Maybe that song wasn’t so stupid after all.
You should make better decisions, Glory.
Eli’s tone when he’d said that. His expression. As if it was already too late for her. And maybe it was a matter of time before he had her facedown in cuffs, too.
Like he’d never kissed her.
Then whispered her name in a stunned voice.
Then kissed her again.
A great fresh bracing tide of pissed-off-ness propelled her out of her chair. “I’m going out for a bit, Mom.”
She grabbed her jacket from the coat rack. She paused and pivoted. She’d almost forgotten.
She grabbed her stuffed tiger out of her bedroom and put it in the living room window, so it could have a view of the highway into town.
And she bolted out the door before her mother could ask questions.
She walked the whole way, down the unpaved road her family had lived on forever, which needed a coat of gravel now that fall was approaching, and gravel cost money. She knew every tree lining it; she even fondly, with an ache, remembered the ones that had toppled in storms. Every inch of it was the equivalent of a memory cell.
Down round the bend and through a narrow path trampled by decades of local feet and lined by big old pines was a shortcut to unused pasture lands surrounded by a splintered whitewashed fence. Every now and then someone mowed the grass in there so it didn’t become too much of a fire hazard. In spring a thousand different wildflowers poked through that fence. When she was a kid, she’d pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Eli had been Sir Walter Raleigh, and he’d laid down his jacket for her to walk across. She’d made a crown out of the wildflowers when she was Maid Marian, and she and Jonah and her siblings had pretended to be Robin Hood’s merry band. Eli got to be Robin Hood. Jonah was Little John. They’d made that elm tree their headquarters, their fort, their castle.
Who knew Eli would actually grow up to be the Sheriff of Nottingham?
She paused on the rise and looked out toward the highway. Men in white painter’s coveralls were clambering over the billboard on the highway, slapping up a new ad. The lip gloss ad was vanishing, which was kind of a shame, mostly because someone had drawn a pretty funny clown on it not too long ago, its butt up in the air, aimed at the big shiny lips. Glory was an admirer of subversiveness in its various subtle forms. Up above on the lip of the canyon was Hellcat Canyon’s version of Olympus: a scattering of huge rustic summer homes, windows glinting like change you found in the street, belonging to tech millionaires and other people (none of whom Glory knew personally) who could buy a house and not live in it for huge swaths of the year.
As much as she itched to get out of town, every time it expanded into view as she emerged from the woods it was like hearing a familiar, beloved old song: meticulously maintained Gold Rush–era homes and storefronts glowing in dusty pastel shades unwound sinuously down tree and lamp-post-studded Main Street. More signs that fall was beginning to supplant summer: gerbera daisies and marigolds and sunflowers and mums, oranges and reds and golds, were now bursting from the little baskets hanging on hooks and the terra-cotta pots flanking storefront doorways. Hellcat Canyon was hardly a tourist destination, but rents were pretty modest and all of the businesses were small enough to survive any monkey wrenches the economy might throw. Some of the merchants, like Kayla Benoit who’d named her boutique after herself (and wasn’t that just like Kayla, everyone said) and whose clothes weren’t in Glory’s budget (she preferred jeans and snug tops, anyway), even owned their buildings.
Glory traveled two blocks down Main and was halfway down Jamboree Street like a homing pigeon even before she realized she’d hooked that left. That wasn’t her ultimate destination, but she decided she might as well check in with the mothership, aka Allegro Music, and she needed strings, anyway.
The big bulletin board on the side wall outside Allegro bristled with decades of staples, which was all that was left of flyers from bands and shows that had come and gone. But a new and blindingly pink flyer currently flanked drummer Monroe Porter’s “lead singer wanted for death metal band” flyer. It was always there. When rain, dust, wind, and snow finally battered the last one into tatters, he put another one up. He’d done it for years. Hope did spring eternal. Especially in music stores.
“Good luck, Monroe,” she muttered, because she really did wish him well. She might be queen of the open mic here in Hellcat Canyon, but it was harder than hell to pull a band together here in the sticks. Let alone a reliable band. Glory had played with Monroe once or twice, and he knew her usual open mic set pretty well, but she thought the RAWWR RAWWR RAWWR way death metal singers felt obliged to sing was really funny, which rather hurt Monroe’s feelings. Different strokes was all. Over the years, she’d played a few gigs with rounded-up musicians in nearby towns like Black Oak and Whitney, but the nearest largish city was Sacramento, and that was nearly two hours away, and reliable transportation was another thing altogether. Currently she and her mom took turns driving their rattling old truck.
She peered at the bright pink flyer.
One Night Only!
THE BABY OWLS
Misty Cat Cavern
1 Main Street, Hellcat Canyon
Saturday, November 12th
Show starts at 8 p.m.
Glory gave a short laugh. “I’ll be damned.”
The flyer featured a photocopied image of three guys sporting woolly neo-lumberjack beards, heavy black hipster eyeglasses, and plaid flannel shirts. Their arms were crossed over their chests and they looked full of themselves, as rock stars ought to.
It just so happened that the Misty Cat Cavern was her original destination.
And then she froze.
Another inspiration had popped into her head like a quarter dropped in a slot machine.
And her heart picked up a beat.
Mesmerized by hope and her own chutzpah, she backed her way into Allegro Music, jangling the bells on the door.
“Glory, baby!”
The guy behind the counter reflexively thrust his hand out for high-fiving purposes but didn’t lift his head: he was engrossed in some kind of delicate surgery. His anarchic gray-streaked black hair was restrained by a pair of goggles pushed back up on his broad, sweating forehead, and a variety of little tools were scattered around a prone, partially dismembered Alvarez acoustic guitar. Solder and sawdust perfumed the air.
She peered down at the patient.
“What happened to her?” she asked on a hush. The guitar looked like her. Something about the abalone inlay on her poor currently detached neck.
“Stolen from a guy’s car in Placerville,” Dion Espinoza said. “He finally found it on Craigslist—some other guy had bought it from some other guy, you know how it goes. When he finally got it back, it was in this shape. When I told him how much it would cost to repair it, he sold it to me cheap. Original tuning pegs had been switched out to these cheap things, the bridge plate has practically been pulled off, and I need to re-bore the holes since the headstock had a crack.” He shook his head. “It’s a beaut. Or was. This was a classic, man. It’s criminal.”
Guitarists from all over California brought abused or aging instruments to Dion to be restored to their youthful sheen and vigor. Once or twice a year he built an extraordinary guitar on commission, and that’s what actually kept his lights on. He was a master craftsman.
Mainly he kept the little store here in Hellcat Canyon because he liked living in the sticks and he liked to talk to music geeks all day long. Most local kids got their first music lessons from some long-suffering low-paid teacher in the warren of little offices in the back. Glory could hear the muffled constipated blats of a saxophone now. She was mostly self-taught, given that her mom thought shoes for her kids were a more important investment than music lessons, but she’d learned a lot by loitering in Dion’s shop and pestering the good players who wandered in. Dion liked attitude and talent in anyone. He’d let her hang out as much as she wanted.
Dion delicately blew a particle of sawdust off the bridge plate. “I’ll take that Martin off your hands when you’re ready, Glory. It must be such a burden to you.”
“Aww. Your selflessness is an example for us all, Dion.”
He grinned. Glory’s fifty-year-old Martin was worth about four thousand dollars, something Dion had told her in confidence and which she’d never told a soul. She would in fact sell her soul, if there were any takers, before she sold that guitar.
She idly spun the little rack of trade magazines next to the door: Guitar Player, Rolling Stone, Mix, Spin. And there they were again—on the cover of Clang:
Wyatt “King” Congdon:
The Man with the Platinum Ear
Talks The Baby Owls, Future of Pop Music
Wyatt Congdon was the legend who’d founded Stellium Records, and he was still viewed as the ultimate star maker, even in an industry changing by the second. More than once she’d entertained herself (and bored Eli and Jonah) with daydreams of meeting him. She could just imagine what that moment had been like for The Baby Owls.
Next she peered down at the contents of the locked, glassed-in case below the counter where Dion displayed smaller instruments—a few Hohner and Lee Oskar harmonicas, a pair of maracas and a güiro, a kazoo, a couple of cowbells. Sometimes he had an autographed photo or some other ephemera or quirky collectables.
Today a flash of red made her sink to her knees as if she was about to kiss the pope’s ring.
“Dion . . . Is that . . . is that really an original forty-five of ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’?”
Technically, it was the forty-five single of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song,” and “Hey Hey What Can I Do” was its B side. Both were brilliant, both were still all over classic-rock radio, and both would probably still be streaming in flying cars on road trips to Pluto in the year 2050, but “Hey Hey What Can I Do” had never appeared on any Led Zeppelin album, ever. Pretty much every serious music freak eventually learned that in a desperate quest to find it and own it.
She’d caught Eli air-drumming to it on the steering wheel of his old Fiero when she was fourteen and he was sixteen. He was parked outside the Greenleaf house, waiting for Jonah to come out, and his eyes were closed, his head was bobbing, his whole torso was swaying—in other words, he was doing what any sane human ought to do when they heard that song. He had a decent tenor but couldn’t really keep it in key and his voice fractured into a honking bray on the high notes, murdering them.
It was funny as hell and touching, too, because it was so rare to see Eli just let go like that.
He’d almost gotten to the last verse when he noticed her standing on the porch, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. Watching as raptly if she’d bought a ticket to do it.
He’d yelped and slapped the radio off.
“Like it’s the radio’s fault!” she hollered at him.
She’d had plans to never let him live that down.
YouTube wasn’t a thing yet. The Greenleaf household was pretty low-tech, given that shoes and the mortgage got priority over gadgets, but she attributed her own resourcefulness to years of selective spending. She didn’t even know what that song was called. So she’d sneaked Jonah’s old tape recorder out of his room and waited under her covers at night with a transistor radio until she finally managed to trap it on cassette. It was absolutely in her wheelhouse, voice-wise: a little folksy, a little bluesy, pretty but gritty. Sexy, but then all Led Zeppelin songs were sexy. She didn’t completely understand all the lyrics but she could wing it, she knew that she could let her voice flirt and lilt through the verse and she could really wail during the chorus.
A few weeks later she played that thirty-year-old song for Eli at his seventeenth birthday party. At twilight, beneath the huge liquidambar in the Greenleaf’s shambling three-quarter-acre backyard, which wasn’t much more than tamped dirt interspersed with lots of trees and a barbeque pit, she banged it out in front of about sixty teenagers. Which took balls. But then, she’d always had those.
As his friends tussled and flirted and danced and eddied around him, and Jonah pogoed around the backyard bellowing “Ahhhhhhh! Yeeeeeah Yeah!”—his Robert Plant imitation was definitely better than Eli’s—Eli remained absolutely still. And he listened. Hard. And a tide of scarlet washed him from his collarbone to his hairline. But as she sang (a song which she realized years later was basically about a guy who was futilely in love with a hooker), the blush gave way to something like awe. Something very close to pain. Like he was stoically withstanding some internal crisis.
Twilight was dimming into night when she rounded in on that last verse, and his expression was now strangely resolute and peaceful. Like a guy who’d accepted some sentence fate had handed down.
She could feel the light of eyes on her skin all the way through to the end.
She finished with a flourish and held her guitar up high. Jonah threw his arms up and bellowed, “My baby sister, everybody!”
Later, she thought she recalled hearing clapping and cheering. But at the time, the only thing her senses took in was Eli.
He’d smiled at her slowly. And gave his head a slow shake. Like he simply couldn’t believe the wonder of her.
And it was odd, in that it had started out as kind of a joke.
But if Eli had walked up to her and demanded she put into words what she was feeling right then and there, she would have had to use words like I’d do anything for you or forever.
She froze, guitar dangling from her hand. That was the moment she understood that those feelings had been growing and growing out of sight, like the roots of that huge liquidambar tree in the Greenleaf front yard that had one day cracked the driveway right down the middle. And remained the bane of Mrs. Binkley to this day.
Then his girlfriend—Tiffany Margolies, who was brainless, which was probably why she didn’t mind being on top of the cheerleading pyramid as she had absolutely nothing to lose if she toppled from up there to the ground onto her head—flounced over and looped her arms around Eli’s neck from behind and the moment snapped like a spiderweb.
The very next morning, before school, Glory had gone and done something a lot of people would have considered rash.
And she’d never told a soul about it. Not one.
Though she was beginning to wonder if she’d pay for that rashness for the rest of her life.
Glory realized her hand was splayed against the glass case in the music store as if that whole night was trapped inside.
She forced herself to rise to her feet. She was happy Dion was focused on his guitar repair because her eyes were burning. Eli was everywhere. In everything.
It was so hard to imagine it any other way. Son of a bitch.
“Found that forty-five at the Our Lady of Mercy Thrift Shop,” Dion told her. “Got it for a buck. It’s in incredible condition.”
It was a moment before she trusted herself to speak over the knot in her throat.
“I’m surprised they didn’t pay you to take the devil’s music off their hands.”
The ladies in that thrift shop could be judgey. Dion was a sweetheart, but he looked like a big heathen with the enormous hair and the tattoos and his round belly taxing the elastic powers of his Pink Floyd t-shirt.
“There was a moment there when I thought my conscience was bothering me and I considered telling them what they had. But then I figured out that the twinge was just the burrito I had for lunch. I’ll let you have it for twenty-five bucks.”
“Highway robbery. I can get it cheaper on eBay.”
Given that she’d had to root between the sofa cushions for the change she was using to buy a new pack of strings today, this was an entirely rhetorical observation.
“Cheeky wench,” he said without rancor. He relished haggling and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the value of music ephemera. He could not be taken. “Maybe five bucks cheaper, if that. I’ll give the extra five bucks to the thrift shop to assuage my guilty c
onscience.”
“Can’t do it today. I’ll take some strings, though.”
“D’addario lights?”
“You complete me, Dion.”
“Do you see it?”
Mrs. Wilberforce’s voice was trembling with hushed outrage. She was wearing a scarf tied over row upon row of curlers, all wound round with iron-gray hair, and they looked like a crew of little Boy Scouts in sleeping bags. Eli figured she must be really incensed to call him before her hair was done. She was always stylishly turned out, in her seventy-year-old way. She was wearing white capri pants and little black ballet flats and sunglasses with gold initials at the temple. He was pretty sure they were Giorgio Armani.
Heavenly Shores Retirement Community was like a cross between Disney’s It’s a Small World ride and a miniature golf course: tidy streets of permanently parked mobile homes of varying vintages, all painted in some tasteful pastel shade, each one immaculate and personalized in some way—a picket fence here, a little pocket-sized yard exploding with petunias or roses or whimsical statuary there.
Law enforcement in Hellcat Canyon could swing between banal and deadly in a heartbeat, and Eli was hoping to burn off some residual Glory angst today by maybe chasing a bad guy. But he was so tired this morning that he found Heavenly Shores kind of soothing. A little like that time he’d stayed home from school sick and had taken a whopping dose of cough syrup and watched Teletubbies.
“Mrs. Wilberforce, forgive me, but what exactly are we looking at?”
“That! Just look at it. My rhododendrons! It’s murder!”
The plant she was pointing at with a finger quivering in rage was indeed half brown on one side, as though it had been burned.
He didn’t hold out a lot of hope for rehabilitation, at least.
“Yeah, that’s a shame. Pretty flower.”
“It was a pretty flower, you mean! That Carlotta Kilgore from Elysian Acres takes her beagle out for a walk in the morning and stops right there every morning so her dog can pee on it. Gives it a good soaking, as you can see. The same rhododendron. Every time. Death by dog pee! It’s undignified for such a beautiful flower. And she knows it’s part of my display. She knows that’s what puts us over the top each year and why we win.”
Wild at Whiskey Creek Page 5