Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  “It won’t be like this for long,” Jason says suddenly, cutting off the drummer and the bassist’s Greek-chorused narration.

  “No?” Cass says, her voice spiraling into arch disbelief.

  “I’m going to be the most famous musician in the world.”

  “And then get rich,” offers the drummer, who’s clearly heard this all before. “Get rich and die old on a pile of thousand-dollar bills.”

  “I won’t get old,” Jason says. “You know that. I’ll be the biggest star in the world, and I’ll kill myself before I’m thirty.”

  “Sure, man,” says the bass player, yawning. “Spoken like a true rock god.” Maia frowns.

  “You shouldn’t say stuff like that,” she says. “Even joking.”

  “Ah, he’s not joking,” says the drummer. “But he’s still full of shit.” The drummer throws an empty beer can at Jason. He catches it, leaps to his feet, shakes his dirty hair, and runs away from them toward the water again. Maia curls her fingers around the secret of his touch, brings her fist to her chin. They are all quiet for a while, save for the occasional whoop from the darkness. Sounds of splashing. Maia can hear a soft buzzing and realizes it’s either the drummer or the bass player’s snores.

  “Goodnight, girl,” Cass says from the other side of the fire.

  “Goodnight, Cass,” she says, her heart full of love that can’t find its way to her tongue. How can you ever tell a person all the things you feel for her? Goodnight warrior, goodnight queen, goodnight girl who set me free. Goodnight my best and only friend. Goodnight and here we are, on the edge of something. What edge, Maia doesn’t know, but she’s sure it’s a glorious precipice. She remembers herself at the campground in Big Sur, standing on the cliff, remembers Cass pulling her back to safety. Was she drunk? She can’t remember. She’d wanted to jump and she cannot, now, remember why. Something out there in the dark waiting for her. Honey and the sound of wings and a dog howling. Silly, she thinks. If she had jumped she would not be here, now, on the brink of whatever magic is about to come her way. She thinks of Jason’s hand on her back and thrashes a little, deliciously. Maia rolls herself up in a blanket that smells of pot and cigarette smoke and boy, watches the fire flicker and quiet into reddening coals. She doesn’t hear him come back until he’s dropping down to the sand next to her, his voice at her ear starting her out of her half-doze.

  “You asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Want to go for a walk?” Maia lifts her head. The drummer is canted backward across a log, jaw hanging open, pint bottle still clutched in his right hand. The bassist is sausage-rolled into a blanket, his back to the fire. Cass sleeps pretty as a girl in a painting, one blue wisp of hair falling across her soft cheek, her hands tucked up under her chin.

  “Yeah,” Maia says, shrugging her way out of the blanket and getting to her feet.

  He takes her hand as he leads her down the beach, away from the fire’s embers and into the starry dark. The air is clean and cool and salt-heavy, and she opens her mouth wide to gulp it down. All around her the night is listening, the universe waiting, as she is, to find out what happens next.

  She’s too dizzy with desire to mark the passage of time. His cool hand in hers draws her along. They dawdle at the tideline, dancing away from the edges of the waves, until she yields to the inevitable and water laps over her bare feet. She lets go of his hand long enough to squat down and drift her fingers through the ebbing wave. Sand rushes past her, bits of shell, slick tangles of seaweed. He leads her back away from the water, tugs her down next to him on the sand, and when he kisses her it is, she thinks, the first and only time she has ever been kissed, because all the kisses she has ever kissed before this were nothing like a kiss at all.

  What is this, she thinks, oh god, what is this, what the fuck is happening to me. Like drugs, but bigger than drugs or more necessary or more new, newer even than the flood rush of speed in her veins or the slow sweet daze of pot or the burning glory of whisky in the back of her throat. This is something else again. This is a thing that will erase her and remake her in its own image, this is what she was playing for all those years. Oh Oscar, this is what you meant. He is kissing her, kissing her, her mouth, her throat, the fine soft skin of her eyelids, her earlobe between his teeth, his lips at her ear, the hot rough sound of his breath. Take me with you, she says with her skin to his skin, her hands to the muscles of his body, wherever you are going, wherever you are from, and his hands trace the letters of his answer across her thighs, under her shirt to the place where her shoulder blades fan out like wings. Anywhere I go with you now is the same place as home. She kisses him back with all the longing in her body, and when his face grows clearer and clearer she thinks at first it is because she is at last seeing him truly, until he takes his mouth away and says, “Look, it’s dawn,” and they lie together in the sand, her head on his chest, and watch the sky lighten as the sun comes up into a new world.

  “Drive to Mexico with me,” he says, and she says, “What?” and he says it again. “Drive to Mexico with me. Today.”

  “I don’t even know you,” she says.

  “Love has nothing to do with knowing.”

  Everyone, it seems, is an authority on this subject, save her. “I just learned your name. Like, twelve hours ago.”

  “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Say yes.”

  She props herself up on one elbow and looks at him. He’s shielding his eyes from the rising sun, staring her down with that azure gaze. He is, she realizes, totally serious. She starts to say of course not and then she shuts her mouth on the no. Isn’t this what Oscar told her she lacked? Passion? Isn’t this what Cass has been teaching her these last months? To say yes? To anything, to all of it, the good ideas and the bad ones? Who is she now if she is not someone who’s learning to tell her own stories? If she is beautiful, he’s more beautiful still: Underneath the stubble and the dirty hair, those eyes, the cut of his cheekbones and the clear line of his jaw, add up to the visage of one of the gods in her mother’s books. He’s looking up at her, beseeching, and sure she doesn’t know him but who knows anything anyway and isn’t this the grandest thing that’s ever happened to her, and so she opens her mouth, laughing, and says, “Why not. Yes,” and then he kisses her again, laughing too, and leaps up, unbuttoning his jeans and scrambling out of them, half tripping, pulling his shirt over his head. He barrels pell-mell into the ocean hollering “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and what else can Maia do but take her clothes off, too, with no more grace than he had, and run after him, shrieking as the wall of turquoise water hits her with the force of a fist. He splashes toward her, picks her up and whirls her around like they’re in some old-timey movie and not buck-naked in the Pacific with her only friend in the world just down the beach, and then he falls with a crash into the waves, taking her with him. Salt up her nose and in her face and she’s laughing too hard to mind it, staggering to her feet, pulling him with her. Kissing him again and again, and he hoists her up and she wraps her legs around his waist and he stops kissing her long enough to say, “This is some music video,” and then she’s laughing again, so hard he nearly drops her. “This is crazy,” she gasps, but he doesn’t hear her.

  When they can’t stand the cold any longer they scramble out of the water, run back to the pile of their clothes. He kisses her again, serious now, his hands insistent on her skin, and who is she to say no now that she’s said yes. Sex with him is already different than the handful of boys she’s slept with this summer, more clumsy but also more real. He is here, with her, present in his skin, and because he is here she stays here too; this is the first sex she’s had sober, she realizes, wondering as she realizes it if that’s supposed to make her worry. He’s greedy for her, his teeth against her shoulder, his breath ragged in her ear, and she is both startled and pleased by her own power. He pulls out of her, shuddering, and comes in a sticky welter across her stomach, and she holds him and strokes his hair and hums nonsense in his
ear while his breathing slows, and when he begins to cry she is somehow not surprised. “You’re safe here,” she says into his hair, “sshhh, ssshhh,” and he weeps without a hint of self-consciousness and she feels, suddenly, very old.

  She pushes his wet hair out of his face, kisses his cheeks, curls her fingers in his pale palm, barely bigger than hers. He’s fragile as a kitten, this lovely creature, this boy who’s hers now. She will have to learn to be strong, to take care of what’s been given her.

  Afterward she runs back into the ocean again, washing him from her skin, and dries herself off with her shirt as best she can. If she looks half as bedraggled as he does, she looks one hell of a mess. There’s sand all through her everything. She touches her hair and a dusting of sand falls into her eyes. He puts his jeans on and tucks the Misfits shirt into his back pocket and leads her back to where his bandmates and her best friend sit yawning by the remains of the fire.

  “Well, then,” Cass says, looking up at her.

  Maia licks her salty, bee-stung lips. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

  Is that resignation she sees cross Cass’s face? Whatever it is, it’s gone so quick she barely registers it. “No way,” Cass says, and starts to laugh. The bass player and the drummer, slower to catch on, stare at her stupidly.

  “Way,” she says, and she knows she is grinning like an idiot.

  “Give me the keys,” Cass says. “I’ll drive.”

  “I’ll meet you guys up north,” Jason says to his gaping bandmates.

  “What?” says the drummer.

  “Like in a week or something. Maybe a couple of weeks. That cool? I’ll call you when I’m back in town.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the bassist says. He shoots Maia a disgusted look.

  “Come on, man,” Jason says. “Our tour’s over.”

  “We’re supposed to split gas three ways.”

  “I’ll give you money when I come back.”

  “Sure you will,” the drummer says. “Fucking hell, dude, this isn’t cool.”

  “I guess we need a map,” Cass says.

  “It can’t be that hard,” Jason says. “I mean, you just go south.”

  The bass player makes a snorting noise and gets to his feet. “Whatever. Call us when you’re back in town and see if you still have a band.” He gathers up the blankets, the bottles, the odds and ends they’ve scattered around the fire. The drummer scowls but gets up, too. “Whatever,” he echoes, his voice valley-girling up a plaintive register.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Cass says. They don’t answer as they trudge away from the beach, backs set in a sulky line, but the drummer flips them off.

  “Maybe you should go with them,” Maia says. Jason shakes his head.

  “They’re nothing without me,” he says, “and they know it. They’ll never find another band like this. They’ll get over it.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “Baby,” he says, grinning at her, “I’m always sure.”

  “Come on,” Cass says, cutting him short. “Help me carry the rest of this stuff back to our car.”

  When they get to the strip of roadside where the car is parked, they see the band has taken off already, leaving Jason’s duffel bag and his acoustic guitar on the trunk of Maia’s car. “They’ll get over it,” Jason says again, still confident.

  “What about your other guitar?” Maia asks.

  “I had to pawn it,” Jason says, “and then Byron got it out of hock, so I guess he thinks it’s his.”

  Cass considers and discards a number of spiteful remarks. There’s plenty of time to make him hate her. She climbs into the driver’s seat. Maia goes for the passenger door, and Jason makes a noise of protest.

  “Come on, baby,” he says. “Sit in the back with me.” Maia obeys meekly, and Cass does not protest her demotion to chauffeur, though her look is murderous. “Just head south,” Jason says. “Until you hit the border. And then head south some more.”

  “Aye aye, captain,” Cass says, and she starts the car.

  THEN

  Maia’s mother goes out of town for the weekend. For a conference, she says, though Maia suspects the conference is a panel of two. Cass’s defiance is catching; the first thing Maia does, when her mother has driven off in her shiny black car, is track Cass down on her corner and invite her over again.

  “Come with me,” she says. It’s a chilly April afternoon, the kind of damp and foggy day that makes you think spring is a foolish delusion. They’re huddled up under an awning, watching people walk by. Cass rolls a joint, brazen as daylight. Maia smoked pot with her for the first time a few days ago. She liked the way it made her feel, blurry and loose. She played well that night, her fingers moving smoothly, her thoughts wiped clean.

  “To your house? Again? That didn’t go so well the last time.”

  “My mom is out of town.”

  “Sure, then,” Cass says, touching her hand. “Let’s go.”

  Her father is shut away in his study, a dollar-store Fitzgerald lost in his world of cocktail parties and limpid-eyed women in silk dresses gazing sadly into their drinks. As long as they are quiet he’ll never even notice. Maia is anxious, at first, to impress upon Cass the necessity of stealth, but Cass seems to understand without prompting and even takes her boots off at the door. “Cool if I take a shower, princess?” Cass asks. Maia gives her soft white towels from the stack in the hall closet and points Cass to the bathroom. “Shit, girl, you got a bathroom of your own?” Cass says. “Plush life.” But there’s no rancor in her voice. While Cass showers Maia paces her room anxiously, her socked feet silent on the carpet, her pastel walls offering her no answers. Now that Cass is here Maia has no idea what to do with her.

  Maia is so engrossed in her thoughts she does not notice the water shut off, and she starts when the door between her room and the bathroom opens. Cass stands on the threshold, wrapped in a towel, her short hair standing on end. “Oh my god,” she says. “You don’t even know how good it feels to be this clean. You got some fancy soap in there. Can I do laundry, too?”

  “The cleaning lady usually does it,” Maia says.

  “Is that a no?”

  “No, I just—” Maia falters, embarrassed. “I don’t really know how to use the washer,” she admits.

  Cass laughs. “Good thing for you I got all kinds of background in domestic servitude. You think I can borrow something while I wash my clothes?”

  “Yeah,” Maia says. “Yes.” She turns to her dresser to hide her consternation. She rummages through neatly folded sweaters, pressed khakis, socks knotted in pairs and smelling of fabric softener. “I think these will fit you. We’re about the same size.” She offers a pair of pants and a button-down shirt. Cass drops her towel on the floor without a hint of self-consciousness and pulls on the pants and shirt over her still-wet skin. Maia flushes crimson and looks away. “I have underwear, too,” she mumbles.

  “All good,” Cass says, “I’ll just wait until mine is clean.” She goes back into the bathroom and laughs at her reflection. “Shit, princess,” she says through the open door. “It’s like Halloween in here. Nobody will believe this is me.”

  Still blushing, Maia peeks around the doorframe. Cass looks like she is about to apply for a job at the mall. “You’re me,” Maia says shyly.

  “Not much chance of that,” Cass says amicably. Maia blinks. “You got some life here,” Cass adds. “All boxed up in this pretty house like Sleeping Beauty. Your mom ever let you out?”

  “Not really,” Maia says. “But I don’t know where I would go if she did.”

  “Oh, come on,” Cass says. “All kinds of places. You ever even been to a show?”

  “A show of what?”

  “Music,” Cass says. “You know? A ‘rock concert’?” She makes quotation marks with her fingers.

  “I play music,” Maia says.

  “Not music like that. Like punk music.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  �
��You are like something out of a fairy tale. Let me wash my clothes and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Maia shows Cass the laundry room and watches, fascinated, as Cass piles the contents of her backpack into the washing machine, adds soap, turns the dial. “See?” Cass says. “Easy. You could do your own.”

  “I never had to,” Maia says.

  “You wouldn’t last five minutes in the wild.”

  “I would too,” Maia says, nettled.

  “Oh, there’s a streak of trouble in you a mile wide, for sure. But you have no skills. What if the world ended and your house blew up tomorrow? Or if there was, like, a zombie apocalypse? You’d be up shit creek.”

  “Not if I was with you.”

  “Well,” Cass says, and Maia is astonished to see that it’s Cass who’s blushing now. “That’s probably true. We don’t have to watch the washing machine for it to work. You got anything to eat?”

  Later, when Cass has eaten six peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and her clothes are tumbling in the dryer, she commandeers Maia’s phone and pulls a grubby notebook out of her bag. She dials several numbers in rapid succession, muttering a mysterious series of instructions, and finally hangs up in satisfaction. “Show tonight at the Greenhouse,” she says. “It’s kind of far, but we can walk there from here.”

  “The Greenhouse?”

  “This punk house over in Ballard. I don’t know, some kid had a big garden there for a while and the name stuck. You in?”

  “What do I do?”

  Cass laughs. “You just go, princess,” she says. “You like the music, you can dance around a little. Get drunk. Whatever.”

  “What do I wear?”

  “That, my girl, is a good question. Maybe not your loafers. You have any clothes that don’t make you look like the head of the Young Republicans?”