“Not like you.”
Ellie smiled. “It’s not that I don’t like them. I just don’t take them seriously. Between you and Jilly and Tommy’s aunts… well, someone has to be sensible.”
“Is that how you see it?”
She looked at him. “Why? How do you see it?”
“That you’re afraid there really might be more to the world than you can see.”
“Why would that frighten me?”
Donal shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Ellie sighed and slouched in her seat. Maybe it was time she filled her life with some more normal people instead of all the half-mad artists and the like that currently inhabited it. The sort of people who’d see a mask as a mask, a folktale as just that—a story. Like Hunter Cole. He didn’t strike her as the type to be looking for fairies under every bush.
“I don’t know why I bother with you,” she said.
“It’s my Gaelic charm. The same as won Bettina’s heart.”
“You wish.”
“Don’t be harsh, Ellie. It doesn’t suit you.”
When he gave her one of those disarming smiles of his, she punched him in the shoulder.
“Hey, watch it. I’m driving.”
“I’ll drive you,” she growled, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Donal in a good mood was impossible to resist.
14
Playing CDs by singer-songwriters on the store’s sound system was normally somewhat of a challenge for Hunter. If one of his employees didn’t complain, as often as not at interminable length, then another did. Usually he simply didn’t feel it was worth the argument. He was the boss, but he liked to keep matters on a somewhat democratic scale when he could, otherwise all you got were unhappy employees and that didn’t sell records.
Except for “The Goddess” as she liked to call Ani DiFranco, Miki preferred instrumental music, or something sung in a language she couldn’t understand, because she’d rather “make up my own stories as to what the songs’re about.” The members of the Goth bands that Fiona liked wrote their own material, but she didn’t have much patience for what she considered the navel gazing of singer-song writers. Hunter never had the heart to point out the irony of that notion. So far as he was concerned, Morrissey alone called up more angst in one song than most artists did in their whole body of work. As for Titus and Adam, their only criterion was how cool the artist in question was, which translated into who was playing on the album, or more importantly, who’d produced it.
So with the store to himself this morning, he was happily humming along with a limited-edition, six-track EP by Dar Williams that a friend had picked up for him at a concert in New England last fall. It had a solo, live version of “Are You Out There” on it, which was his touchstone for her work. He’d liked her first two albums, but it wasn’t until End of the Summer came out last year, with the full-band version of the song on it, that he’d become completely enamored with her music.
The story of how an alternative, late-night radio show had changed the life of the song’s protagonist struck a deep chord with him. He’d grown up in suburbia himself, in Woodforest Gardens north of the city, choking on all of those cookie-cutter houses with their perfect lawns, grotesquely manicured shrubberies, and insipid street names like Shady Lane. Tulip Crescent. Green-lawn Drive. He used to feel himself getting swallowed up by the sheer banality of it all. The only thing had saved him were nightly broadcasts by a pirate radio station—Radio Fug Cue, they called themselves, and that in itself was a giggle, to hear over the air. No call letters. You simply twisted the dial across the band until you found their current broadcast frequency and out of your radio’s speaker would spill an outrageous mix of hip music, opinionated reviews, and irreverent commentaries, all courtesy of Jack Thompson, aka Scatter Jack, the station’s resident, and only, DJ.
Thompson was finally put out of business, which proved to be a windfall for the media when it was discovered that he was the son of a city councilor, Ray Thompson, a high-roller already involved in any number of other scandals, none of which actually went up before the courts. But Thompson’s influence wasn’t enough to keep his son out of jail.
Hunter met the younger Thompson years later, when Hunter had finally managed to escape the ’burbs himself, moving to the city’s core and working in a secondhand record shop. Cool as he was, Hunter had still desperately wanted to find some way to thank Jack Thompson for how he believed Radio Fug Cue had literally saved him from white-collar oblivion, but by that point Thompson had co-opted with the enemy and become the program director for the worst of the local Lite Rock FM stations. Their tag line was “No metal, no rap, no crap.”
Hunter hadn’t even been able to shake Thompson’s hand when they were introduced. He just couldn’t do it, past debt notwithstanding.
But the Bar Williams song let him forget all of that, taking him back instead to those incredible nights when he’d sneak out of the house and lie out in the woods that still edged the housing development, transistor radio balanced on his chest, the world in his earphones taking him away from the ever-shrinking box that was his life. There, Scatter Jack had shown him all the possibilities that lay beyond the closed world of the perfect neighborhood he considered it was his misfortune to be growing up in.
Straightening up from the paperwork scattered across the counter, Hunter winced at the sudden pain in his side. There’d been no blood in his urine this morning, but he knew his kidney was swollen from the way it pressed up against his ribs. The whole area was bruised and sore, his back stiff. Every breath hurt unless it was shallow. He closed his eyes for a moment and the hard man’s features leapt into his mind. The smell of him—tobacco smoke and something feral, a wild dog scent. The cold eyes. The flat voice.
You don’t want to fuck with us, you little shite.
What had that been all about anyway?
The Dar Williams EP came to an end and for a long moment he let the silence hang. The store was empty. He’d only had three customers this morning and one had been returning a defective CD. Between the other two, they hadn’t even put thirty dollars in the till. It made him wonder, and not for the first time, why he even bothered opening on Sundays, though of course he had to. Even if the customers weren’t coming in, he had to be as available for business as the big chain stores were. Hunter didn’t really mind being in the store on a Sunday—especially not now, when his only other option was an empty apartment—but today it just made him feel depressed all over again. One of his staff had to go. There was just no way around it. That salary was just taking too big a chunk of his working capital.
This week he’d been cut off by one of his main distributors because he was late paying his bills. He knew he’d have it covered in a couple of weeks—hell, they knew it, too—but in the meantime, they’d cut him off and he could forget carrying any of their back catalog for a while. New releases he could get from Contact Distributors, a rack-jobber who serviced most of the smaller accounts in town, but that meant at least another dollar cost per unit. And since he couldn’t raise his selling price and stay competitive, he’d be losing a dollar on every CD of theirs he sold. Which didn’t help the money crunch he was feeling now.
This was the part of owning your own business that he’d dreaded the most. But someone had to go, and they’d all have to work longer hours, if he was going to keep his doors open. The question was who. It couldn’t be Titus. With his lack of social skills and graces, how would he ever survive? Adam wasn’t much better. Miki had seniority—next to him, she’d been working here the longest.