The Excitable Boys play a full hour. Mostly originals from the album Russell gave me, but a few covers like T.S.O.L.’s “Silent Scream” and The Cramps’ “I Walked All Night.” They conclude with Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” After the final feedback dissipates, the members drop their instruments on the stage and step behind the curtain without a word. Applause follows for nearly a full minute after.
“You think I could meet them?” Caroline asks the bartender.
The blonde wipes the bar clean with a moist rag. “I guess. On through the back.”
Caroline lifts the guitar case, pulls me off the stool and we navigate through the people clamoring for drinks. I squeeze between leather-clad shoulders studded with spikes, women who smell of skunked beer and marijuana. Caroline opens the back door, pushes me inside and closes it behind us. We swim through total darkness, hands searching until I discern the margins of a narrow hallway. We follow the sound of voices down the path.
After a moment of blindness, the room materializes. Strangers mingle around a row of liquor bottles, laughing as they toss back shots or stand in a circle passing blunts. Cigarettes are dropped to the concrete floor and left to smolder out. I search the crowd and find the band members lounging on plush couches augmented with duct tape. The guitarist is smiling at a girl who’s picking fake blood from the hair of his goatee. She stops plucking at the coagulation as Caroline approaches, but the band members all keep their seats. Only Russell stands from the chair he’s been straddling.
“Are you lost?” he asks.
Streaks of mud run down the lapels of his dinner jacket. He’s much taller than Caroline and uses his size to loom over her, teeth exposed in a grin that shows incisors capped with long fangs. He wasn’t wearing the teeth when he came calling at my house. I wonder how he can sing with them in his mouth.
“I brought Hollis to the show,” she says.
“That’s awful sweet of you,” Russell replies, but his focus has already shifted to me, eyes brightened by the same hero worship as before. He lays a hand wearing a dirty white dress glove on my shoulder. “I’m really honored you came.”
Behind us, two girls lie atop a table. Two men sprinkle their taut stomachs with salt, then lick the exposed abdomens before sucking tequila from the hollows of the girls’ navels. Tongues trace their way up toward eager mouths. A vacuum-hard snort through a rolled bill echoes from the far corner of the party and another girl is swept off her feet by the potbellied drummer, swung over his shoulder like a bindle as he performs a swaying dance. Her giggles turn to a cackle that pierces the murmured conversation. She might be nineteen. The same sort of safety pins in her earlobes and black-nail-polished punk as Angela growing up.
“That for me?” Russell asks and points to the guitar case.
“Once we agree on a price,” I say.
He nods. “I’m thrilled you changed your mind. Can I offer you a drink?”
“No, thank you,” I say. “Just wanna talk business.”
“We got plenty of time for that. I’ll have to swing by the house for the cash anyhow.”
Russell gestures for me to sit. Across the room, Victor sparks a fresh joint and passes it to the guitarist. Remnants of fake blood stain the paper. Everything about the man makes me uneasy. The way he stands off to the side of the party, not engaging with this group of misfits, feels wrong.
I sit and listen to Russell hold court on music. The partygoers lean into his talk, but after about five minutes of his diatribe on X, Caroline asks if they have anything to drink. Victor escorts her to the keg. Russell keeps me cornered, talking so fast about The Stooges that spittle flies from his lips. Occasionally during his lecture, Russell pulls an iPhone from his pocket and texts someone.
“So, you’re a musician?” the guitarist asks me. He’s a large man with neatly trimmed, purposeful stubble that I’m tempted to call a “city beard.”
I don’t know how to respond. I don’t want to give up any more information, and I’ve lost track of Caroline in the crowd. Russell pulls his dress gloves off with his teeth. Lets one of them hang limp from his mouth as he talks. His eyes are covered in enough eye shadow to resemble black holes. “Hollis used to jam with Angela Carver before The Troubadours.”
The guitarist gives an amphetamine-induced titter.
“No shit,” Russell says and sucks on the passing joint. “He’s the best musician in the room.” No one challenges the statement.
When Caroline returns, she’s clinging to Victor so that half the snaps on his shirt have popped open. Her cheeks are flushed, all the muscles in her face slack. I’m not sure what she’s taken, but her eyes have the wet slickness from a fresh line. It’s been something strong. Caroline can typically handle enough drugs to stun a mule.
“What’s with all the makeup?” Caroline asks. She slurs, tongue too medicated to enunciate.
“Don’t we look pretty?” Russell asks.
Caroline laughs and falls against Victor’s chest. She straightens up as Russell leans toward her.
“Appalachia is the right place for the grotesque. Don’t you think?”
“It’s nothing new to me,” Caroline says. “I lived here my whole life.”
“Then you understand how people see it,” Russell says. “A fatalistic, feudist country. Half the town has a man who’s died in a mine somewhere. Some relative who stood in the picket line during strikes. As far as the rest of America is concerned, we’re different. Have you seen the protesters?”
We passed the protesters along the highway again this evening. Men, women and children all holding signs attributing atrocity to Watson Chemical. Sludge ponds of mud left behind where the company used to wash its coal, now quagmires rumored to swallow up small animals too foolish to avoid them. One day, when the companies are finished with this place and the strip-mined mountains are free of people, those preserved skeletons will be all that is left. I wonder how Russell really feels about these people. Sure, he runs with Victor and spouts his rhetoric. Even now the lecture he’s laying on Caroline is more reciting the things Victor has likely taught him. Still, I’m not sure one could totally turn against their family. It took years for me to dispel my father’s influence and even now, on the right sort of night, I can awake with the certainty that The Reverend’s preaching was true. That I’ve lived a false life and eternal Hellfire awaits. If gospel ghosts can linger like that, why wouldn’t the influence of something as tangible as money hold Russell’s allegiance?
“But what does any of that have to do with corpse paint?” Caroline askes.
“A local girl should have read Anthony Harkins’s Hillbilly,” Russell says. “Heard of it?”