“If you’re not chillin’, you’re illin’,” said Louis, grinning. “We did all the tracks in my parents’ basement in Queens—synthesizers, electronic drums, everything. Dewayne did the words.”
“Impressive,” said Christine.
“I am a very gifted composer,” Louis said. “And completely self-taught. I never played baseball—I sat in my basement making music. I can play classical, jazz, rock and roll—anything. But rap—that’s where the energy is. Those people in London thought I was going to be black. Man, did we surprise them—they didn’t even want to believe it. Like in the Wizard of Oz, you know? Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.” He began a laugh that transformed into a violent chest cough. When he was through he wiped his eyes.
Dewayne put down the box he was lifting and stared at Louis.
“Dig it,” said Louis. “Attitude is everything—that’s one thing I’ve learned.” His face was flushed with alcohol. He waved his glass. “More wine.”
Dewayne shook his head. “That’s it. You finished all three bottles.
“Then call the liquor store and have some sent.”
“No phone yet, remember?”
“Well, maybe you ought to go for a walk,” said Louis, his voice suddenly unpleasant.
The two of them eyed each other in silence for a moment.
“Do you think,” Christine asked, “I could use your shower?”
Louis gave her an odd look.
“Mine’s broken.”
In the bathroom she stripped off her clothes and hung them from the inside knob. There was a bar of soap and a bottle of special shampoo for thinning hair already standing on the edge of the tub. She set the water temperature, stepped in, and pulled the curtain.
Under the hot spray she allowed herself to relax. Rather than trying to think, she let her various problems drift just beyond her reach—like floating toys in a swimming pool, if she made a move for them, they only edged farther away. Ray, the guitars, the strange company she now found herself in, it all seemed less important. Soaping herself, she realized that her hands no longer showed any trace of grease. Also, she was struck by how, around her knees and wrists, lines had formed that seemed particularly noticeable. She put her hands to her rear and decided for the hundredth time that it felt too soft. All her life she’d had a strong body, lean and hard. Somewhere along the way, when she wasn’t paying attention, it had become womanly. She hated the word, but there it was. Things changed, whether you liked it or not.
For a moment, she had the sensation that she was being watched, though the plastic curtain made it hard to tell for sure. She tried to whistle, but found it impossible with all the water, so instead hummed loudly. It seemed the air temperature had dropped. When she finished up and stepped out to dry, she saw that the door was open, just a crack. She was sure she’d closed it.
When she returned to the living room, she found Louis seated in a chair with his back to her. Dewayne was at the window, looking out.
“Still there,” he said.
“Damn,” said Louis.
“What’s still there?” she asked.
Louis turned around. “Our neighbor has returned,” he said, his voice almost accusing. “Somebody parked a truck outside with out-of-state plates. Dewayne says it’s drugs. I say it’s stolen. What do you think?” He glared at her for a moment, then began to cough again, a fit that lasted a full thirty seconds. “I need my medicine,” he said at last, red-faced.
Dewayne made to pick him up, but Louis shook him off with a violent gesture and, retrieving his crutches, hobbled uncertainly out of the room.
There was a brief, awkward silence in his wake. Christine thought she ought to explain. “Actually,” she said, “that’s my truck. Well, my friend’s.”
“I know,” Dewayne said.
“You do?”
“I saw you both earlier. You and the man. I’m not blind. But I don’t know what you want to come park yourselves in this part of town for.”
“We were looking for a man who cheated us out of some money. Jamaican guy with gold teeth? He said his name was K.C.” She knew it was dumb to think that Dewayne might know him. Still, it was worth a try. She felt suddenly reconnected to Ray, freezing his bones in the back of the truck, feeling twice betrayed, first by K.C., now by her.
Dewayne laughed. “K.C.? Sure, I know K.C. Used to live next door a couple of years ago. Just got out of jail, I think. Forget about your money.”
“We thought maybe if we talked to him.”
“Darling, I don’t know what department store you think you went to.”
From the other room, Louis was shouting something, his tone that of a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. She thought again of the open bathroom door, and felt suddenly angry.
“Why do you put up with him?” she asked. “I wouldn’t.”
Dewayne stuck his hands in his pockets. “The man’s body is wearing out at the rate of about five years for every one of yours or mine. A thing like that tends to make you a little unpleasant.” He turned and looked out the window, toward the truck. “Parents don’t know where he is, just that he went to London and now he’s back. They’ll be looking for him, if they aren’t already.”
“Short Time,” she said, embarrassed. “I get it.”
“Funny, right? It was his idea.”
“You still didn’t say why you stay with him.”
“He pays me.”
She tried to think of something to say to this that wouldn’t sound insensitive. “At least his song is doing well,” she said. “That’s something.”
“There’s no song. I mean, there’s a lot of tape, you know. But the rest of it—that stuff about the BBC—it’s all in Louis’s head. Make-believe.”
“You went all the way to London for an imaginary meeting?”
“Why not? It’s Louis’s money. He’s not crazy—he just needs to be humored. Nothing unusual about that—we could all use a little humoring. That’s what he pays me for.”
“Oh.” She was convinced it was more complicated. She had the idea that Dewayne needed Louis, too, in some way beyond a simple paycheck.
“He thinks you may be some kind of spy.”
“Spy?”
“From his parents. I told you, they don’t know where he is, and they do have a lot of money.”
Outside, Ray had turned on the truck’s lights. A cough of white smoke spat from the exhaust.
“Your friend is getting tired of waiting.”
Christine didn’t like being pushed, but at the same time she was afraid to stay. If Ray left, that was it. Nothing awaited her back home except plugs and timing belts and gaskets and valves. Even more, she worried for Ray, whose belief in the future was matched only by his inability to get along at all in the present. He was going to need her.
“Tell Louis good-bye for me,” she said, zipping up her coat. Outside, the red taillights amidst all the smoke made the truck look like a waiting dragon.
Something small and hard struck her in the leg. Then another object smacked into the door beside her. Louis had come back into the room, a bag of apples clutched in his teeth. He’d set down his crutches and was throwing the fruit at her.
“Get out!” he shouted. “This is my house!”
She started toward him. Another apple caught her in the thigh. Her impulse was to simply pick him up and give him a spanking. But then she thought of what Dewayne had said, and it made her stop. He was too delicate—inside his round, doughy outsides, he was a piece of fine, thin crystal. She might kill him.
Dewayne moved to block the path between her and Louis with his body, but not before another apple came winging at her face. She caught this one one-handed, the movement so automatic it surprised even her. With a certain satisfaction, she stuck it in her pocket, turned, and walked out the door. As she left, she heard Dewayne’s voice speaking to Louis in low, calming tones.
At the motel where they stopped that night, Ray continued to keep quie
t, just as he had most of the trip since Christine had hopped up next to him in the front of the truck. He was feeling foolish, she knew, and she took no pleasure in it. They shared a pint bottle of Jim Beam, mixing it with Pepsi from the machine outside their room, each of them seated cross-legged on the enormous double bed. They smoked a bunch of cigarettes. K.C.’s karma would catch up with him in the end, Ray said finally. In his next life he’d be a talking clown at a Jack in the Box drive-thru.
Later, he wanted to watch television, an HBO movie about gangsters, with seminudity and stupid dialogue. She slid under the covers, pretending to fall asleep. It was Ray who fell asleep first though—his tall, skinny frame looking deflated and awkward stretched across the flowered bedspread. Christine took his shoes off and put the covers over him. Then she pulled on her jeans, slipped into her jacket, and stepped outside. Dolly stood quietly waiting by their door, and though Christine had grown to hate the truck over the past week, there now seemed something almost friendly about it.
She looked up. Most of the sky was covered by a dull, milky haze, but there was one area that still remained clear, a round tear in the fabric like a dark tunnel outward. It amazed her to think that while all these planets, including her own, were hurtling around the galaxy, she could still stand here with both feet planted firmly on the ground. Stability, she decided, was always an illusion to some extent. The thing was not to look backward, but to confront the darkness head on, and not blink. Tomorrow, they’d head on toward Nashville. At least it was likely to be warmer there, and she supposed one ex-wife wasn’t all that big a deal. Something touched her lightly through the torn knee of her jeans and she jumped, thinking it felt like a small finger, but then realized. It had only begun to snow.
BLUESTOWN
When I was fifteen, my father showed up at our high school and stood outside the door of Mr. Margin’s history class wearing his leather jacket, waving a pink piece of paper. It was a September afternoon, sunny but not too hot, the sky bright blue. I had been alternately staring out the window and making eyes at Lucy Westbrook who sat opposite me, and had probably the nicest body in the whole school. Mr. Margin stopped lecturing (the subject was, I think, slavery) and went to the door, then gestured for me to step out into the hall with him.
“You’re excused Spencer,” he said. “It seems you’ve forgotten something.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the prospect of getting out of that stuffy classroom was an unexpected gift.
“Your doctor’s appointment, Spence,” said my dad, pointing to his watch. “We’re late already.” He had this concerned, fatherly expression on his face, and looked at Mr. Margin in commiseration. “I knew he’d forget. He’s known about this for weeks.”
“It’s my experience,” said Mr. Margin, “that given half a chance, these kids will forget anything. Get a move on Spencer—read the next chapter for tomorrow’s class.” He gave me an affectionate smack on the shoulder.
“Kids,” said my dad to him, then led me down the hall. When we got to the front entrance, he looked both ways, then began to run. He took off across the front lawn, past a group of kids sharing a joint, nearly tripping over a girl who was stretched out in the sun. I ran after him, thinking that this time he had finally, truly lost it. When I caught up with him at his car, a ’67 Buick station wagon with a wired-on front bumper, I could see the back was loaded with equipment—all his guitars, an amplifier, and a suitcase. I got in the passenger side as he started up the engine.
“What’s going on?” I asked when I’d caught my breath.
He slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses. “It’s way too nice a day to hang out in school,” he said.
He loved to break rules—it was one of the things I liked best about him. It was also part of the reason he’d been banished, several years before, from the small ranch house where my mother and I still lived along with Hal, her new husband. My dad, a few gray traces just beginning to appear in the hair that fell over his ears, now inhabited a small apartment downtown, over Angelo’s Pizza and Calzone. I still saw a lot of him, more than my mother would have liked. He was only supposed to get me one day a week, but I’d go over to his place after school and hang around listening to albums, or playing cards. Since his work, when he had any, was at night, he was home afternoons. He liked to talk about the old days, when rock and roll was still counterculture and not just something else to show on TV. We’d sit on his secondhand sofa bed, albums and cassette tapes strewn over the floor, the smell of pizza wafting up through the floorboards, and he’d tell me how he was never really cut out to be a family man. Possessions and responsibilities made him nervous, even things like his stereo and television. Even so, whenever he did get some money, he’d spend it on a new toy—a phase-shifter or a compressor, or maybe a graphic EQ—and together we’d spend hours fooling with the knobs and buttons.
He played me albums, everything from Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins to Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman. Guitar, he said, was the only instrument on which you could really play the blues. I was familiar with all sorts of obscure, Chicago-based players, most of them named Milton or Melvin. I fully believed I knew what it meant to have the blues. In school I covered my notebooks with drawings of guitars and amps. My prize possession was a Muddy Waters T-shirt he brought me back from New York once, and which I wore so often my mother had to swipe it from my room just to get it washed. With my friends I smoked cigarettes and kept my hands plunged deep into my pockets, nodding in time to an imaginary beat. What I liked above all things was the tortured sound of a guitar string, bent almost to the point of breaking.
I asked about all the equipment, and he explained that he had an audition in Montreal for a gig with a new band that had backing, a recording contract—everything but the right guitarist. This seemed major—there was an intensity on his face that I couldn’t remember seeing. When I asked him how they happened to come up with his name, he just smiled and said “a friend of a friend.” My dad had a lot of friends.
He made a living as a guitarist, more or less. It always seemed he was on the verge of success when something would happen. My mother said he brought it on himself, but as far as I could see, he just ran into a lot of bad luck. For a while he’d pinned his hopes on a local woman named Maddie Kelso—an emaciated redhead with an enormous, whiskey-steeped voice. He worked with her for about a year, but she got born again and moved to Wisconsin. Another time he left his car unlocked and all his instruments were stolen, so for months he had to borrow equipment. But he stayed optimistic, full of plans, and even my mom, on the uncomfortable occasion when she would run into him at the supermarket or the drugstore, found it hard to be angry with him. She didn’t like us spending time together and said he was a bad role model, but he could always do something dumb, like wiggle his eyebrows at her, or juggle a couple of avocados, and at least get a laugh.
We went to the Dairy Queen and had black-and-white milk shakes. It was where the greasers hung out, and the parking lot was full of them: slicked-back hair, big combs sticking out of the back pockets of their polyester pants. They leaned against jacked-up cars, smoked cigarettes, ignored the girlfriends who lounged next to them, all hair spray and lip gloss, car radios blaring. With his leather jacket, worn-out jeans, and shades, my dad was easily the coolest-looking person there. I liked the way we could just hang out together on the hood of the Buick, feeling the hot metal under our legs, sipping a cold shake.
“Jimi,” he said. It was something we’d done since I was little—calling each other by the names of dead guitarists. I got to be Jimi, and he was Duane, after Duane Allman, who was definitely the closest thing to a hero in his life. Nobody’d ever played slide like Duane, or ever would.
“They sent me expense money,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “That means they’re serious.”
He shrugged. “I guess. The way I see it, if I drive up, it costs me next to nothing and I pocket the difference. What do you say? Fe
el like a road trip?”
I could think of nothing I felt like more. An image of the two of us cruising north through New England flashed through my mind like the trailer for a sixties road movie. But, I pointed out, my mother was going to be a problem.
He lowered his voice. “We won’t tell her—we’ll just leave a note saying you’re with me, and when we get back, I’ll take all the heat.”
A note from him wasn’t going to get me out of anything, but I wanted to go, so I convinced myself it was a workable plan. After all, it would just be a couple of days.
“It feels a little like running away from home,” I said, enjoying the idea. A friend of mine, Nicky Dormer, had run away from home for four days the year before, and afterward he’d seemed to me years older.
“Jimi, my man,” he answered, massaging my shoulders. “It is impossible to run away from home with your own father.”
My mom was still at work. We drove by the house and I ran upstairs to get a toothbrush while he stood in the kitchen penciling a quick note in his own, peculiarly recognizable handwriting—an angular sort of chicken scratch. When I came back down he was still laboring over it. It was odd seeing him there, back in the house for the first time in years. He looked uncomfortable, out of place. I looked at what he wrote, but it wasn’t until we were in the car and heading out of town that I asked him about it.
“Hey, Duane,” I said, “How come you put down that we were going to Virginia?”
“Just a precaution,” he said. “In case she decides to call the cops, it’ll buy us some time.”
As soon as we were on the road, he slipped in a cassette of the Allman Brothers doing “Statesboro Blues,” and I kicked my feet up on the dashboard. The music almost seemed to be powering the car. I’d seen pictures from back when I was only about three or four, when my dad practically was Duane Allman. He wore his hair all the way down his back and had the same muttonchop sideburns. The day after Duane died on his motorcycle, my dad managed to get into an accident on his. He broke a leg and an arm, but he also got an out-of-court settlement that was enough to buy our house, as well as a good PA system and a couple of guitars. He was twenty-five years old, a high school graduate with a wife, a kid, and his own place. Things started to happen. Weird people would come over in the middle of the night to hang out, and in the morning there’d be spilled beer and cigarette burns in the carpet. My mom and he would fight, then he’d disappear for a couple of days at a time. Afterward he’d always try to make up for it by doing something real normal, like mowing the lawn, or taking the three of us out to the movies.
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