Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 8.

Taking kindly.

We take real kindly to your sort of folk round these parts.

Part Two. The cult and all of the ways it keeps them from getting up north and generally being alright.

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Chapter 8. Taking kindly.

They spend the first night camped out under a Tennessee sky. Marshall’s never left Georgia except once to Florida but it’s occurring to him that maybe everything is the same all over. This long, thin state rolls on and on. Flat, grass, tree-lined highways, lots of gas stations, billboards for lawyers, rotted crosses for the dead, hazy skies. Marshall wonders what America looked like way back when before some distant ancestor of his decided land was all about killing people for, just to kill the land after soaking it in blood. To own with the intent of killing.

Marshall sees death everywhere he goes. In the roadkill splatter, rat traps tucked under Truck’s trailer, lots for sale, airplanes burning fuel in pleasant white streaks across the sky, chemical-soaked rivers. It’s hard to imagine a world before all of that. A time when life was luscious. A time when people might have been mostly good or it was at least easier to be good.

All that to say, Marshall doesn’t feel yet like he’s really left home. The trees look the same, their canopies blot out the stars just the same, the cicadas croon, the squirrels rustle, the night is hot just the same.

Beaver decided he’d like to sleep in Jamie’s tent tonight, though he assured each of them that he would be rotating tents so no one would feel left out. If anything, Marshall is only jealous because he wishes he was the one sleeping next to Jamie beneath the same tarpaulin roof.

Marshall stays up later than the rest, tending to the fire just to have something to look at besides the amorphous shifting darkness all around. They parked the truck deep in the woods off some dirt road. Marshall walked a mile out from their campsite and followed a circular perimeter, finding not a soul to bother them in any direction. He's tired from the driving and the walking but he’s scared to sleep. He feels a haunting coming on.

He puts out the fire some time after midnight and crawls into his tent. He strips down to his underwear and still it’s too hot. He lays on top of his sleeping bag and rolls around for an hour. He thinks only about death. When it becomes too much, he cranks his portable lantern and reads his ASL book by the grainy unnatural light it provides.

Marshall is still learning the most basic phrases. He can do please and thank you and stop and hello and goodbye. Single words and short phrases are easy but Marshall has never had the best fine motor skills so long sentences take him longer. He likes learning though and finds sign language particularly fascinating. Just like spoken language, there are many ways to say the same thing and many ways to misinterpret something. Different cultures have entirely different sets of signs. ASL is only a small piece of the iceberg and there’s a sort of relief in knowing that he’ll never be able to learn everything there is to know.

Sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag, Marshall practices the phrase ‘I want you.’ I and you are simple, just a pointed indicator. He likes want. You hold your hands out, palms up, ready to receive and then curl them in toward your chest as though taking this need into your heart.

Marshall has never had to say the words ‘I want you’ though he’s felt endless waves of desire in his short life.

He had sex for the first time when he was fifteen. The man’s name did not matter but he was probably nineteen. Marshall saw him in a public bathroom and he stared because the man was beautiful and a bit cruel-looking. Wordlessly, he followed him into a dirty stall and did what he did with fumbling hands and a still growing, expanding, desperately awkward frame. The sex hadn’t been very good. It had been wordless and painful and ugly with all of the conflicting need and vying for control without wanting to cede any to the other but that didn’t matter much to Marshall nor did the man’s age or the suddenness of how it happened. It was the first time in his life that he’d gotten something he wanted. It became clear to him that touch and desire were simple stepping stones to closeness, something unattainable until then or only through the means of killing.

Marshall had a lot of sex after that. Boys, girls, fathers, boygirls, people with gender so complex they hadn’t come up with words for it yet, forms only explicable through vague noises and gestures against Marshall’s body. The only thing that mattered to him was the closeness. He liked the heat of two bodies against one another. He liked hands against his chest, his ass, his thighs. He liked multiple points of contact, OSHA compliance. Lips on lips, dicks pressed together, legs wrapped around one another to prolong touch, let the rest be expressed through movement, moaning, primal reflex.

He felt a similar agency while practicing ASL. When he tries to translate his big thoughts into words, it gets his tongue all thick in his mouth like a five car pile up, so unlike the fluid intuitive movements he’s capable of with his head buried between someone’s thighs. But there’s a deeper connection between his mind and his hands. The words come more easily in those quiet flicks and snaps of wrists and fingers, bending elbows, contorting knuckles. There was so much more to express in a movement made of words than in a sentence tumbling from his uncoordinated mouth.

ASL is full of careful intent. I want you. He stretches his upturned palms. Jamie takes hold of his thick hands and Marshall curls them in toward his heart where he holds his want. I pull you into me. I want us to merge. That’s how deeply his desire for Jamie runs in rivers coursing through underground canyons in the hollow earth. Jamie makes him hot and full with desire.

He practices a few more signs. Desire and Kill and Guilt and Penis. Please, performed by placing the hand flat against the chest and rubbing in circles and circles and circles. But his mind has drifted too far to two tents over where he could be inside of the thing he wanted if only he wasn’t a coward. He lays back and slides his hand beneath the waistband of his underwear. To touch Jamie would be a gift. To have Jamie touch him would be something like divine creation.

Marshall touches himself and moans into a Tennessee night. He twists his hand around in circles and circles and circles like he’s signing ‘please’ over and over and over again.

Please, please, please, please.

Please, Jamie, please.

Only when he finishes, releasing a name from his wet mouth into the hot air, then he’s finally able to sleep.

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Last to bed, he’s still the first to rise when the sky is shedding its darkness and giving way to deep blues and soft purples as the sun’s light caresses the cheek of the horizon. He checks their perimeter but nothing has been disturbed. He starts up the fire again, cracks a few eggs in his metal pot, lays a few strips of bacon around the edges and hovers above it all, watching it cook.

Lana is pulled from her tent by the scent or sizzle. She kisses Marshall on the forehead and takes a seat in the leaves and grass. He plates an egg and two strips of bacon on a napkin and hands it to her, taking the rest for himself.

“You made it through the night okay,” Marshall notes.

“I kept a bucket in there with me,” she says, steam spilling from her mouth. “Smells like sweat, shit and vomit in there.”

“Because you were sweating, shitting and vomiting?”

“Yup.”

Marshall scratches the back of his head. He’s known a lot of addicts in his life but he’s never known anyone to get clean and stay clean. Who gives you permission to do a thing like that?

“How do you feel now?” he asks.

“Like I need to dunk myself in an ice cold river,” she replies, swallows a strip of crisp bacon. “I also want to do drugs.”

Marshall nods. “There’s a creek running downhill about a half mile that way.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder.

Lana wipes the crumbs and grease from her palms, looking satisfied. She cleans her mouth with her greasy napkin, tosses it into the fire and walks off toward the creek in her underwear, no bra in the pale yellow light of the morning.

The forest is waking all around Marshall. Birds call out to one another in the high branches. The breeze seems to pick up and carry fresh cool air across the makeshift camp. A chipmunk scurries by in the brush, hoping he goes unseen.

Marshall cleans out the pot with a rag, fills it with water and holds it over the fire. While the water boils, he takes a bag of coffee beans from his backpack, pours a handful into his handheld grinder, adorns the lid and twists the two parts back and forth until he’s confident he’s achieved the right texture. He wedges the base of a plastic thermos into the loose dirt. Puts the pour-over coffee cone on the lid of the thermos, lays a precious filter on top. The water is boiling now and he puts a tiny bit just to wet the paper, swishes it around in the thermos then dumps it out at the base of a thick tree. The coffee grounds go in the filter and he tilts the pot slightly so a steady stream of water tips over the lid and cascades over the beans below. He moves his hand in tiny circles, watches oily bubbles rise to the top of the mixture, feels the strongly scented steam warm his face. Once the water is all filtered through, he spreads the coffee grounds around the fire and massages it into the dirt. Coffee filter goes in the fire, pour-over cone goes back in the pack. He brushes the dirt and grass off the bottom of the thermos and takes a sip, letting it roll across his tongue in waves. It scalds him slightly but the vanilla, toffee jam and wildberry come through well at the back of his mouth.

Jamie places a hand on his shoulder. Marshall is startled but he does not show it. He offers the thermos to Jamie and watches him take a long sip, eyes closed. A wave of serene pleasure rolls across his face. Marshall’s chest flutters. Offering someone a cup of coffee you made is a form of sign language.

“How long were you watchin’ me?” Marshall asks.

Jamie returns the thermos and their fingers do not touch. He holds up four fingers which Marshall deduces means ‘for a long time.’ He imagines kissing each of those fingers individually and taking them into his mouth.

He cooks breakfast once more for Jamie and then again when Beaver crawls from the tent with the big red beanie wrapped around his head. After eating, Beaver finds a big pile of leaves at the edge of camp and sinks into it, finds stillness there beneath the burgeoning sky and stays unmoving for so long that Marshall almost forgets him entirely. Like the boy was on the verge of merging entirely with the landscape. But then he comes back to the fire and scolds Marshall for farting and it’s like he never went anywhere.

Lana returns fully naked with her hair dripping down her bare breasts but no one seems to care. Her body is lean and flat in most places, thin scars lacing random patterns along the skin hugging her bones. She doesn’t shave her face, legs, back, crotch or anywhere that ‘grows hair naturally, why the fuck would I cut off the stuff my body gives me, are you gonna eat my pussy or what?’ she’d said to Marshall one time, to which he replied ‘alright, yeah okay, hell yeah, yup,’ and then he ate her pussy to shut himself up. Marshall doesn’t know how many times they’ve had sex or if they will again but she’s always preferred less clothes to more and Marshall is smart enough to know that the naked body doesn’t have to be inherently sexual.

He tells Beaver this last part because he wants to teach Beaver good things and Beaver says, “I haven’t even formed a sexuality yet and I already know that.”

Jamie laughs. Marshall wants to know his body well enough to not sexualize it instinctively but when he pictures Jamie taking off his clothes he has to stretch his legs for a long time to divert the blood away from his dick.

They pack up after breakfast when the light is shifting from sunrise orange to daylight gold, the default clarity of light. The truck starts up after three turns of the engine and they are off once again.

---

It’s a Backstreet Boys cassette for the next hour. Marshall has never been a fan of boy bands though he does indulge in the occasional K-Pop group. He is a complex person with a lot of stuff going on. He suspected the tape belonged to one of Jamie’s sisters until Jamie began tapping the wheel to the beat, humming the tunes, his vocal cords on the edge of breaking into full song. Marshall’s heart hummed along to the pretty boy’s restraint.

They keep off the highways wherever possible, avoiding any major towns where cameras line the streets, google cars circle, young people record every moment of their days and might catch a fugitive in the background.

The same things seem to roll on forever. There is no shortage of gas stations, Wal-marts, lawns overrun with weeds and lawns devoid of all life. Some lawn signs warn of the coming end and beg reconciliation with Jesus. Other lawn signs insist that love is love and affirm their belief in science. But it’s all just more square houses and brittle sign-laden lawns, too many beliefs and opinions to conceptualize so everything seems to cancel everything else out.

They chug along steadily if not monotonously. Beaver wants to play the license plate game. Then he wants to play the alphabet game. Then he wants to play telephone. He’s saving the battery on his Nintendo Switch until a city of outlets appears and he really wants to play anything that keeps his mind from drifting. To where, Marshall wonders.

Lana has to stop the car to throw up. Lana flings herself from the truck bed and claws at a tree until her fingers are bloody. Lana screams into Marshall’s beanie. Lana begs for drugs. Lana throws up again.

Jamie is steadfast. Jamie plays the alphabet game. Jamie rubs Lana’s back and bandages her fingers with care. Jamie drives for hours without complaining. Jamie is silent but not quiet. Jamie pulls the brim of Marshall’s cowboy hat down on his forehead to shade his sweet cinnamon eyes from the sun.

Marshall thinks about all the people he has killed. Marshall thinks about all the people he has killed. Marshall thinks about all the people he has killed. Marshall hangs his hand out the passenger window and feels the air turn from hot and humid to cool and rising. He looks up at the darkening sky and senses the rain before it begins. Marshall thinks about all the people he has killed.

They’re skirting Springfield, Missouri when Lana suggests that if she doesn’t eat shitty, grease-soaked roadside diner food in the next hour she’s going to run through the woods on her bare feet until she finds some heroin. It’s a good suggestion and so they take it.

They pull onto the road’s shoulder at the first place they find, a dingy thing called Dick’s Diner that looks necessarily misplaced in time. It’s either going for a retro vibe with all those grimy pink pastels and gaseous neons or it simply hasn’t changed in sixty years and both of these possibilities seem at war with one another. It appears almost like a mirage, insisting on being there but with a little smirk that says who knows? It’s unstable to look at. Something about the glass littering the sidewalk without any windows being broken, the pleasant come-on-in smoke rising from cylindrical stacks, the cracked pavement surrounding the diner, all the ruptured slabs of concrete tilting toward the foundation, suggests the whole building is liable to collapse into the earth if it’s pushed past a certain weight limit. Marshall likes being a little chunky and hopes that this will not be the thing that summons him to the planet’s core.

Jamie cases the place. The only camera is out back by the dumpster and doesn’t work. It’s seven pm and there are only two people inside, a man at the bar and a man behind the counter.

They seat themselves and the waiter hands them menus on laminated pieces of paper. Lana is sweating and writhing in her seat but the guy doesn’t seem to notice. He’s old, graying and dark-skinned and it seems that most things don’t matter to him. His name tag says Dick, either because he is the Dick who owns the diner or because he doesn’t think very highly of himself. In the waning light outside, trash litters the street and cars race by well over the speed limit and they probably won’t die. The guy at the bar is smoking a cigar. There’s a mop bucket in the corner, only half of the tile floor looking sort of clean. The other half is grimy and brown as though the cleaner realized how futile and unimportant a task like mopping a floor is in the grand scheme of everything being stepped on over and over for the rest of time.

Marshall orders an omelet, four pancakes, home fries, bacon and a beer. Beaver orders french toast. Jamie orders a large buffalo chicken pizza. Lana slurs out something genuinely unintelligible and the old guy writes something down faithfully so it’s unclear if she will actually be served any food.

While Dick the waiter goes in the back to cook their food because he is also the chef, the other guy turns up the volume on the old, dusty television mounted to the wall. The local news is playing and Marshall half expects all of their faces to suddenly, fortuitously appear on the screen and expose them as the felons they are. But that kinda stuff only happens in movies to advance the plot and pace the fear.

Here, in Missouri, a forgotten place if it was ever once known, everything is happening the way everything happens everywhere all the time. They’ve got their own dead state cops to glorify, their own flooding rivers and missing children, unprecedented heat waves and economic drought, failing farms and town festivals for communities to gather at and eat sugar and drink alcohol and forget that the world is ending and forget that they spent the whole time scared of every stranger that passed them and their so vulnerable children who have seen nothing of the world. There is no time here for Appalachian Georgia and runaways crossing the country, no time for pleas from the authorities because everyone has become an authority and everyone demands attention. 

The food comes out and Lana salivates at the sight of the triple decker burger, thick golden fries and chocolate milkshake that Dick the waiter, owner and chef has whipped up for her. It’s just what she ordered.

They eat like animals who haven’t seen a real meal in weeks though it’s only been forty-eight hours since they left and they’ve been eating the groceries they bought like normal people. The allure of shitty, greasy diner food is undeniably just as American as the cops who shoot black boys to feed their fear of being without power. It begins to rain outside and all the neon lights go on. Jamie puts on a pair of sunglasses.

The news ends and the man smoking at the bar seems to notice them for the first time. He’s got thick glasses but still squints as if he’s struggling to see them. He coughs up a ball of smoke and says, “What are you kids, a bunch of queers?”

“Mhm,” Lana says through a mouthful of burger. She already appears markedly more sane and the color is returning to her full cheeks.

The man’s face turns serene like he’s excited to still be able to identify a group of faggots in his old age. “We don’t take too kindly to queers around here,” he says.

Dick takes the cigar from between the man’s fingers and ashes it. “Yes we do.”

The man shrugs innocently. He’s very bald. “Well sometimes we don’t. Not me, but the community we,” he explains with wildly gesturing, wart covered hands. “Lots of inconsistencies round these parts, see. Those ugly rainbow flags with all the new colors in one window, White Jesus bloody and suffering in the inbred house next door.” This imagery is plenty but he continues on anyway with the voice of someone who has never been told to shut up. “They got them straight-gay alliances in the same schools where they got them tranny bathroom bans. Their words, not mine, I don’t take kindly to slurs, see.”

Lana swallows. “What do you take kindly to?”

The man considers this thoughtfully, then says, “Young girls with big breasts.”

Dick thwacks the man’s head with a rolled up newspaper. Their relationship to one another is unclear. Lana glances down at her relatively flat chest and seems conflicted by relief and disappointment.

Marshall looks out at the rain falling in sheets now, gathering in the bed of the truck where their tents are rolled up and tied down.

“Anywhere around here that would take kindly to a group of queers lookin’ for somewhere to stay the night?”

Dick and the man take a beat. The television warns of flash floods ripping homes from their foundations to be carried down the street on a river and into some oblivion.

“Well, there’s always the cult,” the man says and Dick nods in agreement. “They’ll take near anyone so long as they don’t mind it being a cult and all.”

“What kind of cult?” Beaver asks.

 Lana scowls. “What do you even know about cults, kid?”

“My pa was a cop.”

Everyone nods thoughtfully.

“It’s not so bad as far as cults go,” Dick says. “My granddaughter’s in it and she gets to come home sometimes if she wants to. Of course she’s crazy too and believes Shepherd Maya will lead her through the end of days and I won’t be spared. She’s a sweet girl though and she gets her own room and everything. Usually no one dies there.”

Marshall clears the last of the food from his plate. “Think they’d let us stay the night?”

The room is filled with consideration. Everything is thoughtful.

“You kids susceptible to cult language? Indoctrination?” Asks the man with a newly lit cigar.

“Probably,” says Marshall.

“They’ll love that. They’re way off the grid though. Might try to kidnap and brainwash you and all that.”

“Okay,” Marshall says.

He settles their tab which was much less than he expected but he tips well to close the deficit. He thanks the two old men and they run to the car through pummeling cold drops of rain. Lana puts her legs across Beaver’s lap in the backseat. Marshall shakes the rain from his hair like a wet dog and queries the car: “So we’ll just stay with the cult tonight, yeah?”

Picture your face / I wanna touch you but you're too far away

Previous chapter. Chapters 9 & 10 next weekend.

Table of Contents.

It’s just a cult. Don’t worry about it. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader.. I leave that decision up to you.