Beneath the Stain - Part 7 (4 page)

“What are you thinking?” Trav asked next to him. He had his arm slung over the back of the seat, which looked only natural because the lot of them were cramped, even in the big modified Tahoe, but Mackey knew he did it to give Mackey a place to hide.

“I’m thinking that even if this place is sunshine and fucking roses, I’m going to hate it like poison,” Mackey said passionately, and his voice carried.

“God, me too,” Kell muttered. “I swear, we see houses bigger than this every day, but somehow… I mean, he used to sneak out. I remember his mom used to call us because Grant had gone missing, and Mom would go driving toward his house and find him trying to find us. He always said he just wanted to play.”

Kell’s voice wobbled a little, and Mackey found his favorite refuge.

“Don’t talk like that,” he snarled, making everyone in the car jump. “Grant is still alive, and that place is just a fucking house. I brought his goddamned guitar—he says he can play if he sits down. We’re gonna go play with our friend, and he’s gonna meet Blake and talk about what a pain in the fucking ass Kell is. Stevie and Jefferson can talk about married life, and we’re gonna see him hold his baby—that’s what’s happening today, do you all fucking hear me?”

There was a rather cowed response of “Yes, Mackey,” and Mackey harrumphed in response.

“We will
not
get soft about this,” he promised. “Not this visit. Maybe next one, yeah. But not this one. This one, we’re just sayin’ hi.”

A stocky middle-aged man with gray curly hair, wearing a pricey leather cowboy hat, matching boots, and clean, unfaded Wranglers, waved Debra around the back of the perfectly sculpted yard to a hard-pan dirt spot behind the multicar garage.

“Damn,” Trav said in surprise, and Mackey cackled.

“Wow—it’s like a 50/50 ice cream bar! Wouldja look at that?”

The front of the house may have been all faux English garden, but the back of the house was dusty horse farm. There was a stable about a hundred yards off of the house and a practice ring behind that. Mackey marked four different pens—each one roughly half the size of a football field—with a galloping Arabian horse in each pen getting its panties in a bundle as the new car drove up.

“Horses!” Stevie and Jefferson piped up, excited.

“Grant hates ’em,” Kell muttered, and Mackey nodded. He remembered that about Grant. His old man kept them, paid a live-in trainer, dragged the family to horse shows every weekend, and fawned over the creatures—but not Grant.

Grant had escaped them.

Mackey, who had always known
exactly
how small he was next to an animal that size, had never blamed him.

Right behind the house was a little shaded patio with chaise lounges and a picnic table complete with a big umbrella to keep off the sun. Even though the air was brisk and the wind edged with cold, the sun was still bright and hard.

The young wraith in sunglasses and a bandana, leaning back on a chaise lounge, turning his face up to the sun and smoking a joint through coughing fits, did not seem to mind either the cold or the brightness.

He just looked happy to be there, under the heartbreak blue sky.

He turned toward them when they walked up, though, sitting up painfully and lifting his arm to wave.

“You made it!” he said by way of greeting, although Mackey knew they were probably a little early.

None of the boys wanted to get there late.

“Yeah, well, when we heard it was a day getting high in the sun, we could hardly hold ourselves back,” Mackey retorted.

Grant took a pull on his joint and raised his eyebrows. “Just ’cause you’re jealous,” he murmured. “Besides, I’m almost done, and then you all can come in and see the baby. You haven’t met her yet.”

Kell walked up and claimed brother-privilege by hugging him. Everyone followed suit like they hadn’t just seen him two days before, but nobody said anything.

Unspoken things—stupid unspoken things: Grant Adams had a finite number of hugs left.

They talked excitedly while he finished up, giving him the details of the fight after he’d been hustled out.

“Yeah, you shoulda seen Mackey!” Stevie burbled. “Man, Trav just crouched low and caught Del like a charging horse—”

“Delmont, really?” Grant asked animatedly. He looked at Trav and nodded, adding a low whistle. “Man, that takes ball-balls—he’s freakin’ huge! There’s rumors that man kills people with a swing of his fist!”

“He would have,” Trav said, and Mackey wanted to weep when he didn’t sound grudging or hostile or anything. “But Mackey jumped on his back and wrapped his arm around the guy’s throat. Didn’t quite put him down, but it did
slow
him down before the cops could Taser him.” Everyone laughed, and Mackey brushed Trav’s hand with a careful fingertip. God, he was trying.
Thank you, Trav, thank you thank you thank you.

“Man, Mackey was always the fiercest, but he couldn’t pick his fights for shit. He’d get
whaled
on by the biggest guys. Kell, how many times did we have to beat up little kids to keep him out of the shit?”

Kell groaned. “God, it was a nightmare. And Mackey, in like, the third grade—he’s like that cartoon, right? The ‘I’m a chicken hawk and I eat chicken!’—and then he’d walk up to the biggest, toughest guys and nail them in the jaw. It’s like the whole school was lining up to dust his weenie little ass and Grant and I were taking guys out in hallways to keep them from jumping my little pain-in-the-ass brother!”

“Well, you suck,” Mackey drawled, “’cause I know a bunch of them slipped through!”

“Well, dude….” Kell looked at Blake and shook his head. “He is
so
much less a pain in the ass now that he’s come out. Man, I think if teachers knew that, they’d be asking
all
the scrappy kids at school if they were gay, just to get it out there and stop having to bandage up the poor Mormon kids who didn’t see it coming!”

Blake grunted. “I’m sayin’.” He looked at Grant and shook his head just like Kell had. “Man, he was insufferable. I was just not ever gonna be you. And then I found out why, and yanno, I didn’t mind so much.”

The group laughed like it was all a long time ago and it hadn’t ever ripped Mackey into little pieces and stuffed him full of chemicals so he could get up and do it again.

But that was okay, because Grant laughed too and met Mackey’s eyes in a moment of understanding for just the both of them.

He’d hurt too. Suddenly Mackey knew—they’d
both
been hurt. The only thing that had put the hurt to an end for Grant had been the end itself.

Mackey had been the lucky one.

“Oh!” Grant said excitedly. “There’s my girl!”

Samantha had put on weight, but more than that, she’d put on
lines
, deep, deep, bitter ones in the sides of her mouth. She looked thirty-five instead of twenty-six, and she walked with the kind of aggression Mackey had seen in the women in town. The women Sam’s age who had to buy their eight- or nine-year-olds recorders in the music store but who had to sacrifice their own shoes to do it—those women walked like Sam did. Like she’d given too damned much already and she was going to begrudge the whole fucking world until she got her some back.

“You said you wanted to see her,” she said, her voice hard.

Grant smiled hopefully into her eyes. “Yeah we did. Here, let me hold her a minute.”

She was barely a toddler—still tiny, less than a year and a half old. She was dressed in a little pink sweat suit, with her curly brown hair mercilessly scraped into two corkscrew pigtails on the top of her head.

“Daddy! Kisses!”

Grant took her, his arms visibly trembling a little with the weight. “Y’all, I want you to meet Katy. She’s gonna be trouble, and she’s my baby, so y’all need to watch out for her or I’m coming back to haunt you, you hear?”

“That’s morbid,” Sam said. “Grant, I wish you—”

“Sam,” Grant said, looking at her beseechingly, “you haven’t even said hi to the guys.”

“Hi,” she said resentfully. She didn’t even look at Mackey. Her gaze lingered on Blake for a moment, and Grant introduced them. “You don’t look gay,” she said suspiciously.

Blake caught Mackey’s eye and grimaced. “I’m not, mostly,” he said. “I leave that to Trav and Mackey. They’re good at it, so it’s okay.”

Mackey chuckled deliberately. “Well, I’m getting better with practice,” he said with false modesty, and his brothers laughed.

“Well, I think it’s disgusting,” Sam said with venom. She reached out for the baby, and Grant angled his body protectively. “I don’t want her out here with these people,” she said, like she hadn’t grown up with all of them.

“Well, that’s not your choice anymore,” Grant said levelly. “That’s why the lawyer’s here, and that’s why Mackey brought Trav. She’s a part of their lives, Sam, and she’s gonna be after I’m gone.”

“You’re hateful,” she hissed and then turned and stalked away, leaving the air frigid and toxic.

The baby snuggled into Grant’s arms for a second and then struggled to be let up. “Damn,” Grant said, setting her down. “Jeff, Stevie, could you guys chase after her? Blake, could you help? I gotta talk to these guys for a second.”

They were walking after the little girl even before Grant finished speaking, and Grant breathed a sigh of relief. “She likes watching the horses work!” he called and then fell back coughing.

“You need to come inside.” The voice was unfamiliar, and Mackey looked back toward the house. The man with the curly hair and the cowboy hat—Grant’s dad—was walking from the front yard with a purposeful stride.

Grant kept coughing, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and coughed into it. When he pulled it away, it was flecked with red, and Mackey closed his eyes.

“Dad, you need to take Mr. Ford inside and talk to the lawyer, okay?”

Mr. Adams narrowed his eyes. “Grant, you know your mother and I don’t like this—”

“And I’m dying, and I hired my own lawyer, and he drew up the papers, and they’re my last will and testament, and Mackey needs to know. Trav’s going to be there to keep it all aboveboard.” Grant might have been closer to dead than alive, but damn, he’d grown a backbone in the past two years. “I want this, Dad. I gave up everything, my whole life, for the things you expected me to be. But I want this—and for once, I’m going to get what I want.”

“Fine!” Mr. Adams snapped. He glared at Mackey and Kell. “You boys should be proud of yourselves. Man, all the things my boy had, and the only thing he wanted was to be white-trash faggots like you.”

Mackey was going to say something, but God. Grant looked so sick. He didn’t have the heart.

Kell looked Grant’s dad in the eye, though, and damned if Mackey’s brother didn’t say, “Our house is bigger than yours. And it’s in LA, so the property values are higher. And more than a million people screamed my brother’s name last year. If you’d been any less of a bastard, just think—your boy coulda married up.”

Grant’s dad actually took a stump-legged step toward Kell, but Trav left Mackey’s side and stood in the way.

“Grant said I needed to talk to a lawyer? Why don’t you show me the way.”

It wasn’t a question. Not really.

Mackey stood back and watched them go, missing Trav’s warmth at his side already. He and Kell turned back to Grant, who smiled in relief.

“God, that’s a load off my mind. I mean, I was going to do this anyway—I had the lawyer draw up the papers before your mom came by—but I’m just so glad I get to tell you.”

“Tell us what?” Kell asked, squatting down.

Grant leaned forward and touched foreheads with Mackey’s brother. “I have been sitting on this porch for an hour,” he said, smiling. “Think you and Mackey could help me across the yard? Man, I hated this place for so long, but I sure would like to see more of it right now.”

Kell nodded and stood. “C’mere, Mackey, get his other side.”

He smelled like old pot and sickness—even a little like urine. Mackey guessed it was probably hard to get to the bathroom when everything hurt. As Mackey and Kell helped him stand up to walk across the yard, the scant weight on his shoulder felt hollow and insubstantial, like the bones of a dying bird.

But Grant kept talking like his body hadn’t wasted away, and his life with it. “Yeah, Katy can’t get enough of the horses. For a little while after we moved back, I was in remission. I used to get home from work and take her out for an hour, just walking around, talking to each horse and the chickens. At least one of us liked ’em. We’d ride the tractor and yell at the dogs. I miss doing that with her.”

“She’s going to miss you.” Mackey was glad Kell could say it.

“Yeah, well, I like to think I’m not going to miss everybody. I’ll be here.”

Mackey’d thought about it—of course he’d thought about it. He’d been damned near suicidal—hell
yeah
he’d thought about the afterlife. “I like to think you’ll be far away,” he said apologetically. “Someplace green, like England. You’d like England. Man, the pubs are awesome. You can just walk in and drink a pint and if you root for the right team, you’re everybody’s best friend.”

“So you want me to spend the afterlife in England?” Grant asked, but he was smiling, so Mackey knew he wasn’t hurt.

“I want you to spend it somewhere you’re happy,” Mackey said sincerely. “Happy and free. All the beer you can drink, all the ass you can handle, and nothing but good fucking music unless you want a golden silence and a sunrise, you know?”

“Hmm.” Grant’s legs stilled for a moment. Mackey and Kell both turned to look at him, and his eyes were closed, and he was doing what he’d done on the porch—turning his face toward the sun. “That’s a real nice afterlife you got planned for me,” he said happily. “I’m down with that.” He started moving again, toward the barn, so they followed, supporting as much of him as they could. “I do have to confess, there’s really only one ass I’m interested in, but it’s taken.”

Mackey grunted. “Yeah, well, Trav’s possessive.”

“I appreciate that I got you on loan today,” Grant said. “Kell, what do you think—is Trav good enough for your little brother?”