by Ron Carlson
Now, in the car with these people, Larry felt it again and felt it as a test. He was happy to have had this fall knowing his father in a new way, and he didn’t plan on making a new friend and losing him. He listened to Mason talking to Marci about fund-raising and long-term issues at the museum—a donor strategy. And then Kathleen quizzed Mason about when he was returning to Denver. His only answer: “Whenever feels too soon.” And then, unable to be glib about it, he added, “I don’t know. The clock’s off.” Craig was silent, driving, laying out in his head his plan of attack on the construction job he had ahead. Larry wondered if these people would ever be together in this way again, five in a car in the snow late in the year on the old highway. Finally Larry said, “Jimmy taught me four new chords yesterday, and I gave my word to try them in public.”
When they neared Gillette in the gloom, Craig drove right past the Pronghorn. “Dad,” Larry said from the backseat, “that’s it.” Off to the left there had been a sixty or seventy cars parked in a jumble, the pink neon beer signs almost obscured.
“Really,” Craig said. “All those cars? I thought it was a junkyard.”
“No,” Mason said from the backseat, where he sat with Larry and Kathleen. “That’s it. He’s got a crowd tonight.” Everyone in the car was quiet, and he added, “When I was a kid, every time we drove by Mangum’s junkyard west of town, my dad would say, “Oh boy, Agnes must have a roast on—they’ve got company.”
Craig slowed and waited for Frank’s black Explorer. As they pulled U-turns on the two-lane, Frank lowered his window and called out. “I thought the crowd scared you off. We’re going to have an audience!”
As they approached the Pronghorn now, the huge sign lit up suddenly and began to flash, blue and white, the profile of an antelope, and as the two vehicles picked through the overfilled parking lot, snow began to fall, as a sudden graphic mist of a billion dots.
There were eleven bands. Three were from Gillette, three from greater Sheridan, two up from Laramie, one each from Casper and the hamlet of Sojourn, and Life on Earth in their reunion gig. The owner of the Pronghorn was Bobby Peralta, who had taken the place over from his dad. He wore a black satin shirt with silver button covers and a silver cow-skull bolo tie. They’d all met before. The Pronghorn was a place where you stopped on the way home from the antelope hunt, and all season you could see pickups parked there with game in the beds. Bobby had been in high school in Gillette and had actually heard the band the one time they’d played here thirty years before.
“This place used to be out of town,” Craig said as he shook Bobby’s hand.
“You can’t get out of town in this sorry state,” Bobby said. “It’s all found out and built up. How you been?”
“Busy. Oakpine’s exploded, and I supply the paint.” He introduced everybody: Marci, Kathleen, Larry, Mason, Sonny, and Frank, whom Bobby knew because of his brewery.
“We’re only playing,” Frank told the man, “if you can guarantee that there’re no talent scouts here. We’re not interested in being plucked from obscurity.”
“You’re safe on that count. Here.” Bobby gave them all string necklaces with yellow passes looped on each. “All your drinks are mine, including as much of Frank’s new lager as you can drink. And I’ve got a table for you up front.” He looked at his clipboard. “We’ll start at seven and do four bands, break, four more, break and then finish with three. Craig, why don’t you meet me on stage at about ten to, and we’ll draw the order.”
They’d been standing in the back hallway beside the kitchen and could hear the crowd in the main barroom. “I believe I’ll use the house drum kit,” Craig said. “No sense showing everybody what Larry did to my snare way back when.”
“This is going to require a drink,” Mason said. He looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes to live. This is going to require two.”
As he stepped toward the barroom, Kathleen took his elbow. “I’ll go with,” she said.
“Hey, Kathleen,” Frank said to his ex-wife.
“Hey, Frank. Sonny.”
“Can you believe we’re here, we’re going to do this?”
“I have no trouble believing anything, Frank. My credibility has been tested.”
“You sour bitch,” Sonny said. It was crowded in the passageway, and everybody stood still.
Kathleen stopped and smiled. “I know,” she said. “But I’m working on it, Sonny. It’s not permanent.” She touched the young woman’s wrist. “Listen, I just said your name.”
Craig and Marci were already at the bar when Mason and Kathleen came up. There was no place to sit or stand, but Marci had winnowed between two guys and got an elbow in and was talking to the bartender. The cowboy she’d leaned over looked to Craig and said, “She act this way at home?”
She turned to the man and rubbed his cheek with the back of her knuckles, smiling. “I’m only going to be a minute, darlin’.” Craig liked this side of her, the cowgirl, although she’d hidden it for some time now. He hadn’t heard her say darlin’ for years. It had been too long since he’d done anything with Marci except go over the household accounts or call her parents. He was having fun—it was a road trip. This day was crazy, and then he was going to build a guesthouse in town.
Marci handed back beers to the men and lifted two white wines to her group, one for Kathleen.
The Pronghorn had been a little tavern three miles south of Gillette, a place the roughnecks could stop on the way back to town. Over the years it had grown, first with a room on one side for four pool tables and then a large quonset in the rear with a hardwood floor for dancing. This area was lined with tables behind a low wooden corral. There were neon beer signs everywhere, red and blue and green, so the general glow added to the odd effect of having three ceilings of different heights in the gerrymandered room. Tonight all the tables were full, two and three pitchers of beer on each, four, and the dance floor too was packed with a fluid, partisan crowd, groups of people churning forward, cheering their friends, under a glacial slip of cigarette smoke that drifted toward the high center.
Marci was lit, feeling her nerves ebb and flow as a physical thing. Ever since her long flirtation with Stewart, she’d been out of her life, beside it, and everything seemed simplified. She could easily shed one life and pick up another; there were times every day when it felt she already had. She could leave tomorrow. Craig was strong enough for any new thing, and she’d finished her work with Larry. He was a good kid and had been self-reliant for these last two years. There were times when she felt Craig would understand—she had to move on. And there were times some nights when she started awake in bed, seized by a terror that made her put her teeth into her lip. What was she doing?
Now, as they weaved though the tight throng toward their table, her face burned. She felt a charge she couldn’t contain. This was better than being numb, she guessed, but god. She kept looking at Craig for a clue. If he gave her an opening, she’d tell him, but she was out of sync, and people knew it. On the way up she’d been silent in the car, afraid that if she spoke, her sentences would go right off the edge.
As they’d been packing the lunch, Kathleen had asked her what was the matter. Marci wanted to say that the matter was that she was in love. There were times, when she was alone in her car driving home from the museum, when she said that aloud, “I’m in love.” It sounded good, and it felt good to say, but later she’d look at Craig when he came in or when they were watching television, and all the rush was gone. She wasn’t in love; that was something from a cheap refrain. Stewart would have leaned her against his desk, closing his eyes as he did, and pulled at her needfully, whispering, “I want all of this. When I can I have all of this?” They burrowed against each other. It thrilled her and repelled her and ultimately made her tentative, and she’d straighten until they both stood and adjusted their clothing. She felt brave and stupid. It was too late to be doing this; it was nev
er too late. In the Pronghorn, she ducked under the rope where the bands had their tables and sat down with Larry. The others were just arriving too, and Craig was already on the stage. She looked at her son. “You’re not drinking, are you?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said. “Some pop. I’ll be your designated son.”
“Good.” She put her empty wineglass on the table. “I am. Drinking. Where’s that waitress?” The three guys in red T-shirts at the next table all turned and checked her out, her black satin western shirt. “Hello to you,” one said.
“Where you guys from?” she asked them.
“Gillette.” They were all about thirty, with short hair and sideburns. “We’re the Coyotes, pretty lady, the band to root for if you want to know. You could even sit at our table. We encourage groupies.” The speaker, a thin young guy with a goatee, waved a finger at the two full pitchers. “In fact, we look after our true fans without worrying about the expense. We are dedicated to them hoof, hide, and bone.”
“Oh, shit,” Marci flirted back. “And I’m already with a band, darn it.”
“You won’t be for long.”
There was a drumroll, and Bobby Peralta came on the microphone: “Hey, everybody, welcome to the Pronghorn Bar and Grill, the only four-star establishment in Wyoming and North and South Dakota. Tonight, as you all know, we are happy to host the Pronghorn Battle of the Bands!” There was a roar and clapping and ragged whistles until Bobby held up his hands. In one he had pillowcase full of pool balls. “Ladies and gentlemen, we will now select the order for the Pronghorn Battle of the Bands!” Another upheaval, screaming and a howl or two, followed. Bobby then had a representative from each band reach into the bag and pull out a ball.
“What’d he get?” Frank said. “Is it solid or stripe?”
Craig, like everyone else on the stage, was holding his choice high over his head in two fingers. The noise was impenetrable.
“Is it the eight ball? Tell me it’s the goddamned eight ball.”
“It’s the nine,” Mason leaned forward and said loudly. “We’re late in the lineup.”
“We should have got you shirts that matched,” Marci said to Frank.
“What?”
“We should have got you shirts that matched!” she yelled. One of the red shirts at the next table stood and bent to Marci. “What’d you draw?”
“Nine,” she said.
“It’s not too late to drop out,” he toasted them with his glass of beer.
“You’re drunk,” she told him.
“It’s the only way. We’re the Coyotes, and we will not perform unless inebriated.”
“Good luck,” Mason told the man.
“Well, yeah,” the guy said thoughtfully. “But we’re still going to kick your ass and take this girl here as a trophy. Please excuse my frankness.”
Bobby Peralta named the bands, each to an explosion, sometimes a small explosion, from some quarter of the jammed barroom. Then he introduced the judges: a deejay from Jackson Hole, the owner of a record store in Laramie, and his own wife, Mrs. Annette Peralta, a happy blond woman in a full turquoise body suit. He tried to say something about the categories they’d be judging on, but no one could hear, and then he showed the three trophies, which brought a roar, general yelling, and applause. The dance floor was cleared or almost cleared, and for a few minutes there was relative quiet in the Pronghorn, as snow settled on the arched tar roof and waitresses with trays of drinks worked the room.
Frank leaned over to Larry and said, “Are we ready for this?”
Larry nodded. “Not really. But it’s two songs. We’re tight. Jimmy said to let it rip. I have a feeling this is our last gig forevermore. Whether we know what we’re doing or not, let it rip.”
Frank scanned the cordoned tables of bands. A couple groups had cowboy hats, and one band wore sharkskin suits. Sonny had topped everyone’s beer, and Frank said, “Thank you, dear, but you’re not working tonight. I’ll pour.”
“It’s fine,” Sonny said. “It’s not a problem.” She slid into the chair at the end of the table and touched Kathleen’s arm. “I’m sorry for that remark earlier,” Sonny said. “I didn’t mean it. I’m so fucking touchy. I don’t want to fight with you or your friends.” Kathleen didn’t move, so Sonny slid closer so no one else could hear her. “Every week I’ve been in town, every week for two years, somebody in the bar will start it. You’ve got more friends than anybody I’ve ever known, that’s for sure. You’re an angel, I guess, and they do not like me, even though they don’t know me. They have said things near me and to me, and I haven’t said anything back. But Kathleen, I just want to say one thing to you. I didn’t do anything to you. I know it must be hard to see me with Frank, but I didn’t wreck your marriage, did I? Everybody says that, but we got together November two years ago, I swear. Not a day earlier. No joke. He told me that he’d been out of the house all summer. Is that wrong?” She had whispered all this urgently, and as she stopped speaking and lifted her chin, tears glossed her eyes.
Kathleen looked past Sonny for a minute: Larry, Mason, Marci, Frank. Larry had unfolded the playlist: six songs they knew. They all had a finger on the sheet as if it were a map. They had to choose two. Kathleen smiled weakly at the younger woman and then stood up and pulled her. “Let’s get a drink,” she said, and the two of them disappeared into the smoky room.
Craig came back to the table and plunked the nine ball into the ashtray. “We’re hitting clean up,” he said. “We’ll know what we’re up against.” He sat down and squeezed Marci’s shoulders. “We’re going to need some support from our fans.” He looked her over. “My, but you look fine,” he said. “Am I right, Mason?”
“You both look good. Marci here,” Mason said, toasting her with his glass of beer, “was class . . .”
“Historian,” she filled in.
“I’ve seen the yearbook,” Larry said. “What did you record?”
Marci gave him a look as the first band, a group called Mountain Standard, rattled into John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” It took them a full minute to put it all to the beat, but they did and finished the song going away. After the whooping and applause faded, Craig said, “If that’s what we’re up against, we’re taking a trophy home for Jimmy. These guys are soft.” As if on his cue, the band now tried “Take It Easy,” making it sound as if they were reading the lyrics for the first time, and making the whole a vague exercise. At the end Mountain Standard bowed and bowed until there was no one clapping. They were still waving at their friends when the second band, Wind Chill Factor, six guys in black T-shirts, walked onto the stage.
Wind Chill Factor was all bass, heavy bass, so much so their songs were unidentifiable, a beat and a thrum that simply shook the room, every table and every glass. Larry felt it in his cracked rib and listened through the gridlock vibration and thought he heard “Layla,” but it would have had to be at double time. The six band members stood like mourners at the noisiest funeral of all time, feet planted, raking their instruments, the drum player hunched mostly out of sight. When their second song came in for a landing, the air was immediately filled with white static. Everyone’s ears were ringing. A moment later the applause came as a kind of relief, and it was touched up with laughter. As the artists in Wind Chill Factor filed off the stage, nodding their heads in recognition of their significant contribution to the world of rock ’n’ roll, Mason told his table, “Count your fillings.”
Larry was writing the name of each band on a card in his shirt pocket so he could give the report to Jimmy Brand, as promised. He also had told Wendy he’d give her the news.
The third band was four guys who looked like brothers; they all had identical razored goatees. They could sing. They started a reasonable, if slow version of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” and when the three lead men met at the mike for the chorus, people listened. They got it all and chan
ged the mood in the room for those minutes. Then they made the strategic error of singing a folksy ballad full of strange religious references. “God did a lot of stuff in that song,” Craig told the table when the goatees were through.
Then it was a two-man band—the Experts, they called themselves—and they tried to cover “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was a curious choice because they lacked the punch for it, and the guitar player was rusty and behind the lyric, and it emerged as a kind of tender credo, a dirge, which wasn’t unpleasant. After their second song, Bobby Peralta came up and announced a twenty-minute beer break, and the intermission was louder than the bands, and the room stood up and was at the bar four deep. The sound system filled with Johnny Cash singing “I Walk the Line,” the only one of his songs that would be heard all day. Frank came back from the men’s and said, “Armando Jensen is here. Somewhere.”
“Goddamned pennies in the urinal,” Sonny said.
“He does that?” Marci said.
“Everywhere,” Sonny said. “Some men won’t piss without marking the spot.”
“I can’t afford it,” Craig smiled. They were all speaking loudly, the room a roar.
Frank laughed. “He calls it his tithe.”
“Jimmy should write about this place. There’s some characters.”
“He did,” Mason said. “And you’re looking at them.” He lifted his coffee cup. They all touched every glass. Mason showed the group his hands, which were trembling, and said, “Look. This is very fine. I’m nervous.”
“It has been a long time,” Frank said, “but nobody’s paying attention, so we’ll be all right.”
Shirley Stiver appeared through the mob, dragging a younger man by the hand. She was done up proper in a golden western dress with tiny beaded fringe along the scalloped pockets. Her partner was all denim, the new shirt stiff, and he shook everyone’s hand.