Fiction: Magic Man

By Zach Dundas

 

At the time Paul walked out on us, I didn’t have specified vocabulary for my brother Roy. I would have said that Roy did magic. To be honest, I’m not sure I can improve on that description even now. 

Paul, my nominal stepdad—he had specific words for Roy.

“Crazy motherfucker,” for example, when Roy, bored by a Gunsmoke rerun, conjured a whirling fireball in front of the TV. Or: “Devil-worship son of a bitch,” the time Roy caused Paul’s dinner plate to flip Swiss steak on to his white corduroys. 

Roy projected energy, summoned heat, manipulated objects from a distance. He seemed to influence people in an uncanny, wordless way. These peculiarities manifested when he was about eight years old, and flourished with puberty. No one knew why, and it was divisive, especially given Roy’s personality. Paul blamed Roy for driving him and my mother apart—though to my thinking, that had more to do with Paul being an abusive boor. The man got prickly whenever my mother defended her eldest son.

“Your fucking old lady, little man,” he once said to me with grim formality. “And that boy: Satan’s own work. Take my advice. Come sixteen, get the fuck out. That’s what I did. Made me who I am.” (An insane statement if you knew the man.) 

This situation came to a head one afternoon as I sat cross-legged on the living room’s brown shag, playing Connect Four with my sister June. Paul stood rifling through the LP crate—angry, precise, we all knew this mode—about to drop ash off his Kool straight down Johnny Cash’s forearm on the Bitter Tears cover.

Mom stood between kitchen and living room, bead curtain rattling around her bony shoulders in a Virginia Slim haze, red-eyed but somehow also amused. “Don’t even think for one fucking second you’re taking the Tanya Tucker,” she said.

Paul did, in fact, have the Tanya Tucker album in his hand.

“Like I fucking would.” He slapped Delta Dawn aside. “This shit over here is your shit. You can keep your Tanyas and Dollys and Lorettas and all those bitches. I paid for them, you fucking keep them. Last thing I need, today on out, is another goddamn woman in my ear, listing off complaints.”

“I better find Rumours in there too, then, you son of a bitch.”

“Yeah, goddamn perfect. Witchcraft music, witchcraft kids.” He brandished Buck Owens’ You’re For Me like Exhibit A and started yelling again. “Where I’m going, this is the shit we’re going to listen to. Real shit. Not any more of this—” he nodded at the mom’s-shit stack “—or this.” He gestured towards the hall, towards the room I shared with Roy. We could all sense the vibrations emanating from there: Zeppelin, boiling up “Heartbreaker,” that king-sized intro. Roy liked it loud.

Mom snorted. “‘We’? Who’s ‘we’? You going to charm the pants off some truckstop skank with your rendition of ‘King of the Road’?”

Within minutes, Paul pulled a puffer vest over his pearl-buttoned plaid shirt, slammed out, pitched the record crate into his pick-up and blasted down the dirt road out of Treasure Pines Estates. June ran into the kitchen to bawl into Mom’s hip. Mom tore at the rotary dial. I cracked our bedroom’s door into the hot bounce of “Living Loving Maid” to find Roy stretched out, wearing cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt. 

“He’s gone,” I yelled.

Roy—jet mop hair straggling into a rat-tail, baby mustache, lithe and muscled despite never exercising—jumped up. He snapped fingers on both hands. This shut off the stereo instantly. He made a celebratory Old West-six-gun gesture, bright blue flames sparking from each hand. “Well good goddamn.” He pressed a fist into his right temple and closed his eyes. “And—hold on. Hitting the highway. And—now—flat tire. Tits.”  I couldn’t always tell when Roy was bullshitting about these things. “Let’s do inventory.”

He shoved past me and bolted our tract house’s length, past our sister drinking a calming Kool-Aid, past Mom in deep telephone commiseration. 

In the adult bedroom’s cologne-scented murk, Roy yanked open a dresser drawer, empty and light. 

“Shit. He took the skin mags.” 

He tried another, shifted a few T-shirts, and produced a virgin pack of Kools. 

“See, Waylon? Old Paul wasn’t so bad. Left something for the new man of the house.” He ripped the packet, pulled out a cig and lit it using only his left middle finger. “Like they’ve been saying, Wayls. Paul is dead. I am the Egg Man, and Paul is dead.”

Recalling the moment, I can see that a chain of events had commenced.

 

*

 

Later that year, Judas Priest released British Steel, and Roy shoplifted a copy for me. He had a technique: stroll a shop with a pleasant, blank expression; don’t touch anything. “Just browsing, man,” he would say, with a flouncy affect he himself found hilarious. The cashier would soon wander off on a miscellaneous task, as if he or she had remembered a high dusty shelf. Grab in one clean motion, exit. We all engaged in recreational shoplifting now and again. Only Roy could knock off a 12-inch LP as easily as a Snickers bar.

I dropped the needle on British Steel when it was me and Roy at home—and June, I suppose, back in her room, Mom absent on unknowable missions. “Rapid Fire” sent me around the living room in tight circles. I somersaulted off the couch. Those first three songs, even now, sink me in childish jubilation. The chorus of “Metal Gods”—just “metal gods,” droned, cold as ice—triggered a four-chord guitar chime, oddly optimistic for a song about machines destroying humanity. 

New feelings stirred: entangled desires to smash windows and get laid. 

Roy sat in Paul’s former armchair. “It’s good,” he said. “No doubt about it. A little bit like the punk shit, though. Not real, real heavy.” 

I don’t remember Roy talking about “metal” very often. I was the one who boosted Kerrang! copies and studied the genre’s gnarled family tree. Roy swore by primordial sources—Zeppelin, Sabbath, Purple. He considered my taste lightweight. 

 

*

 

 Some shitheel speculator had scatter-gunned Treasure Pines across a few acres back when the G.I. Bill was new and zoning yet unknown in our corner of the West. An obsolete quarry divided our “neighborhood”  from the woods—quarry, frontage road and pulp mill marked out a triangle around our dirt streets and their mix-and-match of double-wides and kit houses. We would mess around in the quarry’s gravel and dry knapweed. Trina Jones owned a Panasonic boombox, and I’d rigged our bedroom stereo so I could dupe albums on cassette. (Roy avoided such tasks, saying “electrical shit” made him queasy.) I’d play Deep Purple. Roy would accompany “Highway Star” by mounting a boulder and shooting bolts from his fingers. 

Car batteries detonated. Propane canisters were entertaining too, and once we filled a milk jug with gasoline and Roy achieved volcanic results, leaving a quarry wall blackened and smoldering. Trina and I reclined on a filthy green sleeping bag, Roy’s audience. She slotted between us in age, with a judo fighter’s build, a talent for drawing dragons and nymphs on notebooks and jean jackets, and witchy taste in eyeliner. I wanted her so badly, sweat poured down my ribs in her presence. She naturally gravitated more to Roy, and once I walked in on them in our bedroom, shirts and undergarments askew every which way. 

Roy’s distinction was well known around Treasure Pines. Girls took notice. Boys sniggered, yet dodged his gaze. Grown-ups said little; everyone had shit going on. Women typically had to wrangle motley crews of siblings, half-siblings and wayward cousins from out of state, the Pines being a place kids ran away both to and from. Men did shade-tree work in car repair, tattoos, gunsmithing, the like. More conventional types might land pulp mill jobs until, so often, a late night ran into morning and a shift was missed. With police in and out, Pines people practiced homespun omertá. Folks were tired, drug culture was pushing 20 years running, and there was TV on. 

I do remember one of Mom’s G & T nights with Peggy Jones and Jo LaPointe, June and I working in the kitchen as those three nattered over celebrity mags. 

“So, Linda—” Peggy Jones liked to cut to brass tacks. “—Roy. How’s boy wonder?” 

They’d been into the gin for two hours. June stood on tiptoe to reach into the freezer. My mom smoked into the ceiling corner, head-weaving to “You’re So Vain.” 

“You know, it’s not easy, raising a child with a difference. I have been thinking, it’s obviously so genetic in part. Like father, like son, you know.”

Peggy and Jo both giggled.

“Right, prince of the flower children,” Peggy said.

“You always did say he was a skillful motherfucker,” Jo said. 

“The mother being me,” my mom said, sparking jollity. June sighed and poured frozen tots across a cookie sheet. This was not the first I’d heard of it: Us kids, supposedly sired by a man who’d vanished after mom fell pregnant with June. 

I have two recollections of him—I think. 

In both, he’s long-black-haired and gaunt of face. In the first, he sits tucked into a loveseat while a TV plays, eyes amused, rolling a blue glowing sphere of energy like a ball bearing between skinny fingers. In the second, he’s maybe the same man, maybe not, in the passenger seat of a Ford Maverick, parked on the high berm between the Pines and the mill, watching Roy and me screw around outside, windows rolled up, a blurry female figure at the wheel gesturing at him.

I don’t know if these memories are real, or what the story with that man was.

 

*

 

The day after John Bonham died in England, Roy didn’t get on the school bus. When I came home, he was in bed, using “powers” to make the record player repeat “When the Levee Breaks.” 

I believe my brother decided that if John Bonham could die via boozy mishap at a country home, Roy Thanet should seize the goddamn day. 

My mom meandered into a job around then, doing books, inventory and credit checks at a tire distributor. It suited her. She could wake early, do her face to Loretta Lynn, chit-chat in the office all day, clock out at three, drink, gossip and run picayune errands til eleven. Mom needed little sleep and enjoyed having some money. Her routine left no time to intervene in her eldest son’s withdrawal from Mountainview High. Anyway, dropping out was not even noteworthy in the Pines. 

For his part, Roy stepped right into a quasi-paternal role—as if, by his own definition, he had actually graduated. He woke us every morning with Sabbath’s “Supernaut,” fried eggs and hashbrowns. June still brought home crumpled collages and tempera paintings, and Roy curated the refrigerator door.

The only indication that Roy might be a case apart came in late October, a mundane Saturday. A maroon sedan rumbled up. A pantsuited woman with an ear-length wave climbed out, as did a male cop. June and I retreated to kitchen eavesdropping positions. Mom got the door and made TV-educated inquiries about a warrant. The lady explained it just wasn’t that kind of situation. 

Sarah Karls of Child Welfare and Detective Superintendent Dick Holmquist sat on the couch, Mom on the edge of the armchair.

  “This isn’t even an official visit,” Sarah Karls continued brightly, though she opened a fake-leather folder and poised a silver pen. 

Through the beaded curtain I could spy Holmquist, with his genuine cop mustache, running eyes over the room. 

“It’s Saturday,” Karls added, as if no door ever got kicked in outside the regular nine-to-five. “My office heard about Roy’s struggles at school. We wanted to check in.”

Mom’s body language shifted: a snap decision, I could tell, that it was fine to dislike this bitch. “Roy’s not struggling in school,” she said. “He’s not going to school. So he can’t really struggle, if you follow me.”

Sarah Karls paused, then she and my mother traded salvos. 

Some of Roy’s teachers had made, well, unusual notes about him. 

That sounded like fucking discrimination to my mother. 

The concern was social and psychological maladjustment. 

If they thought Roy was crazy, they hadn’t spent time in the Pines. 

There were the other two children to consider. 

The other two children make straight fucking A’s, hard to know how or why.

Where was Roy today, by the way? They would love to check in. (That phrase again: harbinger of wage garnishment, the county holding cell.) 

Why, Roy was out looking for work, bless his heart.

Soon enough, I was face to face with Sarah Karls at the kitchen table. 

“Does your brother Roy ever do things you find odd, or maybe troubling?”

“He doesn’t like Van Halen II.”

Pause, scribble, scribble. “Does he ask you to do things you know are wrong?”

“Yes. He asks me to turn off Van Halen II.”

That’s about as far as Sarah Karls got with me. She traded for June, little suspecting that June hadn’t said more than two straight words to anyone in two years. Some other professional headshrinker labeled this “selective mutism,” but apparently that finding had not been recorded in Sarah Karls’ fake-leather folder. 

I was headed to my bedroom when the Detective Superintendent spoke. 

“Have a seat, Waylon. I’d like a word with you and your mother both.

“You’re just now old enough for this kind of talk, Waylon. Why, you’re almost old enough to be charged as an adult for certain felonies under the laws of our fair state. And certainly of an age that juvenile detention would be the recommendation, should any major transgression occur. No question about that. Still young enough, on the other hand, that juvenile detention—as an experience—would be quite unpleasant for you. Likely dangerous, certainly life-altering.” The officer chuckled. “These are the things we worry about in my line of work, Waylon, and Mrs. Thanet.”

“Miss.”

“Like I give a damn. Anyway, that is not my point. My point is that your so-called family needs to be aware that I have a filing cabinet in my office. In that filing cabinet resides a memo from the United States Department of Justice. The memo contains a list of a dozen federal agencies, all of which would love to know about someone like your Roy. Name. Address. Proclivities. All the funny little things, observed and overheard, about the likes of Roy Thanet. And I’m here today, on fucking Saturday, because I don’t want those agencies to know any of this.”

We both looked at him, nodding wisely, as if we were old hands at deceiving the United States. In the next room, Sarah Karls was outright pleading.

“I can see you both asking yourselves, why is this selfless officer of the state’s third-largest police force taking the trouble on a precious weekend day to relay this personally to us, a Treasure Pines slut and her fuckwit offspring? I assure you it is not for your benefit. It is simply because: I. Don’t. Want. The. Fucking. Feds. Around. And if Roy and his little magic shows ever get out of hand, around the Feds will be—so far up my ass, and yours, collectively, their eyebrows will poke out of our mouths.”

My mother snorted. “That’s not even a thing people say.” I was never more proud.

“You get where I’m going, Miss Thanet. And let me add that, by some cold-blooded calculations, it would be better for my department if someone like Roy Thanet just disappeared one day—if, for example, he became a focus of federal interest.”

Mom lit a cigarette with slow, exaggerated motions. It made me brave.

“We understand, Detective,” I said.  “Problem is, Roy can fry your nuts from twenty yards just by thinking about it, so go careful.”

Holmquist leveled brown eyes at me and, I’m sure, calculated how much bullshit completely trashing this place and its occupants would entail. “Let’s all just hope it doesn’t come to that, Waylon,” he said. 

Sarah Karls emerged, upright and blinking back tears. June had broken her, as I knew she would.

 

*

 

“This shit-simple asshole,” Roy said, spreadeagled on our floor, shirtless, armpit hair glossy, “Tangerine” quiet in the background. “Think, Wayls. Little cop doesn’t want the big cops around. Why? All the little cops are on the take. Strip clubs, keno, hookers, weed—they dip their beak, Wayls. That’s why Detective Man doesn’t want the Feds in town. Shit.” He dragged on a Kool. “So that’s fine. What it means is that—up to a point— they’re the ones who have to look the other way. I just got to keep an eye on that line.”

In truth, it was too late to dissuade my brother from resorting to supernatural powers or from illegal pursuits. By spring, his petty theft skills raised his profile. By summer, he no longer felt the need to steal small things. Weed dealing and sundry projects paid plenty. My brother knew ever more about his abilities, their parameters. He could fritz a car’s electrical system from a quarter mile, given a hearty breakfast and proper atmospheric pressure. Stroll a city block, discreetly disabling retail security systems? No problem. 

But one time a couple of out-of-town suedeheads with accents like old war movie villains came around, asking about a bank. “Nah, man,” Roy told them, “that would take, like, mega-wattage.” Later, to me, he said, “Maybe I even could do it, but I don’t need the hassle, you know?”

I did know. Roy had a steady retainer deal with Kirk and Eric Moscovitch, who drove black and silver Camaro Z28s respectively and needed part-time staff to maintain their volume of larceny. He also shuttled marijuana and cash for a woman known—not to her face—as Dark Monica. She lived in a basement apartment near campus, a warren of black drapes and twisted macramé, and had turned a regular Dungeons & Dragons night into an import/export hub. 

Roy didn’t do much with his money, beyond plucking a loose hundred from under dirty clothes to go to the mall. I decided to handle accounting. Treasure Pines harbored many entrepreneurs, and I collaborated with neighbor ladies involved in network marketing to launder Roy’s earnings into clean paper, which my mother deposited into the very bank he’d declined to rob. One time, we had a Moscovitch brother drive us to Idaho, where we bought a used Pinto for cash. We sold that to a college kid for a check drawn on her parents’ account.

If Mom ever worried, it proved easy enough to ease her concerns. She came home to a stocked refrigerator, a fresh bottle of Bombay in the freezer. She smiled and said, “My hard-working boys.”

           

*

 

One morning, I slept later than customary. Roy must have been out, or never returned home. I sensed an empty calm in our room as I first stirred. Empty it was not, however. When my eyes opened, June stared down at me.

“Jesus Christ.”

“I need you to take me to the mall,” she said, her voice deep, flat, raspy—a hunk of iron dragging on a dirt road, in the longest complete sentence from her in some time. “I want to buy some tapes.” She said each word with slow exactitude. Her brown-blonde hair draped around her narrow face. She looked like a coven elder and sounded like a Roswell Gray learning to speak human. June was a little character.

In Treasure Pines fashion, we had randomly acquired a 1976 Datsun 610, once blue, that someone had rolled down a mountain or the like. The passenger seat was just a sprung cushion, no seatback. I often drove, Roy sprawling across the shiny black back bench, as he didn’t like driving, or anything involving machines. (To Pines thinking, a license was a thing to drive your way into—earn your stripes first.) This day, June curled up back there. I clicked a Thin Lizzy dupe into the deck.

Westgate Mall was only a few years old then, not yet the battered sarcophagus it would become. Early hours, the huge spaces felt hazy and echoing, aromas of cleaning fluid and perfume testers not yet dampened by crowds. A cashier about my age nodded at Orange Julius, barely awake. 

There stands a sucker, I thought, devoid of enterprise.

In Spin City Tapes & Records, June produced a crumpled stenograph page and wandered the wall. I flipped through the New Hard Rock vinyl bins, wondering when Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance—great album title, also words to live by—would arrive in this remote outpost. June came my way, clutching a few cassettes.

“They only have three,” she said. “Of the ones I want.”

“Gang of Four. Buzzcocks. Some esoteric shit here, sister. Sex Pistols? Anyone could dupe that for you. Even Roy likes that one.”

“I want my own. In the package.” She stared at me, carefully running a finger over cellophane, which after three seconds I understood as my cue to pay.

Which branch of the middle-school misfit grapevine introduced June to punk rock? Perhaps no single source. Punk drifted in the air, available, though not so many tuned in. Of course metal and punk shared lineage, like Spanish and Romanian. And who among us would not Beat on the Brat With A Baseball Bat, or Want To Be Sedated? Still, I regarded punk with detachment: interesting, a useful laboratory to test high speeds and torsion stress, but not involving. I didn’t like punk’s low-church Methodist primness, someone always trying to make some nit-picky point. I didn’t want to watch zitty teens flail under a bare basement lightbulb. I craved full-on High Mass: strobe, smoke, the wailing of the peasantry, bent bishops and altar wenches adorned in blood-dipped robes and ermine collars, war-birds settled on their shoulders, darkling scepters and mysterious orbs. Heavy metal, I mean to say.    

But that was me, and June was June. Soon enough, she didn’t need me to take her to the tape store. Packages arrived from San Francisco, New York, D.C. She bought a tiny record player, relishing its crackling high-end. (June’s money, like mine, came from the Roy Thanet bedroom floor fund.) Mom’s haircuts gave way to self-inflicted buzz jobs, miscellaneous up top in skateboarder fashion. June would get a three-pack of Hanes T-shirts and scrawl them with permanent marker to read “THE GERMS” or just “X”—terrible looking, but I admired the effort. She adopted a thin leather choker that came off rather dashing, and discovered the bookstore/macrobiotic grocery near campus, an ambitious ride on her Schwinn. She bought badly stapled, ink-smudging magazines and photocopied pamphlets by the ream. 

Even I, scholar of amplified mayhem, could not fathom how so much reading could be required.

 

*

 

Economic changes, not to mention the repeal of several environmental laws, pushed the mill to round-the-clock shifts around then. Ripe wetness sat on us like a dome. Work became so plentiful even many Pines folk decided to get their shit together. New cars, or almost-new, started materializing like Easter eggs in the Pines dust. Karen Jones’s second husband acquired a chocolate-brown Nissan 280ZX and polished it often, sometimes shirtless. There was a shared feeling of a big wave coming, cresting, already here, foam creaming at its peak. Maybe even Treasure Pines could ride along. 

Mom allied with an inventory manager named Steven. He sat at our table one night, finger-combing his sideburns. Mom set places and cooked a main and two sides, acts as startling as Steven himself. 

He turned out to be fine, a font of well-meant questions. He even wiped the terror off his face when June spoke. Roy looked at Steven, looked at me, pursed his lips, squinted and nodded, like he’d entered a bland but acceptable hotel room. 

Mom lit a cigarette as I cleared plates. “I wrote Steven’s number on the pad,” she said. “He has a beautiful sunroom off his kitchen. What’s the word, Wayls? Waylon is my vocabulary guy. Conservatory? The light and air are perfect for my aerobics and I think I’m even going to start drawing again.” (She had a sketchbook, long untouched, of horses and birds, beautiful and guileless.) “You all have gotten so self-sufficient, and Roy is essentially a legal adult. Even if I’m at Steven’s, I’m just a phone call away.”

 

*

 

Within two weeks, Roy turned our Treasure Pines family home into an annex of the local demimonde. Wednesdays through Saturdays, the place would fill, starting at 6. Metalheads formed the first wave, of course, Trina Jones leading a troupe of girls in raked hair and denim bearing her own artwork. Then hold-over hippies shuffled ‘round in Birkenstocks. Weekend nights, the thin walls heaved with humanity: skateboarders, jocks gone off the radar, the Moscovitch brothers and hangers-on with frosted bangs and puka shell necklaces. 

I witnessed then a new dimension of Roy: host with the most, a smile and a cold Rainier for all, calmly handling subtle drug commerce. June sequestered in her room and cranked her record player. Young women would linger—first five or six, then three or four, circling around Roy. He’d glide from girl to girl in conversation, or ignore them completely to get deep on Jimmy Page with some fellow hesher mafioso. One (sometimes two) of our visitors would end up with Roy in our mother’s unused bedroom, others trudging into the night. 

I often then commandeered the turntable for Some Girls, my favorite Stones record for its gusty, open-door feel, perfect for late hours. I cleared empties and washed cigarette ash out of coffee cups, half-listening to animal sighs and electrical crackles from the bedroom. Roy’s guests emerged flushed, outfits ruffled, abstracted expressions suggesting altered knowledge. Roy would sidle into the kitchen in Paul’s old bathrobe, open the fridge, crack the last beer. My brother might softly chant some lyrics: “The man is back in town, so don’t you mess me around. Because I’m—”

Yes, Roy, you were dynamite. 

And what was I? I think I saw myself as steward of Roy’s gift. We operated on some open-ended mission—like a space program, art collective or architecture firm, no end in sight but the project itself. Roy needed back-of-house support as he kept busy with patrons and collaborators. I enjoyed accounting and chauffeuring. I felt only the mildest urge to party, despite my taste for debauched sounds. I sat at our table, doing geometry, sipping one beer, mentally reviewing albums track-by-track. My grades stayed high. I had more cash money than any rich kid in school.  

Not a Beatles man, myself, I did of course know the saga. I thought often about their great manager, Brian Epstein—though less about his end.

 

*

 

Usually, I waited at the wheel when we visited Dark Monica. One night, Roy, hopped-up on chemicals, insisted I come in. 

“Gonna be awhile, Wayls,” he said. “Momma will want attention.”

The woman herself answered the door in red velvet, leather corset peeking out. Dark Monica waved us into the open-plan kitchen/living room, murky with smoke, busy with her scene: some grad students, some never-graduates, none above considering The Necronomicon somewhat legitimate. Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief played. Four hirsute menfolk ringed a table in the center of the living room, led by a hawk-faced dungeon master who paged the D & D Monster Manual and pronounced commands. Veiled lamps and scented candles glowed on lumpen figures, couches and armchairs. Dark Monica trooped Roy straight back to her bedroom.

  Nervous, I indulged more than my custom. The refrigerator held Rainiers and California Coolers (nothing else), and I destroyed two Coolers in ten minutes, awkward and silent in the kitchen. Edge dulled, I ventured inward to survey the LPs. A pipe came my way, and I lingered with it. I half-ignored a couch conversation about Advanced Human Sexuality, imagining exactly that occurring in Dark Monica’s bedroom. 

Roy reappeared, reeking of sex and weed.

“Little brother. Cool if we hang out for a while? Gotta talk to some folks.”

I nodded, retrieved another California Cooler and let Roy mingle—two mistakes. 

Roy’s glad-handing shifted the mood. The volume climbed, Roy dispensing charismatic wisecracks and tight-rolled baggies. Dark Monica swanned in, now in a purple caftan, swigging wine from a bottle. The D & D boys played on. 

Deep in the vinyl pile, I found Hawkwind’s Doremi Fasol Latido, and scratched the needle off some organic folk record to slap it on. I glanced over at the Advanced Human Sexuality women, who stared back, twin puzzled faces. 

“You ready for a fucking mind journey? One is about to begin,” I said.

“Aren’t you Roy’s brother?” one woman asked.

“The first song is eleven fucking minutes long.”

“Are you as—interesting—as him?” 

“Lemmy Fucking Kilmeister on bass.”

I weaved back to the refrigerator. That Hawkwind track, “Brainstorm,” churns a venomous sludge, and that’s before it gets weird. I saw Roy catch on, jabbing his head back and forth without breaking conversation, lofting a horned hand as guitar and fright-night vocals grew chaotic around Lemmy’s fretboard. 

I knew it would happen before it happened.

At about the four-minute mark, Roy snapped his wrist and fired a foot-long silver spark at the ceiling. Every electrical device—except the stereo—flicked off, then on; I heard the refrigerator motor restart. After a freeze-frame second, Dark Monica cackled. “Hell yeah, Roy—show us what you got.”   

Roy twisted both hands and turned the stereo volume up to a psychotic level.

Roy glanced at my California Cooler. The liquid foamed up, out over my hand.

Roy swept a bow toward the players’ table, shouted something like “Away, rogue paladin,” and blasted papers, pencils and books into a blizzardy swirl. The dungeonmaster squawked, but I couldn’t hear him from the kitchen.

Roy pirouetted. Every candle flame flared into a bright, wavy spire, then died.

Roy did … something to make the music roil in vibrating swells from wall to wall, riffling the heavy drapes.

Roy snapped fingers. An icy-blue sine wave whipped off Dark Monica’s backside, drawing a delighted hoot, leaving a wiggle of char on her caftan.

The dungeonmaster retreated to a corner, arms crossed over his trenchcoat. Everyone else roared and goggled and whispered and pumped fists.

Roy mounted the table. The room’s lamps phased through a florid cycle, turning purple, lightning white, golden and sunset pink, underwater blue, chartreuse. I did not actually see a trio of fire-breathing wyrms twine up through my brother’s aura, or feel pulsing beats from their many wings, or taste sulfur—but I did imagine all of that. I howled as if Lemmy himself had walked onstage before me. 

At that, Roy plunked down into the dungeonmaster’s chair, sweat-sheened. Lights and music reverted to normal, and I went to the bathroom to vomit in the sink.

 

*

 

The albums of that year: a bloody bastinado of greatness. Shout at the Devil. Maiden’s Piece of Mind. Debuts from Queensrÿche and Pantera (the latter, more significant than good, mere hint of future glory). Slayer—Slayer, praise a cloven-hoofed god. 

I had a summer thing with a skater girl, sibling of one of June’s baby-punk pals, and Suicidal Tendencies still recalls up the grit on our town’s improvised bowls and rails, Powell Peralta wheels grinding, Thrasher copies splayed on a dirty bedroom floor.

I’m of an age now. Like so many graying rockers with too much education, I stream Blue Note jazz and vintage country, disgustingly tasteful. Vinyl from 1983, however, battle-scratched and black as night, will sometimes grab my throat and remind me who I am—remind me of that year when it all went sideways.

Even on our intoxicated drive home from Dark Monica’s, I knew Roy had committed an error. My brother knew as well, but Roy couldn’t acknowledge mistakes, much less danger. “Fuck it, it’ll be cool, Wayls,” he said in the morning over home fries saturated with Tabasco. “Most of those motherfuckers don’t remember if they were at Monica’s or on Mars last night.”

This proved untrue. Our party scene inched upmarket, first with appearances by the likes of those Advanced Human Sexuality women—on safari, seeking a freakshow beyond the tracks—and other academic riff-raff from Dark Monica’s scene. Such folk either stayed twenty minutes and scampered as soon as a Moscovitch pulled a keg stand, or got absolutely obliterated. We started getting afternoon drop-ins, usually girls in groups who milled around awkwardly. Roy didn’t do any more public magic. Still, legends spread. By summer’s end, we welcomed a few genuine college professors to Treasure Pines—wild-haired arts faculty, who tended to bring their own jug wine, but scientific types too, eyeing Roy across the party like their next dissection. 

Ominous shit, I thought. I was correct.

 

*

 

I pulled up in the Datsun one autumn afternoon to see a person sitting on our front porch. At first I thought it was a child, then I decided it was a tiny woman. 

As I exited the car, gathering a single grocery bag from the passenger-side floor, it occurred to me that the Pines felt quiet, hushed as if after a snowfall.  

This person could not have weighed more than 90 pounds, spindly body lost in a grimy quilted flannel and foul jeans. She smoked a cigarette and hugged her own knees with an addict’s fidgetiness. Sandy hair cropped short, she either had a bone-deep sunburn or belonged to one of a half-dozen possible ethnicities, aged somewhere between thirty and sixty, I was pretty sure. The chapped look of her bony cheeks, thin lips and bristly eyebrows lent her a country quality. 

My mom had a much older brother, Uncle Kyle, who never grew and became a racing jockey on the county fair circuit. I’d only met him a couple times, first when I was ten. I’d been excited to meet a jockey, imagining a rakish sportsman with pomaded hair and a Rolex. Kyle was drunk when he arrived and nipped at a flask the hour he stayed, fiddling with dirty fingernails, recounting injuries in a ridiculous Okie accent. 

This woman reminded me of Kyle.

“Can I help you?”

“You Roy? No, you ain’t Roy. You’re the brother.”

“Well, yes. How do you know Roy?”

“I don’t, but I got a feeling I’m going to. A lot of people out there, running their mouths about that kid these days.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I knew what she was talking about.

“Waylon, right? Ain’t heard so much about you, but I heard a little. You got any of the same peculiarity as your brother? No? Can’t always tell, just by looking. Can ya?”

The woman cocked her cigarette in her mouth and slowly drew one small, dirty palm up across the other. A six-inch turquoise lightning bolt, shaped as precisely as one in a cartoon, shot up from between them.

“Ah,” I said. I still held the grocery bag; it dangled stupidly at my hip.

“Yeah, never ceases to amaze. Runs in families, except when it don’t. My family sure as shit didn’t know what to do with me but whale on me. Anyway—” She dug in one pocket, moving like she’d run a marathon the day before. She produced a business card, yellowed with nicotine and coffee stains, frayed at the edges. Typewriter letters, off-center, spelled out a street address, no city or state or ZIP.

“In Spokane,” the woman said. “Always someone there. Time might come when Roy wants to be there, too. If he needs to get off any particular radar screens?”

I tried to remain poker-faced.

“Any of us will know Roy’s face and name, and folks generally know what to do.”

“Like what? Make him disappear?”

 “Well, shit—as best we can, Waylon. Not like we can do magic or some shit.” She cackled wheezily as she snapped her fingers to light another cigarette. “Sorry to say, you boys are fucking up big time. You know your brother’s got the rumor mill cranking all the way out in Seattle? Twin Cities, too, I bet. Wide radius. Can’t just do that shit out in front of straight folks and expect otherwise. And that’s just not safe.”

“What do you mean?” I knew what she meant.

“I hear you’re a scholar, Waylon. You study up on the Salem witch trials? Cracked open Mary Fuckin’ Shelley’s Frankenstein a time or two? Square people don’t take kindly to this shit. For the likes of Roy, the only way to live this high—” she swept our house and Treasure Pines with a gesture that implied a grand estate “—with a bed you sleep in and a door that locks and cars that you own the actual key for and all this fancy crap? The only way to live like this is to keep—fucking—quiet about the other shit.” 

She stood up and stretched in her misshapen clothes. I could see her underfed muscles were like iron wires. “But anyhow, that horse pr’y left the barn where Roy’s concerned.” She slouched off the porch and gave my shoulder a slap as she passed me. “Gotta go, Waylon. Been a pleasure. Keep that card handy. Roy might find out real sudden that he’s not meant for this world. Lucky for his ass, there’s other worlds.”

The woman walked away, down our dirt street. I stood watching her until she crossed out the Treasure Pines gate and just kept walking.

 

*

 

Social trends usually washed into our town a half-decade or so late. Case in point, cocaine. 

In retrospect, maybe it was inevitable that Roy and the Moscovitches and their ilk would graduate from weed and trucker speed. Our house’s newfound chic also attracted New Wavers and small-town socialites, some carrying. I first noticed an unusual line outside our bathroom on Halloween night, a sloppy fray that featured a half-dozen wasted Princess Leias, a none-too-metal musical rotation of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Let’s Dance,” and a layer-cake of mud on the kitchen floor. 

Roy soon had a permanent case of the sniffles. The cash-flow tempo ratcheted up and became more confusing—now I couldn’t tell where exactly Roy fit in the logistics. Buying, or selling? Perhaps it depended on the day. He didn’t much bother with Dark Monica any more. One time, Eric Moscovitch ripped up to our house, leaned on his horn, and spirited Roy away for 72 hours, dropping him off the day before Thanksgiving, chalk-pale and giggling at everything, especially the cameo appearance of my mother and Steven, draped around each other over turkey and stuffing I made.

“It just puts a real different spin on shit, Wayls, that’s all,” Roy told me in a rare direct conversation about substance use. “Puts my whatever-you-want-to-call-it, the thing, into some kinda overdrive. Like, I feel like I could pull off just about anything. Turbo-charged. You’d love it. Shit, you’d talk your face off.”

I declined to get involved.

Around that same time, the literature around June’s room changed flavor. She was young enough to need looking in on, and I would poke my head into her atmosphere of pre-adolescent sweat. Whenever I cracked her door, June would snap me a startled look: faun-like, interrupted. I wouldn’t ask. She might have a rough-printed journal in her lap, her usual Maximumrocknroll supplemented by urgent titles the likes of Earth First! and Live Wild or Die!. Once I even idly picked up an oddity called Back to Godhead and discovered to my horror that it was from a Hare Krishna outfit. June stopped eating meat, then took to cooking her own meals, distinct from the trash Roy and I ate: legume creations, bubbling and malodorous.

 

*

 

It was a snowless winter, one of the first where everything just turned gray and brown, the Pines a collage of frozen puddles and straw-colored grass. It felt like the world shut down at four o’clock. I was usually alone in the house as those early nights drew in, and I tried to make the best of it: brewing tea, reading fat paperbacks and listening to the most hobbit-y records I owned, early Angel Witch and the like. 

So it was, on the day when the pulp mill’s siren screamed into the darkness.

I’d only heard this once before, during a well-advertised test, but I knew it meant an evacuation. I looked out the kitchen window at the lights and smoldering stacks beyond the high berm. Nothing looked wrong. I turned the stereo down. The phone rang. 

I could tell it was Roy from the breath at the other end, before he said anything.

“Wayls—”

“Dude, something’s going on at the mill. The siren—”

“Wayls, man, I’m fucked. In a fucking pickle here, dude. I thought I blew out the phones and all that shit. But there must’ve been a panic button or some shit—”

I put a finger in my free ear to block the mill siren. “Where are you?”

“Downtown—you know First Security?”

“Shit.”

“Kirk and Eric and me, we had the whole thing wired, man, worked it out, like, to the second. To the second, Wayls. End of the day, knocked the lights out, fried the phones, all that shit. But then some fuckin’ alarm—”

“Where are you now?”

“Payphone, back of Daggers.” This was a horrific biker bar, not a bad choice for a fugitive. “Fuck, Wayls—Kirk says the cops got cars on the corners—”

A ripping metallic thunderclap smothered Roy’s voice. Our home became bright with a dawn-like glow through the kitchen window. The entire structure rattled. I turned and looked out toward the mill. Bolts of blue and white energy ricocheted around its smokestacks and gantries, touching off showers of sparks and pockets of flame. A brief flash, oval-shaped and stretching toward the sky, flared out of the complex’s center, and the warning siren died with a sad whine. The flash silhouetted a figure, standing on the berm, arms raised and whirling, spinning threads of light overhead and somehow flinging them towards the mill. 

June. In the first split second, I thought she looked like a fantastic album cover. 

On the phone, Roy was babbling. I cut him off.

“Shut the fuck up for a second.”

He sputtered, and I told him again to shut the fuck up.

I stretched the phone cord across the kitchen and opened the silverware drawer. I pulled out the tray of forks, spoons and knives to reveal a letter-size envelope. I tore that open and shook two items loose. One was the business card with the Spokane address, given to me by the weird woman on our porch. The other was a single sheet of paper, with a list of names and telephone numbers printed in dot-matrix on one side.

I closed my eyes and tried to think, then reawakened into our kitchen. On the berm, June’s arms collapsed back by her sides. By the light of the storm she had conjured, I saw her crumble to her knees for a second. Then, she rose and started running toward the house.

“Roy.”
“Man, what the hell’s going on—”

“Roy, I’m going to read you a phone number. I will read it twice. Then I need you to hang up this call and dial that number. Someone’s going to answer it—I hope.”

“Who? Who the fuck am I supposed to—”

“When and if someone answers, I want you to tell them exactly who you are, where you are, what you did tonight and how you did it. Exactly how you did it.”

In Roy’s silence, I could hear the Daggers Tavern crowd bellowing.

“You got me, Roy?”

“I guess so, man.”

“Who you are, where you are and—Roy—you fucking tell them what you can do.” Hot tears erupted down my face in a gush. “Tell them everything you can do. Don’t stop talking.” June was halfway home, running like a halfback shredding a broken defense. The short-out of the mill was already dying into frizzled blackness. “Roy, those people are going to send someone for you. You stay there, Roy, until those fucking people get there. Or go wherever they tell you to go.”

Then I looked down at the sheet of paper.

This sheet of paper—interesting story. One night, one of the endless series of big nights at our place after Mom mostly left, I ended up in an introverts’ corner with a reedy kid in a faded Floyd t-shirt. A computer-science type from the campus, he found his way to the subject of the electronic network, a phenomenon of which I was just barely aware. Soon he fascinated me with tidings of rare information, combed from obscure official and quasi-official corners of this secret and imaginary grid. 

As that kid and I talked, I remembered Detective Holmquist’s visit—his mention of a roster of dreadful authorities who might one day show interest in my brother. 

I plied my new computer-scientist friend with more booze, and I asked if such a list might, theoretically, come to hand. A week later, in a dim basement “lab” stocked with amber-flickering screens, the kid handed me this sheet of paper. It held names and telephone numbers of entities with names like DEPT OF ENERGY DIVISION OF SPECIAL RESEARCH and ADVANCED TECHNIQUES OFFICE, [REDACTED]. I handed him $100. I proceeded to conduct my own investigations of these agencies, deep in the library and across the counters of our town’s headshops, gun stores and Army surplus depots, until I could circle two entities with whispered reputations for competence and, above all, reach. 

I picked one of those phone numbers, and read it to Roy twice, as I said I would. I hung up before he could speak, and opened the door for June.

 

*

 

My sister fell asleep in the Datsun’s backseat before we hit Fourth of July Pass. I drove with controlled speed, Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman album chugging on the tape player. 

June had barely been able to speak at the house, eyebrows charred, cheeks daubed with charcoal residue. I grabbed her shoulders and steered to her room, where she and I spent maybe 45 seconds throwing underwear, jeans, one sweater and several band T-shirts into her school backpack before it was hands on shoulders again, out of the house, into the car.

“They grind it all up over there,” she mumbled early in the drive. “Heat. Air. Trees.” She babbled some more about atmosphere and forest, something about “biomass.” 

I let all that die down, then glared into the rearview mirror.

“How long have you known?” I demanded. 

To my visceral shock, she laughed, a single derisive bark.

“You fucking didn’t know?” Then she slumped down and closed her eyes, and didn’t speak again until we crossed the suburban scrub just beyond the Idaho border, a barren prairie’s outer edge, and could see Spokane’s blocky skyline.

“Waylon,” my sister growled behind me, “where are we going?”

 

*

 

I dawdled around Spokane for a couple cold weeks, sleeping on a ratted-out couch, sneezing the grainy dust of the safehouse living room. The place was a three-story Craftsman, if you counted a creaking attic strewn with mattresses, in a jumbled workingman’s neighborhood east of downtown. Dead grass wedged up through many sidewalk cracks; two rusty sedans sat in the yard. Someone was always on the front porch, smoking, casually keeping sentry duty. Admittance, the night we hit town, required only mention of Roy’s name.

Three middle-aged women and a man in his sixties were knocking around when we arrived. They fixed us scrambled eggs, and one of them gave up a second-floor bedroom for June. The man had his arm in a sling; the women exhibited knocks, bruises and fading shiners. They suggested stragglers at a small town bus depot. As it turned out, they did come and go, these folk—I never knew who would be around, showing up at odd hours, taking their turn at the front door or banging in the back lugging a two-bag grocery run, or when any one of them would walk out the door and not come back. A rotating cast, let’s say: most in ten-year-old clothes, unkempt and shaggy, people of few words and hardened stares. 

Not many of them wanted to know much about me, but they fed me all the same. Someone left a stack of old mystery novels by the couch one night. Meanwhile these people took turns hanging out with June, holding low conversations.

Deep into one night, I stirred against the couch’s lumps. A gaunt figure sat across the room, marked out by a cigarette’s glowing cherry. “Welp, Waylon, here you be,” she said—the woman from our porch. “But not for long. You did good, but you gots to go. Too many normies hang around this place, it brings bad luck, we think. And I don’t like having your car outside. License plate’s pr’y all over the damn wires.”

“Right now?”

“Morning will be fine.”

I considered for a second. “Can I say goodbye to June?”

“She already left, kid. Better that way—keep the scenes to a minimum. Don’t worry, we’ve got our crack guys on it.” She laughed her emphysema laugh. 

“You gonna tell me where she went?”

“The fuck do you think? That would more or less defeat the purpose. Bad enough you know this place—it could get blown the first time you gotta think about a plea deal.”

“You know I wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t know shit, really. That’s one thing I took to heart long ago.”

 

*

 

I decided to risk the license plate thing and drive home. I called my mom at Steven’s from a payphone in Post Falls. After some hysterics, she related that Roy had last been seen walking out of Daggers Tavern toward a black Lincoln Towncar with tinted windows. I told her about June in four or five sentences and hung up. 

A false-spring chinook broke the winter chill. I rolled into a downright balmy Treasure Palms with the Datsun’s windows down, and returned the neighborhood’s stares with my best blank-faced nods. At our place, both doors stood open to the air, shreds of yellow police tape curling around the ground. Detective Holmquist and his colleagues hadn’t bothered to lock up. 

The remains of my record collection lay around the living room floor—no stereo, though. Every room had been rifled, first professionally, then otherwise. I checked a floorboard hiding spot in the room I’d shared with Roy and found a nice wedge of cash, which I distributed to my pockets. The power was out. My copy of Shogun still sat on the counter, where I’d set it when the mill siren rang.

The mill, no surprise, was already back in business, pumping out stench. I went out front where I couldn’t see it, sat on the porch and tried to find my place in Shogun. Trina Jones cruised past, slowly, in her used Ford pick-up, gazing for a second before giving an halting half-wave. I saluted from an eyebrow.

I’d only read about three pages when another car rolled up, a lemon-yellow Renault 18 of all things. Two women sat up front, maybe still girls, both wearing sunglasses to celebrate the weather. They pulled to a stop, basically in our yard. The passenger rolled down her window, her companion nodding, whispering and craning around so she could see me too.

“Hey there,” the passenger said. “Are you the magic man?”

I closed my book and told them yes.

 

 

 

 

 

Zach Dundas is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. He's a co-producer of the crime/history podcast Death in the West, editorial director for Wildsam and the author of The Great Detective, a cultural history of Sherlock Holmes. Instagram @zachdundas.