Page 24 of Beneath the Stain

Playing on the stage next to Grant with come still running down his asscrack was like breathing pot smoke until his feet didn’t even touch the stage. The smell of Grant’s skin got him buzzed, and the smell of his come or the musk under his balls got him high as a kite.

It gave him courage to have that stamp on his skin.

He learned to flirt outrageously with the crowd when he was still in high school. To smile that fuck-off-and-love-me smile until they screamed his name. He learned how to look right over their heads and lick his lips like he’d go down on every guy and girl in the place. When he was on stage and his heart was playing notes instead of blood, he felt like hecouldgo down on everyone in the place, like he wanted to taste them all and hear them scream and feel the clench of their fingers in his hair.

He yearned day and night to song-fuck the crowd one more time.

It was so much easier than living in his own skin when he saw Grant and Samantha walking down the street in the sunlight like they had every right in the world.

Living poor gives you a really short view of the world. You live to your next meal, your next paycheck, your next birthday, your next high. Mackey was no different. He lived for his next moment with Grant, and he didn’t see the time swimming under his feet like fish under a river of ice. He didn’t wake up one day and think,Hey, I’m nineteen, and I’ve spent a quarter of my life loving someone I can’t kiss in public!but one day it happened, whether he noticed or not. He probably could have lived hiswholelife that way, starving at the banquet, but the river under his feet changed in ways he did not see.

For the first couple of years, they played the Nugget one town over from Tyson, in Hepzibah, four times a month. Then one night, right before Mackey’s graduation, someone in the audience, at the first table, said something about Stevie’s dad being a pervert.

Mackey snapped his head back in the middle of the introduction to “One Headlight” and gaped for a minute, then looked back at Stevie for permission.

Stevie looked stricken, and that was permission enough for Mackey to fly off the stage and take the guy out. He didn’t realize the rest of the band had followed him until he heard a table break next to him and saw Kell and Grant on the ground holding their own.

The resulting melee cost over $2,000 in damage and resulted in their first night in jail. Grant’s dad bailed them out via a lawyer—and was apparently so happy to see his son doing something he considered “just boys” that he not only paid damages, he had the lawyer help Grant draw up a property damage clause for most of their gigs. They only ever had to use it at the Nugget, and after Mackey turned eighteen, the judge told him that more fighting might get him real prison time, so they sort of stopped playing there after that. (The judge seemed to think it was all Mackey’s fault that shitheads in this particular bar felt free to be shitheads. Mackey sort of thought Del, the owner, encouraged that to keep up his reputation as a tough, faggot-free sonofabitch, but that didn’t stop Mackey from swinging.)

The band decided they could either give Mackey (and themselves) a brain transplant, or they could start lining up more venues out of the area.

That was how they ended up in Sacramento three or four times a week, which was where they were when the river sands by Mackey’s feet shifted hard and swept them all away.

“Is he really here?” Mackey asked excitedly, peeking onto the stage of Hepburn and Tracy from behind the curtain. The club was deceptively huge, seating nearly two hundred when it had live bands and holding another hundred more in the center of the dance floor. Kell was to his right, and Grant was behind them, close enough to touch Mackey’s body with his front. For once Mackey was focused more on what was going on around him than on Grant touching him, familiar as a lover, right in front of his brother, and his brother not knowing.

“If he is, he looks the same as everyone else,” Kell muttered. “Grant, you’re the one who got the call from the guy—what’d he say?”

Grant laughed softly, and even in the noise from the club, his breath tickled Mackey’s ear. “He said he’d be here,” he murmured. “He said he wanted to see as much of our original stuff as we had. I said we had three hours’ worth of it—it was practically all we played. He said great. Apparently he heard that one single they play on the college stations and wants to build an LP off of it. All that shit I told you about before, Kell—it ain’t changed.”

Kell breathed out. “Ooooooohhh….” He sounded like a kid at Christmas.

Mackey only had a hazy idea of what getting signed might mean. A manager? A record deal? What exactly would that entail? Would they get to play more? Have better equipment to practice with? Would someone besides Grant book the shows? Would they get to record someplace Mackey could get rid of the buzzing from Kell’s guitar that bothered him so much when they made their demo? Would they play bigger venues? More people? Their faces on a Jumbotron?

All of that jumbled together in the idea of success—that, and not having to worry about money anymore, which was sort of a mindfuck for Mackey. If he had clothes and music and a little bit of food, what would he spend all that money on?Betterclothes? He didn’t even know what that meant.

A house, he thought. He’d like his mother to have a house so she didn’t have to worry about an apartment. And Cheever was too old to draw on the walls, but maybe a place he could have his own room now, so he could have all his pens and paints and pencils there. A room with lots of light, because drawing kept Cheever out of everybody’s hair. If art was for Cheever what music was for Mackey, Mackey wanted to give him something good to do with it. God knew music had savedMackey’sass more than once.

“What’s the plan, Mackey?” Kell asked.

Mackey blinked at him. “I don’t know—we have the set list and we play, right? Our best.” Not like any of them had ever gone out andnotplayed their best.

“Same set list?” Kell asked.

Grant spoke up. “Mackey needs his solo songs,” he said with authority.

Mackey glanced at him. “Why’s that?”

“’Cause you’re the one who’s gonna sell the band, McKay.”

Mackey stuck his tongue out, so used to hearing this from Grant that he’d come to believe it was Grant’s way of saying “I love you” in public. But then, surprisingly enough, Kell spoke up.

“Yeah—yeah. I think he’s on to something. We want to sell this guy something no one else has. Mackey’s our secret weapon. Let’s move ‘Scream’ up on the roster, and that new sweet one—whatyacallit, Mackey?”

“River Shadows,” Grant reminded him, flicking his own shadowed glance toward Mackey.

Mackey looked away, not blushing, because he couldn’t. He’d written that song for him and Grant, because more than once during the past few winters they’d parked that van by the river and had themselves a rip-roaring game of “Let’s pretend we’re not hiding the salami.”

“You like that one?” he asked neutrally.