by David Gates
11
He wakes up on the hilltop, with the sun going down. The fuck time is it? He’s got to be at Calvin’s when? Shit, probably right now. He works himself free of the comforter, gets to his feet and snatches the son of a bitch off the ground—and of course his book falls out into the wet grass because that’s what he fucking deserves.
Back at the house, he loads the Twin and the Telecaster. Okay, so what else does he need to bring? Jacket in case it gets chilly. It’s already chilly. Ten of six: shit. Well, not so bad. Wallet? Keys?
He comes jouncing into Calvin’s dooryard and cuts the engine. There’s the truck, still heaped high with firewood. A light’s on in the trailer; Willis gets out of his truck, smells woodsmoke and looks up at the ragged space of pink-orange sky hemmed by black trees.
Calvin opens the door and sticks his head out. Willis can see his bare shoulder. Calvin looks like shit: raccoon eyes, and he must not have shaved since Willis saw him last. “Yah, okay,” he says. “Get a shirt on here be right with you.” He shuts the door, and Willis boosts himself up to sit on the fender. He hears a pack of dogs yapping somewhere, off in the direction of Wakefield. The yapping gets louder, now coming out of the sky. Geese going south. He keeps looking up, but the trees block his view, and the yapping gets fainter and fainter, moving away toward Preston Falls. Then Calvin comes out.
“You hear that string of geese just go over?” Willis says.
“I can’t hear shit no more. Account of the fuckin’ chainsaw.”
“Those ear things help any?” Willis cups hands over ears to show he means those things that look like headphones.
“Nah, bunch of fuckin’ OSHA bullshit. Top of that, I got that fuckin’ thing where you can’t feel nothin’ in your hands?” He massages a wrist with thumb and middle finger. “Same fuckin’ thing them computer son of a bitches get.”
“Carpal tunnel,” says Willis.
“Whatever the fuck. Here, let me see this cocksucker.” He climbs onto Willis’s truck and hunkers down to peer at the amplifier, palms on knees, elbows out. “Yah, okay. Let’s take it in where we can see what the fuck we’re doin’ here.”
“What do you mean?” says Willis.
“Got to put the shit in this here.”
“You sure? You can see right in the back.”
“Nah, up inside here.” Calvin taps the top of the Twin with his index finger.
“What, you’re taking the guts out of it?”
“Yah, that’s the idea.” He stands up, lets down the tailgate and lugs the Twin to the edge.
“But this is what I play through,” Willis says.
“Not tonight I guess you ain’t.” Calvin jumps down, pulls the amp down off the tailgate and starts for the trailer.
“Shit, there’s got to be some other place you can put it,” says Willis, tagging behind.
“It ain’t my idea,” says Calvin. “Talk to Reed about it.” He opens the door. “You comin’ in or stayin’ out?”
It’s hot inside the trailer; Willis takes his jacket off and sits down on the car seat. He watches Calvin lift the Twin onto his workbench and pick up a Phillips-head screwdriver. “You know how to take these things apart?”
“Guess I’ll figure it out.”
“This is a vintage amplifier,” says Willis, hating the tone he’s taking. “It’s worth money.”
“Yah, couple minutes here be worth a whole lot more, tell you that.”
“You mind if I don’t watch?” Ooh, Willis, you bitch.
“Suit yourself,” says Calvin.
Willis pages through a copy of Car and Driver. They’ve got a test report on the Mitsubishi Galant, which makes him think of a Renaissance dance. A venereal disease. Courante, galliard, gallantry, glans, gleet. How can this be happening to someone so well read?
“All right, stay here,” Calvin Castleman says. Willis looks up. The operation’s over, apparently: on the workbench next to the Twin sits a long aluminum box with tubes sticking up out of it, like a city of the future.
“You should get a dog,” says Willis.
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know.” What’s he trying to do? Goad Calvin into beating the shit out of him? “Guard your place.”
“Yah, I thought about it,” says Calvin, and out he goes.
Willis listens for a minute, then creeps over to the window, kneels and gently, gently, with his index finger, moves the corner of the curtain aside an inch to peer out. It’s like he almost wants to see Calvin’s eye right there on the other side of the glass glaring back at him. But Calvin has climbed up onto his truck and he’s kneeling among the split chunks of firewood, tossing logs to the side, digging down for something.
When he comes back in, carrying a black nylon gym bag, Willis is on the seat again, with Car and Driver in his lap.
Calvin sets the bag on his workbench, unzips it and looks inside. “I hate like hell to see anybody get started on this shit.” He zips the bag shut. “Any son of a bitch ever give this shit to my boy, they have to fuckin’ deal with me.”
“You’ve got a son?” Willis never suspected Calvin of having had human entanglements.
Calvin shrugs. “Lives with his mother.” He lays the gym bag inside the shell of the Twin, then takes it out again. “Now, how the fuck am I supposed to do this?”
“How old is he?” Willis says.
“Be fourteen.” Calvin picks up a roll of duct tape and tears off a foot-long piece.
“My daughter’s twelve,” says Willis. “So he lives where?” Which sounds like he’s asking because he dreads the one-in-a-zillion chance.
“California.” Calvin crams the gym bag up inside the Twin and secures it with the piece of tape. “Canoga Park.”
“Long way,” says Willis.
“Yah, about as far away’s the bitch could get him,” Calvin says. “Okay, that’ll work.” He tears off another piece of tape. “He like it out there?” says Willis.
Calvin looks down at Willis. “How the fuck do I know?”
Willis carries the gutted Twin out to the truck and lifts it into the back; it weighs nothing now. “Remember, you want to go careful,” Calvin says. “You ain’t got to rush. But you don’t want to go twenty miles an hour neither. Your headlights both working?”
“Far as I know,” says Willis.
“Get in turn ’em on.” Willis climbs in behind the wheel as Calvin walks around to the front of the truck. “That’s good. Your brights?” Willis stomps the foot switch. “Yah, okay. Let’s see your turn signals.” Calvin walks around behind the truck. “Okay, signals again? Yah. Other one? Now tap your brakes.” He comes around to the driver’s-side door. “Okay. Now, you come back here what time? You don’t want to leave early. You want to wait till the place is clearing out, lot of other cars and shit. Two, two-thirty? So I won’t look for you till three, maybe. The earliest. Just be sure you come straight here. Before you go home. You don’t stop noplace for coffee, nothin’. You got enough gas you don’t have to stop?”
“Three quarters of a tank?” says Willis.
Calvin nods. “And listen, you count how much he gives you, understand? Don’t let him tell you you don’t need to. Supposed to be five thousand. He don’t let you count it, just leave it lay. Tell him you need to see me. Don’t argue with him, nothin’. You just come back here. That way there you ain’t in the middle of it. You understand? But hell, that ain’t gonna happen, probably.”
“Wait. Come back with the stuff?”
“No—shit, he ain’t going to let you do that.”
“Well, then what stops him from saying he never got it?” This is suddenly sounding worse and worse.
“Nah, see, he’s got people waitin’ on him. I know who the fuck they are. So he can’t dick me around.”
“Christ.”
“Quit worrying,” says Calvin. “It ain’t gonna happen. See, last thing he wants is me to fuckin’ show up there. Or him have to come here. Because they’re watchin’ me a
nd him—he heard this from a guy that’s a sheriff. And you’re too fuckin’ scared to get greedy.”
“Tell me about it,” says Willis.
“Want to do a little before you go?” Calvin says. “Little bit never hurt nobody.”
But he’s crashing even before he gets to Brandon: nothing left of his high but baseline irritability. He picks up 7, follows it north toward Middlebury for a couple of miles, and spots the Log Cabin on the left-hand side: a flat-roofed cinderblock building that might once have been a drive-in restaurant. Carhops and shit. Overhanging roof in front, with iron pipes for pillars, and a portable electric sign out by the road.
LADY’S GET IN FREE
TONITE! AIR BAG
He puts his turn signal on, then sees, parked across the road in a dirt turnout, a state police cruiser with his lights off. Not good. What now, boogie on by? Shit. Can’t. Begging to be pulled over.
Willis shifts down and pulls into the cratered parking lot. That clutch is definitely slipping, unless he’s letting up funny because he’s trying not to let up funny with the cop watching him. He checks his mirror, expecting the cruiser’s lights to go on. But no. The lot’s already filling up with cars and pickups; out front, a matched pair of Sportsters—stock except for Fat Bob tanks—lean at the same angle next to a Plymouth Duster with whirlwind emblem, next to a chopper whose long chrome forks gleam from the blue neon outline of the Budweiser dog. Okay, there’s Reed’s car. And the Econoline, by the side door.
He parks where the old blacktop ends and new traprock begins, between a Subaru and some big American shitbomb with a peeling vinyl roof and Fifth Avenue in chrome script on its ass end. Chrysler, right? Let’s all give a fuck. He cuts his lights, turns the key, and sits there: leave the amp in the back of the truck for now and check out the lay of the land? No, uh-uh. And have some son of a bitch steal it? Just have to bring it in; if you’re fucked, you’re fucked.
He carries the Twin and the Tele to the side door, picking his way around potholes, listing to the right as if the amp were still a heavy mother. He glances over (turning his head as little as possible) but the cruiser hasn’t moved. He puts down the Twin and tries the doorknob. Locked. Inside, he can hear Little Richard. He raps knuckles on the glass. Raps again, and here comes a fat guy with salt-and-pepper beard, breasts joggling under a black Jack Daniel’s t-shirt. Guy opens the door and the music’s louder: now Willis can hear that it’s fucking Bob Seger.
“You must be the dude we been waitin’ on,” says Jack Daniel’s. “Need a hand there?”
“I guess I got it under control,” Willis says. “Thanks.” Bad cigarette smoke in here. So this character knows? Or is he just a genial asshole?
“Hey, you made it.” It’s the little Strat guy.
“Hey,” says Willis.
“Everything cool?”
“Mitch, why’n’t you go find Reed, tell him his buddy got here?” says Jack Daniel’s. As Mitch trots off, he shakes his head. “Christ, just what we need.” Guy knows, absolutely.
Willis sets his stuff down and looks around. Low ceiling of stained, sagging tiles, strings of chili-pepper lights drooping between posts, clusters of locals standing at the bar, sitting at the tables, yakking, smoking, laughing, tipping back brown beer bottles. Heavy-metal longhairs, buzz-cut storm troopers, an older guy with a deep-creased face and an every-hair-in-place duck’s ass, a pair of dumpy women in skintight jeans.
“I get you anything?” Jack Daniel’s says. “You want a beer?”
“No. No, thanks.”
The music has changed to “Your Lying Eyes,” as if you needed one more reason to want to get the fuck out of here.
“Hey, my man.” Reed’s hand on Willis’s shoulder. He’s loosed his hair from its ponytail, and it’s hanging down to the shoulders of his black Levi’s shirt. That nose of his pointing. “Way to go. See you got that badass Fender Twin with you. And everything’s hunky-dory, I trust?”
“I hope,” says Willis.
“Hey, you ain’t worried about the law out there?” Jack Daniel’s says.
“Fuck, I should’ve told you,” says Reed. “Fuckin’ sieve.” Slaps his own cheek. “He’s out there every Saturday. You must’ve shit a brick.”
“Yeah, I’ve had better moments,” Willis says.
“Aw, he’s just doin’ his job, like everybody else,” says Jack Daniel’s. “I always go out and shoot the shit with him. That makes him happy. Then he goes away. And I’ll tell you something—what’s your name?”
“Jesus, forgetting my manners too,” says Reed. “Griff? Doug Willis.”
“Doug, nice to know you, man.” His handshake is creepily soft and warm. “Anyway, the thing is, I never known him to hassle a vehicle comin’ in or out of here. He’s just real sympathetic.” The drummer and the bass player have drifted over.
“Griff gives him a fruitcake at Christmas,” Reed says.
This gets a laugh from Griff.
“Hey, Reed—listen, man,” says the bass player. “Can we cut the fuckin’ bullshit a minute? What’s going on? Is it cool?”
Reed stares at him. “Are you cool?” He turns to the Jack Daniel’s guy. “Griff. Here’s the deal. Our swingin’ guit-tar man here’s got some kind of problem with his amplifier, you know what I’m saying? So maybe we could bring it in your office and try to work on it in there?”
“Best idea I heard all night,” Griff says. “Course, the night is young.”
“And I thought we better get some input from El Exigente here.” Reed puts a hand on the drummer’s shoulder. “You remember those ads? But will it win the approval of El Exigente? And they had that guy?” He raises a finger. “Honly thee fines’ beans.”
“Why don’t you be cool?” the bass player says. “I got money in this too, man.”
“Dan,” says Reed. Hand on the bass player’s shoulder. “Dan, my man. I feel your pain. All I can tell you—so far so good, and we’ll know more in a minute.” He reaches down and picks up the Twin, not bothering to pretend it’s heavy. “Gentlemen, you’ll excuse us? We’ll just be a few. Meanwhile, why don’t you guys make sure you’re in tune, right? Oh yeah, so Doug: you’re welcome to plug into that badass Mesa/Boogie with me. Since you’re, ah, incapacitated. Fact, why don’t you take channel one. That’s got all the fuckin’ bells and whistles.”
“Actually, I should come in too,” Willis says. “I need to get, you know, the thing I have to take back.”
“Hey, not to worry,” Reed says.
“I’m not worried. I just—”
“Good man. So let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay? Soon as we know what’s what, we’ll fix you right up. Okay, tiger?” Hand on Willis’s shoulder again.
“I think I should come,” Willis says.
Reed removes the hand, puts the Twin down and looks at him. “Wait a minute. You think? Excuse me?”
“Hey, he ain’t gonna screw you,” says Griff.
Willis looks at the two of them. Hopeless. “Yeah, okay, fine.” Fuckers.
“And now it’s fine?” says Reed. “I don’t get it. What is this shit?”
“Ah, Doug’s cool.” Griff gives Willis’s upper arm a squeeze. For some time now, Marty Robbins has been singing “El Paso”; Willis catches the line about the black puff of smoke from the rifle. “Let’s just do this, right? Shit, you guys got to go on in a couple minutes. Doug, what do you say? You need a beer?”
Willis wants to jerk his arm away but just shakes his head no: this character’s now his defender. Or is it good cop bad cop? Yeah, probably. Jesus, if he ever gets out of this. Reed is still staring at him.
“Hey, you change your mind, just tell one of the gals,” Griff says. One more squeeze, then lets him go. “Come on, amigo,” he says to Reed. “Let me take this thing for you.” He picks up the Twin and leads Reed and the drummer across the room.
“Fuckin’ fries my ass,” says the bass player, once Reed’s out of earshot. Willis watches the Jack Daniel’s guy unlock a door
with OFFICE in gold-and-black stick-on italics; the three of them go inside and the door closes.
Mitch reappears, his Strat slung around him, its coiled cord in his hand. “You know it’s fuckin’ five of?”
“So?” says the bass player.
“So we should be up there.”
“Yeah, doin’ fuckin’ what?” Marty Robbins sings One little kiss and, Felina, goodbye.
“Like we got to get this guy in tune, get him a set list. Minute they come out, man, we got to be ready. Come on,” he says to Willis. “Let’s get you tuned up.”
“Kill that cocksucker one of these days,” says the bass player.
Willis brings his guitar case up onto the stage and unpacks. He plugs the Tele into his delay unit and the delay into channel one of Reed’s Mesa/Boogie. He ignores shit like Presence and simply sets Bass, Treble and Midrange all at five: the heart of the heart of the heart of the.
“Here, you want a tuner?” says Mitch.
“I thought you guys didn’t use ’em.”
Mitch shakes his head. “Fuckin’ Reed and his bullshit, man. Watch him, all night he’ll be cranking and cranking because he thinks he’s flat, and me and Danny have to fuckin’ keep tuning up to him. Fuckin’ pain in the balls. You know what I do? Don’t tell Reed this, man. I set the fuckin’ tuner so A’s like four hundred, four ten? Then I just like hide from him someplace with the fuckin’ tuner, I come back and give Reed his notes, and he’ll be like, ‘Whoa, I’m way sharp to you.’ Least we don’t end up breaking so many fuckin’ strings.”
Willis looks at the closed office door, then unplugs from the delay, plugs into the tuner and tries his high E. Sure enough, he’s sharp.