Warning: not real funny

For those who want it, a BIGGER warning is at the end of the story.

 

“Solitary”

By Pepper Ckua

gen/ambig

about 1840 words

 

“Why is it, Starsk, that you have to wear those paper slippers?”

 

Starsky didn’t answer at first. It worried Hutch. It meant his partner had been pondering something and probably thought he needed to tell Hutch his conclusion.

 

But then Starsky smiled, one of the grins that lit up his face and by default, the inside of Hutch’s heart.

 

“Blondie, you gotta ask that? Just look at your own feet.”

 

Hutch looked down. His slip-on canvas shoes were white and almost brand-new. “Yeah.”

 

“Any trouble lately?” Starsky asked, smoothing the cotton blanket on the bunk.

 

“No. Nothing I can’t handle anyway.”

 

“Hutch, you’d tell me if…”

 

“I would,” Hutch lied. The last thing his partner needed was to be worried about him.

 

“Right,” Starsky replied, drawing the word out a little too long. He tugged at his hospital gown. “I don’t know how you stay warm. You should complain.”

 

Hutch hadn’t really noticed the temperature. He was so used to his thin, cotton pants and long-sleeved shirts that he’d stopped thinking about there being any other option.

 

“Ask for a sweater or something, pal,” Starsky continued.

 

Hutch just shrugged. “It’s fine.”

 

“Doesn’t all this silence make you crazy, Hutch?” Starsky asked.

 

“What silence? You’re talking my ear off.”

 

Starsky’s smile was sad. “If you think this is talking your ear off, then I really do need to visit more often.”

 

Hutch wanted to say, “Yes. Yes, you do.” Instead he asked, “Do you want to play cards?”

 

XXXXXXXX

 

The first visit Dobey made wasn’t embarrassing or even that uncomfortable, at least not from Hutch’s point of view. Hutch just mostly felt tired.

 

He supposed Dobey’s shifting in the hard, plastic chair, calling Hutch by his first name and difficulty in meeting Hutch’s eyes were all signs that Dobey wished he were just about anywhere else.

 

He didn’t have it in him to make it any easier for Dobey, much less himself. All he knew was that the man kept talking about Elmo Jackson and how if he didn’t have Edith he would have… ”

 

Hutch couldn’t remember the last part of their brief conversation.

 

Hutch wasn’t even sure how long Dobey stayed. He knew he should feel bad about it. But what he mostly felt was nothing.

 

Huggy’s two visits weren’t much better. The few times Hutch really looked at Huggy’s face he saw nothing but pity in the man’s dark eyes. He thought that Huggy, even more than Dobey, knew just what kind of a hell to which he’d been assigned.

 

Hutch knew if things were different and the universe was suddenly turned upside down and shaken, he and Starsky would have gotten a cynical laugh over Hutch and Huggy’s relative positions.

 

Cop under glass? It was a real delicacy in some parts.

 

But then, now that the universe had been completely bled dry, Hutch wasn’t laughing.

 

The clergyman that appeared seemingly out of nowhere might have well been speaking in tongues; Hutch watched the man’s lips move but didn’t understand a word he said.

 

When the minister handed him a pack of Wrigley’s gum, Hutch tried to focus on what the man was saying. “Normally, I’d bring you some cigarettes, too, but… well… ” he explained.

 

Hutch looked down at the pack of chewing gum in his hand and was amazed at how green the wrapper was.

 

After the minister left, Hutch remembered why he didn’t leave him a pack of smokes. It wasn’t the Marlboros that were the problem but the astonishingly attractive matches that went with them.

 

Later, Hutch found the energy to make sure Dobey, Huggy and the clergyman were on the No Admittance list.

 

A small part of his brain told Hutch there was no need to add anyone else to it.

 

XXXXXXXX

 

Sometimes when Starsky visited, he would wear his red, Grand Funk Railroad t-shirt. It made Hutch think of those seemingly endless days in the Torino, checking their trap lines, making their moves and chasing down the whippos.

 

God, that seemed like a long time ago.

 

“That’s because it was, blondie,” Starsky teased. He had his feet up on Hutch’s bunk. The bottoms of his Adidas weren’t very worn. It confused Hutch, making him wonder just how long Starsky had been sitting there.

 

They talked of Huggy, and Eddie Hoyle, and Sweet Alice.

 

When Hutch suggested a game of cards, Starsky always agreed.

 

XXXXXXXX

 

Hutch was aware of the constant camera on him and the lights that were never turned off. It was one price he paid for making a slow, sloppy move just after he’d shot that son-of-a-bitch.

 

 Thomas the butler had come up behind, taken the gun Hutch had pointed under his own chin and called Metro

 

Hutch still wasn’t sure how the man had gotten the drop on him that easily, but supposed shock was part of it. After all that railing against people with itchy trigger fingers, Hutch wished he could’ve shared the irony his own goddamn too-slow one with someone.

 

Hutch realized that that had been his first and best chance of continuing down the path he’d intended.

 

Now he was on indefinite suicide watch. And because he was a former cop, he was placed in solitary.

 

“You know it’s nothing personal,” the guard Robert told him. “It’s just that you wouldn’t have much of a future in there with the general population.”

 

Hutch just shrugged and thought, “A future?”

 

It made Hutch’s stomach feel very, very small. He started to stay on his bunk and stare at the light bulb like Tommy Marlowe, trying to burn a part of his brain away.

 

XXXXXXXX

 

You want me to say I’m sorry I killed him?”

 

“No, I want to say I’m sorry I did what I did to make you think you had to do it,” Starsky said, his face too pale. Hutch hated it when he looked like he’d been ill.

 

“Think? There was no thinking involved with what I did. It was pure necessity.”

 

Starsky looked sad. “Hutch, I … Hell, you’re the one that stopped me from sending Prudholm into the next world.”

 

“No, you stopped yourself, buddy,” Hutch said. “Think of why you didn’t shoot a hole in that motherfucker’s head.”

 

“I had you.”

 

“Precisely.” Hutch asked, “Do you want to play some more cards?”

 

“Why do we always play the same game, Hutch?”

 

“You know why,” Hutch answered softly. “And I can’t say it.”

 

XXXXXXXX

 

Hutch stared at the light until he wasn’t sure when day and night ended and began.

 

After a while, he realized he was going blind.

 

And he didn’t care.

 

No one seemed to notice. Hutch didn’t move around a lot and knew his 8 X 9 space like the back of his hand.

 

He knew it was fifty-nine steps to the showers and how far he had to push the food tray back under the bottom rail.

 

The only reason being blind bothered him was that he was worried he wouldn’t be able to tell when the power went out. Then he remembered the beeping noise the emergency light by the stairwell made when the main electric was interrupted.

 

Hutch constantly strained to hear that noise, desperately afraid he’d miss it during the three-times-a-day cacophony of the meal tray or the weekly laundry collection. Or worse, during his twice-a-week shower, the one thing that got him away from where he slept.

 

He knew it was seven steps to the corner, two steps to the left, then on the inside of the bar and out of the camera’s sight, the metal spoon was attached to the metal with a piece of Wrigley’s. Purloined from a meal from a careless guard, Hutch had hoarded that spoon for months. He knew all he needed was five minutes in the dark.

 

Five minutes was the time it took for the generators kick on after the main lights go out.

 

XXXXXXXX

 

Sometimes Starsky appeared in his leather jacket.

 

Even though Hutch couldn’t see him, he could hear the jacket’s creak and could smell the faint odor from gasoline and sandalwood. He could smell blood, too, which made him want to cry.

 

Hutch was thankful Starsky didn’t wear his leather jacket when he visited him until Hutch’s sight was completely gone. He couldn’t bear to look at the three bullet holes through its back.

 

Without his eyesight, cards were out of the question.

 

So he and Starsky sat and talked.

 

Hutch had remembered one of the last things Starsky had said to him before he’d been shot. It was a throwaway line about Hutch taking him out to dinner for steak and lobster.

 

The last words were whispered, bloody and burbling, in Hutch’s ear. At first Hutch had thought his partner was telling him, “Hush, hush, it’s okay.”

 

Now, he realized his partner had been telling him, “Hutch, Hutch, it’s today.”

 

Hutch knew Starsky was sitting with him on the bunk. He felt his partner’s warmth against his shoulder as they both leaned against the wall.

 

“Oh my god, Starsk. All I want to do is to go home with you.” Hutch didn’t even try to stop the tears.

 

“I know,” Starsky said in a broken voice. “And I don’t know what to tell you.”

 

XXXXXXXX

 

Hutch couldn’t have known of the thunderstorm raging outside. Between the thick walls and being two floors underground, he hadn’t been aware of the weather for nearly a year.

 

But when the bolt of lightning hit the transformer on the far end of the compound, it lit the fuse that sent him home.

 

Shortly before supper, the lights went out.

 

Hutch knew this when he heard the steady beep of the emergency generator flick on.

 

Seven steps forward, two steps to the left, one hand to the back of the bars, one hand grabbed the sharpened spoon and pulled.

 

It was the last thing he needed to do in this world.

 

XXXXXXXX

 

“All he did was play Solitaire. Sometimes it seemed like he was talking to himself. Really, the guy gave us no trouble.”

 

“Up until he had five minutes in the dark, that is.”

 

The guard shrugged. “Cleaning up the mess was bad, but I’ve seen worse.”

 

“I don’t blame the guy. His partner had been gunned down in the police parking lot and died three days later. The cop tracked the man who’d hired the shooters and executed him, right at his desk. Point blank. Hutchinson pled no contest, there was no trial, waived a lawyer and refused visitors. Then here, he takes the best opportunity to put himself out of his misery. All he was doing was waiting. That patience and determination is part of what made him a good cop.”

 

“So, do you want this?” Robert tossed his partner the deck of cards.

 

Catching them with one hand, Randy asked, “Those were his?”

 

“Yeah, I took them in the confusion while the medical examiner was there. He’d kept playing that card game over and over again, at least until the last few months anyway. Then he just lay there, looking up at the light.”

 

Robert shuffled them and then counted them. “Fifty-one cards. The man played Solitaire constantly all that time with a deck that had a card missing. Why? I mean, I would’ve gotten him a new deck if he’d asked.”

 

“Randy, the guy never asked for a thing.”

 

The guard laid the cards out. The backs showed the nighttime skyline of Bay City.

 

The card that was missing was the king of hearts.

 

The end.

 

THE WARNING: THERE BE DEATH HERE