Beneath the Stain - Part 5 (9 page)

He removed his hand from Cheever’s neck and glared until Cheever looked away. “Are we clear, Cheever Sanders?”

“Yessir,” Cheever mumbled.

It didn’t feel like enough. The thought of Mackey, ragged from drugs and grief, killing himself to support his family, rose like bile in Trav’s throat. “Did Mackey ever do anything for you?”

“Used to take me to the library and the park when he watched me,” Cheever said promptly. And then he
really
looked like he wanted to cry.

“Yeah, dumbass, it’s the same guy. You ratted that same guy out to the press, and you just walked into his house and tried to destroy the happiest I’ve seen him in months. Don’t talk to me. You started off on the wrong foot and I don’t have another one to spare for you. But if you talk to your brother, you’d better fucking respect him, do you hear me?”

Cheever’s lower lip wobbled. “Yessir. The guys at school say—”

“Did you hear me say I don’t care? Tell one of your brothers—but until you show me you can be kind to the one I love most, don’t fucking tell me.”

It was sixty-five degrees outside, and Trav was getting chilly in his underwear. He walked into the house and slammed the door in Cheever’s face.

Cheever came back inside eventually—after having himself a good poor-is-me cry. When the brothers took him to Disneyland and Six Flags and Legoland and the San Diego Zoo, he mellowed out and rode the roller coasters with Mackey and ate junk food until he threw up in the bushes. (Trav hadn’t seen the appeal of that, even when he
was
thirteen, but the kids from Tyson seemed to think it was high fucking comedy. God. Kids. Trav was pretty sure he and Mackey weren’t the adopting kind, and he was so damned grateful his mother would be ashamed.)

Mackey and his mother never asked Trav what he said to Cheever, but the night before Heather and Cheever were set to drive home, Mackey gave Trav a watery smile and an especially amazing blowjob. Trav figured that dealing with Cheever was as close to being a good father as he’d ever come, and that Mackey was grateful and happy for what he could manage.

He could live with that.

And, of course, after Christmas, he had to live with the chaos of getting ready to go on the road. The band started putting in twelve-hour days working on the light show, the choreography, the sound mixing. Trav watched Mackey and Blake carefully—if there was ever a time they’d want to use stimulants, this was it.

But they went tirelessly, it seemed, fueled by high-protein vitamin-B-supplemented milkshakes and Chicken in a Biskit crackers, and Trav stopped searching the boys for red eyes, red noses, and dilated pupils. He gave himself permission to relax and figured that he knew them well enough by now—at ease or under pressure—to know when the bad shit came out.

Mackey and Briony were apparently an insta-love couple, and Trav could only be grateful. On Mackey’s restless days, when the band was practiced out and Trav was busy trying not to fuck up like he had in Oakland, Mackey would grab Briony by the back of the collar and haul her to the movies or a concert or a celebrity appearance or even to a miniature golf course, and they would snark at each other and laugh at stupid kid jokes that left Trav feeling helplessly old.

At first Trav thought he’d be jealous, but one afternoon he came down from his office to refill his water bottle and heard them talking. They were sitting on the couch in the living room, playing
Halo
, their chatter punctuated by comments on the game.

“He still working?” Briony asked, like Mackey would know who “he” was.

“Yeah. Doesn’t want Oakland to happen again—
die, motherfucker, die!
”

“Yanno, until I worked with Artie, I—get him, Mackey! Jesus, you’re slow. Reboot. I’m killing this round. The game’s no fun.”

“Until you worked with Artie what? Okay, are we the same guys again? My character sucked ass.”

“You have to build him up. You don’t build him up, he’s going to fail. I tell you that all the time, and you just—”

“Do we have a point? Here—reboot. Are you happy?”

“Yes. I’m happy. And see, when I started hauling equipment, it was for this little midlevel band right out of San Diego. My friend Janelle needed help, and she was the only girl, and she was tired of guys grabbing her tits—”

“Gross—”

“Sayin’. But anyway, they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. It was like, they couldn’t figure out why their shit wasn’t working, and I stepped up and said, ‘Guys, meet extension cord, extension cord, meet outlet. See? They fit together and have electric sex!’”

“Sweet!” Mackey crowed. “Run, dammit, stop talking and make him run, you’re gonna—how’d you do that?”

“Built up my character. Told you. Anyway, so I figured that
nobody
knew what the fuck they were doing. And then we started doing festivals and I realized that
everybody
had a better setup than we did, and that’s where I was when you met me. I’m just saying—your setup was still better and more organized than most of ’em I’ve seen. I’ve seen some
great
bands look like shit because of crappy equip—
fuck yeah! Woot!
Your turn, Mackey. Kill the fucker.”

“And I’m dead.” Trav heard the sound of the remote hitting the couch. “Here, I need to get up anyway. Let’s listen to that riff from ‘Tattoo’ again—I think we can do something really cool with strobe lights and shit, you think?”

“Yeah, definitely. Music room?”

“Yeah.”

They got up and wandered away, but Trav had to smile. It wasn’t like Mackey had found a soul mate in the wrong body. He’d found a
sister
—and that made all the difference.

Trav’s resentment faded and he filled up his water bottle. He figured his fierce albeit small circle of protection had just extended to Briony. (Who hated shopping and disdained all girl things but seemed to adore Shelia. Trav loved Briony, but he had a hard time figuring her out when she wasn’t talking to Mackey. She was just one more dynamic presence in a house already bursting with them, truthfully, and he was glad Blake and Kell hadn’t brought any more women into the mix.)

By the time they all packed up their shit and hopped a jet plane for Europe, Trav was on solid ground again. Mackey had a person to talk to so Trav could do his job, and Trav had a good enough feel for the whole gang of them that, with Debra and Walter onboard to round out the entourage and hired security on site, he trusted. He trusted Mackey would stay sober or warn him if things went wrong, he trusted the band would get along and keep making music, and he trusted that the girls wouldn’t rock the boat and make bad shit happen.

And for the most part, his trust was well placed.

In Dublin, when the crowd got too unruly in a soccer stadium, the trust they’d built helped them grab Briony from the ground and run for the exits, where they hid in the dark until the mob cleared. In Amsterdam, when Mackey and Blake got separated from the main group on a bicycle tour, it helped him not make them pee in a cup when they got back. In spite of his own experience that the red-light district was really a very mild, lovely place in the daytime, the rumors of decadence alone made him leery. Apparently Blake thought so too, because he called his sponsor when they got back to the hotel, which made Trav proud of him and just that much more secure.

In Germany, when Blake missed a light cue and fucked up an entire song on stage, Trav trusted that Mackey would get over it, see that
all
the guys were done in, and call a break for the week they had between stops.

When Mackey did exactly that—and with more grace than Trav expected—Trav trusted the band to find their own diversions while he took Mackey to Greece for a three-day stay in an island hotel, the kind with the private swimming pool and the room that overlooked the ocean and the sitting room that was partly a spa and that opened up to the amazing view.

He and Mackey made love all night long and saw the sunrise sitting in that spa, Mackey leaning into Trav’s arms. The moment was so perfectly at peace with the world that for the first time in his life ever, Trav knew what it was to tear up from happiness and nothing else.

Trav learned to trust that Mackey was whole and well, and whatever was coming down the pike, they would be okay enough to face it together.

Sometimes the universe really could not bear for that sort of trust to exist without fucking with it.

T
HEY
HIT
America last and worked their way from New York to Chicago to Houston to the Pacific Northwest. They were in Seattle, in a little pub-slash-bar, when the call came.

The pub-slash-bar hadn’t been part of the stop, really, but they were taking a tour bus as they made their way from Seattle to Portland to Oakland and then LA. The bus broke down and they ended up staying in Seattle and canceling one of their dates in Portland, and, well, here they were. The place offered good barbecue and okay music, but the bartender was a fan of the band’s—and Mackey’s in particular, which made Trav growly until the guy cheerfully told them all he had a boyfriend. Mackey grinned and offered to sing for their supper, and the guy asked for an hour to call everybody he knew.

The crowd was
huge
. Briony ran the soundboard on her own, as she’d bee
n doing since Germany, and they put on an hour and a half of toned-down set that, to Trav’s ear, really showcased what they’d learned in the past six months of touring together when they actually liked each other. Mackey wrapped up with the song he’d written Trav in rehab, which he’d been working on during the tour, and Trav held that moment when Mackey looked out over the crowd and winked
at him close to his heart.

Early on, in England, Mackey had flirted hard with the crowd, coming on to men and women from a tiny stage that had been close enough for him to get groped almost constantly. When Mackey came off the stage, sweaty and aroused, Trav had hidden his exasperation really poorly.

But Mackey wasn’t stupid. “Look, Trav, I promise, I won’t make a fool of you. Whatever happens with us, I won’t do you like that in public, okay?”

And like their relationship, based on the hope that Mackey was working toward wellness every day, Trav had to take his word on it. So far Mackey hadn’t let him down.

So hearing his song—small, intimate like this, played solo by Mackey himself as a quiet closer—that meant something. Afterward, though, as the band all drank soda and Briony and her band of monkeys (as she called the roadies) helped put the equipment to rights, he had a moment of wondering when the shoe was going to drop—the shoe Mackey had been carrying since he’d run out of the airport, sure that he couldn’t go back home.

It was like the thought invited trouble.

Kell’s phone actually rang, and his sort of squinty eyes grew wide, like the news automatically had to be bad. (It cracked Trav up how much a phone call interfered with everybody’s sense of the universe. He figured they should call Mackey’s generation the Texting Generation, because actual personal contact was so alien to them all.) He nodded soberly to the band and excused himself outside, saying, “It’s Mom.”

He was out there for a long time.

When he came back, he blinked red eyes at everyone and spoke with the choked voice of someone who didn’t have a good grip on the world.

“Trav, we’re done with this next week, right? I mean, the whole tour, done next Saturday.”

Trav nodded. “There’s sort of a party planned at Heath’s office on Sunday, but yeah. We end up back at home. Why?”

Kell grimaced. “Can we skip the party? And….” He looked at Mackey unhappily. “And maybe all of us go back to Tyson for a few weeks? Mackey, I know you’re mad at him, but we got to get over that. Mom said there’s not much time to get over it, and—”

Without even looking at him, Mackey snuck his hand into Trav’s and squeezed.

Trav made himself ask the hard question, because Cheever had left on good terms, and this could only be about one person. “Kell, what’s wrong with Grant?”

Kell met Trav’s eyes like a man. “Mom says he’s dying, Trav. He’s bald and skinny, and his lips are chapped, and…. Mom asked him, and he said the doc said maybe two months. Probably less. She said he looked like he wanted it to be less.”

Trav heard Mackey’s little moan and closed his eyes.

“I’ll tell Heath to cancel the party,” Trav said calmly. “We can be on the plane to Sacramento two hours after the show.”

O
H
,
SURE
,
he
sounded
like he had it all together in the bar—or, rather, he didn’t say anything at all—but that night, in the
truly
shitty Hotel Seattle America, Mackey and Trav had the biggest screaming match of their relationship.

It started before they even closed the door.

“We’re
what
?” Mackey rounded on him furiously. “You didn’t even fucking ask me if I wanted to go, Trav. Last year I couldn’t even get on the fucking plane!”

“Well, it’s this year, Mackey—are you telling me nothing’s changed?”

Mackey glared at him, hauling at the hem of his sopping hooded sweatshirt. The rain had started after Briony had stashed the equipment, and the short walk back to the hotel had drenched them all.

“Of course shit’s changed,” he said when the shirt was in a puddle at his feet. “We’re like… we’ve been living like… like a couple. Every night together. It’s awesome. I ain’t—haven’t—felt this safe in my life. But you want to go put all of that at risk? Just because….” He trailed off and swallowed, glaring around the room and kicking the sweatshirt like
that
was what was stopping his throat from working around the big bad word.

Trav ground his teeth, feeling older than Mackey for the first time since Christmas, when he’d gotten the text from Jefferson. He almost hadn’t had time to grab his carry-on before running the hell off the damned plane. He’d never be able to fly American Airlines again.