The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters

by M. J. Beaufrand

  Cilla was three years older than us. At one point she wanted to be a beautician, but instead she was stuck here in Denny’s, her skin slowly going yellow from secondhand smoke.

  Evan didn’t see her that way. To him, she was still the girl who’d babysat the two of us when we were nine and she was twelve. He never stopped trying to get her attention. First with his drawings of his favorite Trail Blazers superstars, then later, when he learned the first few chords of “Smoke on the Water,” he tried to impress her with his musical genius.

  Even now, when we were eighteen and she was twenty-one and he was clearly cooler than she was, he still thought of her as my glamorous sister who’d sat in his kitchen, talking on the phone to a long string of loser boyfriends, painting her nails some shade of ruby, and reapplying her Strawberry Lip-Smacking Potion.

  Now, in my car, he said, “I thought we were going home, Noah.”

  But it was too late. He’d caught sight of my sister through the window and was already sitting straighter. He tucked his dreads into the collar of his army jacket. If he’d been in massive pain the hour before, you wouldn’t know it now.

  “There are things we need to discuss,” I said.

  The three of us walked into the breezeway and were assaulted by the smell of sugar and grease and stale pies and Marlboro Lights.

  Ev and Crock walked ahead of me into the restaurant. I stopped to stare at the posters tacked to the corkboard above the bubble gum machine. The Disappearing Wall, Cilla called it. Which was stupid because the wall itself wasn’t disappearing. It was what was tacked to the wall that was fading away.

  This may not have been the pit of darkness Ziggy had talked about, but it was at least a satellite.

  The giant corkboard was supposed to be a place for people to advertise mixed-breed puppies and lawn-mowing services. Lately, a different kind of poster had been taking over.

  When I came in last week, there had been four of this new kind of poster. Tonight I counted ten.

  The faces were all different, but the messages were the same: “Have you seen this girl?” “Last seen wearing . . .” “Reward for information.”

  Ev came back and stood by my shoulder. He didn’t say anything, just read the Wall.

  “Whoa. There are a lot more than last week.”

  I should’ve torn myself away, but I couldn’t stop reading. There had to be some pattern, some quality to these girls that made them the same type. If there was, I couldn’t find it. They were all teenagers, but that was it. There were blondes and Asian girls and black girls. They were tall and short, rich and poor. They were last seen on Burnside Street or Alameda Street or Vista Boulevard. They went to Wilson High. They went to Grant High. They were last seen wearing miniskirts. They were last seen wearing sweats. They were on their way home from a friend’s house. They were on their way home from the library. Youth symphony. Volleyball practice. Saturday Academy.

  The worst one by far was at the bottom left-hand corner. It didn’t have a reward. It didn’t have a phone number. Just the face of a girl with short brown hair, wearing a caption like a yearbook title that said only Please.

  “Noah, don’t stare at this too long, okay?” Evan said. “It’ll only bring you down.”

  I agreed. “Idiot Willy says the parents are expanding their searches. They’re getting more desperate.”

  Idiot Willy was Crock’s stepdad. He was a cop. He and Crock didn’t get along, but I couldn’t always blame Idiot Willy for that.

  Now Evan buried his hands in his pockets, slouched, and looked away. As he walked off, he mumbled something that I could’ve sworn sounded like “Aren’t we all.”

  • • •

  Cilla was behind the counter when Ev and Crock and I came traipsing in. She was holding a coffeepot that emitted a god-awful burned smell. Her hair was curled and her lipstick and eye shadow were so shiny and glossy they looked like a perfect layer of frost. But all that grooming couldn’t take away from the fact that she was in a puke-colored zip-up dress with a grease stain on the collar and her name stitched on the front pocket. My sister’s shift would be over in two hours, but in a lot of ways, it was never going to end.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed, nimrod? Mom expected you an hour ago.”

  “We need a booth,” I said, staring her down.

  “Fine,” she spat. “But I hope you’ve got money, because I’m not giving you any freebies. You can pay for your own goddamn pancakes.”

  At the lunch counter, half a dozen sad-sack truckers slouched a little farther in their stools. They hadn’t done anything wrong, but Cilla had a way of making everyone feel like bad, bad dogs.

  “Just coffee for us, thanks. Bottomless.”

  She snorted. “There’s a surprise.”

  She showed us to a table with red Naugahyde benches, slapped down paper place mats showing pictures of platters of fake eggs garnished with orange slices and parsley, flashed us a smile just as papery and fake, and stalked off.

  When she was gone, Crock said, “Seriously, man? Was there some reason we couldn’t go straight home? I need my beauty rest.”

  Crock’s shirt opened to show way too much chest hair. He thought he was studlier than Ev and me. I tried not to think about Crock’s personal life too much. I mean, I liked the guy well enough, but he was a legacy. If he didn’t live across the street from us, I don’t think we’d hang out with him.

  Cilla came back with three chipped mugs of vile burned liquid. Ev took his and grafted it with nondairy creamer and eight little packets of fake sugar, so much that the air around us turned sickly sweet.

  Crock drank his coffee straight. I was afraid he might hurl again, but he kept it down. The guy could be a weasel, but his stomach was heroic. Most of the time.

  As Evan doctored his coffee, I took the piece of paper out of my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the middle of the table. It was bright red with big black print. The letters had drops under them as though they were oozing blood. I let the others read it. I didn’t need to. I had it memorized.

  PfefferBrau Haus Presents

  Grand Reopening, Saturday, April 26

  We Want YOU to Wake the Dead

  Do you have what it takes to rock the house?

  Are you the Next Big Thing?

  Apply to Jurgen and Arnold Pfeffer, Proprietors,

  PfefferBrau Haus Brewpub

  Prizes include: Gift Certificates to Jojo’s Records,

  Studio time,

  Airplay on KGW-FM

  Original music, please.

  I watched their eyes scan the words, and waited for a reaction that wasn’t long coming.

  “Wake the dead?” Evan said. “Those twisted fucks.”

  By twisted fucks he meant the Pfeffer brothers. And he was right. They were totally twisted. They may not have been murderers (Idiot Willy said they were not “persons of interest”), but man, they had balls. Wake the dead was crass, even to me. And for a while, before we were the Gallivanters, I’d called our band Putrid Viscera. I was an expert on crass.

  To know why it was so twisted, you’d have to know about Sherell Wexler, the only girl to be taken down from the Disappearing Wall.

  She was the only one who reappeared.

  Most of her, at least.

  “You’re not thinking of going to this, are you, Noah? That place is evil,” Evan said.

  Crock shrugged. “At least there’s beer.”

  “Seriously? You’d actually drink that cannibal brew?”

  That was the other thing you’d need to know about Sherell Wexler. The gruesome part. It was bad enough that she had her throat slit and her body dumped in a vat of porter, but the worst was that nobody found her right away.

  First some customer in the PfefferBrau taproom found a long black hair in his stein. Then someone else found another. And then a third found something that looked like a fingernail, with stuff still attached to it. Finally the police were called in and Arnold Pfeffer, the younger Pfeffer brother and mast
er brewer, drained the huge vat he’d nicknamed Hilda.

  Some nights when I couldn’t sleep (which was a lot), I couldn’t help wondering: Did the beer level go straight down? Or was she clogging the drain at the bottom? Did they have to cut something off Sherell to get her out? A hand? A foot? A nose?

  The police had the brewery cordoned off for weeks, drained every single piece of equipment in the entire place, but they didn’t find anything or anyone else. Jurgen Pfeffer, the elder Pfeffer brother and big business brain, made a big stink about how they were cooperating but there was no evidence that he and his brother had done anything wrong, other than keeping lax security. It was obviously some sicko off the street who’d done it, and had we seen the size of the Pfeffers’ operation? The skybridges? The grain elevators? The train tracks that led nowhere? Jurgen promised to make the points of ingress and egress more secure.

  Whatever.

  The upshot was that Sherell was accounted for and got a burial, and the rest of the girls remained Disappeared.

  In my dark, black heart, I hoped Sherell didn’t just drift gently and settle on the bottom. I wanted her body to thrash, a howl escaping from her beery, undead maw as she clung to some piece of machinery. Not because of the police, or for her parents, but for those two German freaks who had the nerve to advertise a poster like this.

  Wake the dead, my ass.

  Thinking about her, stewed into nothing, and Jurgen Pfeffer worried about something eating his profits, made me mad. I had a mission now. Never mind that it had been handed to me by some Bowie wannabe who I’d usually glare at and walk past.

  “I want us to audition,” I said.

  Evan went bug-eyed. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, seriously,” I said as I shredded my place mat into strips. I’d been away from my guitar too long. I needed something to thrash.

  “Just the two of us?”

  Ev on bass, me on lead guitar, just like old times. Even Crock had his uses. He was good at persuading. He used to be our manager. (“Sure. They’re all twenty-one.”)

  But we were still only half a band.

  Across the table, Ev and Crock stared at me, waiting for what they knew would come next.

  “I was thinking of getting the Old Girls back.”

  There. I’d said it. We hadn’t mentioned them since January, when Sonia had taken her drum kit out of my basement, loaded it into Jaime’s car, and left.

  I’d sat upstairs the whole time, wanting to plead with her to come back, but I didn’t. Ev and Crock were there, waiting to see what I’d do, which was nothing. I wanted to go downstairs. I wanted to cry in front of her, slit my wrists, show her how desperate I was to get her back.

  But I didn’t. Instead, I listened as the two of them disassembled the kit, listening to the crash of the dropped hi-hat or the low bonk of the kettledrum. Evan whispered to me over and over that I’d been the asshole, and if I couldn’t make it right, the least I could do was help them carry Sonia’s crap out of my house. I told Ev that if he wanted to help, go right ahead. But I wasn’t going to.

  Look at the dog collar, I told him. Look at the shredded jeans. I didn’t care about anything, least of all Sonia.

  Now, in Denny’s, Crock was the first to break the stare-off by laughing so hard coffee came out his nose. “The Old Girls? You’re kidding, right?”

  (“I’m not cleaning up your coffee snot!” Cilla yelled across the restaurant, and tossed Crock a dishrag.)

  Evan didn’t quite join in the guffaw-fest. “Forget it, man. The Old Girls hate you.”

  “Not both of them,” I said. “Just Sonia.”

  “Yes, but Jaime does whatever Sonia tells her,” Ev said.

  “She’s still the weakling of the herd. I thought I’d pick her off first.”

  “They’re not a herd.” Ev shook his head. “Definitely not a herd.”

  He was right. There might’ve been two of them, but that didn’t make them the same as each other or anyone else. Sonia was so spiky—her hair, her jean jacket, her attitude. That girl was unique—not to mention a master at pounding on stuff in a way that people couldn’t look away from, the way her eyes bugged out and she sneered when she beat the shit out of any surface to make music.

  I’d known her since seventh grade, and she was still cool—the last one I’d ever want to kill.

  Crock read the flyer again. “April twenty-sixth. Less than two months away. They want original songs, Noah. Even if we get in, the Gallivanters are a cover band. Who’s gonna compose?”

  I fiddled with the crack in my mug, picking at it like a scab. “I’ve been kicking around a few ideas.” Which was a lie. Until I’d seen the flyer earlier that night, I hadn’t been kicking around anything at all. Except other kids in mosh pits.

  But even if Ziggy hadn’t said that thing about the coming darkness, I knew it was time to get my ass out of my basement and do something. Already I was imagining chords and driving rhythms, rearranging them in ways I hadn’t heard anyone else do.

  Why, when Ziggy said, It has to be you, I’d thought about my basement and the guitar gathering dust and the strings slowly warping out of tune, I don’t know. Other than I’d been thinking about it a lot the past few months. All I needed was a nudge to froth over.

  “All right,” Evan finally said. “I get it. You want to get the band back together. But why do we have to play there?” He smacked the flyer. “Why can’t we get a different gig?”

  “It’s actually not a bad idea,” Crock said. “I mean, didn’t you guys ever get tired of playing proms and weddings? We’re all leaving by September anyway, right? Why not go out with a bang? Why not at least try to play the cannibal brewery? Don’t tell me you guys have lost the dream of having your faces on flyers stapled to telephone poles. I mean, if you’re serious, Noah, this could be it. We might be able to make actual money. You wouldn’t have to sell any more plasma.”

  “We shouldn’t do it, because we suck,” Evan said evenly.

  “Not necessarily.” Crock shrugged. “I mean, yeah, a lot of what you did was crap. But you had your moments. A riff here, a growl there. And honestly, I keep telling you. If you really want to be popular, change your friggin’ look. You won’t pack clubs looking like crackheads. Even the Beatles had to clean up before they got famous.”

  “The Beatles are bland,” Evan said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Sorry, man. Forgot how crappy you felt when Lennon died.”

  I stared at the flyer in the middle of the table. We all did. Then, slowly, Evan raised his eyes and said, “You can’t help them, you know. They’re already gone.”

  He wasn’t talking about the Beatles.

  He wasn’t talking about Jaime and Sonia.

  He was talking about the girls on the Disappearing Wall.

  I had a rare, middle-of-the-night “I love you, man” moment for Ev, even though he understood just as much about my plan as I did, which was practically nothing.

  I could see it in his overbright eyes and nicotine-stained teeth, and the hair he had to destroy so it could be art.

  Here was why I needed to get the Gallivanters back together. Here was why it had to be a splashy gig—one that the entire city would remember for years. And that was why Ziggy had said, It has to be you.

  It was because, in some way, Evan himself was slowly disappearing. I was the only one who could keep him from fading away.

  I closed my eyes and thought about what to say to persuade them.

  In the end, all I could do was open my mouth, and plead.

  And even though it was the middle of the night and we all wanted nothing more than to be in bed, Ev took a deep breath and said, “All right.”

  I DIDN’T SLEEP SATURDAY NIGHT. Sunday around 8:00 P.M. I crashed on the sofa. At some point I stumbled to bed, still in the clothes I’d worn for two days. They smelled like smoke and bad coffee and meringue pies.

  I dreamed about my dad again, the way he was before the accident. Jeans, a b
aseball cap, sturdy work boots, handlebar mustache. And the smirk. Oh god, the smirk. He was always a sanctimonious prick, even in real life. Why should he be any better in my nightmares?

  In this one, he was standing at the top of the stairs, looking at me as I lay crumpled and helpless on the landing below. And even though his boots were on his feet, seven steps above me, I could feel those waffle-patterned soles stomping on my chest, crushing the air out of my lungs.

  Daddy, no! Please! I’m sorry!

  You think you’re smart, do ya, punk ass? Lemme tell you something. You don’t got brain one.

  I woke to my clock radio. Or what would’ve been my radio if we got decent reception in my cul-de-sac. So it was more like I woke to static.

  I opened one eye. It was dark out. That didn’t mean anything. It was always dark when I got up for school. Whoever invented zero-hour classes should be shot.

  I whacked the snooze button. Nothing happened, except the static got louder. Kershshshsh . . .

  I whacked it again and again.

  Finally I got a radio announcer voice.

  Noah, it said. Then came the whirs and clicks, like it was tuning into a station.

  “Go away,” I groaned, jamming a pillow over my head.

  Noah, it said. Wake up. We’ve got work to do.

  My eyes snapped open. I knew that voice.

  “Ziggy?” I said. I turned over. My clock read 3:15. My alarm was set, as usual, for 5:45. There was no more static. The house was silent. The night was silent. Which meant either I’d dreamed his voice or Ziggy had found a way to talk to me over the airwaves.

  Had to be a dream.

  Still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t right. I got up and sniffed my armpits. Ripe. Plus I was pretty sure one of my piercings was infected, ’cause I felt hot all over.

  Whatever. I was awake now. Might as well get a head start on the original songs we’d need if we were serious about joining the cannibal brewery lineup.

  It was time for me to do what I’d been putting off since Sonia left.

  I had to go back to the basement.

  I tried hard not to let the basement freak me out. It was just a regular basement, right? Leaky fridge. Ugly plaid sofa. Mildew smell from when it flooded last year. Walls painted jaundice yellow, with a waterline marring the walls a foot off the floor.