It now seemed inevitable that the owners of the LLC that was KVA were all going to have to shell out a little more money before this project was said and done. The only question was how much? She did not look forward to telling this news to Greg, who had been staying in the house for the past week now. That conversation would have to be had soon, probably when Jill made her next visit on the 15th of November, just about two weeks from now.
She heard the phone ringing in the entertainment room, noticing it only because of its rarity. They did not get many phone calls here, as hardly anyone in the world knew they were here. Greg called Celia sometimes, but Greg was already here, so it couldn’t be him. Laura’s fiancé had not called her a single time, although he had been given the number. So who could this be? A wrong number, perhaps? She sincerely hoped so. Because they only other reason someone would call would be if there was an issue with...
“Paulie!” Jake’s voice called to her. “Phone call!”
“Fuck,” she muttered, taking another slug of her wine before getting up to see what this latest shit was all about.
Jake handed his sister the phone and then went back to the pool table, where he and Laura were having a friendly little game of eight ball with Greg and Celia. It was Greg’s turn and he lined up carefully on the fifteen ball, examining the shot from several angles, trying to work out the best way to nudge it into the corner pocket while getting the cue to bounce back and line him up for the twelve.
“This is Pauline,” Jake heard her say into the mouthpiece. “What’s up?” She listened for a moment and he saw her scowl. She then said, “You’re fucking kidding me.”
Apparently whoever was on the other end of the line—the caller had not introduced himself when Jake answered the phone—was not fucking kidding her.
“Jesus Christ,” Pauline said. “The hospital? How bad is it?” Another pause, another shake of the head. “A week? Seriously? That means they’re going to miss at least three dates, right?”
Jake had now lost interest in the game entirely. Obviously something had gone wrong on the Veteran tour, something that had landed someone in a hospital. Was it Coop?
Pauline was now talking about something else entirely, something about how the hospital and a couple of missed shows was not the worst part of the story. “He didn’t?” she asked. “They do?” Another pause. “He actually said that to your face?” A shake of the head. “Jesus Christ. I’m assuming that alcohol was involved in all this?” Another scowl. “Don’t fucking bullshit me, Candid! Were they drunk?” A shake of the head to go with the scowl. “Uh huh. So it would seem you did not introduce that little sobriety before performance rule that Coop and I suggested?” A pause, a sigh. “Yeah. I believe that about as much as I believe in Santa Claus. All right. I’ll get there as soon as I can and see if I can put Humpty back together again. I’m in fucking coastal Oregon right now though, so it’ll probably be late evening tomorrow at best.” Another pause. “All right. Bracken Memorial Hospital. Got it. I’ll let you know when I’m close.”
She slammed the phone down and shook her head again.
“Trouble on the tour?” Jake asked.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Coop and Hamm got into a fight after the show in Detroit—or actually during the show, since it happened at the encore break. Coop put him in the hospital with a broken nasal bone and a concussion.”
Jake nodded appreciably. “Nice going, Coop,” he said.
“It is not nice going,” Pauline said. “They’re going to miss the next two dates at least because of this shit. That’s the best-case scenario. The bigger problem is that Hamm says he won’t ever go onstage with Coop again, that they can just cancel the whole tour unless they fire Coop’s ass and get another drummer.”
Jake raised his eyebrows. “That’s not exactly a rational declaration,” he said. “It would take at least a month to train up a new drummer for the tour.”
“Or a new bass player,” Pauline said. “Coop is spouting the same shit. He says he won’t go back onstage with Hamm.”
“What was the fight about?” asked Greg, who had been listening in as well.
“Who the fuck knows?” Pauline said. “Candid, their tour manager, was just blowing smoke up my ass about that part. It seems pretty clear that alcohol, at the very least, was a catalyst.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “When we toured with Earthstone after Descent was released, they liked to party hard before their shows, particularly Mike Hamm. And he was a mean drunk too. The kind of guy that tries to deliberately pick fights.”
“Sounds like he bit off a bit more than he could chew,” suggested Greg.
“Sounds like it,” Pauline agreed. She turned back to Jake. “I need to get to Detroit as soon as I can and try to sort through this mess and get them back on the road.”
“Understood,” Jake said. “You need me to fly you to Portland?” Since it was now almost winter, the offseason on the coast of Oregon, the commuter airline that provided service to and from Portland International Airport had cut down the number of flights from one per day to two per week. And those flights were on Fridays and Wednesdays. Tomorrow was Sunday. Jake’s plane, however, was currently parked at North Bend Municipal and had been the entire time the band had been in Coos Bay. So far, he had not had occasion to fly it, so busy had they been.
“Yeah,” Pauline said. “I’m gonna get on the horn and see what time the earliest flight to Detroit leaves in the morning.”
“I’m at your disposal,” Jake assured her, already looking forward to climbing behind the controls and taking to the sky, even if it just for the one hour hop to Portland and back.
“Thanks,” she said, picking up the phone book that was stored beneath the table. She opened it up and began to flip through it.
“It’s your turn, Jake,” Laura told him, pointing at the pool table.
“Right,” Jake said, picking up his pool cue and examining the table. There were three solids left, not including the eight ball. As he was lining up on the three ball, something occurred to him. “Hey,” he said, abandoning the shot and turning to Laura. “Why don’t you come with us to Portland tomorrow?”
“Me?” she asked. “What for?”
“Two words,” Jake said. “Soprano sax.”
She knew immediately what he was talking about. A few weeks earlier, while working on the basic melody track for one of Jake’s songs: South Island Blur, a heavy acoustical guitar piece he had penned about the drunken stupor he’d been in while on exile in New Zealand, it had been agreed upon by Jake, Celia, and the Nerdlys that the song was missing something. And so they’d experimented with having Laura play her alto sax as a secondary melody atop the primary one. It fit, and it had improved the sound of the tune, but it had been just a little too heavy. They needed an instrument that could play higher notes. It was Laura who suggested a soprano saxophone might do the trick.
“Can you play one?” Jake had asked her.