Gone to the Wolves, page 8
Is he smiling in spite of, or because of, his injury?
The Anthrax group performs with great gusto, the drummer assaulting his kit with simulated violence, the guitar players and singer jumping, running, twisting, writhing in what appears to be discomfort. The crowd loves it all. The customary barrier between adolescents’ private profanity (with their friends) and their public restraint (with adults) has been thoroughly dispensed with. Vulgarity is made public and celebrated. You can easily see how the term “headbanger” originated: Many of those in attendance “bang” their heads up and down to the rhythm of the songs, hands raised in the “devil horn” salute. The drummer throws his sticks to the crowd, and the metalheads reach and scramble for them, the way medieval peasants might have fought to grasp a reputed fragment of the cross that Jesus bore.
* * *
“Well! That pretty much (expletive) sums it up,” Kip said when Kira had finished. They were headed north on I-75 to meet Leslie at the show in Sarasota. Kthulu’s speedometer flatlined at 58 mph, so that was officially how fast they were going. The light rain made the car seem warm and private. The blacktop shimmered in the headlights.
“What does mesomorphic mean?” she asked him.
It seemed like a word Kip should have known—the version of himself that Kira liked, at least, which was the version he was constantly trying to be. He did his best to think of something funny.
“Cool name for a band,” he got out finally.
“It probably means ignorant.” Kira frowned down at the pamphlet in her lap—Youth Subcultures: Heavy Metalists—then tossed it over her shoulder. “Like a caveman or something.”
“Where did that thing even come from?”
“My dad sent away for it. It’s a guide for cops, if you can believe it. He’s marked some of the bits with a highlighter. Beer-swilling. Headbanger.” She grinned at him. “Cattle disease.”
“The holy trinity.”
“He’s trying to understand my (expletive) alienation.”
“That seems more like a mom thing.”
Her expression changed subtly. “My mom doesn’t read.”
Kip wanted to ask what she meant—whether her mom didn’t like to read, or couldn’t read, or was actually prohibited from reading—but he couldn’t come up with any way of posing the question that wasn’t wildly offensive. He decided to keep his mouth shut for a change.
“Anthrax isn’t even death metal,” he said finally. “Anthrax is thrash.”
“No shit.”
He looked at her. “Hey, Kira.” He turned down the volume on Kthulu’s battered stereo. “Listen.”
“I’m trying to.”
He hesitated. “I’m not going to get in your business.”
“Much appreciated.”
“Right. But if you ever wanted to talk about—you know, whatever’s going on at your house—”
She stared at him as if he’d started talking backward.
“For fuck’s sake, Kira. You know what I’m trying to say. If your dad or whoever—”
“Ever close your eyes when you’re driving?” Kira sat forward and put her left hand lightly over his. “On purpose, I mean. Just to find out how long you can stand it?”
He gripped the wheel harder. “Literally not once ever.”
“That’s what I admire about you, Norvald.” She sat back with a sigh. “You’re basically the opposite of me.”
As so often with Kira—and with Leslie too, come to think of it—Kip didn’t know whether to feel affirmed or devastated. It was raining harder now and he could barely see the road.
“I didn’t even know you had a driver’s license,” he mumbled.
“They don’t issue licenses for driving with your eyes shut. That’s kind of the point.” Her own eyes were closed and she looked peaceful in the green glow of the dash. Kip had that feeling he sometimes got around Kira—that she’d forgotten he was with her—but tonight he didn’t mind. It meant she trusted him completely. Nothing anyone could do or say could change the fact that she was in his car.
“It’s better at night,” she said under her breath.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going. But the road should be straight.” She nodded to herself. “Gravel shoulders, so that you can hear the wheels. In case you start to drift.”
“What about other cars?”
Kira didn’t answer. She seemed almost asleep. He might have been asleep himself for all the attention he was paying to the road. The sudden crunch of gravel jolted him out of his trance, exactly the way she’d described. He hauled Kthulu back onto the highway.
“How high did you count?” she said, opening her eyes.
“I didn’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have a boner for head-on collisions.”
She grinned. “The highest I ever got was twenty-four.”
“Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”
She shrugged.
“What car were you supposedly driving? Your dad’s?”
“Greenwood let me drive his cruiser.”
He looked at her. “I never know when you’re fucking with me and when you’re telling me the truth.”
The grin left her face. “That’s because you don’t know me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Telling the truth is the one thing I care about. Seeing things like they are. Not pretending they’re better.” She stared out at the blacktop. “That’s what metal is for. It’s a flamethrower, Norvald. It burns all the bullshit away.”
“That’s how you use it, maybe.”
“That’s what it is.”
“Come on, Kira. A lot of it is fantasy. Horror movies. Black magic. Look at someone like Leslie.”
“I was enjoying not talking about Leslie for once.”
They drove in silence for a while.
“He warned me about you,” Kip found himself saying. “That night at the Grids. He told me you had a death wish.”
“Sweet of him.”
“He said you’d take me places that I didn’t—”
“Pull over.”
“Huh?”
Her voice went shrill. “Pull over, god damn it. Right now!”
Against his better instincts he stepped on the brake. Kira was capable of walking all the way to Tampa in the rain.
“Right here,” she said, more gently now. “Watch out for the fence.”
They lurched to a halt in the mud of the shoulder. Kthulu’s headlights strafed the guardrail and a sloping field of grass. Just past the hood a concrete marker read MILE 25. In the flickering dark beyond it stood what might have been a cow.
“Have you got a flashlight?”
It took him a few seconds to answer. “I think Oona keeps one in the glove compartment.”
“Good old Oona. Plastic bag?”
“Plastic bag,” he repeated.
“No? Doesn’t matter. We can use our jackets.”
“For the rain? I think there’s probably a windbreaker—”
“Grab it.” She opened her door and disappeared into the mist.
“Where are we going?” he called after her.
“We’re not going anywhere, stupid. We’re already here.”
She was on the far side of a livestock fence already, the flashlight bobbing and weaving like a firefly. Kip found the spot where she’d wriggled under and did his best to follow suit, tearing the hood of Oona’s cherished L.L.Bean windbreaker on a snarl of rusted wire. By the time he’d reached the spot where Kira was crouching, waiting for him with obvious impatience, he’d stepped in seven cowflaps and his sneakers felt like cannonballs. Kira looked even wetter than he was.
“Hold this,” she said, passing him the light. “I can’t do two things at once.”
“I don’t know where to point it.”
“City slicker.” She caught him by the sleeve and pulled him toward her. “At the ground.”
Kira always had reasons for the things she did, and—unlike Leslie—they were reasons Kip could usually, with a certain amount of effort, comprehend. This time was no different.
“Holy shit.”
“Give me some more light, would you? I’m trying to get this knife open.”
Sprouting in discrete bunches out of the manure, somehow both feminine and phallic, a dozen thumb-sized toadstools steamed and glistened in the light. Kip would learn their scientific name later—from Leslie, of course—but he understood what he was seeing right away. He’d been around enough would-be psychonauts by then, in Oklahoma and Florida and points in between, to know that magic mushrooms grew in pastures; he’d even tripped once, or close enough, with a sad-eyed stoner in a park in Pensacola. But the papery debris he’d dutifully chewed that day was worlds removed from the iridescent glory at his feet.
“Should we eat them now?”
“We’ll let them dry for a few days. They taste nasty when they’re fresh.” She smiled up at him. “I just wanted to show you this place.”
He muttered something appropriately mush-mouthed and did his best to keep the flashlight steady. Rain was running down Kira’s hair into the grass. As he watched her extracting the mushrooms, with obvious skill, from the reeking black muck, the book of Russian fairy tales crept back into Kip’s mind: Baba Yaga at midnight, dank hair covering her face, gathering newts and toadstools for her witch’s brew. He felt better in that moment, mud-spattered and shivering though he was, than he would ever have believed someone could safely feel. The witch had been hideous, of course, as witches always are in children’s books. But the trees and stars and firelight had often formed the backdrop to his dreams.
* * *
The rain stopped as they hit Sarasota. Leslie was waiting for them outside the Stardust Lanes & Roller Rink, smoking a cigarette that looked too small for him and talking to a dough-faced kid who claimed to be some sort of roadie. Kip got a suspicious vibe right from the start—he asked the kid which band he roadied for, specifically, and didn’t get an answer. Leslie told him not to be a buzzkill. Obviously the kid had something Leslie wanted: drugs, maybe, or information. It made no difference to Kip. He was perfectly content to sit down on the curb and wait there for his soggy clothes to dry. Kira had gone off to buy Marlboro Reds. He rested his forehead on his knees and imagined the conversation going on behind him as an old-time radio play.
ROADIE: Deicide’s brutal. The sickest. I’m telling you, brother—they’ll sandblast your brain.
LESLIE: That’s the intel I’m getting.
ROADIE: You remember their old shows? Back when they were called Amon? The new shit is sicker.
LESLIE: Sicker how, exactly?
ROADIE: I can’t tell you that. They made me sign a waiver.
LESLIE: A what?
ROADIE: (silence)
LESLIE: All right. I get it. What else can you give me?
ROADIE: Just, you know, rumors. Man-on-the-street type of stuff.
LESLIE: Such as?
ROADIE: (pause) Xecutioner’s called Obituary now.
LESLIE: My mother knows that. And she’s seventy-three.
ROADIE: (longer pause) You know Glen Benton, right?
LESLIE: What about him?
ROADIE: He’s getting plastic surgery to look like a goat.
The next time Kip raised his head Leslie was off somewhere, making his ceremonial rounds, and the sidewalk behind him was packed to the curb. He scanned the crowd sleepily—it was more heterogenous than usual, more like any other rock show. He saw glammers and skaters and burnouts and jocks. Girls in camouflage tank tops. The occasional parent. The scene was expanding.
Kira had come back with her smokes and was playing a game with the roadie, who didn’t seem—as far as Kip could tell—to have a single other friend. They were trying to come up with the most horrible name of an existing metal band. Kip closed his eyes again and waited for the kid to go away.
“Krank.”
“Horslips.”
“Abominog.”
“Chinchilla.”
“Helloween.”
“Chemikill.”
“Volitile Zylog.”
“Sad Iron.”
“Inkubus Sukkubus.”
“Détente.”
“Faster Pussycat.”
“Wadge.”
“Secretion.”
“San Antonio Slayer.”
“Sapphic Ode.”
“Onanism.”
“Rites of the Degringolade.”
“W.A.S.P.”
“Recalcitrance.”
“Diktht.”
“Sieg Heil.”
“Arsetronaut.”
“Lucifer’s Friend.”
“Sarcasm.”
That appeared to clinch the duel in Kira’s favor. The roadie called her bluff, a little peevishly, and she informed him that Sarcasm were a four-piece from Kranj, Slovenia, who’d opened for Anal Cunt on their Suffer Fools tour the previous summer. The roadie seemed personally offended by the depth of Kira’s knowledge. Kip allowed himself to hope the kid might slink off somewhere to sulk, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He was hopelessly in love.
Kip decided to take a walk around the block.
The crowd had thinned out by the time he got back, which meant the venue doors had opened. Leslie and Kira and the little roadie were conferring in whispers. The muscles of Kip’s jaw were starting to cramp. Grow up, asshole, he ordered himself. You can’t go to a show and expect all the douchebags to leave you alone. Not if you’re hanging out with Kira Carson.
“Norvald! There you are, you creeper. Time to mobilize.”
Leslie’s voice always went up an octave when he was trying to hide his excitement. Kira and the roadie were already in motion, giggling and cooing, away from the crowd and the Stardust’s marquee. She had her arm curled through his now, Kip noticed, as if she needed his protection. It made him want to lie down in the middle of the street.
The roadie took them around the side of the rink to a half-closed metal shutter labeled LOAD IN / EXIT SERVICE. He pushed up the shutter and ushered them inside as if he owned the place. Kip hated him by then, but he couldn’t blame Leslie for kissing his ass. He couldn’t even blame Kira. This kid was for real.
He’d expected it to be dark inside, the way backstage areas always are in movies, but the corridor they stepped into was clean and starkly lit. They passed a door marked UTILITY, a door marked ELECTRIC, and another, smaller door marked VIP. Leslie let out a cackle. None of them had ever been VIP to anything in their lives.
“What’s behind that door?” Kip couldn’t help asking.
The kid checked his watch—which, Kip noted with a mixture of envy and disgust, was an honest-to-god pocket watch, complete with fob. “Behind that door, brother, is Cannibal Corpse.”
Kira sucked in a breath. Cannibal Corpse had put out their first demo just a few months before, but they were already being talked about in the tape-trading demimonde as the Next Sick Thing. Kip had had no idea they were even on tour, let alone on tour with Deicide. Leslie looked back at him over the kid’s head—just a casual glance, but Kip got the message. They were backstage, for free, at the show of the summer.
“We hear good things about the Corpse,” Leslie squeaked. He sounded as if he’d been sucking on a helium balloon.
“The Corpse is the sickest. They’ll sandblast your brain.”
“You said the same thing about Deicide,” said Kira, licking her pinkie and sticking it in the kid’s ear. He let out a delighted little chirp.
“No way. Did I really?”
“Fifteen minutes ago,” said Kip. “Literally those exact words.”
The kid laughed. “Doesn’t make it not true.”
“Technically it does, though,” said Kira. “They can’t both be the sickest.”
“Keep your finger in my ear,” the kid told her. “I like it.”
They climbed a low flight of concrete steps to another corridor, turned left, turned right, went down a second flight of steps, down yet another corridor, then past the door marked VIP again. It was a different door, the kid assured them, and this time Deicide were behind it—but by then Kip was starting to doubt him again. He’d done nothing to prove that he was in any way affiliated with the bands or the venue, after all, other than raising a shutter.
Leslie was entertaining a similar notion—Kip could see it on his face—but by that point it didn’t much matter. Someone close by was running a check of their gear, stomping in a businesslike way through a series of distortion settings, and even that by-the-numbers soundcheck was crushingly heavy. They hadn’t been busted for trespassing yet, or even asked who they were, which was probably the most important thing. But it also seemed significant, the more Kip thought about it, that the roadie and Kira were now holding hands.
“Where’s the stage from here?” Kira asked, in a whisper that Kip could hear perfectly. “Are we close now? It sounds like we’re close.”
“Close enough,” said the kid. “That’s Maurice, in case you’re wondering. Guitar tech for the Corpse. His last name’s Baalzebub.”
Leslie squinted at him. “Beelzebub, you mean?”
“Baalzebub, actually. With two As.”
“Hold up a second. We’ve been wandering these halls for the past half an hour. We must have circled the whole rink by now.”
“I don’t see the hurry,” the kid said, making goo-goo eyes at Kira.
“What kind of guitar does Suzuki play?”
“Say huh?”
“Jack ‘Bloodfingers’ Suzuki. Lead and occasional rhythm guitarist for the Good Time Family Cannibalistic Corpse Revue.”
“Your friend’s sort of weird,” the kid murmured to Kira.
“Answer the goddamn question.”
“Some kind of Gibson,” the kid said, avoiding his stare.
“I didn’t quite hear that.”
“A Gibson, I said. A vintage SG.”
“Would that be the SG Special, with the P90 pickups? Or the Standard, maybe, with the buckers?”
