Five Years Ago: Part 1 5 page

“Monty is being antisocial,” she says airily and tosses a glance of disdain toward the brothel, which looks more woeful and neglected than it did the last time I saw it. Spence must have thought restoring the brothel was of little practical value. Tucked behind the fading building is the cozy former caretaker’s quarters where my brothers used to sleep.

“He’s in there?” I ask.

“Yup.”

“Is he alone?”

“I guess. See that semi-hot cameraman checking out the stable? He and Montgomery haven’t really hit it off. Elton, that’s the camera guy’s name, got a little too close early this morning when Monty was bidding farewell to yesterday night’s entertainment.”

The incident doesn’t sound unlike Monty but I’m still a little startled. “He brought a woman out here with him?”

“No. He drove to Consequences last night and somewhere along the way found some sorry little piece of low self-esteem to keep him company for a few hours. You know Monty, he’s not above using the Savage name to get something he wants. For all I know he promised her a starring role.” Bree makes a sweeping gesture. “Anyway, he pushed her into a cab this morning and she was kind of upset about it. Monty and his notorious impatience were already on edge and poor Elton trying to do his job didn’t improve matters.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It wasn’t. Luckily Elton knows when to stay quiet or he might have gotten his head clubbed.”

A groan escapes me as all the misgivings I’ve nursed about this project bubble to the surface. Montgomery and his defiant volatility. No matter what the reward is, how the hell is he going to make it through several months of being observed and recorded like an Animal Planet subject? How will any of us make it?

Careful. They are listening. They are watching.

I am acutely aware of the tiny microphone taped to my skin just above my left breast. It feels foreign, unwelcome. I have the urge to rip it off no matter who is watching.

Brigitte is still complaining about Monty. “He wouldn’t even consider living in the big house even though that building over there is a wreck. They had to bring in two generators just to pump electricity in because all the wiring is shot to hell.”

Ava isn’t saying a word. The look on her face is one I recognize. It’s the worried uncertainty that has been her companion her entire life. That’s partly Lita’s fault; Ava had too tender a nature to be the captivating sex kitten our mother envisioned as her destiny.

I give my sister a small nod of reassurance and her face relaxes.

“Rocks!” squawks Alden as he holds a saliva-glazed object aloft.” “Rocks!”

Indeed, it’s another rock. Plus, while he was drooling all over everything, my nephew managed to acquire a moustache of Arizona soil.

“Oh, honey, no. Icky yuck.” Ava bends over and wipes the desert dust from her son’s face.

As I kneel down and remove the rock from his chubby grip he beams at me. I turn the rock over in my palm. “This looks tasty. Mind if I keep it for myself?”

Alden laughs and allows his mother to gather him onto her hip. He’s a sweet child. He takes after his mother.

“Where are you going?” Brigitte calls after me because I’ve walked away without a word.

“Just saying hello to my big brother.”

I don’t know if the girls can hear me or not because a wide dust devil has descended in a whirling funnel of sand.

Mini tornadoes.

That was how I used to think of them until someone told me otherwise. He always knew what he was talking about when it came to things like that. Dust devils. Rocks. Caves. I can hear the gruff timbre of his voice. I can remember how his words would be curiously offset now and again by an unidentifiable accent, a product of his nomadic lifestyle. I don’t believe he was ever aware of it.

I’m still holding Alden’s rock and when I squeeze it the sharp ridges cut painfully into my palm.

Our family should have been able to find another way to survive. People have managed far more with far less.

I drop the rock somewhere as I walk. I have no use for it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

OZ

I remember hearing once that in the United States there is more land where there is nobody than land where there is somebody. As I travel across the flat plains of the nation’s heart, I can believe this is true.

As I inch toward the western edge of Oklahoma, the last of the summer dusk is settling into night. I’ve been this way before, on this very section of the Interstate, traveling in the opposite direction, east instead of west.

Over the last five years I’ve managed to touch most of the major asphalt tongues stretching across the continental U.S. I haven’t left the country since the day I touched down in New York beside Mina Savage. Strange, considering I spent such a large swath of my life overseas. Or maybe not strange. Maybe I’ve just been thirsty to know the country I was away from for so long. I can’t explain it. Maybe on some level it was even because of Ren.

I could keep driving for another six easy hours but suddenly I don’t want to. Roadside signs promise food, gas, lodging in the town of Sayre so I pull off on the next exit. The surrounding land is flat, with scarcely a ripple. No mountains, no shores, no forest, no subterranean palaces. This is the kind of land that holds no surprises. What you see is all there is, miles and miles of it. The simplicity appeals to me. Right now, anyway.

As I’m gassing up the truck, I catch a strong whiff of barbecue and my stomach lurches in response. There’s a free standing restaurant about twenty yards off and it looks like it’s seen better days; the harsh prairie winds have licked the red paint off in places and the sign ‘Aggie’s BBQ’ is slightly askew above the narrow entrance, like it might land on someone’s head one of these days.

A pair of thirty-something women stand in the parking lot sucking on cigarettes and murmuring to one other as they watch my truck swing into a spot only a few feet away from where they stand. I feel their eyes searching me as I head for the door and I point my head down because a conversation isn’t really part of my plans right now.

The restaurant is dark and appropriately smoky for a barbecue joint. I order a rack of ribs with a soda and devour it quickly in a small booth with seats lined in orange vinyl that might have been cool forty years ago.

The shuffling, wheezing fellow who took my order yells something indistinct back to the kitchen and then begins grimly running a greasy rag over an empty table in wide circles. The air conditioning is either non-existent or broken; the heat borders on oppressive.

All in all, Aggie’s BBQ has the feel of a lost part of the universe where time isn’t relevant.

I chew my food as Johnny Cash croons mournfully from somewhere unseen, recognizing Folsom Prison Blues only because August Savage had a penchant for vintage country music. Every time I walked into the big house at Atlantis an antique record player would be belting out music from a corner of the living room. Somehow it was always on, even if there was no one in sight.

All of a sudden I feel a ripple down my spine and a wild gust of wind rocks the building enough to make the walls creak.

The old man wiping the counter pauses long enough to squint out the dirty window. “Nothin’,” he scoffs, “not a storm.”

I don’t know if he’s talking to me or not so I tear off another mouthful of tender rib meat and stay quiet. This area has got to be prime real estate for tornadoes so I would bet the locals are used to looking skyward every time a few clouds decide to hang out together. I’ve seen one of the telltale funnels myself once, tagging along with storm chasers a few years back at the Kansas/Missouri border. The clouds gather and link arms before they animate and whip up a nightmare to send to the ground. It’s horrifying and fascinating, nothing like the harmless compact whirlwinds of dust that dance across the desert.

“No, not a mini tornado. Dust devil. Read about them in one of your father’s books.”

“Doesn’t look devilish to me, Oscar. Looks happy. Playful.”

Funny how scraps of conversation can revisit out of nowhere, things you might not even realize your mind knows until something else triggers the dormant memory.

Just like that I’m no longer in a stifling barbecue joint somewhere on the Oklahoma prairie. Instead I’m standing beneath a scalding desert sun and beside an incomparable girl, a girl I was never supposed to have and swore I wouldn’t take but did anyway. I don’t even need to close my eyes to remember how she shaded her face with her palm and squinted at the frisky dust tunnel in the foreground of the Harquehala Mountains.

Playful, she’d called it, and then her sweet, full mouth tilted up as she glanced at me sideways. I hadn’t kissed her yet and I didn’t kiss her then. But in that glance she told me she understood what I’d already accepted.

It was only a matter of time.

I would kiss her. I would push all barriers aside and I would get inside of her every which way. We would say fuck the consequences together and then suffer the mortal wounds of our own stupidity when we learned that reality is far messier.

In reality, consequences fuck you.

“Hey, buddy.” The shapeless, rasping old man who took my order is looming over me with a grimace. He puts a hand to his back and I realize the sour look isn’t for me. He’s a man who spends his days walking through pain and the fact has permanently wrenched his face into a scowl.

“You forgot your drink,” he grumbles and sets a plastic-lidded cup next to my plate before he trundles off with a dirty dishtowel slung over a drooping shoulder.

After hastily finishing my meal, I toss the trash and nod a farewell to the proprietor. I don’t imagine Sayre is a real hotbed of tourist activity, particularly not at the onset of summer, so there are probably limited lodging options.

I could sleep in my truck, of course. I’d done it many times. But tonight I don’t feel like risking any attention from local busybodies.

It doesn’t take long to find a place with a flashing vacancy sign. It’s called The Oklahoman and its mid century paint peels from its face but it looks non-threatening enough. There is a malarial-looking woman behind the pressed wood desk in the lobby. She frowns when I tell her I don’t have a credit card but cheers right up again when ten twenty dollar bills land in front of her nose. She touches the money with a ragged fingernail, glances around and then tosses me a card key.

“Room Eighteen. It’s right over my head so keep it down.”

“No problem,” I tell her and flash a smile because she seems like the kind of woman who doesn’t get rewarded with smiles every day. Her lips twitch but she merely stands there and observes me with caution as I head back to the car.

I’d packed haphazardly, with the bulk of my clothes shoved into two black plastic bags and stuffed beneath the passenger seat. In the end I decide I don’t feel like picking through my crap in the dark front seat so I grab it all and head upstairs.

There’s a couple engaged in a tense standoff on the opposite end of the upper balcony. They exchange hissing murmurs which sounded complicated and then abruptly the man scoffs, “Fuck this shit,” before lumbering down the spindly staircase.

Meanwhile, his woman leans over the wrought iron side and whisper screams “Wayne! WAYYYYYNE!”

I’ve had enough of people today so I get indoors and toss my bags in a corner. It’s early and I’m not tired at all.

There’s a ‘How goes it?’ text from Brock so I tap out an answer and then switch the thing off. Unlike virtually every other member of my generation, I don’t wear my phone like an arm. I feel better when I’m not connected.

I really wish I’d packed a few books. It’s rare for me to be without a book. Maybe I ought to pick up one of those e-reader things so I can just click on whatever catches my attention.

The television only offers a handful of channels and two of them are showing World War II movies. Another one seems to be some sort of public access outlet where a group of women sit around a chipped tile table and mispronounce the names of expensive wines.

I’m about to give up and pass a few minutes beating off when I flip to the last channel and notice it’s one of those celebrity shows featuring news about people with gummy grins and collagen lips. Not that I care two pubes about whether Ark Deveroux abandoned his pregnant wife for his nineteen-year-old costar, but I happen to catch a few words of the marquee traveling in slow motion across the bottom of the screen.

“Born Savages, featuring the descendants of the legendary Hollywood family, begins filming this week in a remote, undisclosed location.”

I wait to see if the bubbly host will run a segment about it, but there is nothing else said and the show closes with a fish-faced selfie of some actress I’d never heard of who’d apparently appeared in a campy adaptation about teen werewolves living in Miami before she wound up in rehab.

I shut the television off. If I want news about the Savages I know where to find it. If I want to get a glimpse of Ren I know where to find that too. There have been some weak moments over the past few years where I typed her name in to a search engine only to be cut to the bone by the fact that she grows more beautiful with each phase of the moon. I’ve sat there in front of a laptop, stupidly drinking in every graceful movement she makes as she’s unknowingly tailed by some weirdo who had slyly shadowed her around during her casino shift and then posted it to YouTube.

Even in that short glimpse, Ren’s pride was written all over her. She moved with sure purpose and didn’t make time for distractions. She never was and never will be the kind of woman who craves the glare of the spotlight.

So why this? Why now?

Everything I’ve ever known about Loren Savage screams that something had to have veered terribly wrong for the proud, intelligent girl I once knew to agree to the cheap fucking sideshow that this thing is destined to be.

Ren hates cameras. Ren hates attention. Money wouldn’t be enough of an incentive for her. I can’t make any sense out of it. But maybe that’s because I never really understood her as well as I thought I did.

The lights cut off. Abruptly, as if they are candles snuffed by a cool breath.

Now I hear it outside, the wind. It’s probably a chronic companion to the land here, more so than the desert and its variable moods. The brown valley that cradles Atlantis Star is full of almost tranquil stillness, where sometimes it seems even a loud exhale will disturb the scene too much. Other times the furies of nature threaten to lift every grain of sand from the desert floor.

Strange that in the scope of my transient life I spent so little time there yet it somehow remains the centerpiece of my heart. It’s the place that lives in my dreams and keeps me company in the darkest, most forbidding of caves.

There are heavy footsteps roaming the balcony outside my door. A man’s voice howls into the wind as the utter blackness of the stormy night prevails. He mutters a drunken slur and retreats.

“I’m sure. I’m sure. I want this.”

“Damn, I love you, Ren.”

I go from being all cool and composed to being so hard I ache. I’ve got my pants down and my dick in my palm in a flash.

Sure it eats at me a little, the knowledge that I’m getting off on the memory of a teenage girl, but we’re not kids anymore and if I had something better I’d use it. Every other female I’ve ever put it to before then and since then, they just all run together in my brain like they’re really all one pussy attached to replaceable heads.

But I remember every second with Ren, the way she curled her fingers around the back of my neck and gasped when I pushed deep inside the tight place that hadn’t ever been breached before. I kissed her. I told her things I meant completely. I made her promises that should have come true. Once I was in there I never wanted to leave.

It was more than that though. It was a soul-to-soul connection that I’d never known before, haven’t even glimpsed since.

It was consuming.

It was shattering.

It was something that was forbidden in that time, and in that place.

I stroke my own shaft and pretend it’s her soft hand on me. I close my eyes and make believe her hot mouth explores slowly, licking the sweet spot just south of the head. That’s how I come, hard and violent, with the vision of unleashing myself inside her mouth, my hands gripping her head and not letting go until she swallows it all.

The wind grows stronger. The thin walls of the motel rub against one another and groan from the strain. It sounds like a strange sort of sex ritual, lacking rhythm or pleasure. I wonder how many of the other rooms are occupied, how many other errant travelers wait in the darkness. A town this close to tornado alley would have a storm siren but I hear nothing.

Impatiently I smear my own essence on my bare thigh and listen. The wind begins to lighten just as my thudding heart starts to slow down. Eventually the sounds recede to a vague crackling of dry leaves and an occasional growl of thunder. There is a stirring of people as they resume their night. A few congregate on the balcony outside, murmuring and laughing over a private joke.

The lights are still off. I hop off the bed naked and turn all the switches off so the lights won’t blind me when the electricity resumes. After a quick shower in the pitch darkness, I return to the narrow bed, strip off the towel and sink into the lumpy, well-used mattress.

I’ll see her tomorrow. Every cell in my body vibrates with that certainty.

I don’t know what she’s done since I’ve seen her last and I don’t care. Right now I can barely remember the details of my own life these past five years.

They are irrelevant.

All that matters is getting to her even if I have no clear plan for what comes next. It doesn’t matter if every fucking camera-toting gossip in the country wants to watch it happen or if she screams at the sight of me and tries to run in the opposite direction.

It’s happening anyway.

CHAPTER EIGHT

REN

Monty isn’t in a friendly mood when I find him. That’s not surprising. My older brother has been sunk too long in his own bad temper to shed it on a whim or for a camera.

He greets me with a weary nod as if we see each other far too often for his taste. Then he gestures that I ought to follow him inside and shoots a warning glance toward a skulking cameraman in the background.

“Fuck you,” he sneers at the man. “Told Gary I’m not fucking with that shit until tomorrow.”

He slams the door at my back and looks me up and down with his arms crossed. “They got a piece on you?”

His voice is even more gruff than I remember, as if life has scratched it up a bit and added a few pounds of gravel. There’s a tattoo on his neck. Not a good one. It’s a stark tribal shape that might as easily mean something as it means nothing.

“What?” I answer, a little startled because it sounds like my brother is asking if I’m carrying a gun.

Monty raises his eyebrows. They are roguishly sculpted things that have a mood all their own. Anyone would assume a little manscaping is to thank.

But Monty doesn’t cultivate his looks. He doesn’t have to. Whatever advantages he has are a Savage legacy. His looks, among other things.

“A mic, Ren. They fit you with a microphone?”

“Oh.” My brother averts his eyes as I reach fumbling fingers into my blouse and extract the device taped to my skin. I’m holding it in my hand and wondering how to mute it when Monty hisses between his teeth, grabs it, and severs the wire with a prompt snap between two fists. He lets it fall to the scruffy old parquet floor and we stand there staring down at the pieces.

“That was violent,” I comment and look up, surprised to see Montgomery Savage grinning. If I wasn’t so stunned at the sight I would probably applaud.

“How the hell are ya, Loren?”

“I may have misplaced my mind but that’s probably a good idea considering what’s about to go down.” I pause, looking my brother over more carefully. He’s bulked up but not in a soft way at all. He is a bristling wall of muscle and scarcely bottled wrath.

If I weren’t his sister I would run across the street to avoid him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I say with honesty because after all, I am his sister and right now we are a family in sore need of allies.

Monty clears his throat with a small nod and I know that’s the best acknowledgement I’ll get.

We don’t hug. Ava and Brigitte are huggers. The rest of us are aloof nodders.

He starts walking toward a portable fridge in the corner of the room and seems to expect I’ll follow him. He fishes out a few Blue Moon beers and hands one over. He sucks back his whole bottle before I can even twist the cap off and take a sip.

My brother stares moodily out the window with a frown. The barren valley at the foothills of the Harquehala stare back. At least the cameramen are warily distant at the moment. Instead of pressing a lens against the glass panes they are nowhere in sight.

Monty seems to know my thoughts. He shoots me a wry glance. “Guess we should enjoy our last few moments of obscurity.”

I snort. “Is that what you call this?”

“What do you call it?”

“Popular indifference. We are noteworthy when we do something violent or indecent.”

Monty rolls his eyes. “That sounds like a shot if there ever was one.”

“I wasn’t talking about you. Come on, Monty. You know I don’t cut you down that way. I’m not Lita.” I take a swallow of beer. It’s warm. Only the bottle was cool. “We’re not here to produce some down home family feel good show. We were given this shot because we’re-“

“Fuckups,” my brother finishes and holds his bottle up in a mock toast before draining the last drop and tossing it across the room into an empty cardboard box that seems to be serving as a trash can. “At least some of us, anyway. You’ve managed to keep your nose clean. Me? Not so much.”

I pause. I haven’t talked to Monty much over the past few years. Whatever communication we’ve had tends to skirt carefully away from subjects like prison and fortysomething sugar mamas. I can see the change in him though. Monty was never full of sunshine and delight. But now there’s a steeliness to him that’s sharp and a little frightening. He stews in his own skin like a large angry animal. Suddenly my heart hurts for him, for Monty, my big brother, even though he would be the last man on the planet to ask for pity.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble miserably. I’m confronted by my own selfishness. I’ve removed myself from my siblings, remaining at an emotional and physical distance all because I was nursing a hurt that I’ve never been able to face.

It seemed like the only way to heal my soul was to stay away from the things, the places, the people, that reminded me of what I’d lost.

Anything reminiscent of Oscar.

“Hey, Ren,” says Monty with some gentle concern. He’s peering at me and I don’t realize I’m crying until dueling tears spill down my cheeks. My brother sighs and plucks the beer out of my hand, setting it carefully on the counter.

Monty coughs into one hand and sighs again. “It’s not your fault. You’ve always done the thing where you try to carry all the family’s shit on your shoulders so we don’t have to. I know it’s fucked up for you to be back here. And I know why.”

“Do you?” I’m surprised. We’ve never talked about him. The day he left was the last day any of us spoke his name out loud. “It’s just history. All of it. It only messes us up if we let it.”

A crooked grin crosses his face. “Who’s messed up? I’m fucking spectacular.”

I grin back. “Sure you are.”

He shrugs. “Easy confirmation. Just ask anything on the west coast with a set of tits.”

“That’s a lot of tits, Montgomery.”

“I could stand to meet some more. As soon as we wrap up this circus I plan on working my way east until I hit an ocean or something.”

“That’ll keep you busy for a little while.”

“Maybe.”

A shadow of pain pulses beneath my left eyebrow. An old enemy, prologue to a migraine. My hand goes to my forehead, pressing the spot. If I take two Excedrin within the next fifteen minutes I might be able to head it off in time.

Monty opens a narrow cabinet beside the kitchen sink. After knocking a few other things aside, he finds what he’s looking for. He tosses a bottle to me and I’m glad to pop it open and swallow two of the pills that rattle around inside as my brother watches.

“It’ll be okay, Ren,” he says quietly and touches my shoulder in a rare gesture of brotherly affection.

And that’s Monty; impenetrable, solitary, but capable of rare flashes of gallantry. I remember once when I was nine and he was ten. We were in the middle of a childhood war. Usually such conflicts were Monty vs. Spence or Monty vs. Lita or Monty vs. Everyone. But we battled one-on-one every now and then.

Monty had been pissed for weeks because I’d accidentally left the water on when filling the tub in the hallway bathroom beside his bedroom. Water spilled over the top of the old claw foot tub, flowed across the threshold and found a shoebox full of the vintage video game cartridges he’d left on the floor just inside his room. They might have been salvageable if Monty had the patience to consider such a thing. Instead he screamed and ranted and set the box afire in the backyard barbecue pit. If it was Spencer’s fault he would have clobbered him without mercy but even when in a rage Monty would never hit us girls. He glared and brooded, held his nose whenever I walked into the room, ignored me more than usual at school where we were in the same class because he’d been held back in second grade. I shrugged it all off irritably because I understood my brother well enough to know that sooner or later he would move on to a different grievance.

And then came the Faberge egg incident. It was the most valuable object in the crumbling mansion where chandeliers hadn’t operated for decades, fixtures were cracked and ants marched in dogged lines along the ivory-colored stucco walls. The egg was an emerald green, encrusted with exquisite pink roses, a gift bestowed on our screen goddess grandmother by some minor European royalty. It used to sit in its own display case in the center of the second floor library, one of the few remaining treasures that hadn’t yet been sold off.

By that time our father, August, had pretty much given up on most things; his career, personal hygiene, and fighting with his bat shit crazy wife. He was forever retreating to the moldy attic room where he could pet his vinyl record collection and write sprawling incoherent memoirs about his life. He would have one more battle left in him – the Battle of Atlantis Star - but it was years from surfacing. Maybe he was storing up the energy for it.

In the meantime, Lita was free to practice her brand of roughshod parenting, which involved nightmarish casting calls (don’t improvise, why the fuck did you improvise?? NEXT!), chronic body shaming (my god, suck in that baby fat, you look like a pregnant fourth grader!) and scattered episodes where she would howl that we were all disgusting brats before running off to places unknown for a few days or a few weeks at a time.

Anyway, I had a habit of dawdling in the library and staring trance-like at the glittering antique. You can’t appreciate a thing like that unless you get close. Close enough to understand the intricate artistry that was spent on its creation.

I would stand there, chewing on my thumbnail, and imagining that I was really the resident of a dazzling realm with no ants crawling the walls or dirty floors beneath my feet, no confusing legacies to grapple with or cruel mothers to avoid.

In that world I was Loren the Beloved, twirling in pink tulle, eating as much ice cream as I pleased and tiptoeing around a gleaming castle. The egg winked at me from its golden pedestal, beckoning, promising.

I needed to get closer.

If I got close enough to touch its surface then the magic was possible.

Typically I wasn’t a dreamy child and at age nine I was old enough to know magic was a false promise. But I placed my hands around the glass dome of the display case, surprised when it lifted easily, and watched my finger move to the nearest embellished rose with the same hypnotic power that a certain fairy tale princess would understand when she touched a sharp spindle.

I didn’t mean any harm. I would have gladly tossed my greatest treasures into the old fire pit behind Monty’s video games before I would have willingly damaged that egg. My mind took a moment to catch up to the horror of the prize object rolling from its perch, sliding across the narrow table and hitting the floor, shattering in several places. I stared in disbelieving shock as broken slivers of pink roses spun out in several directions.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 783