Page 143 of Beneath the Stain
“You don’t like me much, do you, Mr. Ford?” Grant asked, not fooled at all.
Trav grimaced. “I cleaned up your mess,” he said bluntly. “I cleaned it up once, and it was ugly—you think it was only Mackey?”
Grant swallowed and looked at the guys lined up playing a bizarre game of “pick up the riff” that Trav had never understood but the guys—even Blake—seemed to get. For a moment Grant’s eyes fastened hungrily on Mackey, who was in his element and happily oblivious to them both, and then his vision ranged the stage, lingering particularly on Kell and Blake.
When he turned back to Trav, his eyes were redder than they had been when he’d first walked in. “No, sir,” Grant said simply. “I am aware I hurt them all.”
Trav took a deep breath. “Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“My dad used to beat fags for fun, Mr. Ford,” Grant said, his voice still even. “And my mom is from the south—old money, I guess. I think her granddaddy was Klan, which is not necessarily something I’m proud of, but I think she is. When I first fell in love with him….” Grant shook his head, and his remarkable eyes—bloodshot or not—grew dreamy. “I thought at first it was a fever, you know? And I figured if I just looked at him, I’d get my fill. But… but just knocking into him, wrestling, like you do, made everything hurt worse. So a kiss, I thought, to prove it wasn’t madness. But the kiss made the madness worse. So a touch. More. And every time, it got worse. And by the time I knew—knew—that Sam was a nice girl and all, but that just wasn’t where my heart was, I’d… I’d set up this lie. I was gonna be the good boy, the one who took my dad’s business, the one who had the grandbabies, I was gonna toe the line.”
A girl came over to take their orders. Trav took a beer, because Mackey and Blake weren’t there and that was sort of a treat, and Grant took a Sprite, presumably to settle his stomach.
“So that’s how you’re going todie?” Trav asked, and the hell of it was, he wasn’t even trying to be cruel. He’d left a career—completely changed his life—to avoid what Grant was talking about, and a little voice in his head whispered,But you were older than he was when you saw that kid crouching in the street.
“Nope,” Grant said, all serenity. He watched Mackey adjust the feed for probably the last time. “Nope. When I die, I am going to be free.”
Trav turned to him, lips parted, to ask what that meant, when Mackey set down the guitar and walked up to the microphone.
“Delmont, kill the fuckin’ lights, will you?”
Everything went out but the spot on the small stage, and Mackey tossed his hair out of his eyes and grinned, then leaned back for a second so the whole world could get a load of the tattoo on his stomach.
The applause was half clapped hands and half catcalls, and Mackey narrowed his eyes and turned to the band. “Y’all, they seem to think this is a gay thing. You got anything to say to that?”
Trav closed his eyes, suddenly understanding why they’d needed to stop by Walmart for cheap T-shirts. Like it was choreographed, everyone on the stage not Mackey grabbed their shirts and ripped them off before chucking the fabric out into the crowd.
The hollers got a lot more enthusiastic—and less violent—and Mackey was onstage with his lace-collared middy and his skinny jeans while his brothers all grinned, pumped up and tatted up, shirtless on the stage.
Mackey grinned. “Now that don’t seem fair at all, does it?” he drawled, moving his fingers to his buttons. “I mean, it’s not like you all ain’t seen us naked in the press for the past two years.” That got a halfhearted laugh. “Hell, Cheever had the paparazzi camped out in front of our house for amonth!”
That got a bigger laugh—and Trav pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Mr. Ford?” Grant inquired.
Trav just shook his head. “I now get why the press never bothered them,” he said directly into Grant’s ear.
Grant shot him one of those grins that brought up the vestiges of cancer-tattered beauty. “’Cause the whole world’s been up their asses from the time their mama conceived Kell,” Grant said with satisfaction.
And before Trav could say “A-fucking-men,” Mackey was in full cry.
“So, y’all, we’re Outbreak Monkey, and we used to live here. In fact”—he turned to the guys, grabbed the collar of his shirt, and ripped it off his body as he screamed—“it’s been a long fuckin’ time!”
Blake and Kell had been practicing that riff for a month—but this was the first time they had played the Zeppelin cover in front of a crowd. The unmistakable opening chords ripped through the tiny bar, flying like a dragon to plunder the suffocating cloud cover of bigotry that had blanketed Trav for two days and his boys for probably their entire lives.
For a full set—an hour and a half—Trav and Grant sat side by side and let the music do what Mackey always knew it would: take them away.
Trav cut his gaze in Grant’s direction a couple of times. Grant was sitting with his face up to the amp and his eyes closed like a cat in a sun spot, just bathing in the sound and the band and Mackey’s fearsome, fearless energy. About the only thing the band did as a concession to the small venue was turn the sound down from eleven and try really hard not to let Mackey fall off the stage. This was one crowd they knew wouldn’t catch him, and Trav figured the guys had given enough of their blood already.
But Mackey’s fierceness, Kell and Blake’s rawness, Jefferson and Stevie’s angry subversiveness, it was all there for the world to see, shining on their sweating bodies, spattering from their hair like heartblood on the stage.
At the end of the set, the crowd was rabid,screeching, frenzied, needing more. Mackey grinned at them, and Trav finally began to feel the roots of that smile under his feet.
“Yeah, I know you want more,” he said, and the bar erupted into sound. “You all, you’d watch us play until we turned to dust, and then you’d call us pussies ’cause we didn’t live forever.”
The laughter had two edges this time—self-conscious and self-aware, realizing that he was telling the truth, and mean, ugly, and taking. Yeah, some of them knew he was telling the truth and figured that truth made them stronger.
“Well, I’m going to take the last two songs for two of the people here in the audience. One of them is one of our own, and this is his song.”
