Beneath the Stain - Part 1 (2 page)

Stevie perched behind the drum set his mom had bought him two years before, Jeff had his bass slung around his hips—without the amp—and Grant and Kell both had their acoustic guitars at the ready. With the exception of the drum set, this was how they’d learned to play together.

W
HEN
M
ACKEY
was ten and Cheever had been in diapers, Kell had been stuck with babysitting duty while their mom was working nights. Grant and Stevie often came over to keep the boys company, both of them playing fast and loose with the truth of “Are there adults there to supervise?”

On this particular night they’d been bored—the Sanders boys didn’t have an Xbox or PlayStation like Grant’s or Stevie’s folks—and Mackey said, “Hey, guys, want to play rock band?”

“We don’t got the equipment for it,” Grant said, but he’d smiled. Grant had always smiled at him, even when Kell was too grim with having to take care of the family.

“No, no—we do. Jeff, get your keyboard!”

Jeff and Stevie took orders easy. Grant liked to play with him anyway. Cheever was asleep in the bottom bunk, where Mackey usually slept. Once Mackey stood in the middle with Jeff’s keyboard and played a basic hymn, he bossed everybody else into place. He knew the melody, and he picked it out for Kell on his little acoustic guitar, and he pounded out a bass beat for Jeff on his thigh. Stevie was a quick study—he picked up the beat and had fun with the flourishes on the practice pad. Jeff took piano with Mackey, too, so he understood that some chords on the bass made you happy and some chords made you sad. For “Simple Gifts” it was happy.

So they played a very basic version of “Simple Gifts.”

And when they were playing it through a second time, Mackey opened his mouth and blew everybody’s minds.

I fight in the playground with the kids mouthing off

And I fight with the teachers when they laugh at us and scoff

And I fight with my brothers ’cause it’s how we play

If I’m not fighting then I died this day

Even Kell had been reluctantly impressed. “Keep goin’, Mackey!” he’d urged, and Mackey grabbed a school notebook—their mother bought them by the case when they went on sale for eight cents a piece—and started writing, his left hand hooked at a painful angle, because that’s just how he wrote. While he was doing that, Kell took them through the song a few more times, until they could play it with hardly any hitches.

By the time their mom got home, Mackey had the lyrics ready to perform. After a long night on her feet, putting up with drunks and shitty tippers and men who thought that her dating history was an insta-pass to her bed, the Sanders boys did the impossible.

They made their mama smile.

In fact, they made her laugh and clap her hands. “Oh, Mackey,” she crowed, “if I’ve got to bail you out of school because you can’t keep your fists to yourself, at least you can give me this!”

Even tired as she was, she’d celebrated by making hot chocolate for them and pulling a box of cookies from the hidden place in the pantry (because otherwise they’d be gone), as well as a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, just for Mackey, because those were his favorite. When Grant’s and Stevie’s parents came by to pick up their boys, it looked like they’d spent a quiet night at home.

The next time the boys got together, Grant brought a music book with the melodies and chord progressions of some of their favorite rock songs.

And Mackey had filled up half a notebook with lyrics.

They’d played “rock band” ever since.

The local music store let Mackey stack crates and sweep up on the weekends, even though he was underage, and in return, he got their used and broken equipment. His mom let him do it if he stayed out of trouble, which meant he had to stop belting kids for jumping his shit when he was smarter than them. He learned to use his mouth, those precious words he kept in his notebook, to keep kids off his back. It didn’t make him popular, but it kept him out of fights.

“Hey, Mackey—how’s your mom?”

“I don’t know—how’s yours? She was looking okay when I left her this morning!”

“I will fucking—”

“You will? I’d like to see that. Wait. Nobody would like to see that. Suggest something else.”

“Oh God—”

“Me? I’m your god? Wow, you didn’t have to! Hey! Go get that!”

“Go get what?”

“Your self-worth—I just kicked it off the sidewalk!”

“What does that even mean?”

“When you find your self-worth, you’ll know! Fetch!”

The rest of the school just stopped talking to him, because, well, Mackey made a fool out of them.

But okay. He didn’t need anyone but his brothers. And the band. Kell could fight for him anytime, but if he had the music to look forward to, Mackey didn’t need him.

Mackey could do just fine on his own.

But he carried that
thing
, that pixilated fuck-off-and-love-me
thing
into the music.

S
O
HE
gathered the guys in Stevie’s dad’s garage—praying that Stevie’s dad didn’t show up, because they could only bug out of there so fast with their instruments, and sometimes they had to leave Stevie behind and that didn’t sit right—and Mackey told them how to play.

“We’re doin’ Nickelback, ‘Rockstar,’ first,” he said, and nodded, waiting for them to nod back. “And Offspring, ‘Pretty Fly’—”

Grant laughed. “Can you do the voice?” he asked. “Which one of us is doing the ‘Uh-huh-uh-huh’?”

Mackey smiled lazily and shook his bangs out of his eyes. “Tell you what.
You
do the ‘Give it to me baby,’ and I’ll do—” And all the guys joined in, “Uh-huh-uh-huh”

They laughed then, all together, and Grant winked at him. “I can’t wait to see you do your thing, Mackey. It’s gonna sell the show.”

Mackey preened, swinging his shoulders, strutting around his little circle of godhood like he was a big man. Then he turned and said, “Nah—it’s Kell and you who’re gonna sell the show. We got two lead guitars—man, that’s right out of Southern Fried Rock right there. You guys gotta play back and forth, ’kay?”

Grant and Kell looked at each other and grinned, then held up their secondhand Gibsons and made fake guitar battle gestures.

“Whaddo me’n’Stevie do?” Jefferson asked, all in one breath. It was how he and Stevie usually talked, which was why he never did backup vocals if there were real words in them.

Mackey smiled at him—not the flirty, cocky smile he gave to Grant or Kell when they were playing either. Jefferson and Stevie were… well, sort of special. They were quiet. In class the teachers just sort of overlooked them, and they hid in the back and got Cs and spoke an entire other language that not even Mackey could fully translate. They had the softest features, round faces, round chins, and the same sandy brown hair which they wore parted in the middle and falling layered to the sides, and they had the same faded blue eyes. They looked like cousins maybe, but Mackey and Kell had asked Stevie straight out if any of his male relatives had the last name Jefferson, and he couldn’t think of one.

“Well, you’re bass,” Mackey said, nodding and trying to give Jeff a complete picture. “You sort of have to ignore all the rest of us here and coordinate with the drums. So Stevie’s gonna be giving us a beat and you’re going to be reinforcing that.” He paused and saw that Jefferson looked sort of downcast. “You don’t get it!” Mackey watched every performance he could find on basic cable. He stayed up late to watch talk shows that had bands in them—hell, it was the
only
reason to watch
Saturday Night Live
. “See, the bassist has
mystique
. You look totally… what’s that word? Alone… no! A
loof
! You look
aloof
from all of us. The bassist always has sunglasses in the daytime, and he’s just totally his own person. So Stevie’s gonna be spazzing on the drums, ’cause that’s his thing, and Kell and Grant’ll be dueling guitars, and I’m gonna be—” He executed some pelvic wiggles and a few jerky dance moves, the kind he’d seen the rock stars do on television. “And
you
, you’re gonna be too cool for all that shit.”

It worked. Jeff grinned and pulled his lanky, slight body into his habitual slouch, but this time it looked purposeful. It was like Jeff
found
himself in that description, and Mackey beamed.

“So that’s three songs,” Kell said, frowning. “We know Nickelback and Offspring, and the Skynyrd.”

“Yeah, but they’re sort of old,” Grant said with a wince. Well, Grant’s dad could afford satellite radio. “We need something newer.”

“Well, how ’bout Cage the Elephant—”

“No!” Kell commanded sharply. “Mackey, all them songs’ll get us kicked outta school.”

Mackey bared his teeth and started the patented Matt Shultz spazz-strut. “We don’t care about the glory—”

And Grant picked up the guitar lick. “We don’t care about the money, we don’t care about the fame…” and just that quickly, their little garage band launched into “In One Ear” and Kell was left with nothing to do but pick up the lead guitar and join in.

The song ended abruptly, and Mackey swung his hands and his ass in time—then snarled at Kell, still wearing his stage face.

Then he dropped the snarl and gave him the stage “Am I stoned or just fucking with you” smile. “Yeah, not that one. How about the Broken Bells single?”

Grant shuddered. “Naw, man. That song gave me the creeps after I saw that redheaded girl in the space video. Can’t we just do the Bravery and ‘Believe’?”

And it was Mackey and the rest of the boys who all said, “Yes!” because just like the Muscat and the burned-out car, Grant really did have the best ideas.

“So, we do ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘No Rest for the Wicked,’” Kell said, still taking care of details.

Mackey conceded to Kell’s choice of classic Stones—because they’d already rehearsed it, for one—and to the “clean” Cage the Elephant song, and gave a fierce I’ll-eat-your-baby smile. “Kk, guys. Jeff, give us a 3/4 rhythm, two chords, C and G, bu-
dum
-bu-
dum
-bu-
dum
—like a heartbeat, right?”

Jeff started that, and then Mackey went to his keyboard and started playing the first riff for Kell. Kell was rock solid on the beat, and he’d play anything Mackey gave him—and fast—but he wasn’t much for improvising. The improv line he gave to Grant. Stevie had picked up on Jeff’s thumping bass and started to keep up a dual rhythm on the cymbal and the bass drum, and Mackey nodded. Good. They had the basics now.

Into the solid sets of chords, he started to sing.

You’ll hear me screaming in the mountains and the valleys far away,

Over oceans over planets over moons.

You’ll hear me tearing out my tonsils and my voice will never fade,

I’m begging and I’m pleading just for you.

I know you do not want me, not even on my knees

I know you want another—I got that.

But you can’t hide away from screaming from the begging and the pleading

’Cause you know you coulda had me on my back.

A kiss is not a promise or a broken vow disguise

And the meaning of it’s lost if you get lost inside my eyes

So think hard about my eyes about my hands about my mouth

Think hard about my stomach and the mystery in the south

And I’ll scream to get you hard upon your back!

The lyrics were hard-driven, borderline filthy, and everything he’d wanted to say to Grant from that moment shotgunning pot smoke in the vacant field.

But you didn’t say that to another boy in Tyson, California, and that was okay. Mackey strutted in their little circle and kicked out with the mike stand and wiggled his hips, and not a girl on the planet wouldn’t think he wasn’t pining for her and her alone.

The first run-through was always rocky, and he finished the lyrics and let the band rattle and die to an end, then turned to them, seeing if they liked what he gave them.

Jeff and Stevie were nodding, and Kell scowled in that way he did when he was making a list of things to fix for the next set.

“Good?” Mackey asked, because this, here, this was the one place he needed approval. The band was the one place someone else’s opinion mattered, and the one thing he could put in his pocket during the day with the shit-for-brains kids who couldn’t just read the fucking books and stay out of his face, or with Cheever, who knew he could get any of the boys in trouble just by falling on his own toys and blaming the bruise on them.

But here, in this little circle, with his brothers looking at him, he could have something good.

“Yeah,” Kell said, frowning as he continued with his list in his head. “Yeah, Mackey. I like that one. It’s sorta dirty, but teachers won’t be able to stop it ’cause it’s clever. Whaddayou think, Grant?”

Grant was looking at him, hazel eyes like liquid, juicy lower lip worried by his teeth. “It was awesome,” he said, his voice throaty and quiet. “I especially liked the part about lost inside your eyes.”

Mackey couldn’t hold his gaze any longer. He looked down at his keyboard and made some notations in his notebook about where the bridge fell apart and how they needed to clean that up. “Yeah, well, girls seem to like that shit,” he muttered. He risked a glance at Grant then and was mortified when he realized Grant knew exactly what he meant by that. Those hazel eyes were devouring him, scolding him, and needing him, and Mackey couldn’t seem to make them stop.

“Mackey, start us over again,” Kell said. “Grant and I need to clean up the guitar parts or I’ll never get to sleep.”

“Yeah,” Mackey said, his throat dry. “I’ll conduct this time and work on the lyrics next time we practice.”