The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  As usual, Sylvie kept showing up to keep an eye on things, though with Quinn aboard the usual glitches didn’t much signify. He’d rewired a faulty connection during the sound check, which to Sylvie was the equivalent of building a microwave oven out of paper clips and a Zippo. “How do you know everything?” she asked.

  The answer: twenty-five years futzing with hard-used equipment, coaxing balance and tone out of barrooms with ass-crap acoustics.

  “My boys can barely manage a wall plug,” she said. “Doug’s even worse. I married a brain surgeon who can’t reset our house alarm.” This was their last night, intermission, and they were hanging out at the swag table, where Sylvie guarded a trove of T-shirts emblazoned with the band’s motto, WALK THE LANE, in crucifixion red. She turned to her helper, a volunteer from campus ministry, a florid man in a gingham cowboy shirt. “Did anybody do a headcount?” she asked.

  The man said, “Six hundred, easy.”

  Quinn let the number settle.

  “It’s that song,” the man said. “The local guy’s been playing it.”

  “Quinn told them to save it for the encore,” Sylvie said. She kissed her fingers and swatted Quinn’s chin. “Make ’em wait, says the expert.” She was fifty-five and looked younger than Quinn, her skin lasered smooth as a nectarine, her hair expensively sun-kissed. As she scanned the room, her shrewd eyes narrowed behind her sleek, urban eyeglasses. “Last time we were in Boston, forty-seven people showed up.” She had to yell a bit over the milling crowd.

  “Sometimes you get lucky,” Quinn said.

  “Fifty weeks on the road isn’t luck,” Sylvie said. “Here you go, sweetie.” She handed a shirt to a girl who gave Quinn the eye through the purplish slats of her bangs. The Christian circuit wasn’t always as vanilla-pudding as people thought.

  “If fifty weeks on the road were luck,” Quinn said, “I’d be living pretty large by now.”

  Sylvie regarded him thoughtfully. Over the past three years they’d spent enough time in each other’s company to become friends, after a fashion. “I suppose this must be galling,” she said, “to someone who’s kicked around as long as you have.”

  Onstage the boys were orchestrating the altar call, exhorting the unsaved to make themselves known to Jesus. Nothing too fire-and-brimstone; it sounded more like an invitation to a backstage party. Sweat-beaded fans swirled stageward to be prayed over by faith counselors who led them to rooms and corners for a teaching moment and complimentary Bible. The idea was to get right with Jesus, then fill out a decision card, which came in cartons of two hundred and included checkoff boxes: I commit, et cetera; I recommit, et cetera; I want more information on, et cetera; I wish to receive Resurrection Lane’s weekly e-mail meditation. This was the ministry portion of the show, scheduled for certain preselected venues, the details of which the boys spent many long hours finessing.

  It was understood that Quinn skipped this part.

  “Sometimes,” Sylvie was saying, “I wonder if Doug and I got carried away bestowing the ol’ work ethic. They do nothing but rehearse and perform. And pray, of course. Pray pray pray.”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  “For your information,” Sylvie snapped, “Doug and I are Unitarians.”

  Quinn laughed. “You’re kidding.”

  “They think cousin Zack walks on water. He came out of his first rehab all Rock-of-Ages and they swallowed the whole enchilada.” She made change for a teenager wearing a JC ball cap. “I guess I should be thankful they didn’t stuff coke up their noses. Instead, they took a big soft Jesus pill.” She looked at him. “They tend to relax when you’re here, Quinn. I tend to relax when you’re here. That’s what I really meant.”

  To the cowboy-shirt man, Sylvie said, “Can you hold the fort?” as she urged Quinn into a nearby alcove. “My kids think everybody means well,” she said to him, her voice rising again over the gabbling crowd. “They think nothing bad can happen, despite their cousin’s upstanding example. You’ve got kids, right?”

  He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. The band hadn’t heard about the boy’s death—or, if they had, they hadn’t connected it to Quinn. He preferred things this way, though he experienced a muted twinge, too distant to matter, wondering how he could have known these boys and their mother this long and let so little of himself escape. They regarded him much the way he’d regarded his teachers in grade school, who ceased to exist once they left the brightly lighted classroom.

  “Even Brandon,” she went on, “who should know better—twenty-one, married, an actual grownup—he’s such a pie-in-the-sky little wisher. And why not? Everything’s gone splendidly, thanks to good old Mom. But I’m afraid they might be under a false impression—a completely false impression—of the music business. Do you think they’re under a false impression of the music business?”

  “Brand-new Winnebago,” Quinn said. “That’s kind of a false impression.”

  Sylvie, who could be snappish about her money, said, “That’s not what I meant.”

  “If you mean the guys who showed up in Providence,” Quinn ventured, “the ones in the really obvious sunglasses? Then that’s a different story.” He slid her a look. “What are they offering?”

  “Nothing interesting,” Sylvie said. “Yet.”

  The main floor teemed with fans, some in tears, Bibles clutched to their chests. The place smelled, strangely, suddenly, of lilac. “Doug thinks I’m way over my head,” Sylvie confessed. Her industrial-looking earrings winked as she moved. “My kids are jugheads when it comes to the business end. Zack’s the only one who ever had an actual job. The drug addict who brought them to Jesus. How ironic is that?”

  “Off the scale, I’d say, if you’re really asking.”

  “I mean, how convenient is it to spread the One True Whatever when Momma’s covering overhead?”

  “Be my momma,” Quinn said. “I could use the overhead.”

  He could always get her to laugh. “Oh, I’m just venting,” she said. The house lights flashed. “Can I just say? These people”—she waved her hands in vague directions, indicating who-knew-what—“they annoy me. I miss decorating. This isn’t my true milieu.”

  Sylvie’s true milieu, Quinn gathered, was showing carpet samples to handsome women with frozen foreheads. Quinn’s true milieu was his guitar, and it had never mattered much where or when he played it. But now—shepherding these shiny boys from town to town, these boys standing at the threshold of luck and fortune—an old, thin, discomfiting hope began vining through him, a hope that twenty-five years might be dropped into a slot called “Before.” He’d thought himself done with all that hope.

  “Everything is”—Sylvie’s fingers fluttered—“poised. They’re poised for something.”

  “I don’t hold it against them.”

  “I didn’t think you did. Why would I think that?” She adjusted her power-lunch eyeglasses. “This was a lark that got away from me, is what I’m saying. If I want to get off the train it’s too late.”

  He saw now: she was scared. She charged back to the table and knocked a tower of fridge magnets into a box. “Five minutes, people!” She turned to Quinn and faced him squarely. “I didn’t mean to imply that I can’t handle myself. I can handle myself just fine.”

  Her mouth softened; she looked—briefly—her age, and Quinn realized why she confided in him. Astonishingly enough, if you were somebody like Sylvie—a human lightning bolt—then somebody like Quinn looked right in his skin.

  The house lights flashed again, and Quinn worked his way back to the stage, accosted en route by the girl with purple bangs, who asked him to sign her CD, which Sylvie had packaged with a soft-focus photo of the boys at sunrise. Even Zack—older, thicker, with his beetled forehead and coke-pinked nose—looked freshly released from church. “I’m not in the band,” Quinn told the girl, shouting to be heard. “I’m subbing for Zack.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Now I get it.”

  Get w
hat? His age-wrecked face? Up went the stage lights, the crowd noise, the amplified opening notes of the final set. With the crowd singing along, he tried not to care that he was only the sub, that the night’s doting audience was not his. He absorbed the upswell of affection, the whoop-whoop-whoops, the indecipherable chants, the baffling gestures of Christian approbation. He didn’t mind the decision cards flaring from their waving hands. He didn’t even mind their sweet, saved faces, as long as they asked him to play.

  By two o’clock they were homeward bound, Brandon at the wheel, the interstate flickering with moonlight. In the cushy cabin, tiny lights revealed earnest puddles of activity: the Jays played a sluggish round of Hearts, and Tyler, parked in a bolted-down armchair, had been thoroughly hijacked by a moldering copy of Carrie.

  As they passed the Wells exit, Quinn realized he’d missed his Friday shift without alerting Dawna, his sprightly team captain. “Shit,” he muttered. “Goddamn it.”

  “Language,” said one of the Jays. He laid down his cards. “Something wrong, Pops?”

  “I disappointed someone.”

  “Not us,” he said. “You rocked the house.”

  Quinn hoped this was the beginning of a larger, more fruitful conversation about how, exactly, he’d rocked the house in a manner heretofore untried by Cousin Cokehead. He’d been waiting for just such an opening—had planned to make his case, plain and simple—but the boys fell silent, except for Brandon, who was rehearsing his part in one of their new songs, his crystalline tenor burning with conviction. These kids did not consort with irony; even so, Quinn couldn’t help imagining himself as a fixture here: resident heathen.

  The boys were out past their bedtime, having finished loading up around one. No one had mentioned Zack since Tuesday, though there had been a few furtive phone calls after Sylvie took off in her Miata and left Quinn in charge of packing up. If he was reading between the lines correctly, Resurrection Lane was about to become one man short. Permanently. “What’re you laughing at?” asked Tyler, looking up from his book.

  “The spin of the wheel,” Quinn said enigmatically.

  “There’s no spin of the wheel,” Tyler said. “There’s only the unfathomable intentions of the Lord.” He grinned; they knew what they sounded like but couldn’t help it.

  A giddy chorus of amens followed. The boys were sleepless and junk-food punchy; yet, being young and resilient, they gave off the sheen of freshly washed apples.

  “Does the Lord unfathomably intend for you to sign a contract with the dudes from the other night?” Quinn asked.

  The boys went silent; clearly Sylvie had ordered them to keep their mouths shut.

  “We’re praying about it,” Brandon let slip.

  How had these boys, these children, cracked open a door that Quinn had body-slammed so often, so uselessly? All those years, all those bands, all those almosts, all that old, unslaked thirst.

  He let a few miles intervene, then got up and made his way to the front, where Brandon kept his hands on the wheel at a precise ten o’clock/two o’clock position. He had the face of an archangel and a wife who taught second grade.

  “So. Okay,” Quinn said, buckling up. “I had a great time.”

  “Have guitar will travel,” Brandon said.

  “Right,” Quinn said. “But what I’m saying. If your man doesn’t come back.”

  “He’ll be back,” Brandon said. “He always comes back.”

  “Right. But if he doesn’t.” Quinn turned to address everyone, feeling the hot possibility of a burning bridge at his back. “I’m just saying. I’ve never missed a gig.” He’d gigged with the flu, with a broken ankle, with an eye-gouging hangover, with a new baby at home who cried for seven hours at a crack. He’d never even shown up late.

  They had calm eyes, these boys; calm blue eyes full of sincerity, a compassion born of material ease. They’d grown up in sunny houses brimming with toys and now they had a minor hit being played on the radio, industry types nosing around, family money older than Moses. He was thinking: managed tours, main-stage concerts, civic centers, and symphony halls. He was thinking: Belle, I made it. Here’s your half.

  Quinn’s head pounded with panic. “You guys don’t think that maybe your man isn’t totally committed to, uh, walking the lane?” He could feel all those calm eyes and felt clumsily exposed.

  “He’s family,” Brandon said. That was that.

  When they pulled up in front of Quinn’s building the night was late and still. Brandon hopped out to set Quinn’s amp on the sidewalk, and for a stinging second Quinn felt like a veiny old man. The neighborhood looked bereft at this hour: apartment buildings dark and silent, cars bumpered along the street and abandoned till morning. You could see the bridge from here, and a sliver of the bay, but nobody ever thought to call this a view.

  “You know you’re our man, Pops,” Brandon said. His summery eyes didn’t waver. “The man we count on.” It was then Quinn noticed the others watching him from the rig, and he wondered if his son would in time have looked at him this way.

  He waited for them to drive off, then hauled his stuff upstairs. Certain women found the place charming, though he’d suspended his desires in the wake of Belle’s bereavement and his own confused misery. In the bedroom he had a double bed, monkishly made up, and wooden shelves burdened with books and music. On the eye-level shelf he’d placed the photograph of the boy.

  A memory came winding back, Quinn returning home to find the baby lying awake and staring through the moonlit bars of his crib. He recalled the shimmering nighttime room, the baby lying silent, and his own sudden need to play his childhood guitar, a gift from his own mother, which he’d stored as a slender hope beneath the baby’s crib. He sat close and played as softly as he was able, singing a lullaby his mother had sung to him, aware of the baby’s lunar gaze, fixed first on the shiny guitar, then on Quinn, as if he understood where music really came from. Quinn felt touched by birds as the baby fell finally asleep, but whenever again he tried to play for his son, the baby flinched and clenched and whimpered, until their midnight moment came to feel like something he’d dreamed.

  Propped in a corner of his bedroom now stood the same guitar, the soundboard scarred from hard use. He kept it the way you keep an ailing dog, out of sentiment and gratitude. He brought it to his bed and tuned it to an open G, breathing easier, trying to shed his awful thirst. In the morning he would fill Ona’s bird feeders and mow her lawn; later, he would bring half his week’s take to Belle. He closed his eyes in gratitude for these obligations, however small.

  The night drained away. Quinn played softly, head bent close to the soundboard, and entered a state of grace that could be called—loosely, generously—prayer. At dawn he lay back against his pillow and fell asleep with the guitar in his arms.

  * * *

  This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life memories and shards on tape. This is Part Four.

  . . .

  War? Again?

  . . .

  That’s true. Those other children in your class, they’ll be interviewing grannies who recall only the second one. Maybe not even that one. You’ll have the oldest interviewee by a good forty years.

  . . .

  I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Mr. Linkman awarded extra credit.

  . . .

  We didn’t call it World War I. How could we imagine there’d be a second?

  . . .

  Well, I was here.

  . . .

  What, did you think I went overseas in a helmet? I was right here in Portland, Maine, working ten hours a day in a typing pool and living with three ninnies in a freezing apartment.

  . . .

  Elm Street. Which actually had an elm, a real beaut, right in front of my building. Six months after the Armistice, Howard spotted me on my way back home from my neighbor’s sister’s house near the park. I’d gone over there to hear a record on their new gramophone.

  . . .

  Oh, but the elms were still
alive back then. Portland was loaded with elms. You never saw such trees. It was springtime. May. The war was over and the Spanish flu, too, which took five girls at the insurance company where I worked. They shut us down for two weeks in November, and it was hard to get warm because the movie houses closed, too. Dance halls, churches, everything shut up tight. And in the meantime all those shocked-up boys coming back by the busload, some of them missing arms and legs. By May, the entire city was ready to wake up after a frightful dream. And here was Howard Stanhope, the courtly widower I’d known as a child, calling my name through the springtime.

  . . .

  It’s an old-fashioned phonograph. A record player. The first song I ever heard was “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the president’s daughter.

  . . .

  Good Lord, no, it was terrible. That poor girl sang like a strangulated mosquito.

  . . .

  I couldn’t. I’m not good at this kind of thing.

  . . .

  Oh, I don’t know: meeeem meeeem meeeem, like that. Kind of like that.

  . . .

  Don’t laugh, she couldn’t help it. Oh, now you’ve got me doing it!

  . . .

  Yes, so there was Howard on the corner of Elm and Congress, flagging me down in his gentleman’s voice. “Miss Vitkus, is it not?” he calls to me. You know the type? Mr. Charming?

  . . .

  Well, I was. I was delighted to be recognized. By someone from home, especially. Last I knew he was running a music store on Mercantile Street in Kimball. Oh, the times were so bad. I was nineteen years old, a grown woman, but I think I was still waiting for Maud-Lucy to come back for me. And now here was this hat tipper who remembered my name. I was a dunderhead who mistook my own delight for love.