Ratcatcher

by Chambers, V. J.

“It’s Lark.”

  What the fuck? Why in the hell was that bitch calling him? “What do you want, cunt?” he asked.

  He heard Lark letting out an angry breath. He wondered if she’d just hang up on him right then and there. Good. If she did, fine. He didn’t want to talk to her. He wanted to talk to Shane.

  “I need your help,” said Lark.

  Hmm. This was interesting. The bitch was calling to beg for help. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Shane’s passed out in a bar in town, and I don’t have a car. Will you come pick me up so that we can go get him?”

  Shane was passed out? How much had he been drinking? Shane hadn’t passed out in ten years as far as Chris knew. Usually, Shane had to take pills to sleep. “I’ll go get him,” he said. “But I don’t see why I need to pick your ass up.”

  “I’m not sure Shane will leave with you,” said Lark. “He is pissed at you, you know.”

  She had a point. Shane wasn’t speaking to him. If he were really drunk, he might be a little tougher to deal with than usual. And he might not want to have a thing to do with Chris. “Fine,” said Chris. “I’ll pick you up.”

  “Thank you, Chris,” said Lark.

  “Save it, bitch,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” said Lark. And she hung up on him.

  Chris considered just ignoring the entire thing. He didn’t deserve dealing with that fucking whore. But it was his best friend. He was going to be there for Shane, no matter what happened. So he got in his car and drove to Shane’s house. Lark was waiting for him out front. He stopped the car, and she opened the passenger side door.

  “Sit in the back,” Chris growled.

  Lark slammed the door. “Fine,” she said. She opened the back door and got into the back seat. Once inside, she folded her arms over her chest and stared out the window. Good. Chris didn’t want to talk to her either.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, but Chris realized he couldn’t handle not knowing. “How come Shane was at a bar without you, anyway?” he wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” said Lark. “I tried to leave.”

  What? She was trying to leave Shane? That was weird. He thought the bitch would get her hooks into Shane and never let go. “Why?” he asked.

  “I’m sick of depending on him. I wanted to go be on my own and take care of myself.”

  Yeah right. Chris snickered. “That’s ridiculous, bitch. You’re just trying to control him.”

  “Fuck you. You’ve made up your mind to think the worse about me anyway. I don’t care what you think.”

  “So why are you back, then?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she retorted.

  “Oh, now you’re all clammed up,” he said.

  “You’re just gonna insult me no matter what I say. I don’t need to talk to you at all. Let’s just go get Shane, okay?”

  So she’d tried to leave Shane. Weird. “So you think he got crazy drunk because you left?” Chris asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s not like him to get that drunk,” said Chris.

  “I know. I’ve never seen him pass out, and I’ve seen him put away more whiskey than I thought was humanly possible.”

  Chris chuckled. “That’s our Shane, all right. What bar is he at?”

  “Um... I don’t know, actually. I hung up on the guy who called me, because he was being rude to me.”

  “You hang up on people a lot, don’t you?”

  “Only when they’re rude. And people have been lots more rude since I started dating Shane. It’s as though everybody thinks they own him, you know. As though his life is everybody’s business.”

  “He’s a rock star, sweetheart. What did you think you were signing on for?”

  “I didn’t sign on for anything. Everything went so fast. I don’t even know how I ended up dating Shane in the first place. I didn’t plan on it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I don’t know why I talk to you.”

  “Well, we’ll try all three of the bars. He’s bound to be at one of them,” said Chris.

  After they pulled into town, they spotted Shane’s car parked outside the bars and parked next to it. Shane wasn’t at the first bar, but the bartender recognized Chris. “Dearborn?” he asked.

  “Hey Brian,” said Chris.

  “You looking for Adams?”

  “Of course,” said Chris.

  “He’s next door. He played open mike night. I could hear it through the walls,” said Brian. “Good to see both of you. Been a long time.”

  “Yeah,” said Chris. “Good to see you too.” He turned to Lark. “Come on. Follow me.”

  They left the first bar and entered the second. Anthony Wallace greeted Chris at the door.

  “Anthony!” said Chris. “Hey, how are you? How’s Trish? The baby?”

  Anthony grinned. “Chris Dearborn. I’m great. Trish is great. The baby is almost four years old. And we’ve got another one on the way.”

  Chris shook his head. “Man, we’re all getting old, aren’t we?”

  Anthony chuckled. “We are, we are.”

  “So, you seen my buddy Shane?”

  “He’s in the back,” said Anthony. “I actually talked to some teenager who claimed she was his girlfriend—”

  “That would be me,” Lark interrupted. “I’m twenty-six years old.”

  Anthony looked her over. He turned to Chris. “She’s actually Shane’s girlfriend?”

  Chris smiled tightly. “Unfortunately, yes. Where’s Shane?”

  “I’ll take you to him,” Anthony said, putting his hand on Chris’ back and leading him toward the back.

  “You’ll take both of us,” said Lark pointedly.

  “You can follow right along, honey,” said Anthony. “It’s a free country.”

  Anthony led both of them into the back room of the bar, where Shane was slumped over two metal folding chairs. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. He was drooling a little. Lark ran to him immediately. She knelt next to him and put her hand on his face. “Shane?” she whispered.

  Shane didn’t stir.

  “That’s not going to wake him up,” said Chris.

  Lark turned on Chris angrily. “What did you have in mind? Slapping him in the face?”

  Shane opened his eyes. “Lark?” he slurred. “You’re back? You came back?”

  “I came back,” she said.

  Shane smiled and closed his eyes again.

  “No, no,” Lark murmured. “You have to wake up, Shane. We have to take you home.”

  Chris pushed past Lark and clapped Shane on the shoulder. “Shane,” he said firmly. “Get up, man. We have to get out of here.”

  Shane opened his eyes again, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. “What are you doing here, Chris? I don’t want to see you.”

  “Dude, you’re drunk. Just let me help you up and—”

  “Don’t touch me,” Shane said.

  Chris sighed and appealed to Lark with a look.

  “It’s okay,” said Lark. “I called him. You have to let him help you up.”

  “Why did you call Chris?”

  “Because I didn’t have a car, baby, and I needed to come get you.”

  Shane sat up. He suddenly looked a lot more sober than he had a few minutes ago. “You called Chris?” he said. “You don’t ever have to feel like you have to call Chris.”

  “Hey,” said Chris, “whatever’s going on with us, man, you know I’m still your best friend.”

  Shane stood up. “No,” he said. “You’re fucking not. You’re nothing to me. I don’t ever want to talk to you ever again.”

  Shane attempted to take a step forward, but he stumbled and collapsed back onto the chairs he’d been lying on.

  Chris shook his head. That had hurt more than he thought it would. He knew Shane was drunk, but it still was hard to hear his best friend say he never wanted to see him again. “Fine,” he said. “Maybe Anthony can help you out t
o the car, then. And Lark can drive you home.”

  Shane glowered at him. “Get out of my sight.”

  “Fine,” said Chris. He walked out of the back of the bar and back into the room where the bar was. It was closing time, so the lights were all on, and there were only a few stragglers finishing up their drinks. Chris meant to keep walking, right out of the bar, but he didn’t. Instead he paused. He looked around the bar, considering what Shane had said. Shane was pissed off at him. Really fucking pissed off.

  Antagonizing Lark only made Shane angrier with him, because apparently Lark had manipulated Shane so deeply that he couldn’t even tell who his real friends were anymore. But Chris knew that Lark was bad news for Shane. And he had to do something to protect his best friend. He wasn’t going to be able to do that if he couldn’t get close to Shane at all.

  That meant he was going to have to swallow his pride and play this whole thing a little smarter. He could be close to Shane if Shane forgave him. And so, Chris decided, he needed to apologize. If he did that, he could stay close to Shane. He could pretend that he wasn’t trying to drive a wedge between them, but he could do it in more subtle ways. He’d stolen Shane’s girlfriend once before. He didn’t know if he could do exactly that again, but he could definitely do something.

  At that moment, Shane, Lark, and Anthony emerged from the back. Both Anthony and Lark were supporting Shane, who still seemed clearly drunk. But the minute Shane saw Chris, he broke free of the two of them and lunged at Chris.

  Shane wasn’t moving too quickly, because he was drunk, so Chris attempted to catch him, to stop him from inflicting any pain.

  Shane was screaming at him, “Why are you still here? I told you I never wanted to see you again, you bastard!”

  Chris grabbed Shane’s forearms as Shane came for him, and managed to keep all of Shane’s weight from colliding with him, but he couldn’t completely stop Shane’s fist from connecting with his jaw. He absorbed the impact, let his head fly backward. Then he got a better grip on Shane, holding him so that he couldn’t move.

  “Stop it,” said Chris. “Stop it, Shane. Just hold on.”

  “Fuck you,” Shane said. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

  “Wait,” Chris said, and before he realized it, he was crying. Which was embarrassing. People were watching. Anthony was fucking watching. He didn’t know why he was crying. It had something to do with the fact his best friend was calling him a bastard and telling him to fuck himself, he was sure of that. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said.

  “Do what?” Shane demanded. He had noticed that Chris was crying. “What’s wrong, man?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Chris. “I’m sorry.”

  “Let go of my arms.”

  “Don’t hit me.”

  “Just let go.”

  Chris let go. Shane backed up, facing Chris. “What do you mean, you’re sorry?”

  “I’m sorry. I apologize. I was wrong.”

  “For what? You apologize for what?”

  “For being a jealous ass. For disrespecting Lark. For breaking up the band. I’m sorry.”

  Shane took several deep breaths. “Apologize to Lark,” he said.

  Augh. This was the fucking hard part. Chris swallowed. He tried to keep the tone of his voice even and sincere. “Lark, I’m sorry. I treated you terribly, and you’ve done nothing but good things for Shane. I’m really sorry.”

  Lark’s eyes narrowed. She stared at him suspiciously.

  Chris looked back at Shane, hoping for approval. Shane was crying too. They looked at each other for a few seconds, and then almost simultaneously grabbed each other in a bear hug.

  “I missed you so much,” Shane was saying.

  “Me too,” said Chris.

  Behind them, Chris heard Lark’s voice. “This is touching,” she was saying, “but I think they’re trying to close the bar.”

  * * *

  It had been too many years since Halley Coil had heard Shane Adams play. She remembered being in her early twenties and how excited she used to get when she knew his band was going to play. Those gigs, sometimes they were the most important things in her life. Her life had almost been too much to take back then, she remembered. She’d needed things, little things, things to look forward to. Things to live for. And those shows... Those shows had been that. Whatever had been going on in her life, whether it had been a break up, or getting fired from her job, or failing some class in school, whatever it was, it had been bearable because she’d known that she was going to see a Shane Adams show. She looked forward to them as though they were the only things she had to live for. In some ways, maybe they had been.

  Sometime after Shane had gotten signed and moved away, things had stopped being that way. She’d never connected the two things before. And it hadn’t been an abrupt change. It had been gradual. So gradual she’d never really noticed it. One day, she was holding onto something tenuous—the promise of a rock band playing at a local bar. And then she just wasn’t holding onto anything. And things had just well...stayed that way.

  Halley didn’t hate her life now. It was. It moved on. She got older. Things changed. But she’d forgotten what it was like to have something to live for. Something to look forward to. She’d forgotten how euphoric she felt when she heard Shane Adams play. Now, she just existed. She got up. She went to work. She came to the bar, ran into people. She went home, hopefully not too drunk, so that when she got up to do it all over again, she wasn’t too hung over to function.

  Most of her friends were married. They were having children. Halley had boyfriends occasionally. Sometimes, she thought things were going somewhere. But her boyfriends always left her. She didn’t know if there was something wrong with her, or if she was just attracted to exactly the wrong kind of man. But she knew that life was empty. And she knew that she didn’t particularly care. She’d made her peace with the fact that she wasn’t going to be one of those people. She wasn’t going to get married. She wasn’t going to have children. She was going to grow old alone. And that hadn’t bothered her. The fact that she hated her job hadn’t bothered her. The fact that she knew that she was a functioning alcoholic hadn’t bothered her. Nothing had mattered to her at all.

  It had been an empty existence but an almost content one. Not wanting anything had kept her from feeling much of anything. When Shane Adams took the stage at open mike and started playing, all that changed. Halley, for the first time in years, was hit by a wave of desire that tore her open. She felt ripped up inside, as though all the pain she’d been hiding inside was suddenly freed. It hurt. It hurt so bad. But for the first time in she didn’t know how long, Halley felt alive.

  She hung around the bar, nursing her last drink, even though she knew she needed to go to bed. She had to work in the morning. She didn’t want to be tired and hung over. But she didn’t care. She wanted to talk to Shane. It had been years since they’d talked. He probably didn’t even remember her, even though, one night, she had taken him back to her apartment, years and years ago, and they’d made out for a long time. And he’d gone down on her for what seemed like hours. He was the only man who’d ever managed to give her an orgasm from oral sex. Still, she doubted Shane remembered her. And she didn’t want to talk to him because she wanted to rekindle anything romantic or sexual. She’d never really felt like that about Shane. If she had sex with him, he might become too human. He might lose some of his awesome power. When he played guitar and sang, he was like a god.

  She waited just because she wanted to thank him. For playing. For waking her up. She had heard that he was retiring. That he didn’t want to play anymore, and she wanted to beg him to keep playing. She wanted to tell him that people needed his music. That she needed his music. And that if he stopped playing, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Now that she’d heard him play again, she was different inside. She wanted him to know what he did. Who he was. What a gift he had.

  But Shane passed out almost right after
he played. Halley stayed. She watched him nearly get in a fight with Chris Dearborn. She watched him and his girlfriend get in his car and drive away. And then...not really knowing why she was doing it, Halley got in her car too. And followed them.

  She stayed back, worried that they would see her car trailing behind them. She didn’t know what she was going to do when they actually got to Shane’s house, and she didn’t quite think that through. The drive wasn’t long. Shane didn’t live too far outside of town, actually. She knew where his house was. Everyone in town did. So she halted her car at the beginning of the driveway after she saw them turn in. She waited.

  Then she made the turn and pulled just inside the driveway. She turned off her car and got out, shutting her door quietly behind her. She could hear the two of them talking in the distance, but she couldn’t see them, because the driveway to Shane’s house was long and curvy, and it was crowded with dark overhanging foliage.

  “Did you hear something?” Shane’s girlfriend was asking.

  “Hear what?” Shane asked.

  “Nothing. Let’s get you inside.”

  Halley waited by her car until she heard them go into the house and close the door. Then she began walking forward. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Was she going to go to the door and knock? She didn’t know if she had the guts to do that. She wanted to talk to Shane, but she was beginning to feel as though this trip out here had been quite silly. She shouldn’t have done it.

  Outside, the summer breeze embraced her legs and arms. She could hear the cicadas chirping in the surrounding woods. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark, and so the trees and driveway were starting to take more defined shapes. They no longer looked like amorphous hunks of darkness. She took tentative steps towards the house, listening to the soft crunch of gravel under her feet.

  Halley was used to living in rural Tennessee. Had done so her whole life. The sights and sounds of the woods at night were familiar to her. So she wasn’t sure why she began to feel a tingling at the nape of her neck. She wasn’t sure why she began to feel a little bit afraid. She paused a moment. Looked back at her car. She could just get back in it and drive home. She had to work in the morning. It didn’t make sense to be out here.