Chapter Text
Ray’s daddy was a roughneck. Used to be rodeo, but quit riding broncs when he realized he blew all his pay every Friday night, thought there’d be more steady money in oil, since he’d heard everybody in Dallas was richer than rich. He figured “what the hell”, since his new wife was expecting, anyways.
Ray’s daddy was tall and thin, built like a string-bean. Washed out hair, washed out skin, washed out eyes. Dull, barely alive after working in the fields all day. Mostly, when Ray thinks back on childhood, he remembers his father’s sleeping face, lax with Jim Bean, illuminated by the ghostly light of the TV set. Sleeping like the dead.
Ray’s mama named him Ray, allegedly, because she said he was like a little Ray of sunshine; a baby with blue eyes like her own, only brighter, burning, somehow.
Ray Bonham grows up in the Permian Basin in West Texas, twenty odd miles outside of Odessa in a double wide trailer. Everybody says he looks just like his mama, who killed herself when he was just two months old. Postpartum depression, the doctor at the hospital had said, right after she’d been pronounced dead. Ray’s father hadn’t known what that meant, or maybe had refused to hear it. Had tried to strangle that doctor.
Ray’s mama had been a beautiful woman, everyone had said, wild as the wind, hill country girl whose first language was Texas German. She’d met his daddy at one of Willie’s picnics out in the middle of nowhere, in a distant time and place where daddy still smiled and said more than two words at a time.
When Ray was born in his daddy’s truck on the way to the county hospital, the sky was ablaze with lightning, and the sand was picking up, all across the plains. When he was born in his father’s truck, he did not cry. He had already been around once, what the hell was a few decades more?
…
Ray’s teachers write words in his student record like ‘listless’ and ‘energetic’. In 1992, the year he begins sixth grade, his homeroom teacher and the principal convince his daddy that he has an attention disorder, that he needs to be medicated if he ever wants to make it to high school.
Ray’s daddy hasn’t trusted a doctor since his wife passed, but Ray’s grades have never been the best, and his mind often wanders when his daddy is lecturing him, or telling him to quit that damn racket.
Ray is only eleven, but he is a magnet for danger; there was the time he took the neighbor’s tractor for a joyride; the time he brought a pack of wild dogs home with him; the time his daddy caught him trying to make a bonfire with a whole gallon of propane.
His daddy is exhausted and miserable, and figures it can’t hurt to try something. Anything.
Ray doesn’t like the way the pills make him feel. It makes every sound and smell more powerful, amplifies his senses and makes time into a liquid; sometimes a lazy desert river, sometimes rushing white water, rapids that pull him under.
On the very precipice of summer the following year, Ray walks across the asphalt, towards the two eighth grade boys who everybody calls queer, who smoke cigarettes behind the storage containers on the far edge of the recess yard, who listen to strange and wonderful music.
He’s only been pretending to take the pills for the past few months. They make his head feel heavy and full of cotton, and even though he hasn’t gotten a grade higher than a C all semester, he feels clearer.
“Y’all buyin’?” He says to the eighth grade boys. He had heard an Italian fella in an all white suit say these words in a movie that played after ten o’clock on the TV, had sat through the whole of it, glued to the screen in the dark, while his daddy slept off the Everclear.
…
His eighth grade year, there are a lot of electives to choose from. Shop fills up fast, and has a waitlist by the time Ray shows up three hours late to school.
He takes art. The art teacher is a skinny little man, delicate-featured with wireframe glasses and long, brown hair. He sort of looks like a man and a woman at the same time.
Other kids call Mr. Sullivan real nasty things, nastier than dirty longhair, which is what Ray’s daddy calls him. But Ray likes Mr. Sullivan, thinks he’s pretty and smart and worldly, because he’s been to France and Italy. Likes that Mr. Sullivan looks at Ray’s paintings of things he sees in his dreams, really looks at them, and sees something worth a damn.
…
Ray stops making art around the time he starts taking rodeo seriously, when he is fourteen. Time to grow up, he decides, and saves up money from selling his Ritalin for a whole month, until he has enough for the entry fee.
The man in the white stetson hat who smells like menthols stares down at him, considering. Taps his bic pen against his clipboard and clicks his tongue.
”You ever rode a bull before, son?”
Ray is tall for his age, can maybe pass for sixteen. Girls are starting to pay attention to him. He hasn’t even ridden a steer before, has only been on his uncle’s horse a handful of times, if that. But Ray Bonham is nothing if not a good liar.
”Yes, sir, I come from ranch people. Bull riding is my middle name.”
That day, under the unforgiving, scorching sun, Ray stays on the the beast ironically named “Sunshine” for eight whole seconds. As soon as they pull the gate, he’s being spun, because he is an unwanted weight to the bucking, angry flesh beneath him. Holding on for dear life.
One time, after Ray’s daddy had too much to drink on the 4th, he confided in Ray about the time he’d seen a man get gored by a bull. Back in his daddy’s rodeo days, in the ‘70s. Long, shining black horns meeting the soft belly of a rookie from Colorado, and then steaming red intestines spilling out onto the frozen Wyoming grass, melting the ice.
(Ray had listened to the story in silence, had watched fireworks light up the sky over the desert, watched red light burst, explode against the open sky at night.)
The bull throws Ray, and for a moment he is weightless, flying. Then gravity is pulling him down, and all of the air is stolen from his lungs as his back hits the dirt. The rodeo clowns come running to the rescue, kicking up the dust, and the crowds’ cheers are almost deafening.
…
His sci-fi type dreams get an upgrade not long after he decides he’s gonna be a cowboy. They become more vivid. The alien-looking architecture is more clearly defined, and the dreams have begun to take motion; he walks through city blocks, sprawling, like something out of Tron or Star Wars. There are fast cars, everywhere, sleeker than anything he’s ever seen, elegant, shining roads, a bustling market place. Bright and gleaming city, neon signs and a constant crush of robots that look like people. That walk and talk and curse and spit and smile like people.
It feels like home. It even begins to smell like home; in wafting, mineraly scents, cloying and sharp and metallic. Things that Ray has never smelled before. Some of them come close to crude oil. As he continues to have the dreams, some of the utterly foreign smells begin to seem comforting. Or disgusting. Or ordinary. Or, confusingly, appetizing.
Certain streets and avenues are suddenly familiar. Intersections. Bars. Night Clubs. Storefronts. Train stations. The beautiful, colorful, busy city of his dreams is what Ray imagines Dallas must be like. Or New York. Somewhere where there’s always something to look forward to, a perpetual Saturday night.
Then, one night, Ray dreams that he wakes up in a dark, dirty place. His head feels like it did the day after daddy had let him have some homemade wine on mama’s last birthday. What would’ve been her thirty-third.
He is chained to somebody else, and his body is not his own. His whole leg is metallic, red and yellow and running hot.
He is chained by the ankle to another robot, who is bigger than him by a mile. Big and gray, (Like the dead. Like the dead.) with fierce red eyes and a fiercer scowl.
He’s the handsomest thing Ray has ever seen, and that’s saying a lot because he just recently lost his virginity to Cassidy Gatlin, who’s the best looking girl on the cheer squad. Usually only does quarterbacks and the rich sons of oil men, but she’d seen him ride that bull, yes she had.
And she had liked what she’d seen.
”So,” Ray says, in a language he does not know, turning to face the beautiful stranger. “You come here often?”
…
As soon as he has his license, he cleans out his savings to buy Ernie Miller’s ‘57 Thunderbird, the one that’s been sitting in the old man’s yard since Ray can remember. There’s a lot wrong with it, which is why he can afford it at all; transmission’s probably on its way out, needs new sparkplugs, tires are cracking and bald, and sometimes it just doesn’t seem to wanna start at all.
But Ray has always been good with cars, helps his daddy every time something’s wrong with the pickup, changed Cassidy’s oil for her just the other week.
“You got mechanical intuition, son,” Daddy had said, pride in his voice, leaning heavy on the picnic table outside their trailer. Ray hadn’t even noticed him hovering, busy as he was on his new project.
You got mechanical intuition, son. The longest sentence his daddy has uttered since God knows when. The only time that Ray can recall receiving something approximating praise from the man.
Ray takes good care of his car. He buffs out scratches, makes her shine, makes that engine purr. It’s enough to get him to competitions, which is all Ray Bonham cares about by the time he is sixteen.
…
A few rodeo clowns he’s chummy with sneak him into a bar, not long after he quits school to focus on his new life. Cowboy life. They buy him straight jack just to watch him squirm as he chokes it down, and after they’ve had their laughs, one of the quieter ones, Dave or Don, maybe, buys Ray a coke to mix it with.
This is the night that Ray Bonham understands, for the first time, why his father drinks.
…
He’s been sleeping on a friend’s couch out in Midland for a few weeks, figures he’ll stop by home to check on his old man.
Ray’s feeling big in his britches; He just scored another eight this past weekend, won a few hundred bucks that he’s already spent, partying with new friends.
Looks like a dust storm might be coming, the sky is tinged a preternatural green. He pulls in next to the pickup he’s fixed dozens of times.
“Where you been?” His daddy says, standing in the dark entryway, long arms dangling at his sides. He reeks of whiskey.
“Where you been?”
Ray’s daddy slaps him across the face. Ray falls backwards, tumbling ass over head, down the four plastic and steel steps that lead up to his childhood home.
There is a metallic tang pooling on the flat of his tongue. Ray brings a hand up to his face, and it comes away sticky, dark with blood. He looks up at his daddy, who is looking down at him from the open door, lip trembling.
“Lorrie, I’m sorry.” His daddy chokes on a sob. Lorrie was Ray’s mama’s name.
Ray’s daddy is looking right into his eyes, because his eyes are just like hers were. Only brighter, burning, somehow.
Bloodshot, horrified gray eyes meeting blue. Ray’s daddy has never raised a hand to him in his life. Not until now.
“Lorrie, I’m so sorry. So, so sorry, oh God, what did I do? Oh God.”
Ray scrambles backwards until he is on his feet, and turns, and runs for the ‘57 Thunderbird. He gets in and speeds away as fast as he can, and he does not look back, even though the dust is beginning to swirl in the air, even though it’s hard to see the road through tears, even though he knows his daddy will probably die alone in that trailer, miles away from Odessa lights.
…
My spark, come back to bed. The handsome Goliath beckons.
They are in a room with tall walls, adorned with purple and black tapestries. The same strange, angular design on all of them. Like a mask, or a face.
There are crystals and gems of all varieties and colors in this room, practically littering the shelves that line the walls. It’s opulent, but not overly so. Tasteful might be a better word, but Ray isn’t sure he has good enough taste to judge.
It almost reminds him of this spiritual-type store he’d been to, once, while on mushrooms with some girl called Barbara Jane.
But that place had been in a tired old strip mall, had smelled like bad incense and dust. He’d been too afraid to touch anything, for fear of breaking it, and highly uncomfortable as a result.
Here, he feels comfortable. Safe. Like he is swimming in a pool of golden light, which, to Ray, is a novel experience. The feeling of safety. Of comfort that is not bad for him.
“Gimme a sec, hot stuff, gotta finish polishing here,” Ray responds, in a voice that is not quite his own. At least the words don’t sound so strange anymore, like the whirring and clicking of machinery. It doesn’t feel like he is speaking another language, but he is keenly aware that he is.
You’re as bad as a seeker, The stranger rolls his pretty red eyes, (eyes?), and slumps back on the massive bed he’s reclined upon. Defeated. His big, silver thighs are spread wide open, which he must know looks very enticing.
You’re too far away. Come closer.
“Aw, don’t pout.” Ray says, abandoning the waxy cloth in his hands, which feels like it’s made of something living, something fluid.
I do not pout.
Ray moves in body-that-is-not-quite-his-own, towards the stranger who is most definitely pouting, and straddles that massive lap. Ray proceeds to pepper that handsome, otherworldly face with kisses, until there is a deep, rumbling laughter coming from the warm body beneath him.
…
Ray wakes up alone in his car, in the pre-dawn Walmart parking lot, and cries so hard that no sound comes out.
He feels cold.
…
He rodeos in Abilene and Amarillo, down in the Big Bend area and back up again. Ray is good. Better than good; his friend Ed thinks he might even be good enough for West of The Pecos, or even The National Finals, one day. Other cowboys say so, too, when they’re not too bitter about being beaten by a teenaged-kid.
His friend Ed, who is twenty-six and sits around all day playing guitar, scrapes by on disability and government cheese. Ed walks with a noticeable limp, and used to ride saddle bronc, sometimes did team roping.
Ray met him in Abilene. Ed was the only guy near the liquor store who would agree to buy him a 40. Had bought Ray a twelve pack, in fact, and they split it behind the fences, watching the barrel racers come out.
The start of a beautiful friendship.
Ed gave Ray his first joint, his first tab of acid, his first can of nitrous.
It’s a late spring afternoon. Ray is crossfaded, a double whammy of most of a blunt and far too many beers. He sits on Ed’s front porch and finishes the roach he put out earlier, even though the edges of his vision are blurred and every time he turns his head too fast, he sees streaks of colors.
He can smell ozone in the air, see the lightning flash, hear the thunder rumble not five seconds after. The clouds are dark, fat with rain. Everything seems more detailed, more significant.
“Hey man,” Ed says, limping to stand beside him, looking up at the sky. “You good to drive?”
“Should be alright.” Ray answers. He’s been worse off, and it’s not like Ed’s ever got enough gas to go anywhere himself.
Ed smacks two crumpled twenty dollar bills into his hand.
“Cool, cool. Go get as much cough syrup as that’ll buy.” Ed says, and slinks back inside.
…
Rodeo is hard on the body. Especially in the wintertime.
It’s thirty degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the two ribs he cracked this past summer, the wrist he broke last spring, and the ankle he managed to fracture sometime in between all ache something fierce.
Dull but resonating aches, which sharpen and crackle on bad days, on very cold days.
He’s had (at least) two (confirmed) concussions since he started bull riding. He’s always covered in bruises, and since he still has a few months supply of Ritalin, sometimes, he swaps pills with a few of the other cowboys. A little Vicodin here, a little Xanax there.
Ray makes it work, even in his constant accumulation of bruises and cuts and scrapes, even when he’s hit a bad luck streak, and a bull sends him pinwheeling through the air, knocks him flat in the dirt.
…
Ed’s whole bachelor pad reeks of cat piss, even though he doesn’t own a cat. Ed says it’s supposed to smell like that.
Ray smokes homemade crystal meth for the first time on Ed’s porch. It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before. His breaks and fractures and strains and aches and tears don’t hurt anymore. There is a tingling sensation in his fingertips, a good tingling.
It must be a year or two, at least, before he comes down from the clouds.
…
At first, it’s just a little hit every few days or so. Then one day, it’s every other day. Then every day. Then a few times a day. Etc, etc, etc.
Ray has long since stopped answering his daddy’s drunken phone calls; his daddy, who can go from pleading and pathetic to furious, spittle-flying-out the mouth furious, in a fraction of a second.
One of his aunts who lives way over in Tyler gets Ed’s landline one day, somehow, and immediately starts laying into Ray, hollering about you need to call your daddy you little truant and if your mama bless her soul were still with us, she’d have a thing or two to say about her son being a no-good hick who can’t even call his da—!
He slams the phone back into the receiver.
Ray has always had a wandering mind, a rambling body, but this takes the cake. If he’s not high all the time, he can’t hardly focus on anything, these days. When he tries to stop, his hands start to shake something awful, and it feels like his heart is racing. He feels too hot and too cold, and sweaty in places he didn’t think he could be.
He starts to think that maybe this stuff isn’t any good around the time Ed starts to lose his teeth, enamel wearing away and gums turning brown. Ed, who’s been smoking even more than Ray, for longer, too.
It all comes to a head when they’ve blown the last of Ray’s winnings from the Plainview Ranch Rodeo, and Ed suggests that they just rob the damn pharmacy, talking almost incoherently, waving his hands around and gesticulating in an uncontrolled way. In a way that suggests any semblance of control has jumped out the window.
“Hell, I’ll figure out something.” Ray assures him, a gracious offer. He’s twirling his keys around on his pointer finger and giving Ed what he hopes is a winning smile, walking backwards towards the front door. He turns, then walks in long strides out to the Thunderbird before Ed can even say “bye”, screen door slamming shut behind him.
He leaves just like he’s left everything else in his life. Because Ed doesn’t want help; he wants to die, like Ray’s daddy had.
Ed, who taught Ray to play his first few chords on the guitar, how to make a mean chili. Ed, who never could get over that ex-wife of his, after she left him for a younger cowboy, one who could still dance.
…
He is freshly eighteen and he has just checked himself into a rehab center, out in New Mexico, near Taos.
It’s snowing outside, and his leg and his ribs and wrist hurt.
“I’m trying to get clean.” He tells the middle-aged woman in scrubs, sitting behind her little booth, behind the clear acrylic screen.
“If I had a nickel, honey…” She rolls her eyes behind her cat-eye glasses. She feels very far away. Layers and layers away from him.
“Take a seat with the rest.”
It’s snowing outside, and it takes everything in Ray not to just walk back out that door, take off running, into the white, endless expanse.
…
The woman in scrubs is taking his blood pressure, shining a light in his eyes, asking him about his medical history.
“I wasn’t even born in a hospital.” Ray admits. He doesn’t think he’s ever been to the doctor, not even as a little kid. His daddy never did trust doctors.
The woman rolls her eyes again, puts on a stethoscope and presses it to his chest. Waits. Frowns.
“Damn thing must be broken.” She mutters, mostly to herself. He gets the feeling that she doesn’t get paid enough.
…
Ray does not, cannot sleep for three days and three nights.
Then, it seems like all he does is sleep.
The vivid, wonderfully real dreams of his childhood had faded into nothing, sometime after he got on meth. They come back with a vengeance.
Are you well, my spark?
He feels pain, yes, but it is not the same visceral, liquid-fire-in-his-veins pain he has been feeling of late in the waking world.
Can you be hungover in a dream?
“Too much to drink.” He mumbles into the pillow, which his face is shoved into.
Ray does not want to look at the handsome stranger, just yet. He thinks if he did look, right now, he’d be liable to start crying.
Ah. Weight shifts on the bed, and a broad, cool hand is brushing against his upper back, rubbing a soothing pattern.
Hot Rod, this is the fourth time I’ve found you like this since the deca-cycle began.
A nervous sound, like the handsome stranger is clearing his throat.
Have you thought about what I said? About talking to your— to Ratchet?
Ray stills entirely. Can’t even be a good person when he’s somebody else, apparently.
“I’ll do it,” He says, into the pillow. Too much of a coward to face the stranger, even though this isn’t real. “I’ll do it for you.”
…
He gets his first trophy buckle in Lawton, Oklahoma, on a balmy day in April. Ten seconds on a bull called Titan, and now he really feels like he’s in the big leagues, because he has a check for two-thousand dollars in his pocket, too.
Those pretty girls in the stands had been screaming.
Ray is twenty going on thirty, six feet tall, with coarse, dark stubble and a sharp, movie star jaw. Reddish-brown, almost auburn hair, brushing his shoulder blades. A twinkle in his eye.
The only thing that people ever give him funny looks for is his walk. Confident, toes pointed out, long strides. But Ray walks with a bit of a limp, now, ever since he broke his femur bone last summer. Had to have a metal pin inserted. He wonders what Ed would say about it. Likes to imagine he’d get a laugh out of it, since they’re matching, now.
He looks like he’s been a grown man for a long time, on account of the crystal, which means no more sneaking into bars and honky-tonks; he just waltzes right on in.
Tonight’s destination is just off the interstate, less than a mile away from where the rodeo was camped. Little spot called Wynette’s, with a blinking neon sign of a scantily clad Tinker-Bell.
He orders his drink and drapes himself over the bar counter, stretching theatrically, showing off his white and red leather chaps, his matching vest with flames and red tassels.
His golden, first place trophy buckle glints in the low lighting.
This is the kind of place where people still smoke inside, and if it gets rowdy enough, bottles will start flying. A just-okay country band is covering Merle Haggard songs on the stage, the bassist always lagging behind a note, the singer’s voice just a touch too nasally.
“I could do better.” Comes a woman’s voice. There is a high, lonesome twang to it that does not come from anywhere out here.
Ray turns to look at her. She’s the tallest woman he’s ever seen, though it’s hard to tell for sure just how tall that is, since they’re both in heels. Taller than him.
Her hair is salt and pepper, even though she’s young. Hair cropped short, just below her chin. She is handsome.
“I bet,” Ray nods. He finds that he cannot look away from her. She reminds him of someone, he is sure of it, but he really couldn’t say who. He’s already had a couple drinks, by now.
“You from around here?”
“No,” Ramona, his Mona, laughs. Deep and rumbling. Ray is struck by the strangest urge to reach his hand out, touch the soft skin under her collarbone. Just to feel her laugh.
He tries again.
“You rodeo?”
“Duh,” She says, tips her black hat up at him. “Aren’t you, pretty boy?”
“No.” Ray smiles at her, big and goofy. He can’t help it, he’s already in love. “I’ve just been looking for you. Wanna dance?”
…
They get hitched in Vegas.
They buy champagne, and dance cheek to cheek in the hotel room, waltzing to Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills, which is what Ray has always imagined would play at his wedding.
Even though Ray is the one who is actually partial to jewelry, (and is a little put out that he hadn't had a say), Mona had insisted on the rings being turquoise. Said turquoise was the exact shade of his eyes, which gets Ray behind the idea because ever since he started making serious money, he’s been getting awfully vain.
Mona says she loves his flashy clothes, his flashy personality. Says he looks like a real Rhinestone Cowboy, like Gram Parsons, like a pretty little thing.
He loves her big arms, her big thighs, which pin him down, sprawled out naked on his back, on their wedding night.
Her big hands, big fingers threading between his own.
“You been saving yourself for me, little lady?” She asks, teasing. He didn’t expect to like it when she calls him things like that, but boy, does he.
Mona’s negligee is slipping off her shoulder, showing the broad, white scar that she got from a bull. Slashed her open shoulder to armpit.
Ray giggles, shakes his head.
“I don’t know if you noticed, Mona, but I’m a bit of a hot commodity with the sweethearts.”
She chuckles, presses her chest flush with his. “You mean you’re easy?”
“That too,” he wriggles underneath her, glancing at their fingers intertwined, the rings on their fingers.
“But you already knew that, baby.”
…
Mona is five years older than him. She comes from coal mining people up in West Virginia, and her daddy died of black lung when she was only fourteen— all that silica dust gets in the lungs real easy if you dig too deep.
Mona’s mama was mean to her because she wasn’t small and pretty like all the other women in their family.
Mona and Ray are both half-orphan. They’ve both broken enough bones for a lifetime. They both play guitar, though poorly. They understand each other well.
Mona loves rum and fruit juice, dogs, video poker, old cars, and usually, women. Ray is a rare exception to this rule; Mona says that his eyes are like a woman’s eyes.
She hates when steak is anything but rare, hates politicians, hates bananas, hates the cold. She’s been married before, when she was seventeen, to a man that was no good. A man that treated her like dirt.
A doctor had once told her that she couldn’t have babies anymore, because of that man. She pretends not to care, but Ray sometimes catches her looking longingly at families with small children, expectant mothers, ads for baby formula.
Ray’s never thought about kids before. He likes them, to be sure, had always liked playing with his little cousins, when his extended family was still talking to him. He doesn’t even know if they know he’s clean.
Well, drinking an awful lot, because he and Mona are both casual drinkers who tend to become heavy drinkers when they’re in each other's orbits, but. Still. Clean-er.
…
“Did you ever think about having sparklings?” Ray asks, flipping through what seems like the alien version of Sports Illustrated. He can’t actually read any of the lines (words? characters?) on the page, because they are in a language that he is almost certain doesn’t exist. A language which he is somehow speaking in, fluently.
He’s never thought too hard about how this all works.
The handsome stranger jumps in place, sitting at his desk, like Ray had just thrown a pop-it at him.
Hot Rod, I— do you— do you want sparklings? The handsome stranger asks him, voice careful, uncharacteristically high and thin. He’s nervous, Ray realizes.
Ray likes being called Hot Rod. Like a Hot Rod Lincoln.
Ray laughs at the handsome stranger, folds the magazine in his lap.
“Loosen up, would you? We’re both young, it was just a question!”
The stranger visibly deflates.
You vex me, He rumbles, resting his square chin in the palm of his great, black hand, looking at Ray fondly from across the room.
Perhaps one day, when our planet is a more equitable place. A kinder place.
“You’ve always loved Soundwave’s bitlets,” Ray points out. Whatever that means, it gets a laugh out of the stranger.
So have you. Just two cycles ago, Rumble and Frenzy were practically using your spoiler as playground equipment, remember? I thought they’d rip it off— you’re far too lenient with them, you know.
Ray smiles at him. “They are pretty cute, aren’t they?”
…
“I’m pregnant,” Mona laughs, happy and disbelieving and a little crazed all at once. “I’m actually pregnant!”
She hadn’t been able to keep her morning coffee down for the past week straight. Ray thought she should go to the hospital, that she’d maybe caught the stomach flu that was going around. But she’d gone out and bought three pregnancy tests. Done all of them, just to be sure.
Three positives.
Ray smiles and hugs her tight, and squeezes her thick torso from behind, hooks his chin over her shoulder to gaze down at the positive test with her.
He wants to ask; Are you sure you want to do this? What about the risks? What if there’s complications? How in the hell are we gonna scrape together enough money to raise a kid? Christ, I’m only twenty years old.
But Ray doesn’t want to ruin this moment for her. Mona is looking down at that test with watery eyes, something like reverence on her face.
She laughs again. She sounds like a little girl, giddy and light.
“Guess it’s about time I quit the rodeo circuit.”
…
Mona finds work at a place that boards horses, up near where the 10 and the 20 intersect.
Ray finds work on a cattle ranch; something steadier, a check at the end of every month, even if the pay is less than desirable.
His new boss is from a long line of ranch people, a quiet man who nobody addresses by his first name, who everybody just calls “Gutierrez”. Three of Gutierrez’s sons also work on the family ranch, and they also call him “Gutierrez.” At the very least, Ray’s Spanish improves a bit during this period, and the hundred-and-twenty-five acres are some of the most beautiful he’s ever set foot on.
It’s hard work, moving from dawn ’til dusk, herding cows, but it is always worth it when he crawls into bed at the end of the day, in the little place he and Mona have been renting out past Fort Davis, and cuddles up to her, just to feel her heart beat, feel the growing swell of her stomach. Ray wonders when he’ll be able to feel the little heart beat in there, too.
…
One night, around the six-month mark, Ray stumbles in at half-past midnight, drunk off his ass.
He’d been out honkytonking with some old rodeo buddies and one of the Gutierrezes, lost track of time and tequila shots. He’d been doing that more and more, as of late. Had been thinking a lot about little baby hands and little baby feet, and his daddy’s passed out, washed out face.
“Either you grow up, or get out.” Mona says, as serious as death. She’s standing there in her faded Austin City Limits shirt and underwear, arms crossed over her belly.
She turns on her heel and walks back into the bedroom, into the quiet dark.
Ray stands alone in the yellow light of the kitchen, and realizes that she is right.
…
The longer he is sober off alcohol, the more frequent the dreams become. There are new sensations, new streets, new faces. New, all of it, but also all strangely familiar.
There is the tired, almost perpetually grumpy face with blue eyes, attached to finely tuned, top-of-the-line hands. Hands that scold and sometimes even throw things, yes, but they are also hands that rub his back, soothing, arms like a mother’s arms holding him tight, when it feels like he is going to fall to pieces.
There are three nearly-matching faces; all pretty, like exotic birds, all red-eyed. All evoking something like the feeling of seeing friends one has not seen in a long time. One is quiet, controlled, another laughing, cackling like a witch. The last seems to change expressions every minute, but the last is also determined. Maybe driven is the better word— driven, in a way the others aren’t.
There is the pale face with big, yellow eyes. Intense, fleeting eyes. (He gets the feeling that not just anybody gets the chance to see them, gets the feeling that usually, they are obscured by red.) When these eyes are on Ray, they seem to soften. He can’t begin to guess what he did to deserve a look so fond.
There is the face that is not a face at all, but a single, golden eye set against a void of black. At first, Ray is afraid of this face— but he likes a challenge, and over time, patient time, this one, too, becomes familiar, comfortable.
There are so many faces, these days, more than anything else in his dreams. Sometimes it is overwhelming, because he does not know any of their names.
Then, there is the face that comes to him tonight. Thin, long, pointed chin. Pointy teeth, too.
“So, how’re you liking the new job?” Ray asks this newest-not-new face, the one who is all sharp angles, who looks like he hasn’t unclenched anything since he was born.
Sharp-and-moody glowers at him, but it’s more weariness than real hostility.
Aren’t you Megatron’s conjunx?
What the hell is a conjunx? And, for that matter, what the hell is a Megatron?
“Whoa, whoa, we’re not conjunxed,” Ray grins. “At least, not yet.”
Sharp-and-moody does not say anything to that, shifts his weight uncomfortably.
“You have nice thighs.” Ray tells him. It’s true.
Does Megatron know you wander around, flirting with his recruits?
“Just flirting with you, actually. And it’s not flirting if I’m just stating the obvious.”
Sharp-and-moody makes a strangled noise, what might’ve been a laugh if he’d let it come to fruition.
You are exactly how they said you would be, Hot Rod.
“And your name is…?”
Sharp-and-moody is already walking away, towards the deck. Pity, it had been fun messing with him. For a moment, though, halfway down the corridor, he pauses. Looks back at Ray over his shoulder, and smiles.
It’s Deadlock. Don’t wear it out.
…
The baby is due in two months, and Mona has stopped working. Ray starts picking up the slack, starts cleaning the house, starts giving her massages, starts building the crib and installing shelves, starts making dinner, even after work, even though Mona says she’s afraid to let him in the kitchen.
He wants to show her that he can be good.
The first real meal that Ray cooks for her is Ed’s chili, and she says it’s the best she’s ever had.
“Where’d you learn to cook like this, honey? I would’a bought you a frilly apron a long time ago if I’d have known.”
Up until a few short months ago, they were the sort of couple that subsisted off of takeout and takeout leftovers, anyways, but Ray smiles up at her, adoring, indulgent.
“Old friend. You want seconds?”
…
“Yello?”
Ray hasn’t heard his daddy’s voice in so long, he forgets to breathe for a moment. Forgets to say anything into the pay phone outside the doctor’s office. He doesn’t remember his daddy sounding so old.
He takes a deep breath in.
“I just called to let you know you’re gonna be a granddaddy.”
Silence.
“Ray? That you, boy?”
“Yeah.”
Silence. A crackle, maybe static, maybe a huff of laughter.
“Got some poor girl knocked up?”
“She’s older than me.”
Silence.
“You need money?”
Ray scoffs. “No.”
Silence.
“You know, not too long before we found out your mama was pregnant—” Here, his daddy’s voice breaks a little. “She got up in the middle of the night. That was when we were still in Marfa, when she was still selling her paintings.”
“Mama painted?” Ray asks. He hadn’t known.
“She got up in the middle of the night, wandered out into the desert. When she came back to the house at sunup, she was barefooted and bleedin’ from the soles of her feet, and her eyes were all wide. And she told me that she caught a falling star, and swallowed it. Ain’t that something?”
…
Mona dies in the hospital after five long, painful hours in labor. They had known she was bleeding internally by hour four, had known to look for signs because of the damage she’d sustained from her first marriage. Something that was ruptured a long time ago ruptures again.
She’s dead by hour five.
Ray, somehow, keeps himself from crumbling to the floor, keeps himself from flinging his body onto hers, from begging, from screaming at God, but not from crying. He cries until he cannot breathe.
The baby is alive and healthy, still attached to Mona’s rapidly cooling body, still covered in warm blood from her insides. Ray holds her for the first time, (a baby girl), blind with tears, and the tears fall onto his baby’s face and run down her fat cheeks, carving clear trails through the red. He wipes the blur of water away with the back of his hand, and realizes that his baby looks just like her mother— except for her eyes. Blue.
…
I don’t like it.
“C’mon, Megs,” Ray sighs. “You were the one who said Shockwave could use some company up there.”
Ray is sitting on the bed, and what seems to be a black cat, made entirely of warm metal, is draped over his lap. It’s purring, or maybe it just has an engine.
The handsome stranger (… Megs?) does not relent, only crosses his arms over his broad chest and looks out the window, out at the city lights. It sort of looks like Dallas, but it also sort of doesn’t. Ray hadn’t much cared for Dallas, the one time he’d been.
“… anddd you were the one that insisted he set up the base on Luna I. Tactical advantage or something, remember?”
Why can’t someone else go?
Ray snorts out an ugly laugh, and the dozing creature in his lap stirs.
“Because I don’t know any other bots who’d be willing to keep him company for a few cycles. He’s lonely, sweet-spark, I can tell.”
Hm.
“What, you miss me already?”
Yes, The handsome stranger replies, so fast and so sincere that it nearly gives Ray whiplash. The handsome stranger drops to his knees before the bed, before Ray, and now they are practically at eye level.
Ray starts, surprised. The black cat makes a small, questioning noise, one red eye peeking up at him. He scratches between her ears.
Hot Rod, A nervous click. It may sound… silly, but. I cannot bear to be apart from you any longer. I do not want to be apart from you, ever again. Will you… will you go through the Ritus with me, when you return? So I may feel you, even across space, time, even when we absolutely must be apart?
Ray grins, wobbly, teary-eyed. The black cat in his lap is somehow exuding feelings of excitement, of contentment, of happiness all at once. Her tail swishes. I feel the same way, pretty kitty, he thinks.
”Aw, you big bucket-helm. I’ve been waiting for you to ask.”
…
The transport shuttle is not alive, only a vessel, set on a predetermined course to Luna I. Ray doesn’t know why this knowledge unnerves him, doesn’t know why the silence is so oppressive. He is the sole passenger.
He wonders what the handsome stranger is doing, back home.
He presses his face against the glass, looks out into the black, empty expanse of space. For a moment, he is taken out of it, out of what a marvel it is; Ray recalls a snowy white plain, out in New Mexico.
Then there is noise so loud that his ears are ringing, and the shuttle he’s inside of makes an involuntary barrel roll, belly up, and everything including him is consumed by fire, by heat, by light.
But Hot Rod has always burned brighter, stronger than any barrage a functionist ship could throw at him.
Hot Rod’s frame burns away with the explosion, but his spark, a ball of blue light, falls through space. Rushes through space, towards the Milky Way, towards a little planet where a woman called Lorrie Bonham will come to be. She will walk out into the desert at night, after waking from a strange dream. She will catch him, just in time.