Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 4.

Caring but not careful.

Another one! Thanks for comin’

Chapter 4. Caring but not careful.

With ripe adrenaline from Truck’s confrontation coursing through his veins, Marshall decides that he will get drunk enough tonight to kiss Jamie on the mouth and not think about the state of decay that Beaver’s father might be in every time he looks at the kid’s face. So they walk instead of biking. It’s a muggy night and bugs swarm from all directions in endless supply. Marshall’s tee is growing dark with the weight of his sweat before they’ve even arrived.

They’re early but the party is already going which means it’s been going all day which means it’s going to be a long and exhausting one. When Lana gets particularly perplexed after a long week of being unemployed, traumatized, anorexic and riddled with amphetamines, she mass invites every person she’s ever had sex with which is an absurdly long and thoroughly kept list (Marshall’s seen it) and because most of those people are also hooked on something, they all show up in the morning to trade drugs and spit and they’ll be going all day getting high, coming down, fucking, getting high again before the people who have day jobs even begin to trickle in.

The house sits crumbling and unkept in the middle of the woods. According to Lana, it was built by her great-great-great grandfather in the 1800’s and it once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad but Marshall has seen three generations of Lana’s family slip away from this place and none of them were exactly friendly to black folk and more inclined to hide drugs than people, so he thinks maybe she made this up to offset the fact that she doesn’t know many black people herself.

Five years ago, the week of high school graduation, Lana came to Marshall in a state of disarray, a manic high, and asked him to kill her father. He was her main supply of drugs and she wanted out–of the steady drip, his placid grin subsuming her, the mental prison of that house–out of all of it, and she couldn’t escape while under her father’s coke-stained thumb.

Marshall’s plan had been to kill him and then bike himself to graduation, an educational feat he was barely managing to accomplish anyway and didn’t feel much pride about. And he did pump his bike over to that house in the woods and he did walk through the open back door with a machete hanging at his side only to find a body at the kitchen table, blood pooling around his feet, head open like a blown out door from a self inflicted gun wound. He didn’t write a note but he did leave behind the deed to the house in Lana’s name as a graduation gift which was weird because she wasn’t graduating, she’d dropped out a year before, but he’d never been really paying attention anyway and his motivations couldn’t really be questioned on account of he was dead. Marshall walked the stage and accepted his diploma with the scent of death in his head and the sight of blood that he tried so hard to avoid.

Lana’s mom, hardly there in the first place, took off that same night without a word and it was like, wait did she kill him and forge his signature on the deeds for some reason? But she couldn’t be questioned either because, well, she had gone and Lana didn’t care much in either direction who did what or why she was alone because suddenly the house was empty, it was all hers to own along with an unsatisfying end to her father’s life and his innards staining the floors. With both of her parents gone like the native flora there was no longer anything to escape and no reason to go anywhere else but also all of her friends were graduating and getting gone too or otherwise sticking around town but getting sad about it and so there was very little reason to get clean and so she didn’t. In the five years of her solo squatting there, the house had fallen into disrepair and neglect, serving as a halfway house for people trying to stay addicts. There were ten people or more living with Lana at any given time but they rarely stayed very long and they never came back. In a way, it had become a sort of underground railroad for addicts moving deeper into addiction. A sad, sludgy pipeline. 

Marshall had done the landscaping in the yard once, probably hoping it would encourage Lana to touch up the rest of the place, maybe at least learn the basics of home ownership but no such luck.

Worse for wear than even any of the trailers in the park, the house is three stories tall made of rotting wood like a kid got his Lincoln logs wet and kept building with them anyway. All windows except the one high up in the attic were broken. The bushes around the foundation that Marshall had planted long ago are long dead, composting cigarette butts and vomit for sustenance. Strobing lights flash inside and house music thumps like a neighbor pounding on the door.

“Okay,” Marshall says. “It's a big one. You tell me if you wanna go and we go, no questions asked unless you want me to ask questions. Got it?”

Beaver spits at the ground. “Yeah. I want some juice.”

The lawn and porch are littered with empty cans, bottles, the occasional needle. Some guy is laying flat like a plank on the porch steps looking up at the stars emerging through the gaps in the trees. He laughs as they pass him though he’s not smiling at all.

Inside, Marshall finds some apple juice in the fridge and sniffs to make sure it’s not spiked or expired. Beaver finds a big chair in a corner and sips his juice while playing something on his Nintendo Switch. Marshall is worried about him only a normal amount. He still feels weird about bringing Beaver to a party like this but he also trusts the kid to be honest and tell him if he hates it.

Marshall palms his flask and takes small, burning sips as he wanders the house in search of Lana. Though the music and the lights pulse in every room, replacing the rhythm of his heartbeat, nobody is dancing. There are small scattered groups of people kissing or talking or poking each other’s faces. A bald guy wearing a long skirt is staring at himself in the mirror like his reflection might erupt through the glass at any moment. A topless woman with huge tits rolls her head around on her neck in Sisyphean circles. There’s a messy, writhing orgy occurring in Lana’s bedroom, a tangled mass of sweaty flesh, black and white and red and blue under the LED strobes. Marshall pokes his head under swinging balls, darting tongues, heaving breasts, but no part of the groaning flesh mass appears to belong to Lana.

He’s searched every room and come up empty. None of these other people mean anything to him. He circles back to the kitchen where Beaver is playing Super Mario Galaxy as Luigi. He knocks on the kid’s helmet to the beat of the music, sips his whiskey, looks around. He feels like a kid in the cafeteria again wondering where he belongs, if anyone has the desire to be kind to him. Where is Jamie?

The house is hot even with all the windows smashed in and the whiskey in his gut is like a tiny fire. It’s then that he notices the glow of a fire out back and sees Lana’s hair swaying in the orange light.

Outside is much cooler though the air is still dense with moisture like the sweat pouring from the orgy. Lana is dancing by the fire with her eyes closed, holding some girl’s hands and they’re spinning around and around laughing at the feeling of centrifugal force with little regard for their proximity to the tall, sputtering flames spewing from the massive pile of burning wood and brush. Lana’s long, tangled hair bounces and swooshes across her gaunt face, occasionally swaying through a lick of fire and coming out unscathed. She’s always been sort of invincible. The drug-taking sometimes seems like an elaborate choreographed dance she performs to tempt death into fucking her senseless for a while, but maybe death just doesn’t get horny like that.

The woman she’s dancing with is some butch dyke with close cropped hair, a tight leather vest and hairy armpits. Her breasts are small but her hips wide and swaying, her thighs fat beneath big denim shorts.

Lana hasn’t opened her eyes but she calls out, “Oh Marshall, my angel, I haven’t seen you in ages!” She pulls the dyke in for a tight hug then releases her recklessly and falls toward Marshall, clasping his hands with a tight certainty. Her own bony hands are cold in spite of the warm night and the dyke. Her nails are hot pink.

“I saw you last week,” Marshall says, pulling one hand from her grasp to brush the hair from her face. “We made out.”

Her bright eyes open wide now, though there’s only a spark of recognition. Her pupils are wide and black. “We did, didn’t we! How have we never done that before!”

“We have,” he explains patiently. “We’ve had sex a dozen times, too.”

Lana tilts her head back like their sex can be found in the stars up high. Was the guy on the porch steps looking for sex from above too?

“Of course we have, but that was the first time I really felt it. You kissed me with feeling, my Marshy. Feeling for who?”

Marshall takes each of her arms and wraps them around her thin body so she’s giving herself a hug and that makes her smile wide, her teeth neat and yellowing. “I was doing a voyeuristic thing,” he says. “Sorry.”

Lana squeezes herself tight and tilts her head. She thinks Marshall is some sort of flawed angel. “You don’t need to apologize, darling. Though it would all be much easier if you just loved me, wouldn’t it?”

Marshall sees Jamie walking up the drive now and adjusts his hat. “Yes it would be.”

Jamie hasn’t noticed him yet and passes the planking sky sex guy to go inside.

“Who’s the kid?” Lana asks over his shoulder.

Beaver has silently taken up a spot on the back deck, eyes still trained on the device in his hand, face lit up from the LED glow.

“Name’s John. I’m watching him for a bit or maybe forever.”

Lana sighs and her face softens. “How lovely. Would you ever get me pregnant, Marshy?”

“No ma’am, I would not.”

She kisses him on the cheek. “Won’t get me pregnant and won’t love me. You’re not very good at being a man, my love.”

“Never have been,” he agrees. “I think your friend would be a better man for you, hon.”

“Oh, Terry!” She exclaims, suddenly remembering her dyke. She pulls the big woman into another hug and kisses her neck. “Will you love me, Terry?”

“Yup,” says the dyke.

This is enough for Lana. They go back to dancing, loose and falling all over each other. Lana looks beautiful and sad and free and floating. It really would be much simpler if Marshall could love her the way he was supposed to. He worries that he only has sex with her sometimes because he felt bad that he hadn’t been able to kill her dad like he was supposed to. Or because he thought being close to her might save her from the drugs. In that way, he figures he’s actually pretty okay at being a man, or maybe he’s the horny incarnation of death tempted by the lap dance. Marshall can convince himself of anything.

Back up to the deck, he sits next to John Beaver, sipping his whiskey and watching the girls dance without tiring. He’s barely done anything at all and he’s already tired. He watches Beaver play Super Mario. Kid’s really good. He hardly ever gets hurt and seems to figure out all of the little puzzles quickly.

The drunkenness is beginning to burn a tender hole in his gut, the heat of it smoldering in the wide prairie of his chest and the restless yearning in his hips.

Eventually Jamie joins him on the deck. He looks handsome out of uniform, wearing a big green flannel under a pair of dark overalls and combat boots. He’s got one sparkly earring in and he nods at Marshall as he leans against the railing like he’d known all along that he’d find Marshall here.

“Hey, Beef,” he says to Beaver.

Beaver nods without looking up. “Hey, James.”

Jamie rolls a blunt on the flat of the railing, carefully grinding the nuggets of green and purple, pinching them out bit by bit across the rolling papers. Marshall holds his breath as Jamie’s tongue darts out to wet the edge of the paper. He shifts in his seat.

The fragrant flower fills the air as Jamie brings the lit blunt to his thick lips and inhales. Marshall watches his every movement. The tenderness of his fingers around the paper, the pucker of his lips, the rising of his chest filling with smoke, his eyes gently closing as he exhales a stream of white into the summer sky where sex lives.

Jamie turns to Marshall with the knowing glint in his eye that he’s keenly aware he was being watched. He offers the blunt and Marshall trades it for his flask. Their hands do not touch in the exchange though it still feels intimate somehow. He thinks about how easy it is to cut a man’s throat with a knife but how impossible to touch another man’s hand.

Marshall kisses the place where Jamie’s lips had been and sucks on the blunt. His chest fills with smoke and he watches Jamie’s throat expand and contract as he tosses back a long swig of liquor. He slams the flask down on the railing. “Know what Lana’s on tonight?”

Spoken to twice in the same day. Marshall could scream. Instead he shrugs. “Something light. MDMA or acid maybe. She’s in a good mood.”

Jamie does not react to this. They pass the whiskey and the blunt and when both of those have dwindled, he walks down to where Lana is now swaying by herself and joins her in dance. What does the internal landscape of his mind look like? There is nothing in Marshall’s backpack that can help him with this.

There are lots of people at the party now and movement is spreading like an airborne contagion. More locals are filling the pulsing rooms, spilling out back to drink shitty beer by the fire. People Marshall went to high school with, people still in high school, people that hate being here, some that just are here. They flow past Marshall with their drinks and their drugs and their chatter and the sweat on their skin. Some of them stop to talk to Marshall and his widespread legs, sturdy thighs and the company they might provide but he’s a bad conversationalist with his gaze latched onto the girl he kisses when he wants to kiss the boy and their gentle, silent swaying. Those two strange friends of his have a relationship he is not privy to and doesn’t quite understand. Lana has never needed Jamie’s words. They don’t seem to need anything from each other.

And so, with Marshall indisposed, a lot of people have turned to the novelty of the little black boy wearing a painted pot on his head. They say stuff like, “Hey kid, what are you doing here?” and Beaver will say, “I’m John. I’m just hanging out.”

Marshall is proud.

Some 70’s psychedelic rock song comes on and Lana is pulling herself from Jamie’s grasp either to go dance closer to the music or do lines off the coffee table. Jamie sits down hard in the grass and dirt by the towering flames.

“You good?” Marshall asks Beaver.

“I’m John,” he says with a measure of certainty. He turns to his new adult friends to tell them more about being John.

Marshall is crossed but mostly competent. It takes a lot to truly intoxicate him. Mostly he just feels the obliteration of his inhibitions and the melting away of things that normally matter like murder and getting home safely.

He sits down on the earth next to Jamie and starts picking at the grass. The ground is cold and hard and a little damp.

“I kiss Lana all the time,” Marshall says though he doesn’t think that was what he meant to say.

Jamie’s eyes are guarded but they always are. Even wiping tears from his cheeks in the bathroom, he kept his feelings folded close to his chest. He’s even less sure now with so many chemicals pumping through his system in a stimulant vs. depressant cage match.

Jamie is quiet for a long time, a contemplative silence and then he says, “I like the cowboy hat.”

Is this forgiveness? Avoidance? Flirtation?

Marshall removes the hat and puts it on Jamie’s head. Marshall swallows hard. He can’t believe how powerful attraction can be like gravity between two spinning bodies in the sky. In his overalls and Marshall’s hat, Marshall feels like he’s watching a dying star about to engulf him. He wishes he could paint it.

Jamie looks down and plays with the laces on his boots. “That’s just Lana. She’s got a pull to her.”

Marshall watches the fire dance, random and chaotic like Lana and Terry. “What about you?” he asks.

“What about me?”

“You ever kissed Lana?”

“Nope.”

Marshall almost wishes that they had kissed, that their lips might have met in a kiss by transitive property. But all he has is the wetness of the blunt. He pulls his knees to his chest. “I love her in a weird way. But her pull can hurt. She’s not a careful person. Caring, but not careful.”

Jamie makes a small noise in the back of his throat. “Is that what you are? Careful and caring?”

His mind stalls like a body catching on a rock as it rolls downhill, the spine audibly snapping. He sighs like a person with a neck still intact. “Guess so. What about you?”

He goes quiet again for a while. Beaver is making a bunch of people laugh but Marshall isn’t really paying attention. Cicadas call out their late summer song high up in the trees and fireflies dance in the empty spaces.

“Careless and scared of caring,” Jamie says finally.

Marshall tilts his head and rests it on his knee. By the glow of the fire, Jamie’s brown skin is gold like honey, orange like a sweet nectarine.

“What makes you scared of caring?”

Jamie mimics him, resting his own head on his own knee so their heads are parallel to the earth, aligned with each other.

“The look in your eyes.”

Marshall feels strangely calm though he can tell something is brewing in the space between them like the tides receding quickly before a tsunami.

“What’s the look in my eye?”

Jamie opens his mouth but rather than his own voice, Marshall hears Beaver and he’s yelling, “No I’m not!”

Marshall is on his feet before he can think and he’s running to the sound of his kid’s voice. There are a handful of people looking down at Beaver in his chair, his face scared and angry in the light of his Nintendo Switch. As he approaches, Beaver drops his device, winds back his arm and punches some guy directly in the gut. The crowd gasps with a hive mind and hands lift to cover mouths and a few people take the Lord’s name in vain. 

“What the hell is going on here?” Marshall demands.

The group of people are looking confused. They’re younger, probably high school kids. They look mostly harmless but the look on Beaver’s face fills Marshall with a primal anger. He feels Jamie wavering behind him as he puts his hand on Beaver’s shoulder, sending strength down through the kid’s body with his firm palm.

The guy that Beaver sucker punched has short red hair and bad acne looks particularly perturbed as he catches his breath. “Dude, I don’t know. All I said was ‘hey, aren’t you in my sister’s class? You’re Beaver, right?’ and he started freaking out. I was just asking but like he’s friends with my sister, I know him and his dad. That’s Beaver, dude.”

“No I’m not!” Beaver shouts. “I’m John!”

Marshall’s grip tightens. “His dad?”

“Yeah,” the ugly kid says. “My uncle is on the force with his dad.”

The blood halts its progress through his veins. Very slowly, Marshall crouches to meet Beaver’s face at eye level. The kid contains a lifetime of emotion all in one big, scared face.

“John,” Marshall says carefully. “Your dad is a fucking cop?”

Beaver wavers, whispers, “Was.”

another red heart taken by the american dream

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