba. Keep on looking, Ravn silently tells Itzhak. Please don't catch me doing this. Please don't catch me doing this and misunderstand it. What the fuck am I doing.

Sitting next to the New Yorker, his left hand -- always the left, people always watch the right -- wanders into a pocket that's decidedly not his, looking for the wallet that he was given permission to try swiping. I'm sure he meant the other way but what the hell. I get to show off a little, too.

No one new to Gray Harbor would have accounted for the acute spatial awareness of the other man. Ravn makes the rookie mistake of not considering just how alert people are around here, where the laws of physics are entirely negotiable. When a peal of girly laughter rings out too close to him for comfort he startles so slightly that no one would have noticed -- except that his hand is literally feeling around Itzhak's pocket and the slight tremor is enough of a shift in the arrangement of limbs and bodies around the table that someone with that level of spatial awareness is very unlikely to go unaware of it.

Please don't notice, please don't think I'm groping your ass, I'm going to murder that girl.

Itzhak's eyes pop open as if indeed someone is grabbing his ass. He shoots Ravn a completely baffled look--then cracks up, laughing madly into the back of his hand (because the front of his hand has a cheese-sauce-covered fry). And of course, he blushes bright red, from scalp all the way down his neck.

"Hey pal, you missin' a hand? I found it on my ass!" He kicks Ravn lightly under the table, still laughing. "Nice try."

Ravn has on occasion demonstrated his ability to deadpan and keep a straight face. This is definitely one of those times. He takes his hand back, and carefully removes his plate of sticky fries -- before face planting on the table in utter embarrassment. Turns out his pale skin is capable of a remarkable display of crimson on request, too. "I'm going to murder that girl with a dull wood spoon," he murmurs without looking up. "Almost had you. Then she squeals. Right behind me. Murder her. Slowly. Dull. Wooden. Spoon."

Reaching down to rub his shin a bit, the Dane eventually does raise his head -- but not until he's managed to return it to a semblance of its normal, pale hue. "That's what you get," he murmurs in a tone that definitely declares it's all your fault and hopes to get away with it, "for enabling me. You are clearly a horrible influence. Everything ever is your fault. And that girl's. Mostly hers."

He puts both hands on the table where indeed, Itzhak can see them, and eats the cheese fry that he has been holding between the fingers of his right during all of this little scene. "Your -- awareness -- of what happens around you is amazing."

All of which just makes Itzhak laugh harder, beet frikkin' red. People are going to think he's drunk. He laughs until he's wheezing. "Oy vey. Hell yes I'm a terrible influence! You only got yourself to blame, you shoulda figured that out the second we met." Catching his breath, he grins wickedly at Ravn as the other man surfaces. "Yeah, well, I grew up in Manhattan and went to prison, yannow?" He scoops up cheese sauce with a fry. "Ain't exactly a tourist on the subway. You'da had me if we were in a crowd, though, do the ol' bump and jostle and apologize, something like that. Totally woulda had me. Telling me to mess with the game was a pro move."

"Well, I also wanted to see you do it," Ravn admits, carefully applying his usually quite successful mental technique of ignore everything until it goes away, something else will distract everyone soon, nothing happened, be the ostrich. "I've never done this for real -- not in the subway meaning of the word. Stealing people's wallets, things like that. I used to swipe my father's car keys or credit card or undo a window latch, things like that. Most of what I've done in public has been with consent -- well, not direct consent, but the kind of consent you sort of imply when you agree to play something like the three cups game. The mark knows there'll be cheating. The game isn't really the nut and the cups, it's figuring out how the hustler does it so they can feel smart about it. But there's not the actual risk of someone realising what's going on and punching you in the face or calling the cops -- they know you'll be trying."

He dips another fry in cheese fat enough to clog up an arterial valve just by being in the room. "I didn't know about the prison bit, actually. Here's to hoping that American prisons aren't quite as bloody awful as the American movie industry wants the rest of us to think. My frame of reference is pretty much The Shawshank Redemption."

Itzhak tips his eyebrows up at Ravn, who has lots to tell him. "Yeah, yeah, right, people love it when you make 'em feel smart. You're good at it. Never had the knack myself. Gotta rely on what I'm good at, which is mostly fiddlin' and being an asshole." Those eyebrows rearrange into a new configuration, curious. "Eh." He finished the cheese fries and gets to work on the funnel cake, shedding cinnamon and sugar when he tears a piece off. "In some ways it's not as bad, prison. Most ways it's worse. Them movies and whatever don't talk about how fucking boring it is. And how goddamn junior high, bunch of grown hardass men playing stupid social games like it's Mean Girls."

He holds up his right hand, back towards Ravn, to show him the ink on his knuckles. STAY on that one. "Americans usually get a look at that and figure it out from there."

Ravn glances at the man's other hand, with its DOWN. "I think even I can do that math," he agrees and looks thoughtful for a moment. "I have never seen the inside of a prison. But the way you describe it reminds me of a psych ward. The boredom, that is. Nothing to do all day but stare at the wall and at the ceiling, and wait. And absolutely stupid things happening all the time -- some nurse, actually they're not even nurses, they're more like glorified porters -- some nurse telling you that you should take walks and get some fresh air, it's good for you, and you're just sitting there staring at him or her, wondering if this is the time to point out that the doors have magnetic locks and the windows have bars, and their mouths are just following a polite social script because their thoughts are a million miles away."

Ravn glances up at the night sky a moment and then shrugs. "So you're an ex-criminal and I'm ex-crazy. This is the beginning of a bizarre buddy cops movie, isn't it?" A small smile flits across his lips. "Or Gray Harbor."

Itzhak is being awfully cavalier talking about his time in prison, but there's an internal tension while he does. The warm summer night, the lights of the Boardwalk and the murmur of the crowd flowing past seem removed, only the faintest line of a shore seen from far out at sea. His hands slow to a stop, poised on the table with a violinist's precision, as he listens.

"Visited a psych ward once. It was...yeah. It was prison. Right down to them making me empty my pockets. Not a good day, that one." Light, motion, and life are all around him, the shouts of the carnies and the bleeps of the games and the scent of fried dough and cigarette smoke and beer and the ocean, and yet for a moment, it's nothing but ash. Itzhak raises his gray-hazel eyes to Ravn. Without smiling, perfectly serious, he says, "Or a beautiful friendship," and points at Ravn's plate. "Eat. You're too skinny."

"Says you, Pillsbury doughboy," Ravn ribs back with good humour and indeed, picks up another fry. "And yeah, they do that. Can't have you smuggling anything in, or hide anything that you might use to hurt yourself." He shakes his head at himself and lets the memories fade back to the place they belong; halfway around the planet and firmly in the past; this is a place full of life and laughter -- and a fair bit of existential terror, but at least that terror is on the outside.

A beautiful friendship.

He falls silent a moment or two, eating fries, considering the words. Then, after a while, he says, "I'm so used to not staying anywhere long enough to think much about the long term. I think I will be staying here for some time. And you know? Beautiful friendships sounds like something I could get into. Even if I'm a bit rusty on the whole being a social creature thing."

Itzhak grins, his lined face creasing and the corners of his eyes crinkling into crow's-feet, and just like that the moment of ash is gone, skirled away on the sea wind. "Feh, who needs to be social? I need another violinist around! You ever play in Cajun tuning? Well if not, you're gonna." He sets to enthusiastically demolishing the funnel cake, so crisp and sweet and greasy awww yeah.

"It's darker, isn't it? I've heard it done a few times but I never tried my hand at it. I've picked up most of my training from classical studies and from taking notes when watching Irish and Scottish folk bands." Ravn looks interested (and perhaps mildly relieved to be off a topic full of landmines too). "Unless we're talking the really well known international bluegrass bands like Creedence Clearwater or Walter Trout or similar, we don't really get a lot of cajun abroad -- and I'm not even sure Trout qualifies. The word cajun makes me think gumbo, the Mississippi, and, well, a superhero who does things with playing cards."

Ravn, your lack of familiarity with American culture is showing. A lot.

"Ol' Remy LeBeau," Itzhak says in an uncannily accurate Cajun accent, and laughs. "Well lemme tell you--" and tell Ravn, he does. About Cajun tuning (several varieties thereof), about the bayou as he experienced it on trips to Louisiana, about the Cajun folk punk band that was his minor claim to fame in New York ("oh man, the shows we did, and the afterparties, god damn!"). Turns out Itzhak loves Cajun music and was probably--no, absolutely--in love with the front man of that band, a Cajun himself. The way he talks about him is the kind of fond, sexy nostalgia one has for a favorite ex.

He hardly pauses for breath, yet manages to vanish the funnel cake like a stage magician. "Aight, ya ready to win some hilariously big stuffed animals?"

It's hard to tell which part the copper blond appreciates the more; the new world of music opening up to him, or the fond nostalgia. He listens attentively, asks the occasional question, but on the whole, simply enjoys the moment -- the backdrop of carnival music, the seagulls, the chatter of tourists and the peals of laughter of children winning something plushy, the fire in Itzhak's eyes when he talks about his passion; all of them. Fire and ice, somebody might say, although in the cacophony and the crowd, anyone paying the two men particular attention are more likely to write down something like Suspected Swedish Connection; Is Russia Introducing Psychotropics to American Cuisine?

"Hell all the yes," Ravn agrees, amusement glittering in his eyes that are a shade too grey to be called ice blue. "No idea what to do with them, but show me how to bring down the house, Obi-Wan."

"As long as I can be hot, young Obi-Wan," is Itzhak's condition for that one. "That red beard, am I right?" Does he forget Ravn is straight or does he just not care? Smart money's on the latter. Itzhak seems respectful in his own weird way, not making any passes and only that one time informing Ravn he was hot. Also he seems like he's not about to modulate who he is for anybody on God's green earth. Some queer guys would tone it down around their straight friends. Not Itzhak Rosencrantz. His fabulosity shall not be restrained.

"Give 'em to the hospital," he says, about what to do with their future giant prizes. "Donate it to the library, I bet Harper would love one." He stalks along the boardwalk, eyeing the game booths like a chef considering which lobster is gonna come under his knife. The one he picks is a ring toss, the kind with glass bottles densely packed together.

"Nothing like forcing a little charity on the carnies?" Ravn's eyes are still sparkling with laughter. One would have to look very hard to find anything in his demeanour that seems bothered by the New Yorker's flamboyancy. He's a strange one -- flustered to the point of self-obliteration by the idea of putting a bow to a string with an audience though highly capable, yet utterly unbothered by innuendo and directness in other matters. Everyone has their triggers and their mine fields. Perhaps an introvert finds a strange kind of comfort in spending time with someone so much more apt at drawing the public eye; either way, fabulosity must indeed not be restrained. "I actually owe Miss Harper a favour, that's a good idea. She came through for me pretty hard on the whole dead guy on the beach thing, it'd be nice to be able to put a smile on her face in return."

Ring toss, eh. Ravn studies the rings while a fat man from Seattle attempts to make the toss. They're a little bigger than anything he's used to shiftily relocating. Definitely going to need a distraction there. Or more skill, something which he knows Itzhak to possess in ample amounts. This is certainly going to be interesting.