We Sold Our Souls

by Grady Hendrix

  But as the years passed and no new albums came out, and no more tours were announced, and Terry Hunt stopped giving interviews, her love got rusty. She forgot everything except her next shift at Pappy’s, and losing herself at depressing parties where she pretended to have fun, and reading TMZ on her phone during her breaks, gossiping to the other waitresses about famous people who had no idea she even existed. And now here was Terry, staring down at her, back from the grave, and there was nothing Melanie wanted to do more than go out to Vegas and see him play live. They were a band that had given her so much, and she had never even seen them live, and these were their last shows.

  It was only a billboard, but it felt like reconnecting with a younger part of herself that was good, and pure, and true. It felt like a door to a world where she wasn’t tired all the time. But she didn’t have the money. Navient owned all her potential future earnings, and anything she saved had to go to a deposit on a new place. The world was a trap and there was no way out. Melanie started to cry. When she realized she was sitting in her ten-year-old Subaru in a Sheetz parking lot, looking at a Koffin billboard in West Virginia and crying, she cried even harder.

  Terry Hunt looked down at her with his all-black eyes, black blood streaming down his face. Melanie knew his story. He came from a crappy little town in Pennsylvania. He came from a poor family of steelworkers. He put himself out there and played in any band that would take him. He wrote his own songs. He developed his own material playing bar after bar after bar. He pulled his way up out of that hole all by himself, and now here he was on a billboard, the most famous rock star in the world, and he did it all by himself.

  If he could do this, she could do this. If he could claw his way up out of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, she could claw her way up out of Nowhere, West Virginia. She swiped the tears off her cheeks and came up with a plan. Then she started her Subaru, whose transmission kept making a noise that sounded like metal screaming, and she drove home to tell her boyfriend that they were changing their lives. The Blind King gave her strength. The Blind King gave her hope.

  She could do this.

  NANCY: Lollapalooza! Monsters of Rock! Ozzfest! Now, get ready for another of rock’s landmark events: Koffin’s Farewell to the King Tour. Five nights of mayhem.

  SID: Oh, brother.

  NANCY: In LA, both shows at the Rose Bowl sold out in under thirty minutes. Three shows at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas sold out in under an hour. Every single ticket to their concerts in San Francisco was gone in six minutes.

  SID: Koffin isn’t a band, they’re a corporation. Koffin condoms, Koffin headphones, Koffin black scented candles, Koffin panties with Terry Hunt’s face on the crotch, Ibanez’s Terry Hunt Signature guitars…He doesn’t even play guitar. Trust me, this is the first of what’s going to be many “farewell tours” from Terry Hunt. The man is everything bad about KISS rolled up into one person.

  —100.7 WLEV, “The Sid & Nancy Wake-Up Rumble”

  May 11, 2019

  cottie Rocket lived a half-hour drive from the Saint Street Swamp, but to Kris it was another planet. Gurner had a suicide rate four times the national average and so much lead in the ground that the EPA put up a chain link fence around Bovino Park. Scottie lived in a nice part of Allentown where everyone had yards, the trees were healthy, and big houses lined pothole-free streets.

  The drive gave Kris time to calm down. She didn’t want to storm out to LA and rip Terry’s head off anymore. She just wanted to talk to someone else who knew what it was like to live in Terry’s shadow. Worried that Scottie still hated her, she parked a few houses down from his place and watched a bunch of kids play basketball in their driveway while she gathered her courage. She hadn’t seen Scottie in six years. He probably didn’t want some ghost from his past showing up and invading his home. Then again, he had sent her that Christmas card.

  She checked her hair in the rearview mirror, checked her teeth, checked her hair again, smelled her breath, then launched herself out of her car, across the sun-dappled front yards, up the front walk, and rang Scottie’s doorbell before she had time to stop herself. The electric chimes echoed deep inside the house, someone shouted at someone else, and the door opened to reveal a skinny beanpole in a white hoodie eating a bagel.

  Kris ransacked her brain and came up with, “Martin?”

  His Adam’s apple worked as he swallowed.

  “I’m Kris,” she explained. “A friend of your dad’s? From his old band?”

  “Mooooom!” he shouted, turning away into the house and disappearing into the gloom.

  A woman in sweats emerged.

  “May I help you?” she asked, wiping her hands on a paper towel.

  “I’m—” Kris began, but the woman recognized her before she could finish.

  “Oh, shit,” the woman said. “You’re Kris.”

  “Hey,” Kris said, like an idiot. “It’s been a while. Angela, right?”

  The woman nodded, and they stood there, Angela inside the dark house and Kris outside in the bright morning sun.

  “You’re here to see Scott,” Angela said.

  “Is he here?” Kris asked.

  “Downstairs,” Angela said, and didn’t move.

  “Should I go around you?” Kris finally asked. “Or…how do you want to work this?”

  Angela stood aside and Kris walked into a house that smelled like scrambled eggs. In the living room, Martin slumped on the sofa, next to an identical skinny blonde girl, both of them playing on their phones and ignoring the cartoon blasting from the flat-screen TV. Angela led her down the carpeted hall.

  “Ursula,” Angela called, as they passed the living room, “you have to be at practice in an hour.”

  “I! Know!” Ursula said, not taking her eyes off her phone.

  “What does she play?” Kris asked.

  “Soccer,” Angela said.

  They entered the kitchen and Angela leaned back against the sink, facing Kris, who froze in the doorway. Bright sunlight streamed in the window looking out over the block’s unfenced backyards. Angela nodded toward a door on the other side of the room, dim and hazy in the shadows.

  “He’s in there,” she said. “Knock loud so he’ll hear you.”

  Kris walked across the tiles.

  “Kris,” Angela said, “find me before you go. You’ve known him longer. I need to know if this is just some midlife crisis or if I should be worried.”

  Then she disappeared down the hall, and Kris turned to the basement door. She knocked, then knocked louder. Something scuffed behind the door and then a muffled voice called, “I said I don’t want any breakfast.”

  “It’s me,” Kris said. “Kris. Kris Pulaski.”

  She heard a padlock pop open, then a deadbolt turn, then a chain slide aside, and finally the door swung open and a short man she’d never seen before stood there, one step down, giving her a perfect view of his bald spot. He had long hair that hung past his collar in greasy wisps. He needed a shave. A woven leather belt barely held up his sagging jeans. His belly pushed a small black fanny pack down over his crotch.

  The man rubbed his right hand over his face like he was cleaning off spiderwebs, and Kris recognized the hand she’d stared at for years. A thick white scar ringed his first finger and a matching scar ringed the second. Faint white puckers bunched on the backs of his knuckles, long-faded scars from punching dry wall, from punching unruly stage divers, from punching the sides of vans, from punching the lead singer of Powerhole.

  After his hands, the rest of him came into focus. All the years disappeared. The knot that was her heart unpicked itself, her knees loosened, her belly gave an embarrassing flip from way down low, and Kris was twenty-four again and her entire life stretched out ahead of her and she had never made any mistakes. Everything could still be saved. She still had her friends. She still had her music. She still had Dürt Würk
. Possibilities filled her like helium and she stepped forward and threw herself into Scottie Rocket’s arms.

  “Scottie Rocket!” she shouted, and it was the first time in six years she’d felt truly happy.

  Kris had never been a big hugger because she had a body like a bag of knives, but this felt right, like picking up her guitar again.

  “Hey, Kris,” he said, muffled.

  “I forgot how much I missed you,” Kris grinned, her chin on his shoulder.

  “You look,” he said, holding her back at arm’s length and studying her face, “you look really good.”

  Kris knew what she looked like. Ever since she’d moved back to Gurner she’d stopped wearing lipstick and eyeliner, stopped dyeing her hair and plucking the gray. Her necklines had gotten higher, mostly to cover up the tattoo on her left breast, and her basic black wardrobe had more beige in it, more white, even some prints. She’d left behind boots and embraced flats. But now, with her Bones on, she knew what he meant. He meant she looked like herself, not like this imposter who’d been living her life for the last six years.

  “You look good too,” she said. “Like an Earth Sciences teacher.”

  He didn’t reply, just kept watching her, standing so close Kris could count every wild hair growing out of his salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

  “I should have come sooner,” she said.

  “You came at the right time,” he said. “I don’t like to keep the door open. Come on.”

  He locked the door behind her while she clomped down the stairs and entered a pharaoh’s tomb of brown cardboard boxes, stacked up as high as her head, lining every wall, each one carefully labeled with black magic marker: S, M, L, XL. CD. 3” STICKERS. The boxes, sagging and broken with time, were filled with unsold Dürt Würk merch. Hoodies and bandanas spilled onto the floor. In a collapsing pile of boxes on an air hockey table were posters for All That Cremains. A cardboard pyramid beneath the stairs contained unsold cassingles of “Reaper’s Harvest.”

  It was the graveyard of all their hopes and dreams, the dusty rubble left behind after a band implodes, and it pushed Kris’s breathing higher in her chest and made her hands itch. Inside all these boxes was the crap they sold at shows to pay for their gas and stay on the road. It had once been more precious than gold. Now it was worthless.

  “Over there are the studio tapes for All That Cremains and Digging to China,“ Scottie said.

  Kris looked at the boxes he pointed to, containing their first two albums that she no longer felt much affection for. But if they were here, maybe Scottie knew about the other one.

  “What about Troglodyte?” Kris asked.

  “No one knows what happened to those,” he said. “I thought maybe the masters were in my mom’s house, or at the Witch House, but I’ve been looking for years and can’t find even a single copy. Terry buried that one deep.”

  There was a cot in one corner with a sleeping bag on top. An electric kettle sat on a box of “Chinagirl” 7” singles. Beside it was a plastic shopping bag full of ramen. A faint whiff of sour sweat filled the room. Kris looked at Scottie, and he looked back, and they held each other’s eyes.

  From their very first show until contract night at the Witch House, Kris and Scottie Rocket had stood shoulder to shoulder for eleven years and delivered twelve strings of heavy metal death to their frontline. They’d played every kind of venue that existed, from all-ages shows in Mexican restaurants outside Baltimore to the cramped basement of Wally’s in Allentown. They’d played biker bars in New Jersey where a girl bit off the tip of some guy’s pinkie, and Zoot’s in Detroit where a kid in the pit had glued razor blades to his watch and no one noticed until Kris saw flecks of blood speckling Terry’s face.

  They’d slept on the roof of a Chinese restaurant in Florida, and they’d slept in the back of their broken-down Volvo waiting for a new fuel pump after playing the Burnstock Chili Fest in West Virginia. She’d taped up his split lips, he’d guarded bathroom doors while she peed, they’d thrown up in the same toilet, had a terrible twelve-hour acid trip together in Atlanta, and like every guitar duo in metal, they were a little bit in love and a little bit in hate all at the same time. For Kris, Scottie was the brother she’d always wanted and the marriage she’d never had, and she suspected that if she ever did get married it would be a shallow thing compared to what she’d shared for eleven years on the road with Scottie Rocket.

  That’s why she could say, “Scottie, are you living in your basement?”

  Scottie unfolded two bright-blue canvas lawn chairs and set them in the middle of the floor. He wiped at one with his shirt sleeve and offered it to Kris. It creaked when she sat down, and her butt nearly touched the floor.

  “Scottie?” Kris asked again.

  “Angela and the kids,” he said, sitting across from her. “You know, they just don’t get the journey I’m on. Ha. Sometimes I don’t get the journey I’m on. Check this out.”

  He leaned over, belly resting on top of his thighs, and scratched at his jeans until he’d raised one leg halfway up his calf. A bright orange and black butterfly rested in the middle of a patch of red skin. It was so vivid Kris could see its wings pulse. A needle pricked her heart. Scottie had only ever had one tattoo, the same one she had. Back in the day, they’d each gotten a corny red rose, its stem wrapped in barbed wire, from a tweaking ink jockey in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, around four in the morning It had been a joke, but not really. Her rose was a faded, rusty smudge at the top of her left breast, an ugly duckling compared to this bright, living thing on Scottie’s calf.

  “I don’t even remember getting it,” Scottie said, and grinned, but his eyes looked worried. “I just woke up a couple of days ago and was like, ‘Holy shit!’“

  “Are you drinking again?” Kris asked, but before she finished her sentence, Scottie started shaking his head.

  “I’d never, ever, ever do that,” he said. “I went back to rehab this winter, but not because of that. Just to get my head together. Top up, you know. I keep getting these flashes…these headaches, like I lost something but I don’t know what it is, you know?”

  “Oh, Scottie Rocket.” Kris leaned forward and touched his knee. “You should have called me. I would have come.”

  “I know why you came today,” Scottie said.

  “Yeah?” Kris asked, smiling back at him.

  “I invited you,” Scottie said. “In your dream.”

  “You wish I dreamed about you,” Kris joked uneasily, her smile fading.

  “It’s the only secure way to communicate without Terry hearing,” Scottie said.

  “You saw he was going on tour again this summer?” Kris asked, trying to divert. “I was thinking about going out to LA, talking to him, trying to get paid up. Maybe he’s changed and…”

  She trailed off because Scottie was laughing at her, a hissing, whispering giggle, his eyes crinkled shut, bouncing up and down in his lawn chair like a happy baby.

  “What?” she asked, embarrassed.

  “Kris,” Scottie said. “You think Terry will let you get anywhere near him?”

  “I know we had problems, but a lot of time has passed and…”

  Scottie stood up fast, threw himself to the other side of the room, and came back with a box full of Ziploc bags. He yanked one out and thrust it into her hands. It held a little black metal tube with two wires at one end and a glass lens at the other.

  “This was in my wall,” Scottie said, then passed her another Ziploc bag with a tiny circuit board inside. “That was in the handset of our land line.” Then he handed her an empty Ziploc bag. “That was inside my cell phone.”

  “There’s nothing in here,” Kris said.

  “It’s too small to be seen with the naked eye,” Scottie said, sitting back down, pulling his chair so close their knees touched.

  “Do you know why I’m down here? The TVs ar
e upstairs. Three of them, all internet accessible. I took a look at their activity and they’re bouncing video and audio packets to a secure IP address. But I can’t disconnect them because then he’ll know that I know. And if Terry knew what I knew, he might take steps.”

  “What steps?” Kris asked, feeling nervous.

  “Like killing me,” Scottie said.

  “That’s—” Kris began, still hoping this was all some elaborate put-on.

  “The Blind King has been asleep for years,” Scottie plowed on. “Now he’s awake. And you’re here. That’s not a coincidence. He’s calling this his ‘Farewell Tour,’ but come on, we all saw what happened with KISS. He’s back and he’s going to keep coming back until the whole world is Black Iron Mountain. Or until we stop him.”

  Kris had come to Scottie for comfort, she didn’t want to feel sorry for him, but Black Iron Mountain was just a song, the evil bad guys off their third album, Troglodyte, and he was talking about them like they were real. If it was a joke, it wasn’t funny. If it wasn’t a joke, then he was doing worse than her. She’d talk to Angie. She’d go home. She’d come back when she was prepared for this. She braced her hands on her thighs and pushed herself up, her right knee aching.

  “I need to go,” she said. “But let’s get together again soon, okay?”

  Scottie’s forehead wrinkled, his cheeks turned red.

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No,” Kris lied. “You’re going through something, though. Let’s reconnect later this week.”

  “I thought if anyone would believe me it would be you,” Scottie said. “You’re the first one who saw Black Iron Mountain. That’s why I went into your dreams last night and told you to come.”

  “I was working last night,” Kris said. “I didn’t have any dreams. Let’s take a break. I’ll come back tomorrow.”