“Hey!” she screamed, and picked up the pace.
The matter of virtue had appeared. The chance to do something selfless was upon her. The opportunity to transcend her navel-gazing had reared its rosy-cheeked face. So she found a second wind, fought against the weight of the various aches and pains, and charged in to help save the day.
“Nazi punks!” she screamed. “Nazi punks, fuck off!”
The guy the two skinheads were attacking was up now. His backpack whirled about, exploding with pens and paper, and a sketchbook went airborne. He was up and trying to fight back, but with little success. The entire contents of his backpack fell out like from a shattered piñata and he screamed, “Leave me alone!”
She knew that voice.
She knew that lament.
“Adam!” she yelled from across the green. “Adam!”
The guitar player flailed and rolled like a kid being dragged underwater by a great white. He didn’t seem to have any idea that half of the people he knew in all of Holland were barreling crazily toward him.
“Leave me alone!” he howled, spinning.
Ahead of her, Darlo was just about to hit the beach. He gurgled a cry of attack, lifted his arms, and hurled himself into the scene.
17
COVERING HIS HEAD with his arms, Adam figured that his assailants would soon grow bored and move on to whatever pint of neo-Nazi beer awaited them on the other side of town. They were angry, but they weren’t psychopaths — except that they were. The kicks kept coming, and Adam realized that this was for real. He windmilled his arms, hands in fists, flailing.
“Help!”
The short one tried to tackle Adam, but he pushed him off. The Nazis smelled like beer and cigarettes and vomit.
“Help me!”
Pizza Face came at him the other way and threw him down, tried to get on top of him, pin him down. Each moment escalated Adam’s panic, and he felt a hum in the back of his neck.
Is that my soul leaving?
“Help!” he yelled, struggling under Pizza Face, whose dog collar was too tight around the neck. Adam heard the crowd again, alive and free, and a charge went through him. He threw Pizza Face off, but then the short one was wrestling him down and he was screaming again. He heard the crowd coming toward him, stomping in unison. Voices rose up out of the crowd, and he screamed back in a blues. The skinhead reached for Adam’s throat, put pressure on his windpipe as the hum in his neck grew, rubbing against the sounds of the crowd, but the crowd was going to cover them all.
From nowhere, some guy came charging in, followed by a hobbling girl, a cut-and-paste out of some dreamscape. He thought, with his soul leaving and all, that his mind was playing tricks. But then the skinheads held up their hands in pointless protest, and this black-haired guy tackled Pizza Face, tackled him and started punching, a whirling dervish of anger.
“I’ll kill you!” he guttered. “I’ll ghill-yuuuuu!!”
The hobbling girl ran at the other skinhead, bopping and howling like a Caucasian Pocahontas, and sprayed pepper gas in his face. “Die, you fuck!” she screamed, and sprayed him, sprayed him, sprayed him until he fell back against a tree, clutching and clawing at his face.
Adam scampered back while these transports from a dream railed against his attackers.
“Ghill youuuuu!” the black-haired guy said.
Darlo?
Adam felt the hum in his neck move to his spine as the Astroglide sweat poured down. This was a fantasy his mind was enacting, brought on by lack of oxygen. It was all wrong and soon he would be back underneath Pizza Face, being strangled. Soon he would wake up from his suffocation-induced delusion and find himself dying.
But no. That was Darlo. And that was Joey. And he was here, in a foreign place, at the end of many things. And he was going to live.
Joey’s skinhead writhed against the tree in a spasm, grabbing at his cheeks, whimpering like a dog. She had her arms out, shaking, and every few seconds she hobbled in and sprayed him again, as if he were a big wasp that wouldn’t die.
“Sick fuck!” she said in a phlegmy growl. “Nazi fuck!”
Darlo had Pizza Face pinned and punched away, little spats of blood rising up under his blows. Adam’s ears were pressuring up, like on airplanes, and sound went murky. He watched Darlo take out that knife of his, that scimitar switchblade, the so-called Magic Wand. And truly it glittered with the spirit dust of the lonely Sioux spirit plain from which it had been forged. It glittered even in dour Dutch fog.
Darlo raised the knife up high, like he raised up a drumstick at the start of a song, counting off before they blasted into power-chord infinity.
“Ghill yuuuu!” the caveman gurgled, and reared up to strike.
18
JOEY HAD ALMOST DECIDED against taking the pepper spray with her to Amsterdam; the damn thing was so old she wondered if it even worked. Now she pulled it from her bag and fired away.
“Die!” she screamed. “Die!”
That little atomizer packed a real punch.
“Die! Die! Die!”
She heard the crunch of sticks in Darlo’s direction. Darlo, on top of his skinhead, was in the process of losing his mind, bearing down like Godzilla over Bambi. He’d pinned the kid, put his arms under his legs so he was defenseless, and was throwing his fists.
“That’s my friend!” he screamed. “My friend! My friend!”
She realized that Darlo was crying.
“My friend! My fra-heh-heh-hend!”
Joey went numb. For a second this had been fun, high adventure, but now she bore witness to a meltdown.
Adam crawled away like a man emerging from quicksand.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Darlo, stop!”
Darlo raised his red hands above his head like a rabid ape.
“My friend! Rrrruuuggghhhh!”
Darlo landed punch after punch, and blood peppered the drummer’s face. Then he leaned back and, from his back pocket, took out the Magic Wand.
Joey realized that Darlo was going to kill the skinhead. Rage had taken him. The knife, built by those who struggled every day merely to exist, snapped open in a rich boy’s hand.
The dream was over.
“Darlo!” she yelled. “Stop!”
She kicked the knife out of the drummer’s red paw, then tackled him.
“We have to go now!” She put her hands on Darlo’s face. He looked like a panicking dog, eyes rolling in his sockets. “Now! Look in my eyes! Look in my eyes! Now!”
Darlo’s cries were sorrowful. He rolled and sputtered, rage and anguish going at each other behind mad eyes.
“Think of his mother!” Joey said, because that’s what an ex-con she’d dated had said to say to a person contemplating the taking of life. “Think of his mother!”
“No I can’t no!”
“A mother, come on!”
She looked around. Adam had disappeared, and the skinhead she’d pepper-sprayed crawled to his friend, who was just a bloody mess. The knife was barely visible in the grass, had blended back into the ground, was melting back into the earth.
“Oh I’m sorry!” Darlo said. “Oh God I’m sorry Oh God I’m so sorry —”
“Run!” she yelled.
“Sorry oh my god oh no —”
“Now!” she said, and heard the roar of protesters calling themselves to arms against the evil empire. Adam appeared on his bike downfield, escaping from them, getting all the distance he could between him and them and every little thing they were. Wind blew through the bare trees.
“My hands!” Darlo yelled, already running. “My hands!”
19
BLOOD WAS ALWAYS STICKIER than he expected. Fighting was always more fun. They balanced themselves out.
Darlo kept swinging. He’d swing until his father went straight, his cock quit straining against his pants, and Aerosmith took them out on tour. He’d swing until that girl from the dungeon was safe at home, in her bed, at peace. He’d swing until Adam was safe from harm.
Below him, a face lay covered in red, the bones shifting to the left side, sliding like a seashell into the ebb tide. Now he was an artist like Adam, painting it black.
The skinhead made a noise, whimpering, the sound of fear before the time of the wheel, stripped down, raw tracks unmixed, just like the girl Darlo had found in the basement among the thugs, blubbering in her nakedness, scores on her back, sweat burning down her face.
Darlo thought, You may not share that noise with her, and took out the Magic Wand. You may not dare make that noise. I am a good person. I am not my father. I do not hurt the weak.
He took a second to look at the curve of his precious possession, and the barbs along the blade, and then Joey kicked the knife out of his hand.
“No, Darlo, no no no!”
Joey threw him off the skinhead, and Darlo heard the sound of his own crying and babbling and felt the wetness on his cheeks.
“No, Darlo, no, come on, no!”
Joey pulled him up and he was running. The world rushed at him, mistakes on mistakes, ill-fitting. Darlo fell to the ground again, his legs jelly, but Joey pulled him as if he were weightless.
“Can’t stay, come on, cops, come on!”
He looked back. The skinhead rolled on the ground, no longer imitating the innocent. Darlo had done what needed to be done. Though his father would be putting on gloves right now, wetting his lips, laughing at another nervous girl in black negligee right off the damn bus and there was nothing he could do, he had started to make things right. His proof lay there, in crimson, wiped out.
“Now Darlo, get the fuck up!”
He ran past Joey. He couldn’t wait for her. He bolted into the mass of well-dressed unbloodied Dutchies, over another lovely canal, and spun on the sidewalk.
God if you exist deliver that girl from him. God if you exist deliver that girl from him. God if you —
Joey slammed into him. He wasn’t running. When had he stopped running? Her breath climbed all over him. She pulled him, but he wasn’t running; she pulled him down into the canyon. She would help him find that girl. Into the canyon. She was always there for him. He wanted to tell her. He wasn’t running.
Doors opened, and Joey pulled him into a room. Faucets and tile. Coat of arms and Guinness signs. Leather seats like in the dungeon. Green leather here, black leather there. Going down into the canyon. Not running anymore.
20
ADAM HID BEHIND A TREE while Darlo whaled on the skinhead. He knew that, hidden deep inside a number of less savory motivations, Darlo’s act of extreme violence was payback for the time Adam had saved his life at Crow Head.
Crow Head was a big chunk of rock that jutted out of the water about two hundred yards from the shore at Paradise, the five-hundred-dollar-a-day studio in St. Croix where they made Rocket Heart. During low tide a sandbar emerged, and Adam would walk out to the end of it to draw and listen to music. People avoided the sandbar, an incongruity to the perfect, smooth aspect of everything else in sight, but Adam loved being out there. A former member of the Bakersfield High swim team, he would often leap off the sandbar and breast-stroke the fifty yards over to Crow Head. He hit riptides now and then, but he knew how to handle them, and would sometimes end up on one of the adjacent beaches, appearing to people in the shallows like some castaway from Faggy Boy University.
Darlo hated it when someone could do something he couldn’t do. Adam could play every known instrument, and that grated on the drummer.
“I’m gonna come out there one day and we’re gonna race to that fuckin’ rock,” he said one night at dinner as they broke open lobster. “Yeah. I’m gonna come out there and school your ass.”
Shane smashed a claw. “Drown your ass is more like it.”
Bobby sucked at a leg and nodded. “It’s rough out there, man. People go down every year.”
“That is such bullshit,” Darlo said, and pointed at Adam, who was trying to be delicate with his sea bug. “I will school you.”
Bobby ripped open his lobster’s middle, spraying green liver goo on his Iron Maiden T-shirt. “Goddamn,” he said. “This is a collector’s item.”
Darlo made his lobster dance. “School you,” he repeated.
Adam nodded, and Shane laughed.
“So fucking arrogant,” the singer said. “God did not —”
“No God at the table,” Darlo said. “None. Nada.”
Shane stuck his nose up. “You’ll drown, Darlo. That’s all I’m saying.”
A few days later, Adam was out there, trying to make good on Instructor Samuels’s dictum on sketching out one’s narcissism, when Darlo came stumbling up the sandbar. The day was out of a Club Med ad, with little white wisps against a deep blue sky and the sound of steel drums echoing from the shore. Darlo coming toward him was the lone storm cloud fucking it all up.
“What’s up, faggot?”
He just stared at the drummer.
“What are you doing out here all day, anyway?”
“Drawing. Thinking.”
“Well, la-dee-da,” Darlo said, and plunked down.
Adam had been there an hour, his only visitors a few Jet-Skidiots, silly Frenchies who made Adam look masculine. The Jet-Skidiots would splash him and call him dirty French names while he detailed the curves of a bodacious, war-lusted maiden in a plate-mail bustier.
Darlo looked at Adam’s sketch. “Hot,” he said. “You wanna race?”
“It’s not as easy as it looks.”
Darlo looked at Crow Head and grunted in contempt. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”
Adam pondered the ethics of dissuading Darlo. “There’s riptides.”
“Is that your way of saying no?”
“It’s my way of saying you’d better really know how to swim.”
“Watch me.” The drummer pulled off his shirt and cannonballed in. Adam rolled his eyes, annoyed.
“Come on, dude,” Darlo said, sweeping back his luxurious black mane. He looked strong enough to swim to Africa. “I’m gonna get one hell of a jump on you.”
You’re gonna need it, Adam thought. He put down his sketchbook and dove in. On down the watery line, Crow Head resembled the Loch Ness Monster, a big inverted J of black stone.
Darlo’s strokes were sloppy and uneconomical. Adam knew that the drummer would tire halfway and, like a fucking tortoise, Adam would catch up and easily overtake him.
The sound of steel drums rose from the beach but seemed to be coming from above, like a rogue god tuning the atmosphere. Adam did a sidestroke and watched a cloud change shape from a mouse to a dragon.
“Hey, what the fuck, Adam?” Darlo treaded water, huffing and puffing, maybe twenty feet ahead. “Don’t handicap me, bitch. Make it for real.”
Adam sighed at Darlo’s stupidity. In water, you saved your strength. You didn’t yell out taunts at the top of your lungs.
“Always staring at me!” Darlo yelled. “Fucking say something!”
“Save your strength,” he said.
In response, Darlo sang in a bellow, as if he already stood atop Crow Head, pounding his chest in victory. “Wish I … was ocean size! They cannot move you, man — no one tries!”
The drummer drifted away from Crow Head, which loomed above them like a piton. The steel drums rained on them in a flange of sonic mist.
“Fucking love that song!” Darlo yelled. “Makes me feel so fucking alive!”
“Good for you,” Adam grumbled.
The sound of Jet-Skidiots came across the water.
“Come on!” Darlo yelled, and started swimming again, his strokes becoming more like flailing. He didn’t know the water any better than he knew the inside of a homeless shelter.
Adam changed to a crawl, his movements in time with the rhythm of the bay. Steel drum notes drifted above him like guiding gulls, and he experienced a moment of total bliss, rudely interrupted when he slapped Darlo in the face.
“Whoa, sorry,” Adam said, turning away, waiting for a promise of retribution
. None came, and he looked back.
The drummer looked at him. His eyes were wide open. His tongue pushed out his lower lip.
“Darlo?”
Darlo did a water dance. The panic Watusi. And then, silent and straight as an arrow, he dropped.
Now the steel drums turned to carrion vultures and dove in sharp. Adam took a second — a sinful, very un-Adam kind of second — to confirm that the song was indeed “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” During this second he was the king; he ran the show, and complete freedom was his to slice into any shape he wanted, because Darlo was moving beneath the surface, drowning. Then Adam dove down to save the scourge of his existence.
Once Adam had rescued a child from the deep end of a pool in Bakersfield, and the child had thrashed in the same way that Darlo did as Adam grabbed his midsection and hoisted him.
Darlo tried to climb on top of him in a piggyback, as if Adam stood on concrete. The drummer whimpered and shivered in Adam’s arms and then toppled off. Adam grabbed his midsection again, feeling a cramp in his back from having to support their collective weight. The water grew syrupy. In Darlo’s eyes he saw nothing but black; the drummer was in shock and somewhere else. Adam needed to bring him back. He couldn’t do this alone.
“Get it together, Darlo.”
Darlo shook his head and made a wheezy grunt. Beachside, an impossible quarter-mile away, people laughed over their vacations. The clouds laughed over their ability to change shape. The sky laughed over its ability to reflect all colors save the most gorgeous blue. Laughter laughter laughter.
“Oh no,” Darlo peeped, in about the most unharmonious, choked-up wail. “Oh no no no.”
“You need to help me with this. You need to help me.”
The drummer started to cry. “I don’t want to die. I don’t —”
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