Page 134 of Beneath the Stain

“Mackey made his own disaster,” Blake said with passion.

“Easy to say,” Kell snapped, wiping his cheeks again. “Just because I didn’t have a computer until I was twenty-five doesn’t mean I don’t use it now. You think I didn’t look that shit up when Mackey came out? You think I didn’t read all the articles and shit about how hard we make it on people, how they’d rather use drugs and hurt themselves than not be loved?”

Kell was shaking, and without warning, Blake launched himself at his friend with a full ten-points-for-the-fist-bump on the back style hug. Kell let him, trembling in Blake’s arms, and Blake sighed.

“Trav?”

“Yeah?”

“Would it be awful if I asked you to take him out and get him drunk? He’s not an addict—he stopped without even being asked. But he needs something… something….”

Trav sighed. “Something. Yeah. Blake, you wanna wait here for Mackey and Briony? Text me when they get back, okay? I think Kell needs a fucking drink.”

Blake nodded. “Can I watch your TV?”

Trav wanted to laugh. Kids. All of them. “Mackey’s tablet is in his carry-on—you guys play games on it, right?”

“Yeah—and I even know which icons to ignore.” Blake shuddered. “Gay porn is for gay men and straight women, I’m not telling you something you don’t know.”

Trav laughed. He had to. “Thanks, Blake. C’mon.” He slung his arm over Kell’s shoulders and steered him toward the bar. “Blake?” Trav said over his shoulder before they walked out from under the hotel overhang and into the pouring rain. “Text Jefferson—have them come down too. I don’t want any of you alone.”

The look on Blake’s face—God, it was grateful. Trav steered Kell to the bar they’d left not half an hour ago, thinking that addictions and comfort were a very, very tricky business.

“DOYOUknow how hard it is?” Kell asked soggily. “Being his brother? He’s like, all bright… like the song. Like everything is a song to him. There’s shooting stars, and there’s Mackey, and the stars are trying to catch him. And the rest of us… we’re… I mean, he’s sosmart. He just got in the middle of the living room and said, ‘You, you’re gonna play lead,’ and I did. Man, I didn’t even know what lead guitardid, and he made me practice, and now I wouldn’t change it….”

Trav took a deep breath and patted Kell on the back. He thought about offering up another beer but then figured Kell would have enough to throw up as it was. No wonder the boy never got drunk—this was just embarrassing.

In a way.

In another way, Trav thought as he nursed his own beer bitterly, Kell sort of hit the nail on the head. Mackey was a shooting star. The kind of guy Trav hadalwaysgone for. Whether it had been his painful half-realized crush on the soccer forward who played the lead in the sixth-grade school play or the blistering first affair with the guy who played saxophone on the corner by the library and the drugstore the summer before he went into the service, Trav had loved the shooting stars, the talented, the magnetic. He’d never been able tounderstandwhat drove them, but he loved it just the same. It hadn’t been until Mackey that he’d seen his same obsessive need for order mirrored in Mackey’s creative drive, and still—Mackey was the shooting star. Trav just cleared the cosmic debris from his path.

“It’s hard,” he said, feeling melancholy with two beers. “It’s hard loving people that bright, that shiny, that they make everyone else in the world look dim.”

Kell nodded. “Grant was like that,” he said ruminatively. “Grant did what you did, real smart, but…. God. He was only happy when he was on the stage with me and Mackey, playing the guitar. He was good. So good.” Kell sighed into his beer. “So, so good….”

Trav pulled out his wallet and set his card on the table, nodding at the night-shift bartender. The place had cooled down after the band’s set, and no one seemed to recognize the lead guitarist of Outbreak Monkey working some shit out with his brother’s boyfriend.

“It’s not your fault you didn’t know,” Trav said, wondering if Kell would remember in the morning.

“It is,” Kell said, proving, once again, that people underestimated him a lot. “I told them they couldn’t be who they were. I told them they had to hide. So they did. Grant hid until he disappeared. Mackey tried, but—” Kell laughed fondly and drunkenly, rubbing his hand over his growing buzz cut in thought. “Mackey was always torn, you know? He thought he was no one, but he didn’t wanna be.” Kell rubbed his head again. “Why’s my little brother so much more interesting than I am?”

Trav wished for the zillionth time that he was a hugger. “You remember that Joe Walsh song?” he asked, smiling a little. “Ordinary Average Guy?”

Kell laughed. “Yeah. Boring life. Picking up dog doo, hoping it’s hard. I remember. Is that my fate, Trav? Wife, kids, dog shit?”

“Happiness,” Trav said softly, thinking about his parents and his brother and meaning it. “It’s going to be easier for you, Kell. Mackey’ll keep you fed, keep you in a job, and you will help him make music history. But when it’s time to find that wife to follow you around and have babies, it’s gonna be easy.” He sighed and shut his eyes. “That fight that Mackey and I had? There’s gonna be none of that shit for you. No breaking your fist on walls, no sixty-eleven trips to rehab. Just falling in love and having babies and doing your job with all your heart. It’s gonna be a good life.”

Kell nodded with big eyes, like he was clinging to Trav’s words with all the strength in his big, rough hands. “Yeah?”

Trav nodded and smiled. “Yeah, man. You’re gonna have a good life.”

“Not spectacular,” Kell said, and then looked Trav in the eyes with startling sobriety. “Is it worth it?” he asked. “The trade-off? The spectacular for the ordinary? Is it worth it?”

Trav sighed and closed his eyes. “Ask me when we bury your friend, Kellogg. I might know then.”

The tabletop they were sitting at was overvarnished, tacky with too much spilled booze, riddled with stickers and stamps, which was apparently this place’s idea of kitsch. Kell worried one of the stamps with his thumbnail and looked around the little dive with the surprisingly tasty barbecue.

“This is a good place,” he said after a minute. “Someday I want to come back to this place and remember the shit you said to me. It’s important shit.”