by Mercy Brown
“You need some real ink, Emmy,” Cole says, admiring it. “Trap could design it for you, because that’s not bad.”
“Prepare to get naked, Sonia,” she says, giving me the once-over as I stand there feeling overdressed. “Because I’m sinking this eight and I know you’re not wearing a bra.”
There’s a bunch of “oooooohs” and “ahhhhs” from the crowd, and this fact must have just dawned on Cole, too, because he looks perplexed, like he can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Neither can I, but sadly, I’m more competitive than I am wise, and one thing is true about me—I will never back down from a challenge. That tenacity is probably going to kill me one day, if this is any indicator.
Now I have to decide if I’m drunk enough to part with my dress in case Emmy does sink the shot, and the answer is fuck no, so I take Cole’s drink and finish it, which is for the best because he’s so ripped he can’t even protest. The room falls completely silent and my buzz comes on hard and strong.
“Ready,” I say.
There’s one collective gasp as Emmy sinks the eight right in the corner pocket and then jumps into the air, pumping her fist high, saying, “Yeeeeeee haw! Show us your tits, Sunshine!”
Cole’s eyes go wide, Travis’s mouth drops open, and everyone stares. Before I can lose my nerve, I squeeze my eyes shut and pull my dress right up over my head and toss it into the crowd to a whole hell of a lot of applause, leaving me in nothing but a pair of blue cotton Kmart panties. I might feel embarrassed or I might try to cover myself with my hands, but there’s no time, because as soon as my dress comes off, Cole backs me to the wall and puts his arms around me, blocking any possible view anyone might get.
“Aw, come on, man,” the Stain complains. “No fair.”
“Emmy, find Sonia’s dress,” Cole says, and oh shit, that look he’s giving me tells me I am in all the trouble. But I can’t stop myself from laughing, because for one, this situation is totally absurd, and secondly, I am more turned on right now than I know what to do with. Cole shakes his head at me. “I can’t believe you lost strip pool and got me drunk.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you?”
“Not exactly?”
“I can’t find Sunny’s dress,” Emmy says, stumbling around in her underwear in a crowd of people. “What the hell, who took Sonia’s dress? And where’s my shirt?”
Cole whips his T-shirt off to even more cheering and pulls it over my head. The sight of his bare chest and his tattoo rivets me. Emmy and Travis try to find our clothes but apparently the crowd are playing a game of keep-away with them.
“Pay up, bitches! Bow to the mighty Emmylou Soft!” Anton says, as I see a bunch of Monopoly money flying through the air. “Who’s competing in round two?”
Someone tosses Emmy’s shorts to me, so I put them on and help look for my dress, but then Emmy gets her hands on it first and puts it on, and it’s hilariously short on her. Cole snatches Emmy’s T-shirt and wears it like a belly-tee.
While Cole goes to scout out the house for a bed or somewhere, anywhere, we can get it on, the Stain, who turns out to be named Earl (who is now wearing overalls over his stained briefs, with a wifebeater and a vintage Esso trucker’s hat), tells me he’s got a bed over at his place and he’s right in the neighborhood. Meet him at his truck in five minutes, he’ll give me a ride there and bring me back here to meet up with everyone in the morning.
Thing is, I’m so drunk now that I think this is a great idea. Earl, aside from having questionable laundering practices, seems like a pretty okay guy, and being on tour is all about accepting and trusting strangers, right? How many strangers’ floors have I slept on in the last two weeks—and this guy is offering an actual bed! Besides, I’ve just had the experience of partially disrobing in front of him and a room full of people I don’t know, so we’re all practically family now anyway. A bed with Cole after strip pool? Sign me up. The thing is, Cole is still so drunk from my shitty pool playing that he actually agrees to it. I take him out to the truck where we find Earl waiting, smoking a cigarette, looking slightly dismayed.
“Wait, you want to go home with this guy?” Cole says.
“Yeah, this is Earl!” I say. “He’s got a bed! When’s the last time we got to sleep in a bed?”
“Hey, this isn’t what I planned, either,” Earl says. “But the more the merrier, I guess. We’ll make it work.”
Cole shrugs, tosses our sleeping bags and backpacks in the back of the pickup, and then we climb right in the bed like no big deal. It isn’t until Earl tears off at a clip down the street, his unmuffled tailpipe ripping across the quiet night, the wind whipping my hair everywhere, when Cole and I look at each other in surprised, awakening horror.
“Wait, wait. We didn’t just jump into the back of a pickup with some drunk hick we don’t even know,” Cole yells over the sound of the tailpipe. “Did we?”
“Do we even know where he’s taking us?” I yell. “What the shit is wrong with us?”
“Fucking road sickness, that’s what,” Cole groans.
I look into the cab through the back window. Earl is blasting Jethro Tull and I can see a big, unsheathed hunting knife on top of a case of Bud Light perched on the seat. Earl notices me looking, waves, and gives me the thumbs-up. Then at a stoplight he sticks his head out the window.
“Be there in ten minutes,” he says. “My cabin’s just down the road a piece. Nice, quiet spot on the creek. Got some weed and some hard cider in the fridge and a box of corn dogs, too.”
The light turns green and then Earl guns it.
“Jesus Christ, we’re going to die,” I say.
“Okay, just . . . fuck. Fuck, let me think of something.” Cole rubs his face with his hands, trying to sober up. He pulls his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and flips out the corkscrew.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he says. “Just, you know, trying to think.”
“Yeah, well we need a better plan than opening wine bottles!”
When Earl stops at another light I throw the sleeping bags and our backpacks over the side. Cole looks at me like I’m nuts when I jump out onto the sidewalk.
“Come on!” I urge him, hoping that Earl doesn’t notice.
Cole hops out over the side just as Earl steps on the gas, and the momentum gives him a little more lift than he’d planned. He stumbles to the sidewalk, landing in a heap on the sleeping bags. I’m pulling him to his feet when Earl notices us in his side mirror and screeches to a halt and calls, “Hey! Hey! Where you guys going? The night is young!”
Cole grabs our sleeping bags and his backpack as I pick mine up and we start running down the street towards this park, just in case he decides to chase us. We don’t look back when Earl yells, “Y’all beware Tinglewood. You’ll get yourselves haunted!”
Chapter Fifteen
Sonia
We wander down an asphalt bike path, alongside a wide creek. There’s a street right across the water that we can see, but I don’t recognize it. I was so busy panicking, I wasn’t paying attention to where Earl was driving.
Here’s where I should probably vow to never drink again.
“Do you remember where the house is from here?” I ask.
“We can’t be far from Barnstormers,” Cole says. “I think it’s this way.”
It’s really late and my eyes are super tired, but the deeper we get into the trees, the more this park is really creeping me out. There are way too many angular shadows on the path, too many shapes that don’t make sense in the dark. Earl’s warning about the woods being haunted rings in my ears.
“Wait, what the hell is that?” I whisper, stopping short when I see a shadow on the path ahead that looks a little too much like it’s wielding a knife. “That’s not Earl, is it?”
Cole whisks me behind
him. He gets his pocketknife back out, only this time he palms it with the spike coming out between his knuckles as he makes a fist.
“Who’s there?” he calls, sounding a hell of a lot more menacing and way less freaked out than I am. There’s no reply, but the rustle of leaves in the wind makes a shuffling sound, and I cower behind him. “Open your mouth and answer or I’ll open it for you with my fist, asshole.”
But the shadow doesn’t move. Cole creeps forward, his knife out in front of him. A car passes on the road and the headlights shine across the creek, flashing on what looks like a tree trunk. We walk over, and Cole swaps his Swiss Army knife out for his penlight.
“Sunny, look at this!” he says, now sounding way less like he’s about to give someone a homemade lobotomy. He shines the light and we can make out an elaborate carving of a unicorn coming out of the tree trunk with a snake in its mouth.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” he asks in awe, like a little kid as he gingerly reaches out to touch it. Then he shines the light on a wooden sign that simply reads Tinglewood. We check out another tree—a wizard, this time. He’s so excited now, he makes us examine every single carving in the grove, and I think of all the memories I’ll have from this trip (and there are many scrapbook-worthy moments), watching that boyish excitement cross his face as he explores Tinglewood by starlight might be my favorite so far. I feel like I can actually see the kid in him—that part of him I suspect was never afforded much carefree wonder. Then I picture Cole at sixteen in a jumpsuit, doing push-ups and jumping jacks in a fenced-in yard. What the hell ever happened that led him into that kind of trouble?
“Cole?” I’m about to ask him about it, but when I see that delighted smile on his face, I think better of it.
“Yeah?”
“Wanna make out under the unicorn?”
“Hell yeah I do.”
He takes my breath away with a kiss that is so deep and so sweet I’ll remember it the rest of my life. He comes up for air and licks his lip, his eyes darting up and to the right like he’s thinking. “Is that Cherry Coke this time?”
The boy knows his Lip Smackers. He should by now, with all the making out we’ve done.
We spread out his sleeping bag under the unicorn and he stretches out, wincing as he rubs his ankle.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I just landed weird on it when I jumped out of the truck.”
“Well, I’m sorry I made you jump out of a moving vehicle, but at least you didn’t have to stab Earl with your corkscrew. Not sure how much of a match that would have been for his buck knife, anyway.”
“He had a buck knife?” Cole says, and it’s dark out but I think he goes a little pale. “Are you shitting me? You saw an actual buck knife?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to alarm you. More.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I guess.”
“I swear, I have no idea what’s gotten into me. I’ve done so many crazy things on this trip, I feel like I don’t even know myself anymore.”
“I’ve known you had a wild side ever since I first saw you jump into the mosh pit at that Bouncing Souls show on Commercial Ave. back in ’92.”
“You have?”
“Well okay, I never imagined you’d show your tits to a room full of strangers,” he teases. “At least not outside of my own private, filthy fantasies.”
“Hey, that wasn’t me. That was my psychotic, drunk alter ego, Highbeam.”
“It was hot.”
“It was?”
“Fuck yes it was,” he says. “But if you ever take your dress off in public again, I swear to God, Sunny, I’m going to end up back in jail.”
I laugh and stretch out next to him on the sleeping bag. “Are you mad that I did that?”
“Hmm . . . depends. If I say yes, will you make it up to me with a blow job?”
Cole leans back, grinning as he clasps his hands behind his head. I’m about to pull his thunderbolt out and get busy with it, but I find myself staring at his arms, all flexed as he relaxes there, totally unaware of how hot he is. Or maybe he’s absolutely aware—that would explain the cocky smile I’m getting. I smile back, my eyes wandering over to his tattoo again, that simple, braided rope around his bicep. I stretch out on top of him and take a better look at it.
“When did you get this tattoo?” I ask him.
“My seventeenth birthday,” he says. “My uncle took me after I got out of the youth house. My mother nearly disowned us both.”
“Sounds like your mother and my mother have a lot in common,” I say with a small laugh.
“Yeah, I guess your mom doesn’t like your tattoo,” he says, running his finger slowly along mine.
“I think it’s more that she doesn’t like me,” I say. “She wanted a daughter who would pick up the life she gave up, you know? But hey, she never should have married my father and had me if she was going to have to give up her spot in the New York Symphony. It wasn’t worth it to her.”
“Come on, you were worth it,” Cole says. “Of course you were.”
I prop myself up so I can look at his face, all sweet and concerned. “Well, if I ever marry someone, it’ll be a guy I can follow my dreams with—not someone who wants to hold me back. What good is being married for twenty-five years, wondering what your life might have been if you’d gone after what you really wanted?”
“Twenty-five years, huh?” Cole says. “That’s a long time.”
“They’ve even planned this big, fancy twenty-fifth anniversary party. But I don’t know if I’m going to go.”
He runs his hands up my back, under my T-shirt. I love his hands, how calm and sturdy they are as they warm my skin.
“Oh come on, Sunny. You have to go,” he says. “It’s your folks’ twenty-fifth. Are they really so terrible that you couldn’t just show up and fake it for a night?”
“I suck at faking it,” I say, frowning. “Isn’t that obvious by now?”
“Then just do the showing-up part,” he says. “That’s good enough.”
“Not for my parents.”
“It’s not for them—it’s for you.”
I bristle, but I can’t be mad, because he slides his hand into my hair and gently massages my scalp and it feels so, so nice. The sound of his steady breathing calms me. I rest my head on his chest and listen to his heart, thumping away in there. Then I look back at his tattoo again, stretching my fingers out along the rope.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“It’s from a story someone told me while I was locked up.”
“Tell it to me,” I say. “I want to hear it.”
Cole shifts onto his side and we lie next to each other. He twirls a strand of my hair as he tells me the story of the thief’s rope.
“There was a nurse at the youth house who was pretty cool,” he says. “She once told me a story about this thief who gets stopped by a homeless guy on his way to rob a bank. The homeless guy asks him for some spare change but he says no, of course. He’s a thief, so what’s he going to do, give away money? Then the homeless guy asks for some food, and the thief says no. He asks for clothes—you get the idea. Well, finally the homeless guy says, ‘Hey, please, how about your belt? I’m so thin now, my pants won’t even stay up. Can I at least have that?’ The thief pulls this old piece of rope out of his pocket and gives it to the homeless guy, just to get him off his back. ‘Here, use that,’ he says, and then goes on his way.
“He ends up getting shot by the cops in the middle of the robbery and finds himself in hell, of course. He’s a bad guy, right? But then he looks up and sees the crappy piece of rope he gave to the homeless guy dangling down from the sky, and Saint Peter is on the other end, telling him to hop on if he wants a lift to the pearly gates. So the thief grabs onto the rope, but while Saint Peter is pulling him up, it begins to fray. Th
e thief gets angry, thinks he’s being tricked or something, but Saint Peter explains that for every time the thief hurt someone, another thread snaps. But for every good deed, a thread remains.
“Well, there’s no way the rope will hold him by the time that calculation works out. He may as well let go and plan on an eternity of hellfire. But, for whatever reason, he holds on, just to see. By the time he’s almost to the pearly gates, the rope is down to one single thread that’s holding him up. The thief shuts his eyes, waiting for it to snap, but he doesn’t let go. Next thing he knows, he’s sitting on a cloud next to Saint Peter. ‘But, how could just that one thread hold me?’ he asks. And Saint Peter explains that it was the thread of kindness. If the thief had led a decent life, he would have been carried to heaven in a basket woven of golden thread. But even that one act of kindness, small as it was, was just enough to save him.”
“It reminds me of that story in The Brothers Karamazov,” I say. “It was an old woman and an onion, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Dostoyevsky,” I say. “I read it in high school.”
“I’m dyslexic,” he says. “I’ve never been much of a reader.”
“What made you decide to get that as a tattoo?” I ask.
“When I went to the youth house, I really thought I’d fucked my whole life up, let everybody down who ever counted on me. When I heard that story, I thought maybe I could still turn shit around, you know? So it’s a reminder, I guess.”
He glances away, like he’s surprised he’s said all that and not sure how to feel about it. I reach out to touch his face, and when he looks back at me, I kiss him with open eyes and an aching heart.
I drag my fingertip lazily along the black ink snaking around his arm until I’m fingering the golden, single thread. Studying it. Meditating on it, really, and what it means to him. All that weighing on his conscience, just for making mistakes when he was a kid. It seems so unfair to me.
