The Man Who Would Not Be King

Reeling, Tré closed his eyes in the hope that if he couldn’t see he also wouldn’t feel his cheek stinging. He opened them when this plan failed, to find Mike huffing mere inches away from his face. “I knew this would happen,” he growled. “That’s why I told you to back off and stop confusing him. If you had fucking listened to me—”

“I wouldn’t be in this mess. Right. I know, Mike.” Tré ran a hand over his jaw. Damn, he hit hard. Before he knew what was happening, there was a hand on his chest, and then he had lost balance, stumbling backward. “Mike!” he cried out in indignation.

It was as if someone had dumped a bottle of wine over Mike’s head, his face stained with an unshakeable crimson rage. “No, you don’t know! It should have been Annabelle. And only Annabelle!” he roared, and spittle flew. On second thought, maybe Tré didn’t mind being pushed a few feet back. Mike’s typical zen-like demeanor had made a run for it, and for whatever reason, Tré was now stuck with a volatile stranger.

“Dude, what’s your problem? She’s over it, why can’t you be?” Suddenly he preferred the shrill, but articulate, confrontation with a woman. Mike didn’t usually talk about his feelings—hell, none of the guys did unless it was necessary—and arguing with him was as useless as lighting a wet match. He felt like a boy.

Mike brazenly pushed him again.

“Will you fucking stop that? You’re being like Jason right now. And I don’t mean the normal friend Jason, I’m talking about the asshole jump-to-conclusions Jason.” Tré was working up a cold sweat trying to defend himself, and he didn’t like the odds on this one.

“The difference between me and Jason right now is that I know what I’m talking about. I have a legitimate reason to be angry.” His nostrils flared, and Tré imagined steam coming out of them, like breath on a cold day.

Tré paused. “Yeah, and what is that, exactly?” he countered. “Last time I checked, you had nothing to do with this. You aren’t like Annabelle’s sworn protector or anything.” Maybe that wasn’t it. “Or Billie Joe’s,” he added.

“Yes, Tré, I am aware of that, thanks. But you fucked things up for both of them, somehow under my nose, even though I warned you not to go there.” Mike stared at him intently, using some disguised human male instinct to threaten Tré.

The drummer’s ears latched onto a few specific words of his statement. “Wait, is that it?” he asked, catching on. “Is it that nobody told you what was going on?” Tré watched Mike’s expression change from close to spread, surprise. It vanished in a second. Before it was lost completely, Tré modified his question. “…Or is it that Billie never let you in on it?”

He had hit his mark. Shadows clouded Mike’s face as the slow realization that Tré might be correct slammed into him, full-bodied. “No…” he said slowly. He had to turn this around or he would lose control of the conversation. He wouldn’t be disarmed and neutralized like Annabelle had been, the poor girl too weak to stand up for herself. “It’s wrong, Tré, you and him. He and Annabelle were good together like you two will never be. They fit together right.”

Tré flared his own nostrils. “Are you thinking what I think you’re saying?” His eyes became harder.

“What do you think I’m saying?” Mike taunted, a merciless smile tugging his lips at the corner.

“That I’m a worthless piece of shit, and that I don’t deserve him!” His right hand balled into a tight fist at his side. In preparation? What was he going to do? Attack one of his best friends? Tré began to laugh an uncontrollable, manic fit of pressure and release, pressure and release.

Mike’s face cracked into a full blown grin before he replied. “That could be it, yeah.” Mike’s voice was seductive as it slipped through Tré’s great, gasping convulsions.

The answer was yes.

And his fist responded—hauling Tré with it—to land squarely on Mike’s cheekbone. It stood back, along with Tré, surveying its work a safe distance away.

“Asshole!” Mike bellowed, as he charged through the “safe distance” to tackle Tré down to the unforgiving concrete floor. The back of his head smacked into it with a sick thwock, and both men’s bodies tensed, a reflex too late. Their mouths gaped open, apparently trying to process what had just occurred.

Then Mike’s hand cradled the crown of Tré’s skull, which was already sending thick, yellow waves of pain cascading through his brain. “Oh my God. Can you count backwards from ten for me?” he asked, wrath replaced by concern.

A headache the size of an elephant stomped its way forward from the back of Tré’s head to the front, and crushed any lingering empathy for Mike. “I don’t have a concussion, you stupid fuck! Get off of me! This is all your fault!” He struggled to get up, pushing Mike roughly away by the shoulders. “I can’t believe you, man, where has your head gone? You’re usually the one that makes the most sense, not the least. Now because of you tonight my drums are gonna sound like fucking bombs, fucking headache… Fuck you, Mike, I’m out of here.” He aimed one last glare behind him as he shuffled out the door holding his injured head; Mike was still kneeling on the floor in shock.
***

“I can’t fucking believe him,” Tré muttered, his back to the staff person rummaging through the freezer for ice.

“Excuse me?” she asked, and the grinding sound of the ice coming together to fill the cup ceased.

Tré spun, startled. “Oh, nothing. Thanks for the ice, by the way.” He smiled weakly at her. He noticed, unfortunately, that even moving his facial muscles made the throbbing a bit louder. The woman, dumpy and plain in her venue uniform, shoveled the ice into a gallon Ziplock bag and handed it to him. He took it without delay, pressed it gingerly a ways above his neck, and sighed, content when he felt the pain ease up. “Ohhh, sweet Jesus,” he groaned.

“There you are!” The relief in Pete’s words sounded better suited for a sentence like, “Oh good, I was hoping you were still alive!” Tré winced. He thought hangovers made everything louder, but this migraine was one for the books. Pete’s bear of a voice certainly didn’t help things. “I’m supposed to call you for sound check. What happened to your head?” The technician looked at him worriedly, and Tré could see in his eyes all the murderous scenarios he was dreaming up. Wait till he hears who did it.

“Mike jumped on me,” he replied, as if this were simply something that happened every so often, like being stung by a bee. A surprisingly built bee, for one so lanky.

Pete’s eyebrows hopped high as jack rabbits. He fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket and glanced at the time. “We should have ten minutes. I wanna know who shot who, what went down play by play. How did Annabelle take it? Ronnie and Jason ran out before anything could happen, so I don’t know shit. Lousy fuckers, heh.”

Tré shifted his bag of ice to a different spot; the skin where it had been was starting to go numb already. “I wasn’t there when she went apeshit on Billie,” he let him know, then told him everything, more or less, in a condensed version.

Pete checked his phone again before reacting to the story. “You know, you guys are worse than my retarded high school friends. The only one with any fucking perspective at all is Annabelle, and, seriously, Tré, she should be the one right now to be saying stupid, mean shit and dropkicking your asses. You need to do what she says, and also forget about Mike right now. He’ll come around, and if he doesn’t, you should get him checked out for a brain tumor in his frontal lobe, because you know he’s not really like he was today.” Pete searched Tré’s face for acknowledgement that what he’d just said was solid advice. He found it, and took his chances with a little extra. “Besides, you kind of deserved to get hit. By Annabelle, I mean, but still.” His eyes flicked to Tré’s nervously.

He admitted hoarsely, “Yeah, I know.”
***

In the time remaining until Tré absolutely had to be at sound check, Pete rigged up a cold compress using an ace bandage and some of the ice from his bag. He commented that Tré could probably pass for a man with a gunshot wound now, and Tré, mildly horrified, put on a hat and pulled it down low so as to be less conspicuous. The compress felt nice, even if it were inconvenient. If the drummer had to suffer through a full two and a half hour concert later, he’d make sure he was going to be as comfortable as possible until then.

He snuck over to his drum set, darting behind stacked amps to reach his round, black stool. His butt sank happily onto it, and he bent down to pick up a pair of drumsticks from the cylinder where he stored them. Billie Joe’s chest greeted him once he’d sat back up.

“I just wanted to make sure you, uh, survived Annabelle earlier,” he began tentatively, gaze directed at the familiarity of his Converse. When Tré nodded, the bit of bandage uncovered by the hat dipped into the singer’s peripheral vision. “Tré, what the fuck happened to your head?” he exclaimed, startled. Without being asked to, he removed Tré’s cap to survey the damage. All he could see was the bandage, with a suspicious wet patch at the back. “Are you okay?” he asked, from above him.

Tré exhaled, and debated while the air rushed out whether now was the appropriate time for a joke. Never one for inhibitions, he played into his appearance. “Beej, I was shot,” he deadpanned.

Billie Joe grimaced through Tré’s obnoxiousness. “Then what’s that wet patch? It doesn’t look like blood, thank God.”

“Oh, you know, the doctors discovered that I’m so frigging anemic my blood is actually clear.” Tré adjusted himself on his seat as he considered how much easier it was to make up impossible lies than to tell him that their best friend had hurt him. Billie Joe might take Mike’s side, after all, and Tré already felt too alone to lose this slight contact with someone who would maybe one day forgive him.

Billie Joe placed the hat gingerly back onto Tré’s head, and utilized his now empty hands to strike a pose of impatience with them on his hips. “You wanna tell me the truth now?”

“It was me! I did it.”

They both looked toward the left corner of the stage, where the voice had come from, to find Mike crouched, fixing some tape on the floor, arm stretched around a bass that banged against his knees. He stood back up unsteadily, then turned to face them. “It was an accident.” Tré’s expression turned suddenly cross behind Billie Joe. “Well, I pushed him, so it was my fault, but I didn’t mean for him to hit his head.”

Billie Joe’s stance somehow toughened, though he didn’t move. “Why the fuck did you push him?” he demanded.

Mike resisted the temptation to dodge the question, despite the appearance of Jason White with a guitar. “I was angry at Tré for coming in between you and Annabelle. And I still am, but I also realize that I’m pissed at both of you for keeping this secret. Is that how it would be if you two got together? Would it be the Billie Joe and Tré show? Since when do neither of you fucking talk to me anymore?”

Jason tuned his guitar, the only sound the pluck of his pick against dead strings, listening in.

Billie Joe swallowed, his only response to Mike’s voiced worries. He didn’t know how to reassure him short of saying that he and Tré would surely never get together again after all this. And he didn’t want to let go the small bit of impossible hope Annabelle had handed him that morning. Instead, he brushed the issue aside with a ready-made excuse. “Guys, we should really get back to—”

“Mike, you don’t have anything to worry about. We’re not.” Tré spoke with a frightening finality, and Billie Joe felt like someone had unloaded a quarry’s worth of heavy rocks into the chambers of his heart. Every time his heart beat, the jagged hardness shocked the condensing walls.

Jason whipped around, and instantly regretted keeping his strap so loose as the guitar’s weight made him stagger. “Um, guys, Bill’s right, we need to get this show on the road.” His mouth was dry, and he wondered if he’d said the right thing. But backing up Billie Joe seemed the least he could do as part of his ongoing campaign to make up for his freak out a few weeks before.

The rest of the band each assented, though with no degree of enthusiasm. Billie Joe chose a cream-colored Gibson from the rack and went back to his position at the front of the stage. Never had he felt more vulnerable, on display for everyone to pick apart.