The Listeners (19 page)

Cam told me I was venal, and I had to later look up
venal
in the dictionary that sat under a speaker in the Belfry Street living room.

ME AND A
man and a curtain. He hid behind the tall red pleats until I'd finished taking my sweatpants off. Red streaks marbled the milk of his shoulders. He swelled toward me. It was plain he would kill me, but not before we fucked. I did not try to get away. I loved the thick full feel of him driving up my downstairs, hitting the mouth of my cervix, again and again.

I was making materials the uterus discards. The discarded body went on a shelf, then into a box. The box was lowered. After the worm ate the body, there was no more to eat. Worm licked bone to white. A worm was a tongue. Each month, an egg came down. Did a chicken have a uterus?

A worm was a foot and a stomach. The bloodworm's eyes were grown over with skin. It nibbled sightlessly, taking its time. First the tender lining of the mouth. Lacustrina had had the head of a girl and the legs of a snake.

Does the worm live in your vagina?
The good doctor could be so stupid. Worms did not live in vaginas. Bugs
did—if you slept with certain guys, later you might find bugs in the hair—but the bloodworm didn't. It had been too hard to explain. I'd hated that look the good doctor got when she didn't get it.

WE SAT IN
the kitchen, rainy morning, toast and jam. I took my chance. “So, Ri, how's your love life?”

One eye slitted and his freckles heated from brown to red. He put his fingers over his mouth.

“Um,” he finally said.

I nodded encouragingly.

“I don't know,” he said. “Will you give me the butter?”

“The Pinecone, right? You like her?”

He shrugged.

“You do, right?”

“Kind of, but I don't know if
she
does and we're friends so I don't want to mess it up and it would be the worst if I tried to kiss her and she didn't want to kiss me back.”

His face was so red that I would have laughed if I hadn't been weirdly on the verge of tears.

I cleared my throat and said, “It would also be the worst if you didn't try, right? Maybe you guys would be really happy if you got together. Maybe not, of course—but the maybe yes is the important one.”

He nervously smiled, the green of his eyes like a shoot on the forest floor.

MY BROTHER WENT
with us to the diner the day we left for the
Purgastoria
tour. It was a Wednesday but we ordered massive Sunday breakfasts and Cam told the waitress, as usual, “He'll have the
rye
toast please!” and watched Riley's face for the smile. I was fretting, running down loose ends out loud—
We still have to call the, Mink have you heard from the, Is our percentage confirmed for the
—but the others were in good moods. It was a soft blue day, warm for January, and our van had new tires.

“Send postcards remember,” said Riley.

“You've only reminded me a hundred times,” said Cam.

“Last time you didn't,” he accused.

“Aren't you supposed to be back at college?”

“Next week,” Riley said. “We have a long winter break.”

“We'll put you on the list in Chicago,” Mink said. “Don't forget to come.”

“I won't!”

“Do we know where we're staying in Madison?”

“Not yet,” I said, “but—”

“Lot easier if we still had a manager.”

“If we still had a manager,” I hissed, “we would be even broker, because that fucking plonker would have cleaned us out entirely.”

Cam said, “But after this trip, we have to get someone. Too disorganized otherwise.”

“What's disorganized? I booked twenty-five shows for thirty days. This is a well-oiled machine.”

“You're the
queen
of booking!” purred Geck, leaning to lick my earlobe.

Cam closed his eyes.

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, we argued about food. Supplies from store versus sit down at restaurant versus drive-through. I, a despiser of all hamburger-related in-gestibles, vetoed drive-through. Mink said a supermarket would save us money and Geck said supermarkets were too depressing.

“Let's decide by cephaleonomancy,” said Cam. We waited for the definition he would supply: “Divination using broiled ass's head.”

“You are a strange person,” said Geck.

“We've passed like ten donkeys in the last hour,” Cam explained.

Geck said, “Is a donkey the same thing as an ass?”

In Rockford, Illinois, P.I.T. stood for Private Indoor Terrain and was downy-chinned boys and their skateboards in a cavern stinking bright of plywood. Across one of the half-pipes I sprayed our name, then the stars
and stripes of our city's flag. After playing for a jolly throng and drinking fake absinthe from the passed-around horn of a giant animal somebody claimed had been shot in Africa, we laid our sleeping bags at the top of a ramp. In that boy-built skatepark, falling to sleep in a row on wheel-scarred wood, I trusted deeply that things would be all right: I had my tribe to surround me, and thereby could not come to harm.

In Chicago, shy Riley could hardly bear the hissings of Can you get us backstage? Can you? I will
so
love you if you can. Their voices were a hot press
Can you? Can you?
and Riley hoped his head was shaking along with the rest of him. The pinprick in his forehead began to blare, a headache minutes away. When are they sound-checking? Are you going early? Can I come? He was shocked so many people knew who he was. It was a small college, but he didn't have many friends—wasn't
known
—or hadn't been, until the fliers went up and a slew of our fans got friendly all of a sudden. Maybe he wouldn't go. But he wanted to see us. He yanked up the hood of his windbreaker and left the dorm by the back stairs, happy it was raining because the umbrella further concealed him. The prickle in his forehead was bigger by the time he reached the club and stuttered to the guy on the stool who he was. A black tunnel with voices at the end, swivers of guitar, brisk thump of a drum, my voice going Coo, coo, coo! and Okay, how's that? When he emerged from the tunnel mouth, Cam was first to notice: Hey, Coyote! he yelled across the big floor and
Riley tucked his chin, shy, stroking the camera case dangling at his hip.

Riley had taken our picture for the
Purgastoria
cover. All four dressed in drugstore Halloween, black nylon long underwear painted with bones: Cam tall and planky; me whatever; Mink with movie-star teats pushing out the skeleton ribs; and Geck with his arms above his head, reaching for nothing.

I NOTICED THERE
was no wine on the table. Water glasses sweated by the plates. My parents always drank wine at night; had Mert prodded Fod into giving it up? Did he have cancer? Did
she
have cancer? Did wine even affect cancer?

“This polenta is a masterpiece, let's be honest!” said Mert, bearing in a massive yellow mound.

“Smells delectable,” said Fod.

“Pettle, would you move the trivet? Thank you. Now, everyone, I have some really nice goat's cheese, if you want to mix that in…”

“Did you guys run out of vino or something?” I asked.

“No,” said Mert, “we're just not having any tonight.”

“How come?”

She looked at Fod, who looked at Riley, who looked at the polenta.

“No particular reason. People don't always have to drink with dinner, so tonight, we're not.”

“Well, but a particular reason must've made you choose
this
night not to serve wine, because every other night you do.”

“Actually, a lot of the time when your father and I are on our own, we don't necessarily—”

Fod squinched his eyes. I believed my mother was not to be believed. I said, “Does someone have a disease and you're not telling us?”

“Oh, pettle, no! It's simply healthier for all of us to drink less.”

“When you say
all of us
, do you mean—”

“You,” said Riley.

“What?”

“She means it's healthier for
you
to drink less.”

“According to who?”

My brother spooned a glistening dump of polenta onto his plate. “I asked Mert to not have wine tonight, so get mad at me, not her.”

“Jesus, Ri, it's not like I'm an alcoholic!”

“But you drink a lot.”

“Compared to who? You drink like a Baptist grandmother.”

“Stop yelling,” Fod said.

“Then you don't have to sleep on my couch anymore,” said my brother.

“Is that a threat?”

“It's a promise.”

I considered getting up from the table. I had done some storming out in my time, but I felt too lazy for it now.

“Who wants broccoli?” asked Mert, holding up the bowl.

We got a ride home from our father. Nobody talked at all. As we were climbing out of the car he said, “Sweet dreams, kids.”

SOMETIMES WE WERE
not alone. Unseen companions went where we did, reached their hands in. Tube blown, string broken, tire nailed on an empty highway. The companions had wooden legs and knocked gently, rattled softly out of rooms before you could catch them. I waited as long as I could stand before mentioning it to Cam.
This sounds crazy but
…but he did not think it was. He was good that way, a listener. I explained that the freakeries were friends of my sister. They spied for her, messed with us on her behalf. She had always been bossy; why not boss spirits?
On the third song, drop the latch in my sister's throat to kill her voice—she will panic!
I panicked. Fell away from the mic, spat foam, yelled unheard at the light-studded ceiling.

 

We'd had two meetings with the scout and it was all very vague, everything implied, many promises bandied about without a single one actually made; but I swallowed it. Cam was too suspicious—what was his
problem? Couldn't he just be happy for once? We had a fucking Offer! But we
didn't
have one, he reminded me; there was no contract. No, but there would be, just as soon as we came back from tour. Scout's honor.

No longer would we sleep on kids' floors or in balcony motels; now it would be separate hotel rooms and my ego engorged to bursting and Geck on the covers of guitar magazines and—Cam didn't want anything to change that much. He wanted to keep us snug in a booth at the diner, together on the ripped seats of the van.

THE WARNING ACHE
had started below my belly, though I wasn't due to bleed for two weeks. A hoof of cramp made my brain tell me we were eating too much—its reflex chorus—and I corrected my brain, No, we eat healthy and nutritious amounts, and it is normal for a uterus to discard its materials each month.

Did the bloodworm come to the army prisons?

The women soldiers wiped fake vagina blood on the men's faces. The men were tied to chairs, sore from beatings. It was bad blood, a pollution, worse for Muslim prisoners (said the radio) than electric shock: they were defiled. The worm said, I don't care if this blood is fake, I will come anyway! When a prisoner died in captivity, the worm ate his eyes.

The city was a toppled ship, the cathedral its pale prow. Leaden circles broke when they hit the sea floor. Broken bells heaped on my tongue; sun pricked my cheek where it touched the pane. Again the dungeoner was coming up Riley's street.
Again?
What was
happening in his life that he needed so much of Mrs. Jones? I wondered what fortune he was getting. You will find the map! You will find your true love! The popular kids will die in their sleep!

Please have been sleeping. Please don't have felt a thing.

I knocked my forehead at the glass of the window that held the cathedral that sat on top of the city. Wrapped a broken-off piece of shoelace around my finger and sucked. Wake rhymed with lake, fake, and break.

When the dungeoner came out, he was walking slower than when he went in. Mrs. Jones had told him something he didn't like. He staggered into the street and almost got hit by a taxi whose horn was knife orange. Another car, nicer, waited for him to cross. On the other side of the street he lingered in front of the supermarket. Thanks to the hood I couldn't tell which direction his eyes were pointing, but from the way he was standing, they could have been pointed at me.

What would you say?
repeated my sister.

I'd ask him what's wrong, and why is he getting his fortune told so much and can I—

Can I help him.

Not total, I've seen him before. Three times.