Page 98 of Torch Songs

Guthrie stared at the lyrics on his phone, his eyes burning, sobs trapped in his chest. This was dumb, he thought. So dumb. He was going to see Tad in a week. He’d taken his stand against his father, refused to take abuse, made his peace with Jock. He could last a week, right? And after that, there were only a few more hurdles between him and a whole new life, with everything he’d ever wanted in the package.

A whole new life. A little cabin of heaven. Tad.

He buried his face against his arm and cried.

BUT TAKINGa stand against abuse wasn’t the end of things. It never was.

Butch didn’t spit anymore, and he didn’t throw stuff or drop his cups on purpose or dump his plates, but how much of that was respect or fear, and how much of it was simply dwindling strength, Guthrie would never know.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have some barbs left.

“Lookit you,” Butch muttered one day as Guthrie bustled around the house, cleaning up. “You can’t wait for me to die.”

Guthrie took the earbud out, surprised. Butch was in his afternoon mode—he usually just stared at the television until he slept. Guthrie had seen the newish carpets that Jock had bought, waiting for the right time to install them. In fact from what Guthrie could see, Jock had been quietly hoarding all sorts of things—indoor paint, discount tile, used appliances he’d gotten that still had some life in them. Guthrie suspected that the moment Butch passed on, Jock would move in and fix the house into a decent home, the one Jock had always wanted but Butch had never been willing to settle down in.

It made Guthrie proud in a way. No, Jock had never lived out from under Butch’s thumb, but he wasn’t planning to get drunk and wallow or wander lost. Jock had apparently been imagining how to be his own man for quite some time and using the few life skills he had to make that happen.

But Guthrie had assumed Butch had missed all that.

“Well,” he said now, to Butch’s rude—if accurate—comment, “if you’d wanted us to be excited about your life, you shouldn’t have been such a bastard.”

Butch rolled his eyes. “You and Jock—always fucking whining about something. I wastryingto keep us in gigs!”

“For what?” Guthrie asked. “To make music? ’Cause I assure you, Butch, you make better music when you’re not falling asleepin your own puke and running away from creditors and the cops.”

Butch grunted and then coughed, a deep wet one that spewed blood into the dingy handkerchief in his hand. “You act like you didn’t love every fuckin’ minute of it,” he gloated.

Guthrie sighed, some of the fight draining out of him. “You got me there,” he admitted. “When I was a kid, I thought that was livin’. Then I grew the fuck up and realized how much more there was to life than faking music.”

“You meanmakingmusic!” Butch crowed. “Me and Jocko taught you and that faggoty fiddler a thing or two, didn’t we!” Seth wouldn’t have cared about the slur, and Guthrie had been protecting his sore spots, his hot and bare nerves, from Butch since he’d walked in the house. At this point, the only way to explain to the dying old pusbag how wrong he was would be to rip away the only self-delusions the old fucker used to keep breathing. Guthrie had needed to balance honor and compassion against cruelty and vengeance on the blade of a knife for the last two or three weeks, and when he’d been with Tad, he would have said he could fall on the side of icing, white feathers, and marshmallow fluff. But something had slipped in Guthrie these past weeks, the whispering conscience that would have kept him from saying the ultimate cruelty to a dying man.

“Oh get off it, old man,” he snapped. “All you ever knew was a garage band’s chord progression!”

“I was a music man!” Butch whined, and that meanness Guthrie had warned Tad about was suddenly the nine-hundred-pound gorilla of his nightmares.

“You were adrunk! And a shitty father and a liar and a thief—”

“We never got a break,” Butch told him, and it sounded like a plea for Guthrie to understand, but Guthrie was beyond that.“One good break we had, you let him slip away. Couldn’t even suck the right dick.”

Roar!“Ohbullshit.You make a big deal out of Fiddler deserting us after we gave him his break. Dad, Fiddler wasourbreak. Weluckedinto that kid wandering into the bar and trying out for us. He’s not just good—he’s aprodigy. Everything he touches turns to gold, and for a bare, precious moment, he gave us some of that shine. You drank yours away. Jock saved it so he could fix your shitty house when he got a chance. I put mine into my education because I knew I wasn’t ever going to be no Fiddler.” Guthrie’s eyes burned, because Seth was still trying to give him a break, and he refused to tell his father about it. It was obscene enough that the old man tried to use his friend like a sledgehammer to take Guthrie out at the knees. “But before Fiddler came around,” Guthrie continued, “you were no better than a teenager playing ‘Smoke on the Water’ on a shitty guitar. You couldn’t hold a tune in a fucking bucket. You’d pawned your axe so often you forgot what it looked like and you were playing on a Walmart kid’s special and it showed. The only reason bars were hiring you at the end was because you drank enough liquor to make up for the customers you drove off, and I know this because I played at some of those places after you’d left, and it was hard to get those people to trust me once they heard the name Woodson. Do you get me? Fiddler was always the sunshine, and you and me were always here, scrabbling in the dirt, but I ain’t played in your shadow since I was seventeen, old man. You been playing in mine.”

Oh, it poured out of him, and he knew it was pure meanness. He wanted to rail at things like living in the front of a truck when he was eight years old, or going without meals, or going without a bath for two weeks, until he showed up for a rare stint at school and had to put up with the kids making fun of his smell. He wanted to ask Butch why he couldn’t have been a fucking parent,or why he had to be an asshole, or why he had to get pulled out of his own puddle of puke every night before they could go up on stage and earn at least a meal. But none of that would hurt his father—Guthrie knew that. So he went for the jugular, the truths that would really hurt, and he knew he’d won this round when a mewl like a rat getting its balls crushed issued from the old man’s throat.

“You ungrateful little bastard!” Butch screamed, and that was the last coherent thing Guthrie could hear from him because he’d grabbed his keys and his phone and stalked out.

Jock was waiting for him by his truck with a fistful of twenties.

“The Alley Kat’s still open,” he said shortly. “This’ll get you enough beers to cool off.”

He had the baby monitor on his belt, and Guthrie could hear Butch sputtering, his voice weaker and weaker.

“I’m sorry, Jock,” Guthrie mumbled, feeling apowerfulneed for a beer and a fuck or a fight or a chance to take a sledgehammer to a wall or something. He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped for when he’d come down here—he’d told himself it was nothing. Told himself he was down here for Jock and no other reason, butGodthat was a lie, wasn’t it? A moment—just a moment—of humanity from the man who’d raised him—it shouldn’t have been a goddamned dream, should it? But Butch wasn’t going to change. Was going to go to his grave without remorse for the shit he’d done to Guthrie. Hell, the shit he’d done to Jock. For all Guthrie knew, the shit he’d done to Guthrie’s mother, who had taken off and left Guthrie in his care. Expecting a change of heart from Butch Woodson was like expecting to wake up one morning to be the next Elton John. It wasn’t going to happen, and the only thing—theonlything—Guthrie could do was to wake up every morning and try to be the bestGuthriehe could be.

He just needed a minute before he tried.

It was unfortunate that there were only two places in town to get a drink. One of them was the Cut, where the construction workers who maintained the tunnel hung out, and the other was the Alley Kat.

As Guthrie pulled his truck up to the Alley Kat—his bedding, computer, and guitar all hidden behind the seat or locked in the lockbox because he wasn’t a fool—he scanned the parking lot and almost turned around to go back.

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