Give Me That Body (Oneshots)

Leonardo (1959) - Kallines

"I don't get why we have to be here," I said. I shifted on the step, my hands in my pockets.

"I've got to see somebody," Mini said, pulling the doorbell.

"I've never been in America before, isn't there anything else we could be doing?" I asked.

"Wanna shut up already?" he asked.

I reached out and thumped him on the back of his head.

"Don't hit him," Matteo said quietly, patting me on the back. He had always been there for me, my entire life, teaching me how to be mild.

We'd been having a grand old tour of America, pulling Matteo out of a heroin flop house in Florida and flying out to California for something else no one would tell me about.

"I really hate that the two of you are in love. It's too new, and it's weird to me and I wish you would stop," I said.

We stood at the door for a few minutes, waiting.

"Shut your mouth, you self-involved son of a bitch," Mini said, finally, heading around the side of the house.

"I'm going to find a way in before you do," I said, half-heartedly.

Sometimes, a lot of the time, I felt tired anyway. The worst part of the new situation was that Mini didn't seem like very much fun anymore, uninterested in challenging me or finding ways to raise a little hell. Now he wanted to be in California, and he usually would have said something like, "You know what, you're right. Let's go to Venice," or something like that, before Miami, when he had confessed his long-held love for Matteo. Two weeks ago. 

To be honest, without Mini, without Matteo, I didn't really know what it would mean for me. Surely, now we would grow apart. I'd been by myself before, a lot, but in this life, since childhood, it had been the three of us. I was older than the two of them, maybe by about five years, but I'm not terribly smart. I guess I can admit that I'm not terribly smart, not like Mini, even though I am taller, and faster, and better at everything else.

I was born around 1480, and I have been always, not incompetent, rather, slow to catch on to most things. But I had always known really, from childhood, even sitting in the back of a cart with Matteo on the way to Rouen -- our fathers chatting with each other about the weather as they walked the horses -- that not only did Matteo like other men, but that he was especially keen on Mini, the little red-haired weirdo, and that was why we had to be friends with him. If Matteo hadn't liked the French wool trader's son, we would not have been friends with him. Matteo and I came from the same class of merchant families, mine from Corsica, and his from the mainland, but our fathers were old friends from the college inns, and in business together. Always, we were travelling, as soon as we were old enough to abandon our mothers' apron strings. Among our siblings, in both of our families, Matteo and I were the oldest, and therefore the likely inheritors of our fathers' business. On the road, living was always risky, but perhaps less than if we lived in cities year round, as in the wet seasons, disease came in on the water. We slept on piles of sheep skins. Seeing Mini was a once a year sort of thing, traveling north to Normandy in the spring.

When Mini and Matteo were 20, I was about 25, newly married, ready to begin to travel without my father, who had admitted to me that he felt he was getting too old for so rough a sort of life. My wife was 13 years old, the only child of a merchant family less wealthy than ours, but she was Corsican, and had a pretty face, and a nice laugh, and a dowry large enough. She would live with her parents until she was 18, giving me enough time to take over the business and woo her. While on the road, Matteo helped me compose letters to her, because I wanted to impress her, but I didn't know how to talk nicely. "That's all right, Leonardo," Matteo would say, patting me, "you've got a good nose." He told me to keep my face neatly shaven, and my skin clean. Things that girls liked. His father had been threatening to marry him to his cousin for some time, a shy, cute figure that nobody would call beautiful, but meeting her, I knew that she would be kind to Matteo, even if he never looked at her.