‘Sounds familiar. Give me a second.’
Rolly heard Bonnie rustling through things on her desk and other voices in the background. She was at the office, not in her car.
‘Dorothy Coasters,’ she said, coming back on the line. ‘Yeah, she’s listed here. They gave her immunity for testifying against Gibbons.’
‘Is there a description?’
‘Let’s see. White. Long blonde hair. Five foot two. Founder of Universal Vibration Technologies and alleged companion of Parnell Gibbons.’
‘I think it’s her. Dotty. The woman at the shop.’
‘You mean the old lady who locked you in?’
‘Yes. They’re in this together. She and Parnell.’
‘Why would he hook up with her after she testified against him?’
‘They’re looking for something. Randy Parker was looking for it too. And Daddy Joe. They were trying to find it before Parnell got out of jail.’
‘What are they looking for?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s got something to do with Macy.’
‘You think she knows something?’
Rolly saw Macy’s face in his mind. He saw her dirty-blonde dreadlocks and her gold eyes. He saw the necklace, the gold tube hanging above her lovely jugular notch. He remembered what the birdman in Slab City had said.
The Macy has the key.
TWENTY-SIX
The Number
Rolly pulled up to the corner of the street next to the Villa Cantina. Marley Scratch stood outside the cantina’s front door with a takeout container in one hand and the Astral Vibrator schematic in the other. Rolly opened the door of the Tioga and let Marley in.
‘Where’d you get this beast?’ said Marley, climbing into the cabin.
‘Borrowed it from my dad.’
‘Where you headed?’ said Marley.
‘Not sure yet. Someplace I can stay out of sight for a while.’
‘Going underground, huh? Where you want this?’
‘On the table,’ said Rolly, nodding towards the back.
Marley placed the items on the dining-room table and glanced around the interior.
‘Sir Roland’s rolling crime lab,’ he said. ‘Stylin’!’
One of the drivers behind them started leaning on the horn. The Tioga was blocking the lane.
‘Just remember,’ said Marley as he headed back to the door. ‘It’s a sequence of specific frequencies – nine, I think. That’s how it unlocks whatever it unlocks. I left you my notes.’
‘Got it. Thanks.’
The car behind them honked again. Another one joined in. Marley descended back down to the street.
‘I owe you one, buddy,’ said Rolly.
‘Good luck, bredren,’ said Marley. He flashed Rolly a peace symbol and shut the door.
Rolly put the vehicle into gear and turned down Tenth Avenue. He hadn’t completely worked out his plan yet, but until he knew why Gibbons was looking for the diddley bow and the Astral Vibrator, he would stay on the move. He drove to the end of Tenth Avenue and turned onto Harbor Drive. There was a public parking lot behind the Convention Center that might be empty at this time of night, assuming you were allowed to park there this late. He circled around the Convention Center and found the lot. It was open, mostly vacant. He steered the Tioga to the emptiest section of the lot, parked and ate his dinner. Then it was time to go to work.
He placed the black box, the box Cool Bob had given him, on the dining-room table, opened up the schematics plan for the Astral Vibrator and reviewed Marley’s notes. The word was there in the bottom corner, just like it was on the whiteboard at Daddy Joe’s house. The birdman’s call. TEOTWAYKI. Maybe it did mean the end of the world, but it meant something else too. It was a code. It was a clue.
He unwrapped the diddley bow, slipped a clip-on tuner to the bridge and adjusted the peg until the tuner indicated he’d found the right note – 440Hz, concert A, the answer to one of the questions Cool Bob had asked him when they met in Slab City. He pulled the tuner off, connected one end of his guitar cable into the diddley bow and the other end into the black box. He pulled out a guitar pick and his slide and played a few notes. The slide was a metal tube, not unlike the gold tube on Macy’s necklace. He was ready.
The Astral Vibrator is a locking security device utilizing a pitch interval based system for encoding and decoding physical locking mechanisms via vibration-tuned tumblers.
An hour later he was still there, contemplating defeat. He’d run out of ideas. His phone rang. He picked it up and checked the caller’s ID. There was no name but he knew who was calling. It was the beeper’s number. He answered. The same pattern of tones played on the other end of the line.
‘Why do you keep calling me?’ Rolly said. The tone pattern stopped. Rolly could hear the other man breathing.
‘Teotwayki,’ said the man. He played the tone pattern again. Rolly hung up and placed his phone on the table. The digital keypad stared up at him. There were three letters listed under each number on the keypad. It gave him an idea. He grabbed his composition book and a pencil and jotted the numbers down. ‘T’ was an 8. ‘E’ was 3. ‘O’ was 6. He wrote the whole word down as numbers. It was the numerical equivalent of Teotwayki, if you spelled it out on a phone’s keypad. The numbers were the same as the ones on Macy’s gold charm. He had the combination. He knew how the lock opened. He felt sure of it.
Notes in a musical scale could be represented by numbers. Each number indicates the distance from the root, or key note. The root was the one. Other notes could be thirds, or fourths, or fifths – any whole number. Using his pencil, Rolly marked the positions of each of the notes in the sequence on the diddley bow, assessing the accuracy of the position by ear. The first note was easy. Eight was an octave above the root, exactly halfway up the neck. He could recognize the sound of an octave in his sleep. The other notes were more difficult to nail down, especially the nine, but he felt sure he had them all now. He practiced playing the whole sequence of notes. Nothing happened. He played it again. He tried it a dozen times, but still nothing happened.
Frustrated and fatigued, he decided to take a break and set the diddley bow down on the table. Assuming the numbers represented standard intervals in a major scale, he knew he’d played the correct sequence of notes. The concert pitch he’d tuned to was the standard frequency that everyone tuned to, be it guitar duos or ninety-piece orchestras.
He climbed out of the booth, went to the bathroom, turned on the faucet in the tiny sink and looked at himself in the grimy mirror. The man he saw looked like he hadn’t washed his hair in a week. The man needed a shave. He suspected the man in the mirror had started to smell funny, too.
Returning to the cabin, he grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator, seated himself at the table again and reconsidered his plan, wondering where he’d gone wrong. It came down to two things: the sequence of notes was incorrect or his execution of them wasn’t accurate enough. He picked up the diddley bow and thumped out a funky rhythmic figure, singing along with it, trying to clear his mind.
She sells black honey,
She sells black honey,
She sells black honey in Tupelo
Few people realized it, but almost all of the music they listened to, be it live or recorded was built on an arbitrary system, a series of compromises musicians had worked out over hundreds of years. A protocol had been agreed upon, one that made it easier for instruments and their owners to play together in harmonious ways. As frequencies went, an octave note was twice the frequency of the original. The octave for A440Hz was A880Hz. The octave to that note was 1760Hz.
The songs you played on your guitar, or your piano, on almost any instrument of European origin used twelve equal divisions for the notes between the octaves. But you could break the space between them into any number of frequencies. There were other types of scales, other divisions of the frequencies musicians could use. They could be found in some non-Western countries, in avant-garde experiments, in
the Indonesian Gamelan scales, Wendy Carlos’s electronic temperaments or Harry Partch’s homemade instruments. When you considered the whole range of frequencies, a single stringed instrument, one without frets like the diddley bow could play any number of notes in-between the standard divisions of the twelve-tone scale. If the UVTs really thought they were aliens, they might have used some sort of alternate tuning and scales.
He picked up the diddley bow and looked at the marks he’d made on the neck. None of them matched up with the dots of gold filigreed into the neck. Norwood had remarked on the filigrees when Rolly first showed him the diddley bow – how they looked out of place. He and Norwood had both assumed they were decorative, but that was because he and Norwood had been playing the same guitar their whole lives. Their guitars came in different colors and shapes, with variations in the pickup configurations, and they were constructed from different types of wood, but they were all the same guitar in one important way. The position of the frets on each of them was based on the twelve-tone scale. The relative position of the frets and fingering guides was always the same.
He laughed. He understood now. The diddley bows were so simple he’d completely missed the meaning behind their design. They’d been built for beginners, people who’d never played a guitar in their life, not experts like Norwood and he. There were exactly nine gold dots on the diddley bow’s neck, a filigreed inset for each note in the sequence. It was the Solfeggio frequencies, the New Age tones he’d read about in Marley’s loft. There were nine of them, and nine dots on the diddley bow’s neck. It was like painting by numbers. He rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. It just might be that simple.
He pulled out his slide again and plucked the string nine times, matching the position of his slide to the proper dot on the neck of the diddley bow. He played the notes slowly, making sure to match his position with each dot before he plucked the note. When he played the last note the bolts locking the front panel of the vibrator box clicked open. He stared at the box, almost afraid to look at what was inside. He tugged on the guitar cable where it connected to the box. The front panel fell off. There was something inside. It was a postcard of the Desert View Tower. It was blank on the back. He felt cheated.
He grabbed his phone, found the beeper’s number and tapped it. If the man answered, he was going to give him a piece of his mind. The pay phone at the other end of the line rang four times, then five, six, seven. He let it keep ringing. He was going to stay on the line until someone answered. He didn’t care who it was.
‘Hola?’ said a voice at the other end of the line.
‘Hello,’ said Rolly. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Manuelito.’
‘Manuelito, can you speak English?’
‘Sure. I speak English.’
‘Did you call me just now, Manuelito?’
‘I no call you. I hear the phone ring. It rings a long time, so I answer.’
‘Where are you?’
‘By the 7-Eleven. I ride my bike here. Get some Takis and a Monster drink.’
‘Was there anyone else using the phone just a minute ago? Did you see anyone?’
‘There was this old guy in the parking lot. The one with the crazy car. I seen it sometimes. That car.’
‘Why do you call it crazy? The car?’
‘He’s got all this stuff on it. Flying planets and wings. I seen him before. He’s kind of loco, that guy.’
‘What kind of car is it?’
‘It’s like one of those hippie things. You know?’
‘A van? A Volkswagen Van?’
‘Si. That’s it.’
‘Is the man still there?’
‘No. He is gone. He drive away.’
‘You’ve seen him before? Using the pay phone?’
‘I seen the van before, in the parking lot. On the street.’
‘All right. Thank you, Manuelito.’
‘You want me to tell the man something? You know, if I see him?’
‘Tell him to call me,’ said Rolly. ‘Tell him Golden Eyes is in trouble. Tell him the Waters needs his help.’
‘OK,’ said Manuelito. ‘I tell him, if I see him. I hope he helps you.’
‘I hope so, too, Manuelito.’
‘You buy me some Takis if I get him to help you?’
‘You bet. I’ll buy you a whole case of them.’
‘OK,’ said Manuelito. ‘Adios.’
‘Adios,’ said Rolly. He hung up the phone. He had to drive to Slab City. Tonight.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Constant
By the time Rolly pulled into Slab City and parked the Tioga he couldn’t remember what parts of the drive had been real and what parts he’d only imagined. Driving through the early morning darkness – the looming shadows of the East County mountains, the heavy canopy of stars over the desert, the ghostly green streetlights of Brawley and the silhouetted cross above Salvation Mountain – had been like one long, disjointed dream.
An icy blue line hung over the eastern horizon, the cold gleaming before sunrise. He knew it would be safer to wait for the sun to break above the desolate landscape but he’d abandoned all sense of caution. He would find his way to Cool Bob’s trailer in the half-light.
He grabbed the diddley bow from the dining booth, stepped down from the vehicle, locked the door and set out for Bob’s trailer. His leg still hurt. He could walk without crutches now, but he still limped. He’d figured it out, almost to the finish line, but there’d been no prize at the end. There was only an empty metal box with a fancy lock he could open by playing the diddley bow. There had to be more.
He trudged down the dirt road. Clumps of creosote bush and mesquite rose up in gnarled bunches around him, interrupted by single tall spires of desert agave and spiky explosions of ocotillo plants. Finches and flycatchers twittered from inside the bristly shrubs. A family of quail marched across the road in front of him, returning home from a night’s foraging. He stopped so as not to disturb them then turned his head at the sound of footsteps behind him.
‘Hello,’ he called. ‘Is someone there?’
There was no answer. He started off again, listening to the night air. The sound of other footsteps returned. Cool Bob’s trailer was close, no more than fifty yards or so by his figuring. He’d be safe once he got there, after he’d knocked on Bob’s door. Unless it was Bob following him.
‘Stop right there,’ said a voice from behind him. Rolly kept walking.
‘If you don’t stop, I’ll sting you,’ said the voice.
Rolly stopped. The man walked up behind him and stood so close that Rolly could feel the man’s breath on the back of his neck. The guy was a serious mouth-breather.
‘Where are you going, jerkoff?’ said the man.
‘I’m going to see Bob. Cool Bob.’
‘What for?’
‘I just want to talk to him.’
‘What’s that in your hand?’
‘I don’t know. What do you think it is?’
‘I think it’s a funny-looking guitar with only one string.’
‘Sorry, it’s a machine gun.’
The man chuckled. ‘Little Roland Waters. Always a smartass; always acting like he’s the coolest shit in town.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘No. But I remember you. Snotty-nosed little bastard.’
‘Are you Buddy Meeks?’
The man laughed. ‘You would remember Buddy, wouldn’t you? Yeah, of course. Buddy would’ve done anything for you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Buddy fell for your bullshit. He thought you were his pal, the way you talked to him.’
‘I liked Buddy. I learned a lot talking to him.’
‘I spent twenty years in prison because of that little shit.’
‘Buddy’s here in Slab City, isn’t he? Randy Parker was looking for him, wasn’t he?’
‘Randy Parker was a little shit, too.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘Shut up,’ the man said, kicking Rolly’s legs out from under him. Rolly ate dirt. The man stepped on Rolly’s bad leg. Rolly screamed and let go of the diddley bow. He reached for his ankle as a nauseous bolt of pain shot up the side of his leg. The man applied more pressure. Rolly squirmed. He broke loose and crawled away. The man followed and crouched down next to him. He grabbed Rolly’s collar and shoved his face behind Rolly’s ear.
‘It’s been fun, Roland Waters,’ he said. ‘I could do this all day. But it’s time for me to go. My prize is waiting.’
‘I know who you are. You’re Parnell Gibbons.’
‘What’s in a name?’
‘I met you at the Alien Artifacts shop. You pretended to be Randy Parker.’
‘We met a long time ago, Roland Waters. I recognized you right away when I came in to the store, even with you being old and fat. You know what I said to myself when I saw you?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Look who’s a big fat loser now. That’s what I said to myself. Roland Waters, the skinny little kid with the fast fingers and the big mouth.’
‘I don’t remember you,’ said Rolly.
‘You insulted me.’
‘Sorry.’
Gibbons shoved Rolly back into the ground and stood up. ‘Fuck you, Roland Waters,’ he said.
Rolly rolled onto his side. He watched Parnell pick up the diddley bow and walk away.
‘I know how to open it, the Astral Vibrator,’ said Rolly. ‘I have the key.’
Gibbons stopped. ‘I have the key, too,’ he said, turning back to Rolly. ‘And I have the Sachem.’
‘Let her go,’ said Rolly.
‘Who?’ said the man.
‘You know who I mean. Macy Starr. What have you done with her?’
‘What have I done with her? What kind of question is that?’
‘I know it was you. When we came back to the shop. It was you that locked me in the shop, wasn’t it? After I found Daddy Joe.’
‘That was unfortunate, having to leave the false witness behind. He’s a tough old bird.’
‘Daddy Joe told me everything,’ said Rolly. It was a lie. The paramedics had taken Joe Harper away while Rolly was still talking to the police.
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