Guardian
by Ian McDuff
For Jen’s (
tallories
Like any good guest, I defer to my hostess’s known preferences. So. Not slash. Those who wish may see it as pre-slash if they like.
‘How,’ Alex said.
For a moment, Howie thought that Alex was trying out a new nickname for him, and contemplated retaliation: we’d just see if the great Alexander James McLean liked being called Al, then, wouldn’t we.
Then Howie realized that Alex was sitting on the floor, literally ‘Indian-fashion,’ and had his hand raised, palm open, flat, and out, facing Howie in true horse-opera bad-acting fake-Indian style. Apparently this was what Brian had meant, just now, as they’d passed in the hallway and he’d quipped, obscurely, ‘You watch out for Chief Shittin’-Bull, back there’ – and had blushed a little even as he’d said it, no matter how irresistible the pun had been to him.
Yep. The double-take confirmed it: Alex was sitting tailor-fashion on the brick-flagged floor of a chill German atrium, playing at cowboys-and-Indians or some damned thing.
Alex. AJ McLean, rising popstar, seducer (so far mostly in his own mind) of hordes of ecstatic fangirls, musical genius – well, cackling loon, really, but, still. The Alex whom Howie would remember in after years as Alex Before the Fall, scrawny, rubber-faced, wry, a natural comic, Alex before the booze and the drugs and the scrawling ink, all wiry limbs and raised eyebrows and a blessed ability to accept himself with a laugh. There he sat, fighting – and not quite failing – to keep a straight face, the jeans-and-polo-shirt normal old Alex, his concession, so far, to popstardom being the two gold hoops in the ears that had long been a source of self-mockery to him, hoops defiant in calling attention to those ears, hoops that would have been a trifle excessive for a Masai warrior. Playing at being a movie Indian.
In Germany.
Surreal.
‘How,’ Howie replied, dryly.
Alex inclined his head to one side, and Howie looked over in the direction indicated. Nicky was stretched out on the bricked floor, headphones on, dead to the world, sleeping as only a weary, growing teenager can sleep. The age of miracles being not past, he was for once not snoring to wake the lemures of the sheeted dead, which was probably why and how Howie had not noticed him at first.
‘Him bluecoat scout,’ Alex intoned. ‘Him put ear to ground to listen for thundering herd of buffalo, what White Man call “Lou, walking.” Him out like light. Me sentry; guard Golden Hair from Fat Chief of Bison, and from chief pony soldier Dances-With-Suits. Golden Hair not get sleep enough these many moons.’
Surreal was an understatement. This was what they got for going to a German-style ‘Western’ park on a day off, Howie thought. For some reason, the mythos of the American West still had a strong hold on the German imagination, and Germany had a remarkable number of ‘cowboy’ amusement parks, cheap ‘Western’ novels, and re-enactors: almost as many as the surprising number of German re-enactors of the American Civil War. Staid, straitlaced German bank executives spent weekends in the dark Teutonic woods playing at being mountain men, trappers, Cheyenne, cavalry troopers, and trying against all odds to develop drawls. Sometimes it seemed that Germany was slightly more cowboy-mad than America herself: than Eisenhower’s America, even, when every other TV show was a Western – Maverick; Gunsmoke; Bonanza – and any small boy not wearing chaps, a holster with a couple of cap pistols, and a tiny Stetson, was instead wearing a coonskin cap and singing Disney’s Ballad of Davy Crockett at the top of his little lungs.
But what was really surreal about it was Alex’s being positively paternal.
Of course, that could be a way of showing off, of setting himself firmly on the grown-up side of the divide; but Howie didn’t think so. No; they all agreed, even Alex, who was insistent that he himself was not a ‘growing boy’ and that he didn’t need sleep or care or anyone to watch over him, or, indeed, help, they all agreed that Nicky was being pushed well beyond his limits. Even Kevin admitted that when he paused to think, and remembered that he was on the talent’s side, not the suits’s. (Sometimes the responsibilities Kevin had assumed as a sort of deputy manager warped his judgment.) They all knew that the growing Nicky needed far more sleep than all of them put together were getting (though, as Howie sometimes said with a rueful sigh, it didn’t seem to be stunting the kid’s growth). But as a rule, Alex’s way of handling the problem, or for that matter any problem or worry, was sharp teasing, not this affectionate parenting.
Howie tugged, resentfully, at his earring. How Lou Pearlman had talked them all into these fashionable piercings…. All Howie had wanted to do was sing, darn it. Not to be remodeled out of all recognition, and expected not just to dance as they sang, but to be sexy for people he didn’t even know. Oh, well: what he got for signing them all up with a man whose other main source of income was a troupe of male strippers. And none of them was about to quit now, on the cusp of Making It. Still, there were days on which all Howie wanted was to be Somewhere Else, far from fans and wardrobe and their image, safely back in Bass Weejuns, a nicely ironed and lightly starched pair of chinos, and a well-broken-in Izod. (Alex had always kidded him, since audition circuit days, about dressing like a Junior Republican. Especially if one of Howie’s extensive, prized collection of sweater-vests were involved.)
‘Listen, Raging Bone,’ he said.
‘Me “Crazy Horse,” oh great chieftain Sings-Like-Girl. That because me hung like –’
‘Hamster?’ Howie shot back.
‘Smartass,’ Alex said, in his normal voice, abruptly bored with the whole shtick.
‘Alex, what are you – I mean. Normally.’
‘Normally, I let Junior here take his own lumps?’
‘Well. Yeah.’
‘Not my job, y’ think?’
‘Well … you’ve never wanted it to be.’
‘ ’S not my job. I was just subbing.’
‘For Brian, huh? He passed me in the hallway, must’ve had something to do.’
Alex just looked at him, with a cool, level glance.
‘They share a brain, D, but, no. Not Bri’s job either. Nor Train’s.’
Howie wasn’t going to win this staring contest. He shifted his gaze to where Nicky slept on, sprawled out helplessly, sunk profoundly in a sleep of sheer exhaustion, defenseless. And there welled up in within him a great tenderness, and he knew what his own older siblings must feel, all of them, Caro most obviously, Pol, of course, but even John, though John would die under torture before admitting it. His job, then. In that moment, Howie took on, fully, the guardianship of Nicky, against all comers. With a nod and an exchange of glances, he dismissed Alex from his watch, and sat down against the jamb of the doorway arch, pulling out his German-English dictionary.
When Kevin plunged in a quarter-hour later, eyes wild and harried as usual, brandishing a tattered schedule and primed to explode, Howie silenced him with a glare before he could begin to erupt.
‘Do not wake him,’ Howie snarled.
Kevin stared at him for a moment, in blank confusion. But it was obvious that Howie was poised and tensed to climb him like a tree and pummel his head, if necessary; and in any case, when push came to shove, they all knew that Howie, the creator and motive force of the group, was ultimately in charge and not to be trifled with.
In the end, with surprising meekness, Kevin merely said, ‘Fifteen minutes. And that’s cuttin’ it awful close at that.’ And he turned on his heel and strode away, chivvied by his self-imposed responsibilities.
Fifteen minutes. Howie look at his watch. Nicky could get in another ten, at least.
END