Scratch Fever

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Name’s Julie something. She runs a place called the Paddlewheel, near Gulf Port.”

  “Illinois, you mean? Across from Burlington?”

  Gulf Port was a wide-open little town where the bars stayed open all night. When clubs on the Iowa side shut down at two, the “Wanna Party?” die-hards headed for Gulf Port.

  “Right,” Bob said. “Quite a place. Big gambling layout and everything.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I wouldn’t shit a shitter. Little Las Vegas, they call it. You oughta see the place. Maybe you will—she wanted to talk to you about that, in fact.”

  “This Julie did?”

  “Yeah. She needs a band. Somebody cancelled out on her. She was hoping you guys might want one last job, ’fore you call it quits.”

  “No kidding. Well, maybe I ought to talk to her.”

  “That’s the funny part. She was asking me about the band—asked about you, in particular—then she just walked away. I wasn’t even through talking yet.”

  Jon smiled at Bob; inside his head sirens were going off and red lights were flashing. “Well, be honest, Bob—when are you ever through talking?”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Bob said, and slapped the bar, and drinks all down the line spilled a little.

  Jon thanked Bob and went back to Toni, pulling her away from her admirers.

  “I was right,” he said, taking her by the arm.

  “About what?”

  “It was who I thought it was.”

  “The woman?”

  “Yes.” And he told her what Bob had told him.

  “So what now?”

  “Now I call Nolan.”

  The pay phone was in the bar, on the wall around the corner from the pinball machines. He got change from the bartender. Toni was right with him.

  “Do you have this guy’s number?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I memorized it.”

  “Memorized it?”

  “In case something like this came up.”

  “Oh.”

  He had the receiver up to his ear and the coins poised to drop, when a hand settled on his shoulder, like a UFO landing. It was a hand that made Bob Hale’s hand seem dainty.

  Jon turned and looked at a guy just a few inches taller than he was but infinitely bigger. A sandy-haired man with sad grey eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses, and shoulders you had to look at one at a time.

  “Excuse me,” the man said. He licked his lips.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m waiting for an important call.”

  “My call won’t take long.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d not use the phone.”

  It wasn’t a threat, exactly; the tone was rather kind—Please do me a favor. But the favor was being asked by a man who looked like the son of Kong in a business suit.

  “Look,” Jon said, “this is a public phone. You can’t keep people from using it.”

  Which was a ridiculous thing to say. This guy could obviously keep people from using the phone. He could keep the state of Iowa from using the phone.

  “I have a sick kid,” the man said. Softly. “I’m waiting to hear about my sick kid.”

  Toni spoke up. “What the fuck are you doing here, then?”

  Jon raised a hand to quiet her. “It’s okay, Toni.” He smiled at the guy. “It’s no emergency on my end, mister. You can wait for your call. Be my guest.”

  Toni stood with fists on hips and glared at Jon, who pulled her away from there by the arm.

  “Jon, why are you letting that asshole . . .”

  “Shut up,” Jon said, and took her back into the club.

  He pulled her off into another of the cubbyhole rooms behind the storefronts; a couple was making out in this one, so Jon dragged her into the cubbyhole next door. She was fuming.

  “Why d’you go along with that bullshit?” she demanded.

  “I think somebody told him not to let me use the phone.”

  Toni thought about that

  “Look,” he said. “I got to find out if that woman is still around. My guess is she split, but if she’s still around, maybe I could corner her or something. I don’t know.”

  “What good’ll that do?”

  “Maybe I can avoid a violent confrontation. I know how this woman’s mind works. She’ll figure if Nolan finds out she’s alive, he’ll come looking for her.”

  “Is she right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what good does talking to her do?”

  “I’ll lie. I’ll tell her Nolan’s dead or in prison or something. That she has nothing to worry about from him.”

  “But what about from you?”

  “I’ll tell her I don’t give a damn, personally, about her or the money she took.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s go look for her, then.”

  They went back out through the bar, and noticed that the sandy-haired guy was sitting in a booth near the double doors to the club area, well around the corner from the pay phone, not an ideal place for somebody waiting for a call. Jon looked at him with a smile and a silent question, and he looked back and shook his head no, indicating that the call hadn’t come yet. Jon shrugged at him, smiled again, and walked on with Toni.

  Around the corner, a drunk in overalls was leaning against the wall, talking on the phone, slobbering at the receiver.

  Jon said, “Looks like I’m the only one the worried papa wants to keep off the phone.”

  He and Toni casually walked through the bar and up through the restaurant, both floors of it, and the woman with streaked blonde hair and tinted glasses wasn’t there.

  “She either split,” Jon said, “or she’s outside, ducking me. In her car in the parking lot, maybe.”

  “You want to go looking for her?”

  “Not in a dark parking lot.”

  “You’re not scared of her?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Why?”

  “She almost killed me once. With a shotgun.”

  “Oh.” Toni swallowed and followed Jon back into the club, where they immediately headed for Bob Hale, still perched at the stage-right bar.

  “Bob,” Jon said, putting a good-buddy hand on the big man’s shoulder, “some drunk is tying up the pay phone.”

  “Well,” Bob said, smiling, hauling himself off the stool, “let’s kick his ass off, then.”

  “No, no. Listen, I have a kind of private call I’d like to make. Can I use the phone in your apartment?”

  Bob grinned at Jon, then at Toni, then back at Jon. “You two can use my apartment for anything you want, if I can watch.”

  Toni laughed—a little tensely, but she laughed. She liked Bob, Jon knew. Considered him harmless, a teddy bear with a hard-on.

  “No, really,” Jon said, “I need to use the phone. How about it?”

  “Sure,” Bob said, and led them back around the bar to a hallway. They followed him down it.

  Bob lived at the Barn. So did a German Shepherd about the same size as Jon. It stayed in the bedroom Bob kept, on the lower floor of the barn part of the Barn, in the rear, a bedroom Bob referred to as his apartment.

  Bob unlocked the door, and the dog began to growl. It sounded like Mt. St. Helen’s thinking it over. Bob reached a hand down and grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled him away from the doorway, back into the bedroom. The dog was still growling, but that only made Bob laugh. Amid the laughter, he gave the dog a sharp command, and the dog sat, teeth bared, Rin Tin Tin with rabies. If Bob hadn’t been there, Jon and/or Toni would have been dead by now.

  It was a big, messy room: plush red carpeting with underwear, shirts, other clothing carelessly wadded and tossed; a queen-size canopy waterbed with red satin sheets and black plush covers over at the right. No rough barn wood here: dark paneling, with built-in closet. At the near end was a bookcase wall with no books in it, just thousands of dol
lars’ worth of stereo equipment, as well as a 19-inch Sony with videotape deck, and a library of XXX tapes.

  Also the phone, which Bob handed Jon as he marched the dog out into the hall, closing the door as he went. Toni stood and watched as Jon touch-toned Nolan’s number.

  On the third ring, he heard Nolan’s voice: “This is Nolan.”

  “Nolan! Listen . . .”

  “You’re talking to a machine. Leave your message at the beep.”

  Jon just looked at the phone.

  “What’s wrong?” Toni said.

  “An answer machine,” he said. “Now I’ve heard everything. Nolan’s got an answer phone! I don’t believe this.”

  The phone said, beep.

  Jon left his message, Bob locked his dog back in the bedroom, and they all went back into the club, where Jon and Toni headed for the stage.

  For the last set.

  4

  WHEN SHE blew the words on “Heartbreaker,” Toni knew she was scared.

  Certainly not stage fright—she’d been singing with rock bands since junior high—but some other kind of scared, something in her stomach that was far worse than butterflies.

  Something cold.

  Something alive.

  Fear.

  When the song was finished, she rushed over to Jon and whispered, “Fill in with something. I need a few minutes.”

  Jon nodded, and away from the mike, stage-whispered to Les, Roc, and Mick to “forget the list—do ‘Light My Fire’ next,” a song Toni didn’t do anything on, which would give her a chance to take a break.

  She stood inside the cubbyhole room stage right as the band went into the old Doors classic, Jon doing right by the elaborate pseudo-baroque organ break at the beginning. She was breathing hard. She wanted a smoke. She’d given it up two years ago and rarely had felt the urge since the first hard months, but now she wanted a smoke. She went out and bummed one off Tommy, the roadie, sitting at his sound board halfway down the dance floor, over stage left. Then she returned to the cubbyhole, sucking in smoke as if it was food and she was starving.

  Mick was singing. He didn’t sing very well, and in fact was incurably flat, but the Doors tune lent itself to that: the late Jim Morrison was known for many things, but singing on key wasn’t one of them. Then the band went into the instrumental section of the song, Jon taking the organ solo, a sing-song thing that climbed the scale in mindless little would-be Bach progressions.

  She wondered if that big sandy-haired guy—Jesus, was he big—was still in his booth, waiting for his mythical phone call. She decided to find out. She’d have plenty of time; this song went on for nearly ten minutes. She wandered back through the club, nodding as fans touched her arm and made comments about the sad fact that the Nodes were splitting, and then she was in the bar, where the big sandy-haired guy was sitting in the booth, talking intensely with a woman.

  A woman in white with a black cardigan and tinted glasses and a beautiful face and—even seated in a booth it was obvious—a beautiful body.

  Suddenly the cigarette was burning her throat I knew there was a reason I quit these fucking things, she thought, and went up to the bar and put the cig out in an ashtray up from the bottom of which a little picture of Bob Hale stared. Standing next to her at the bar were two young women.

  Toni had seen these women before; they had been to hear the Nodes at the Ramp in Burlington a few months ago, part of a group of half a dozen hard, hoody-looking bitches, one of whom had been attracted to Jon, and vice versa. She was one of the two at the bar, a lanky brunette about nineteen, in jeans and jeans jacket and a Nodes T-shirt; lots of eye makeup, and smoking a cigarette.

  The other woman was in her early twenties, medium height, boyish build—nothing remarkable, other than the close-set beady eyes, the lump of a nose, the thick lips with permanent, humorless sneer, the dishwater blonde hair greased back in a ducktail, the black leather jacket and red T-shirt and jeans, cigarette dangling from the Presleyesque lips, a hand on the other girl’s shoulder.

  Toni couldn’t remember their names, but she did remember that the night Jon and the brunette had spent a break in the band’s van, the beauty with the ducktail had come up and smiled at Jon during the next break and, cleaning her nails with a switchblade, told Jon if he ever touched Darlene (that was the first girl’s name; what was the second one’s?) again, she would cut his balls off and hang ’em over her rearview mirror. Jon hadn’t argued with her. He’d tried to make a joke out of it later, about what a cornball creep that dyke was, doing her Sha Na Na routine. But it hadn’t come off: Jon knew the dyke had meant what she said.

  Terrific, Toni thought It wasn’t enough somebody shows up from the part of Jon’s past that included that thief Nolan; the dyke and Darlene had to turn up, too. Wonderful.

  She ducked back into the club. Jon was still playing his organ solo, getting ready to let Roc take over on guitar.

  “Light My Fire”—the baroque opening, anyway—had been the first thing she’d ever heard Jon play on the organ. She’d been in a music store in Iowa City—the Sound Pit—looking at PA equipment with some of those jerks in her old band, Dagwood, and Jon was playing a Crumar portable organ, asking the clerk if he knew anywhere he could find an old Vox Super Continental. The clerk was trying to sell Jon a Moog synthesizer, telling him nobody played combo organ anymore, and Jon was saying, “Bullshit, the punk and new wave bands are all using old Vox and Farfisas.”

  When she heard that she knew she’d found a kindred spirit. She started up a conversation with him, and soon they were having a drink at the Mill, a bar in downtown Iowa City, and then they were in bed at his apartment, or anyway the room he kept on the bottom floor of the antique shop he’d inherited from his uncle, a shop that had been closed since the uncle’s death.

  Rock ’n’ roll, it seemed, was not Jon’s first love. He lived in a cartoonist’s studio, with drawing board, boxes of comic books, posters of comic strip characters like Dick Tracy and Batman and Tarzan, some framed original strips, making a gray-walled, cement-floored former storeroom a four-color shrine to comic art. Even the finely carved antique headboard of the bed they were in had some drawings tacked to it—Jon’s own work, and good work it was, at that.

  “Are you a musician or a cartoonist or what?” she’d asked him, letting the sheet fall to her waist as she turned to look at his drawings; she liked her breasts and liked having him look at them as she looked at his art.

  “I don’t know if I’m either anymore,” he said. He was sitting up in bed with a pillow propped behind him. His chest was almost completely hairless, she noted.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ve been at this cartooning shit for as long as I can remember.”

  “Oh, and you’re all of twenty.”

  “Twenty-one. I’d guess that’s about how old you are, too. And I bet you aren’t finding rock ’n’ roll an easy life, either.”

  “You’re right,” she admitted. “I been at it eight years, and it’s a hard go, even if you’re good at it, and I am.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m good at cartooning and I’m not making it.”

  “It’s hard to make it in any of the arts.”

  “No kidding. Oh, I’ve had a couple of things published in the undergrounds. Ever hear of Bizarre Sex?”

  She smiled. “Try me.”

  “That’s the name of an underground comic. I’ve done a couple of science fiction parody things for ’em. Doesn’t pay much.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “But it isn’t a career. I don’t know. I don’t have much interest in commercial art, and the comic book field doesn’t appeal to me; the pay sucks and they’re doing the same old superhero junk, only badly.”

  “What about a newspaper comic strip?”

  “Landing a syndicated strip is almost impossible, particularly if you don’t do humor, which I don’t.”

  “I thought you said you did two parodies for that underground comic.”
<
br />   “Yeah, but I doubt many newspapers would want to carry ‘Dildos in Space.’”

  “You may have a point. So where does music come in?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard you play the organ. You’re good.”

  “Aw, that’s nothing serious with me. I played off and on with some bands when I was in junior high and high school. I don’t think I could make a living at it. And I’m not sure I’d want to, if I could.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother was in ‘show biz,’ and she had a shitty life, playing piano and singing in bars, on the road all the time, dreaming of being on Ed Sullivan someday, only he’s dead now, and so is she.”

  “Do you have any kids?”

  “Kids? Me? Hell, no.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be doing anybody a disservice leaving ’em behind when you went on the road, would you? If that’s what your problem is.”

  He thought about that a while. Then he said, “What kind of band would I be in? I hate disco. I hate country rock. I hate heavy metal. There isn’t much I could stand to play, except old sixties stuff and maybe some of the new wave music coming out of England and the East Coast.”

  And that had been the beginning of it. She had told him about her mock-Blondie band, Dagwood, which she wanted out of, and together they made plans to launch what became the Nodes. She knew about Roc, Mick, and Les, and they all got together in a friend’s garage and jammed through some material, and two weeks later they had relocated in Des Moines, to be with the booking agency that had handled the now-defunct Dagwood.

  Leaving Iowa City for Des Moines seemed to be slightly rough for Jon. He didn’t say much about it but he was apparently very close to this guy Nolan, though they seemed to have had a minor falling-out of some kind lately, which made it easier to Jon to leave. So he said, anyway.

  She had only seen this Nolan a few times. Actually, he seemed to be using the name Logan, but Jon always referred to him as Nolan. She didn’t know if Nolan had ever even noticed her, really; to him she was probably just some twat Jon was shacking up with. They’d never exchanged a word.

  But she had noticed him, all right. Looked him over good.