'no kid should ever feel unsafe in their own home.'
SHORT TERM 12 SENTENCES / ACCEPTING
“No, they shouldn’t.” Easy to agree to. Will does agree. Easy to leave it at that, too, but he isn’t naturally inclined. “So you’re here to protect them?”
It’s an excuse to plaintive that it borders on pathetic, but Mahone knows that, and Will knows that, and it easily placates the invisible audience of expectation that sits in the empty back seat behind them. They’re unpleasant men, crammed into an unpleasant space. It’s humid. Frenetic, tense. When Mahone raises his voice around others, Will’s skin jerks sharply—stuttering with resentment. But Mahone’s quiet now, sharp and focused, twisting the steering wheel as he stares out at the dark of the road. Will quietly imitates that twisting motion by pressing his own fingers into the palm of his left hand, turning his fist a few times. It’s subtle, but it eases the tension in his body.
Mahone isn’t here to protect anyone. Once, maybe, but not anymore.
Punishment is a form of protection. Evenhanded, nonselective, nonarbitrary. Will ticks back through a printout from his early education in his mind. Corporal punishment: any sort of punishment inflicted on the body, as distinguished from a pecuniary fine. Corporal punishment is not necessarily cruel and unusual, though it may be. Capital punishment: punishment by death. Capital punishment is not necessarily cruel and unusual, though it may be.
A self-repeating line of the appropriate versus the grossly disproportionate.
The edges are obfuscated, and there’s a thread in his fist that Mahone is following. He’s following it down through his entire life, head bent, shoulders first. Barreling through. The metaphorical bull lost in the near-bare realm of what’s left of his own flimsy interpersonal china. Near-bare, and getting barer all the time. He’s pulling and pulling, things are breaking around him until they aren’t anymore, and all the time something at the bottom is unravelling. By the time he arrives there’ll be nothing left. Just the end. Maybe a single, unsatisfying knot, tragically (or comedically) easy to unwind.
It would be obvious to make surface associations to his own life. Will has designed his life that way deliberately—to support such associations, to encourage them, to enable others to use themselves and their acquaintances to colour in the lines he’s left behind for them. He doesn’t bother with it now, just as he knows the man beside him isn’t bothering with it either. It’s doesn’t matter. They aren’t actually alike.
Somehow, in the length of the avenue of thought, Will has been staring almost without realizing. Staring hard at the shape of Mahone’s face in profile against the blue-white of the half-open window and the wet, black night outside. He has a compelling face. Will finds that he likes it—the planar line of his prominent nose, his heavy brow, the deep creases around his mouth that indicate a propensity for snarling more than they indicate a tendency to smile.
Some of the ways they seem alike are genuine.
Neither of them is particularly gentle—not with men like them.
Will continues staring until Mahone meets his eye, and then skates the flash of his flat-or-ecstatic gaze deliberately away. Dark blue eyes. Blue past blue, where Mahone’s are pale and clear, almost powdery. Distantly veined with a different form of fever. Maybe benzodiazepine, maybe he’s just tired. It’s obvious that Will is unconcerned with being caught staring; simply done looking. Back to the windshield. Back to the yellow curve of the headlights on the road. Will doesn’t have to resits the urge to smile. It’s latent, buried far underneath plain impatience, inaudible in the hard-annunciated flatness of his words, “Your method of intervention could do with a dose of rapidity.”
