But then Thomas finally saw the light, finally had us both figured out. He put his arm around my shoulder and held out a hand to Christine. I gave her a nervous glance and she did what he wanted.
“You two,” he said, pulling me closer, squeezing Christine’s hand. “That is why y’all are Thomas’s all-time favourite couple, do you know that? You are, you really are.” We both lobbed back toothy grins in return for the compliment. Whatever the hell it meant.
“But don’t you two worry a lick about that old man, you hear? He’s gonna be fine, just fine. Because he’s rich, you see? More money than one man ever needs—more money than he’ll ever know what to do with, believe me. And I don’t have to remind either of you of what the Good Book says about a rich man, the eye of a needle, and a camel. Because what that old man is doing is helping himself pass through that needle.”
Thomas drew me tighter to him and was squeezing Christine’s hand so hard I could tell he was hurting her.
“Soul by proxy,” he said. “Friends, we are soul by proxy.”
If the wrinkled apparition hunched over his cane in the doorway hadn’t materialized, I think Thomas might have started sobbing for joy. Or crushed Christine’s hand.
Spotting the old man, though, “Scotty!” Thomas shouted. He let go of Christine and me and rushed toward the door. In a shabby dark suit with a sick-looking yellow daffodil wilting out of his top button and carrying a beat-up black violin case and a brown paper shopping bag full of newspapers and scribbled-on legal paper sticking out of the top, Scotty definitely wasn’t the millionaire old-timer of Thomas’s story.
Six-feet-and-then-some Thomas tenderly entwined his arm with the diminutive old man’s. “Buckskin, Miss Christine, I’d like you to meet Mr. Scotty Robinson. Scotty, sir, this is—”
“Save it, hippie boy,” the old man interrupted, “there’ll be plenty of time for that nonsense later.” He broke free of Thomas’s arm, pivoted on his feet, and looked up high and right at him. The old man’s eyes were watery but almost as glimmering ice blue as Thomas’s.
“Are you still going to buy me a beer tonight or are you going to turn out to be just another one of these goddamn fast-food people who believes that a promise made to a decorated war veteran isn’t worth the breeze it was blown on?”
Turning to us, “What do y’all say we go out and do a little celebrating our first night all together at the studio?” Thomas said. “We can start practising tomorrow.”
The two of them on that side of the room and Christine and I over on the other, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to keep it that way.
“I’m buying, y’all,” Thomas added. Then, leaving off the “y’all,” he repeated what he’d just said, this time speaking slowly and right into the old man’s face.
“Now that’s more like it,” he replied. Motioning to Christine and me, “You two come along, too.” Jabbing his thumb up at the towering Thomas, “You wouldn’t leave a defenceless senior citizen all alone with this maniac, would you?”
After running around Mississippi on business all week, Thomas’s father couldn’t be expected to be the one to take him and his sister. Saturday mornings are for eighteen holes at the Rattlesnake Golf and Country Club and maybe afterwards a few drinks and a late lunch. And Christ, even then it’s not just fun and games—how many times did a deal with a new supplier get made at the Nineteenth Hole over the third highball of the afternoon? His mother, of course, being a good Southern lady, doesn’t know how to drive, and even though the maid, Selma, does, how would it look to have a Negro steering one of your two brand new ’54 Cadillacs down main street in the middle of the afternoon?
No, it’s for situations like this that Thomas’s father keeps one-armed Jimmy Bowman, a retired Jackson policeman, on call as the family driver. Every Saturday morning Mr. Bowman comes by the Graham house at 9:15 sharp to take Thomas and Becky on their weekly shopping trip.
Miss Becky insists upon being driven, first, to Teen World Junction for this week’s must-have outfit, followed by at least an hour at Rankin Footwear for a new pair of shoes to match. Accessories from Perkins Fashions and a basket full of cosmetics at Spencers’ Drugstore and her usual hot fudge sundae at the Soda Works conclude the trip, Mr. Bowman patiently taking Miss Becky wherever she wants to go and waiting in the car out front until she decides it’s time to move along. Her younger brother isn’t anywhere near as demanding.
Before chauffeuring Miss Becky to the first of her many stops, Mr. Bowman drops Thomas off on the sidewalk in front of the Sound Shop, usually just as the young clerk inside is unlocking the front door and yawning his way through his first cup of coffee. When Mr. Bowman reappears with the Cadillac a few hours later, a spent Becky in the back seat surrounded by her small mountain of packages, Thomas climbs in beside her and sits there quiet and still the entire ride home with a neat stack of 45s on his lap and his eyes fixed directly on the road ahead.
Home—the car refuelled, washed, and returned to the garage, Mr. Bowman paid by Selma for his morning’s labour—Thomas and his sister go to their respective rooms, Becky slowly, the sheen on today’s purchases already beginning to fade, Thomas quickly, having to remind himself twice on his way up the stairs that running is not allowed in the house (his father, when he’s home, with the belt and temper to confirm it). First Thomas’s and then Becky’s bedroom doors shut tight. Selma, in the kitchen downstairs washing fresh strawberries for dinner tonight, softly hums to herself an old gospel song, apart from the sound of cold running water and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the front room, the old house’s only noise.
Thomas locks his bedroom door and heads right for the record player. Placing the first disc on the turntable, he carefully sets the needle down and sits on the floor cross-legged in front of the speakers and waits.
First he just listens, lets the record play, allows the music to engulf him like the foaming wild August waves he wades into every summer at the family cottage at Myrtle Beach.
Song done—Thomas’s absolute favourite of the moment, Hillbilly Cat Elvis and his “That’s All Right Mama”—he puts the arm back at the beginning and this time tries to really hear all that’s there, to get a feel for how the whole thing manages to fit together so magically, so completely, to sound so unbelievably reined-in reckless.
Before picking up his Fender from its case to begin the long task of attempting to work his way through Scotty Moore’s electric guitar lines, Thomas takes a short break and sits studying the picture of Elvis on the record sleeve. Eventually he sets the needle back down again and stands in front of the full-length mirror hanging on the door to his walk-in closet with his acoustic guitar strapped over his shoulder waiting for the sound of Moore’s sharp Fender trebling to get things started and his own body stirring. He doesn’t have to wait long.
Bill Black’s steady stand-up bass-slapping starts right in soon after Scotty does and straightaway Thomas is swivelling his hips and shaking his hands and knees and snarling at the girls in the front row just like Elvis himself did last spring when Thomas saw him at the City Auditorium.
“That’s All Right Mama” finishes up with Thomas on the edge of the stage staring deep into the adoring eyes of Debbie McDonald, the prettiest girl in his grade seven class, Thomas pitching his guitar over his shoulder and leaving the crazed audience dying for the favour of just one more.
For the next who-knows-how-many hours Thomas is back on the floor in front of the hi-fi, cradling the unplugged electric white Fender in his lap and working away on the lead to the song as best as his eleven-year-old fingers will allow. A little after six o’clock Selma knocks softly but insistently in steady little rap-taps on his door.
“Thomas.”
Thomas lifts his head from the guitar.
Selma doesn’t bother knocking again, knows that he’s listening.
“Thomas, your daddy called from his club and he’ll be home any minute now so you put your records and things away and start getting rea
dy for supper now, you hear? You don’t need to wear no tie tonight, your jacket and good pants’ll do, it’s just gonna be you and Miss Becky and your daddy. Your momma’s still not feeling too well but she’s gonna be just fine so don’t you worry.”
Thomas goes back to his guitar.
Not wanting to raise her voice for fear of disturbing Mrs. Graham resting in her own room at the other end of the hall, Selma comes closer to the bedroom door, her cheek pressed right against the wood.
“You know how your daddy don’t like for you children to make him late in getting his supper, now.”
Thomas presses the strings of the guitar harder.
“Thomas, you know how he hates it.”
His little fingers flying up and down the fretboard now, desperate for the secret of how Scotty does it, Thomas begins to scat along with Elvis as the song reaches its end for the umpteenth time that day, his own picking and singing almost managing to drown Selma out.
“Ah da-da-dee-dee-dee-dee.”
“Thomas ...”
Both of them hear the crunch of hot gravel under the tires of Thomas’s father’s Cadillac tearing into the driveway.
“Thomas ...”
“Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.”
13.
AND WHAT A HAPPY ragtag crew we must have made! Learning to play together, learning how to get along, learning all about that most elusive of lost chords, life. Ta dah! And weren’t we all on the way to Interstellar North American Music worship right out of the gate, right off the bat, just like that? Sorry to disappoint.
More than a week after we’d first toured the studio, Christine still didn’t know she’d been conscripted into the band, Thomas still didn’t know she didn’t know, and I was still too petrified to let anyone hear me play the drums. But at least I was playing. I knew I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but it felt good to do it anyway, too good to stop. All I could hear was the thunder of the musical gods, not my own puny little hallelujahs.
Somehow I always managed to find an excuse not to be in the studio whenever Thomas said he would be—overtime at work, I’d plead, or girlfriend stuff, or fighting off the beginning of a bad cold, or whatever other untruth happened to be lying around and handy. Then Thomas himself actually got sick—the flimsy leather jacket he’d been wearing since the fall no match for his first real sample of Canadian winter—and at least for a little while I didn’t have to listen to him gripe about how the band hadn’t started rehearsing yet. To try to provide a little cheer, I lied to him over the phone and said I’d made an extra studio key for Christine and that she was there almost every night working away on improving her chops on the bass, an instrument it turned out she’d played in her high school’s senior band. Thomas sneezed and said she should be, that we had a lot of work ahead of us.
Through a plugged nose, “Next week we start, Buckskin. Rain or shine, the ball gets put in play next week.”
I said I couldn’t have been more excited and told him to drink lots of liquids and get plenty of rest.
14.
WHEN I SAY THAT no one heard me play, that’s not quite right. Maybe Scotty was deaf and didn’t actually listen to me, but he was there in the studio almost every night I was, hunched over the rickety green card table Thomas had set up in the corner as a sort of break space for the band, working away as usual on his poetry. Here, he’d carry on not that much differently than he did at the Riverboat, where he rubbed wrinkled elbows with us hippies, or at his own favourite watering hole, the Palm Grove Lounge, the downstairs drinking arm of the Embassy Tavern.
Ramming open the door of the studio with the rubber end of his cane, Scotty would nod/scowl at me behind the drums like he was reluctantly bestowing permission for me to continue playing and without a word shuffle off to the card table. Impeccably slovenly dressed as always—antiquated suit jacket, egg yolk–spattered tie, beat-up black Oxfords—he’d carefully unpack his out-of-tune violin and the contents of his paper sack onto the table. Today’s Toronto Daily Star; a wide variety of different coloured pens, each for performing a different editorial task; and paper. Lots and lots of paper. And every long, legal-sized piece covered top to bottom with Scotty’s indecipherable chicken scratch poetry. Only his customary glass of draft beer was missing. He managed to make do with a small silver flask full of cheap scotch from which he’d periodically nip before returning to the inside pocket of his jacket.
The first time he burst into the room while I was practising I froze in mid–drum roll, caught in the act, like there I was with my dick in my hand and half the world was watching. He barely even acknowledged me, merely undid the bottom button on his suit jacket, sat down at the table, and got down to work putting his portable office in order. He finally turned around in his grey metal chair.
“You think you’re going to disturb me or something?” he said.
I knew he was expert at reading lips. “How’d you know I wasn’t playing?” I said.
Slapping the sole of one of his Oxfords against the hardwood floor a couple of times to make his point, “I’m deaf, not dead, you know,” he said. “And don’t you or anybody else ever forget it, either.”
With that, he swivelled back around and began to furiously scratch out line after line of apparently unworthy verse. Run or drum? The ball was clearly in my court.
I played.
It was like when I was a kid and it was two o’clock in the morning and I was downstairs in the family room with the Late, Late Show turned way down low so my parents wouldn’t know I was awake, wondering why Ellen Simpson liked Jack Tate better than she liked me. Although Snowball, our family Westy, had never, as far as I knew, known the triple-heartburn package of lust, jealousy, and complete and utter self-doubt that makes up a fourteen-year-old’s definition of love, having him beside me at the other end of that couch felt good. Even if he was sound asleep on his back with all four white furry legs stuck straight up in the air. Snowball was there. And sometimes that’s not only enough, that’s exactly what is needed.
So I played. And Scotty slashed with his red pen. And I played. And Scotty scribbled with his blue pen. And I played. And Scotty pulled from his flask, wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve, and read what he’d just written. And I played.
A half an hour in he swung around in his chair.
“Slow that down a little and you might actually have something there,” he said.
Naturally I stopped playing. Of course he let me have it.
“If that’s your idea of slowing it down, Thomas is in a lot worse shape than I thought.”
“You can feel it that much?” I said. “Just through the vibrations?”
“Enough to know that a waltz doesn’t sound like a goddamn jackhammer.”
I stared down between my feet at a black boot smudge on the floor and wondered how many drummers have ever been bawled out by a deaf guy. While I sat there trying to figure out a way to tell Thomas that he’d have to find another percussionist, I looked up to see Scotty’s feet moving together to some sort of rhythm.
Left Oxford tap tap, right Oxford tap; left Oxford tap tap, right Oxford tap.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I realized it was me—me—making those old shoes move. Imagine. Go on, try.
15.
BY THE TIME THOMAS got over his cold it was almost Christmas and the Duckhead Secret Society was just going to have to wait. Phlegm-free and vertical again, with both cowboy boots firmly planted on the ground, Thomas didn’t take the news that his entire rhythm section was going to be spending the next several days at the homes of their respective relatives in quite the generous spirit of the season I’d hoped. It was the day before the night before Christmas and we were at the nearly deserted Riverboat for what I, at least, was calling a goodbye cup of coffee. We’d agreed to meet at two that afternoon and he’d showed up a half-hour late. He must have been at it since early that morning because he was already as juiced as I’d ever seen him. I ignored the coffee he bought me spiked with his own w
hisky. Drunks at Christmas-time always depressed me. Still do.
“Don’t think I don’t understand that you and Miss Christine have obligations that have got to be fulfilled,” he said. “Don’t think that because of my unfortunate orphaned condition I’m not sympathetic to the duties of kin. Because I am, Buckskin, believe me, I am. Let there be no misunderstanding between us on this point.” He laid five cold fingers across my hand and leaned across the table, obviously his cool-headed feverish old self again. I nodded back as heartfelt as I could muster in the hope of breaking free of his cadaver’s touch and getting one step closer to the door.
Because it was Christmas! In spite of how counter-culturally uncool it sounded, well ... it was Christmas!
I wanted to taste my mum’s hot mincemeat tarts with a plop of homemade whipped cream on top and see her in her old blue cardigan, the one with the bottom button missing, the one she alway wore around the house whenever she was in a serious baking state. I wanted to drink hot apple cider and watch Bonanza and Gunsmoke and The Fugitive on TV with my dad and get bugged at the smog of cherry smoke from his pipe filling up the downstairs rec room. I wanted to sleep in my old room again and not get up until noon and wear my green leather high-school football jacket and take long walks with Snowball after lunch and leave tracks in the freshly fallen snow down by the creek and maybe afterwards take a nap on the couch in the basement in front of the fireplace. I wanted to go home for Christmas.
“All of these family matters are legitimate and true,” Thomas said, “all of this I admit to you as absolutely valid, one hundred percent, all of it. But I ask you this, here’s the thing I want you to really, really think about: Even if there are unavoidable responsibilities that you two have, why should this mean that what we’ve got going here has to go to hell in a handbasket just because of it?”
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