James Hynes - Next

“This is Lynda,” Kevin had said, his arm curled around her narrow waist, his hand cupped over her hip. The room was lit only by a couple of red bulbs plugged into a floor lamp in the corner. The sash windows were open to the whirring crickets outside, but even so the room was fifteen degrees hotter than the summer night, humid with sweat and spilled beer and the sweet reek of reefer. Even in the resinous gloom, Kevin could see that the Philosopher’s Daughter was flushed and excited, her hair pasted with sweat to her forehead.

“Oh, hi!” she shouted, rocking back on her heels and laughing, piercing Kevin’s heart even as he stood with his arm around another warm girl. “Hi!” she chirped again, as high-pitched as a chipmunk, but Lynda gave her just a slow, sleepy smile, stroking Kevin’s back as she let her heavy-lidded gaze stray around the room. The Daughter, her pupils dilated, just blinked at Kevin and laughed again, and Kevin, to fill the silence, was about to say “Great party” when the music erupted once more and Wayne jumped up and started one of his infrequent boogies, throwing his bulk around and flinging his black hair about like a go-go dancer’s. Without a word Lynda tugged Kevin away by the hand as the Philosopher’s Daughter blinked dopily after them in the dim cathouse light. He turned away from her and instead watched Lynda kick her flip-flops to the wall, then start snapping her fingers over her head, slouching and swaying and closing her eyes behind the screen of her disheveled hair.

Kevin’s dimly aware of the metallic insinuation of the radio—“Early indications,” in the measured tones of an NPR announcer, “significant casualties”—and above the trees along a stretch of Lamar Kevin doesn’t remember, all he sees is the faded bedsheet of Texas sky. His hand on the radio, the cabbie is watching Kevin in the rearview, but Kevin’s trying to remember that first song he danced to at the party with Lynda, and he can’t. Despite his record store job, he was just enough older than the other dancers that the music wasn’t instantly familiar to him, a throbbing, quasidisco beat he identified as something from Manchester, England, though he couldn’t name the band. In fact, he remembers only the one song from that night, but he still remembers the way Lynda danced mostly on her toes in that steamy living room, pivoting and twirling so that her hair lashed across her face, the old farmhouse floor bouncing under their feet. At first Kevin simply chugged in place, closing his eyes as if he were really caught up in the music, which he wasn’t, not to begin with, still experiencing the thunderous, pounding bass as an assault, still self-consciously sober among all these swaying, drunken dancers, hoping the Philosopher’s Daughter was watching him, hoping she was wondering who this new girl was. But he kept his eyes on Lynda, who danced with her eyes closed, swaying her hips and her long, freckled arms in a complex, sinuous, but precise relationship to the beat. She wore a loose sundress that swung with every movement of her hips and flared to reveal her calves. The dress had no back to speak of, so that when she spun Kevin saw, under her flying hair, a single, smooth curve of skin, stained red by the lamplight. As the cab glides down the long slope of Lamar toward the river, the busy skyline out of sight behind the heatstruck trees, Kevin remembers hoping the Philosopher’s Daughter was noticing what a good dancer Lynda was, how effortless and sensual and unself-conscious, with not a hint of the Daughter’s spastic Molly Ringwaldisms. In the breaks between tapes he and Lynda visited the keg out back, and soon he was drunk enough so that it wasn’t even an effort not to glance around the dance floor, soon he was drunk enough to dance like Lynda, swaying his own hips and snapping his fingers over his head. During another break he stood breathless to one side as Lynda did a line off the coffee table, lifting her hair back with one hand, baring her slender neck, and he felt an electric surge from his medulla down his spine to the tip of his cock as if he’d done the line himself. He feels it now, in fact.

“Somethin’ bad happen,” says the cabbie. He’s fiddling with the radio, which hisses and spits from station to station.

“I’m sorry?” Kevin shifts on the backseat. A moment after she did the line, he and Lynda were dancing again, and now she was watching him with half-lidded eyes through her wild screen of hair, now she spun closer and ran the tips of her fingers down his arms. He grinned stupidly back at her, woozy and aroused, almost touching her but not quite, close enough to feel the lash of her hair across his cheek, close enough to smell her sweat.

“On the radio,” says the cabbie, searching the dial without pausing. “Somethin’ bad in Minnesota.”

The cab is already crawling across the Lamar Avenue Bridge, though Kevin can’t remember descending that last mile, curve after curve, to the river. He’s disoriented by the view out his window, where he sees a line of boxcars crawling across the rust-red trestle, the inverted reflections of the railcars crawling through the glassy green water of the river below. On the pedestrian bridge where he fell an hour or two ago, sweaty joggers trudge past a cluster of busy young men in polo shirts and khakis, some sort of film crew, it seems, working within a rough rampart of metal boxes, setting up a couple of tripods and aiming them at Austin’s dynamic skyline. Kevin feels as if his own film is being rewound, as if his lust has reeled him out to the end of the line, and is now reeling him back in, all the way down Lamar back to the center of town where he started. His disarticulation and reconstruction as a Texan as he traveled south down Lamar has been reversed, and now he’s being returned to his former state, the original Kevin, Michigan Kev.

The cabbie’s watching him in the rearview, his gaze more mournful than before, but Kevin can’t remember what the guy just said. He cranes around the headrest in front of him and sees traffic kinking and unkinking up the hill toward Gaia Market. Perhaps there’s been another accident; it can’t be the same one. Kevin, restless and rattled, notes the glowing red numbers of the fare; this is going to be another expensive cab ride.

“I got a brother up there.” The cabbie has given up on the radio; he’s feeling for something on the front seat. “He drive a cab, too, in the Twin Cities. I gettin’ worried.”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin says. “I didn’t hear what you said.”

The cabbie’s cradling a glossy red cell phone in his broad palm and thumbing the tiny keypad, shifting his gaze back and forth between the traffic ahead and the cell’s display as the cab glides and stops, glides and stops.

“What’s this about Minnesota?” Kevin leans forward against his seat belt, but the cabbie raises his finger for silence as he cups the tiny phone to his ear. The man’s other hand grips the wheel tightly, even though they’re crawling at only fifteen miles per hour off the end of the bridge and under the railway underpass.

“Fine,” mutters Kevin, settling back against the seat. Over the rush of the AC vents Kevin hears the tiny ring of the cabbie’s phone and then the ringing silence on the dance floor when the tape cuts off in midsong and everybody sags in place and groans in the heat and humidity. “Waaayyyne!” sings out the Philosopher’s Daughter, laughing, mocking. Wayne vaults from the couch, the old floor shuddering under his weight, and pushes his way through the breathless dancers to the stereo. Kevin and Lynda sink back on their heels, and Lynda pushes her hair away from her face with both hands and fixes Kevin with her cocaine eyes. All around them people are shouting over the music that isn’t playing, and Wayne and the Philosopher’s Daughter are loudly haggling over which tape to play next. Lynda sways against Kevin and catches his T-shirt with one hand and tugs him toward the door. They pinball off other dancers who don’t seem to notice and stumble out onto the empty farmhouse porch, the screen door slapping shut behind them. The red light within tints the windows but casts no glow on the porch, and Kevin isn’t sure if the shrilling all around him is the absence of amplified music ringing in his ears or the crickets under the shadowy trees on the farmhouse lawn. Lynda backs up to a porch upright and pulls Kevin up against her, and she drapes her arms over his shoulder and kisses him. She tastes salty from sweat. Kevin slips his hands inside the loose armholes of her dress and slides his palms up her warm, slippery rib cage, stiffens her nipples under his thumbs, feels her blood pulsing through the tips of his fingers. She kisses him deeper in the ringing, buzzing silence, her fingers through the sweaty hair at the back of his head. Kevin’s cock was already stirring on the dance floor, and now he’s hard. He frees a hand and slides it up under her skirt. “That’s the one!” he hears their hostess cry over the chatter inside the house, and now he’s aware of the Philosopher’s Daughter somewhere behind him like a source of heat, and he sends a thought in her direction, watch this, his thumb sliding up the inside of Lynda’s slick thigh, I’ll show you passion. Lynda flinches, catching her breath.