Voice

by Joseph Garraty

  John leaned forward. “Cool.”

  Case nodded. She drove through campus, looking around at the buildings. Students walked between classes, but they didn’t walk very far.

  “This is a very small college,” she said with some asperity.

  “I told you it was, didn’t I?”

  She pulled over to the curb, stopped, and put the car in park. John pressed himself against the car door.

  “John?” Her voice was pitched low and felt tight in her throat.

  “Yes?”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me that this college is going to pay us eight hundred dollars to play for a couple of hours.”

  He squirmed. Case saw a frantic look in his eye, and he looked out the window like he was half-thinking about making a run for it. “I never said that,” he said.

  She ground her teeth. “You told me, very clearly, at least twice, that I would personally take home two hundred dollars from this gig.”

  “That’s true,” he said.

  “It better be. If you stiff me, I will pull your balls off.”

  John nodded hastily. “I won’t stiff you, I swear. I never lied to you—I told you you’d get two hundred dollars, and you’ll get it.”

  She faced forward and put the car in gear. Before she pulled away from the curb, something else occurred to her. She turned back to John. “How much is the total pay for the gig?”

  “Six hundred,” he said, too fast. She gave him a flat look. “Forty dollars,” he mumbled.

  “Forty dollars,” she repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, John had a stupid, sickly grin on his face. “You dumb fuck,” she said. “If—and I stress if—I stick with this band for any length of time, you are never allowed to handle band finances again. Got that?”

  John nodded. “So, since now you know about the forty, do you suppose that maybe—”

  “Don’t even joke about that. Just shut up, John.”

  He shut up.

  ***

  “This is a fucking cafeteria,” Case said.

  John glanced nervously at the two girls from the Student Activities Committee, who were in turn looking nervously at Case, as if she might go off or something. The four of them stood in the basement of the student union, in a little corner area full of ugly, varnished yellow tables and benches.

  “It’s not really a cafeteria,” John said. “It has more of a, I don’t know—coffeehouse vibe.”

  Case didn’t bother to address that. She walked over to the tiny platform that constituted a stage and made a show of inspecting it. The drums would fit on it, just. She put her hands on her hips. “Where’s the PA?”

  One of the girls—John thought her name was Charlotte—pointed at a big green Rubbermaid box in the corner. Case walked over and pulled a snarl of cables out of it and looked inside. She dropped the mess on the floor and then picked up a speaker that was about the size of a toaster. The look on her face could have curdled milk.

  John walked to the box, trailing the nervous committee girls. There was a second toaster-sized speaker in the box and a cheap combination mixer and power amp.

  “I, uh, guess these are the monitors?” he said hopefully.

  Case gave him another of her withering stares. She could communicate an awful lot with silence, John had noticed. Mostly disapproval. And anger. She was very good at anger.

  John had a sinking feeling. “Those are the mains, aren’t they?”

  “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.

  “Yes,” Case said, ignoring her. “Those are the main PA speakers.”

  “No monitors? At all?”

  “You figure it out.”

  Danny and Quentin showed up then. Danny took in the place in one glance. His forehead wrinkled up and his mouth tightened in that way it did when he was trying not to laugh. He was being a good sport, but that only pissed John off.

  Quentin looked like somebody had punched him.

  “Well, let’s get the gear in,” Danny said. He chuckled. “I’ll get the roadies started and make sure the tour manager has security on standby. Looks like it’s gonna be a rowdy gig.”

  Case grinned, and it looked like there was actual humor in her smile instead of just spite. That made John feel even worse—this wasn’t much of a gig, but it was still important, dammit! His guts were churning; he was worried about the equipment, about whether anybody would show up, and above all about his own performance. Was it too much to ask for them to take it seriously?

  “I’ll start unloading,” he said, and he stalked out.

  ***

  They put the little speakers up on chairs that were themselves on top of tables they’d dragged to the sides of the “stage.” There were, in fact, no monitors, so they angled the speakers in toward the center to try to give John a fighting chance to hear himself. If he moved so much as half an inch forward, squalls of screeching feedback rent the air, but if he moved back a step, he couldn’t hear himself at all.

  Not that he could hear himself that well in any case. The speakers were small and not nearly loud enough to get over the drums. At first, John just turned the amp up louder, but the speakers started to distort, putting out an ugly, compressed sound that fuzzed out whenever he got loud. That wouldn’t work, so he tried fiddling with the equalizer to find some way to get the vocals to stand out more in the mix.

  After twenty or thirty minutes of this, Case pushed him out of the way and cranked the amp up until well past the point of ugly distortion. John grimaced. His voice sounded like it was coming out of a megaphone and going through a fuzzbox at the same time.

  Case listened for a moment and then nodded. “That’s not a bad sound for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “It makes you sound mean. Can’t understand a damn thing anyway, so you may as well sound like you’ve got some attitude.”

  He wasn’t sure the speakers were going to survive the experience, but the sound definitely had attitude. It made the feedback problem even worse, though, until he found the one spot where the mic could stand without shrieking all the time. He resolved not to touch the mic stand the whole night. That would be awkward—he had no idea what he’d do with his arms, and he suspected he would look like a fucking tool, but those seemed like the least of all available evils.

  It was a good thing they’d arrived early, because sound check took over two hours. They finished up less than twenty minutes before the show was supposed to start. A handful of curious students had already taken up some of the chairs toward the back.

  Behind them, standing in the very back corner, stood an aging ex-rocker, hair hanging lank around his face, his eyes narrowed in a steady, measuring squint.

  What the fuck is he doing here? John’s nerves, already frayed from the gathering crowd and the stress of sound check, sizzled with unwanted extra voltage. His stomach heaved and twisted, and he excused himself. It was all he could do not to run to the bathroom, and as soon as he got around the corner, he did run. He made it to the toilet just before his meager lunch came up.

  He washed his hands and rinsed out his mouth. His hands were shaking even worse than they usually did before a show. He stared at himself in the mirror for a minute or more, working up his courage, and then he went back out.

  The guys—Case included—were waiting just to the side of the stage.

  “All right,” he said, trying not to look at the crowd, or past it to the man appraising them at the back of the room. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  The performance turned out to be a good time, much to Danny’s surprise. They made a few embarrassing fuckups at the beginning, but the crowd had a good attitude and didn’t seem to care. About thirty bored college kids had showed up, probably because the entertainment options in Wichita Falls, Texas, were pretty thin, particularly for the under-twenty-one crowd. They weren’t the most animated crowd he’d ever seen—mostly they just sat at the tables and
nodded their heads—but they clapped at the right parts and didn’t run off, so that was cool.

  John didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he jammed them in his pockets and left them there the whole time. He looked like a flagpole or a stalk of corn, and Danny felt bad for him. He sang as badly as Danny had ever heard him, and between songs, he made awkward, garbled jokes into the mic and shuffled his feet a lot.

  That was a shame, but it would be okay. It was obvious that the students had come out because they were bored, but that they stayed because of Case. She was smokin’ tonight, playing like a woman possessed. Danny had been worried before the show—she had seemed more than a little put out at the venue, and really pissed at John, doubtless for one of the ten thousand reasons John usually pissed people off—but Danny had cracked a few jokes and gotten a smile out of her, and once the music started she loosened up a lot. She was a hell of a player, and it was hard not to watch her move once she got into it. Danny stared, just like everyone. At one point, she turned around in the middle of a song and happened to lock eyes with him. It felt like a spark—no, lightning—jumped from her to him. He flushed and almost lost the beat. She turned away in an eyeblink, and maybe it was wishful thinking or just his distractedness, but he thought that she fumbled the next chord.

  During the last song, she got up on one of the tables and played her solo to raucous cheering. This was probably the loudest it had ever been in this room, Danny thought.

  They got a hell of an ovation when they finally finished up, a little before ten, and the four of them stared at each other in bemusement and surprise. Danny gave Quentin and John a high-five each, and then held up a hand for Case.

  “That’s really lame,” she said, but her eyes were bright and she was smiling.

  “Come on.”

  She slapped his hand hard enough to sting his palm.

  A lot of the students hung out while the band tore down, and while most of them wanted to talk to Case—she was not incredibly receptive to this, Danny noted, answering in monosyllables—a few of them were musicians who wanted to talk shop with Danny and Quentin. Danny chattered happily about snare drum heads and bass pedal tension, Neil Peart and Mike Portnoy and all the usual drummers-only topics, and before he knew it one of the kids invited him and the rest of the band to a party off-campus.

  That was when he noticed that John was gone.

  Chapter 4

  “Fucking Christ,” John spat as he kicked open the doors exiting the student union. The air had grown stifling and oppressive inside, and he wanted nothing more than to get out, to get as far away from this building as possible. He’d tolerated it as long as he could, but as the mob formed around Case and zit-faced college kids lined up to talk to Danny—and a couple of cute college girls stood giggling and talking up Quentin, for fuck’s sake!—he’d stood, alone, just in front of the stage, waiting for any sort of acknowledgment. None had come. One kid gave him a sheepish nod and half a smile as he walked past, trying to get to Danny. When John had finally stalked off, nobody had even noticed.

  “What a goddamn disaster.”

  Outside, a soft breeze blew over him, but instead of cooling him down, it made him unnaturally aware of his clammy, sweaty skin.

  The scent reached him before he saw the man—cigarette smoke covering something nastier, more elemental. John turned, and though he knew what he would see, he still gave a start when he saw the old guy, the ex-rocker, leaning against the wall as he’d leaned against the bar two weeks before.

  “What are you doing here?” John asked.

  The guy exhaled a cloud of smoke that curled and writhed in the air. “Your band did good tonight, Johnny,” he whispered.

  Those few kind words blunted the edge of John’s misery, and he started to relax. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “Not you, Johnny. The band.” The guy looked directly at John, his eyes gleaming black caverns in his skull, and the corners of his lips curled up. “You sucked.”

  “Hey, asshole, I—”

  The guy flicked his cigarette to the sidewalk and walked toward John. “Yeah?”

  John looked down. “I wasn’t asking for your opinion,” he muttered.

  Cold, damp fingertips touched his chin and pushed his head up to meet the man’s eyes. “It’s not gonna get any better, you know. They’re good. Your guitar player is real good. She’s gonna get up on stage and shake her ass, and you’re gonna be left outside, watching them clamor for her attention every time.”

  “That’s . . . that’s not really fair,” John said. “She works hard.”

  “The band’s got the magic, Johnny. Believe me, I know. They’re gonna be the real deal. How long do you think it’ll be before they figure out you’re holding them back? Half a dozen more shows? Maybe a dozen, at most? You looking forward to starting over when they shitcan you?”

  “They can’t fire me,” John protested, but he heard the whine in his own voice. “It’s my band. Danny’s my brother, for Christ’s sake.”

  An awful sound clawed its way up from the man’s throat, as if he were coughing up jagged metal hairballs. It took John a second to recognize it as laughter.

  “Sure,” the guy said. “Sure.”

  “What do you want from me?” John shouted. “I’m doing the best I can, dammit! Did you follow me all the way up here just to make me feel like shit? You’ve got that much time on your hands?”

  “I’m telling you how it is, Johnny. And like I told you before, I can help you. If you’ve got the guts for it.”

  “How are you going to help me? You can’t even fucking talk.” That got another hideous laugh from the man, so John kept talking to drown it out. “And what do you know about me? How did you know my name? How did you know about the money? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  The guy put out a pale hand. “Call me Douglas. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Johnny. You’re going to do great things.”

  John reluctantly shook the man’s hand, then pulled away, fighting the urge to wipe his hand on his pants. The wind picked up, and without the cigarette masking the smell of decay, John’s stomach rolled over. “Yeah, I’m off to a hell of a start.”

  “Everybody was nobody once.”

  “Most of them stay that way.”

  “Come with me, and I promise you won’t.” The man’s words hung heavy in the air, the whisper seeming to echo and scrape in John’s ears. This seemed like such a crock of shit, and yet—

  The door to the student union swung open behind him, letting the yammering of the small crowd out into the night. It seemed to violate the silence somehow, and John clenched his fists.

  “Hey, there you are.” It was Quentin. “We’re going to a party, come on.” Quentin’s eyes glanced over at Douglas, then quickly back to John. “Come on,” he repeated.

  Douglas spoke before John could answer, his nasty whisper carrying on the night air. “You having a good time, Quentin? Meet some nice girls in there?”

  “Come on, John.”

  A lurking green anger flared to life in John’s heart. “Answer the man’s question,” he said. “You meet some nice girls in there?”

  Quentin reached one hand back and rested it on the door handle. “Yeah, I guess so. You coming or what?”

  “Nope. You have a good time.” He turned to Douglas. This is crazy! part of him thought. You don’t know this guy from Adam! But it was burned raw by the sudden release of anger. “All right. Let’s go.”

  Douglas nodded and started walking. After a moment’s hesitation, John followed.

  Quentin rushed forward and grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts? Who the hell is this guy? What do you want with him?”

  John shook Quentin’s hand away. “Just business. Go have a good time. I’ll call you later.”

  Ahead of him, Douglas was still walking, boots tapping a regular rhythm on the sidewalk. John rushed to catch up.

  He could feel Quentin watching them until they turned the corner.
<
br />   ***

  “Get in,” Douglas said.

  John stared, openly gawking at the sleek black car parked at the curb. He didn’t know from cars, but this one was forty years old if it was a day, and yet it was so pristine it glistened in the moonlight. It had a hungry look to it, poised to leap though it wasn’t even running yet. “This is your ride?”

  “Yeah. Nineteen-seventy Charger. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. Get in.”

  The car started with a throaty growl, and John barely got in before Douglas peeled away from the curb. The lights of Wichita Falls, Texas, faded in the rearview mirror, and in a surprisingly short period of time, they were in the middle of nowhere. No streetlights, no house lights, no lights of any kind other than the stars and a fat, pale moon. This country seemed somehow slippery in time. Away from the road and the power lines, it could have been yesterday, or a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred. Perhaps the illusion would disappear in the daylight—there’d be a tractor in the fields, airplanes overhead, something—but right now he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had invaded an earlier era. The few houses they passed with their electric porch lights seemed to shrink against the surrounding darkness.

  John’s cell phone rang, and he jumped. He took it from his pocket, looked at the small screen. Danny. John turned the phone off.

  “Where are we going?” he asked at last.

  Douglas’s face was ghostly in the light from the dash. “You’ve heard of Robert Johnson?”

  “Yeah. Blues guy.”

  “The blues guy. He inspired Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix—all those guys. You know the story they tell about him?”

  “Sure. Everybody knows that one. He went down to the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil.” John tried to laugh, but it died in his throat.

  Douglas nodded. “He was nobody once, just like everybody else. Just a kid living on a plantation who wanted to play the blues more than anything else. He worked like hell, but it came slow.” His mouth twitched in a smile that was gone a second later. “You know how it is.