Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

“Are you eating much these days?” he asked, brushing his hand over Tim’s rib cage. “I’ll buy myself a sandwich on the way home,” Tim explained through a dreamy yawn. “On nights when Woodforde’s girlfriend tries to cook, everybody flees. You know, Mr. Osborne says the job will be in the main State Department building, so if it comes through I thought I’d try to get a little place not far from where you used to be on I Street. I can cook for myself then.” Fuller found himself suddenly wary. Inside Skippy a future little life was rising, as surely as the white-brick apartment house beginning to grow from the ruins of the gasworks across the street. “Where exactly are my jockey shorts, Timothy?” “I was hoping to steal them.” He laughed. “Try under the plaid blanket, near the radio.” Fuller dressed in the gathering darkness, but with only a sandwich awaiting him, Tim lingered in the makeshift bed. Fuller glimpsed his face in the orange glow of the space heater; it looked like some small ornament lit by a Christmas bulb. Its cheer and serenity prompted him to remember the expression’s opposite, a face Tim had shown during an especially tormented moment back in the early days, while he’d been explaining yet another spiritual infraction he was afraid of committing.