Soul Music
an excerpt

Over a breakfast of grapefruit and oatmeal, Neal skimmed the paper. The story of Riley Wolf had been pushed to page 46, and reduced to a brief paragraph. Thirty seven year old local man missing for two weeks. No leads, no word from the missing to his friends and family. The rest was an unimportant blurb about the continued investigation. Neal folded the paper and pushed it aside. His mind was always on the matter subconsciously, and there wasn’t time to dwell on it now. He had to get ready for work. It was hard enough to sit in that back room hunched over the instruments, all in need of maintenance or repair, and concentrate while the whispered conversations and furtive glances of his coworkers intruded his space; the room his brother had sat in with him five days a week, six depending on the workload, disassembling and aligning the brass instruments while Neal worked on tuning guitars. The music shop they worked at owed its steady stream of customers to their craftsmanship, acquiring them the status of some of the best instrument repair technicians in the county.

Neal regarded his reflection in the bathroom mirror as he undressed and twisted the shower nob. His eyes were a murky grey, hollow, his face pale and long to the point of appearing sickly. Thin lips, framed by laugh lines, were drawn in a tight, serious line. His nose was narrow, tapering to a rounded base, and his ears jutted out from the sides of his head, like the handles of a jug. Both were pierced several times with silver hoops. In elementary school his nickname had been Dumbo, though with his disheveled mop of flame red hair his brother had always insisted he looked more like Alfred E. Newman, the mascot of Mad Magazine.

Both his biceps were covered by tattoos, the right adorned with an image of an Hawaiian shirt clad cartoon wolf sitting in a DJ booth and screaming into the microphone with a pair of headphones strapped to his head. Beneath it, in what was supposed to be pink neon, read ‘Wolfman Jack’. On the left arm was a cloven footed devil playing a golden violin, which ran down into a sleeve of interconnected instruments being strummed, beat, and blown by a demonic band that ended at the wrist.

With fingers whose nails were ragged from biting, he traced the long, shiny scar that stretched from the side of his hip to his abdomen, staring at the mark as if he’d never seen it before, though he’d had it for most of his life. Riley had cut him open with a fish knife there. An accident. They’d been fishing in the creek just beyond their backyard one summer as boys. There was a fight as they were leaving, over who had caught the most of the gasping fish whose smooth, slippery bodies lay entangled in their bucket. Riley was holding the knife, and Neal had jumped him, seeking to deliver his point with his fist. But Riley’s arm jerked with the impact, and the finely honed edge of the blade pierced Neal’s t-shirt and slid across his flesh like a steak knife cutting meat. The blood had welled up, hot and red and with a throbbing pain that threatened to bring tears. The bucket was all but forgotten as Riley scrabbled to drag him back to the house. And it was Riley who packed the ice and applied steady pressure to the wound as their fretting mother called the ambulance. Six stitches and a stern word from their father followed, but within a few days they were back at the creek with their fishing poles. Riley always kept the knife sheathed after that, or didn’t bring it at all. Which was just as well, because there were many more fist fights to follow.

The water had gone cold by the time Neal stepped into the shower. He shivered, turning it up higher, though it seemed to do no good. The time he’d spent lost in his thoughts of the past had expended the hot water heater’s supply. He shivered as icy cold needles of water rained down upon his thin frame, making it rise with goose flesh. And then he closed his eyes and lifted his face to the spray, trying to think warm thoughts.