The Last Days

by WESTERFELD, SCOTT

  I was an insect in a canyon of giant TVs, mystified and irrelevant.

  And penniless.

  I’d never felt poor before, never once. I’d always thought it was moronic to ogle car ads and store windows, but now that I needed it, I saw money everywhere—in silver initials on thousand-dollar handbags, woven like gold threads into suits and silk scarves, and in the flickering images overhead. On the subway coming up here, I’d coveted the dollars invisibly stockpiled in magnetic strips on MetroCards, even the change rattling in beggars’ paper cups.

  Money, money, everywhere.

  I couldn’t go back to my piece-of-crap guitar after that Stratocaster. I had to own that same smooth action, those purring depths and crystal highs. Of course, maybe it didn’t have to be a ’75 with gold pickups. In the music stores on Forty-eighth Street, I’d found a few cheaper guitars I could live with, but I still needed to scrape together about two thousand bucks before the crazy woman returned.

  Problem was, I had no idea how.

  I’m not lazy, but money and me don’t mix. Every time I get a job, something always happens. The boss tells me to smile, pretending I want to be at work when I’d rather be anywhere else. Or makes me call in every week to ask for my hours, and it turns into a whole extra job finding out when I’m supposed to be at my job. And whenever I explain these issues, someone always asks me the dreaded question, If you hate it so much, why don’t you just quit?

  And I say, “Good point.” And quit.

  In that flickering canyon of advertising, two thousand dollars had never seemed so far away.

  Zahler was waiting at the corner where he’d said to meet, seven dogs in tow.

  He was panting and sweaty, but his entourage looked happy—gazing up at the signs, sniffing at tourists passing by. It was all just flickering lights to them.

  No jobs, no money. Lucky dogs.

  “How much you get paid for that, Zahler?”

  “Not enough,” he panted. “Almost got killed on the way down here!”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. One of the little ones was nibbling me, and I knelt and petted him. “This guy looks deadly.”

  “No really, Moz. There was this alley . . . and this cat.”

  “An alley cat? And you with only seven dogs.” One of which was gigantic, like a horse with long, flowing hair. I stroked its head, laughing at Zahler.

  Still panting, he pointed his free hand at one of the little ones. “It’s all his fault, for peeing.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was just—never mind.” He frowned. “Listen, you hear that drumming? It’s her. Come on.”

  I grabbed the monster-dog’s leash from Zahler, and then two more, pulling the three of them away from a pretzel cart whose ripples of heat smelled like seared salt and fresh bread. “So, you think Pearl will approve of this drummer?”

  “Sure. Pearl’s all about talent, and this girl is fexcellent.”

  “But she plays on the street, Zahler? She could be homeless or something.”

  He snorted. “Compared to Pearl, you and me are practically homeless. Didn’t you see that apartment?”

  “Yeah, I saw that apartment.” I could still smell the money crammed into every corner.

  “And there were stairs. More floors than we even saw.”

  “Sure, Pearl’s insanely rich. And this is supposed to convince me she can deal with a homeless drummer?”

  “We don’t know that this girl’s homeless, Moz. Anyway, all I’m saying is that if Pearl can deal with you and me, she’s no snob.”

  I shrugged. Snob wasn’t the word I would’ve used.

  “Are you still bummed because of what she did to the Riff?”

  “No. Once I got used to the idea of flushing all those years of practice down the toilet, I got over it.”

  “Dude! You are still bummed.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Look, I know it hurts, Moz. But she’s going to make us huge!”

  “I get it, Zahler.” I sighed, angling my dogs away from a hot-dog cart. Of course, practicing yesterday had hurt—but so did getting a tattoo, or watching a perfect sunset, or playing till your fingers bled. Sometimes you just had to sit there and deal with the pain.

  Pearl had rubbed me raw, but she knew how to listen. She could hear the heart of the Big Riff, and she hadn’t done anything I wouldn’t have if I’d been listening. I’d had six years to figure out what she’d recognized in six minutes. That’s what made me cringe.

  That and the whammy she’d put on Zahler. He wouldn’t shut up about how brilliant Pearl was, how she was going to make us big, how things were finally going to happen. Like all those years with just the two of us had been a waste of time.

  Zahler had a total crush on Pearl—that was obvious. But if I said so out loud, he’d just roast me with his death stare. And talk about wasting time: girls like her were about as likely to hook up with boys like us as Zahler’s dogs were to pull him to the moon.

  “Okay, I thought you said she was a drummer.”

  “What?” Zahler cried above the rumble. “You don’t call that drumming?”

  “Well, she’s got drumsticks. But I thought drummers were to supposed to have drums.” I shook my head, trying to keep my three curious dogs from surging into the rapt crowd of tourists, Times Square locals, and loitering cops surrounding the woman.

  “Yeah, well, imagine if she did have drums. Listen to how much sound she’s getting out of those paint cans!”

  “Those are actually paint buckets, Zahler.”

  “What’s the diff?”

  I sighed. Painting had been one of my shorter-lived jobs, because they just gave you the colors to use, instead of letting you decide. “Paint cans are the metal containers that paint comes in. Paint buckets are the plastic tubs you mix it up in. Neither of them are drums.”

  “But listen, Moz. Her sound is huge!”

  My brain was already listening—my mouth was just giving Zahler a hard time out of habit and general annoyance—and the woman really did have a monster sound. Around her was arrayed every size of paint bucket you could buy, some stacked, some upside down, a few on their sides, making a sort of giant plastic xylophone.

  It took me a minute to figure out how a bunch of paint buckets could have so much power. She’d set up on a subway grate, suspending herself over a vast concrete echo chamber. Her tempo matched the timing of the echoes rumbling up from below, as if a ghost drummer were down there following her, exactly one beat behind. As my head tilted, I heard other ghosts: quicker echoes from the walls around us and from the concrete awning overhead.

  It was like an invisible drum chorus, led effortlessly from its center, her sticks flashing gracefully across battered white plastic, long black dreadlocks flying, eyes shut tight.

  “She’s pretty fool, Zahler,” I admitted.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Especially if we could rebuild this chunk of Times Square every place we played.”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “What, the echoes? You never heard of digital delay?”

  I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the same. Wouldn’t be as big.”

  “Doesn’t have to be as big, Moz. We don’t want her playing a gigantic drum solo like this; we want her smaller, fitting in with the rest of the band. Didn’t you learn anything yesterday?”

  I glared at him, the anger spilling out from the place I thought I’d had it tucked away, rippling through me again. “Yeah, I did: that you’re a total sucker for every chick who comes along with an instrument. Even if it’s a bunch of paint buckets!”

  His jaw dropped. “Dude! That is totally unfool! You just said she was great. And you know Pearl’s fexcellent too. Now you’re going to get all boys-only on me?”

  I turned away, thoughts echoing in my brain, like my skull was suddenly empty and lined with concrete. Between the Stratocaster that wasn’t mine, the other guitars I couldn’t afford, Pearl’s demolition of the Big Riff, and now the thought of paint buck
ets, it’d been too many adjustments to make in forty-eight hours.

  I almost wished it was just Zahler and me again. We’d been like a team that was a hundred points behind—we weren’t going to win anything, so we could just play and have fun. But Pearl had changed that. Everything was up in the air, and how it all came down mattered now.

  Part of me hated her for that and hated Zahler for going along so easily.

  He kept quiet, wrangling the dogs while I calmed myself down.

  “All right,” I finally said. “Let’s talk to her. What have we got to lose?”

  We waited till she was packing up, stacking the buckets into one big tower. Her muscles glowed with sweat, and a few splinters from a stick she’d broken rolled in the breeze from a subway passing underneath.

  She glanced at us and our seven dogs.

  “You’re pretty good,” I said.

  She jutted her chin toward a paint bucket that was right side up and half full of change and singles, then went back to stacking.

  “Actually, we were wondering if you wanted to play with us sometime.”

  She shook her head, one of her eyes blinking rapidly. “This corner is mine. Had it for a year.”

  “Hey, we’re not moving in on you,” Zahler spoke up, waving his free hand. “We’re talking about you playing in our band. Rehearsing and recording and stuff. Getting famous.”

  I cringed. “Getting famous” had to be the lamest reason for doing anything.

  She shrugged, just a twitch of her shoulders. “How much?”

  “How much . . . what?” Zahler said.

  But it was obvious to me. The same thing that had been obvious all day.

  “Money,” I answered. “She wants money to play with us.”

  His eyes bugged. “You want cash?”

  She took a step forward and pulled a photo ID card from her pocket, waved it in Zahler’s face. “See that? That’s from the MTA. Says I can play down in the subway, legal and registered. Had to sit in front of a review panel to get that.” As she put the card away, a little shiver went through her body. “Except I don’t go down there anymore.”

  She kicked the upturned paint bucket, the pile of loose change clanking like a metallic cough. “Seventy, eighty bucks in there. Why would I play for free?”

  “Whoa, sorry.” Zahler started to pull his dogs away, giving me a look like she’d asked for our blood.

  I didn’t move, though, staring at the bucket, at the bills fluttering on top. There were fives in there—it probably totaled a hundred easy. She had every right to ask for money. The world was all about money; only a lame-ass bunch of kids wouldn’t know that.

  “Okay,” I said. “Seventy-five a rehearsal.”

  Zahler froze, his eyes popping again.

  “How much for a gig?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. One-fifty?”

  “Two hundred.”

  I sighed. The words I don’t know had just cost me fifty bucks. That’s how it worked with money: you had to know, or at least act like you did. “Okay. Two hundred.”

  I held out my hand to shake, but she just passed me her business card.

  “Are you crazy, Moz? Pearl’s going to freak when she finds out she has to pay for a drummer.”

  “She’s not paying anyone, Zahler. I am.”

  “Yeah, right. And where are you going to get seventy-five bucks?”

  I looked down at the dogs. They were staring in all directions at the maelstrom of Times Square, gawking like a bunch of tourists from Jersey. I tried to imagine rounding up customers, going door-to-door like Zahler had, putting up signs, making schedules. No way.

  My plan was much better.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got an idea.”

  “Yeah, sure you do. But what about the Strat? You can’t save up for a guitar if you’re paying out seventy-five bucks two or three times a week.”

  “I’ll figure that out when its owner shows up again. If she shows up.”

  Zahler let out his breath, not sure what to make of this.

  I looked down at the card: Alana Ray, Drummer. No address, just a cell-phone number, but if she could make a hundred bucks a day in cash, somehow I doubted she was homeless.

  It had been so simple hiring her, a million times simpler than I’d imagined. No arguing about influences, getting famous, or who was in charge. Just a few numbers back and forth.

  Money had made it easy.

  “Moz, you’re freaking me out. You’re, like, the tightest guy I know. You never bought your own amplifier, and I’ve only seen you change your strings about twice in the last six years.”

  I nodded. I’d always waited until they rusted out from under my fingers.

  “And now you’re going to pay out hundreds of dollars?” Zahler said. “Why don’t we find another drummer? One who’s got real drums and doesn’t cost money.”

  “One who’s that good?”

  “Maybe not. But Pearl said she knew a few.”

  “We don’t have to run to her. We said that we’d handle this. So I’ll pay.” I turned to him. “And don’t tell Pearl about the money, okay?”

  Zahler groaned. “Whoa, now I get it. You want to pay this girl so she owes you, right? You want her to be your drummer, not Pearl’s.” He shook his head. “That is some dumb-ass logic at work, Moz. We’re supposed to be a band.”

  “Pearl’s already paying for rehearsal space.”

  “Which is no big deal for her. You’re getting into a spending contest with a girl who lives in an apartment that has stairs. Whole other floors!”

  I looked down at my tattered shoes. “It’s not a contest, Zahler. It’s just business.”

  “Business?” He laughed. “You don’t know jack about business.”

  I looked up at him, expecting to feel the death stare, but he was just confused. I didn’t understand myself, not completely, but I knew I had to get some part of this band under control. If I let Pearl decide everything and pay for everything, Zahler and I would wind up just a couple of sidekicks along for the ride. “Just don’t tell her about the money, okay?”

  He blinked, his dogs winding around his feet in disarray. I saw him wondering if I’d gone insane, wondering if I was going to screw this whole thing up, and knew I was right on the edge of losing him.

  Which was fine, if he really thought I was that hopeless. Maybe it was better to walk away now than later.

  But finally, he exhaled. “Okay. Whatever. I won’t tell Pearl you’re paying. I guess I can pitch in some of my dog money too.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got it covered.”

  “But maybe we should warn Pearl . . . before we all show up for rehearsal.”

  I frowned. “Warn her about what?”

  “Um, that our new drummer drums on paint buckets . . .”

  9. FEAR

  -PEARL-

  I took the subway to Brooklyn, so Mom wouldn’t find out from Elvis.

  Skittering sounds wafted up from the tracks as I waited for a train, the shuffling of tiny feet among discarded coffee cups and newspapers. The platform was empty except for me, the tunnels murmuring with echoes. The subways sounded wrong these days, almost alive, like there was something big down here. Something breathing.

  I hated facing the subway on Sunday mornings, with no rush-hour crowds to protect me, but we didn’t have much choice about when to rehearse. Minerva said that church was the only thing that kept Luz away till after noon.

  This would all be much easier when we didn’t have to sneak Minerva out of her room, but she needed to join the band now. Lying around in bed all day was never going to cure her. She had to get out of that dark room, meet some new people, and, most of all, sing her brains out.

  Moz, Zahler, and I had rehearsed together four times now—we had a B section for the Big Riff and two more half-formed songs. We were better every time we played, but we needed structure: verses and choruses, a drummer too. We didn’t have time to wait for Min to get completely w
ell. The world was in too much of a hurry around us.

  Except for the F train, of course. Ten minutes later, it still hadn’t come, and I hoped it wasn’t broken down again. The subways were having some kind of weird trouble this summer. Minor earthquakes, they said on TV—Manhattan’s bedrock settling.