We're only taking turns holding this world
It's how it's always been, when you're older you will understand
The Fray
Winter 2010
The night he met his maker. Logan held tight on the wheel to keep in check the resentment he should’ve felt at getting torn away from that holy grail of his past. From the answers at his fingertips, cold and solid as ice.
“Here,” Marie said, his tag dangling from her hand like an apology. Like a guarantee. “This is yours.” The air in the car was thick with how much more she wanted to say, but the space between them was scrutinized from the back. The one who wasn’t the boyfriend shouldered his way in. “I don’t like uncomfortable silences.”
Well into early morning, Logan searched his slivers of memory for the answer to the only question he’d been asked: “Don’t you remember me?” A man with a name he somehow knew hung over him, bathed in sterile green light, with a split in half a tag stamped ‘Wolverine.’ The same one that cut deep lines into the meat of Logan’s palm. In her sleep, Marie shifted her forearm closer to him, skin luminous in the blue-gray light. He had to pull away.
Stopped on a wooded dirt road so the boys could take a leak, Logan came around Marie’s side to stretch his legs and snap at her to keep her bare feet in the car. The ground was littered with broken bottles. Sighing, she turned toward him, knees settling against the fabric of his jeans as he stood at her open door.
“I was sure they’d kill you,” she said, and, leaning on the roof, he countered, “I don’t go down that easy.” Marie looked up at him, not so sure. “That man was talkin’ like he was God and you were listenin’…“ Her hair fell forward as she nudged herself into the arc of his stomach.
The dam he was holding up inside – the one that bore the weight of fifteen years of being stranger to himself – got another crack. He put his arms around her head. For a moment that felt like freefall, he let her be scared for him.
“Just don’t, okay? Don’t listen,” she whispered, and he replied, “I’ll make it through this,” knowing he would because somebody needed him to.
The meeting happens in Times Square. They spot each other at the same moment, Wraith looking down at Logan from an otherwise empty double-decker tour bus.
“Ororo, damn, baby,” Wraith says, putting down his bundle of long-stem roses as Logan comes to sit in the row across. “Your phone voice doesn’t do you justice.”
“If you wanted her to keep your little date, you shouldn’t have double-crossed her. Where’d you stash Magneto?”
“That information doesn’t belong to you ‘til I get paid. Tonight starting after ten I’ll be accepting bids in this fine establishment.” From the band of his hat, he takes a business card and sticks it to the damp seat in front of Logan. “They take care of me there. Oh, and, I’ve got to warn you, there’s a mutant supremacist name of Elijah Cross who’s promised to double y’all’s offer.”
Logan springs forward, pressing three blades to Wraith’s stomach. “How ‘bout I triple it?” When Wraith teleports away, Logan’s claws tip through the plastic seat.
At the stairs of the bus, Wraith says, “Color me surprised, Logan. I thought you’d given up the assassin trade. That’s why they didn’t bring you in official for the Yashida deal. You were a ‘changed man,’ Charles said.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Tell you what. You get the goddess to get you some of Charles’ cash, and you bring it to me without any of your usual violent bullshit, and we’ll talk.” Wraith teleports again, disappearing into a crowd of umbrellas.
Logan walks five blocks to the car, the fine rain doing nothing to cool him off. He’s stewing over what that bitch Stacy X had said – “Your people really don’t tell you anything.”
Through the Mazda’s back window, Logan can see Marie inside with her head buried in the textbooks she’s never without. Her finals are coming up. If she does good, she graduates a semester behind instead of a year. So she’s stopped slacking, toeing the line like she’s up for parole and Storm’s her warden.
Except for the attitude, she’s been a model student. Logan hasn’t caught a whiff of alcohol on her, not since that night in the woods when things got all sideways between them. But he knows every Friday when she goes to DC to stay with her firecracker friend that she’s coming back Sunday on the wrong side of a bender.
The way she’s hurting, last thing she needs is for him to unload on her. She’s been listening over the wire, so it’s going to be a hell of a job keeping her off the subject.
Minute he gets inside the Mazda, Logan starts sweating. Marie’s got the heat turned up to broiling. He reaches under her tall, black boots to turn it off, eyes definitely not her short skirt and the crotch-shot he’d be getting. “Kid, it’s winter. Put some goddamn clothes on.”
She pretends to contemplate that before saying, “Pass,” like she always does.
“Christ, you’re gonna get me pulled over for pickin’ up a teenage hooker,” he mutters, backing out of the lot.
“I’m not a prostitute.” She turns a page. “Anymore.”
Logan shoves her legs off the dash with the hand that’s not on the wheel. “I’m gettin’ real sick of the way you run your mouth.”
Marie shrugs. “I did get fifty bucks once for letting a truck driver hold my hand over his lap and move it around for a while. And this diner cook bought the underwear I’d been wearing for a week and a half. I don’t know which was grosser.”
He doesn’t dignify that charmer of a story with a response, just takes out a cigar to gnaw on while he navigates them through side streets. Isn’t she tired of the grudge she’s carrying? Yeah, okay, she’s embarrassed and maybe offended, but he shouldn’t have to justify not taking advantage of a drunk high schooler with a Mack truckload of baggage about sex.
Logan looks at Marie. Really looks at her. Watches her skirt ride up as she puts her textbooks into her backpack. The way she brushes her white bangs out of her mouth when she sits up with the surveillance computer.
“I don’t trust Wraith,” she says. “I don’t even trust that he’s not somewhat trustworthy.”
Logan pinches his eyelids. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. “What asshole taught you to be so suspicious, kid?”
“That wasn’t you, Logan. That was life.”
With the things about her past she’s oh-so-causally dropped on him of late, he believes it.
She brings up the recording to send to Storm. “I don’t think Wraith would sell Magneto to that Cross guy. Listen to how he said, ‘mutant supremacist,’” She starts the recording too late, right on “assassin,” and Logan has to tap the brake to avoid the car in front of him. She lets it play from there, frowning. “What’s the Yashida deal? You said the Professor asked Wraith to meet you about Stryker, but Wraith changed his mind.”
“He was sellin’ Stryker’s mind control serum on the black market for a microchip. I was s’posed to stop him, ‘cept turns out he wanted both. He had another mutant playin’ double-agent, and she got the microchip and Wraith got the serum and hell if I know what I was even doin’ there.”
Marie’s not hiding her annoyance at only getting the full story now. “And did you talk to him?”
“Not much. He said he knew me. I must’ve known him, because when he dumped the serum he was lookin’ at me like it was mine much as Stryker’s. ‘The work we did together,’” Logan echoes darkly. Marie punches him in the arm, and it’s so unexpected he almost veers into a van in the next lane. “Jesus! You know I don’t do city drivin’ – ”
“Who cares? My God, Logan. You’re blaming yourself for all of Stryker’s sins based on a look! You only pretended to walk away,” she accuses. “You’re still listening to him.”
“I’m not listening to anybody. I got my blinders on. World’s a mess, and you’re livin’ in it. I gotta take care of that for you.” It’s an attempt to soften her up, to get her off his back.
“Just admit you’ve stopped asking questions because you’re scared of the answers.” Marie glares out the window, at the traffic pinning her in with him. “Stop putting that on me.”