Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  Linette crossed the room to stand beside Haley in front of the painting. It was a huge canvas, very old, in an elaborate gilt frame. Thousands of fine cracks ran through it. Haley was amazed it hadn’t fallen to pieces years ago. A lamp on top of the frame illuminated it, a little too well for Haley’s taste. It took her a moment to realize that she had seen it before.

  “That’s the cover of your album—”

  He had come up behind them and stood there, reaching to chuck the kinkajou under the chin. “That’s right,” he said softly. “The Erl-King.”

  It scared her. The hooded figure in the foreground hunched towards a tiny form in the distance, its outstretched arms ending in hands like claws. There was a smear of white to indicate its face, and two dark smudges for eyes, as though someone had gouged the paint with his thumbs. In the background the smaller figure seemed to be fleeing on horseback. A bolt of lightning shot the whole scene with splinters of blue light, so that she could just barely make out that the rider held a smaller figure in his lap. Black clouds scudded across the sky, and on the horizon reared a great house with windows glowing yellow and red. Somehow Haley knew the rider would not reach the house in time.

  Linette grimaced. On her shoulder the kinkajou had fallen asleep again. She untangled its paws from her hair and asked, “The Erl-King? What’s that?”

  Lie Vagal took a step closer to her.

  “—‘Oh father! My father! And dost thou not see?

  The Erl-King and his daughter are waiting for me?’

  —‘Now shame thee, my dearest! Tis fear makes thee blind

  Thou seest the dark willows which wave in the wind.’ ”

  He stopped. Linette shivered, glanced aside at Haley. “Wow. That’s creepy—you really like all this creepy stuff . . . ”

  Haley swallowed and tried to look unimpressed. “That was a song?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a poem, actually. I just ripped off the words, that’s all.” He hummed softly. Haley vaguely recognized the tune and guessed it must be from his album.

  “ ‘Oh father, my father,’ ” he sang, and reached to take Linette’s hand. She joined him shyly, and the kinkajou drooped from her shoulder across her back.

  “Lie!”

  The voice made the girls jump. Linette clutched at Lie. The kinkajou squealed unhappily.

  “Gram.” Lie’s voice sounded somewhere between reproach and disappointment as he turned to face her. She stood in the doorway, weaving a little and with one hand on the doorframe to steady herself.

  “It’s late. I think those girls should go home now.”

  Linette giggled, embarrassed, and said, “Oh, we don’t have—”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Haley broke in, and sidled toward the door. Lie Vagal stared after her, then turned to Linette.

  “Why don’t you come back tomorrow, if you want to see more of the house? Then it won’t get too late.” He winked at Haley. “And Gram is here, so your parents shouldn’t have to worry.”

  Haley reddened. “They don’t care,” she lied. “It’s just, it’s kind of late and all.”

  “Right, that’s right,” said the old lady. She waited for them all to pass out of the room, Lie pausing to unplug the Christmas-tree lights, and then followed them downstairs.

  On the outside patio the girls halted, unsure how to say goodbye.

  “Thank you,” Haley said at last. She looked at the old lady. “For the tea.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” echoed Linette. She looked over at Lie Vagal standing in the doorway. The backlight made of him a black shadow, the edges of his hair touched with gold. He nodded to her, said nothing. But as they made their way back down the moonlit hill his voice called after them with soft urgency.

  “Come back,” he said.

  It was two more days before Haley returned to Linette’s. After dinner she rode her bike up the long rutted dirt drive, dodging cabbage butterflies and locusts and looking sideways at Kingdom Come perched upon its emerald hill. Even before she reached the cottage she knew Linette wasn’t there.

  “Haley. Come on in.”

  Aurora stood in the doorway, her cigarette leaving a long blue arabesque in the still air as she beckoned Haley. The girl leaned her bike against the broken stalks of sunflowers and delphiniums pushing against the house and followed Aurora.

  Inside was cool and dark, the flagstones’ chill biting through the soles of Haley’s sneakers. She wondered how Aurora could stand to walk barefoot, but she did: her feet small and dirty, toenails buffed bright pink. She wore a short black cotton tunic that hitched up around her narrow hips. Some days it doubled as nightgown and daywear; Haley guessed this was one of those days.

  “Tea?”

  Haley nodded, perching on an old ladderback chair in the kitchen and pretending interest in an ancient issue of Dairy Goat magazine. Aurora walked a little unsteadily from counter to sink to stove, finally handing Haley her cup and then sinking into an overstuffed armchair near the window. From Aurora’s mug the smell of juniper cut through the bergamot-scented kitchen. She sipped her gin and regarded Haley with slitted eyes.

  “So. You met Lie Vagal.”

  Haley shrugged and stared out the window. “He had Valentine,” she said at last.

  “He still does—the damn thing ran back over yesterday. Linette went after it last night and didn’t come back.”

  Haley felt a stab of betrayal. She hid her face behind her steaming mug. “Oh,” was all she said.

  “You’ll have to go get her, Haley. She won’t come back for me, so it’s up to you.” Aurora tried to make her voice light, but Haley recognized the strained desperate note in it. She looked at Aurora and frowned.

  You’re her mother, you bring her back, she thought, but said, “She’ll be back. I’ll go over there.”

  Aurora shook her head. She still wore her hair past her shoulders and straight as a needle; no longer blond, it fell in streaked gray and black lines across her face. “She won’t,” she said, and took a long sip at her mug. “He’s got her now and he won’t want to give her back.” Her voice trembled and tears blurred the kohl around her eyelids.

  Haley bit her lip. She was used to this. Sometimes when Aurora was drunk, she and Linette carried her to bed, covering her with the worn flannel comforter and making sure her cigarettes and matches were out of sight. Linette acted embarrassed, but Haley didn’t mind, just as she didn’t mind doing the dishes sometimes or making grilled cheese sandwiches or French toast for them all, or riding her bike down to Schelling’s Market to get more ice when they ran out. She reached across to the counter and dipped another golden thread of honey into her tea.

  “Haley. I want to show you something.”

  The girl waited as Aurora weaved down the narrow passage into her bedroom. She could hear drawers being thrown open and shut, and finally the heavy thud of the trunk by the bed being opened. In a few minutes Aurora returned, carrying an oversized book.

  “Did I ever show you this?”

  She padded into the umber darkness of the living room, with its frayed kilims and cracked sitar like some huge shattered gourd leaning against the stuccoed wall. Haley followed, settling beside her. By the door the frogs hung with splayed feet in their sullen globe, their pale bellies turned to amber by the setting sun. On the floor in front of Haley glowed a rhomboid of yellow light. Aurora set the book within that space and turned to Haley. “Have I shown you this?” she asked again, a little anxiously.

  “No,” Haley lied. She had in fact seen the scrapbook about a dozen times over the years—the pink plastic cover with its peeling Day-Glo flowers hiding newspaper clippings and magazine pages soft as fur beneath her fingers as Aurora pushed it towards her.

  “He’s in there,” Aurora said thickly. Haley glanced up and saw that the woman’s eyes were bright red behind their smeared rings of kohl. Tangled in her thin fine hair were hoop earrings that reached nearly to her shoulder, and on one side of her neck, where a love bite might be, a tattoo no
bigger than a thumbprint showed an Egyptian Eye of Horus. “Lie Vagal—him and all the rest of them—”

  Aurora started flipping through the stiff plastic pages, too fast for Haley to catch more than a glimpse of the photos and articles spilling out. Once she paused, fumbling in the pocket of her tunic until she found her cigarettes.

  Youthquaker! the caption read. Beside it was a black-and-white picture of a girl with long white-blond hair and enormous, heavily kohled eyes. She was standing with her back arched, wearing a sort of bikini made of playing cards. Model Aurora Dawn, Brightest New Light in Pop Artist’s Superstar Heaven.

  “Wow,” Haley breathed. She never got tired of the scrapbooks: it was like watching a silent movie, with Aurora’s husky voice intoning the perils that befell the feckless heroine.

  “That’s not it,” Aurora said, almost to herself, and began skipping pages again. More photos of herself, and then others—men with hair long and lush as Aurora’s; heavy women smoking cigars; twin girls no older than Haley and Linette, leaning on a naked man’s back while another man in a doctor’s white coat jabbed them with an absurdly long hypodermic needle. Aurora at an art gallery. Aurora on the cover of Interview magazine. Aurora and a radiant woman with shuttered eyes and long, long fishnet-clad legs—the woman was really a man, a transvestite Aurora said; but there was no way you could tell by looking at him. As she flashed through the pictures Aurora began to name them, bursts of cigarette smoke hovering above the pages.

  “Fairy Pagan. She’s dead.

  “Joey Face. He’s dead.

  “Marletta. She’s dead.

  “Precious Bane. She’s dead.

  “The Wanton Hussy. She’s dead.”

  And so on, for pages and pages, dozens of fading images, boys in leather and ostrich plumes, girls in miniskirts prancing across the backs of stuffed elephants at F.A.O. Schwartz or screaming deliriously as fountains of champagne spewed from tables in the back rooms of bars.

  “Miss Clancy de Wolff. She’s dead.

  “Dianthus Queen. She’s dead.

  “Markey French. He’s dead.”

  Until finally the clippings grew smaller and narrower, the pictures smudged and hard to make out beneath curls of disintegrating newsprint—banks of flowers, mostly, and stiff faces with eyes closed beneath poised coffin lids, and one photo Haley wished she’d never seen (but yet again she didn’t close her eyes in time) of a woman jackknifed across the top of a convertible in front of the Chelsea Hotel, her head thrown back so that you could see where it had been sheared from her neck neatly as with a razor blade.

  “Dead. Dead. Dead,” Aurora sang, her finger stabbing at them until flecks of paper flew up into the smoke like ashes; and then suddenly the book ended and Aurora closed it with a soft heavy sound.

  “They’re all dead,” she said thickly; just in case Haley hadn’t gotten the point.

  The girl leaned back, coughing into the sleeve of her T-shirt. “What happened?” she asked, her voice hoarse. She knew the answers, of course: drugs, mostly, or suicide. One had been recent enough that she could recall reading about it in the Daily News.

  “What happened?” Aurora’s eyes glittered. Her hands rested on the scrapbook as on a Ouija board, fingers writhing as though tracing someone’s name. “They sold their souls. Every one of them. And they’re all dead now. Edie, Candy, Nico, Jackie, Andrea, even Andy. Every single one. They thought it was a joke, but look at it—”

  A tiny cloud of dust as she pounded the scrapbook. Haley stared at it and then at Aurora. She wondered unhappily if Linette would be back soon; wondered, somewhat shamefully because for the first time, exactly what had happened last night at Kingdom Come.

  “Do you see what I mean, Haley? Do you understand now?” Aurora brushed the girl’s face with her finger. Her touch was ice cold and stank of nicotine.

  Haley swallowed. “N-no,” she said, trying not to flinch. “I mean, I thought they all, like, OD’d or something.”

  Aurora nodded excitedly. “They did! Of course they did—but that was afterward—that was how they paid—”

  Paid. Selling souls. Aurora and her weird friends talked like that sometimes. Haley bit her lip and tried to look thoughtful. “So they, like, sold their souls to the devil?”

  “Of course!” Aurora croaked triumphantly. “How else would they have ever got where they did? Superstars! Rich and famous! And for what reason? None of them had any talent—none of them—but they ended up on TV, and in Vogue, and in the movies—how else could they have done it?”

  She leaned forward until Haley could smell her sickly berry-scented lipstick mingled with the gin. “They all thought they were getting such a great deal, but look how it ended—famous for fifteen minutes, then pffftttt!”

  “Wow,” Haley said again. She had no idea, really, what Aurora was talking about. Some of these people she’d heard of, in magazines or from Aurora and her friends, but mostly their names were meaningless. A bunch of nobodies that nobody but Aurora had ever even cared about.

  She glanced down at the scrapbook and felt a small sharp chill beneath her breast. Quickly she glanced up again at Aurora: her ruined face, her eyes; that tattoo like a faded brand upon her neck. A sudden insight made her go hmm beneath her breath—

  Because maybe that was the point; maybe Aurora wasn’t so crazy, and these people really had been famous once. But now for some strange reason no one remembered any of them at all; and now they were all dead. Maybe they really were all under some sort of curse. When she looked up Aurora nodded, slowly, as though she could read her thoughts.

  “It was at a party. At the Factory,” she began in her scorched voice. “We were celebrating the opening of Scag—that was the first movie to get real national distribution, it won the Silver Palm at Cannes that year. It was a fabulous party, I remember there was this huge Lalique bowl filled with cocaine and in the bathroom Doctor Bob was giving everyone a pop—

  “About three a.m. most of the press hounds had left, and a lot of the neophytes were just too wasted and had passed out or gone on to Max’s. But Candy was still there, and Liatris, and Jackie and Lie Vagal—all the core people—and I was sitting by the door, I really was in better shape than most of them, or I thought I was, but then I looked up and there is this guy there I’ve never seen before. And, like, people wandered in and out of there all the time, that was no big deal, but I was sitting right by the door with Jackie, I mean it was sort of a joke, we’d been asking to see people’s invitations, turning away the offal, but I swear I never saw this guy come in. Later Jackie said she’d seen him come in through the fire escape; but I think she was lying. Anyway, it was weird.

  “And so I must have nodded out for a while, because all of a sudden I jerk up and look around and here’s this guy with everyone huddled around him, bending over and laughing like he’s telling fortunes or something. He kind of looked like that, too, like a gypsy—not that everyone didn’t look like that in those days, but with him it wasn’t so much like an act. I mean, he had this long curly black hair and these gold earrings, and high suede boots and velvet pants, all black and red and purple, but with him it was like maybe he had always dressed like that. He was handsome, but in a creepy sort of way. His eyes were set very close together and his eyebrows grew together over his nose—that’s the mark of a warlock, eyebrows like that—and he had this very neat British accent. They always went crazy over anyone with a British accent.

  “So obviously I had been missing something, passed out by the door, and so I got up and staggered over to see what was going on. At first I thought he was collecting autographs. He had this very nice leather-bound book, like an autograph book, and everyone was writing in it. And I thought, God, how tacky. But then it struck me as being weird, because a lot of those people—not Candy, she’d sign anything—but a lot of the others, they wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything so bourgeois as signing autographs. But here just about everybody was passing this pen around—a nice gold Cross pen, I remembe
r that—even Andy, and I thought, Well this I got to see.

  “So I edged my way in, and that’s when I saw they were signing their names. But it wasn’t an autograph book at all. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. There was something printed on every page, in this fabulous gold and green lettering, but very official-looking, like when you see an old-fashioned decree of some sort. And they were all signing their names on every page. Just like in a cartoon, you know, ‘Sign here!’ And, I mean, everyone had done it—Lie Vagal had just finished and when the man saw me coming over he held the book up and flipped through it real fast, so I could see their signatures . . . ”

  Haley leaned forward on her knees, heedless now of the smoke and Aurora’s huge eyes staring fixedly at the empty air.

  “What was it?” the girl breathed. “Was it—?”

  “It was their souls.” Aurora hissed the last word, stubbing out her cigarette in her empty mug. “Most of them, anyway—because, get it, who would ever want their souls? It was a standard contract—souls, sanity, first-born children. They all thought it was a joke—but look what happened.” She pointed at the scrapbook as though the irrefutable proof lay there.

  Haley swallowed. “Did you—did you sign?”

  Aurora shook her head and laughed bitterly. “Are you crazy? Would I be here now if I had? No, I didn’t, and a few others didn’t—Viva, Liatris and Coppelia, David Watts. We’re about all that’s left, now—except for one or two who haven’t paid up . . . ”

  And she turned and gazed out the window, to where the overgrown apple trees leaned heavily and spilled their burden of green fruit onto the stone wall that separated them from Kingdom Come.

  “Lie Vagal,” Haley said at last. Her voice sounded hoarse as Aurora’s own. “So he signed it, too.”

  Aurora said nothing, only sat there staring, her yellow hands clutching the thin fabric of her tunic. Haley was about to repeat herself, when the woman began to hum, softly and out of key. Haley had heard that song before—just days ago, where was it? and then the words spilled out in Aurora’s throaty contralto: