A Lonely and Curious Country

by Matthew Carpenter

  I shivered and crossed my legs tightly and imagined him and me in our castle lying on a bearskin sipping cognac. We would own white Lipizzaner stallions and mastiff dogs that ran after us when we went for our long rides on the rocky beach. No, scratch that, no beach. A meadow, an alpine meadow with edelweiss and blue larkspurs and . . . what was the name of that tree? An aspen that’s what it was. There’d be lots of those. The band launched into a thunderous version of Open Wide and, as I galloped through my daydream, he slid to his knees at the edge of the stage and looked down, down, down to . . . me. He looked tenderly into my eyes as he sang to me, and me only. Open wide, my little flower. Give to me all your power. Yeah, ROCK ME! Rock, rock, rock me, bay-buh!

  The moment ended with a jolt. The lights broke away from him to illuminate the guitarist, who ripped into a long screeching solo with lots of masturbatory riffs and dramatic flailing.

  I leaned over and whispered across to Mar-Lyna, “I think this guy David’s friend can get us backstage.” She made her eyes big. I could tell she liked the idea but was probably not happy with the fact that I might make it happen. I stuck my tongue out at her. The rest of the show was a blur of light and thudding sound. I hoped he would look at me again and he didn’t. But he would be backstage after the show. Backstage? I felt a little dig of nerves that threatened to escalate to terror. What, exactly did you do, backstage?

  Mar-Lyna would know what to do.

  I was on my feet along with hundreds of other chanting fans, holding a lighter over my head, swaying back and forth. There was stomping and the floor beneath our feet shook with the strength of our devotion. The band rushed back onto the stage to a pounding roar of applause. They played two more songs. More applause, this time a little quieter, more satiated and the band left the stage like gods off to Valhalla.

  Darkness. Then the blinding house lights came up. Low-lying tendrils of dry ice smoke hung over the bottom of the arena. Everything sounded muffled and my ears rang with unpleasant pressure. “What?” I asked as David mumbled something into my ear and Mar-Lyna reached over and grabbed my arm hard at the same time. “We follow these guys and go back this way,” I whispered to her. She hissed something to Hair Guy. He looked at David who shrugged and said, “I guess Alex can come too.”

  The auditorium was emptying out. We stumbled, following David through a barely visible door at the bottom of a ramp. Dim red light on the other side showed block walls and a concrete floor. A janitor’s mop bucket blocked the hall. A very large shaved-bald man with gold earrings and a black As The World Burns Tour t-shirt grunted as David’s friend presented his pass. “Pass says four. I’m only supposed to let FOUR in.”

  Mar-Lyna shouldered past me and planted herself in front of the guard with a perky grin, “But I’m small. I won’t take up much room.”

  “Yeah, I just bet you won’t. How old are you anyways? Gotta be twenty-one to go backstage.”

  “Even for a kiss?” she laid that adorable pout on him, “a nice one?” He hesitated for just a split second. I don’t know if he was considering her offer or about to throw us all out on our behinds. The walkie-talkie in his back pocket let out a blast of static and he held up one finger halting us as he half turned away to answer it.

  “Come on.” Mar-Lyna gave me a yank. “Let’s GO!”

  I scampered after her. David, Alex and the other guy gaped at us. I looked back, “What are you waiting for?” There was a dissenting murmur from behind but everyone pounded up the metal staircase, following Mar-Lyna and me. Below us the bald man spluttered into the walkie-talkie. We darted through a heavy metal door that clanged shut after us.

  Blocking our way stood a girl with a skimpy bandanna top and a battered leather cowboy hat, holding a clipboard. “Rafe knows he’s not supposed to send you up those stairs.” She made a little snort, and said something under her breath. She had a tattoo of a scaly clawed something running up her collarbone and I tried to see what it was without actually staring at it. “Let me see your pass.” She narrowed her eyes at the clipboard and frowned, “Won passes, huh? You’re just real VIPs. I guess I can let you go through.” She looked us girls up and down. “Y’all ready for the inner sanctum?” she snickered in a not entirely pleasant way. When I looked back at her she was still staring at us and thumping her boot toe against the bottom of the wall.

  ***

  The Inner Sanctum. Mar-Lyna’s fingernails bit into my arm as we entered the room. It was small, cramped and full of sweaty people, all talking at once. A crowded table held bottles of Jack Daniels, mixers, ice and snacks. Somehow I had pictured something a little grander, maybe with tinkling chandeliers or crushed velvet pillows and mirrors. Mar-Lyna was cruising for the liquor table when I saw him. Him. My internal organs turned to water and jumped up through the top of my skull in a warm roar.

  He was sitting in the middle of the room slightly off to himself though I could see there was a watchful swirl of young women around him. He looked like a lonely Viking king with a long black leather coat draped around his shoulders like a cape. He must have caught me staring because he raised a bottle of beer in my direction and my remaining insides contracted. He beckoned me with one finger. Me? I looked around to see if he was motioning some other girl and tapped my chest questioningly. He smiled and pulled out another beer from a big cooler and opened it with a crack and held it out to me.

  “So, how’d you like the show, kiddo?”

  Somehow my throat had locked up and nothing came out but a scraping noise. I grabbed the beer and took a fast swig. The bottle was so cold that white vapor came out of the opening.

  “My close friends call me Killer.” He winked and the whole room telescoped down to just us two. “You know, as in Ladykiller. Have a seat.” His eyes were very blue. Like those mountain larkspurs.

  My knees gave way and I plumped down onto a case of beer at his feet. One of the swarm of young women separated and hovered over at his side, buzzing something into his ear. “It’s okay, Honey,” he said to her, “she’s not bothering me.” He stretched back in his chair and turned his intense blue gaze full on her and ran one finger down her bare golden arm. “So pretty. You are just so beautiful. Hey, you know what would be really good right now? One of those White Russians you make. Awwwww, c’mon you make ’em the best. Purty please.” He dragged his voice, trying to sound sultry and southern. Honey gave me a dirty look and pulled herself away, half-turning for a few steps until she finally gave up and went over to the bar table where Mar-Lyna had found a bottle of tequila and was setting up shots for the guys.

  He fixed those blue eyes on me again and I scooted just a bit closer. “So, tell me all about yourself. What’s your favorite album?” he said.

  I cleared my throat, “All of them . . . maybe not the second album as much, it’s kinda slow.”

  “Ah, yes the acoustic folk one. That wasn’t really my idea. I’m more of a plugged-in artist, myself. I have to really feel the music in my body, know what I mean?” He tapped my knee and looked at me as if we had a special understanding.

  I nodded. How many times had I listened to them turned up full blast, the music rocking my bed until my mother hit the ceiling with a broomstick to make me turn it down. Yeah, I felt their music in my body.

  He leaned his face in nearer to mine. “I’m really looking to go someplace darker with my work. More real.” Up close the eyeliner had seeped into a fine network of lines around his eyes and he smelled of beer, leather and man sweat.

  “I know what you mean.” My voice shook a little. “I’m all about darkness.”

  There was a blast of cheers and wolf whistles from the bar table and he broke eye contact. As I looked up, Mar-Lyna had just slammed down a shot. She licked a lime wedge with a tiny baby pink tongue, tossed her rippling hair back and strode over with her hand stuck out in front of her.

  “Well, what have we here? A queen. Is this your friend?” he asked without looking back at me. Mar-Lyna stood in front of him as if she expected hi
m to kiss her hand. He took it, in his two hands and laughed as he brought it to his lips. She gave him an abrupt little slap on the cheek and his eyes widened in surprise.

  “You fresh thing, I was only going to shake your hand,” she said. Her face glowed and her heavily lashed eyes sparkled against the blue eye shadow. Behind her at the bar Alex the Longhaired looked up in her direction like a wary deer at a watering hole that has just heard a wolf in the surrounding woods.

  “Why don’t you have one of your handmaidens make me a drink. Margarita. Rocks. Extra salt on the rim.” It wasn’t a question. She was being awfully bold, even by Mar-Lyna standards. He was a rock star, for god’s sake. He stared at her for a moment and then burst out laughing and gestured at poor Honey, who had just walked up, White Russian in hand. “Honey, darlin’ see if you can make Miss—”

  “Name’s Mar-Lyna.”

  “—Make Miss Lili Marlena here a proper margarita with ice and extra salt and what-all. And, Honey . . . ”

  Honey sniffed and threw the White Russian on him and stalked off. Cream ran down his draped coat and bare chest.

  He shrugged and shook off the ice. “So hard to get good help these days.” Sighing, “Well, I guess I’m just going to have to make you a drink myself, Miss Lili. A Killer Special. And your little friend, what does she want?” He barely nodded in my direction. “I really should be making you both Shirley Temples, right? But life is short in the fast lane as they say. Y’all little ol’ southern belles invented the fast lane, didn’t you?”

  Mar-Lyna glanced in my direction and hesitated one fraction of a moment and commanded, “Make that two margaritas then.” He heaved to his feet to go make the drinks, leaving the black coat in a leather puddle on the floor. Mar-Lyna eyed the coat and I knew what she was thinking.

  “Don’t you dare. That’s his coat.”

  “Me-yow! Relax, don’t be such a B. He don’t care about it.” She looked at me with pretend-innocent eyes, “Besides, I got bigger fish to fry, girlie.”

  “I was talking to him,” I sulked.

  “What? You was talking to him. What is he, your boyfriend now? All’s fair in love and war, babes, you know that. RIGHT?”

  I muttered something.

  “What did you say?”

  Feeling crazy brave like going over the top of the first big hill of the roller coaster down at the Pavilion, holding your hands up over your head and screaming, I said, “Don’t you dare do what I think you’re going to do. You . . . we’re not old enough.”

  She pushed her face up into mine and bared her sharp little teeth. Her eyes were very black, the pupils dilated. “I’ll DO whatever I WANT. Besides, it’s time. I’m tired of waiting. He’s the One—I’m sure this time.”

  “That’s what you said about those others.”

  The ugly animal look on her face was wiped over by a huge smile as he walked up with the drinks. “There you are,” she cooed. “Did you make your Killer Special for me?” Her eyes slid to someone behind me, “Oh wait, my little friend has to go home. It’s past her bedtime.”

  I turned around. It was David, flushed and gawky. There were pink blotches on his cheeks and beads of sweat on his forehead. His black hair stuck up in all directions. “That guy Rafe caught me. Thought I was never going to get in here.” Faintly accusing, “You girls ran off and left me.” He looked down at me, “Everybody in here looks . . . older.”

  “I think she’s had too much to drink,” Mar-Lyna said to David as if I wasn’t there. “Why don’t you take her home now.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Definitely too much to drink. Go on, get her out of here.”

  “Girls, temper, temper,” the Killer interjected. He looked lost somewhere between concerned and enormously pleased. He held a drink out to Mar-Lyna. “I think you’ll like this one. I put something special in it.” He took a slug from the other glass. “Yeah, that’s more like it.” His blue eyes were fixed on her as she sucked liquid through the red straw.

  “Let’s get out of here,” David said, leaning down to me. “Mar-Lyna, you should come too, if you want. I think my guy is ready to go. Alex went off somewhere with that Honey chick.”

  She licked the straw, “Go on home, pussies. I’ll be okay.” Grandly, “Re-e-e-ally, I’ll manage somehow.” Looking straight at me for the last time, “See ya later, Alligator.” It was a litany of our girlhood and it demanded a response.

  I leaned over, whispered in her ear after a while, Crocodile and my voice broke hoarsely. Then I turned around and walked out with David and onto the dry land of the rest of my life.

  ***

  “Are you sure you feel comfortable taking care of her by yourself?” I asked.

  Our baby girl, swaddled in crocheted pink, gurgled in her carrier on the motel bed. I stood in the bathroom door wrapped in a towel with a toothbrush stuck in my mouth, watching her father as he played with her. The television was on for background noise, some fishing show, but he wasn’t really watching it. As usual, the baby was our center of attention. “You know you two can come with me, if you want.”

  He shook his head yes for the baby girl, hard no for coming with me.

  “I haven’t seen any of the family in years. Now with Mama gone, I’m . . . curious about them. You understand, don’t you?” I dressed and carefully applied makeup: a little pale foundation, a soft peach shade of lipstick. I blotted my lips on a tissue. There, I was ready. I turned sideways to the mirror, eyeing myself critically, a habit I’d had since girlhood.

  “You look nice,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  I kissed him and our precious daughter and went out and started the rental car and pulled out onto the highway. The flat coastal landscape, littered with brand new retirement villas, fancy beach cottages and strip malls gave way to raggedy old shotgun shacks and trailers that hadn’t changed much since I’d left. I turned down what felt like an endless sandy dirt road, hoping my rental wasn’t going to bottom out. I passed a windswept farmhouse that looked deserted, wondered what had become of the family who lived there but kept going through a grove of skimpy pine trees and out to the marsh. The tide was starting to come back in and it smelled like rotting fish.

  There it was. I got out and slammed the car door shut. The eerie peep of tiny frogs stopped and started up again. I felt a moment of shock. The house they used to live in was gone, torn down. In its place stood a huge raw-looking brick monstrosity that loomed on the small hill over the incoming water. There were no vehicles outside but windowpanes reflected blankly from a multi-car garage behind the house and there was a neglected algae-clotted swimming pool.

  I guess that’s what they did with his money.

  I rang the doorbell. It boomed deep fathoms within the silent house. I leaned, with my ear against the door, not breathing, listening for the inhabitants in its depths. I rapped the cavorting dolphin-shaped doorknocker. Nothing.

  I was fighting the nervous stomach-tingle urge to flee when I heard something faint but getting closer from inside. A scuffling noise and the door flew open. It was Mar-Lyna’s mother holding a dirty little white dog. “Say hi to Tiny,” she said, jiggling the animal in my face.

  The dog let out a ripping growl and snapped in my direction. “Do you recognize me?” I asked.

  “Of course. You’re still one of us.” She looked much as I remembered her, slender with wavy jet-black hair that flowed over her shoulders. “Missed you. Sorry couldn’t none of us make it to your mama’s funeral.” She turned and gestured for me to follow her into the darkened house. “We sent flowers.”

  She waved a hand back in my direction, “Mar-Lyna’ll be happy to see you. Of course there’ll be the baby. There’s a fresh one for you to look at.” She muttered, as if to herself, “The other ones got so big.”

  She led me to a dark-paneled den at the back of the house, crammed full of enormous furniture. Velvet curtains covered the windows so that no sunlight entered. Mar-Lyna’s mother flopped down on an overstuffed
sofa, of which there were several. She stared at the blue underwater flicker of a large television with the sound on low. Tiny nursed a basketful of squirming white puppies.

  Mar-Lyna was curled up in a huge round chair carved in the shape of a shell. “Aw, come here and give me a hug. I’d get up but I’m just tuckered.” She wheezed and said in a hoarse voice, “The baby, you know. Just wears me out.” She appeared bloated and her features were rubbery. Her skin felt clammy. Surely she couldn’t be pregnant again. Hadn’t one just been born?

  “I know about that. I have a baby too. She’s six months old now, a handful.” I thought of our little pink bit wriggling on the hotel bed with David and wished I were there with them.

  “Well where’s she at, hon? Should have brought her.”

  “Her father is taking care of her back at the hotel. She was feeling a little . . . under the weather.”

  “David?” she sneered. “Well, I guess he’s okay. Y’all married now?”

  It was then I realized we were not alone in the room.

  “I can’t get him to do nothing.” She glared at a corner. “Worthless.”

  “Well, hello,” I said. “How have you been?” and immediately regretted it when I saw his face.

  He crouched like a toad next to the cold empty fireplace. His once-fine physique had melted into a pale ruin and the long blond hair was gray and stringy, pink patches of scalp showed through. In the dimness I thought I saw a flicker of recognition in the thickened blank of his face. He looked at me with the beseeching expression of a dog about to be kicked for piddling on the rug.

  His cracked white lips struggled to form a word.

  “Hey, I know what,” Mar-Lyna said, “Bet you want to see the new baby. She’s big now. I mean huge. Probably way bigger than your kid.” Her eyes were very bright. “Mumma, go get us girls something fun to drink.”