Crushing (The Southern California Wine Country Series)

by Smith, J Gordon

  “But are you pirating vampires or vampires who are pirates?”

  “Neither.” Kyle took a gulp of his water; the ice was too cold and froze his throat. “We are just nefarious hoodlums here to swash your buckle.”

  “I see. Good news that I have a buckle.” She tipped up her hips, showing a wide Texas rodeo buckle holding a glittery belt strung through her designer cut-offs. “Though, I was hoping for a vampire.” She licked her lip, “Where did you get the idea for the name?”

  “I read a book about vampires.”

  “Just any book?”

  “You like to screw with me, I see.”

  “Maybe,” Amanda said. Kyle saw her cheeks flush and she lifted her fingers to cover her mouth.

  “This chick gushed over a book and made me promise to read it – something about Livix.”

  “What about Pirates?”

  “I always liked pirates. Chasing dreams on the open seas. The salty air in your hair.”

  “And scurvy?”

  Kyle shrugged his shoulders, “Occupational hazard.”

  “Hold on.” Amanda left a finger in the air as she went to the other end of the bar to pour wine for a group of women Kyle saw having a good time. A younger group of those here tonight. Amanda soon returned. “Now where were we?”

  “Hi, I’m Sardis. Kyle hasn’t been molesting you, has he?”

  “No, he hasn’t.” Amanda did not like that term, her smile fell.

  “Well, if he does, here’s my phone number.” Sardis slapped the paper on the bar and pushed it toward Amanda. She looked from the paper to Sardis and then to Kyle. Kyle shrugged.

  Sardis looked along the chalkboards hung behind the bar, “What’s your most popular flavor?”

  Amanda said, “Zack’s Blend put this place on the map. But I like any of these three reds; you might too, at least a place to start.”

  Sardis said, “I didn’t think you were old enough to drink wine.” A smile crept across his mouth, revealing each sharp tooth like a conveyor of lust.

  “I’ve been twenty-one for half a year, if it matters.”

  Sardis said, “I’ll bet you had a great party.”

  Amanda’s nostrils flared, but she said flatly, “I didn’t have a party.”

  “Have you gotten hammered yet? Where you can’t stand up?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sardis grabbed the paper with his phone number, the same phone that Kyle carried, and wrote an address on it. “Some friends are having a party at this house, here's the address – we’re gonna get you wet.”

  Kyle held his head, “Sardis, cut that out. Amanda does not want to go to a party of your friends. I’m not sure I want to go there with you but we only have the one car.”

  “Is your whole band going to play there?”

  Sardis said, “No, just partying. You'll have a good time, I promise. Tomorrow night after our gig here. You can ride with us or meet us there.”

  Amanda picked up the paper as if peril contaminated it.

  Kyle said, “That number is really for my phone, we share that too.” Kyle spun his head back, “That’s where the sharing ends though. The car and the phone.”

  “Uh-huh.” Amanda nodded and slipped the paper carefully into her pocket, still wary as if its presence might get her into more trouble than she could bargain for.

  Chapter 4

  The car door’s rust-fouled voice complained at opening its worn hinges.

  Sardis rolled his head over and asked, “What are you doing?” He looked at his watch, “God. It’s early.”

  Kyle grunted, “I got to take a piss.”

  Sardis rubbed his face and searched for his pork-pie hat on the floor. He shook the sandy grit that stuck to it from the dried mud on the floor mat. He pushed his head against the space between the seat and the door and settled the hat over his eyes.

  Kyle stepped barefoot over the crumbly grass. The broken ends stabbed his feet but his bladder forced his unerring march toward the tree. His belly had swollen tight and he could not stand straight. He released his belt and popped the row of buttons down his jeans. How did he not wake up earlier so his bladder did not hurt so much?

  It felt like his kidneys had backed up and drained out with his bladder. The pain lessened as he relieved himself but he still hunched forward from the aches running along his sides and belly. He could not believe how much urine sprinted out of him. He looked around at the vineyard leaves floating like butterflies in the light breeze that already seemed hot for the day. He peered over his shoulder at the car and saw Sardis’ hat propped over his face. Then he saw the edge of the canvas pinched between the tire and the ground, its whole bulk lay flat on the ground. Last night they stacked all their gear under the canvas so they could sleep on the car seats.

  “Sardis!” Kyle could not stop urinating, trapped at the tree. “Sardis!”

  Sardis lifted his hat, “What, your dick hurt when you pee? They have a shot for that.”

  “The gear is gone.”

  “What?” Sardis lurched up. Then he clawed across the seat and poked his head out the car window. “Fuck! Where’s our stuff?”

  “You see footprints or tire tracks?” Kyle knew if he tried stopping his piss that he would only end up with wet shorts and pants. The only nearly clean ones he had, though he had worn them for the last two days. Wet pissed pants would not do. “Any clues?”

  Sardis pushed his hat back from his forehead in disbelief. “A bunch of different footprints. Here and here and here. Tire tracks over there. What are you doing? You’ve been at that for more than two shakes.”

  Kyle felt drained but still his body pricked with pain as his nerves decided not to let him forget his misadventure too quickly. He buttoned and belted his pants and trotted to the car like a troll with wooden legs. Sardis followed the footprints around and counted the different pairs of shoes and their trips back and forth to the tire tracks. Kyle looked around the car and was somewhat relieved that their car still had wheels and the fuel door remained shut. He flicked the fuel door aside and saw the cap still on the tank. Then he brushed the trunk lid. It moved.

  “Shit!” Kyle saw the crushed trunk lock hanging out of the trunk lid like an eyeball dangling by its nerve bundle. He gripped the lid and lifted it up. Crown Victoria cars have a huge trunk, why police departments used them for so many years and why Kyle and Sardis bought the thing. An inexpensive durable used car that served them like a utility van. Perfect for mobsters that could fill it with half a dozen bodies to take out to the desert. Or a band to store their most valuable pieces of equipment.

  Sardis stood next to Kyle, “Fuck me. They took the amps.”

  “And my guitar, the effects pedals, the microphones. They took everything.” Kyle looked around the quiet vineyard toward the gas station. No cars or people were visible anywhere. “Did you hear anything?” He saw their big drum leaning into a row of vines down a short hill. Kyle and Sardis walked down and looked it over. “They rolled it away like a big tractor wheel.”

  “That thing is so huge they probably had as much problem taking it as we do.”

  Kyle spun the drum around to see their band logo, “It’s huge, but it also has our logo on it. You stole this from a high school marching band and put a new head on. Right? That’s probably karma biting us now.”

  “That drum is our signature feature. No one has a kick drum that big.” He gripped the drum. “Yeah. Karma is laughing the shit out of us.”

  “Our gig goes through tonight before we get paid. We only have five or six bucks in change. What are we going to do?”

  “If we were any real band we’d have a second backup set of everything.”

  “We hardly afforded the gear we had. Now …” Kyle looked at their car. The rear springs sagged because one was broken and threatened to slice into the tire at any unfortunate jounce, rusty holes chased around the wheel wells and along the front edge of the long hood like bubbling cancer. A spidery split glinted from the low sun
light striking the front windshield. The busted grill barely kept road rocks from damaging the already seeping radiator. “Even if we could sell the car today, it wouldn’t get enough cash to buy a cheap guitar and a single drum.”

  Kyle stomped back to the car. Sardis followed him carrying the drum. Kyle pulled out the spare tire from the shelf at the front of the trunk, then stepped inside the trunk and rummaged in the mass of jumper cables and gloves and tools. “They left us our tools.”

  Sardis said, “At least we can fix the car. I saw the winery has a few amps in their storage room and a PA system. If we could get instruments plugged into those we could do that, at least.”

  Kyle found a stretch cord and hooked it into the trunk lid as he stepped out of it. He stretched the cord down over the bumper and found a solid anchor on the rusting body.

  -:-:-:- -:-:-:-

  Kyle stopped the car in front of the Salvation Army store.

  “What, you need a new shirt?”

  “No. The last time I was here I saw a broken guitar in a bucket.”

  “We were here a month ago. That will not be there. But we can always look.”

  Kyle came around the display gondola and on the bottom shelf sat the same bucket with the broken guitar in it. It looked like the remains of one of those guitar shows where they bash the instruments apart at the end. Kyle never understood that, but then he never had money to buy more than a nothing guitar. Most of the parts seemed to be in the bucket. The tuner knobs on all but one were broken off and missing. The headstock was fractured off the neck, the truss rod bent over and nearly tied in a knot with a chunk of the neck, frets curled out like cartoon cat whiskers. The single pickup left in the guitar was fractured and the wires hung in a spaghetti bird’s nest. The bridge was missing most of its parts except the bracket and mounting screws. The hookup jack seemed to be the one undamaged piece.

  Sardis said, “I’m surprised they kept that here. We’d never be able to get the glue dried on that by tonight – even if Humpty Dumpty could be put back together again.” He looked down the aisle toward the toaster ovens then back, “That pickup is a mess, and that’s the core of the guitar.” Kyle looked along the nearby shelves. He dropped a wall-wart power transformer from a forgotten appliance into the bucket. A dirty computer peripheral extension cord filled the top of the bucket. “Shielded cable for the wiring.”

  The woman at the checkout line said, “Broken guitar in a bucket. Surprised that was not thrown out. Still, I need seven dollars for what you have.”

  “How about three? We have six dollars and I need to buy glue at the hardware store next door.”

  “That’s a really nice metal garden pail. I saw those new at the plant store for fifteen dollars. Same designs and that one is in really good shape.”

  Kyle asked, “How much without the bucket?” He pulled off his shirt, laid the fabric down on the counter, and poured the bucket contents onto it, catching a spring before it bounded away. Several women in line behind Kyle and Sardis shuffled their feet to marvel at Kyle.

  The checkout woman bit her lip as she looked along his arms and shoulders while he arranged the precarious pile of unwanted broken things. “Fine. You can have the parts, without the bucket, for three dollars.” She rang them up, took their money, and returned their change. Kyle picked up the corners of his shirt and held everything like a hobo treasure walking with Sardis toward the exit door. She said after them, “The hardware store next door has a no shoes, no shirt, no service policy.”

  Kyle nodded as he pushed through the exit door.

  Sardis opened a crumpled box in the trunk, “She was more worried about the price of that bucket.”

  Kyle carefully poured the guitar parts into the box, “Well, this doesn’t look like much.” He slipped his shirt on and they went to the hardware store. They bought a bottle of glue for two dollars and a discounted clearance can of Magnificent Magenta spray paint.

  Kyle held up the can, “Forty-nine cents to hide the guitar’s ugliness.”

  “That’s not a manly serious guitar color.”

  “Only real men can wear pink.”

  Sardis laughed, “That’s my point.”

  On their drive back to the shade tree, they stopped at a restaurant and asked if they could have any of their discarded pails. Their car smelled like pickles and the slightly off odor of fermented salad dressing remains left stacked by the dumpster for half a week in the sweltering sun. “Your drum set.” A subdivision was already putting out trash and they picked up a broken pallet and a scrap of lumber left over from a repairman replacing deck steps, another house had put out an old stereo with a note that it was broken. They picked up a few metal coffee cans.

  “I don’t know how you are going to get a guitar out of all that.”

  “Do we have a choice? You should start whittling drum sticks out of that pallet board.”

  Kyle tore apart the stereo and found the power supply transformers. He used wire from them and the wall-wart transformer to wrap the guitar pickup coil that he dismantled. The pallet gave a fingerboard while the cedar deck board gave a sturdy body. He mounted the parts.

  “What are you going to do for frets?”

  “I’m going to play without them.”

  “How will you know where you are on the fingerboard?”

  “Muscle memory. Just like violinists. And hope.” Then Kyle looked up, “I saw a guy once …” Kyle rummaged in the debris of the car trunk, “Here it is.”

  “That’s our extension cord we made for the two amps out of old house wires.”

  “Amps that we don’t have. However, I’ll strip out the solid wire and wrap it around the fingerboard in a spiral. I’ve seen it done before. That will give more sustain and musical ring than a fret-less neck.”

  -:-:-:- -:-:-:-

  Laying the wood over the buckets, he attacked them with the hacksaw from the toolbox. He used a sharp screwdriver as a wood chisel. He twisted wires together and taped the connections. After he fit all the hardware to the rough guitar, he removed everything, walked with the assembled wood to the road, and made sure no cars came from either direction. He laid the instrument on the blacktop and scrubbed the pieces back and forth.

  Sardis sat on one of the buckets watching Kyle, “That’s a mile long sanding-block. That will certainly get that thing flat.”

  Kyle rubbed the neck along the blacktop, “That’s what I need.” Satisfied the neck appeared flat he used a few boulders that tumbled away from the road at the edge of a ravine because the stone had curves that matched the arcs in his guitar.

  Kyle hooked a wire through a screw hole and held it up while he used the spray can to coat the guitar body. He hooked the wire over a stick and hung it all inside the car with the windows up so the heat increased.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The paint has to be hard enough to play tonight. And I need time to assemble the hardware and tune it up.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s work on your drums now. I think if we cut them across here we can change the tone.”

  Sardis dropped a fistful of gravel on one of the turned over buckets, “And rocks on the top make a crude snare. The coffee cans opened up on a tree branch give us a cymbal sound.”

  “Real rock music. I don’t know about the cans though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kyle looked at the car. “The hubcaps might work better.”

  Sardis wrenched off a hubcap, “This is going to suck balls.”

  Kyle shrugged and tested the paint on the guitar body. While it still seemed soft, it was mostly dry. Kyle rubbed it all with a rag and put the parts on the guitar. He tuned it up and strummed a few of their riffs.

  Sardis said, “Hey, wow. That’s real. As long as that pickup works, you’re in business.”

  “Playing is in your hands.” Kyle put the guitar down. He decided to use his pocketknife to create nicks in the side of the neck where dots marked a regular guitar. He wrapped wire ar
ound the neck and set it in the shallow cuts he made for the frets, determining their position from their tone.

  Amanda walked out of the winery seeing Kyle and Sardis assemble their gear on the patio. “What kind of stuff is that? And what happened to your black guitar?”

  Kyle said, “All our gear was stolen last night.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Sardis said, “It’s not like it was expensive gear. We had the cheapest we could find, beg, and borrow.”

  Kyle plugged his guitar into the amp next to the microphone, “Thanks for letting us use the amps and the microphone.”

  Amanda said, “We keep a few things as backup.”

  Kyle strummed his guitar. It sounded muted. He checked the amp, dialed the treble up, and pushed more bass. He strummed again.

  Amanda said, “That’s nice.”

  Kyle gripped the strings to quiet them, “We might just finish this gig. You wouldn’t believe this thing was made from discarded lumber.”

  “A trash guitar?”

  “The pickup doesn’t have enough turns so I have to manually push the amplifier into distortion.”

  Amanda looked at Kyle, “Strum the strings again.”

  Kyle rang through three chords.

  Amanda said, “That’s a great tone. I can’t believe you built that.”

  “Hey, Kyle. When do you think Elliot will be here? He’s late.” Sardis tapped lightly but impatiently on several of his bucket drums. They would do for loudness. A couple hours on the salad dressing brigade or the pickle factory. “I’d like to get paid tonight.”

  Kyle said, “It’s time to start. I hope Elliot can make it.”

  “Start with Cold Why?”

  Sardis said, “Yeah.” Then he stood, “Hey, Amanda.”

  She turned around and followed her steps back to them, her eyebrows raised in question.

  “Don’t forget that party tonight after the show. You can ride with us.”

  “I’ll meet you two there. I still have the address.”

  Kyle watched Amanda saunter back into the winery.