We Sold Our Souls

by Grady Hendrix

  “Hunter,” she tried, her voice lost in the crowd. “Hunter!”

  She realized that the hands on her breasts were his.

  The boys’ true faces surrounded her, baring their teeth, grinning, eyes wide and excited. Their hot breath stole all the oxygen from the air as Terry’s voice drowned everything out. She started to cry as they pushed in, pushed down, pressed her back into the metal strut of the sound tower, harder and harder until her ribs bent, then started to fracture, bruising her lungs.

  “Help,” she said, but her voice sounded weak and pathetic in her ears, lost in the sound of “Die for Me.”

  Spencer grabbed her hair and banged the back of her skull on the sound tower, and Melanie saw blackness and flickering pinpricks of white light. She clung to the tower as hard as she could, but hands prised her fingers up, pulled them away. The boys crowded in eagerly, standing on her toes, crushing her, pushing her down, and she knew she wouldn’t come up again. Hands found her neck and squeezed. And Hunter leaned into her ear and hissed the last thing she’d ever hear him say:

  “Die, bitch.”

  * * *

  – – –

  There was a brisk knock on the RV door.

  “Half hour,” a woman’s voice called, and Kris and Tuck looked at each other.

  “Are you giving me the badge, or do I have to fight you for it?” Kris asked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Tuck said, standing. “Get under my arm.”

  What security saw when they came out of the holding area was Tuck, the enormous guy they’d been told was going to play, with a giggling, drunk, blonde groupie clinging to his side.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the security kid said. “If she doesn’t have a pass she can’t go backstage.”

  The kid was one of the few remaining volunteers brought in to fill out the ranks. No one expected any trouble backstage. The guys with experience were out front fighting the crowd.

  “You got a problem with a black man dating a white woman?” Tuck asked, and the kid waved them in fast, not wanting to get fired for being racist.

  Kris and Tuck followed the cables, up the stairs onto the back of the stage, and the noise of the crowd hit them like a punch to the face. Kris actually rocked back a half step. The two of them walked past hard cases and rolling cases, dodged roadies carrying coils of cable on the fly, past security guards, past lighting techs looking for a missing gobo. Koffin sounded terrible because all the speakers were in front, facing out. Back here the music echoed like a cheap radio turned up too loud, heard from three blocks away.

  They finally found a place to watch in the darkness behind the guitar station. Three rows of guitars stood on angled racks while two beefy guitar techs with long hair moved between them, bending and pecking at the instruments by the light of their tiny flashlights, fishing out guitars and handing them to runners.

  Kris watched Terry on the monitor, feeling she was exactly where Troglodyte wanted her to be. She was in the right place; now she waited for the right time. Her life was a bullet, headed for the target.

  Terry ended “Die for Me” and the crowd roared.

  Over the PA, Terry said, “I’m going to play a song now called ‘Chinagirl.’ I haven’t played this song in a while, but it tells you everything you need to know about a band I used to be in called Dürt Würk. A band we’ve been hearing a lot about recently.”

  That was her cue.

  She’d always hated “Chinagirl.” A song isn’t a commercial for an album. It isn’t a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains. “Chinagirl” would never be that song.

  A bullet took Scottie Rocket away. A bullet killed his family. A bullet was what she had become.

  One life, one bullet.

  Kris stepped away from Tuck and reached for his big hand, lifted it up, held it to her face and kissed his palm, closing her eyes and inhaling the scent of his skin. She’d known this hand all the way back to the beginning. He was the last person she was going to see before she finished what they’d started all the way back in 1987.

  Kris dropped her windbreaker and came up over the shoulder of the guitar tech whose beard was way too big for his face.

  “Hey,” she said, indicating a Strat, as Terry’s hoarse voice rambled on. “What’s that tuned in?”

  “What?” the tech whispered, giving her a quick look. He decided she was probably the big guy’s girlfriend, and turned back to the stage. “Standard.”

  “Sounds good,” Kris said.

  Without giving herself time to think, Kris Pulaski picked up the instrument and stepped out of the shadows and walked into the stage lights in front of 440,000 people, strapping on the Strat as she went. With the guitar bouncing off her hip she walked over the cables, past all the gear, to the front of the stage, into Terry’s space, into the limelight, into the focused force and intensity of 880,000 eyeballs and their unblinking camera phones.

  She didn’t worry, she didn’t smile, she didn’t feel out of place.

  A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.

  JASMIN AHMED: …over forty million dollars of damage and that estimate is still climbing. There are 1,566 persons who have received emergency medical care, as well as reports of countless sexual assaults, our colleagues from local station KNPR are still missing, and police have been making arrests into the early morning hours…

  —BBC World Service, “Newshour”

  September 8, 2019

  he audience noise was a blasting physical force, a black ocean smashing into her chest. Their sound never stopped. And when the crowd saw Kris before Terry did, noticed her standing right behind him, their noise shifted, modulated, leapt impossibly higher. Terry turned, and he had three seconds before the camera jibs craned in close, and he used them to say, “You can’t be here.”

  Then she stepped around him and reached for his mic stand. He tried to block her, then realized what that would look like to the cameras, so he dropped his arms, and Kris took the mic and said, into the pounding black ocean, into the biggest audience she’d ever seen in her life:

  “I’m Kris Pulaski, the guitarist for Dürt Würk.” She heard her voice bounce around the desert on a system of 30,000 speakers. “The Blind King asked me to join him onstage to play an album I don’t think many of you have heard. It’s gotten a bit of a reputation over the years. We wrote it back in 1998 when we were still in Dürt Würk together. It’s called Troglodyte.”

  Terry held two expressions on his face at once, displaying a cool thin smile for the cameras projecting his image a hundred feet tall on the screen, sending his face around the world, recording this moment for all time. The other expression was just for Kris: hatred mixed with disbelief. But Terry was nothing if not a professional, and he easily pried the mic out of Kris’s hand.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked. “I didn’t think you’d have the lady balls to join me up here on stage.”

  Kris didn’t answer. She didn’t have the words Terry did. She only had one thing and she prayed that she wouldn’t fuck it up. Not when it finally counted.

  She bent her head over her guitar and without tuning or running through any warm-ups, trusting that the techs had done their job, without giving Terry a chance to make another comment that would diminish this moment, without hesitation, without a count-off, she crunched into the opening chords of “Beneath the Wheel.”

  Terry had taken that riff and bastardized it on Insect Narthex so at first the audience thought she was recycling something they’d already heard. Then the ones who’d heard Troglodyte on bootleg realized what was happening and started to cheer. It swept backward to the next pocket of people, and the next, and the people who didn’t know why they were cheering further back, and the people behind them, racing through the crowd like a fire. A storm of air blew through vocal
chords, a hurricane, an ocean, a vast black sea of sound. And across its surface, lightning flickered as cameras went off, flashes over a vast and sunless sea.

  * * *

  – – –

  The sudden disruption brought the boys up short, and they turned from Melanie, looking up at the stage. Through her bruised and swollen face, Melanie saw Hunter’s lips move in the shape of, “What the fuck?”

  Melanie hauled herself to her feet and a hand smacked her face. She flinched, then realized it didn’t belong to any of the boys. She looked up. Above her, clinging to the struts of the steel sound tower, a fat woman in suspenders with a tiny bow tie leaned down, one hand stretched out to Melanie, the other held by an enormous dude with long hair lying on his stomach above her on the tower floor.

  “Sweetheart,” the woman said, “gimme your hand.”

  Terrified, Melanie froze, but the woman snapped her fingers in front of her face, and Melanie took her hand, and the woman hauled her up out of the crowd, into the sound tower, and the boys didn’t notice until her sneakers were scrambling up the struts, on the same level as their faces, and they reached for her, but it was too late—she was flying. The woman hauled them both up until, panting and sweaty, she stood Melanie on her feet on the swaying tower, next to the sound board.

  “Whew,” the woman said. “I won’t do that again. Now what the fuck is going on?”

  The long-haired guy at the board scrambled to mix what was coming off the stage as Kris Pulaski played the intro to “Beneath the Wheel” again and again, and Terry stood onstage, paralyzed.

  Melanie looked down at the surging, whirling crowd and it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t topple this little spindly tower and suck it down into the bottomless sea of bodies. The hairy guy did something violent behind her, and she heard him say, “No access!” before he was back up, brushing his hair over one of his ears, and the fat woman with the bow tie was taking over the board, running her fingers across its sliders and knobs.

  “Holy shit,” the woman said, taking in what was happening onstage. “That’s Kris Pulaski.”

  * * *

  – – –

  As the crowd began to boo, Terry realized he had no choice, because Kris wasn’t going to stop playing that goddamn opening riff, and if he didn’t do something, the crowd would turn. And so he grabbed the mic, and shouted:

  History

  Is a boot

  Smashing your face

  Forever

  The crowd roared back, giving him the juice he needed to sing the next verse.

  Eternity

  In the mud

  Crushed like a bug

  Whatever

  Born with a squeal

  Die where you kneel

  All that is real

  Crushed!

  Then he reached deep and pulled out his Cookie Monster growl, an effect he never unleashed anymore because it was so identified with death metal, black metal, with doomcore, and because it shredded his vocal chords. But it electrified the crowd, crackling out of massive speaker towers, lashing the sea of bodies like a whip.

  Beneath the wheel

  The roar from the crowd blasted into Kris, almost blew her off her feet. Even all these years later, even with just Kris and Terry, it still worked. And when they got to the end of the song, the screaming roaring chaos got inhumanly louder, and bodies charged the stage, barely held back by security. Their screams slammed into Kris like a tidal wave, and before Terry had a chance to shut it down, Kris tore into the bluesy love song solo from “My Master’s Eye.”

  She saw Terry’s shoulder’s hunch when he realized what she was doing, and then the crowd realized what she was doing, and even the ones who had never heard Troglodyte before knew that this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and the roar was like pushing your face into a jet engine.

  Kris grinned and took her solo higher, making it sarcastic and jeering, punching Terry’s back with it. Terry was nothing if not a creature of the crowd, and when she stopped playing for the three beats of silence before the first verse, he cut loose with a pure, sweet, 1950s doo-wop falsetto:

  Everything I do he studies

  Everything I do he knows

  He watches me wherever I am

  He follows me where I go

  Kris looked back at whatever mercenary drummer Terry had playing rhythm and miraculously, the guy was watching her, and even more of a miracle, he seemed to know the album because he came in with a nice four-by-four beat on the cymbals and snares, a lover’s shuffle, for the next verse.

  He has one hundred hands

  He has all-seeing eyes

  He is all I am

  Without him I die

  And die

  And die

  And die

  And die

  Kris brought in the monster riff that gobbled up the last of those words and the song took on its pounding, crashing speed, and the drummer and Kris drove it to its conclusion, not perfectly, and with two terrible tempo changes because the drummer still had the click track in his ear, but somehow they both went silent on the exact same beat, letting Terry deliver the last verse a cappella, into the seething crowd with its forest of pale arms throwing horns, its flashing phones, its cameras, its laser pointers, its glow sticks.

  And all that I am

  And all that I was

  And all that I am

  And all that I see

  And all that is me

  And everything

  Everything

  Everything

  Is he

  Kris leaned into Terry’s mic and said, “Hey, Mr. Sound Board. Kill the click track. We’re way off book here.”

  There was another roar of approval from the crowd who were thrilled to be in uncharted territory. The fat woman in the bow tie chuckled and made an adjustment, and now the only thing Kris and Terry and the drummer were getting fed was the monitor mix, so they could actually listen to each other.

  “And one more thing,” Kris said, doubling down. “Can we get Mr. Tuck Merryweather out here? Dürt Würk’s original bass player.”

  She stepped back from the mic, and Terry turned to stop her, but Kris was already playing the riff from “Eating Yourself to Live” over and over again, each time with more confidence. Amped up it sounded way more like they’d stolen it from Black Sabbath, so she bent it, drew it out, chopped it up, tossed it back, killing time until Tuck appeared. Just when Kris was about to give up, she heard the crowd roar and turned to see a follow spot pick up Tuck, shambling onstage, bass already strapped over his shoulders.

  He was too far away and the crowd was too loud to say anything, so Kris played the riff from “Eating Yourself to Live” at him, then again, then again, and he looked at her, and she nodded, and the dark ocean roared when he fired the bass riff back at her.

  They did that for a minute, just swatting it back and forth between them, and then Kris gave him her back and took the song forward. Onstage, Terry realized that they were all chained to this whale and the only way out was through, so he kept going.

  As they rolled through “Eating Yourself to Live” Kris forgot the audience. She focused on remembering her chord progressions and time changes, thrilled to realize she’d never forgotten them. Even when she couldn’t see them ahead of her in the song, the second she needed them, they were there, like Tarzan swinging through the jungle, reaching out into the air and always finding another vine.

  Melanie watched from the vibrating, swaying sound tower, the feel of the boys’ hands on her body fading as she stared at this woman onstage, the one she’d listened to Dolly Parton with, the one she’d decided was crazy, the one she’d betrayed. Under the stage lights, this woman glowed.

  The arrangements were skeletal and shaky, and the drummer just barely kept time a
nd didn’t play any fills. To Kris, the lack of Scottie Rocket felt like a phantom limb, but she did her best. Scottie loved “Eating Yourself to Live” so she used it to pay him tribute, soaring off into rocket runs, flashing across the sky in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it note drops. Even Terry seemed to feel it as he brought it to an end, cranking things up higher, and higher, and faster, and louder.

  Everything’s a game

  And everything’s been tamed

  And everything’s the same

  And everyone’s to blame

  And no one sees the pain

  And everyone’s insane

  The Blind! King! Reigns!

  The song cut off, unplugged, hit a wall, and there was a second of silence and then the roar returned and Kris was shocked, because for two minutes, she’d forgotten the crowd existed. It had just been the three of them, older, but together, a band again, surrounded by darkness.

  She put her pick in her mouth and started the fingerpicking for “Poincaré’s Butterfly,” praying that Terry remembered the words. There was only a small stutter when Kris missed a chord change on the intro, but then Terry was there, actually singing like a choirboy in his high sweet voice.

  Down

  Through the dirt

  Through the floor

  Through the Blue Door

  Tunnels

  Made of darkness

  Made of whispers

  Made of screams

  Like a choir

  On wings

  Made of red

  Made of yellow

  Made of dust

  Made of fire

  It lands

  On my hand

  I see