POKED
By Naomi Niles
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Naomi Niles
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Chapter One
Marshall
Sometimes I wondered if I made a mistake leaving Texas.
Don’t get me wrong, Summerville had its pleasures—I had never regretted attending Clemson with Sean, where I had spent the best five years of my life. South Carolina in early spring was a place of spectacular beauty. As I drove down I-95 and the Ashley River Road on a March morning, a brisk wind stirred the elms and azaleas on either side of me. Moss grew over the ruins of old plantation homes, and alligators lazily pawed through the dark waters.
But there was a sameness to my routine that was beginning to feel suffocating. For example:
Right now, I was sitting on the hood of my car outside the lumberyard where Sean worked. Sean was a licensed attorney, but he also had a part-time job hauling lumber and doing odd jobs for his grandfather, a fact that never failed to perplex me. Whenever I asked him why he was slumming it in a lumberyard when he could be making bank as an attorney, he coughed into his hand and found a way of changing the subject.
It was a quiet morning in mid-March. I had laid out a deck of cards on the hood in front of me and was practicing my poker face in the windshield. After about six months of practice, not even my best friends could tell when I was bluffing. A chickadee with white plumage and a black breast sang melodiously in an elm at the front of the drive leading up to the yard. Through the shop window, I could see Mr. Wood leaned against his desk as though fast asleep. At this hour, the yard was a perfect picture of tranquility.
But it wouldn’t be that way for long.
In a few minutes, with a rumble like thunder, Sean would pull around the corner in a front-end loader holding an enormous tree trunk, kicking up white dust and rocks as he went. Because it amused him, he would begin doing doughnuts on the gravel with one hand over his head like a cowboy. As if on cue, his grandfather would stir from his morning slumber and fling open the window, fist raised, hurling obscenities into the air.
I knew this because it happened every morning.
By now I had lived through this exact scene more times than I could count. It was enough to make me wonder if I was living some sort of hellish Truman Show existence where my friends and acquaintances were being handsomely compensated to enact the same routine every day for the delight of a watching audience. Surely—eventually—Sean would tire of acting the cowboy, and Mr. Wood would realize he was just wasting his breath. But it never happened.
Sure enough, within a few minutes, the chitter of birdsong was replaced by the roar of a motor and the mad laughter of my best friend. He was still grinning wickedly as he pulled the truck up beside me. He seemed pleased with himself and surprised at his own audacity, as if he had never done this before.
“You keep that up, Sean,” I said with a shake of my head, “and you’re going to get yourself fired. I don’t care if your grandfather does own the place.”
“We can only hope,” Sean replied, still grinning. “Anyway, doesn’t it feel great out here? Give me a second to clock out, and we’ll head uptown to my favorite bar. Drinks on me!”
“It’s nine in the morning!” I shouted, but he was already gone.
I had met Sean during my first semester at Clemson. I’d walked out of my room at 3:00am one morning to find him standing in front of a crowd of guys who were all chanting his name. He held an entire gallon of milk in one hand. As we watched, he began to slowly drink it. Within an hour, he had drunk the entire gallon. I was so impressed that I went up to congratulate him—whereupon he vomited on my blue fuzzy slippers. We had been best friends ever since.
“So what did you do last night?” he asked me on our way to the bar. “Were you out late partying?”
“Sean, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting too old to party.” I stretched my arms and yawned as if to underline the point. “Things change when you’re in your early to mid-twenties. You can’t stay out as late as you used to.”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered Sean. “I was out until two in the morning, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at me. I had been talking to this girl for about an hour and had almost convinced her to come back to my apartment when I mentioned that I have a law degree.”
“Why did you mention that?”
“I was trying to impress her! But then just out of the blue her sister showed up and told her to get in the car.”
“You should’ve just told her you work in a lumberyard.”
“That was what I led with, but then we got to talking, and I let my confidence get the best of me. Also, I was slightly drunk, and we got into an argument about the Eagles. She didn’t seem to care much for the Eagles.”
“Nobody under the age of forty likes the Eagles, Sean.” Through the window, I could see the remains of a slender-columned plantation. “There are several bands it’s not wise to mention on the first date. In your case, you would be better off not talking about music at all.”
“I can’t help it that I’m a little old-fashioned,” Sean said with a defiant sneer. I had never understood his love for what’s known as “dad rock.” In college, he had started a garage band that mostly played covers of Genesis and Tommy Petty and the Heartbreakers. Tom Petty’s longtime drummer had heard the band play at a wedding and reportedly described them as “solid.”
There was no one either ahead of us or behind us on the road now, so Sean pressed down hard on the accelerator and brought the car up to ninety. At this speed, the woods and glens on either side of us melted into green blurs. “You know, I really thought I would’ve made it big by now. Would you believe Springsteen released Born to Run when he was only twenty-four? Bowie was in his early twenties when he recorded most of his best work. Every Bowie song you’ve ever heard was released in his twenties or thirties.”
“You’d better get a move-on,” I said, only a little sarcastically.
Sean shrugged. “It’s hard being a musician. If you haven’t broken into the music industry by the time you’re thirty, you’re probably never going to. Can you think of a single great artist who recorded their best music in their forties? By that point, most singer/songwriters are releasing their greatest hits collections. Hell, by the time Paul McCartney turned twenty-eight, the Beatles had already broken up. The Rolling Stones haven’t made a decent album since their twenties.”
“If you wanted to become famous, maybe you chose the wrong hobby.”
“Maybe.” There was still a trace of doubt in Sean’s voice as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit it. “If I was a writer or painter, I’d have a few more years. Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her late seventies.”
“Not sure I would call her a great painter,” I muttered.
“Still. You’ve got a better shot in some professions than in others. Actors usually make it big when they’re young or not at all, although there are a few exceptions. Hans Gruber was Alan Rickman’s first major film role, and he was forty-six. If you’re an athlete over the age of thirty, you can forget it! Sports is for the young.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
Sean drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, looking agitated, but the tone of his voice was surprisingly earnest. “I’ve got to make it out of this town, Marshall. I’ve been stuck here too long. I’ve wasted some of the best years of my life doing odd jobs for my grandfather when I ought to have been playing lead guitar in a band. In my dreams, the girls are screaming so loud we can barely hear ourselves play.”
“But what’s the point of even playing if nobody can hear you?”
“I think you’re missing the point here.” Sean was beginning to sound irritated. “I really thought there would be more my life than this,” he gestured broadly, “whatever the hell it is I’m doing.”
“Maybe you set your expectations too high.”
“Maybe. But The Boss had big dreams for his life, and he went after them. I don’t think it’s a sin to aim high. The only real sin is to aim too low.”
He put on Born to Run and cranked the stereo up to its full volume so that the seats rattled. We sat there in silence for a few minutes listening to Bruce’s wail of despair for his hometown and the misbegotten dreams of youth. Sean wasn’t quite ready to grow up yet, and in a weird way, his grandiose dreams for his life were a manifestation of that. I had already resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be somebody big or somebody people had heard of. With my degree in mathematics, I could have gone into teaching or accounting, but I wasn’t ready for that yet, either. Besides, I had made too much money playing poker to desire any other profession.
Sean pulled into the parking lot of Montreux and brought the car to an abrupt halt. “You think maybe we’ll ever grow up?” he asked.
“Maybe someday,” I said, and got out of the car.