Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (34 page)

 
          
“
Popacatepetl
Purple,” Terry said softly. “You look like you
could use some heavy mind groove.”

 
          
Absurdly,
Steve felt tears start in his eyes. His friends loved him. Girls might fuck you
over, but you could always count on your friends. “I
gotta
find Ghost,” he told Terry. “I want to smoke this with him.”

 
          
“Sure,”
said Terry. “Enjoy it, huh?” He turned to R.J. and started talking about the
strip clubs on Bourbon Street. R.J. had gone to sleep on the bar, his head
cradled in his arms, his face smooth and blameless as a child’s. His fourth
Natty
Boho
sat in front of him, untouched.

 
          
Steve
pushed his way through the crowd, still carrying his half-finished beer,
smelling clove smoke and the dusty musk of thrill-shop clothes, searching for
the
streamered
beacon of Ghost’s hat. He saw black
berets, bright dyed hair, pale scalp showing through buzz cuts. Ghost was
nowhere to be found. “Fuck it,” Steve muttered finally, heading for the men’s
room. He couldn’t carry the joint around all night. He guessed he would just
have to smoke the whole thing himself. Life was rough.

 
          
He
locked the door behind him and dug in his pocket for matches. FINISH HIGH
SCHOOL FOR $50! The matchbook cover exhorted him. His first drag filled his
lungs with bitter, delicious smoke.

 
          
By
the time half the joint was gone, Steve had decided he was in dire need of a
tattoo. It would be a grinning skull with black bat wings veined
bloodred
, and it would have a rose clenched in its teeth,
and in the center of the petals the name ANN would be etched in flaming
letters. He would show it to the bitch next time he ran into her. Then she
would know how he really felt about her, and she would die of guilt.

 
          
Maybe
there was time to drive to Fayetteville tonight. That was where the tattoo
parlors were. Steve stashed the joint in his pocket and started out of the
restroom. He raised his beer to his mouth and scanned the crowd, looking for
Ghost, meaning to get their equipment loaded up and start for Fayetteville.
Instead he saw a girl standing at the bar talking to Terry, a girl with long
gold-red hair beneath her vintage 1940s mourning hat, with a tough, pretty
face. A girl who shaped her words with her hands, whose hands were
paint-stained and delicately ugly. Between the forefinger and mid-die finger of
her right hand, a Camel cigarette burned.

 
          
On
the third finger of that same hand Steve saw the dull gleam of a ring. He
couldn’t make out the design, but he knew what it was. A pair of hearts,
wrought in silver and turquoise, interlocked. He had given her that ring, and
she still wore it.

 
          
Ann
had come to see him play tonight.

 
          
Steve
started to duck back into the men’s room in case she turned around. But then
she lifted her arm in a gesture he remembered well, lifting her heavy hank of
hair off the back of her neck for a moment. The lapel of her black suit jacket
folded back.

 
          
Beneath
it she wore a lace tank top, also black. Steve saw the
sideswell
of her breast, and above that the dark auburn tuft of her armpit hair.

 
          
That
had surprised him when he’d first started going out with her, back in their
senior year of high school when she was still just Ann
Bransby
-Smith,
the cute redhead in his psychology class. He had never before gotten laid with
a girl who had armpit hair. It was sort of weird, but it seemed somehow to go
with the black turtleneck sweaters she wore and the beret she pulled down over
her ears sometimes.

 
          
“Artsy
chicks who paint aren’t allowed to shave their pits,” she’d told him that
night.

 
          
Steve
had only looked up at her—she was haft-straddling him on the couch, her jeans
still zipped up but her shirt off and her hair hanging in her face. He wasn’t
sure whether she was kidding, and he didn’t especially care, since his hand had
slipped inside the filmy cup of her bra and her nipple was as hard as a piece
of candy beneath his fingers. A few minutes later he discovered that she
perfumed the hair under her arms, and from that moment on, those tufts had not
disturbed him in the slightest.

 
          
Until
now. That fleeting sight filled him with such a miserable surge of desire and
loneliness that he almost spit out his mouthful of beer. He thought about how
fucked up the past month had seemed without her. Playing wasn’t fun anymore;
she got into all the songs somehow.

 
          
Even
drinking wasn’t fun –-often as not he got hung up in a
jag
of serf-pity, cursing her name, crying in his beer, hurling things she had
given him against the walls of his room. He was sick of working at the Whirling
Disc, sick of reading, sick of his dreams. Only spending time with Ghost seemed
to help, but even Ghost couldn’t be there all the
rime
,
though Ghost often came padding into Steve’s room and sat in the dark with him
when Steve couldn’t sleep at two in the morning.

 
          
Ghost
did that, but he couldn’t do everything. He couldn’t be Ann, with her smell of
paint and tea-rose perfume and Camel smoke, with her welcoming body.

 
          
Steve
circled around the bar and approached Ann from behind (From behind, the demon
in his mind said wickedly, yeah, I remember that one pretty good, but there
were lots of other positions too, and he told it to shut up). She was saying
something to Terry, who nodded sagely and glanced past her at Steve. Terry
raised one quizzical eyebrow. Steve shrugged and reached out to touch Ann’s
shoulder.

 
          
At
the same moment, R.J. raised his head and regarded them all with bleary good
humor.

 
          
“Hey,
Ann!” he exclaimed. “Hey, Steve! You guys getting back together or what?”

 
          
Ann’s
back stiffened. Her head whipped around, and a red-gold strand lashed across
Steve’s face. Her eyes met Steve’s and seemed to crack a little. Out of that
fault line spilled all the nights, all their nights. The wild sweat-slicked
ones when nothing short of devouring each other would satiate their hunger. The
quiet beery nights on the front porch of the house, sitting with Ghost, who
always knew when to stay up talking past midnight and when to go to bed early.
The nights lying across Steve’s bed in the half-darkness of the moonlit window,
before the Penthouse centerfold went up, watching life go by and not needing to
chase it because they were together and that was enough.

 
          
Those
nights, and the psycho bloody ones when they said things that could not be
taken back, when they didn’t care what they said. “I just can’t compete with
alcohol, can I?” she had asked one bitter night, and he had responded, “Fuck
no–you’re not that good.”

 
          
But
that was nothing.

 
          
That
was nothing compared to the night, the one he couldn’t bear to remember, the
one he couldn’t help remembering in every gory detail.

 
          
When
he had thrown Ann on the bed and unzipped his pants, he had ceased to be Steve
Finn. Maybe that was a cop-out, but that was how it had felt. His sense of
selfness had deserted him. The feeling of Ann’s body beneath him, bucking and
struggling against him, was remote as a figure on a movie screen. In fact, the
whole thing was like a movie; watching a badly faked snuff film might have
given him the same sense of mild, free-floating disgust.

 
          
The
shame and horror at what he had done hadn’t hit him until, driving home, he had
looked at his hand on the steering wheel and seen the mark of Ann’s teeth. Tiny
beads of blood were welling up from the imprint, which circled the base of his
thumb. What had he done to make her bite him that hard?

 
          
Get
home, his mind had chanted. Get home, to Ghost. Just get there and you’ll be
okay.

 
          
He
had. They hadn’t talked much, but Ghost had sat up with him until he could
sleep.

 
          
The
next few weeks had dragged by. He missed her, he ached for her; he hated her;
he pictured her making wild sweet love with her schoolteacher boyfriend. He
called her house and hung up twice. Then one time her father answered, and he
worked up his courage and asked to talk to her. Surely she wouldn’t have told
her father what he had done. But Simon only informed him in accents more
clipped than usual that Steve was not to try to see Ann, telephone her, or
communicate in any way. This was the only warning, Simon told him. On his
second attempt Steve would be disposed of.

 
          
Arguing
with Simon
Bransby
was like smoking a big joint of
killer grass and then trying to take an exam in
Nietzschean
philosophy or organic chemistry. You had no idea what made sense and what was
bullshit; Simon bombarded you with words faster than you could sort them out.
Steve had hung up again.

 
          
He
had not seen Ann since then. Until now. He was very high and more than a little
drunk, and here she stood before him, come to see him and Ghost play at the
Sacred Yew. A few minutes ago he had been thinking about getting her name
tattooed on his arm.

 
          
The
crack in her eyes closed, and she smiled what Steve recognized as her most
guarded smile. “Hey, Steve. How’ve you been?”

 
          
Steve
wanted to grab her, to bury his face between her breasts and sob for all those
lost nights, even the ones that had ripped both their souls open. He wanted to
wipe that fake glossy smile off her face. He couldn’t stand to see that smile
on the lips he knew so well, the lips he had nudged open with his tongue, the
lips that had brought him to the forbidden zone between pleasure and madness.
The betraying lips. Were they printed with the kisses of the teacher from
Corinth? He wanted them for himself, wanted to reclaim them.

 
          
But
even as drunk as he was, he could not. To do that, he would have to show his
desperation. He would have to apologize or cry or something. Such raw openness,
with its possibility of scorn, was not in Steve. Ghost had it, but Steve’s dark
eyes hid his soul as Ghost’s pale ones never could. So he only smiled back, as
easily as he was able, and offered her his half-full bottle.

 
          
“
Wanna
beer?”

 
          
“Natty
Boho
, huh?” she said. Steve winced. She liked Rolling
Rock, he knew that.

 
          
But
her voice was the same as ever, that tender voice roughened by too many Camels,
with the hoarse little catch in it, like a fingernail on a jagged piece of tin.

 
          
“Uh,
yeah,” he said. Jesus. Brilliant repartee.

 
          
“Oh
well.” She took a swallow and managed not to grimace. “Ghost brought me a copy
of the tape. Oh, wait, did he tell you he came over?” Her hands played
nervously with the tattered veil of her hat. Obviously she didn’t want to get
Ghost in trouble.

 
          
“Yeah,
he told me.” And it was no big deal, not like I yelled at him or nearly decked
him or anything …

 
          
“It
made me want to come see you play again. I’m glad I did. That was a damn good
show, Steve. You two are getting too good for this town.”

 
          
Terry
slid off his bar stool and hauled R.J. down by the back of his collar.

 
          
After
testing his balance, R.J. managed to remain precariously upright. “We’ll catch
you later, man,” said Terry. “Hey, here—you want these?” He put a fresh beer in
Steve’s hand, and another in Ann’s. A Rolling Rock and a Bud. Before Steve had
a chance to thank him, Terry had dragged R.J. off through the crowd.

 
          
“You
think we’re too good for Missing Mile?” Steve said. Another scintillating
reply.

 
          
Jeeesus
…