Page 3 of Beneath the Stain

Jeff and Stevie took orders easy. Grant liked to play with him anyway. Cheever was asleep in the bottom bunk, where Mackey usually slept. Once Mackey stood in the middle with Jeff’s keyboard and played a basic hymn, he bossed everybody else into place. He knew the melody, and he picked it out for Kell on his little acoustic guitar, and he pounded out a bass beat for Jeff on his thigh. Stevie was a quick study—he picked up the beat and had fun with the flourishes on the practice pad. Jeff took piano with Mackey, too, so he understood that some chords on the bass made you happy and some chords made you sad. For “Simple Gifts” it was happy.

So they played a very basic version of “Simple Gifts.”

And when they were playing it through a second time, Mackey opened his mouth and blew everybody’s minds.

I fight in the playground with the kids mouthing off

And I fight with the teachers when they laugh at us and scoff

And I fight with my brothers ’cause it’s how we play

If I’m not fighting then I died this day

Even Kell had been reluctantly impressed. “Keep goin’, Mackey!” he’d urged, and Mackey grabbed a school notebook—their mother bought them by the case when they went on sale for eight cents a piece—and started writing, his left hand hooked at a painful angle, because that’s just how he wrote. While he was doing that, Kell took them through the song a few more times, until they could play it with hardly any hitches.

By the time their mom got home, Mackey had the lyrics ready to perform. After a long night on her feet, putting up with drunks and shitty tippers and men who thought that her dating history was an insta-pass to her bed, the Sanders boys did the impossible.

They made their mama smile.

In fact, they made her laugh and clap her hands. “Oh, Mackey,” she crowed, “if I’ve got to bail you out of school because you can’t keep your fists to yourself, at least you can give me this!”

Even tired as she was, she’d celebrated by making hot chocolate for them and pulling a box of cookies from the hidden place in the pantry (because otherwise they’d be gone), as well as a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, just for Mackey, because those were his favorite. When Grant’s and Stevie’s parents came by to pick up their boys, it looked like they’d spent a quiet night at home.

The next time the boys got together, Grant brought a music book with the melodies and chord progressions of some of their favorite rock songs.

And Mackey had filled up half a notebook with lyrics.

They’d played “rock band” ever since.

The local music store let Mackey stack crates and sweep up on the weekends, even though he was underage, and in return, he got their used and broken equipment. His mom let him do it if he stayed out of trouble, which meant he had to stop belting kids for jumping his shit when he was smarter than them. He learned to use his mouth, those precious words he kept in his notebook, to keep kids off his back. It didn’t make him popular, but it kept him out of fights.

“Hey, Mackey—how’s your mom?”

“I don’t know—how’s yours? She was looking okay when I left her this morning!”

“I will fucking—”

“You will? I’d like to see that. Wait. Nobody would like to see that. Suggest something else.”

“Oh God—”

“Me? I’m your god? Wow, you didn’t have to! Hey! Go get that!”

“Go get what?”

“Your self-worth—I just kicked it off the sidewalk!”

“What does that even mean?”

“When you find your self-worth, you’ll know! Fetch!”

The rest of the school just stopped talking to him, because, well, Mackey made a fool out of them.

But okay. He didn’t need anyone but his brothers. And the band. Kell could fight for him anytime, but if he had the music to look forward to, Mackey didn’t need him.

Mackey could do just fine on his own.

But he carried thatthing, that pixilated fuck-off-and-love-methinginto the music.