Have A Little Faith In Me (2 page)

“God dammit,” Dex roared at the roadie.  “Be careful with that.” 

The roadie looked at him in astonishment.  He
had
been careful with the big black utility trunk, squatting and lifting with his legs and setting it down as gently as he could. 

“Sorry,” Dex mumbled, walking away.  “Bad day.”

He’d seen the roadie lift the case.  Tim, that was his name.  Dex made sure to know the names of everyone on his crews.  He’d seen Tim from behind, squatting down in his khaki hiking shorts.  Had seen the perfect pair of buns that came from a hard physical job.  Had seen them rise up, on a pair of sturdy legs.  And had felt a flush that had to be redirected, the way he’d always redirected those feelings since he met Pastor Panko.

The midnight show had gone badly.  Something had gone out of him after his encounter with Rocky.  How was he supposed to go on stage and whoop and holler and dance around as if he was the happiest guy on earth?  Sing a song like “Six Pack, Four Wheels, Two Dogs”? 

Instead of hanging out with the band after the show, he’d gone into the trailer, mumbled at them, and walked back out again with a bottle of Jack Daniels.  They’d discreetly mumbled back, which told him that he was right – it was a shit show, and everyone was out of sorts now. 

And that was my fault
. He was mentally kicking himself as he cracked the seal on the bottle and took a swig.  The Delta Devils were living in their luxurious RVs, all the better to enjoy the, um, fruits of festival fame, so the woods were a short walk away.

Dex threaded his way through the performers’ area, and headed out to a grove of trees where the incessant sound of the performers was somewhat muted.  He leaned against a tree and took another swig.  He’d felt…tired.  No, that wasn’t it.  Out of sorts.  Yeah, getting warmer. 

There were a bunch of tree stumps he’d had to navigate to get to the woods.  Someone was probably going going to build another housing development out here.  The big tree stumps had been drilled out in spots, into which he knew fuel would be poured, to burn out stumps too big to be torn out intact. 

Hollowed out.  Yeah, that was how he felt.  He took a big swig of the JD and then laughed. 
That’s me.  An old stump that needs burning, so fill me up with Dr. Jack and light the match.

Dex was 26 years old, and knew damn well that anyone older would laugh at him if they heard him saying that.  But as the saying goes, you’re only as old as you feel, and he felt very old right now. 

Everyone was always coming on him for something, everyone fucking
expected
something from him, expected him to do another interview, expected him to play the early, stupid songs he was sick of playing, expected him to marry Charlotte Deakins and start poppin’ out kids, what you waitin’ for? 

“Fuck,” he said out loud.  “Fuck, fuckity fuck fuck,” he said, unable to help saying it in time with the insistent beat of the house music DJ on stage now, the pounding of the bass audible even this far out.

Then he heard the murmur of approaching voices. 
Dammit, they must have sent out a search party for me.  I am not ready to deal with people right now
.  He decided he’d move a little deeper into the trees, and hope they didn’t search too hard. 

“How’s this?” he heard a voice say.  It was Tim, the roadie he’d just yelled at. 

“Looks good to me, cowboy.”  He didn’t recognize the other voice.  Then there was silence, and Dex held his breath, waiting for them to approach him.

But they didn’t.  Instead, he heard a sharp intake of breath.  “Oh, yeah,” the other voice groaned.  “Fuck, yeah.  Suck that dick.”

Dex’s heart started hammering at the sound.  Tim was…no, he couldn’t be.  That dude?  He was a…no. 

He heard Tim choke, choke again, then gasp for air.  “Oh shit that’s big.”

Dex wanted to see, didn’t want to see.  He turned slowly and let one eye gaze around the tree.  The other dude was one of Rocky’s band mates, Jet the drummer.  Dex never would have thought he would be …

Jet’s arms were exposed in a sleeveless t-shirt, muscular and tatted up, and his powerful hands were on the back of Tim’s head.  He gave Tim just a couple of gasps’ worth of air before he pushed him back down on his…
holy shit
, Dex thought,
that’s a huge fucking cock.

The movements of the two men, Tim’s head bobbing back and forth and Jet’s hips pushing in rhythm, were like a cobra dance that Dex couldn’t stop watching.  Jet’s ass was pale in the moonlight, and Dex could see Tim’s sun-darkened hands wrapped around them, squeezing them, forcing Jet’s cock deeper into his own mouth…

Jet grabbed Tim’s hair and held on tight, one hand swinging free like a rodeo cowboy’s and the other using Tim’s hair like a saddle pommel.  Or like a Fleshlight, as if Tim’s head was nothing but a receptacle for his dick. 

“I want that ass of yours,” Jet growled.

Dex swallowed.  He had a fever.  He had to go.  He couldn’t stop watching.

“Fuck yeah, man,” Tim grinned up at him.  “Right over that tree stump right there.”

“Oh yeah, that’ll put your ass up good and high.”

Dex was startled when they both laughed.  Like this was all, just…a game.  A good time.  And not…a sin.  A crime.

He should stop them.  Had to stop them.  For their own good. 

Tim turned away from Jet and dropped his shorts, his big firm pale ass glowing in the moonlight.  “I don’t suppose you got any lube?  Guess you’ll have to use spit?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Jet growled.  “Taking it all rough like that.”

“You know it!”

“Nah, my dick’s too big to plug that ass with just some spit.”  He reached into a pocket of his jeans.  “Good thing I always gotta little lug lube with me.” 

Tim laughed again, getting down on his knees, bending over the stump and arching his ass to the sky.  “Lug lube?  You guys don’t have any bongos.”

“I do now,” Jet said, slapping out a rhythm on Tim’s ass cheeks. 

“Ow!” Tim laughed.  “So you’re into spanking, huh.”

“Among other things.”

Tim paused.  “Oh yeah?  Like bondage and shit?”

“Are you?”

“Yeah,” Tim said, his breath coming in a whisper now.  “Why don’t you…take off that big black rock star belt of yours and use it on my ass…”

“Oooh, yeah?”  Dex could hear the grin in Jet’s voice.  “Tenderize that shit before I get in there?”

Dex had an erection, and at the sound of Jet’s promise of pain it became so hard it was painful.  Dex could feel the belt in his hand, could feel what it would be like to land it on that ass, to see those cheeks quiver in pain and…pleasure?

He stumbled away, deeper into the trees.  The sound of the festival, the deep bass of the giant speakers, covered his retreat.  He uncapped the bottle and chugged, until the whiskey burned his throat so badly that he cried. 

He couldn’t see or hear the two men anymore, but his mind could see nothing but.  Jet, Tim, both getting more excited with every stroke of the belt, Jet squeezing that lug lube out onto his cock, onto Tim’s ass, then pushing himself in, the thump thump thump of the house music lending the musician the metronome he needed to time his thrusts….

“NO!” He shouted, hurling the bottle into the forest, where it hit a tree with a satisfying shatter.  “No.”  No I won’t, I can’t.  I.  Will. Not. 

It had been years since this had happened.  Since those feelings, those…urges had taken him.  He had worked so hard for years, successfully doing just what Pastor Panko had told him to do when he’d confessed them:  Take every surge of primal sexual desire and channel it into work.  Into his music, his career, away from those unproductive, unwholesome, barren thoughts. 

He’d never seen anything like that.  Two men, fucking.  He’d seen two men kissing, of course, and turned away, revolted, upset.

Yeah, what they all said was true.  He knew it.  Homophobia, revulsion, it was all directed at that part of yourself that you feared was gay.  And why shouldn’t you fear it?  Why shouldn’t you fear that something so wrong was inside you like a cancer?  Pastor Panko knew that.  He knew that there was no way to “pray away the gay.”  All you could do was fight it.  Like you would fight if you had cancer.

And the worst of it was, when Dex had imagined the belt in his hand, it hadn’t been Tim’s ass he’d been thinking about.  It had been Rocky’s.  Rocky, whose face had been as close to Dex’s as any man’s – though any other man who’d gotten his face that close to Dex’s had been itching for a fight, and usually got one. 

But what Rocky had wanted was another kind of battle.  Rocky, whose lips had parted in a gasp of astonishment when he’d seen inside Dex, seen the twisted, broken sexuality, the same as his own.

But it isn’t the same, is it?  Rocky had no shame about his. 

Well, he should,
Dex thought. 
He fucking well should.
  He took the long way around to the RVs, making damn sure he didn’t see any more of what he’d just seen.  But it was too late to unsee it, to stop thinking about it.  It would take at least another bottle of Dr. Jack to blot that out tonight. 

Rocky was glad Jo’s Coffee was just a block down South Congress from the motel.  He’d made it in time to order some breakfast tacos, which improved his mood immeasurably.  He could have waited for Korey to join him, but the restaurant might have run out the famous tacos before his chronically late friend and manager arrived. 

While he waited for Korey and tacos, he sipped his coffee and started scrolling through his phone.  He had 30 text messages!  Overnight.  That was crazy.  He started browsing them.

Dude.  HOT PIC.  You guys fuck yet?

You showed him who’s boss, buddy! 

What an asshole!  Glad you stood up to him.

Rocky blinked.  What the hell where they talking about?

Korey sat down in front of him, his brown eyes shining behind his big-ass tortoiseshell “Urkel” glasses.  “Dude.  That picture.  It’s everywhere.” 

“What picture?”

Korey sighed, his fingers dancing over his phone.  “This one, duh.”  He turned it to show Rocky.

Rocky took the phone.  It was a photo of himself and Dex, face to face, challenging each other over control of the microphone.  “So?”

“Turn it sideways.  Blow it up.”

Rocky pinched the photo and stretched.  The facial features came into focus, and then he saw it.  The look between the two of them.  He swallowed.  The whole world could see what he had been thinking, feeling at that moment. 

He was looking up at Dex, a foot taller than he was.  The tilt of Rocky’s head was defiant, the narrowing of his eyes showed his anger, but the way his lips were parted, as if waiting, hoping for a kiss, showed the world the lust in his heart.

“Look at him, too,” Korey said, reading his face if not his mind.

Rocky willed himself to look at Dex.  There was something on his face, as well.  His eyes were wide, his mouth in an O.  The world would see astonishment there, but it would fill in its own causes – they would call it disbelief that this little banty rooster would defy him. 

But Rocky knew better.  He’d felt the lust rising off Dex, had seen what had really surprised him.  Dex had been caught off guard by a surge of desire.  For Rocky.  And Rocky had responded with desires of his own.

“So here we are,” Korey smirked.  “At a festival designed to promote friendship between Red States and Blue States.  And there’s you two, looking like a poster for Friday Night Fights.  Well, Friday Night Fight and Fuck, maybe.”

Of course Korey would notice the “and fuck” part.  After all these years of friendship, he knew better than anyone what Rocky looked like when a man made him weak.

Rocky handed the phone back, his face a blank mask.  “It’s nothing.  A disagreement.  A scheduling conflict.”

Korey wagged a finger at him.  “You.  Want.  Him.”

Rocky sighed, leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through his lavish dark curls.  “Fuck.  You know me too well.  Another straight dude, right?  Naturally.  Seriously, man, I’m done with that.  After Frank?  Done diddly done-a-reeno.”

“Well, here’s the deal.  As band manager, I’ve been contacted by the promoters.  They want a rematch.”

“What?”

“They’ve set up a meeting this morning, you and Dex.  To discuss a duet.”

Rocky choked on his coffee.  “Duet?  Are you out of your gourd?”

“The whole world is watching.  You gotta do it.  I already said yes.”

“God dammit, why’d you do that?”

Korey sighed.  “Publicity.  Oh my God so much publicity you can’t imagine.  And that means money.  Gold.  Ducats.  Buckets of ducats.”

Rocky smiled as Korey hauled out their old phrase, the ambitious dream of two Southern boys, each with their own very good reasons for wanting to escape from Marietta, Georgia.

“So we’re supposed to get together like Whos in Whoville, huh, hold hands and sing and it’ll just warm that Grinch’s heart.”

“Or you could just fuck onstage.  That would work too.”

Rocky shook his head.  “The dude is a closet case.  I saw it.  He wants it, but he’s never had it.  His gayginity is intact.  And I mean it.  Never again.  I’m going to find a nice homo and settle down.”

Korey gave him an old lady smile and patted his hand on the table.  “Of course you are, dear.”

Rocky wiped his palms on his jeans before he entered the trailer.  Dex was in there already – Rocky had seen him go in.  He steeled himself for the encounter by swearing a vow to himself. 
I won’t let myself look at him like that again.  I won’t.

He stepped into the air conditioned trailer, out of the Texas heat.  Korey was already there, along with Dex and his manager.  Rocky almost laughed at Dex’s manager’s getup –
holy crap, it’s Colonel Fucking Sanders,
he thought.  Okay, not as old, but the white getup with the bolo tie made him look old.  He didn’t have the Colonel’s kindly face, though – more like Lyle Lovett on a bad day.

Jason got up and the two old friends hugged, back-slapping each other.  Jason had risen as far as an alt-country opening act for Ryan Adams, but then his career stalled. Then he’d gotten married, had a kid, and needed a steady income.  So he’d reinvented himself as a promoter. 

“Rocky, man, how’s it going.  This is Sam Griggs, Dex’s manager.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rocky said, shaking the man’s hand.  He was startled when Sam not-so-discreetly rubbed his own hand on the fabric of the bucket seat after the handshake. 
Typical fucking cracker
, he thought,
thinks he’s gonna get AIDS from touching the queer.
  Then again, he thought sourly, it could be because he’d also shaken Korey’s hand, and he wanted to make sure the Blackness wasn’t catching either.  Or both, probably.  Racism and homophobia held hands and sung together all the time.

“Okay,” Jason said.  “So you’ve all see the media shitstorm around this.  And we’d really like to put a lid on it.  As a personal favor to me, I’m asking you both to do this duet.  I want this festival to go well, to end well.  If it doesn’t…” He threw up his hands.  “Kind of a stake in the heart of my new career, you know?”

Rocky nodded.  “I owe you a solid, Jason, I’ll do it.”  He looked Dex in the eye.  “I have nothing to lose.”

Dex didn’t blink.  He nodded curtly.  “Me neither.  Nothing to be scared of here,” he said contemptuously. 

Man, fuck this guy,
Rocky thought.  Dex and his manager were everything he hated about the South, were everything he’d worked so hard to escape.  And now here he was again, having to sit here and take their shit. 

Dex was checking him out, clearly, his eyes traveling over Rocky’s tats, most of them replicas of his favorite artworks. 
Like you’d have any idea what they are,
Rocky thought. 
You stupid fucking hick, you’ve probably got a house full of Thomas Kinkaid or some shit like that.

“Okay,” Jason said hastily.  “So if you guys want to take some time to think about the song you wanna do…”

“I don’t think it should be a duet,” Rocky said, inspiration striking him.  “I think it should be a face-off.  A battle of the bands.  A friendly competition to see who’s the better musician.”

Dex’s nostrils flared, and he grinned.  Rocky’s heart skipped a beat at the way Dex’s face lit up, the way it glowed with rude good health.  The way one corner of his mouth turned out, a dirty knowing smile that promised what Korey had seen in their photo – either a good fight or a good fuck, the two weekend specials of Southern male life. 

“Hell, yeah.  That’s more like it.”  Dex tipped his black cowboy hat back and scratched his forehead with mock confusion.  “The only problem is, what songs are we gonna play?  I guess we’ll do a great old country standard, and you’ll do, I don’t know, one of those Emo songs, screamin’ about how your mom made you clean your room.”

Rocky almost laughed, the description of the typical Emo song was so accurate.  But he repressed it, hard.  “No, I think we can do your country standard, too.  Some Patsy Cline or Hank Williams, something much better than the overproduced, plastic stuff that comes out of Nashville these days.  That’s really the only way to face off, isn’t it, to do the same song?”

Dex didn’t take the bait Rocky had thrown out there about contemporary country music, including Dex’s own.  “Right.  And then, we’ll play an old rock classic, one you might know, Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis Presley.  You heard of them, I hope?”

“I was raised in the South, just like you.”  Then it was Rocky’s turn to smile.  “I’m going to go with Little Richard, though.” 

Dex laughed, the joke too good to resist.  For a moment, they looked at each other, appreciating Rocky’s move in selecting that famously outrageous queen. 

Then the moment was gone.  Dex turned away, scowling, something infuriating him suddenly that Rocky could only imagine.  He didn’t need to imagine it.  He’d seen the look on a thousand men, the moment of freedom, of joy, in being themselves, that they just as quickly buried, deep in the ground, before someone else did it for them.

“So we’re good?” Jason asked.  “You guys up for doing this today?”

“Hell yeah,” Dex said.

“No problem,” Rocky agreed.

“Okay.  Guitars at sunset instead of pistols at sunrise, right?”

Rocky and Dex nodded.  But it might as well be pistols, Rocky thought.  This was going to be a war.