2.

Forgetting the time difference, I phoned and woke Claire. I needed to hear a familiar voice, and figured she’d be the only person who’d care where I was. Even in her befuddled state, she seemed unconvinced when I told her I was staying a bit longer to see Boston and Philadelphia. I hung up knowing I had no number I could be called back on, and that soon I’d be in another town and it would be the same story there. I’d just be some figure who’d roll in and vanish as quickly as he’d arrived. Nobody would know my name unless I wanted them to. Something about it excited me, though I felt like it shouldn’t.

I zigzagged south-west, taking convoluted routes passing through as many towns and green-shaded areas of my map as possible. It could take an entire day of winding roads and old bridges over creeks twisting through valleys and towns to move a straight two-hundred miles towards the next city on the map. On the road, I didn’t have many people to speak to. My days’ most meaningful connections were made with the bartenders, motel receptionists or gas station clerks of towns I found myself in. I would dawdle and prolong conversation to try to feel some form of companionship with these people. I found I was talking to myself a lot.

I called ahead and booked a room at a hotel in Louisville North, Kentucky. Its foyer was connected to a Mexican restaurant with a bar. At least I wouldn’t have to walk far that night. I picked up my room key and drove towards the rear of the hotel. The sun was setting behind the wing my room was in, casting a shadow across the adjacent pool. A group of shirtless men stood on a balcony, drinking cans of beer and smoking cigarettes on the second floor. I parked in the late afternoon sun behind the building, knowing it would be shaded come the morning I was to leave.

I put the roof up and my shirt back on. A few days earlier, I’d discovered the Miata’s air conditioning did zilch and had resorted to driving with the top down for as long as I could each day to manage the heat. My shoulders and chest had burned raw a few times already and were beginning to darken, along with my face and arms. The strap of my bag cut into my pink skin as I hiked up the staircase at the end of my wing.

The group was still there, five of them, loud, most no older than me. I took note of the room numbers as I walked along the balcony and counted ahead to mine. It was one door past where they were: perfect. They quietened as I approached, turning sideways to fit through the little space the group made for me.

‘Recede, motherfuckers. Let the man through,’ said a guy with blond tips, as he leant his back against the railing, elbows on top, a knee bent to rest his bare, dirty foot flat against a rail. They did. He brought his head down to the cigarette between his fingers and not the other way around. ‘Cut him some slack. Can’t ya see the man’s been deep-fried, flipped and fucked?’

The group laughed. Blondie was the man.

‘Cheers,’ I said, dropping my large bag to the ground outside my door and pushing my key into the lock.

‘You look like shit, brother. Where’d you come in from?’ he asked.

‘Cincinnati.’

‘Oh, no wonder then.’ The group laughed again and even I found myself smirking. ‘Tell you what, drop your stuff off inside, wash up if you want, and get back out here. We’ll have a beer waiting for you. Ice cold.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, smiling. He slid off the railing, hiked his jeans up over his exposed pubis, and walked over to me with a proffered hand. ‘Chris.’

‘Mark.’

‘Alright, you motherfuckers hear that?’ he asked, addressing his followers. ‘This here is Mark, and he’s gonna be helping us drink all that beer we got. You remember the name so you know who to thank when you wake up tomorrow able to remember which city you’re in for a change.’

The group roared as I closed the door behind me. The sounds of cans being crushed and new ones cracked open made its way through the wall. A night on the drink would be nice. A night off it might be nicer. I took a long shower, towelled off and got into bed. I listened to the laughter and hollering outside. None of them sounded lonely. None of them were lying in empty beds in empty rooms either. I got up, put on only my jeans and stepped outside barefoot.

Chris was a man of his word, thrusting an unopened beer at me before my door had even closed behind me. The group was different now. Three of the guys had gone, and another two and a girl had taken their place. The girl sat with her back against the wall, facing out towards the pool, listening to someone speak. She looked up at and through me. I smiled and lifted my can; her expression remained unimpressed and unchanged. She turned back towards her friend.

I drank a beer and then another. I’d been drunk more times than I cared to remember in the past few months, but that evening was the closest I’d come to the first time’s euphoric sensation. The dread of tomorrow and the pain of today melted away. All I needed was a few drinks, or maybe a few friends. I mingled, being introduced to someone and forgetting their name right away. They seemed to be on a constant rotation, one or two disappearing at a time into a room along the wing and another one or two emerging from another, about nine in total, the group on the balcony seldom in the same arrangement twice. Chris explained they were roadies working a gig in town and had every room on the floor except mine. ‘We were wondering which poor bastard was gonna end up with yours,’ he added.

We polished off a case of beer and opened another as the sun set. The sky was tinted pastel, seeming somehow both impossibly far away, yet close enough to be grasped and scrunched up into your pocket. I found myself sitting next to Chris with my back against the railing, across from the girl who hadn’t moved. Monica was her name, but I hadn’t found out because she’d introduced herself.

The group quizzed me about Australia in the same one-dimensional way I was getting used to. My answers had become streamlined after being asked the same things so many times. ‘Did you ride your own kangaroo to school?’

‘Yes, but only when the family one was in for repairs.’

‘So what are you doing here?’ Monica asked all of a sudden.

‘I’m kinda … driving around aimlessly.’

‘Why?’

‘Just trying to see as much of this country as I can.’

‘Now why the fuck would you want to do a thing like that?’

She spoke softly but there was an edge to her words.

‘Don’t mind her,’ Chris intervened, ‘we get carted all over this damn country for work. Easy to forget sometimes people do it for fun.’

Monica looked at me for a moment before turning away, lighting a cigarette and sipping her beer. She’d had more than any of us, at least in the time I’d been there, and I was drunk. She looked South American, maybe, with crimson lips and dark eyebrows which framed her face in a way that made her seem angry. She seemed dissatisfied with everything, but especially with me for whatever reason.

I wondered what this world had done to her. I couldn’t help but notice her legs. Brown skin charted her ankle, past her knee and up her thigh, disappearing into the darkness inside her skirt. She might’ve been Chris’s girl so I looked at something else.

The roadies started trading stories, each more ridiculous than the last. Whoever held the floor would stand in the same place on the dark balcony – an exposed globe above like a spotlight over the bard. I was seated at the back of the group, leaning forward and looking on with a turned head. One of them stood and began the story of the cursed harness. ‘Oh, this is a good one. Listen to Dave, listen to Dave,’ Chris said, flicking my shoulder with the back of his hand without turning back to me, already enthralled by the story.

‘So me and the regulars on this gig, we all got our own equipment, of course,’ Dave said, ‘but we were getting a few kids as extra help in each town. These kids are just, whatever, replying to ads in the classifieds, they don’t do this kind of thing; they don’t own their own gear. Anyway, we had these harnesses, helmets, etcetera, left behind from other gigs that had become “property of stage management”. These kids used that equipment. I mean this shit was worn out, but the kids helping in each town didn’t know that.’

The people who’d heard the story before started to squirm.

‘We do this one town. It’s all going pretty standard, right. Dave – Other Dave – any of you ever met Other Dave? Well, anyway, Other Dave calls in with a sick stomach. Probably shitting pure bourbon from the night before. He’s meant to be on high rope with me. I try to get it all done by myself, but we’re behind schedule. Stage manager and my boss put this kid – he’d done, like, two shows – on the goddamn high rope with me instead.’

The group all exhaled and shook their heads. High rope was bad, I guessed.

‘I tell ’em not to do it, they don’t listen to me. They put us up, and this was a thirty-five, maybe forty-foot rig. I tell the kid to keep an eye on his slack. He’s trying to, but he’s nervous and the buckle is worn to shit.’

I felt something press against my ankle. I looked across to see Monica’s leg spanning the balcony towards mine, the dirt on the sole of her foot rubbing off against my denim. She was looking at me with the same bare, empty expression as before. I hadn’t noticed her eyes before. They were deep; the kind of deep a man could fall into and never be seen again. I shifted my foot away from her.

‘So we’re making good time, the kid is a good worker, but suddenly he slips. Now, he was doing a good job pulling slack out, but that buckle would serve you a good six feet of it if you even looked at it the wrong way. The kid drops and almost goes ass-up out the harness when the rope takes. I get over there fast as I can.

‘Now, here’s the thing, it wasn’t a big drop, but the kid is screaming. I’m talking the kind of scream that still sends a chill up my spine thinking about. I figure he’s just afraid he’s gonna fall the whole way out the harness and he’s screaming for the Lord, but not long after I get to him, I see this blood, right? This little stream of blood, running from the inside of his shirt and down his neck onto his face. I look up. One of the leg straps, bitch had come so loose it’s got the buckle of the other one caught up inside it.’

Again, I felt a rubbing on my leg. Monica’s leg had straightened out further to reach my ankle. Her other leg bent at the knee, thigh pressed against her chest, hands clasped around her ankle. She placed her chin on her knee, looking at me with the same blank stare. ‘What are you doing?’ I mouthed to her without a sound. Nobody else had noticed. If I moved my leg any further I would’ve kicked Chris. I sat in checkmate.

‘His pants are soaked through with blood already. What happened was the loose strap had caught on and brought the other buckle across like a goddamn guillotine on this poor kid’s dick when the rope caught. So there I am, stuck thirty-five feet up, with this kid bleedin’ out through his dick, upside down, screaming. Anyway, we got him down and into an ambulance. He was fine, a few stitches I think. So, then, the next day …’

She wasn’t tiring of it at all. She was a sadist. Maybe she couldn’t get her kicks by embarrassing me so she’d settle for watching her friends kick the shit out of me. She rubbed against my leg through my jeans, and then, with a dextrous toe, slid the cuff up a few inches and rubbed my bare ankle with her foot. I felt myself start to rise. She withdrew the leg, tucking it up like the other. I looked into her eyes. They seemed like they held in a lot more than they let out. The tired dams of her life.

‘I wake up, hung over as a motherfucker. I’m talking top-ten here. I manage to get myself in the car and start driving. Pull over to throw up a few times on the way, whatever. Venue is about forty-five away and I’m already late. I get to the parking lot, turn to the back seat, and … I’ve forgotten my gear.’

I listened to the story, but watched her. She rested her head against the wall behind, mouth ajar. I don’t think she’d blinked. I don’t think I had either. Without even a glance to see if anyone was watching, she began to move the leg furthest from the roadies, its shadow on the inside of her other thigh descending as her knees came apart.

‘Now, I know I’m not getting paid for a full day already, so I can either drive home to get my shit and lose another two hours, or take my chances. Then I remember the kid from the day before. I just … I hear that scream in my head and it makes me cold. So you know what I do? I go the fuck home, call my boss and tell him I’m feeling unwell. He starts yelling, all tough, that if I don’t come in today not to bother coming in at all, whatever.’

The shadow reached the valley as her knee reached the floor, and I could see it all. Taut and serious like the rest of her, adorned by a solitary tuft of hair worn high and proud like a crown. It stretched and sighed, the balcony’s fluorescent light clambering onto and falling from its intricacies as they glistened and moved with her slow, deep breath.

‘I go in the following day. Everybody’s real serious – don’t really want to look at me. I think I’m either getting my ass kicked or fired or both, for sure. Boss says he wants to see me. I go into his office; he asks me if I’ve been told what happened the day before. I play dumb, ya know, but, shit, turns out I didn’t know anyway. Those dumb fuckers. They put another kid in that same harness and the same damn thing happened. Only this one’s in intensive care and the parents are suing the asses off anyone involved.’

There was pain in her eyes, I was sure of it. She was probably thinking the same of mine. I stared into them and then back into her. She rocked her hips up and down on the tiny piece of skirt separating her arse from the ground, pulling herself tight and then relaxing. I took a drag of my cigarette and blew it out, watching her deep breath steal the smoke from the air between us, pull it in through flared nostrils and push it out through her hanging mouth. We didn’t need words; this was maybe the best conversation I’d ever had.

‘Cops, they seize the harness; my boss and the stage manager, they end up getting charged and doing time for it. I mean, that alone is messed up, but, man … I could’ve been that fuckin’ kid. I could’ve been the one hanging upside down, approaching those pearly gates with my dick in two. Shit, I got real lucky – someone was looking out for me that day. That harness is probably out there somewhere, too, you know, locked away in some evidence room … Probably still has all that dried dick-blood over it as well. Fuck.’

Chris began clapping as the rest of the group erupted in cheers and whistles. He turned to me. Monica pushed her skirt down over herself just in time. She was swift but not frantic. She was a mystery. He gripped and shook me by the shoulders. I clenched up for a moment.

‘Have you ever heard anything so fucked up? Ha!’ he asked, wide-eyed, his words slurred as he tried to keep a cigarette between his lips.

‘He got very lucky,’ I said to him, projecting the words towards her. ‘Could’ve ended real badly for him.’

Monica looked at me for a moment with her same expression. I waited until my swelling went down, then stood and headed into my room’s bathroom. When I came back out, she had vanished.

‘Where’d she go?’ I asked.

‘Mon’?’

‘Bed,’ another responded.

‘Pretty sudden. She alright?’

‘Eh, she gets like that. Bit loopy,’ he said, running a circle around his temple with his finger.

The last case ran dry. Chris and I threw wrinkled, dirty T-shirts on and ambled into the foyer’s restaurant-bar with dirty, bare feet. We took stools at the bar and ordered last-minute feeds and nightcaps. The staff looked unimpressed, but they didn’t say a word. I assumed they didn’t want trouble, and I assumed they didn’t want it from Chris.

The following night was the last of the shows in Louisville before they’d pack up and head to St Louis. Chris told me to swing by his room before 11 a.m. the next morning and someone would have a spare ticket for me. ‘It’s fuckin’ country music, but you’ve never seen so much ass squeezed into such little shorts in your entire life,’ he said. His life sounded exciting – a lot more than mine. I daydreamt what it would be like to travel across the country with them. A tour convoy tailed by a Miata. Hard, dangerous work by day, Monica by night. I could manage both as long as they’d replaced the harnesses.

‘How long have you been doing this?’ I asked.

‘The shows?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Too long, brother.’

‘Why do you do it then? I mean, how can you spend so much time on the road?’

‘The money is good – real good, and it’s easy when you don’t really have a home. You don’t belong anywhere, so you can just keep … leaving things behind.’

‘Where was home before you started doing this?’

‘I’ve, ah, I’ve got a little girl. So it’s wherever she is. That’s where my home is. Right now that’s Kansas, but, I’m not welcome there no more.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I did some bad things. I did some bad things and I did some time and now her mother doesn’t want anything to do with me. But … she’ll come around.’

Chris seemed different from there – less chatty; the charisma had been stripped away. What did I expect? I’d held a man by his ankle just long enough for whatever he was running from to catch up. I’d done what I resented other people doing to me. He stared across the restaurant in silence and then his head crashed down onto folded arms on the bar. He convulsed in what I thought was laughter, but then I heard a cry.

‘My little girl, man. My little fuckin’ girl. She’s out there without a daddy,’ he whimpered into the bar. Other patrons watched on. The bartender motioned to me that Chris was cut off and I nodded understanding. ‘Come on, let’s get you back to your room,’ I said.

I walked with Chris past the pool with his arm over my shoulders. He could barely support his own weight and I wasn’t in much better shape. I looked up to the empty balcony. His colleagues had all gone to bed. A good thing, I decided; I didn’t know how they’d take seeing him like this.

‘Hey, Mark,’ he said as we reached the top of the stairs.

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t tell my boys about this.’

‘Of course.’

‘Man, please. I’m serious. If you tell any of my boys about this, I’m … I’m gonna hurt you. I’m gonna hurt you real bad,’ he said, pressing a finger into my chest.

‘Alright, relax.’

‘I’m not playing around. I’ll put your nose through your fucking brain.’

He pushed me. He was strong, or at least a lot stronger than me. It launched me into the wall behind, my back slamming into it, my head following suit. I keeled over, bracing myself from my knees. Suddenly all I wanted to do was sleep. Chris walked over to me.

‘Goddamn it, you see? This is what I do,’ he said, labouring words out of his limp, drunk jaw.

He caught hold of me, lifting me by the collar of my slack T-shirt as if he was going to hit me. I clinched in preparation, but didn’t try to stop him.

‘You okay? You’re being so nice to me, like a brother, and I hurt you. I fucking hurt you.’

‘It’s okay, I probably deserve it in some way,’ I said, coughing.

I found my arm over Chris’s shoulders as we staggered back down the balcony, bouncing off the wall and the rail.

‘Hey, those arses in the shorts tomorrow though, eh?’ I said.

‘Oh, buddy, they’re … they’re majestic. You’re gonna love ’em. Hey, say ass again.’

‘Arse.’

‘Are-ess?’

‘Arse.’

‘Heh, that’s funny.’

He left me at my door.

‘You’re a good man, Mark.’

‘You too.’

I fell into my room, collapsed onto the bed and passed out.