The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  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.

  Did you wake them, little Coyote?

  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.

  If you could meet the dungeoner, what would you say?

  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 you what?

  Can I help him.

  But he’s a total stranger.

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

  Three is black.

  No it’s green mixed with blue!

  It’s black.

  No it’s green! Like you!

  I’m not green.

  Yes you are.

  Not anymore.

  Then what are you?

  Black.

  But they didn’t burn you.

  I burned anyway. Under the ground.

  Did it hurt?

  No answer.

  Sister?

  Empty room.

  Clench your teeth so the germs don’t get in. Make your mouth a wall.

  My brother padded in on his soft toes. “Who’re you talking to?”

  “Myself, as usual!”

  “Coo?” he said.

  “Coo,” I agreed, noticing that his face had gone the particular gray it tended to go when he was bothered. “What’s up, Coyote?”

  “I’m—I’m—”

  “Yes?”

  “Mad,” he finished, staring at the floor.

  I waited.

  “You haven’t done dishes in three days. You said you’d be better about it!” He was still looking down.

  “Right. I’m sorry. I’ve just been really stressed out.”

  “You’re not even working!”

  “Which is the source of my stress. I go into this panic mode where—”

  “Don’t explain. Just do the dishes.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Totally.”

  “Also,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been smoking in the shower.”

  “That is a lie.”

  “I could smell it, and there were two cigarette butts in the toilet, which you didn’t flush.”

  “It’s sad how anal you are,” I said, instead of sorry.

  I CALLED AJAX to propose myself as a babysitter. His kids liked me—remember the movies at Christmas?—and I wouldn’t charge much.

  I heard him breathing on the other end, wheezily, even though he’d quit smoking years ago.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think,” he said, “that a person with even below-average intelligence could reflect upon this situation for, say, five seconds and realize that a man who is unemployed does not need to hire a babysitter.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Not trying to be rude here, but, hello.”

  “Right,” I said, tugging at the rubber band.

  “I HAVE TO pee,” said Geck. “Can you pull over?”

  Cam, at the wheel, said nothing.

  Geck bellowed, “Have to pee!”

  Still nothing.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “We stopped twenty minutes ago,” Cam said.

  “I didn’t need to then.”

  “You’ll have to hold it.”

  “I can’t. My urinary glands are extremely sensitive.” Geck waited, then added: “I could spray the back of your head.”

  “Yeah,” Cam said, “I’m sure you’ll do that.”

  Geck rolled down the window, knelt upright on the seat, unzipped, and carefully maneuvered his pizzle out the window.

  Tribe is from the Latin tribus: originally, a third part of the Roman people. We were his people, even though he hadn’t been with us long, and even though he peed out car windows. He played the guitar so weirdly well that we were going to get a deal. An actual one. With a major.

  We sheltered from morning sun in a doughnut shop. I asked Mink for aspirin—cramps bad that day—and Mink said anyone who ate as much aspirin on her period as I did should see a doctor about it and Cam said, “Didn’t you know she was born with an abnormally large uvula?”

  We were always near each other’s bodies. Bed to bed, couch to floor, front seat to back, sleeping close. We learned each other’s sounds: Mink’s humming, my tooth grinding, Geck’s dream-moans, Cam’s chirrupy snores. Whenever one of us let fly, the smell went straight up the others’ noses. Cam’s voice went softer when he talked to me Throw me that ashtray and brisker when to Geck This pedal is crap, why’d you buy it? (Uncle Seven once said, out of the boys’ earshot: Your outfit’s got itself a bit of an alpha male problem, doesn’t it?) I knew how to dress their coffees—Mink black, Cam light, Geck light and sweet—and laughed at myself at the counter of a dirt-child café in Cleveland for being so moved by this knowledge. What is the big fucking deal, I told myself, giving our orders to a knife-collared boy; and yet knowing how they liked their coffees was a way of being family. It was like family how Cam and Geck, from the beginning, bickered worse than brothers and how Cam and I, by the end, weren’t speaking at all.

  “WHY ARE YOU whispering?” I asked the night phone.

  “Because he’s here… sitting like four feet away…”

  “I can’t really hear you.”

  “…!”

  “Mink, I cannot hear a fucking word you are saying.”

  “I’m at work,” she hissed. “I think you-know-who is using again.”

  “More than drinking?”

  “It’s—”

  “What?”

/>   “It’s that—”

  “Come again?”

  “That skull look!” she sputtered. “He has it.”

  “Okay, drama.”

  “I’m not being dramatic.”

  “Are his eyes pinned?”

  “I can’t tell,” Mink said. “He won’t look at me. He’s going to kill himself one of these days.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Maybe so? Don’t you give a fuck?”

  “I give a small fuck only,” I told her. “I mean, it’s on him, right? He’s a forty-year-old man.”

  “But he’s our friend,” Mink said.

  “Then drive him back to treatment yourself,” I said.

  IN THE BLACK muffle of a motel room, a freakery reached its claw to my throat. Sent by my sister, the claw was moist; it wore her sweat. Like a washcloth. Its orders were to kill me, because she wanted me brung down to her where we could play. Cadmus, what will become of me? Now pull off my sheet. (But you’re naked.) Pull it off. (But then I’ll see your—) Pull it! (I see your—) You spent years looking, never found.

  In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some children resembling elves lived in a falling-down castle of a house, all turrets and rickety stairs. There were so many extra rooms that some sat empty, their walls rucked with old paint. The elves’ elfin band was opening for us that night, just as they had when we’d come through town two years before. That first time, Cam had the flu and Mink had only recently joined us so was still fucking up her parts, but the elves loved us anyway and insisted we stay over. In the morning their singer brought a mug of sugared coffee to each of us, asleep in far-flung parts of the castle. He said sorry for waking us but added, You guys have such a long drive today I didn’t want you to be late! and so we loved the elves back, and were happy to see them again, now, in the castle whose slate roof groaned with beer-scented snow.

  It was the same body—a little hairier and harder-skinned, but still Cam. We were at the top of the castle, the attic room. He’d known where to look. Hi, I said. Hi, he said. Bare-shouldered in the sleeping bag we seemed younger, like our old selves who had kissed in the basement of Observatory Place. With the tip of his nose he grazed the tip of mine.

  He was in me again.

  He was too soon. “Fuck, sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered.

  He reached across my stomach for the lighter on the floor.

  The air on our faces was cold. Somewhere below, Geck was shout-singing a nursery rhyme. The beer factories clanked and hummed. Cam licked the face of the sailor. Bit very gently the tail of the serpent as it bled into the doll’s mouth. Snagged his tongue on the scars under the paint. I dragged my big toe up his calf, and could not wait to do it again.

  ALL IS NERVOUS with him now I catch him looking at breakfast and look is like from high school—and did I even want to? yes but no but yes but why did I want to is the worry: is it horniness or is it really wanting to? because he hasn’t been up there in quite a few years. He looks at me like telepathy but I’m not getting it, what message C? is it I want to again! or Let’s forget it ever happened! Oh C why now—but, OK, I was there too—reminded me of ancientry hiding in the basement under my family listening to creaks and coughs getting ready for bed, we’d be so quiet fucking without noise since floor was thin and pipes were echoey. What the fuck I feel half-happy. Do you?

  NEXT TO HIM in the backseat on our way out of Milwaukee, I couldn’t stop smiling. Our thighs pressed in secret. The air was yeasty. The whole freeway as it curved past the factories smelled sour, and I loved the smell because it meant Milwaukee, which meant Cam’s body reopened to me, pushing itself back into the space it had made when we were sixteen. He packed a new pack on his palm and yelled at Geck for going too slow in the left lane and I stared at his cheek, red from the razor, and at his grimy neck, wondering when I could kiss them next.

  BUT WHAT IS supposed to happen now? If I break up with G he might leave us and where will we be? High chance of non-success without him. The Offer will get revoked. Watch me and C stop sleeping together like the week after we get home but G’s already quit and we are cricked and Offerless.

  THERE WAS TIME for one game before heading to my interview at the Christian-owned bookstore chain. This one was an old favorite. Controls cool in my fingers, I hunkered down. Plank over moat: you entered the castle. Somewhere, deep within, behind oak panels, through slimy passages, past trick-locked doors and manticores, he waited. His mouth was ready, wet and rosy, hiding a skillful tongue. He heard your boots floors above, knew you were coming, started to rub himself—and with his every sucked whine, you hurried faster to crack the locks, slide the bookcases, kill the little house dragon with a flung ax. When you found him, he would bend to your wrist, licking, licking, catching the rubber band on his teeth.

  The man in the space helmet stood at the bus stop. Without looking at his face I dropped a bill into his can, and with this gesture warded off my embarrassment that the man slept on boxes while I did not—my throat filling, at the deposit of a hundred cents, with all the remorse to be found in pity, and I ordered my eyes to look back at him where he leaned against moss-veined brick, humming, counting coins.

  The bus aisle was blocked by someone with a huge camera on his shoulder and another guy wielding a white umbrella. The news team? But if something TV-WORTHY had transpired, the bus would not be traveling its normal route. I strained to see what they were shooting. The bus driver, at my elbow, made a sound between throat-clear and horse-whinny and said: “Everybody gotta be a celebrity.”

  “Is that a celebrity?” I couldn’t make out anything beyond the huge sweatpanted buttocks of the cameraman.

  The driver shrugged. “I personally never saw him before.”

  When we rounded a corner sharp enough to throw the cameraman to one side, I finally glimpsed their subject: Jupiter, fly-eyed, wearing a suit made from what appeared to be tinfoil. His recently gauntened body lay in model pose across two plastic seats, and his hair, greased into an arrowhead, was flashing hectically in the umbrella light.

  I turned back toward the bus driver, ready to disembark at the next stop.

  “Quinn?”

  Fuck.

  “Hold on a second, boys,” he said.

  “We can take five,” said the cameraman.

  “Quinn, what’s up!” shouted Jupiter. “Get over here.”

  “Hello!” I said gaily, squeezing past the other passengers. “Didn’t realize that was you.”

  “Yeah, I know, kind of a demented place for a photo shoot, but they wanted to do a series where I’m in my old haunts. Like, this is the bus he took to get to work—this is the bar he used to drink at—”

  “Because he, I guess, no longer takes the bus.”

  Jupiter smiled and I noticed some lipstick on his teeth, which I did not alert him to. “So how are you?” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  “Well, I’m—”

  “You ever run into Geck? You know, he opened for us kind of recently. What a fucking disaster. I don’t know what Lad is still doing behind a drum set—he’s got such bad carpal tunnel he can barely swat a mosquito—and Geck, man, I mean, come on, seriously?”

  A beehived girl heaved in to dab Jupiter’s face with a powder puff. As she withdrew, her shellacked hair hit me in the chin.

  “I’ve never seen them play,” I said.

  “I just feel sorry for the guy. Somebody should tell him that his wares are way past their sell-by date.”

  “Ready, Jupe?” said the cameraman.

  “Yee-ah,” he said.

  “Have a good, um, shoot,” I said.

  “For sure. And next time we play in town—” He straightened his foil collar. “I’ll totally put you on the list.”

  Cam had hated him too.

  After an unpromising interview with a woman wearing a lapel button that said “Spread the Good Word,” I hurried back to Riley’s to type out the message I’d been composing in my head: Hi again. Want to go to the din
er sometime for old time’s sake? If you have time. If not, no problem of course.

  In Madison, Wisconsin, I pictured Geck finding out. Throwing a tantrum. You fucking said he was only a friend! Twisting yellow hair in his fist. Well, you lovebirds have fun without me. The scout on the phone: If your guitar player is no longer on board, we might have a problem . . .

  IN ST. PAUL, Minnesota, Cam said: “But I love you again.”

  My cheek twitched.

  He nodded. We sat in the screeching sun of 10:00 AM

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well,” I agreed.

  He got to his feet and pulled on his jacket and touched the pockets.

  “Here,” I whispered, throwing him my own pack.

  Lacustrina never cried, nor did she bleed. Her skin was made of water and her necklaces of weed. She loved to swim but preferred to read. A boy ached to kiss her, in his hot heart’s shell, but Lacustrina said no thank you and politely fared him well.

  In the middle of nothing, under a cold-colored sky, we were headed for some little country town where a college was, a festival, a winter-wonderland deal with a bunch of bands and it paid well. It wasn’t late but the sun was already setting, and we were hungry but not enough to stop. We had gummy bears and a loaf of bread on the van floor, rock with cold. We hadn’t seen another car for more than an hour. All the Vikings, Geck said, must’ve gone back to Switzerland.