Dirty Wings (11 page)

 

 

Maia can't say what it is that stakes her through the heart. His eyes or his mouth or maybe even the music, which is like all the music Cass has given her but also more so. More something. More than just the promise of each chord. Something bigger, the way that Bach is made up of tiny pieces of order pieced together into a quilt of god far more immense than the sum of its parts. But this music is not god's music, not anything to do with glory. She's not so new to this world that she doesn't recognize with a flicker of delight that he's playing for her and her alone, that Cass is fading into the darkness at her side even as the face in front of her grows more illuminated with the light of their eyes on one another. She imagines a chorus of celestial voices, something ethereal carrying them toward the rafters. His white-blue eyes burn right through her, all the way to the bloody gristle of her heart.

After the show is as easy as breathing. She waits in the parking lot, Cass in tow, as the band loads their equipment into a rusty van with
CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE CHRISTIAN ACADEMY
painted in fading letters on the side. There's also a drummer and a bassist, a rhymed couplet of torn jeans and patchy facial hair, but they're of no interest to her. The singer's name is Jason, and when he looks at her she can feel all the blood in her body rising to the surface of her skin. She tells him they have nowhere to stay.

“There's a beach near here we can camp at,” he says. “All of us. If you want. Half an hour, maybe.” Cass is a wall of silence next to her.

“Sure,” Maia says. The couplet has finished loading amps and instruments into the back of their battered van, are climbing into their seats, smoking and talking softly among themselves. She looks straight into his eyes. Here she is, out in the world, free as anything. The Maia of six months ago would never in a million years have believed this Maia could exist.

Maia follows the red wink of the van's taillights through the maze of city streets to the freeway north. Cass is quiet in the passenger seat, rummaging through their tapes and putting one in Maia's never heard before. A woman's voice fills the car, big and haunting, singing in a language Maia doesn't recognize against a background of church bells and strings. The music is orchestral and spooky and full of longing, and outside the night is moving past them, filling up with stars as the city slips away and they fly further and further into the dark. Maia can't think of what to say and so she's silent, and the bells ring more and more majestically, tolling down a deep minor progression. To their left the silvered black mass of the ocean heaves liquid and humming against the shore. “Who is this?” Maia asks when the song ends and the tape clicks over to the other side.

“Dead Can Dance,” Cass says, looking out her window.

“It's beautiful. What language is that?”

“She made it up.”

“Cass, is something wrong?”

Cass pulls her tobacco out of her pocket, rolls a cigarette, lights it. The windows are already open. She blows smoke toward the hills. “No,” she says. Ahead of them, the band's van is pulling to the side of the road. Maia parks behind them, touches Cass's shoulder as she reaches for the door handle.

“You're not telling me the truth.”

“No.” Cass gets out of the car before Maia can say anything else.

They follow the boys through patchy scrub and beach grass to where the sand begins, carrying dirty blankets from the back of the van. The tide is out and there's no moon. The boys range up and down the beach, gathering sticks, until they have enough to start a fire. Cass builds a little pyramid of dried grass and twigs, lights her construction, coaches it into flame. When it's crackling merrily she adds a few pieces of driftwood. The boys arrange themselves around the fire, pull bottles from their pockets and bags. Cass offers a joint. Jason paces to where the breaking waves roll up to the beach, touches his fingers to the water and brings them to his mouth before loping back to join them. He sits next to Maia, close enough that the fabric of his jeans touches her shorts-bared skin. “Communion,” he says, explaining, Maia assumes, his brief foray to the water's edge.

He offers her a sip of his pint bottle. “Communion,” she agrees, and he laughs. Maia tilts her head back, lets the whisky slide down her throat and turn to courage. Cass is trying to catch her eye; she dodges Cass's unsubtle stare. The joint makes its way around the circle. Cass rolls another. He's asking them questions but instead of answering she takes the bottle back, and so it's Cass who tells him where they're from and how they got here. Cass leaves out the bad parts, leaves in the punk rock and beach sleeping, makes them sound like warriors in the right kind of battle. Maia can't help grinning at the sound of her own story made majestic. They're revolutionaries, storming the gates, piling the paving stones into barricades.
Sous les pavés, la plage.

“Runaways,” he says when she's done, but he's the first of them to bring up the word.

“Not really,” Cass says, and then, “I guess a little.” Maia can feel the length of his leg pressed against hers. After her third chug of bourbon she lets her weight shift into him and is rewarded by the touch of his hand at the small of her back, his fingers burning through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. It's the drummer who tells Cass and Maia their own saddish story: boys from a little town on the peninsula, cemented by their love of Black Sabbath, Black Flag, and their high school football team's penchant for beating them up each in turn before they gave up the fight and dropped out. Guitars passed down from older friends and older brothers, their first amp, their first drumkit, their first show at somebody's kegger out in the woods. Jason listens to this detailing of his shared history without comment. Kicked out of their parents' houses, sleepless nights curled up with forties in the backseats of cars. Et cetera. And now here they are, doing their best to make a name for themselves. Playing their first tour, basement shows down the coast, passing a hat around to a crowd of filthy punks who reward them mostly in singles and quarters. Cass and Maia have had the privilege of seeing their first real paying gig—fifty dollars, the barkeep handed them, on their way out the door—scored for them by a friend's friend's friend who'd moved to LA and almost made it big some years back.

“It won't be like this for long,” Jason says suddenly, cutting off the drummer and the bassist's Greek-chorused narration.

“No?” Cass says, her voice spiraling into arch disbelief.

“I'm going to be the most famous musician in the world.”

“And then get rich,” offers the drummer, who's clearly heard this all before. “Get rich and die old on a pile of thousand-dollar bills.”

“I won't get old,” Jason says. “You know that. I'll be the biggest star in the world, and I'll kill myself before I'm thirty.”

“Sure, man,” says the bass player, yawning. “Spoken like a true rock god.” Maia frowns.

“You shouldn't say stuff like that,” she says. “Even joking.”

“Ah, he's not joking,” says the drummer. “But he's still full of shit.” The drummer throws an empty beer can at Jason. He catches it, leaps to his feet, shakes his dirty hair, and runs away from them toward the water again. Maia curls her fingers around the secret of his touch, brings her fist to her chin. They are all quiet for a while, save for the occasional whoop from the darkness. Sounds of splashing. Maia can hear a soft buzzing and realizes it's either the drummer or the bass player's snores.

“Goodnight, girl,” Cass says from the other side of the fire.

“Goodnight, Cass,” she says, her heart full of love that can't find its way to her tongue. How can you ever tell a person all the things you feel for her? Goodnight warrior, goodnight queen, goodnight girl who set me free. Goodnight my best and only friend. Goodnight and here we are, on the edge of something. What edge, Maia doesn't know, but she's sure it's a glorious precipice. She remembers herself at the campground in Big Sur, standing on the cliff, remembers Cass pulling her back to safety. Was she drunk? She can't remember. She'd wanted to jump and she cannot, now, remember why. Something out there in the dark waiting for her. Honey and the sound of wings and a dog howling.
Silly,
she thinks. If she had jumped she would not be here, now, on the brink of whatever magic is about to come her way. She thinks of Jason's hand on her back and thrashes a little, deliciously. Maia rolls herself up in a blanket that smells of pot and cigarette smoke and boy, watches the fire flicker and quiet into reddening coals. She doesn't hear him come back until he's dropping down to the sand next to her, his voice at her ear starting her out of her half-doze.

“You asleep?”

“No.”

“Want to go for a walk?” Maia lifts her head. The drummer is canted backward across a log, jaw hanging open, pint bottle still clutched in his right hand. The bassist is sausage-rolled into a blanket, his back to the fire. Cass sleeps pretty as a girl in a painting, one blue wisp of hair falling across her soft cheek, her hands tucked up under her chin.

“Yeah,” Maia says, shrugging her way out of the blanket and getting to her feet.

He takes her hand as he leads her down the beach, away from the fire's embers and into the starry dark. The air is clean and cool and salt-heavy, and she opens her mouth wide to gulp it down. All around her the night is listening, the universe waiting, as she is, to find out what happens next.

She's too dizzy with desire to mark the passage of time. His cool hand in hers draws her along. They dawdle at the tideline, dancing away from the edges of the waves, until she yields to the inevitable and water laps over her bare feet. She lets go of his hand long enough to squat down and drift her fingers through the ebbing wave. Sand rushes past her, bits of shell, slick tangles of seaweed. He leads her back away from the water, tugs her down next to him on the sand, and when he kisses her it is, she thinks, the first and only time she has ever been kissed, because all the kisses she has ever kissed before this were nothing like a kiss at all.

What is this,
she thinks,
oh god, what is this, what the fuck is happening to me.
Like drugs, but bigger than drugs or more necessary or more new, newer even than the flood rush of speed in her veins or the slow sweet daze of pot or the burning glory of whisky in the back of her throat. This is something else again. This is a thing that will erase her and remake her in its own image, this is what she was playing for all those years.
Oh Oscar, this is what you meant.
He is kissing her, kissing her, her mouth, her throat, the fine soft skin of her eyelids, her earlobe between his teeth, his lips at her ear, the hot rough sound of his breath.
Take me with you,
she says with her skin to his skin, her hands to the muscles of his body,
wherever you are going, wherever you are from,
and his hands trace the letters of his answer across her thighs, under her shirt to the place where her shoulder blades fan out like wings.
Anywhere I go with you now is the same place as home.
She kisses him back with all the longing in her body, and when his face grows clearer and clearer she thinks at first it is because she is at last seeing him truly, until he takes his mouth away and says, “Look, it's dawn,” and they lie together in the sand, her head on his chest, and watch the sky lighten as the sun comes up into a new world.

“Drive to Mexico with me,” he says, and she says, “
What
?” and he says it again. “Drive to Mexico with me. Today.”

“I don't even
know
you,” she says.

“Love has nothing to do with knowing.”

Everyone, it seems, is an authority on this subject, save her. “I just learned your name. Like, twelve hours ago.”

“You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. Say yes.”

She props herself up on one elbow and looks at him. He's shielding his eyes from the rising sun, staring her down with that azure gaze. He is, she realizes, totally serious. She starts to say
of course not
and then she shuts her mouth on the
no.
Isn't this what Oscar told her she lacked? Passion? Isn't this what Cass has been teaching her these last months? To say yes? To anything, to all of it, the good ideas and the bad ones? Who is she now if she is not someone who's learning to tell her own stories? If she is beautiful, he's more beautiful still: Underneath the stubble and the dirty hair, those eyes, the cut of his cheekbones and the clear line of his jaw, add up to the visage of one of the gods in her mother's books. He's looking up at her, beseeching, and sure she doesn't know him but who knows anything anyway and isn't this the grandest thing that's ever happened to her, and so she opens her mouth, laughing, and says, “Why not. Yes,” and then he kisses her again, laughing too, and leaps up, unbuttoning his jeans and scrambling out of them, half tripping, pulling his shirt over his head. He barrels pell-mell into the ocean hollering “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and what else can Maia do but take her clothes off, too, with no more grace than he had, and run after him, shrieking as the wall of turquoise water hits her with the force of a fist. He splashes toward her, picks her up and whirls her around like they're in some old-timey movie and not buck-naked in the Pacific with her only friend in the world just down the beach, and then he falls with a crash into the waves, taking her with him. Salt up her nose and in her face and she's laughing too hard to mind it, staggering to her feet, pulling him with her. Kissing him again and again, and he hoists her up and she wraps her legs around his waist and he stops kissing her long enough to say, “This is some music video,” and then she's laughing again, so hard he nearly drops her. “This is crazy,” she gasps, but he doesn't hear her.