Nebula Awards Showcase 2017

by Julie E. Czerneda

  “Kind of unusual for somebody to pass through here, let alone bother to stop. What attracted you?” His use of the word “attracted” was pointed.

  If he put an arm around me, I’d have to slug him. I shifted a few inches, trying to put distance between us, and emphasized my next word. “We wanted a drink. We’ve been driving a while.”

  His disappointment was evident. “Boyfriend? Husband?”

  I nodded at the bar, letting him pick whichever he thought looked more like he might be with me, and whichever label he wanted to apply. It amused me either way, since I couldn’t imagine being with either of them. Not at the beginning, and especially not after having spent all this time in the van with them.

  Then I wondered why I was playing games at all. I turned to look at him. “We’re a band.”

  “No kidding! I used to have a band.” A reassessment of the situation flashed across his face. A new smile, more collegial. The change in his whole demeanor prompted me to give him a little more attention.

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah. Mostly we played here. Before the insurance rates rose and StageHolo convinced Maggie she’d save money with holos of famous bands.”

  “Did she? Save money?”

  He sighed. “Probably. Holos don’t drink, and holos don’t dent the mics or spill beers into the PA. And people will stay and drink for hours if the right bands are playing.”

  “Do you still play for fun? Your band?”

  He shrugged. “We did for a while. We even got a spot at the very last State Fair. And after that, every once in a while we’d play a barbecue in somebody’s backyard. But it’s hard to keep it up when you’ve got nothing to aim for. Playing here once a week was a decent enough goal, but who would want to hear me sing covers when you can have the real thing?”

  He pointed his beer at one of the women by the stage. “That’s my ex-wife, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s okay.” He took a swig of beer. “That’s when Polly left me. Said it wasn’t cause the band was done, but I think it was related. She said I didn’t seem interested in anything at all after that.”

  He had turned his attention down to his drink, but now he looked at me again. “How about you? I guess there are still places out there to play?”

  “A few,” I said. “Mostly in the cities. There’s a lot of turnover, too. So we can have a great relationship with a place and then we’ll call back and they’ll be gone without a trace.”

  “And there’s enough money in it to live on?”

  There are people who ask that question in an obnoxious, disbelieving way, and I tend to tell them, “We’re here, aren’t we?” but this guy was nostalgic enough that I answered him honestly. Maybe I could help him see there was no glamor left for people like us.

  “I used to get some royalty checks from an old song, which covered insurance and repairs for the van, but they’ve gotten smaller and smaller since BMI v. StageHolo. We make enough to stay on the road, eat really terribly, have a beer now and again. Not enough to save. Not enough to stop, ever. Not that we want to stop, so it’s okay.”

  “You never come off the road? Do you live somewhere?”

  “The van’s registered at my parents’ place in Maryland, and I crash there when I need a break. But that isn’t often.”

  “And your band?”

  “My bassist and I have been playing together for a long time, and he’s got places he stays. We replace a drummer occasionally. This one’s been with us for a year, and the two of them are into each other, so if they don’t fall out it might last a while.”

  He nodded. The wolfishness was gone, replaced by something more wistful. He held out his beer. “To music.”

  “To live music.” My can clinked his.

  Somebody shouted over by the bar, and we both twisted round to see what had happened. The air-drum player had wandered over—Max Weinberg was on break too—and he and Jacky were squaring off over something. Jacky’s blue lips glowed from twenty feet away.

  “Nothing good ever comes of blue drinks,” I said to my new friend.

  He nodded. “You’re gonna want to get your friend out of here. That’s the owner behind the bar. If your guy breaks anything, she’ll have the cops here in two seconds flat.”

  “Crap. Thanks.”

  Blue liquid pooled around and on Jacky, a tray of overturned plastic shot glasses behind him. At least they weren’t glass, and at least he hadn’t damaged the fancy bar top. I dug a twenty from the thin wad in my pocket, hoping it was enough.

  “You’re fake-drumming to a fake band,” Jacky was saying. “And you’re not even good at it. If you went to your crash cymbal that much with the real Bruce, he’d fire you in two seconds.”

  “Who the hell cares? Did I ask you to critique my drumming?”

  “No, but if you did, I’d tell you you’re behind on the kick, too. My two year old niece keeps a better beat than you do.”

  The other guy’s face reddened, and I saw him clench a fist. Silva had an arm across Jacky’s chest by then, propelling him toward the door. We made eye contact, and he nodded.

  I tossed my twenty on a dry spot on the bar, still hoping for a quick getaway.

  “We don’t take cash,” said the owner, holding my bill by the corner like it was a dead rat.

  Dammit. I squared my shoulders. “You’re legally required to accept US currency.”

  “Maybe true in the US of A, but this is the US of Starker’s, and I only accept Superwally credit. And your blue buddy there owes a lot more than this anyway for those spilled drinks.” She had her hand below the bar. I had no clue whether she was going for a phone or a baseball bat or a gun; nothing good could come of any of those options.

  I snatched the bill back, mind racing. Silva kept a credit transfer account; that wouldn’t be any help, since he was already out the door. I avoided credit and devices in general, which usually held me in good stead, but I didn’t think the label “Non-comm” would win me any friends here. Jacky rarely paid for anything, so I had no clue whether he had been paying cash or credit up until then.

  “I’ve got them, Maggie.” My new friend from the booth stepped up beside me, waving his phone.

  He turned to me. “Go on. I’ve got this.”

  Maggie’s hand came out from under the bar. She pulled a phone from behind the cash register to do the credit transfer, which meant whatever she had reached for down below probably wouldn’t have been good for my health.

  “Keep playing,” he called after me.

  Jacky was unremorseful. “He started it. Called us disease vectors. I told him to stay right where he was and the whole world would go on turning ’cause it doesn’t even know he exists. Besides, if he can’t air drum, he should just air guitar like everybody else.”

  Silva laughed. “You should have pretended to cough. He probably would have pissed himself.”

  He and Silva sprawled in the back together as I peeled out of the parking lot.

  “Not funny. I don’t care who started it. No fights. I mean it. Do you think I can afford to bail you out? How are we supposed to play tomorrow if our drummer’s in jail? And what if they skip the jail part and shoot you? It’s happened before.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Jacky said.

  “Not funny,” I repeated. “If you ever call me ‘Mom’ again I’m leaving you on the side of the road. And I’m not a Chauffeur. Somebody come up here to keep me company.”

  Silva climbed across the bed and bags and up to the passenger seat. He flipped on the police scanner, then turned it off after a few minutes of silence; nobody had put out any APBs on a van full of bill-ducking freaks. I drove speed limit plus five, same as the occasional Chauffeurs we passed ferrying their passengers home. Shortcutting onto the highway to leave the area entirely would’ve been my preference, but Daisy would have triggered the ramp sensors in two seconds flat; we hadn’t been allowed on an interstate in five years.

  After about twenty
miles, my fear that we were going to get chased down finally dissipated and my heartbeat returned to acceptable rhythms. We pulled into an office park that didn’t look patrolled.

  “Your turn for the bed, Luce?” Jacky asked. Trying to make amends, maybe.

  “You guys can have it if I can find my sleeping bag. It’s actually pretty nice out, and then I don’t have to smell whatever that blue crap is on your clothes.”

  “You have a sleeping bag?”

  “Of course I do. I just used it in . . .” Actually, I couldn’t think of when I had used it last. It took a few minutes of rummaging to find it in the storage space under the bed, behind Silva’s garage sale box of pulp novels. I spread it on the ground just in front of the van. The temperature was perfect and the sky was full of stars. Hopefully there weren’t any coyotes around.

  I slept three or four hours before my body started to remind me why I didn’t sleep outside more often. I got up to pee and stretch. When I opened the door, I was hit by an even deeper grease smell than usual. It almost drowned out the funk of two guys farting, four days unwashed. Also the chemical-alcohol-blue scent Jacky wore all over his clothes.

  Leaning over the driver’s seat, I dug in the center console for my silver pen and the bound atlas I used as a road bible. The stars were bright enough to let me see the pages without a flashlight. The atlas was about fifteen years out of date, but my notes kept it useable. The town we had called Nowhere was actually named Rackwood, which sounded more like a tree disease than a town to me. A glittery asterisk went next to Rackwood, and in the margin “China Grove—Mike Sun—grease AND food.” I drew an X over the location of Starker’s, which wouldn’t get our repeat business.

  I crawled inside around dawn, feeling every bone in my body, and reclined the passenger seat. Nobody knocked on the van to tell us to move on, so we slept until the sun started baking us. Jacky reached forward to offer up his last leftovers from the night before. I sniffed the container and handed it back to him. He shrugged and dove in with his fingers, chopsticks having disappeared into the detritus surrounding him. After a little fishing around, I found my dinner and sent that his way as well.

  Silva climbed into the driver’s seat. I didn’t usually relinquish the wheel; I genuinely loved doing all the driving myself. I liked the control, liked to listen to Daisy’s steady engine and the thrum of the road. He knew that, and didn’t ask except when he really felt the urge, which meant that when he did ask, I moved over. Jacky had never offered once, content to read and listen to music in his back seat cocoon. Another reason he fit in well.

  Silva driving meant I got a chance to look around; it wasn’t often that we took a road I hadn’t been down before. I couldn’t even remember how we had wound up choosing this route the previous day. We passed shuttered diners and liquor stores, the ghost town that might have been a main street at one time.

  “Where is everybody?” Jacky asked.

  I twisted around to see if he was joking. “Have you looked out the window once this whole year? Is this the first time you’re noticing?”

  “I usually sleep through this part of the country. It’s boring.”

  “There is no everybody,” Silva said. “A few farmers, a Superwally that employs everyone else within an hour’s drive.”

  I peered at my atlas. “I’ve got a distribution center drawn in about forty miles back and ten miles north, on the road we usually take. That probably employs anybody not working for the company store.” There wasn’t really any reason for me to draw that kind of place onto my maps, but I liked making them more complete. They had layers in some places, stores and factories that had come and gone and come and gone again.

  Most backroad towns looked like this, these days. At best a fast food place, a feed store, maybe a run down looking grocery or a health clinic, and not much else. There’d be a Superwally somewhere between towns, as Silva had said, luring everyone even farther from center or anything resembling community. Town after town, we saw the same thing. And of course most people didn’t see anything at all, puttering along on the self-driving highways, watching movies instead of looking out the windows, getting from point A to point B without stopping in between.

  We weren’t exactly doing our part either. It’s not like we had contributed to the local economy. We took free dinner, free fuel. We contributed in other ways, but not in this town or the others we’d passed through the night before. Maybe someday someone here would book us and we’d come back, but until then we were passing through. Goodbye, Rackwood, Indiana.

  “Next town has the World’s Largest Salt Shaker.” I could hear the capital letters in Jacky’s voice. He liked to download tourist brochures. I approved of that hobby, the way I approved of supporting anything to make a place less generic. Sometimes we even got to stop at some of the sights, when we could afford it and we weren’t in a hurry. Neither of which was the case today.

  “Another time,” Silva said. “We slept later than we should have.”

  “I think we’re missing out.”

  I twisted around to look at Jacky. He flopped across the bed, waving his phone like a look at the world’s largest salt shaker might make us change our minds. “It’s a choice between showers and salt shaker. You decide.”

  He stuffed his phone into his pocket with a sigh. Showers trumped.

  About an hour outside Columbus, we stopped at a by-the-hour motel already starred in my atlas, and rented an hour for the glory of running water. The clerk took my cash without comment.

  I let the guys go first, so I wouldn’t have to smell them again after I was clean. The shower itself was nothing to write home about. The metal booth kind, no tub, nonexistent water pressure, seven minute shutoff; better than nothing. Afterward, I pulled a white towel from the previous hotel from my backpack to leave in the room, and stuffed one of the near-identical clean ones in my bag. The one I took might have been one I had left the last time through. Nobody ever got shorted a towel, and it saved me a lot of time in Laundromats. I couldn’t even remember who had taught me that trick, but I’d been doing it for decades.

  We still had to get back in our giant grease trap, of course, now in our cleanish gig clothes. I opened all the windows and turned on the fan full blast, hoping to keep the shower scent for as long as possible. I could vaguely hear Jacky calling out visitor highlights for Columbus from the back, but the noise stole the meat of whatever he was saying. I stuck my arm outside and planed my hand against the wind.

  I didn’t intend to fall asleep, but I woke to Silva shouting “Whoa! Happy birthday, Daisy!” and hooting the horn. I leaned over to see the numbers clicking over from 99 999.

  Jacky threw himself forward to snap a picture of the odometer as it hit all zeroes. “Whoa! What birthday is this?”

  I considered. Daisy only had a five-digit odometer, so she got a fresh start every hundred thousand miles. “Eight, I think?”

  Silva grinned. “Try again. My count says nine.”

  “Nine? I thought we passed seven on the way out of Seattle two years ago.”

  “That was five years ago. Eight in Asheville. I don’t remember when.”

  “Huh. You’re probably right. We should throw her a party at a million.” I gave her dashboard a hard pat, like the flank of a horse. “Good job, old girl. That’s amazing.”

  “Totally,” said Jacky. “And can we play ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ tonight? In Daisy’s honor? I love that song. I don’t know why we don’t play it more often.” He started playing the opening with his hands on the back of my seat.

  “I’m on board,” Silva agreed. “Maybe instead of ‘Manifest Independence?’ That one could use a rest.”

  “‘Manifest Independence’ stays,” I said. “Try again.”

  “‘Outbreak’?”

  “Deal.”

  Jacky retreated to make the changes to the set list.

  Our destination was deep in the heart of the city. Highways would have gotten us there in no time, not that we
had that option. We drove along the river, then east past the decaying convention center.

  We hadn’t played this particular space before, but we’d played others, mostly in this same neighborhood of abandoned warehouses. Most closed up pretty quickly, or moved when they got shut down, so even if we played for the same crowd, we rarely played the same building twice.

  This one, The Chain, sounded like it had a chance at longevity. It was a bike co-op by day, venue by night. Cities liked bike co-ops. With the right people running the place, maybe somebody who knew how to write grants and dress in business drag and shake a hand or two, a bike co-op could be part of the city plan. Not that I had any business telling anyone to sell themselves out for a few months of forced legitimacy.

  Our timing was perfect. The afternoon bike repair class had just finished, so the little stage area was more or less clear. Better yet, they’d ordered pizza. Jacky had braved the Chinese leftovers, but Silva and I hadn’t eaten yet. It took every ounce of my self-restraint to help haul in the instruments before partaking. I sent a silent prayer up to the pizza gods there’d still be some left for us once all our gear was inside.

  I made three trips—guitars and gear, amp, swag to sell—then loaded up a paper plate with three pizza slices. I was entirely capable of eating all three, but I’d share with the guys if they didn’t get their gear in before the food was gone. Not ideal dinner before singing, anyway; maybe the grease would trump the dairy as a throat coating. I sat on my amp and ate the first piece, watching Jacky and Silva bring in the drums, feeling only a little guilty. I had done my share, even if I hadn’t helped anyone else.

  The bike class stuck around. We chatted with a few. Emma, Rudy, Dijuan, Carter, Marin—there were more but I lost track of names after that. I gave those five the most attention in any case, since Rudy had been the one to book us, and Emma ran the programming for the bike co-op. We were there because of them. We talked politics and music and bikes. I was grateful not to have to explain myself again. These were our people. They treated us like we were coming home, not passing through.

  More audience gradually trickled in, a good crowd for a Wednesday night. A mix of young and old, in varying degrees of punk trappings, according to their generation and inclination. Here and there, some more straight-laced, though they were as punk as anyone, in the truest spirit of the word, for having shown up at this space at all. Punk as a genre didn’t look or sound like it used to, in any case; it had scattered to the wind, leaving a loose grouping of bands whose main commonality was a desire to create live music for live audiences.