Desert City Diva

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  Macy sank down to her knees and took Daddy Joe’s hand. ‘I’m here, Daddy Joe.’

  ‘Tell her what happened,’ said Kinnie. ‘You don’t have much time left. No more sleeping dogs. She needs to know. I need to know.’

  Daddy Joe’s lips parted again, as if he might say something, but he didn’t speak.

  ‘He’s too weak to talk,’ said Rolly.

  ‘He’ll just have to listen, then,’ said Kinnie. ‘Daddy Joe, you listen to me. I’m going to tell you a story. You just nod if I get it right. Shake your head if I’m wrong. This might be your last chance to do right by Macy. You understand me? Shake your head if you understand me.’

  Daddy Joe gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

  ‘That time when I left Macy in the mine, when you got so mad at me, when you found the body down there, the skeleton. You knew who it was, didn’t you? That’s why you closed down the mine, wasn’t it?’

  Daddy Joe nodded.

  ‘You knew who it was because you found the necklace there, on the body. You found it with the bones. That’s how you knew it was her. You knew it was Betty.’

  Daddy Joe nodded again. His bottom lip quivered.

  ‘Then you got them to put that gate in to keep people out. Because you knew someone else might find the body. And if they found it, the sheriff would have to investigate, try to identify who the body was. They’d find out it wasn’t that old. And they might find out what you did. How you lied on the witness stand. Then they might have to let that Parnell guy go free. You perjured yourself. You told the jury he was by himself when you arrested him. But he wasn’t, was he? There was a girl with him, a black girl with a little baby. You brought that girl home with you, and her baby.’

  Kinnie paused, waiting for Daddy Joe’s acknowledgement. Rolly could see him still breathing. He nodded.

  ‘That’s what happened, isn’t it, Daddy Joe?’ said Kinnie. ‘Nobody else ever knew. Not even me, not until after Macy ran away and I started thinking about things, trying to figure it out. What happened to her, Daddy Joe? What happened to Betty?’

  Daddy Joe nodded. His lips moved.

  ‘What’d he say?’ said Macy.

  Daddy Joe spoke again, barely audible. ‘Birdie,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ said Macy.

  A thumping sound floated through the air. A shadow passed across the sunlight pouring from the window.

  ‘The paramedics are here,’ said Kinnie. She stood up. ‘I’m going outside. Keep talking to him. Keep him responding.’

  Kinnie left the room. Macy held Daddy Joe’s hand up to her chest.

  ‘Daddy Joe? It’s Macy,’ she said. ‘What’s the birdie?’

  Daddy Joe’s lips parted. It was almost a smile.

  ‘The little birdie,’ said Macy. ‘What’s the little birdie, Daddy Joe?’

  ‘In the dark. Led me to you.’

  ‘Yes, Daddy Joe. I remember that now. I told you about the little birdie that was my friend. The little birdie that stayed with me all night.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Rolly. ‘What did this bird sound like? Do you remember?’

  Daddy Joe pulled his hand away from Macy. It wavered as he pointed two fingers up at the whiteboard, the word on the board. He gave his hand back to Macy. She looked at Rolly.

  ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘He was with me, in the cave, when Kinnie left me there. That Buddy guy was there.’

  The paramedics arrived, Kinnie leading them in. Macy and Rolly retreated into the living room. They walked outside with Kinnie and watched the emergency crew load Daddy Joe onto the helicopter. The helicopter flew away over the ridge.

  ‘Kinnie,’ said Macy, ‘why did you lie about Aunt Betty?’

  ‘Daddy Joe made me promise. He was going to give you that diddley bow thing and tell you the whole story when you turned eighteen. He was going to explain it all to you.’

  ‘I remember him, Kinnie. The birdman. We would hear him sometimes. When you and I went exploring. He helped Daddy Joe find me, that time you left me in the cave.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Macy.’

  ‘Was it him? Did he kill my mother?’

  ‘He didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Your mom, Betty, heard the birdman calling one night. She tried to find him. She ran away. Daddy Joe didn’t tell anybody because of the trial. Those bones that we found in the cave – that was your momma.’

  ‘I know,’ said Macy.

  ‘He didn’t mean for her to die, Macy. That birdman was your daddy. He loved your mama.’

  ‘I know, Kinnie,’ said Macy. ‘I know he did.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Homecoming

  Rolly Waters stood offstage at The Range in Slab City. His Fender Telecaster hung from his shoulder as he waited to go on. It had been less than a week since he’d first played with the Slab City Rockers, a few days longer than that since he’d first met Macy Starr while eating Mexican food at two-thirty in the morning. Macy was here, sitting in the front row, the guest of honor in a beat-up reclining chair placed front and center in the audience. The Rockers would close out tonight’s ceremony, a memorial service for the man the Slabbers called Goldhands: Buddy Meeks. The Rockers would play all night if they needed to. They would play until everyone in the audience felt that they’d done Buddy justice, until everyone had gone home, until they’d given the proper adieu. Until the sun came up, when the morning light told them it was time to move on.

  The first part of the evening was for others to take the stage, a chance to express their personal feelings and appreciation. Cool Bob acted as master of ceremonies, introducing each person who offered a testimonial, poem or prayer. Many of the Slabbers told personal stories of how Goldhands had helped them, how they came to respect his eccentric ways. They talked about the weird birdman who had flitted through camp, the one who fixed their generators, hooked up their solar panels, restored old guitars so they played better than new. They talked about how they kept strangers away, protecting his privacy. One man displayed drawings of a sculpture he planned to build in East Jesus as a more permanent memorial, a large golden hand you could play like a harp, with guitar strings stretched between the various fingers.

  Rolly and Macy had arrived early that afternoon in the Tioga, which they’d borrowed again from Alicia. Rolly’s father had returned home from the hospital two days earlier. Macy had insisted on coming along to meet him. Her salty style seemed to amuse the old sailor. Rolly was glad to have her along to take up the slack. Their conversation remained civil, not strained. It helped Rolly avoid the big questions his mother had hoped he’d address with his father. Those questions were for another visit, one he’d make by himself when he screwed up his courage. He had enough on his plate now, keeping up with Macy and surviving a second trip to Slab City.

  Sometime next week the DNA tests would come back, and Macy would find out for sure if Buddy Meeks had been her father. Then the coroner’s office would honor her claim. Macy had a plan. She’d proposed it to Rolly earlier in the day. It was a crazy and reckless plan, but he’d have to give her an answer on the return trip.

  After parking and setting up the Tioga, they went to meet Bob at his trailer. From there, Bob took them to Buddy’s place, an old trailer parked further down the road from the East Jesus. Buddy had staked out a modest kingdom over the years, delineating his territory with a hodgepodge of barbed wire, old tires and corrugated tin sheets. A box had been set on a post at the entrance. There was a tuning fork set in the top of the box. According to Bob, anybody wanting to communicate with Buddy had to write out a message, set it inside the box and tap the tuning fork. An hour later, sometimes as long as a day, Buddy would show up at your campsite and take a look at the problem that needed to be addressed, tossing gravel and dirt at your window to announce his arrival. You could pay him in food or any discarded junk he found to his liking.

  Buddy’s property was covered in neatly arranged piles of junk, sorted by types. Computer pa
rts, plastic dolls, metal wire and pieces of wood were all separated into individual piles. Two workbenches sat in the shade, close to the trailer. Bob showed them the table where he’d watched Buddy make gold, where Buddy melted down old motherboards with Bunsen burners and mixed in chemicals to separate the gold from the slurry. A half-finished diddley bow lay on the second bench, its roughed-out shape awaiting more passes with increasingly fine gradations of sandpaper.

  The inside of the trailer looked surprisingly neat, even orderly, filled with papers and technical books. There were drawings and sketches taped to the walls, stacks of composition books filled with paragraphs of text and mathematical equations. There were cans of beans in the cupboards – white beans and black beans, pinto and red beans, baked, refried and barbequed. There was no identification to be found, no photos of Buddy, of any family and friends. He’d stripped away all vestiges of a personal life except for one item, a promotional flyer taped to the wall across from the dining table, a flyer for DJ Macy Starr.

  Bob told Macy the trailer was hers if she wanted it. The police had already been through everything. Bob and the Rockers had set up a volunteer watch to discourage scavengers until Macy decided what she wanted to keep. He left Rolly and Macy alone in the trailer. They sat next to each other in the dining-room booth, going through papers and notebooks.

  ‘How much you think I can get for this trailer?’ said Macy.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How much do I owe you?’ said Macy.

  ‘I haven’t figured that out yet,’ said Rolly.

  ‘You think the trailer will pay for it?’

  ‘It would more than pay for it, I’m pretty sure.’

  ‘I might want to keep it a while.’

  ‘We’ll work something out.’

  ‘This piece of ass don’t come cheap, if that’s what you mean by working it out.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘You’re done with me, right, Waters? No more boning with Macy?’

  ‘Would you stop it?’

  Macy surveyed the trailer. She seemed nervous, even more twitchy than usual. ‘It’s weird,’ she said. ‘Having a dad.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Rolly.

  ‘Your dad’s OK, not as bad as you made him seem,’ said Macy.

  ‘He wasn’t drunk,’ said Rolly.

  ‘What’s he like when he’s drunk?’

  ‘Louder. Likes to tell you what’s wrong with you. All the ways you’ve failed to meet his expectations.’

  ‘That did kinda piss me off, the way he orders your stepmom around.’

  ‘I don’t think she even hears it anymore.’

  ‘Is that how you were? When you were a drunk?’

  ‘I was very happy when I was a drunk. I liked everybody.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’

  ‘I didn’t always make good decisions. About people.’

  Macy laughed. ‘Hell, Waters, you don’t make good decisions when you’re sober. How else do you explain me?’

  Rolly smiled. He couldn’t explain Macy Starr. He didn’t need to. ‘Have you called Eric Ozzie yet?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ Macy sighed. ‘I guess I should meet him.’

  ‘He could tell you more about Betty. He’s your uncle, after all.’

  Macy scrunched her nose. Her dirty-blonde dreadlocks bounced off her shoulders.

  ‘Does this mean I’m gonna have to start going over to his place for Christmas and stuff now? I don’t know if I’m ready for that shit. I like being unattached.’

  ‘Just meet him and see how it goes. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Shut up and deal with it. That’s what you’re saying.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Aargh,’ said Macy. She waved her hands in the air. ‘I don’t feel connected to any of this. The weird music and the alien shit. All those people that died. It seems like I should be freaking out or something. It’s all kind of horrible. I mean, I’ve seen four dead people in the last week. My mom’s a pile of bones and my daddy died in my arms. Shouldn’t I be freaking out more?’

  ‘We all process stuff differently.’

  ‘You’ve seen people die before. How did you react?’

  ‘Well, one time I threw up.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Something more visceral.’

  ‘It was pretty visceral.’

  ‘You think anyone knows about it, besides us?’ said Macy.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The room, with the gold.’

  ‘Kinnie might know. She knows about Betty.’

  ‘You think she was testing us?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about the gold. All she talked about was the bones.’

  ‘I thought that was weird too. She just told us it was Betty’s body.’

  ‘It’s a freaking weird thing not to mention, right? A gold room and gold bones?’

  Rolly nodded.

  ‘We wouldn’t have known about it without you playing that vibrator thing so the lights would go on.’

  ‘No. I guess not.’

  ‘How much do you think all that stuff is worth?’

  ‘No idea. I’m not sure how you get it all out of there.’

  ‘Remember that guy, Leonard, I told you about?’ said Macy.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy that built Salvation Mountain.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘You remember how I thought it was cool, when someone goes crazy and spends their whole life on something that’s not all about money.’

  Rolly nodded.

  ‘My dad was like that, wasn’t he?’ said Macy. ‘He could’ve kept all that gold for himself, retired down to Puerto Vallarta or something. That’s what the others would’ve done – Gibbons or Randy or that Dotty lady. My dad must’ve spent a lot of time working on that room, the gold rocket ship or whatever it is. How many years you think he spent doing that? Just to help those people out, make sure they connected with the aliens, hitching a ride to the planets or whatever it was. That’s what it was about, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  Macy slid out of the booth. She walked to the rear of the trailer then walked back.

  ‘I want to go back there,’ she said, ‘when I get the body. I’ll cremate him and take his ashes there. Put him back with my mom. That’s where he belongs. I want to seal the place up.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  ‘I’ll get some cement or something, maybe some boards and rebar, get rid of that ladder and seal up the hole. I don’t want any spelunkers or gold bugs or aliens finding the place. I want it to stay like that, forever. At least until that Conjoinment thing comes along again. I’m the only one left now who was there with the UVTs. I’m the Sachem. I’m in charge. It’s my responsibility now.’

  ‘I guess you could look at it that way.’

  ‘It’s a real word, you know. I looked it up.’

  ‘Sachem? What’s it mean?’

  ‘It’s an Indian word. The chief. That little gold baby is now the chief.’

  ‘Hail to the chief.’

  ‘So, are you in, Waters?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘I want you to go with me,’ said Macy. ‘I want you to play that diddley bow again, like you did before. So I can see it one last time. Then we’ll leave him inside, with my mom, and seal the place up. They’ll be together. I’ll be free. That’s what I want, Waters.’

  Rolly blinked and looked out at the audience. Someone was calling his name. Cool Bob stood at the microphone, beckoning Rolly on to the center stage. The audience cheered as he stepped out from the wings. He waved and connected his guitar cord into the amplifier. He wondered if he could ever plug a guitar into an amplifier again without thinking of the Astral Vibrator and the golden room, a room in a cave in the mountains, a room that lit
up when you played the right notes, golden notes for the gold-blooded aliens. He wouldn’t play any golden notes tonight. He would only play notes that were dirty and rough, bent notes and blue notes and slide notes. He would play imperfect frequencies for all the flawed earthlings he knew. He would play for the heretic citizens of Slab City, his own dishonored father and the eccentric orphan girl Macy Starr, for everyone who was going to die. As they all would. Someday.

  The drummer counted to four. The band launched into the song. He joined them. The sound they made was like a beautiful rocket ship, breaking through gravity and arcing into an uncertain universe, full of bright stars.