Now, standing in my driveway, Sullivan says, “It’s time.” He jerks his chin up and I see that his eyes are wild and intense. To not play with him tonight, somewhere, would be a crime. I can talk him out of Mullen’s on the way.
“I’ll get Cú Chulainn,” I reply.
At first, it is not Them. It is She.
She is beautiful. When I first saw her, I thought she was too old for Sullivan, though when I looked again, I couldn’t say why I thought that. She makes my chest feel strange—when I first met her, I thought, so this is what heartsick means. She made me feel ... wanting. Not like wanting a specific person or thing. It was that I wanted everything, anything that I couldn’t have, everything out of reach.
With the benefit of crystal-clear hindsight, I think I knew, right off, that she was no ordinary girl.
What I definitely knew was this: when I saw the way she looked at Sullivan, that first night, the ground beneath our friendship felt suddenly fragile. It was the first time I considered the idea that our ascendancy to punk god status might not be as inevitable as I had thought.
And I saw him look back, his eyebrow quirked, thinking.
She scared me for so many reasons.
So here we are at Mullen’s, because I couldn’t talk Sullivan out of it, and we’re heading back through the building towards the session, because Sullivan is high on his mood and can’t be talked out of it. The pub is full of cigarette smoke and the scent of a decade’s worth of spilled beer. It is hot as the Dominican Republic outside the pub and several degrees warmer than that inside. I’m already sweating. We do the perp walk past the bar, and the heads turn to watch us, expressions curious at best or sardonic at worst. We’re young and unfamiliar, and we’re carrying instrument cases. Last year, I ducked my head and stared at the floor as I walked past the bar stools, but this year is different. We are different now, Sullivan and I. I stare back at the onlookers and Sullivan gives one of them the finger.
As we approach the back room, I can pick out the tune of the reel they’re playing—“The Hare in the Heather”—and it’s clipping along nicely. Maybe a little too fast to be really sexy, but hey, that’s how some people roll. Last year, this was the bit where we’d come in and hung at the side of the room, waiting for a pause between tunes to ask Lesley if we could sit down.
This time, Sullivan has already pulled his case in front of him and partially unzipped it by the time he strides into the back room, like it’s a weapon case and he’s a Mafia hitman about to pull out his Tommy gun and waste everyone. In a way that’s true. His fiddle is a weapon. He draws it out in the space of a breath. Half of the session players have their backs to him, unaware of our presence, and the other half hesitate slightly when they see him. But they don’t stop. It would take more than us to stop a set in midplay.
Sullivan draws his bow across his strings and it wails a long, slow note from a high, high E down to the E that begins the measure they are playing. It’s a battle cry, that note. He rips into “The Hare in the Heather” with them. He doesn’t wait for permission. He doesn’t move from his place just inside the door. He just hauls ass on his fiddle, it singing loud and sweet and fast, rolls falling from his finger like a bird calling to the heavens.
I sure as hell am not leaving him there on his own, so out comes Cú Chulainn—no time to really tune, though the B string could afford to come up a bit—and then I am half-strumming, half-fingerpicking my way along with him. The strings sound watery and clear under my pick. All of us playing together sounds like something you’d buy off a rack. It sounds like nostalgia made flesh.
At the end of the reel, everyone else stops playing and Lesley drops his fiddle from his shoulder. He gives Sullivan a look which clearly means okay, now stop, you pissing usurper, I’m going to kill you, but Sullivan doesn’t stop playing. He charges into another reel, and I follow him, counterpoint my swagger to his sweetness, and then let his fiddle chastise my guitar into submission. We two are louder than all the other session players combined. We fill the room. We fill the pub. Sullivan is sawing away so hard that there are loose hairs floating from his bow. I am sneaking a bit of sly tuning in between riffs, my hand snaking up to twist a peg to brighten my B string. Sullivan buys me time with some dirty bowing—the bow goes scuff, scuff, scuff on his fiddle like someone laughing in time with the music. People have come in to stand behind him in the doorway to listen. It is wild and brilliant, everything that the fever in his eyes had promised before.
We come to the end of the set—Sullivan doesn’t have to tell me we’re done, I know it, because we’ve jammed together so often that his fiddle and my guitar are nearly one instrument—and we stop.
Lesley Nolan looks at Sullivan and I. He’s a square, gray-haired man, sharp corners and deep set eyes. Beside him the bodhrán player is surrounded by a cloud of smoke from a cigarette that dangled from his lips even while he was playing the drum. There’s a long pause, during which the accordion player takes a mouthful of beer. We can all hear him swallow.
“Sit down,” Lesley says.
Sullivan says, “what?” although he knows perfectly well what Lesley said.
“Sit down,” Lesley says again. And to the others, “make some room for them.”
The others shift and push around on the chairs and the corner booth. The table in front of them is a mess of full and half-full beer glasses; the glasses are jostled together, impossible to tell whose is whose. There are hands shaken, names exchanged (I remember none of them), we are brought sodas by a waitress who doesn’t ask to see our licenses.
“Patrick Sullivan,” Lesley says, as if trying it out.
Sullivan says, “Just Sullivan. And this is Bryant. Black.”
“And you want to play some tunes,” Lesley says.
“That’s all we want,” Sullivan says.
Something draws my attention to the doorway, then, and that’s when I see her for the first time. She’s standing at the threshold, and like I said, the first idea I get of her is that she is a lot older than she really looks. I only watch her for a moment—her hair is light, light gold and her eyes are the color of my father’s blue work shirts, and she is beautiful in a way that hurts. She’s so out of place that it is unsettling. Or dis—discomfiting? Is that a word? Sullivan uses forty-point words like that and I try to remember to use them to make them my own. Anyway, I feel discomfited, if it is a word, with her standing there and Sullivan looking at her. Then someone says, “Bryant?” and the next time I think to look, she’s long gone.
Sullivan calls me that night, at four-oh-seven in the morning. The phone doesn’t wake my parents since it only rings in my room. I have held my good grades ransom and one of the concessions my parents had to agree to was a personal phone line. (My father said, “ I thought I only had to worry about multiple phone lines if I had girly girl daughters” ).
Sullivan’s voice is hushed and it’s clear he’s come down from his musical high of earlier. “You sleeping?”
“Never,” I reply. “You?”
Sullivan thinks this over. “That was something, wasn’t it, at Mullen’s.”
“Something? That was nothing,” I say. “They had it coming a long time. You could play circles round Lesley Nolan.”
“Ha,” Sullivan says, but I can tell he’s pleased. He is silent again, but I don’t hang up. Hours we’ve spent like this, on the phone in the short hours of the night, a dozen words exchanged over the course of a few hours. Sometimes it’s just enough to know you’re not alone with your thoughts.