Sergeant Bull : Part 4
A second later, the line went dead. The dial tone droned against the sound of falling rain. Bull hung up and tried again, banging out the numbers on his phone card. This time, the line was busy. Two more attempts ended in the same results.
Bull never cried, and probably hadn’t in the twenty years since he entered the service. With the rain falling everywhere around him, he felt the caustic first sting of a tear to the corner of one eye, and to his surprise, he didn’t fight it.
The tears fell, spurred on by the downpour. By the time he gave up, it had gotten noticeably darker out, and much colder. Wiping his eyes, Bull mounted his motorcycle and started back to the motel, swearing out a long string of angry swears under his breath, all weakness again buried beneath the stone faзade of his pissed-off, hard-assed Army game face.
He passed the car at the side of the highway a few miles down Interstate 213, but his head was so full of other things, he thought little of it until he caught sight of a lone, rain-drenched figure thumbing ahead. Bull noticed immediately that the hitchhiker, besides being soaked all the way through, was dressed in a camouflage jacket and pants and black boots. A waterlogged ball cap bearing the logo of Seaside’s baseball team covered the stranded man’s face. Bull figured it was his car he’d passed a minute earlier. Not knowing fully why, he pulled over.
“Hey,” the other man growled in a youthful, relieved voice, trotting over.
Bull tipped his head up as the soldier cut across the beams of his hog’s headlights to stand close enough for a better view. He caught a flash of clean-buzzed dark blond hair under the ball cap, a day’s worth of facial shag on a square-jawed, handsome face, and pale blue eyes. He pegged the young soldier at being somewhere in his early twenties, no older than twenty-four. The image of the other man, so cute, so lost in the downpour, sent a surge of fresh warmth through Bull’s frozen insides. It was powerful enough to dispel the chill he’d been at the mercy of all day.
“What’s up, guy?” Bull asked, extending his gloved hand.
The young soldier accepted and shook. “You seen that piece of shit a mile back?” Bull nodded. “Fucker left me stranded out in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, and I got a good hundred miles to go yet.”
Bull quickly thought it out. “Cape Cod? You from Otis Airforce Base?”
“126th AVN,” the young soldier nodded, the barest trace of a proud smile on his handsome face. “Chris Hendricks.”
“Sergeant Tom Bullen. Bull,” he corrected. “When you due back on base?”
“O-Six hundred tomorrow, but wanted to get back early. Now I got this shit.”
Bull hesitated for a moment. He knew Hendricks could probably call a dozen people at the base, get his car towed, and be back on Otis by the skin of his ass. Still, he wouldn’t leave the young soldier stranded out here on such a rotten, fucked-up night. “I can give you a lift somewhere,” Bull said.
“Really?” Hendricks asked, his handsome blue eyes warming like an excited puppy dog’s.
Bull fell deeper into the other man’s baby blues, so deep, he could easily, he realized, spiral out of control. “Yeah,” he nodded. “Course, I don’t got a helmet for you to wear. Breaking Mass law if you hop on back without one.”
“I’m freezing my nuts off,” Hendricks joked. “I ain’t worried about friggin’ helmet laws at this point, Sarge.”
Bull nodded and waved the young soldier on. “I’m not far away. Got a motel room about four miles up the road. We’ll call you a tow truck, figure out how to get you down to Otis, and you can warm your ass, maybe take a hot shower if you want.”
The handsome young soldier mounted the bike. “That would be great,” Hendricks enthused, sighing the words in a hot breath past Bull’s ears. “Thanks, Sarge. I can’t believe I got so lucky to meet you out here tonight.”
“Yeah, it’s like we’re the only two people alive in the world tonight,” Bull huffed under his breath, trying his best not to think about the day and what he’d learned. “Maybe both our luck’s gonna change soon enough, guy.”
Hendricks wrapped one arm around Bull’s taught, washboard stomach and held on. Bull started up the hog and pulled back onto the deserted highway. Darkness, rainy and miserable, streaked past them. The final leg of the journey back to the cheap but warm and dry room he’d rented at the motel seemed to pass much slower than the actual minutes it took. Finally, they pulled into the parking lot of the one story red brick building. Across the street, a brightly-lit service station and all-night diner sat nearly empty in the pouring rain.
Bull jiggled the key in the lock. “While we’re waiting for them to tow your shitbox, you want to grab a bite to eat?”
Hendricks shifted nervously in place. “I’m kinda broke, Sarge.”
Bull forced a smile and pushed open the door. “I got you covered.”
It wasn’t much of a room – a double bed with an ugly pleated comforter, dresser, cable TV and bathroom. Bull’s overnight clothes sat in a neat stack on top of the dresser, everything looking crisp and uniform.
“Old habits,” he said jokingly when the young soldier finished giving the room a quick once-over. Bull waved him toward the telephone atop a dog-eared phone book. “Make your call then we can chow.”
Twenty minutes later, they sat alone at a booth in the diner, downing hot soup and roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy. Bull did little more than move the food around his plate with the fork.
“What’s wrong, Sarge?” Hendricks asked.
Bull looked up. Even in the diner’s pale lights, the beauty in the rugged face across from him was startling. “Nothing,” he growled, turning toward the window and the rain-swept, desolate March night outside. At least here with the young soldier, he didn’t feel so lost, so alone. Chris Hendricks, he admitted to himself, had helped dispel much of the gloom that had twisted his stomach into tight knots.
“It’s cool,” Hendricks persisted. “I mean, dude – er, Sergeant, Sir-”
Bull grinned. “Sergeant Bullen’s waiting back on that base in North Carolina. For now, I’m just Bull. Dude’ll do.”
Hendricks flashed a four-alarm smile back across the table. “Dude, you’ve treated me real good. If there’s something you want to tell me, I’m okay with it.” The exuberance suddenly fled the other man’s youthful face.
“What is it?” Bull asked.
Shaking his head and setting down his soupspoon, the young soldier said, “I’m in deep shit if I don’t make it back to Otis on time.”
Bull pushed his plate away. “I told you not to worry. We’ll take care of it, somehow.”
A slight curl twisted Hendricks’ hairy mouth again. “You’d help me like that?”
Bull pulled a twenty and a five from his wallet and tossed them on the table. “Yeah. Finish your meal, Chris. I’ll meet you back at the motel.”
He started for the door, but as he pushed it open and a blast of cold, raw air blew in, he heard the scuffle of boots and realized Hendricks was right behind him, a soldier to the end.
What am I doing? Bull wondered. Look at what I’ve already done:
As the sound of the shower drummed on in the background, Bull stretched out on the bed and wrestled with his confusion. Every few seconds, he heard a grunt or a shift in the continuous water spray – Hendricks clearing his throat or the shuffle of big bare feet in the tub, and the pang of guilt mixed with a tremor of anticipation flared again, worsening the chaos inside him.
Was it only his attraction to the young soldier, or the fact that the day’s events had left him feeling so lost and alone in the world? I’m not using the boy, he told himself. I’d have helped him out even if he had two heads and no teeth. He’s a fellow soldier. But, fuck, he’s cute:
Bull shook his head and shifted on the double bed, absently flipping the channel from some dumb sitcom over to the sports channel for that day’s sports highlights. Two sodas from the machine outside the motel’s office sat half-consumed on the bed stand. Bull reached for his as the sound of the shower died and he heard the young soldier toweling off beyond the flimsy barrier of the bathroom door.
Bull’s mouth had gone completely dry. He choked down a swig of bubbles, only to choke on the taste.
The bathroom door opened and an image from a dream strolled in, smelling clean and soapy and dressed only in a towel. Bull buried his focus on the TV, at first avoiding Hendricks’ return to the motel room.
“You believe Seaside this year?” the young soldier sighed, one hand on his hip, the other scratching beneath the towel about his waist.
“You a hockey fan?” Bull asked.
Hendricks narrowed both eyes on him and let out a loud sigh. “You kidding me? I’m a huge pucks nut.”
Bull glanced up, and to his shock and amazement, Hendricks’ pale blue eyes sparkled even brighter. In that bottled gaze, he caught sight of the rest of the young man’s body, his damp hair, perfect, sculpted chest, and the patch of dark blond fur at the base of his neck. Bull tried not to stare, but this proved impossible. Against his better judgement, he traveled down the happy trail that cut Hendricks from the top of his chest to his flat, hairy abdomen, and beyond that into the tangle of prickly man-hair jutting from the top of the towel. The rest of the young soldier was equally impressive; he had strong, hair-covered legs and big, sexy feet. The lump in Bull’s throat worsened, and the uncomfortable heat between his own denim-covered legs intensified.
“Whaddaya think?” he half-heard Hendricks ask.
Bull shook out of the spell he’d fallen under and crossed his feet, hoping to shift his half-hard cock out of clear view. “About what?” he countered dumbly.
