This must be how you got movies made, by saying the right thing at just the right time. I could feel how badly Myers wanted it. Something about the intensity of his need made me want to keep it—at least for now. What it made me want most of all was to talk to Zoey, to hear her tell me the truth.
“No. I can’t. I need to talk to her.”
Myers touched the rattler again. “Okay, well, you tell your friend there’s a guy who knows what this thing is, and you tell her he doesn’t care where she got it but he wants it. Very badly.” He took another business card out of his wallet. “This one’s for her. You tell her I’ll be in town until Sunday.”
“Wait,” I said. “She’ll want to know what you’ll give her for it.”
He shrugged. “How ’bout fifty?”
I couldn’t believe it. After everything he just said, I almost laughed. “That’s it? Fifty bucks?”
Myers threw his head back and belted out another gunshot whoop of laughter.
“Not fifty bucks. Fifty thousand bucks.”
60
The Three Words That Played
on Repeat inside My Head for
Hours after Andrew Myers Left
Fifty! Thousand! Dollars!
61
A Sampling of Unanswered Texts
I Sent to Zoey That Morning
Seriously, my boss gets here @ 12:30 LATEST.
Your thing cannot b here!!
What if i had a way 4 u to go to any music school
you wanted?
Would u txt me then? WHERE R U??? Should i
b worried?
You cud at least answer me
Ok, so I’m worried now. PLS call or txt.
That’s it. I cant w8. My boss’ll be here. Im moving
the thing upstairs. Txt me when u come to get it.
62
A Surprise Gift
“What’s that ?” Nomi asked as soon as I was inside the entranceway.
“It’s nothing,” I lied. “Just a thing.”
Nomi ran for a closer look but then stopped. “Are those … bones?”
“Shh, you’ll wake Mom.”
“She’s in her room but I don’t think she’s asleep.”
“Well, don’t tell her about this. It’s a surprise.”
Nomi stared wide-eyed at the rattler. “You bought that for her? Like a present?”
“It’s an antique. Really valuable.” At least that much was true.
Nomi wasn’t convinced. “Looks like a whole bunch of garbage to me.”
“It’s a musical instrument.” I tugged on one of the strings and got a shivering note. “You know how before you were born, when Dad was alive, we used to have a real piano?”
Nomi hung her head. “Yeah, I know. But now it’s gone.”
“I thought Mom might like something new. There’s no room for a piano, so … ” I shifted the rattler on my shoulder. The bones rung lightly together. Nomi nodded, but after a moment’s thought, she looked on the verge of tears.
“What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t get her anything!” she said, her voice starting to crack.
“No, it’s cool. This is from both of us.”
“It is?”
“Help me take it to my room. We’ll hide it under my bed, but quick, I gotta get back to work.”
Nomi kept the chains and cogs from rattling and we carried it down the hall. It nearly fit under my bed, with just the bottom sticking out. The initials were carved clearly into the bottom. S.C. I covered it with my gym bag.
“When are we going to give it to her?” Nomi asked.
I had to think about this. After Zoey and I sold it to Andrew Myers, I would have to explain to Nomi why it had suddenly disappeared. I could already hear her questions: What happened to Mom’s present? Where did it go? Then again, once we sold it, we’d have so much money, no one would care. I could buy Nomi her very own violin. That ought to cheer her up.
“Let’s wait until Mom’s feeling a bit better,” I said. “Maybe after she goes to Beauhaven.”
Nomi agreed. “She always feels better after she goes there.”
I hadn’t been upstairs for long, but when I returned to the Sit ’n’ Spin, I knew I was in trouble. Mr. Rodolfo was there, arms folded, red faced, standing behind the counter. A trio of DIYers crowded around, shrugging in bewilderment as he interrogated them about something. I had a hunch he was grilling them about where I was.
“There he is!” Mr. Rodolfo shouted, pointing at me with the flat of his hand. “You might as well turn around and leave. You’re fired! ”
“I just needed to go upstairs for, like, one sec, because—”
“No-no-no! ” Mr. Rodolfo shook an angry finger at me. “No excuses! This is a business establishment.” He pointed to the cash register. “What were you thinking? There’s money in here, you understand?”
“I just … ” A new and perfect lie popped into my head. “It’s my mom. She came back from the hospital and she needed something.”
Mr. Rodolfo paused to look up at the ceiling. “She okay?”
“She is now.”
“Good, because we’re not finished here.” He pointed a thumb backward over his shoulder. “I want to talk to you.”
“Where?”
“Downstairs.”
He turned and led the way, not bothering to see if I followed. He took the stairs sideways, his shoulders rolling heavily with each step. Why had I never noticed that before? He lumbered downstairs like an old bear.
The door to his office was locked. He opened it up and ushered me into the room I’d seen a few days earlier.
“Have a seat, Kaz.”
I sat in one of the plastic chairs.
“I’m only going to ask you this once, okay?”
“I told you, my mom’s sick. I had to bring her something.”
Mr. Rodolfo shut his eyes. “It’s not that.”
“So what is it?”
“Are you trying to steal from me?”
“What? ”
“Don’t lie, Kaz. It’s too late for that.”
“I would never, ever steal from you.”
“But you would let your freaky girlfriend contaminate the shop? Is that it? Because even if you’d never steal from me, I’m pretty sure she would.”
“She? Who?”
“The Jesus freak,” he said, making a face. “I know you put that thing in with the dry cleaning. I saw you.”
How? I thought.
“What if one of my customers gets some disease?” He shook his head. “Talk about bad for business!”
I was still speechless. I had made sure we were alone when we hid the rattler. How could he know?
“Is that why you tried to break in here? Into my office? Did she ask you to steal from me?”
“No! ” He knew about me coming down here. How? In a tiny, sullen voice I said, “Zoey isn’t like that.”
“What do you know?” He looked at me like I was a worm, like I had no brain to top off my rubbery spine. “Why do you think that door was open when you came down here, snooping around like a thief? I left it open. It was a test, you get it? I wanted to see what you’d do.”
My head was spinning, again. The whole room was spinning. “Wait—how do you know I came down here?”
“In here.”
He pushed out his chair and went to the other door in the corner, the one I’d knocked on just before Andrew Myers showed up. When he opened it, I saw that it was nearly empty. The only thing inside was another shelving unit, full of old video recorders. I knew what the blinking red lights meant.
“You’re recording,” I whispered.
“Me and the brothers installed them a couple weeks ago.” He pointed to a shiny gray dome hanging from the corner of the ceiling.
“So many weirdos coming around. I never thought you’d be one of them.”
He pressed a button on one of the recorders and flicked on the old TV on top of the filing cabinet. The screen showed a black-and-white image of upstairs. There I was—with Zoey—on the night of our date at What the Pho. We were carrying the rattler into the dry-cleaning booth.
“I don’t get it,” Mr. Rodolfo said. “Why’d you wanna bring that in here?”
“It wasn’t for long.”
He pointed at the screen. “I can’t believe you let a freak like that in here.”
“She’s not a freak! She’s just … ” What was she, really? I didn’t know anymore.
“You gonna tell me what you were looking for down here?”
“I was just … ” How could I tell him the truth? How could I tell him I was checking to see where he had hidden B-Man’s body? Obviously, it wasn’t down here. “I was just curious.”
“Good, you can get curious about finding another job.”
“Fine then,” I said, and I meant it. I was sick of Mr. Rodolfo, the way he wrote people off just because of how they looked. I was sick of how obsessed he was with running his shitty little business—a dead-end laundromat in fucking Evandale. I was especially sick of how the whole world got cleaved down the middle: good for business and bad for business.
Of course, it was easy not to give a shit about your job when these three little words kept marching through my head:
Fifty! Thousand! Dollars!
63
Ten Million Hits in 0.15 Seconds
I needed to find Zoey, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I texted her for the zillionth time.
Please call me. I have good news.
Upstairs, Nomi wondered what I was doing back so soon. I told her I had the day off. In my room, I pulled out the rattler. The initials stared me in the face.
S.C.
What if I sold the rattler without telling Zoey? How could she mind, especially if I split the money with her? With that kind of cash, she could buy a whole orchestra. Better than that, she could fly off to whatever music school she wanted. Anyway, the rattler—or whatever it was really called—wasn’t even hers in the first place.
Then again, the thought of her on a plane gave me a stab of regret, and I knew if I sold the instrument without telling her, she would hate me.
On the other hand, it was just so much money.
That got me thinking. If Andrew Myers was willing to shell out Fifty! Thousand! Dollars! for a long-lost Shain Cope instrument, maybe he knew something I didn’t. Maybe it was worth even more.
I googled “rood rattler,” but nothing came up. It was probably a name Zoey had made up. Shain Cope could have dubbed it something completely different, so I searched for the man himself. There were ten million hits.
I went through fan sites, lyrics, Wikipedia entries, grainy videos of live performances, and zillions of photographs, many of which featured strange, otherworldly instruments, but nothing that looked like what was under my bed.
It was odd to see so many images of the man. Generally, I didn’t give much thought to the CDs Dave Mizra brought over. Some were good, some weren’t; but Shain Cope was different. In every way. The singer’s ghost was haunting every aspect of my life.
In the pictures, he was perpetually shy, always looking away from the camera, rarely granting the photographer a clear view of his face. Getting his features steady in your mind was like piecing together a puzzle, shifting the angles from different images. His strong jaw and a jutting brow gave him a slightly concave face. He heightened the effect with a grisly pompadour and matching goatee. It made him look only half human. Onstage, his teeth gleaming as he sang, he was more like a wild animal, a starving wolf.
Cope’s Wikipedia page said he was known “not only for his distinctive, rumbling voice but also for constructing his own instruments, several of which he used on his final, most famous album, Freudian Slap.” I learned that no one saw it coming when he shot himself. He didn’t leave a suicide note. Later, probably because his house was empty and his death was so well publicized, there was that break-in. A link sent me to a scanned newspaper article published that same summer:
* * *
The vacant home of idiosyncratic musician Shain Cope, who took his own life in April, was last night the site of an opportunistic robbery. Thieves gained entrance through a ground-floor window some time before three o’clock in the morning, making off with a number of valuables.
“This was a heinous, cynical crime,” said Los Feliz chief of police Raymond Saunders. “These are criminals who took advantage of a man’s death to enrich themselves, acting at a time when his family was already dealing with so much pain.”
Local authorities would not specify what had been stolen, but Cope’s mother, Eleanor, confirmed that at least one of her son’s most valuable instruments is currently missing. “It’s really the only thing we want back,” she said. “It was so much a part of who he was.”
Cope’s career as a singer-songwriter began in 1970 with the release of his critically acclaimed debut album Four Lane Road. By the end of the decade, he had proven himself not only as a musician, but also as a gifted craftsman, designing and building the unusual instruments that gave him his unique sound. Among these were a steam-powered organ and a multi-story drum kit made from the engines of classic cars. Although the value of the stolen articles is unknown, all of Cope’s pieces were one of a kind. Their value is thought to be considerable.
Shain Cope died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 18, 1983. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean by friends and family, in accordance with his wishes.
* * *
After reading the article, I wanted to hear the music again. I put on some headphones, shut my eyes, and listened. I wanted to see if I could hear it. The rattler.
I did.
The hollow chinks of bones and chains. The rough whine of a bow chafing over taut strings. Thumps like a felled tree come to life, trying to stab itself back into the earth. In my head, I saw Shain Cope, a howling wolf-man, clawing at
the very same instrument that now lay dead on my bedroom carpet.
When the final strains of “Get Me Home” faded, I lay there in the dark. I thought about all the places Zoey had lived. Europe, Mexico City, Montreal, New York, California. LA was crazy, she had said. What did that mean? The rest were just names of places, but LA—she had paused when she mentioned LA. LA was crazy. But no, Zoey wouldn’t have even been born in 1983. But there were those times her voice sounded so old. How old? I had never asked her.
No, I thought, it was impossible. Anyone could see she was my age, or at least somewhere in the ballpark. Even if she was one or two years older—even five years older—there was no way she could have robbed an LA mansion in 1983. So how did she get it?
The question hung in my head, words coiling like smoke above a dark stage, one where Shain Cope had just folded his last bow.
My phone buzzed.
What good news? z
64
Oceans of Applause
“Mom?”
She was in the kitchen by the window, staring out at nothing. The most recent attack, coming so quickly after the last one, had really taken its toll. I was completely ready to drive her up to Beauhaven if only it would make her feel better.
“Mom? ”
“Uh-huh?”
“There’s someone here to see me.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“Calen?”
“Somebody else. She just needs to pick up some stuff. It’ll only take a second.”
Mom blinked at me. “She? ”
“Just a girl I know. I have something of hers. She’ll only be here for five minutes, okay?”
She turned back to the window, sizing herself up in the ref
lection. “Can I meet her?” she asked, smoothing her hair.
It struck me as an odd request; Mom hated seeing people after an attack. “Are you sure?”
“Just bring her up.”
Out on the street, Zoey looked amazing. The setting sun turned her skin to gold and she was dressed in the same clothes she’d worn the first time I saw her. The same cut-off jeans; the same T-shirt, still melting off her shoulder; the same pink bra. A few dreads hung across her face like a shredded veil.
She frowned when I came out empty-handed. “Where is it?” she asked. “You still have it, right?”
“Where have you been? How come you never answered any of my texts?”
“I was in trouble,” she said, as if that was explanation enough. “Have you got it?”
“It’s upstairs.”
“So are you gonna bring it down?”
“Could you come up a sec? There’s something I want to ask you.”
Her whole body twitched. “Ask me here.”
“Just come up. Anyway, you look hungry. You can have something to eat if you want.”
“I don’t need food. I just need—”
“My mom said she wants to meet you.”
“She did?”
“Just come up, okay?”
Mom was still at the window, still staring out. “Hello there,” she greeted Zoey, who came in behind me. “You’re a friend of Kaz’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s your name?”
“Zoey.”
“That’s nice.” She tilted her head and pointed a finger. “I think I know who you are.”
Zoey’s eyes flashed. “How?”
Blues for Zoey Page 16