Justin’s frown warned him he wasn’t the most cunning linguist running around loose. But the lead guitarist said, “Well, write it and we’ll see what it looks like.” Most bands came up with tunes and found lyrics that went with them. Not Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. With them, words usually came first. That had to be one more reason they wouldn’t hit the jackpot any time soon.
“Al Stewart already did a song about Constantinople,” Charlie pointed out. “And They Might Be Giants did ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople).’ Does the world really need three?”
“It wouldn’t be the same kind of song as those,” Rob said. “Give me a break, man. Doctor Seuss used Constantinople, too.”
“See? Everybody does.” Charlie could be relentless.
“Enough, you guys.” Biff sounded more forceful this time. He struck a ringing chord to emphasize the suggestion.
They tuned up. They’d played in Pasco two nights before, and in Portland two nights before that. They’d been on the road together since forever-it sure seemed that way, anyhow. They didn’t need long to get ready for what they would be doing later that night. Then it was off to the place next door. “Fee, fie, pho, fum,” Rob said happily. Not even Charlie called him on that one.
Pho had to be the best comfort food in the world, even better than chicken soup. You could put almost anything into it. Rob’s favorite was beef tendon. Before he started eating pho, he wouldn’t have imagined you could boil beef tendon long enough to make it meltingly tender. He wouldn’t have imagined it turned so delicious when you did, either.
The waiter and the cook and the proprietor were all the same little guy. He had a wispy mustache and iron-gray hair. His English was good, but no one would ever mistake it for his native tongue. Had he got out of Saigon just before it turned into Ho Chi Minh City? Rob wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Not many Americans like that one,” he said. “Round-eyed Americans, I mean. They see it on the menu, they make a face.” When he made a face, he showed more wrinkles than he did with his features in repose.
“They’ve never tasted it, then,” Rob said. He left a big tip, although the place was so cheap it was a big tip on a small bill.
They went back to the dressing room and passed joints around. Rob couldn’t prove using weed made him play better, but he sure thought so. Time slowed down when he was loaded. There seemed to be more of it between the notes, so he had as much as he needed to nail them one by one. And he could hear-he could almost see-how they fit together ever so much better than he could straight. Everything sounded better stoned, too.
Justin stepped into the corridor and checked the house. A few shouts out there said people spotted him doing it. He came back with a grin on his round face. “We’ll make enough to go on to the next gig,” he reported. They’d been doing that for a few years now. As far as Rob was concerned, it beat the hell out of a day job.
A local band played a short set before they went on. The locals got the kind of hand an opening act could expect. Rob remembered getting that kind of hand himself, and remembered being pumped about it. Now… A guy with a booming baritone shouted, “Here they are-the band you’ve been waiting for! Let’s give a big Spokane hello to… Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles!”
And damned if they didn’t. Applause was a drug, too. Anybody who didn’t think so had never tasted that particular high. It was one of the reasons Rob came out here and waved to the people beyond the house lights. The other two were oldies but goodies: to piss off his old man (he’d sure done that) and to get laid till he couldn’t even stand up (not so easy when you were on the withdrawn side, but Rob had no complaints).
They started out with “Pleasures,” not least to bring along people who were hearing them for the first time. Always a few newbies in the crowd. Why not let ’em think they were listening to regular rock ’n’ roll, at least for a little while? “I would bed you,
I would head you,
I’d do anything that’s right
For your body’s sweet delight.”
Justin sang. Rob strummed and found chords without conscious thought. A good thing, too, right this minute. Yes, he seemed to have all the time in the world. He knew he didn’t, but he seemed to, and that was all that counted.
After the song ended, they got another hand. Somebody in the front row squirted Justin with one of their namesakes: a piece of made-in-China plastic madness from Archie McPhee. Somebody else called out, “I don’t believe in evolution!”
“Well, if you find a band called Squirt Frog and the Created Tadpoles, maybe you should latch on to them,” Justin answered easily. He was fast on his verbal feet. He got a laugh. It was still fading when he went on, “If you didn’t like that last song, you really won’t be able to stand this next one.”
They swung into “Punctuated Equilibrium.” Not everybody could make a song out of Stephen Jay Gould’s attack on classical Darwinism, but Justin Nachman wasn’t everybody. He was wasting a master’s in biology even more thoroughly than Rob was squandering his engineering degree. Well, they were having fun… weren’t they?
They were tonight. They got called back for two encores. Afterwards, they sold CDs and signed them for the people who thought autographs proved reality. They plugged the new single on their Web site. They did all the other necessary things that separated music-as-business from music-as-fun.
Then they went back to the motel, not completely alone. A little sleep, or something, would be good. They’d play in Missoula, Montana, tomorrow night. Another long haul, another university campus. With luck, another crowd. Another paycheck. Sometimes this gig looked an awful lot like work. But only sometimes.
Colin Ferguson took notes on the things he read. He found that helped him remember them better. He often kept the scribbles to himself. When they held nothing earthshaking, he didn’t bother.
Cops are no less nosy than other people. Cops, in fact, are nosier than most other people; if they weren’t, they’d make lousy cops. And so Colin wasn’t particularly surprised when Sergeant Gabriel Sanchez pointed to a sheet of paper on his desk and asked, “Who the hell is Huckleberry Tuff?”
“Not who, Gabe. What,” Colin said.
“Oh, yeah?” Sanchez said. He had a bushy black mustache just beginning to get gray flecks and sideburns a good half an inch longer than the San Atanasio Police Department’s dress code allowed anyone not on undercover drug duty. He reached for the pack of Camels in his breast pocket.
“Naughty, naughty,” Colin said. The San Atanasio PD had gone smokefree the year before. Colin’s father had died of lung cancer, one bad inch at a time. He had his share of bad habits and then some, but cigarettes weren’t one of them.
“Ah, fuck,” Sanchez said without heat. “I’ll go outside when I’m done bugging you, then. Okay, what’s Huckleberry Tuff? Sounds like a gangbanger who’s read Mark Twain.”
Colin chuckled. “Kinda does, doesn’t it? But it’s this layer of rock the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park laid down when it went kablooie two million years ago and change. There’s lots of it-I mean lots-in Wyoming and Montana and Idaho.”
“O-kay.” Whatever Sergeant Sanchez had expected, that wasn’t it. “And how come you give a rat’s ass about this super-watchamacallit?”
Normally, that would have been an altogether reasonable question. As things stood, though, Colin had a reasonable answer: “ ’Cause this gal I’ve got interested in is studying the supervolcano. Geologist, I guess you’d call her.”
“Oh. I gotcha.” The medium-brown skin on Sanchez’s hands had a lighter streak on his ring finger that testified to his own recently deceased wedded bliss. Caution-police work may be hazardous to your marriage. They didn’t issue warning labels like that, but they should have. The sergeant leered and laughed a dirty laugh. “Geologist, huh? Long as she gets your rocks off…”