Zachary Lazar: Sway

Sway is a work of fiction. Among other things, it is an examination of the way several public lives were detached from the realm of fact and became a kind of contemporary folklore. As such, the book should not be read as a factual account of events or as biography. While many of the characters in the novel bear the names of actual people, they and their actions have been imagined by the author and should be considered products of the imagination.

FROM A DISTANCE,they had the demeanor of prisoner and guard. Bobby looked down at the frayed cuffs of his shirt, pushing them back over his wrists as he followed Charlie away from the house. His truck stood in the sun, its fender dented, the bed enclosed by weathered wooden boards. Beside him, Charlie looked silently ahead, his hair covering his face and beard, his hands crossed behind his back. He was an ex-convict, maybe fifteen years older than Bobby, but it was hard to think of him as being any particular age. He had taken just one look at the beat-up piano in the back of Bobby’s truck and his face had gone expressionless, as if it disgusted him.

“We’ll take the Ford,” he said, holding out the keys to Bobby in the flat of his palm. Then he smiled a little facetiously, a smile at nothing, as if they both knew there were intricate layers of pretense between them and Charlie was inviting Bobby to admit it. “Do you mind driving?” he said. “I don’t really feel like driving right now.”

There were two men coming up the road on motorcycles, some girls walking back from the corral, carrying empty buckets. Dogs slept in the shade beneath the broken planking of a shed. It was an abandoned ranch. The first time Bobby had seen the place he’d felt oddly protective of it because it had seemed so doomed. The buildings were falling apart — shingles missing, holes in the walls, windows covered by black garbage bags or sometimes just left as empty frames. There were drawings everywhere of peace signs, animals, birds. His first day there, with his girlfriend Kitty, they had all fallen in love with his teen-idol face, his jeans with the colored velvet patches. It was like a lot of other places he’d been in the past two years — everywhere along the coast now there were groups of young people with nowhere to go and no money to spend. It was as if they were living in a fort or a tree house. They scraped meals together out of plants they grew or things they scavenged from the trash outside of supermarkets.

He looked back at his truck as they got into the car. The piano was strung up with lengths of rope, a battered upright with a few deep scratches on its side. He was a musician — that had been his plan, to be a rock musician — but it struck him now, with Charlie there, that the plan had become unreal somehow, that it had been diminishing so slowly that he hadn’t noticed. Two years ago, he’d starred in an avant-garde film about the rise of Lucifer, a kind of rock-and-roll god who seduced the world not into peace and love but into something more brutal, something more like ecstasy. He’d thought of it at the time as just a stepping-stone to other ambitions, but the role had also appealed to him, had spoken to his particular gift — “charm,” “charisma,” none of the words captured its unpredictability, the way it was sometimes in his grasp, sometimes not.

Yesterday, in one of the barns, he’d been looking for some twine or rope to secure the piano to the back of his truck when he’d come across a gun sitting in a tool chest, wrapped in a towel. Kitty had been with him — she was hardly even a friend anymore, just another one of the girls he would see when he was at the ranch. She watched his expression as she pulled up the halter strap on her shirt, her face a mocking reflection of his surprise. The gun was a revolver, the wooden grip splintered on one side, the wood as dry and smooth as bone. When he looked back at Kitty, his head tilted a little to the side, her eyes seemed to say, Who do you think you are? You’re really just some good-looking fool, the kind of boy I would have had a crush on in high school .

“Be quiet for a minute,” he said.

She looked at him, her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Cut it out, Bobby.”

“You can stop staring at me like that. I know what you were thinking just now.”

He brought his hand to the back of her neck and tried to kiss her. She turned her head away at first, but he turned it back, his fingers on her jaw. His chest was heavy, his face unsmiling. He moved away from her a step, letting his hand slide from her neck down her back, the gun still in his other hand, pressing against her arm. Her hair was sheared off at different lengths, standing up in clumps. She was so small, so delicate, that he was almost afraid, his hand on her back, feeling the flat muscles beneath her shirt. She kept her eyes open, watching him, as he backed her toward the table behind her, propping her up a little in his arms. He just stood there for a while, close enough to brush his body against hers, to feel the rise of her breasts against his rib cage. Then he unbuttoned the front of her jeans, using just one hand, the other one still on the gun.

“You know, you’ve been here so long you can’t even remember your own name anymore,” he said. “I thought you were a little smarter than that.”

“I don’t really care what you think.”

“All this ‘Charlie is Christ’ bullshit. Or is it ‘Charlie’s the Devil’? I forget.”

“My parents were strange people,” she said, leaning back, her hand on the table. “They never really talked. They just sort of policed each other. I never understood what they were so afraid of. What are you so afraid of?”

The words and ideas were not exactly hers. She had become smarter than before, but also dreamier, smarter but also absent. He thought of the first time he’d seen her walk off with Charlie, maybe a month or two ago, her hand in the back of his jeans, sloppy and blatant and stoned. “Turning them out,” Charlie called it, “breaking them in.” If you seduced them like a father with his daughter, if you scared them a little, got inside their heads, then any kindness you did them afterward would seem like an act of God.

He pushed his fingers down through the opening of Kitty’s fly, feeling the rise of muscle beneath the tangled wedge of hair. She looked right into his eyes and seemed to barely see him.

This morning, he’d found her in the kitchen, washing dishes in the ragged slip she sometimes wore as a dress, her nose and the skin around her mouth burned red by the sun. She was all forearms and shins, barefoot on the dirty kitchen floor, even smaller than he’d remembered.

“You just need to leave me alone for a little while,” she’d said.

He thought of her hips rising toward him in the barn, the freckles on her rib cage reminding him somehow that she was sixteen, a girl from a house with a swimming pool in Brentwood. He told her that he was going to take the used piano over to his friend Gary’s place, pick up the twenty dollars profit, use the money to buy some motorcycle parts. He asked her if she wanted to come along. He spoke in a purposeful voice, as if nothing had happened between them, but she just smiled at him in a disbelieving way, as if she knew that Charlie was about to walk in and say that he and Bobby needed to go have a talk.