Suckers (5 page)

Halfway through
F Troop
he took a piss, got out of his clothes, turned everything off.

He pulled the blankets up and closed his eyes.

He thought for sure he was going to lie awake all night, but after a few ticks of silence, he was gone.

Something squirmed in the back of his neck. Some
things
. He had no idea where the band had gone, the crew. He tried to flip the hood of his sweatshirt up to cover his neck, but he remembered he’d left it in the alley. He clamped his hand over it, the skin there stretched tight, about to split like a tomato in the sun. Things wriggled underneath, hot and alive.

He woke in the dark, unsure whether this was real or the dream was, and he rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the ghost of tiny insect legs creeping over it, but nothing was there.

He got out of bed, pissed, gulped down more water. Looked at the other bed, its covers untouched, Ray’s bag right where he’d left it. His shoulders felt like someone had stuck a key in his back and wound them tight. He rolled them to loosen them, then texted Ray, chewing a fingernail while he waited for a response. The tension in his muscles was giving him a killer headache. His phone lit up. He let out a breath of relief. The text said, “Hotel bar. Wanna come down?”

He passed on the offer, took some more ibuprofen, and stood under a spray of hot water for a while, trying not to think. North Carolina was four hundred and fifty miles behind them. They’d gotten away. The alley attack was just a bad dream.

He burrowed under the sheets. Sleep came in fits and starts. As it came over him one time, his body began to vibrate. He heard bees. He snapped his eyes open. A soft rustle of clothes came, a light step on the floor. The bathroom door closed. He slipped under again.

And felt more dragged down when he forced his eyes open in the morning than he had when he’d closed them.

† † †

Breakfast ended up being more like lunch, then they were back on the bus, heading to the club for soundcheck—which Jamie made it to, and which went off without a hitch, so thank you higher power for
something
going right. They jammed for a while at the end of it—their support hadn’t arrived yet, no one was breathing down their necks. Playing eased the headache he couldn’t completely shake.

After soundcheck, Carey herded him and Ray to a picnic table in a fenced-off smoking area, where a freelance journalist with hair the color of candy apples introduced herself as Prism.

He tried to focus on the interview, but his thoughts were muddled and muddied. He wanted to be back in the dimness of the club, his bass in his hands. Or in bed again, in the dark. Prism had Ray talking about how their songs evolved on the road, how they never really considered a song finished when they put it on an album.

“We’d do a live album for every tour if we could,” Ray said. “But even then…you know, six, seven years after we put out a song, we pull it back out, and it’s all new again, it’s changing again. There’s always more to do with it.”

Sunlight glinted off the thin hook in Prism’s nose as she nodded.

“Nothing’s ever finished,” Ray said. “Not until you’re, you know, fucking dead.” He gave a wheezy laugh as he raised his cigarette to his mouth.

Dan cupped the nape of his neck. The mosquito bite had gone down, but it felt weird back there, under his skin, in his vertebrae. Tingly.

Prism laughed at whatever Ray’d just said, Ray saying now, “Well, you know.” And then the thank-yous went around, Prism stopping the recorder on her phone, gathering her stuff.

Dan rose, his hand out. “I hope you got what you needed.”

When she grasped his fingers, a sting pinched the back of his neck. He jerked away from her touch.

Her mouth opened.

“Sorry. Static shock.” A hive of bees swarmed hotly at the back of his neck, under his palm.

“I hate those,” she said. “I didn’t feel that one, though.”

“Sometimes they just getcha one way,” Ray said. When he offered his own hand, she said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I could probably use the jump,” Ray said. She laughed.

As she headed off, Ray raised an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t know what the fuck happened.” He rubbed his neck again, where the bees hummed distantly.

He grasped Dan’s shoulder. “You been feeling all right?”

The bees swarmed at the touch—a vibration crawling through the top of his spine. “Headachy,” he said.

“Need something for it?”

“I’ve got ibuprofen.”

Ray nodded and removed his hand to light his cigarette.

The hive of bees flew apart, and the headache pushed tighter against his temples. Between soundcheck and showtime, there weren’t many places to hang out—the bus or the back of the club, or the smoking area, which would be packed with fans soon. He retreated to the bus’s bathroom—the smell of disinfectant intensified by the fact that it didn’t get as much air conditioning as the rest of the tin can—and leaned a shoulder against the wall and let his mind wander, mostly through empty fields, which was what he was after. On the road, you had so much downtime you started to feel like you were stuck in your head. You got sick of yourself, sick to the roots of your teeth of your thoughts chasing after each other. Sometimes you could take off, walk around an unfamiliar city, crowd out your thoughts with sights and sounds and smells. Other times you were trapped, and you had to take that walk in your head. Empty fields. The woods after a warm rain. Scuttling over rocks at the top of Mount Chocorua in the bright morning sunshine.

He closed his eyes, letting the noise from outside the bathroom—voices, feet, traffic—settle and slip away. The buzzing at the base of his skull was so soft he had to settle into himself to hear it. Staying inside himself, he rested his back against the wall. He wished the bus were moving so he could have that rocking feel, that vibration under his boots.

He stayed there until Carey gave a quick knock and a “Dan? Almost time.”

He was ready. He took a leak, then went out and played. All the tension and frustration and the sound of his own thoughts plowed down his arms, through his fingers, and out into the noise he was making. He attacked the bass with his eyes closed, with a pick pinched between his fingers, with his lips bumping the mic as he sang words without having to think them first.

After the show, they talked with fans behind the venue, stood for pictures. He dropped an arm around a girl’s shoulders, and the bees swarmed and buzzed. His arm tightened. He dragged it off her—it felt filled with lead until contact was broken and the bees died back a little.

“You all right?” Stick asked, passing by with a crate of t-shirts.

Dan gave a short nod. The next photo, he just stood near the guy. Their shoulders bumped. He shook his head to clear the bees when the guy moved away. It was dark behind the club, just a security light and a standard bulb at the back entrance. A flash went off in his face, and he thought he saw grains in it. He needed something solid to grab on to—solid and inanimate. He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and blinked through another flash.

“Sorry to break it up,” Carey said, “but we’ve got a schedule.”

Josh had a couple bottles of water in his hands. He flipped one toward Dan. Dan caught it against his chest. The fans drew back a little, disappointed but understanding, and he thanked them as he backed toward the bus, turning around to make real headway toward it while Carey said, “You too,” as he grabbed Ray in the middle of a laugh, dragging him away from a small crowd.

As the bus started away from the sidewalk, Josh grabbed a can of beer from the fridge. Jamie was sober. Everyone seemed to be feeling decent. They pulled through a twenty-four-hour Taco Bell for something to eat.

“You feeling okay?” Stick asked again from the couch in the front lounge.

“I’m gonna go lie down.” In the bunk area, he shucked everything but his shorts and crawled into bed with a Michael Connelly novel he’d gotten halfway through last month and forgotten about until it resurfaced in his bag earlier today. He half expected the others to turn in early too, but it sounded pretty lively out there. Maybe a card game going on. The laughter sounded good; it was enough just to hear everyone getting along—no snarking, no short fuses. He laid the book on his chest. After a minute, he turned off the reading light.

He was still awake when people dragged themselves to their bunks. It sounded like Moss had been the big winner, but that was about usual.

With the bunk area full, the bees vibrated inside him. He pressed his hands over his eyes.

He was still awake when the only noise was the road passing under the bus’s tires.

He was still awake—and pacing the front lounge with a bottle of orange juice—when sunlight made its way through the cracks between the blinds.

Standing in front of the window in only his shorts, he watched flat acres of land spool by like a film reel.

By the time the others stirred, he was back in his bunk, his head under the pillow. He’d swallowed three ibuprofens. The headache thrummed under the surface of his skull—more tension than anything. But he was tired of it, not to mention just plain tired. Tired and wired. His brain wouldn’t shut up and let him drift off.

The bus slowed. In a few minutes they’d be gassing up, and Ray would be sucking down smokes, a sight so familiar by now it was almost iconic. Freshman year in high school, Dan had been in the marching band and Ray on the football team—smoking even then. Dan didn’t bother with marching band sophomore year, and Ray wasn’t any good at football, but during that first autumn of high school, when they’d both spent time on the field, Ray had singled him out somehow, calling him names with the kind of lazy smile that made you not take it too hard. They jabbed each other through the fall semester, passing in the hallways, the cafeteria, out on the field.

He had no idea why. Even Ray shrugged if you asked him about it: “You looked like you knew what you were doing.” On the field, he’d meant, in the marching band. How it looked like he knew what he was doing with a fucking tuba, Dan had no idea.

“And you had that Stooges shirt,” Ray would add.

One day, in line at the cafeteria, Ray’d said, “If you want to hear some
real
music instead of that marching band shit…”

Real music turned out to be Ray and a pockmarked kid named Steve, one on guitar and vocals, one on drums, making nothing but noise. Painful, set-your-teeth-on-edge noise.
Loud
noise. The noise drew Dan, though, and there was something else there too, if you ignored Steve’s dropping the beat to push his glasses up and Ray’s inability to decide whether he’d rather be Jimi Hendrix or Greg Ginn. There was something about what Ray was trying to do when he wasn’t trying to be someone else, and it clicked with Dan.

Around the same time, Dan happened to see an old Global bass at a flea market. Cost him twenty bucks. Getting an amp to go with it cleaned out the cash in his sock drawer.

Bass turned out to be a lot more fun than tuba.

They went at it every day—after school, weekends, school holidays. Steve got tired of their relentless practices, the hours of jamming and writing—especially the writing, Dan and Ray with their heads together, talking in half-sentences they didn’t need to finish, and Steve bored, flipping drumsticks. He’d been uncomfortable with original music, stuff he couldn’t pop into a CD player and mimic. After a while, he’d begun complaining about being the third wheel.

Dan wondered if Jamie was also a third wheel. If he was, he
had
been—for like a decade now.

Unlike Steve, Jamie was usually happy to let them do their thing. Not to take anything away from him; he could play his ass off, and he had no problem working with all-new songs. It was just…it was the way they worked, he and Ray holed up for days or weeks, a month or two even, with or without Jamie over in the corner, building tiny cities out of stubbed-out cigarette butts. Then they’d bring Jamie in on it. Jamie’d put his touches on what they told him they wanted, and they’d be ready to go.

It worked really fucking well, actually…when he wasn’t wanting to wrap his hands around Jamie’s neck and shake his eyeballs out of their sockets.

But if the band could get by without a drummer, he’d be all for it. After all these years, he couldn’t conceive of finding a third member for the band who gelled the way he and Ray did. If they thought of themselves as brothers, Jamie was the one who’d come along too late to be coming at things from the same point of view Ray and Dan had.

† † †

When Dan finally wandered out of his bunk, rain was pelting the bus’s roof, fast and hard. What light came through the windows was bleak and dismal. The weather subdued the whole crew: Stick and Josh stared slack-jawed at the TV, with Jamie between them snoring softly, his head tipped back. Carey hunched over the table, going through papers and receipts, checking his calendar, answering emails. Moss read; Greg played a game on his Nintendo 3DS.

Scrubbing the back of his hair with his hand, yawning, Dan headed to the back lounge.

Ray had his head hung back, his eyes closed, his hands laid one over the other on his stomach. He cracked open an eye as Dan pushed the door shut. “It lives.”