The Ballad of Kace Cheyes, pt. 2

Everyone should have a song.

I mean, if you think about it, our lives are a billion little snatches of lyrics. Take Pink Floyd's "Time," for instance.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, you fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

How normal, right? How painfully dull, like my first couple of weeks in Sumter. Don't get me wrong; the song is a great one. Pink Floyd are wonderful at what they do--or rather, what they did, before the band itself ceased to be, and the days of Roger Waters' self-stroking, all-but-solo, million-dollar butcheries began, preening around and sulling a name that was only fractionally his to sully--but what they were doing with "Time" and with several of the songs (or, it could be argued, the entire album) on "The Wall," which is the story of a tortured artist's life and descent into madness, was taking the ordinary and mundane, throwing them under a new shade of light and putting them to a tune. Using metaphor and innuendo, poetry, to make us feel that something that may have looked completely lame was actually spectacular, intricate, and a song about a boring day(s) becomes a life lesson, ending in a cryptic but beautiful passage:

Far away, across the field, the tolling of the island bell draws the faithful to their knees to hear the softly spoken magic spells.

Art, buddy. Story-telling; music. A song--somebody's song.

Though there are some differences between us these days, and my head may (or may not, maybe he would surprise me) be in a different place than ours were back when we raised Hell through Snohomish county, Kace Cheyes is someone I will always remember as a rider; they don't come with any more heart, or a more crooked, shit-eating fuckin' grin than that boy, and if you ever fuck with him, you'd better hope I don't catch you out of your house. So here's to the best car thief the world will ever know; my boy with meat cleavers for hands, Kace Cheyes.

I wrote him a little story. It's his fucking song. The Ballad of Kace Cheyes. You ready for part 2?

Josh Vee gets Tenderized

"Hey, wake him up."

"Kace, you know you aren't supposed to be here, didn't Ameron banish you or something?" said a sleepy, feminine voice to my left, slightly amused. That would be Jenn, of course, and there wasn't much that didn't amuse Jenn. She was a little like me, in a way, though quite a bit more amazing. She was my own age, and came from roughly the same lot in life; like me, Jenn was not a victim of circumstance. Less so, even. Jenn wasn't even a proper criminal. When it came right down to it, Jenn just wanted to party. She was my good friend, and after a "fling" during which she discovered I was a womanizing prick and I discovered that she was too smart to be played, we resigned to being cuddle buddies and developed a mutual respect for one another. So, the night before, we had fallen asleep together.

I was dope sick, and still had a few more days of sleep left in me, so all of this waking up business was too much to properly digest. So, I pretended to sleep on.

"What? That was like, a.. fuckin' week ago. He's gotta be over it by now. Plus," he said, kicking me, "we've got a sick man here."

"Fuck yooou, Kace," I groaned into the pillow.

"You wanna hit the Marysville Trail* with me or what?" he asked, and I could hear that goofy-assed smile in his voice. "Huh, Starvin' Marvin?"

"Lemme 'lone," I said, and rolled away, against Jenn. Or rather, where Jenn had been, before Kace had woken her and caused her to sit up, thus becoming less comfortable. Damn.

"And smoke all this heroin by myself? That's intimidating, bud, but if you insist.."

I heard him taking the foil out of his pocket, and groaned.

"I'm up, you sack of shit," I told him, sitting up. I was smiling, because if it weren't for Kace, it would have been a fucked up day at right about that point. Dope sickness, while not the world's most life-threatening or probably the most unpleasant ordeal, is nothing nice. Kace and I had made a point of having one another's backs with regard to heroin supply and demand, since the night we had met; when one of us had a supply and the other had a demand, we seemed to find ourselves sitting and comparing notes an awful lot.

"Zhat's what I sought," Kace said around the tooter** between his teeth, and we smoked.

"Dutch, I think you might be a drug addict," he said to me with a grin as the foil came my way. "Just a minute ago you said you weren't getting up, remember?"

"One of these days we're going to have to flail you up a new expression," I said to him. "You'll get trap-dust all over your teeth."

We smoked and Jenn pretended not to notice, because she hated heroin, even though she bought it for me from time to time when she took pity on my sick-face. Eventually, I realized that something was amiss.

"Man, where the hell is my phone?"

"You let that slut use it this morning, remember?" Jenn told me, referring to a girl I had brought to the trap house as a "booty call" and kept there for a few hours, until she had freaked me out by trying to shoot me up with meth in order to have "life changing sex." I believed that I worked just fine without a vein full of drugs, and when we had finished what we were doing, I promptly ceased to pay attention to her. She didn't like that much and had run upstairs to Josh Vee, a lesser man, and began to fill his dumb little head full of all kinds of inimical nonsense about me, gearing him up to start something that he would definitely not want to finish.

Now, in his defense, it isn't all Josh Vee's fault. He had just gotten over a tough breakup with one of the local girls, and with his lower-than-average IQ, he was very susceptible to Yvanna's "charms." It didn't take long for her to fill his head full of sob stories and win him over. Plus, I think I may have owed Josh twenty bucks or something, and I have a habit of losing track of my small debts sometimes, which just may have been the case with Josh. That has a way of clearing the road for some less-than-savory deeds.

So, Yvanna had come down and asked mein sleeping self if she could use my phone, and then "forgotten" to return it. The phone wasn't exactly working at the time, which made it a more comfortable loss to accept; the thousand and sixteen contacts in it, however, I needed.

"Is she still here?" I asked Jenn, and she shrugged. At that moment, as if on cue, there was a knock at the door and Josh Vee walked in.

"Hey Dutch," he said, looking like a window-licker as usual with his slightly Sid Vicious upper lip and hair a-fly as he walked in. "Do you have that twenty bucks? Yvanna wants to go and get some Dairy Queen.."

"Nah, bud, I'm sorry. Hey, do you know where my phone is?" I asked him.

"Well.. I don't know, man," he said slowly, obviously considering his options. "I think.. I may have seen it, earlier. Why?" He was smiling at the end, and my blood temperature went up by a degree or two.

I looked at Kace, and he was as smiley as ever, though there may have been a glint in those hawk eyes. He lived for uncomfortable situations, his heart swelled with glee at the first sign of static. It was something that both mystified and intrigued me about my friend; he was a shit starter, a problem creater, and it was even better if you had something to say about it.

"Well.. Yvanna asked me if she could use it this morning, and--hey, what the fuck is that on your.." I trailed off, looking at the Kenneth Cole watch on Josh's wrist. Wian had given me a Kenneth Cole watch just like that, and it was in the pocket of my..

I grabbed my Ecko hoodie off of the foot of the bed, and felt in the pocket. Nope, no watch.

Now, this situation warrants some explaining.

Wian is a man of his word. He will be the first to tell you that he's not always level headed, that he has some problems, and even from time to time isn't the best of friends (there have been two separate occasions during which I have caught him stealing something of mine, but our friendship was strong enough that we talked it out both times. I am not completely innocent of being a fucked up friend from time to time, myself). But when he attaches his word to something, he lives up to it or busts on the way. He had given me a watch and told me never to lose it, and I had extracted his word from him on the same in return, giving him a Guess watch that was one of the better ones I had owned at the time.

"Josh, that's my fucking watch on your wrist, dude."

"What?" Kace said, and he began to laugh. My heart raced, and the edges of my vision began to collect little sparkling filaments of something.

Josh stammered, and looked at the watch. "No, it's a Quartz crystal!" he said, before I could even accuse him of possessing a certain brand of watch.

"That's a fucking Kenneth Cole, Josh," I said. "What has Yvanna done to your fucking head, dude?"

"Well.. I didn't come down here to talk about this, and if you want to talk about it, we can do that outside!" he said, and turned on his heel and exited the room.

I looked at Kace for a minute, and he was smiling, his eyes shining with the glaze of craziness or something that often lived in them. I don't know what I looked like, but it must have been something else entirely, maybe a shade of sickly-shocked disbelief. Jenn put her hand on my shoulder. "Dutch, I'll go and talk to them, okay?" she said. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, rapping a tattoo against my ribs as my lungs swelled and waned entirely too fast. Kace laughed again, a short burst of guffaw that was as crazy as his expression.

Jenn left without another word, and I started to pack my things up. "This isn't fucking done, dude," I said. "I don't care if Jenn comes back down here with all of my shit, this isn't fucking over," I continued, talking as much to myself as to Kace, who helped me get my clothes and all the rest of my worldly possessions into my Dakine backpack. He didn't say anything.

Jenn came back down, and she had my phone. "She took it all, Dutch, but Josh won't give back the watch. I'm sorry. That fucking bitch.. who the fuck does she think she is?"

"Jenn, will you give us a ride to pick up my girl?" Kace asked her, and I was already standing with my backpack slung over my shoulder. Kace had my other bag, a suitcase.

"Yeah, of course," Jenn said, and Kace and I trooped up the stairs and out the back door. It was a nice day, I remember; sunny, some time in Spring's last gasp but not quite Summer's infancy. The trap house was full on the upper deck, a little crowd gathered outside of the hallway, close to Josh's room. I could hear Yvanna's voice rasping conspiratorially from inside Josh's window as we walked down the path toward the gate and Jenn's car, and turned to look after we had secured my belongings in the trunk. I considered Yvanna's face as she peered at me over the window sill, and something in my eyes must have told her what was about to happen, because her eyelids disappeared entirely as Kace and I walked back toward the house, purpose in our strides. She called something out, and I was too busy marching to pay attention to what it was. There was a dam-burst of people from the hallway into the living room as we entered, and the onlookers made a ring around the room, giving us a wide berth as Yvanna and Josh emerged from the throng and looked expectantly at me. Josh was wearing a smile that told me he he had was confident, and had probably been speaking with people and had somehow earned himself a following; he wasn't alone in here.

All of this I calculated, for a moment, and before I could open my mouth Kace had stepped up to Josh, offering his hand. Josh looked at it a moment, and his smile widened; what a bunch of jokers, that smile said, giving up already. That's what I thought. Josh took the hand, and with his left, Kace punched him right in his fucking teeth.

What happened next is a blur, but I will do my best to recount it. As Josh dropped, a native man I happen to like named Dennis stepped toward my friend, and I got in the middle. "Fuck that," I yelled, "He took my shit, Dennis!"

Yvanna stepped toward my friend then, and attempted to join the fray. I pushed her over her stooped lover, and she tumbled over him and into the bathroom as Kace and I took turns aiming a few kicks at Josh's crumpled form, then I turned to face the rest of the room. Dennis had backed off at my word, but Wian had taken his place. "What the hell is going on, Dutch?" he said, and I pointed a finger accusingly at Josh, who was scrambling away toward his room.

"That mother fucker," I panted, "took the watch that you gave me, Wian. Get it back from his fucking ass," I breathed, and Kace and I began to walk toward the back door again. Just then Josh came out of his room with a big ol' fucking knife in his hand, and I turned toward him and started screaming. I can't remember exactly what I said, but it definitely included "pussy" and "fight me like a man" as he half-advanced on me. I put my fists up and he didn't come any closer, and I continued to taunt him, telling him to put the knife down. When he didn't I made it clear to the house at large that this man was a bitch, and walked out the door. As I cleared the other side of the fence, Josh followed, and I teased him a little more, giving the gate a shove and knocking a section of the rotten fence over by accident, clearing the way for him to step over and make something of it, if he wanted to put the knife down. Jenn was already in the driver's seat. Wian emerged from the house and walked up to Josh, putting out his hand expectantly. Josh's bleeding mouth twisted up for a moment, but he took off the watch and placed it in Wian's outstretched hand. I took it and put it back on, and Kace guffawed again from the back seat of the car where he now sat, waiting.

"I wasted a whole lot of time trying to be your friend, Josh," I told him. "You are nothing but a punk ass, bitch made, tail-tucking little faggot," I told him. "A knife-having, ball-less, girly little boy," and approached the passenger seat of Jenn's car. He didn't say anything as I got in, and the engine started. I rolled the window down and hollered one last "bitch!" before we pulled out. There was silence in the car for a moment, and then all three of us began to laugh. "Did you see his fucking face?" I said, and the car filled with fresh peals of laughter. "That stupid fucking lip?"

We drove toward the other side of fourth, where Wegan was waiting.

The first punch anyone had ever thrown for me in the heat of the moment had taken off that day, one projectile problem delivered by one Kace Cheyes, and even now sitting behind this computer in South Carolina thinking back on that day in late spring, my heart is full of pride. Pride that I had found a friend worth keeping, someone who was going to not only talk about it but be about it the way I had always been for my best friends and partners, only to be let down when the shit hit the fan for me and they were nowhere to be found. There is a girl in Washington who could tell you about how I have my friends' backs, even though they often can't seem to come through in a pinch for me; her name, which I will of course change for her legal safety as it comes into question in future posts, which she will certainly be featured in at least one of for the glorious night I am telling you about now, is Joanna. She never threw a punch for me, but certainly did stand her ground one night (unlike the puling, jealous little punk I was sticking up for) with a Winchester thirty-thirty in her hands on my behalf, which I will tell you about another night. My point is, of course, that I did not entirely know what it was like to know a man with heart like Kace. If I did, it was an understanding between some other set of friends, a bond in someone else's life that I could not fully grasp.

Kace Cheyes is a man amongst men, and fuck you if you think any differently.

Until next time, when we sing the third and final installment in this song of his. Later, blogdom.

*Marysville Trail: code for smoking heroin, refers to the "heroin trails" (the name of this blog! ;P) that are left when the piece of heroin slides over foil while flame is applied

**tooter: a tube, usually a broken pen or a cut-in-half straw, used to inhale heroin smoke