WES: OW FUCK
COREY: what is there still glass in your hand or something
WES: NO IT’S THIS STUPID SCORPION UPHOLSTERY
Actually though there was still a bunch of glass in my hand.
17.
YEAH THERE WERE SHARDS OF GLASS IN THERE STILL
In a lot of ways, Ash was the least girl-like girl that either of us had ever met. She had memorized multiple Angus Young solos and was completely indifferent to the cleanliness status of her own hair. It was impossible to imagine her, for example, Instagramming herself in a bathroom.
But the blood coming out of my hand brought out a relatively girl-like side of Ash.
“Fuck,” she said. “I feel like this is my fault.” She was holding my hand and arm and kind of running her finger over the wound.
“It’s all good,” I said. I would literally cut myself with dirty highway glass every day if it led to this, I somehow prevented myself from saying.
“There’s definitely some glass in there still,” she said, pulling the cut apart a little bit.
“Uuuuunnnnnnnnnn,” I said.
“Does that hurt?”
“Nnn.”
“Sorry.”
“No. Do it again. Because that shit does not hurt at all.”
“YUP,” barked Corey like a dog.
It was near sunset when we finally found a CVS. It was in Fargo, Alabama, and it was pretty busy. Fargo seemed to be mostly black. Definitely everyone in the CVS was black. So we got some attention when we walked in there. Although it may have been less about us being the only nonblack people in the CVS and more about the bloody washcloth tied around my hand. We had cleaned up my arm a little outside a gas station with bottled water, but I still looked like an extra from The Hunger Games.
Also we smelled terrible. So that was probably getting us some attention, too. We collectively smelled like Jennifer Lawrence’s armpit.
We rounded up some medical supplies kind of at random—gauze, rubbing alcohol, silicone scar sheets, a three-pound bag of Mike and Ikes—and were waiting in line when the guy in front of us turned and said, “Buying all that for your hand?”
He was a tall, fortyish, stripey-polo-shirted guy with a brisk conversational manner.
“Uhhhh,” I said.
“Do you need medical attention on that hand,” he asked, this time less conversationally and more like a high school vice principal who is dealing with that one kid that he has to deal with all the time.
“Oh,” I said. “This hand? No. I don’t think so. But thanks.”
The guy just raised his eyebrows, like, are you sure.
“He needs medical attention on his dick,” suggested Corey.
A silence fell over all of us.
The guy stared at Corey with a total lack of facial expression.
Corey responded by inspecting various parts of the floor, fidgeting, and softly humming a goat noise.
This went on for a longer time than you would think possible.
“You know, he probably does need his hand looked at,” said Ash eventually.
The guy nodded, still staring at Corey. “Charlize,” he called. “Boy needs your help.” Then he went to the cashier and bought cigarettes and we never saw him again.
Charlize turned out to be a woman getting a prescription filled at the pharmacist’s counter. She was tiny and sixtyish looking, and she had her hair in a purple flower-patterned Russian-peasant-type babushka. Up close we saw that her arms were criss-crossed with what looked like decades-old burn marks.
She made no secret of being not amped at having to deal with us.
“You can’t just go to urgent care?” she muttered, unwrapping the washcloth.
“We’re in kind of a rush,” said Ash.
“Also they’re closed,” said Corey.
“Corey,” said Ash.
Charlize just shook her head impatiently. “Hand me that alcohol, please, and go fetch some cloth pads,” she told Ash, and fished a tweezers out of her purse, and sterilized it, and pretty soon she was just straight-up performing surgery on my hand in the middle of CVS with a bunch of increasingly enthusiastic spectators.
“Where are you children from,” she muttered to us.
“New York,” said Ash. “Pittsburgh,” I said at the same time.
“Around here,” said Corey.
“Corey,” said Ash again.
I was too busy focusing on not thrashing around and sobbing uncontrollably to investigate Charlize’s medical credentials. But Ash asked her if she was a doctor.
“Nurse,” she said. “Retired.”
“Why’d you retire so young,” said Corey.
She raised her eyebrows but didn’t look up at him. “How young do you think I am,” she said.
You could hear Corey trying to think again.
“Thirty . . .” he said, “four.”
She clearly was incapable of coming up with a verbal response that expressed how dumb she thought this was. So instead she shook her head and made a little coughing noise of derision.
“Three. Thirty-three.”
“Not twenty-three?” she said, with no smile at all.
Then she pulled out the last and biggest chunk of glass, something loosened up in my hand, and what felt like a pint of my own blood just sort of plopped out of there onto the linoleum, and almost everyone else started shrieking and panicking and a couple of spectators actually passed out, and in general it was just chaos.
Not too long afterward, we were out on the street and my right hand was wrapped up super tight, and Ash and Corey were peering around into the distance trying to figure out whether we wanted to stay in town or not.
“This seems like the direction hotels and bars and stuff would be in,” said Ash.
“I don’t think we’re gonna find anything, though,” said Corey.
“Well, let’s at least look,” said Ash.
“We’re gonna waste like an hour, though, just driving around and not finding anything.”
“How could that possibly be more of a waste than getting back on the highway.”
“The highway’s got signs for Motel 6 and stuff.”
“Yeah, but then we’d end up staying at Motel 6.”
“Yeah. That would be tight.”
I saw Charlize about half a block away, lighting a cigarette and kind of eyeing us.
“No,” said Ash. “That would not be tight. That would suck a bag of dicks.”
“Motel 6 is badass. It’s not even named after a word. It’s named after a number, because they give no shits.”
“Six is a word, and Motel 6 is where you go if you’ve been evicted from your home and you need a place to do the meth that you just stole from the corpse of a prostitute.”
“You don’t know anything about Motel 6. You just embarrassed yourself with how little you know about Motel 6.”
“Where are you children trying to go,” called Charlize.
Somehow no one could figure out how to answer as she walked back over to us.
“Are your parents traveling with you?” she said.
“We’re a band,” I said. “So we’re pretty much on tour right now.”
“We are on tour,” clarified Corey.
“No teachers?” she pressed. “No adults?”
“I’m twenty-one,” Ash told her.
Charlize gazed at Ash for a very long time.
“And they’re nineteen,” Ash added.
Charlize nodded, slowly.
“Where’s your next show, if I may ask,” she asked us.
“We’re figuring it out,” said Corey.
“We don’t really have one,” I said.
“Right,” exhaled Charlize, like a teacher who had finally gotten us to explain what a cosine was. “Right. That was my sense. I am about to make an offer to you. Are you ready? You’re listening? The offer is of a place to sleep, and some food to eat. Now. This offer is one time only. No hard feelings if you turn it down. But. The offer
will not be renewed. So consider it carefully, take a moment to confer amongst yourselves, and—”
“Yeah, we would like that a lot, please,” I said, and fortunately neither Ash nor Corey tried to fuck it up.
Corey and I squeezed into the back so Charlize could have shotgun and give directions to her house a few blocks away.
“How old are y’all, seriously,” Charlize wanted to know.
“Seriously, I’m twenty-one,” said Ash.
“If you’re twenty-one, I’m Michelle Obama,” announced Charlize.
There was a meditative silence in the car.
“And I am not Michelle Obama,” clarified Charlize. “Because the man I married is not the President of the US of A. He is more like the President of the US of PYF.”
She gazed out the window.
“United States of Picking Your Feet,” she said eventually, kind of to herself, and somehow that was how we knew she didn’t hate us.
“My dad picks his feet,” said Corey.
The President of the United States of Picking Your Feet was not amped about the three random kids who were going to sleep in his house.
“Charlie,” he announced. “These young people have got to go.”
We were in the living room with him. He was sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea and a book called The Mauritius Command with pirates on the cover. His name turned out to be Ed, and I would describe his fashion sense as “frumpcore.” It was socks and flip-flops, pants that looked like they were meant to be worn in a lab over your actual pants, and an old mucus-colored polo shirt that somehow had a hole right over the belly button. It was a look so committed to late-middle-age frumpiness that you had to respect it.
“They have nowhere else to stay and you can just deal with it for one night,” Charlize called down from upstairs, where she was making some beds.
“NNNNNNOPE,” shouted Ed, staring squarely at me.
“Yyyyyyyes sir,” called Charlize.
“I will NOT be responsible for the children of strangers.”
“That’s funny, because my crystal ball says you most certainly will.”
“I am deeply opposed to this foolishness.”
“We really appreciate this,” offered Corey, but Ed just stared at him wordlessly for ten seconds. Then he repeated, “Opposed.”
“Oh, go oppose yourself,” we heard Charlize say.
“I am strenuously opposed to this latest misbegotten misadventure.”
“Ed, it sounds like the second-floor toilet’s still acting up.”
Ed exhaled a few times through his nose.
“Charlie,” he called upstairs, in a more rational tone of voice. “Suppose the police come by. Suppose they make the discovery of three children in our home—white children—without the knowledge or express permission of any type of legal guardian. Now tell me realistically what you think might happen next.”
“The police are not gonna come by, and by the way only one of ’em’s white.”
He did an eye roll so hard that it was kind of amazing that he didn’t dislocate his eyeball.
His next move was to peer intensely at each of us in turn, clearly with the purpose of getting one of us to break. Unsurprisingly, that person turned out to be Corey.
“His parents are also white,” volunteered Corey, pointing at me.
Ed turned his CIA-interrogator-type stare back to me.
“I’m adopted,” I said, feeling ridiculous. “From Venezuela.”
Ed nodded gravely, as if this information could possibly have been of any use to him.
“I grew up outside New York,” added Ash irrelevantly, at which point Ed cut us all off by throwing his arms wide and saying, in a slow and reasonable voice, “Now look. You three can appreciate my predicament. Am I being asked to harbor runaways?”
It is safe to say that none of us had any idea what the fuck to do. We all just stood there nodding at him thoughtfully. We were trying to nod in a way that said, We appreciate your predicament, but not in a way that said, Yes, we are runaways that you are being asked to harbor.
“In the eyes of the law, will I be culpable of harboring fugitive minors? In the eyes of the law.”
We continued nodding in our halfhearted, confusing way. Ed seemed to just be addressing me. He thinks I am the leader, I tried not to realize.
“Tell me,” he boomed. “Am I complicit in some funhouse-mirror perversion of the Underground Railroad?”
I had to stop nodding in order to contemplate what this meant. Corey just nodded even more vigorously. And Ash started shaking her head. So we looked like total idiots taken as a group.
But somehow that response was the one that satisfied him. Because he grinned and went, “HA.”
And then, mysteriously, he just let it drop. He cleared his throat, sipped some tea, picked up The Mauritius Command, and went back to reading it as though we weren’t there.
We shuffled upstairs to three made beds in three different rooms. Charlize was lying facedown on the floor in my room when I went in there. She got up briskly as if that was a totally normal thing to do.
“Just resting,” she told me, patting me on the arm and walking out.
Charlize told us we could play a little backyard set after dinner, and neighborhood folks would come see us and have some beers and stuff. It seemed like Ed wouldn’t possibly agree to let this happen, but nonetheless, we rehearsed out there for a couple of hours while the sun set, and no one stopped us.
This was clutch, because no one could remember any part of any song. Also I needed to get used to playing with the heel of my right hand all wrapped up. But the main thing was we were still just getting started on figuring out how to play with one another.
I mean, I was really just beginning to learn who Ash was as a guitarist. Like the specific things she liked to do and when she liked to do them. But also, I was starting to understand her overall musical personality, which seemed kind of sloppy and haphazard until you really started listening to it and you realized that actually she was in total control.
She was never right on the beat. She liked to come in a split second late, or early, and was always putting either too many notes into a phrase or too few. She’d shadow the bass part for a few bars, like an intro or a verse, but with all kinds of hiccups and ghost notes that made it actually a different part completely. Or she’d set you up with some very orderly squared-away blues comping and then, without warning, stamp a big weird note over it in a way that kind of made your skin jump. But it was all super intentional.
Her whole thing was about giving you whatever it was you didn’t expect, and so for me and Corey it became about giving her the maximum amount of space to do that, and getting as tight and gridded-out as we possibly could, and for a couple of hours that’s what we did, and we couldn’t be totally sure but by the end we were starting to feel like we really were onto something.
Charlize and Ed’s four sons came for dinner. Two of them brought their wives and kids. We were spared the indignity of eating at the kids’ table in the living room. Instead we got squeezed in among the adults despite there being not really enough room for all of us.
Dinner itself was some kind of poached fish, plus a million delicious sides. In an effort to get at these miraculous sides, I kept accidentally elbowing the guy next to me, who turned out to be Ed Jr., a.k.a. Little Ed. Eventually he mumbled, “Just tell me what you want I’ll get it, okay.” He did this without turning his head or making eye contact.
That was all he said until Charlize started telling the story of how she met us.
“Well, my heart sank when I saw Walter in that CVS because you know Walter, he’s like a hypochondriac but for everybody in the room, and sure enough he sees this young man with his hand wrapped up, and he hollers, Charlize! Hey! Charlize! I need you to look at this! And soon as I say, look at what, he just goes, whoopee!! and—and books it out of there, knocking people over, leaving a Walter-shaped hole in the wall. But it isn’t that false o
f an alarm because this young man Wesley does need some attention, and Wesley, I don’t want to embarrass you, but you looked a little like a hobo standing there, sorry but you did, you had a dirty little bloodstained washcloth around your hand like you were going for your Hobo Patch in Boy Scouts—heh—Quincy, don’t make me laugh—and there’s all kinds of dirt and grime and shattered glass in his hand just begging to get infected. So I cleaned it out and then I sent these three on their way—”
“The evidence would suggest you did no such thing,” said Ed.
“Ma, what were you doing in CVS,” said Little Ed, in his mumbly scratchy voice.
“Ed, I did send them on their way, but then outside I catch up to them arguing and bickering about motels, not a parent or a teacher in sight, which, let me ask you three, is that normal for you young people? I’m not judging, I’m just curious, is that a normal circumstance?”
“I will answer that question,” said Ed cheerfully. “NO. No, it is not. There are three runaways sitting at our dinner table.”
“Pop,” said Quincy.
“You three would’ve told me if you were runaways, I hope,” Charlize asked us.
My skin got very hot and itchy and I squirmed involuntarily. Corey stared at his food unhappily like it was forcing him to watch an episode of the news. And Ash was completely expressionless, which somehow made her seem the guiltiest of all three of us.
“Their silence is deafening,” said Ed, munching some fish.
“Ed, let them speak.”
“You,” said Ed to me. “Do you have express parental consent to be in this house.”
Fortunately, I had a full mouth. And I knew that having a full mouth was going to buy me a little time. So I tried to chew the food as conspicuously as possible. But I was not able to use the time that this bought me to have any kind of productive brain activity.
Everyone continued to wait for me to say something. I knit my eyebrows and puffed out my cheeks a little bit, hoping to convey the idea of, There is a whole bunch of food in here. So I probably will not be able to talk for a while.
Unfortunately, puffing out my cheeks caused a small amount of stuffing to lurch out of my mouth and into my lap.