Sophie

Greg Preston did what he always did on the anniversary of his sister’s death—he drank. The Red Star was the third bar he had stopped at that evening. A crowded shit kicker kind of joint, where almost everyone was wearing cowboy boots, hats, and multi-colored long sleeve shirts, the kind with ivory snap on buttons. The place was packed, with sweaty drunken Texans, and the only group that seemed to have some order was the line dancers, their boots stomping the floor in snappy syncopation. Random shouts, noise, and tobacco smoke engulfed the rest of the bar like a ghost. God how he hated that word, ghost. He ordered a shot of tequila to help forget he even knew it, and took a handful of peanuts to suck in his mouth for the salt. He was about to get up and wander to another bar, when he happened to bump into the guy sitting next to him, spilling beer on the stranger’s arm.

“Sorry,” Greg said, then took another drink. “I didn’t see you there.”

The young man grunted, and stared forward, taking the last sip of his own drink. To make up for the incident, Greg bought him another beer. The kid was tall and lean, and Greg kind of liked the way his black T-shirt and ratty hair made him stand out amongst all the honky tonk types.

“I’m Greg,” he said, sticking out his hand.

The young man took it firmly, “Lucky Dick, nice to meet you.”

“Lucky Dick, that’s an interesting name,” Greg said. He smiled, then decided to order himself another drink. He ended up staying at the Red Star another hour, talking to the underfed kid next to him, who turned out to be a lot more interesting than Greg could have ever imagined. He was a biker, and was crossing the country alone on his motorcycle. Lucky said he had just decided to make the trek one-day, and quit his job to set out on the road, but Greg wondered if that were true. The paranoid way the kid constantly scanned the crowd bouncing around the bar made him think that Lucky was more likely on the run than on a pilgrimage to the Pacific ocean. But Lucky gave off a feeling of anxious danger that intrigued Greg. He had felt like a vagabond of sorts when he was Lucky’s age, and the young man reminded him of that part of his life. When he had moved from steamy, crowded Atlanta to the monuments and porticos of Washington D.C., working his way up at Brown&Stevens, the accounting firm; he had lived in a nice enough high rise in the capital, but it never felt like home. When he finally moved back south to South Carolina, he had finally felt a sense of belonging, deep in the humid summers and syrupy accents he had missed up north.

Greg motioned with his glass towards a woman with bleached hair and an orangish fake tan. “See, look at that,” he pointed at the woman’s low cut blouse, “Advertisement, pure advertisement. Commercialism has completely changed American sexuality. “Stay here, stay here,” he told Lucky, then walked over to the blonde in the low cut blouse, with a collar stitched in red and blue stars.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked, tugging lightly on her arm.

“What was that?” She yelled into his ear.

“I was just curious to know why a woman like yourself was standing alone. You look like you’re waiting on someone, have you been stood up?”

The woman smiled and turned her back to him. “I’m waiting on my husband.”

“Oh. Well, while you’re waiting you can join me and my buddy at the bar if you’d like,” but the woman said nothing else. She kept her back to him, and her face toward the dancers, as they now clomped backward in unison. To Greg it was an army of bright colors and Stetson hats that hurt his eyes to look at. He stepped away and headed back for the bar, miming a gunshot to his own head. The kid asked what had happened.

“I don’t get it,” Greg started. “If she’s here with her husband why would she be dressed like that. That shirt and that skirt do not say taken. They don’t, do they? Look at it, false advertisement.”

Lucky Dick cupped a hand around his ear. “Huh?”

Greg plopped into his chair. “Nothing.”

“Maybe she’s married, or something.”

“I just said that,” Greg protested. “Look at you, you’re drunk. You’re young, so that’s okay and I bought you all the drinks, so who’s to blame? But you’re gonna have to learn how to hold your liquor if you want to make it anywhere in this state. Texans hate lightweights, or so I understand.”

“I’m not young, I just haven’t had anything to eat today, that’s all.”

“Nothing to eat!” Greg motioned for his tab. He suddenly wondered just how old this kid was. “I’m thirty-four,” he said, “What’re you, twenty-two?”

“Twenty-one,” Lucky corrected, then drained the rest of his glass.

Greg nodded. Two women leaned up on the bar next to him wearing tight Wrangler jeans and red cowboy hats. The one directly on his left had long brown hair and was tapping her fingers restlessly on the bar.

“Hey!” He hollered, trying to get their attention. “This is my friend, Lucky, Lucky Dick.” Greg swayed forward, leering at them. “He quit his job to cross the country alone on a motorcycle. What do you think about that?” The women ignored him, calling for the bartender instead.

“Well, I agree. A guy like that is probably too cool for you anyway.” Greg stood up to sign the credit receipt on his bill, laying a hand on kid’s shoulder when he was finished. “Come on. We’re going to Waffle House.”

He led the way to the door with Lucky protesting he had done enough already. “You’re forgiven, for spilling the drink,” he said.

But Greg waved a nonchalant hand and held one of the double oak doors open to let them both outside. The wind kicked up his brown hair as they crossed the street for the yellow glow of Waffle House a block up. Lucky cursed behind him.

“Does the wind ever stop here?”

“In the panhandle?” Greg asked. “No.”

“It blew my motorcycle around all damn day,” Lucky said, his black engineer boots clomping along the sidewalk. A rock he kicked sailed past Greg and bounced off into the street. “Its a bitch.”

“A lot of things are,” Greg said under his breath, thinking of his sister’s face in her casket. Funny, how most times he could only remember her in the context of lying in that wooden box, when the mortician’s make up had made her look more like a waxy imitation, than her real self.

They sat in a booth towards the back, both ordering a double stack of waffles with bacon on the side. Greg laughed at their shared taste in breakfast food and reminded Lucky Dick to get anything he wanted. The restaurant was crowded, but solemn. Long faced truck drivers sipping coffee sat alongside the assorted bar hoppers, loudly jerking butter knives across plates of greasy breakfast food.

“You’ve done too much for me, Greg,” Lucky Dick told him. “You got all my drunks,” Lucky laughed at his own mistake. Greg noticed his face couldn’t turn any redder even if Lucky had wanted it to, since it was already wind burned to an unnatural crimson hue. “Drinks. Anyway, it’s too much.”

“It’s the island way, don’t worry about it. Besides, it’s a company credit card. I’m in Amarillo on business, I live off the coast of Charleston, in a town called Mt. Pleasant.” Greg reached across the table and patted Lucky’s arm. “Point is, it’s the island way to take care of strangers.”

Just as one of the cooks was slopping the batter for their waffles on to the griddle, two women in their late twenties stumbled in, letting the wind through the door and into the restaurant. Elbows locked together, they made their way to the booth directly in front of Greg’s. He recognized their matching red hats from the bar as his nose wrinkled at the light lilac smell that came with their passing. The shorter one, the girl with curly dark hair, deep black eyes, and pointy ears, blushed when she saw the two of them. Greg draped an arm over the booth, thumping a beat on the back of the chair behind him with his hand.

“Yes, Lucky Dick, you were very lucky indeed in meeting me. I’m going to show you how to truly live the island way,” Greg told him. He stood up, brushing his pale blue oxford of crumbs and cigarette ashes, then walked over to the booth with the two women, who were both looking at him now. He could see Lucky out of the corner of his eye, turning to see what was up, and Greg bowed at the waist.

“Hello, how are you ladies tonight?”

The shorter of the two swallowed, “Fine.” Then added, “Sorry about ignoring you earlier.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Greg smiled broadly. “How has your night been?”

“Okay, I guess.”

Her friend put a hand to her cheek. “We got stood up, it’s sucked.” She looked him up and down. “Is it just you?”

“No, no,” he said, then told Lucky to stand up. The kid stood next to him, and Greg draped an arm over his shoulders. “Looks like Tom Cruise, doesn’t he?”

“Not really,” the taller of the two admitted.

"I fear then that you haven’t had enough to drink yet,” Greg said solemnly.

Two hours later, Greg was standing in the men’s room of a bar called The Hideaway, watching Lucky Dick’s back through a smudged mirror. He gritted his teeth to check them in the reflection. A hole in the tile of the wall made Greg stoop to eye level to examine it. It had an oddly familiar shape that his mind shuffled through memories to place and label. Almost like an hourglass, but not quite.

“Which one you want?” He asked as he saw in the mirror that Lucky was buttoning up his worn out jeans.

“Huh? Oh, that.” Lucky walked over to the sink and began lathering his hands with pink soap. “Penelope is the shorter one right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she hates me. Marjorie though, she seems to want you pretty bad, so I’ll take one for the team and go with Penelope.”

“Why does Penelope hate you?” Greg asked, picking with a finger at the wall.

“I think I told her I can’t stand brunettes with agendas, or something like that. I’m a little buzzed.”

Greg meant to run a hand through his own brown hair and joke about how disappointing that was, but he was staring at the hole again, trying to put a name to it. Beyond was nothing but darkness, hiding insulation probably. He imagined he could hear the vibrato of electrical lines and pipes humming their way up the wall. He listened hard, as if waiting for the coils and copper wires to sing him the right word. The lime-covered tiles were cold and scummy on his fingers as he rested his weight on his right hand. Lucky asked what he was looking at.

“I’m not sure…” Then it hit him, a keyhole. The chunk missing in the tile looked just like a keyhole, the old skeleton kind, like in the movies, and his parents’ old house in Atlanta. It was an old two story, with white scrolled floorboards and heavy doors with brass handles that were always cold to touch in the winter.  

When he was younger, his older sister Sophie had held sleepovers with a few of her friends from school; he had been twelve at the time. At night, and during the day when he was feeling daring, Greg would sneak up to the door to peep through. Afraid any amount of noise would give him away, he would purposefully slow his breath. The beat of his heart was often so loud it drowned out most of the conversation he was trying to hear.

Usually, what he heard and saw was teenage gossip and games, so it didn’t really matter. That was up until the morning he got caught. Sophie must have been fourteen then. Greg had heard her and some of her friends running down the stairs to eat breakfast. The hardwood floors were frigid on his feet as he stepped out shirtless into the hallway, and the smell of cinnamon rolls coming from the kitchen called to his stomach. Down the hallway, Sophie’s doorway was closed, so he tiptoed over to take a look.

Inside, one of Sophie’s friends¾Kristen Allison he remembered now¾was standing naked in front of a mirror. Her nearly white hair hung to the middle of her back while her hands cupped the bottoms of her breasts, the right one larger than the other. She lifted them up one after the other, as if trying to will them to be the same size. It was the first time he had seen a naked girl except in magazines his friends had stolen from their fathers’, and he could feel himself getting erect. Dreams of busting through the door and rushing her ran through his mind like a racing river, although he wasn’t sure what he would do with her once he had her in his arms, other than kiss her.

Suddenly a warm hand was gripping his shoulder. Not hard, or painfully, but heavy enough for Greg to know it was there. His father stared down at him; his quivering bushy eyebrows seemed to be the only part of his body that was moving. A single finger was raised over his lips, signaling for Greg to be quiet. A motion of his father’s head beckoned him back to his parent’s bedroom.

The bed had been made tight and neat, while a black and white photograph of his grandmother stared out crookedly from the wall. Greg cupped his hands over his pajama pants trying to hide his erection, while his father sat down on the mattress, resting both hands on Greg’s shoulders.

“Gregory, what were you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“Son, I need to know.”

Greg shook his head bashfully. He looked toward the picture of his grandmother, suddenly wishing he were dead. His father’s hairy hands tightened their grip.

“Was it your sister?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” He paused then to shift uncomfortably under his father’s grip. “It was one of her friends.”

Nostrils flaring and red faced, his father shook his head and excused Greg to breakfast. He paused in the hallway, wanting to look back at his father, but was unable to force himself to look back. Even at that age Greg knew he had gotten off light, that there should have been more of a discussion about privacy and decency. He probably shouldn’t have been surprised six years later when Sophie’s suicide note, tucked under the bottle of sleeping pills she had swallowed, made lengthy mention of her father’s sexual abuse.

Lucky Dick put a hand on Greg’s shoulder, shaking him. “Hey, man. You alright?”

“I know she used to smile, I just can’t remember it.”

“Who?”

“Sophie.” Lucky looked at him confused and Greg breathed in through his nose slowly. The bathroom smelled like urinal cakes and cigarettes. There were several butts stamped out beneath him. “Doesn’t this opening look like an old keyhole? We used to have some at the house I grew up in, but no one had the keys for them.”

Lucky Dick nodded. He pulled two sets of keys out of his pocket. One was on a translucent red key charm and the other on a black leather fob. “Sorry,” he said. “Just my room and motorcycle key. No skeleton keys for secret passageways.”

Greg smiled and straightened himself up. “Nothing behind that wall but dust and wall studs anyway. Come on, we got two drunk girls that need to go back with us to my hotel room.”

“Yeah, about that. I don’t know…”

“Nonsense, kid. Look, we met up this night for a reason. You’re my rabbit’s foot, Lucky Dick, you can’t bail on me now.”

He led Lucky out of the bathroom. The women in red hats, Marjorie and Penelope, were waiting quietly at their table. They followed the two men out of the bar and into the street, crossing the empty road to Greg’s hotel. Streetlights, traffic stops, and neon signs glowed around them, sharpening the inky darkness of night just beyond the city. He noticed Lucky Dick staring off towards the black humps of grain silos at the stockyards.

 “Nothing but hills and scrub bushes out there, you know?” He called out over the wind.

Lucky Dick said something that sounded like “I know,” and Marjorie tugged on Greg’s arm, asking about the islands off South Carolina. He told her about palm trees and old civil war estates in downtown Charleston. The open air market, with its raised voices and haggling merchants selling basketfuls of bananas and peaches, thrusting crafts and native art toward passerby’s, and the old singing black man on Wentworth Street who sometimes lifted his head back to scream at the sun like an electric guitar.

“It’s the people,” he said in a quick and excited manner. “A bunch of hippie types. We wake up in the morning, and as long as we still got a beach in front of us, and maybe some smoke,” he pinched his fingers together and put them to his lips in the universal sign of a joint. “Well, if we got all that then there ain’t nothing else worth worrying about.”

“You can’t live your life only worrying about that,” Penelope stated flatly.

“No, but I spend forty hours of my week crunching numbers and details. It makes me want to spend my leisure time worrying over ocean sunsets and palm trees as much as I can.”

When the four of them were finally in his hotel room, Greg ran down the hall to fill a bucket with ice from the machine, and bought a couple of Cokes to mix with the spiced rum he had left on the nightstand. He didn’t dare stay by himself too long, for fear of where his mind would wander again. When he ran back into the room, Lucky Dick was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in his lap. Both women were sitting on either side of him asking what it was like to travel so far on a motorcycle. Greg lifted the cowboy hat off of Marjorie’s head and pushed it onto his own. Then he unwrapped the plastic off the complimentary hotel cups, scooping ice into each before pouring the rum and soda. Penelope pointed to a light bruise on Lucky’s temple, saying she had meant to ask about it in Waffle House.

“Its nothing. A rock bounced off a gravel truck and hit me when I was riding a few days back.”

“Don’t let him fool you,” Greg told the women, handing everyone their drinks. “Outlaw Dick there got in a terrible bar fight with some rival Hell’s Angels. He’s a dangerous man, ain’t that right?”

Greg was only joking, but the startled look on Lucky’s face made him wonder if he hadn’t come close to something. Marjorie laughed though, and so did Greg, nestling himself a seat on the sage green blanket, in between her and Lucky. The lonely corner lamp put out enough light to make the room shadowy and dim and otherwise perfect. Marjorie held her cup in both hands, gulping the liquid down greedily, while the other two swirled their drinks, sipping on them casually. Greg rested a hand on her plump thigh and gave it a light squeeze.

“Well, here we all are,” he said, nodding to everyone.

Marjorie smiled, her teeth small and sharp looking, and Greg wondered what they would feel like biting his skin. He was hoping he was about to find out when she took his drink out of his hand and rested it with her own on the floor. With a flick of a French manicured nail she knocked the hat off his head and leaned into kiss him. Her tongue was cold in his mouth and tasted like liquor. As she squirmed her way closer to him, he opened the slit of his left eye, watching Lucky and Penelope. They were sitting looking away from one another. Penelope, with her back to everyone, was crowded onto the corner of the mattress, studying the blinds covering the doors to the balcony. Marjorie shifted to nibble on Greg’s ear when he reached out, brushing his arm across Lucky’s.

It was when Lucky lifted his rum and Coke to his lips that Greg stretched a pinkie out, stroking Lucky’s thumb gently, and waited for a reaction. Lucky sat motionless staring at the back of the door. Greg wished he could see Lucky’s gray eyes at that moment, when he moved his hand further on to Lucky’s, then further still, caressing the kid’s wrist.

“Oh,” Lucky Dick murmured. He drained the cup, his adam’s apple bobbing up with each drink, and gently took his hand from the bed. Greg watched him stand up, throw the empty drink into the garbage can, and exit the room, closing the door behind him with a polite click.

Marjorie and Penelope turned to look at the door. Greg leaned back on his elbows and sighed towards the ceiling. The sounds of clunky semis and buzzing import cars could still be heard through the closed balcony doors. He wished someone would turn off the lamp, so he could lie down in darkness and steal these small morning hours from his memory with more alcohol, since tonight was falling apart anyway. Marjorie surprised him though by working her hand around the buckle of his belt and undoing it.

“What’re you gonna do?” She asked Penelope, looking her in the eyes.

He watched Penelope, who turned from his face back to Marjorie’s with a look of unblinking disbelief. She said she would go sit outside for a while, and slid off the bed, then stumbled through the sliding doors and onto the balcony. Marjorie shrugged and quickly began undressing herself. She lifted her shirt off with both hands; her lacey bra she unclasped with one. He wiggled out of his charcoal colored slacks and lay completely back on the bed as Marjorie climbed up on top of him, asking if he wanted the light on or off. He told her it didn’t matter and she kissed his mouth, sucking on his lower lip. He dug his fingers into her back.

In his mind he pictured Penelope sitting just outside, separated from them by only a double pane of glass and a set of eggshell vinyl blinds. He imagined her pacing impatiently until curiosity won out, and she slid the door open slowly, so as not to make any noise. In his fantasy she stood just outside of the lamplight, watching his mouth open into a gasp, as Marjorie bit down on his neck.

He knew it was empty visualization, but Greg could almost feel Penelope staring in from the shadows. She didn’t seem like that kind of girl, but it was something all the same, to fictionalize reality into matching his dreams. In his dreams he was worth spying on in a poorly lit hotel room in Amarillo, Texas, where the wind never stopped, and sisters didn’t lock themselves behind doors with Seconal and a bottle of Smirnoff Black Label vodka, or leave horribly confessional suicide notes as a last witness; in his dreams, he wasn’t left standing alone at a funeral, staring at the back of his father’s head, wondering why.

Rod Dixon is from Mt. Washington, Kentucky, although most of his time is spent in Louisville. His current projects include compiling a collection of short stories based loosely off the summer he crossed the country alone on a motorcycle and obtaining his MFA through Spalding University.