Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  The printer is grunting and groaning while Lucy hovers near it, sipping her drink. Without turning toward me, she holds her hand out and takes the cigarettes. When the printer falls silent again, she pulls the paper from the tray, lays down on the bed and motions for me to do the same.

  “New issue of Pulp?” I ask, flopping down near her.

  She shakes her head, props open the window and lights her cigarette simultaneously. “No.” She lays the sheet of paper on the pillow in front of me and grins. “Our meal ticket.”

  Smoke Palace Productions Presents:

  The Skins

  Experience this hot new country-soul-blues

  band LIVE for the first time.

  Barbecue

  Beer

  Sexy Party Favors

  “The Skins got soul like a dog’s got fleas.”

  Charlie Parker

  “If you haven’t heard these guys, you’re missing out. Arlan Green’s the Crown Prince of rockin’ country blues.”

  Seattle Weekly

  6:00 July 4th @ 453 Railroad, the second warehouse from the tracks. Follow the music!

  “Don’t just sit there,” she says, furrowing her brow before the grin has disappeared. “Say something! What do you think?”

  “You got a quote from Charlie Parker? Isn’t he dead?”

  “Is he?” She looks stricken. “Arlan,” she yells over her shoulder. “Did Charlie Parker die?”

  “Yeah,” comes the answer. “Nineteen fifty-something.”

  Lucy pulls a pen from behind her ear, draws a line through Charlie Parker and scribbles Ringo Starr. “He’s not dead, is he?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Jesus, I hope not,” she mumbles.

  I raise my eyebrows at her and point to the first line of the flyer. “Smoke Palace Productions?”

  “Okay,” she says. “So I borrowed it. Ideas long to be free, you know.”

  “How did you even—?”

  “Your notebook. It was lying around. It’s good. I like the map.”

  “I never leave that out.”

  “So maybe it was lying around in your bag.” She presses her lips together to keep from giggling.

  “Lucinda!”

  “Well, what? Nobody ever tells me anything. I’m not above a little investigation.”

  “But that’s my private—”

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s not get sidetracked. What do you think? Isn’t it brilliant?”

  I can’t decide if I’m furious or what; I just stare at her, opening and closing my mouth as I consider and discard a series of possible responses. No one ever pried into my private thoughts before—who would have bothered? I’ve been so invisible most my life. To be sought out like this is disturbing and exhilarating. I have no idea how to reconcile all this, so I just study the flyer again, trying to concentrate.

  “Are you renting a warehouse?”

  “No, it’s free.”

  “How’d you swing that?”

  “Blake Charles—guy that owns the head shop downtown? It’s his. He wants to get in my pants, so he’s letting us use it.”

  “I see.” I stare at the paper some more, and she squirms, exhaling smoke impatiently. “It’s good,” I say. “It is.”

  “Good? Come on, it’s pure genius! We’re going to be richer than God!”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Just like the movies. You think they make money off your seven-dollar ticket? No, they lure you in and then they gouge you for popcorn and soda—that’s where the real money is. We’ll do the same thing, only we’ll have something more powerful than popcorn—we’ll have meat!” There’s a visionary zeal to her, an evangelical glint in her eye. “We’ll undo them with the smell of searing flesh.”

  “And the ‘sexy party favors’?”

  “We’ll think of something. Homemade butt plugs, maybe. I just think it sounds good—mysterious.”

  “You ever think about going into marketing?”

  She grins. “You like it, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I say. “I might not even sue for plagiarism.”

  “This is our gig,” she says. “You and me. We’ll run the show. You in?”

  I nod. “I’m in.” There’s a brief pause as we watch each other. I get uncomfortable after three seconds of this, so I reach for my backpack and pull out a manila folder. “I got you something.”

  “Oh! You shouldn’t…” Her voice trails off as she flips it open and sees the application for Stanford staring back at her. Under that are the forms for Yale, Harvard and UC Santa Cruz. She turns the pages with a look of sudden exhaustion. “Jesus. These would take me ten years.”

  “We’ll do them together,” I say. “It’s just data entry, really—my specialty.”

  She closes the folder and sucks at her cigarette, squinting suspiciously at me through the smoke. “Why do you want me to go so badly, anyway?”

  “You help me out. I want to help you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I like you. You’re smart. You should have what you want.”

  She smiles with one side of her mouth—a crooked, still-not-convinced look. I’m about to tell her again how brilliant and original she is, college material and all that, but just then someone bangs in through the front door and a booming voice rings down the hallway: “The Big Dog’s back!”

  Lucy and I both freeze, she with her cigarette halfway to her mouth, me lying in a fetal curl, watching her. Our eyes lock, and I can tell she’s thinking what I’m thinking, Holy shit. Danny.

  We don’t move, we just listen to the silence that descends like snow. I can envision him standing in the living room doorway, his bony elbows locked into forty-five-degree angles, his big, pink hands gripping his hips. And there they are: newly christened The Skins, caught off guard, sucking at beer bottles innocently, their hair still damp with sweat.

  Danny blurts out, “What the fuck?” His voice cracks on the word “fuck” like that of a thirteen-year-old kid.

  “Hey, Danny,” Bill says. “Good to see you.”

  “Where’s Sparky?” he asks.

  “Moved back to Tacoma,” Bill tells him.

  “No shit?” There’s a silence. “So, we need a new drummer, eh?” More silence. “Berlin, you play?”

  “Listen, Danny…” Arlan’s voice is low and forcibly calm. “We decided to try something new.”

  “Is that right?”

  Bill slips into his nasally, nervous chatter. “It’s not that we wanted to…well, we didn’t know what your plans were—we figured you’d be a while, but we didn’t want to—”

  “What? Fuck me over?”

  My eyes are still locked with Lucy’s, and now she cringes slightly; we stay motionless on the bed, except for Lucy’s cigarette hand drifting now and then to her mouth for another drag.

  “It’s time to try something else,” Arlan says.

  “Fuckin’ Green. You’ve always been a punk-assed traitor. First the shit with Lucy, now this.”

  Lucy sits up and stabs her cigarette out.

  “You’ll never get a gig without me. You’re just redneck trash—you can have that ugly bitch, but this is my band.”

  “If you want a beer,” Arlan tells him, “then have a seat. Otherwise, please get the fuck out.”

  “You’re trying to get back at me—I got the good end of the deal, dumping that skanky whore off on you.”

  Lucy springs from the bed and shoots into the living room like a wind-up toy just released. “Say that to my face, Dog— I’d like to hear it!”

  I go into the living room and there’s Danny standing in the middle of things, looking thin, pink and surrounded.

  “We don’t need you here,” Lucy tells him, flatly. “We should have let you die.”

  “Go back to your mommy’s trailer where I found you, sucking off your stepdad and—” But whatever he intends to add never emerges. Lucy, roughly half his height, takes two steps and punches him in the stomach
so hard he doubles over in pain.

  From here, all is pandemonium—threats and grappling, shoving, distorted faces. A beer spills onto the carpet in a foamy puddle, Bill trips over the Martin case and falls to his knees. Everyone tries to contain Danny, who is a blur of arms and legs, throwing punches at anything, cursing in that huge, booming voice of his. The two-toned eyes flash around the room. I feel sort of sorry for him, until one of his enormous feet catches me square in the shin. Grady finally gets him in an awkward half nelson and shoves him out the door.

  I watch him out the window as he walks shakily back to his car. He glances over his shoulder; his face is splotchy, his white-blond hair looks like lint haphazardly glued to his bony head. He sees me in the window and turns away, then folds himself into his beat-up old Mustang and drives off.

  The collective adrenaline level in the room ebbs some. A trickle of blood is seeping from Grady’s forehead, where some part of Danny broke the skin. I go to the kitchen and get him a wet paper towel, which he uses to dab at the wound cautiously, studying the blood that collects in damp smears. Lucy picks up a half-empty bottle of beer and sucks some down.

  “You’ve got a mean right hook,” Arlan tells her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “Never even saw that coming.”

  Though it’s not terribly funny, we all laugh and then can’t seem to stop, until Lucy’s choking on her beer and Arlan’s whacking her between the shoulder blades in a quick, giddy beat.

  Grady’s walking easily on the branch of an old pine. “Come on,” he cries. “Nothing to it.”

  He reminds me of Peter Pan up there, with his disdain for gravity and his impish face. It is twilight, the deep blue hour, after sunset but before darkness seeps in. A single star—the North Star, I guess—is glowing above Canada and the neighborhood is scented with the rich smell of barbecue coming from the halfway house. It’s nearly July, and true night comes so late now that it seems we can stay up forever. Grady is half obscured in pine needles and branches; I’m trying to imagine myself up there beside him.

  “I’m afraid of heights,” I tell him.

  “What?”

  “Afraid!” I yell. “Of heights!”

  “No,” he calls. “Not at all.”

  I sigh, and contemplate the painted dragon on the old church building that’s used as a dojo. I can hear the screech and holler of the Goat Kids’ music a couple of blocks away, and under that, the guttural cries of the martial arts students warming up inside the church. I feel strangely light, a little exhilarated by the blue all around me, and I want very much just to float up to where Grady is—avoid the humiliation of climbing and sweating altogether.

  “If you come up,” Grady calls, “I’ll tell you a secret.”

  He’s hanging from the branch now, letting his legs dangle like they have nothing to do with the rest of his body, and I envy his fearlessness, his ease. I’ve never climbed a tree in my life. I inch toward the trunk and grab hold of the lowest branch, my heart picking up tempo as I leap up, grab it, kick fitfully in the air for a moment, and drop again.

  “Hopeless,” I pronounce under my breath.

  “Other side,” Grady tells me. “There’s a better one to start on over there.”

  It takes me twenty minutes, creeping painfully from branch to branch with long, dizzy pauses, as Grady coaches, but eventually I arrive, sweaty-palmed and terrified, to perch beside him, twenty feet above the ground. He nods at me. I think it’s a sign of approval, but who can tell with Grady?

  “So what’s your secret?” I ask.

  “Secret?”

  “You promised!”

  “Did we pinky shake?”

  “Pinky shake?”

  He grins and holds out his pinky finger. “Unless you shake pinkies, the deal’s void.”

  “I never heard of that—”

  “Historical ruling—1913, Pinky versus Hand.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say, laughing. He offers me his pinky again, and I curl mine with his. It occurs to me that I haven’t had sex in several months, and even then it was with Derek, which was about as erotic as dry toast. We stay there, pinkies interlocked, and I watch the shadows from the branches above sweep back and forth across his face. His eyes are a bright sea-green; he’s recently shaved, so his cheeks are as smooth as a girl’s. He licks his lips; I notice they’ve got a shine to them—lip balm, I guess. He looks at me intently, and for a split second, I think he’s going to kiss me.

  Instead, he pulls his hand away from mine and his face contorts with horror as he drops backwards without warning—just falls like a dead man. I gasp and reach for him, but he’s already gone. I’m stunned until I get the joke, see that he is hanging upside down with the branch nestled securely in the crook of his knees.

  “Very funny,” I say, as he pulls himself back up.

  When he’s stopped laughing, he says, quite seriously, “Okay, secret number one…”

  “So there’s more than one?”

  “I have countless secrets,” he says. “But you only get one right now.”

  “Okay. I’m ready.”

  He waits a good long beat, opens his mouth to speak, closes it again. “I can’t.”

  “Come on!” I say. “Who am I going to tell?”

  “Lucy. Arlan. Anyone.”

  “Never,” I say. “I promise.”

  “Pinky shake?”

  “Sure.” We do.

  “I just think you should know,” he says, finally. “Lucy fucks around.”

  I watch his face for any signs of deception. “You’re being serious?”

  “Swear to God. She does anyone, any chance she gets. Male or female. Don’t get me wrong—I love the little scamp—but she’s out of control.” He laughs at my shocked face. “I figured you should know a little more about the den of sin you’ve wandered into….” He says this with an air of amusement, like he’s retelling the plot of some bodice-ripper he’s half-ashamed he read. “Well, don’t look at me like that! You don’t have to believe me!”

  “No, I mean—” I’m not sure I do believe him, but it seems silly to argue over. “If you say so.” After a pause, I force my voice to sound casual as I ask, “What about Arlan?”

  “What about him?” he says with a sly grin.

  “Does he?”

  “Hell, no. Lucy likes to accuse him of it every now and then, mostly to ease her guilt. But Arlan’s pathetically faithful. He hasn’t even looked at another girl since he met her.”

  The evening breeze sends the pine needles all around us into fragrant, whispery convulsions. Grady reaches toward me and wipes something from my cheek. “Pine sap,” he says. And then, as if we’ve really been talking about this all along, he tells me, “I loved your map.”

  I stare at him. “What map?”

  “Of Smoke Palace and all that. The Land of Skin.”

  “I really wish she hadn’t shown that around,” I say. A wave of anger threatens to break inside me. I picture Lucy handing my notebook out drunkenly, cackling in her maddening way, and suddenly I want to kick her.

  “But it’s great,” he says. “You’ve got a vivid imagination.” His praise makes me shy and angry all at once; in my confusion, I make the mistake of looking at the ground, and a brief but intense spell of vertigo seizes me. I tighten my grip on the branch. “A strong imagination,” he says, “is very sexy.”

  We sit there for a moment with nothing to say. I keep my eyes locked on a branch a few feet away. The tension in the air tells me that if I turn toward him he’ll definitely kiss me, and I try to want that, I really do, but all I can see is Arlan, shirtless and glazed with sweat, smoking a cigarette in the sunshine, and this keeps me frozen in place.

  “Well,” I mumble, when I’m beginning to feel awkward and dizzy again, like I might throw up. “Is it hard getting down?”

  “Not at all,” he says. “Just don’t fall.”

  That night I’m sleepless as usual. My whole body is still buzzed off the events of the day—my cold
-water plunge, the brawl with Danny, soaking up Grady’s attention while balancing too many feet above the earth. I can’t seem to work up much desire for Grady, but I’m not above savoring the rush from his flirtation; it’s rare for someone with his bone structure to pay attention to me, and I can’t deny that it’s a little delicious.

  I think of Lucy’s blatant invasion of what little privacy I’ve got left. I know I should be mad, but somehow I keep landing on the side of flattered, instead. It’s just so strange for me, being whisked inside this little hive of human activity, where there are eyes everywhere. Before this, no one but my mother had ever seen my Suicide Maps. I always assumed they were too bizarre for the light of day. I’m surprised Lucy didn’t freak about my morbid habit and kick me out. Knowing that people have witnessed my dirty secrets fills me with a strange mixture of alarm and relief. There’s something painfully awkward about being so suddenly and unexpectedly exposed, but there’s also something almost pleasurable about it, like being discovered. I hardly know what to do with myself now that people are actually paying attention to me.

  It’s after midnight, and it’s obvious that sleep is not within my grasp—it’s nowhere close. My body and brain refuse to slip into the slow, unwound rhythm that brings dreams. I take out the bundle of letters and once again unwind the twine until the leather unfolds, exposing the age-softened envelopes, some of them bearing exotic stamps. I put the first two aside and pick up the third. I study its postmark; the ink has faded to a barely there pink, but I’m pretty sure it’s from Amsterdam. On the three identical stamps there are beautiful, long-necked birds swimming over a gray-green sea.

  I faintly remember my father telling me about the years he traveled on a Swedish barge, making just enough to keep going. He was in Europe for a couple of years, then spent a little time in Asia. Before that he’d gone to college for a brief stint—Stanford—but dropped out quickly when he realized all he’d learn there was attitude. Sometimes when we were hanging out in his shop he would mention those years of traveling and his eyes would become glittery, his face flushed with the vitality adults seemed to stumble upon during their second round of martinis.