“He knew I’d be home.”
“I don’t know, man. You figure it.”
“He’s been like this before.”
“He’s never sent me his stocks before.”
“Well, send them to me. I’ll take care of them. Mom still having headaches?”
“Major pain. The migraine that ate Nebraska.”
“They’re like kids,” Adams says.
“Yeah, but it don’t bother me. I’m a star now. Video King.” His band is called Curveball and they’re appearing on MTV in heavy rotation, he says, “wearing leather and abusing chicks. In our next shoot, we’re going to desecrate a church. We’ve picked an old cathedral in Monterey they were going to tear down anyway. It’ll be like that haunted house, remember?” When they were little, Kenny and Adams crept into an abandoned house that their friends claimed was haunted. Inside they found the shell of a player piano with a few rusty wires still intact, broken boards, exposed nails in the floor, and cracking plaster. Adams, older than most of the boys, wasn’t afraid of ghosts. He tugged on a loose flap of wallpaper and was surprised when part of the wall came with it. The plaster was simply cardboard and chalk, eroded now. He could level this house with his hands. Happily he ran about the room punching holes in the walls. Kenny whooped and joined him. Then, for some reason, Adams felt a presence in the room. He spun around, the heel of his shoe shattering a wedge of glass on the floor, and saw a craggy, vulturous man, hands heavy at his sides. Veins ran like rivers in his temples. Adams trembled at the sight of this horrible ghost; then the man spoke, ordering them out “this very minute.” The boys ran, and watched the tall figure from a nearby field. He owned the gas station across the street from the house. Taking a Coke from his machine, he sat out front in a chair near the pumps.
“Anyway, Mom and Dad know I have a steady gig, but they don’t know what kind of gig. It might shake them up to see me in leather.”
“You’re a long way from your roots.”
Colored lights circle Morty’s eaves like a spangled hem on a Spanish dancer’s dress. Inside, a man is stuffing doves into a hatbox. The birds reappear as bouquets.
From the back of the room Adams sees Pete, Denny, and Bob pick up their instruments. The magician performs his final trick. Pete’s shaved his head. His shirt says YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE. The band launches into a Laurie Anderson tune, backed by a Linn drum machine:
I met this guy, and he looked like he might have been
a hat check clerk at an ice rink.
Which, in fact, he turned out to be.
And I said, Oh boy. Right again.
“They’ve adapted their style to compete with Bullets,” Morty explains. “On the more complicated numbers, Zig sits in with them.”
“They’re awful.”
Morty shrugs, insinuates his hand into Adams’. “Didn’t I tell you this was going to be an entertainment capital? Thursdays, we got chipmunks shimmying to a chainsaw. It’s a dynamite act. Good to see you again, Sam. Grab yourself a beer on me.”
“Things have changed,” Bob tells him at the break.
“For the worse, I’d say.”
“You don’t know the numbers we’re doing now.”
“It’s the same beat over and over. What’s to know?”
“Precisely. We don’t need to pay a drummer — ”
“You sound like shit, Bob.”
“I think we sound just fine.” He turns to Zig for confirmation.
“Leave me out of this, man.” Zig slumps in his chair. “I’m stoned anyway, like on the edge and falling.”
“I’ll audition for you,” Adams says.
“You haven’t been asked, Sam.”
At the next break he rolls out his bass drum and sets it in front of the back curtain, behind the amps. Zig follows with his cymbals. “This is a radical move, man.”
“How do you cut the power to this thing?” Adams says, indicating the drum machine. Zig hits a button.
“What are you doing?” Bob yells from the edge of the stage.
“Folks, I’m auditioning for the band,” Adams says into a mike. The crowd is indifferent.
He settles himself on the throne, picks up his sticks. Twice as many people in the audience as in the old days. Morty’s been hustling.
He hasn’t played in six months. His fingers are nimble from his work on the practice pad, but a solo — cold?
He starts with a standard ride on the hi-hat, one-and-a-two-and, one-and-a-two-and, brushing the snare on the offbeat, then rolls into a rumba on the tom. His foot’s slow, nothing fancy on the bass.
A rim-shot, a machine-gun roll on the snare, snap ‘em to, faster and faster, with hits to the high tom, a little action on the Zildjian, subtle now then loud, make ‘em cry, cowbell in the middle of the phrase, slow it down pick it up, building to a run on the snare, faster, louder, draw it out, make ‘em suffer, like a long, slow hump, then he’s off, rim bass tom high low bass tom high tom bass tom, wrestling with the Dark Angel. A smoky dirge, the heartbreak blues. A series on the cymbals and he’s done. Not quite. Now then. The crowd is on its feet.
Pete and Denny take the stage, laughing excitedly. Zig says, “Teach me that?”
Bob picks up his bass. “All right, you son of a bitch,” he says with grudging pleasure. “Let’s play.”
“An old one,” Denny says. “It’s been a long time.”
When they slide into Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Art Farmer, he feels the wings close in around him, the heavy thudding of the angel’s many hearts.
Than writes from California:
Things are going well for me here. I just got a raise, and may do some more traveling at the end of the year for Arco. In the meantime I have met a nice young woman who owns a Vietnamese restaurant with her brother in downtown Los Angeles. Nothing serious, but I enjoy spending time with her.
I found your brother’s name in the phone book, but so far he has not been home when I have called.
A Soviet scientist I met defected before I left Svalbard. The story I heard says he stowed away on the Polarstar, which pulled in beside his mining vessel in Barentsburg. The Norwegians discovered him halfway to Longyearbyen, and he asked for asylum. He seemed to me a very smart man, careful about his work. I’m glad to know he’s all right.
I thought of you the other day, Sam. I saw on the news an American military advisor in El Salvador. His goal was to “bring order to Central America.” It reminded me of the conversations we had. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I can’t resist citing one more example of why I distrust the Western passion for reason. At the height of the war in my country, a team of political scientists from Michigan State University arrived to study military tactics, write articles on the special police, and so on. At one time it seemed there were more professors than soldiers in Vietnam. One of the men came up with a blueprint for evacuating villagers. He relocated the entire population of an area into a compound surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. It was like a dormitory, only padlocked and dark. And he dressed the refugees in uniforms — a different color for every village — so he could identify them as he studied their “refugee mentality.” He tried to ease the pain of the situation by placing South Vietnamese, rather than American, guards in the compound. But the place was too crowded, too anguished. In time the guards, under stress, began to shoot noisy children.
People they didn’t like they kept from the food. I heard of one place where they were chopping each other’s hands off — couldn’t tell the refugees from the guards. So I don’t trust order, I’m afraid. It’s not human nature.