“Hang on a minute.” But in only a few seconds True realized he wasn’t calling anyone. No bars, no service out in this expanse of desert. He said, “Just checking something,” and then he put the cellphone away.
“We ought to be almost there,” Terry told him. “The sign’ll say Blue Chalk.”
“Okay,” True answered, and he tried to concentrate on his driving.
Terry knew very well what he’d heard and kept when he was a child, and knew he had it still, hidden away in a place of safety. It was something from his grandparents’ house. His mother’s parents lived in a brick house a few blocks from his grammar school. They were still there, Granddad Gerald in his mid-seventies and Grandmother Mimi just turned seventy. Some days after school, Terry had gone there to get a cold drink and sit on the screened-in porch as his grandfather listened to the early autumn baseball games on the radio and smoked a pipe with a face carved on the bowl that GeeGee said was a musketeer. His grandfather played board games with him, too. Any excuse to pull from the closet the old Milton Bradley Dogfight or the Mattel Lie Detector or the really cool Transogram 52-variety game chest with all the different colored boards. And then as the afternoon wore on, and Terry didn’t want to leave because this house was small and warm and not like his own at all, Grandmother Mimi brought from the closet a small plastic keyboard that she plugged in and placed in her lap as she sat in the front room. He would never forget the sound of that keyboard coming to life when she flipped a switch. It was like hearing an orchestra warm up, the violins, the oboes, the flutes and trumpets just softly starting to awaken. An orchestra contained in a small plastic box. And then she played it with her supple fingers, and he was sure that her fingers were supple because she did play it, and maybe it called to her to play it, day after day, because they needed each other to stay young.
What stories that keyboard told! When Terry closed his eyes and listened, he could see the image in his mind of a boy on a raft with a beautiful girl clinging to him, and in the river the rapids ran fast over dangerous rocks and the boy would have to be quick and smart to get them through that treacherous stretch. Or he saw a hundred Cossacks on their horses, driving forward through the snow under a moon as bright as a new quarter. Or he saw himself, older but still young, playing that very same keyboard before a vast audience, in a great concert hall, and then the Cossack chief rode in right down the aisle and awarded him an official sword and the beautiful girl stood up from the front row and said she would be his forever.
And then, of course, GeeGee cleared his throat across the game table, and when Terry opened his eyes GeeGee puffed smoke from the musketeer’s feathered hat and slapped down the dogfight’s ‘5 Bursts’ card, which meant Terry’s Spad was going down in flames.
He began to think they were teaming up on him.
“Terry,” said Grandmother Mimi, “do you want me to show you some chords?”
Chords? You mean…like…ropes?
“Sort of,” she’d answered. “Only these ropes never wear out, and they always keep you connected to something wonderful.”
Years later, the small portable organ just didn’t wake up on one day. It was a Hohner Organetta, not the kind of instrument found in every neighborhood music store. It sat silent in the closet, gathering dust. Was it for that reason Grandmother Mimi’s fingers began to swell and twist with the onset of arthritis?
“Let me try to fix it,” said Terry Spitzenham, the high school freshman.
There was no owner’s manual. No electronics diagram. Maybe somewhere in Germany there lived a Hohner Organetta expert, but he wasn’t in Oklahoma City. Terry opened the keyboard up, and looked at the old wiring and the reeds. He replaced the electric cord, but no go. It had to be a voltage problem, according to his electronics books. Not enough voltage was being generated to produce sound. He tried this and that, and that and this, but the keyboard remained mute. Finally he decided to take it all apart, every last bit of it, and rebuild it.
It regained its voice too late for Grandmother Mimi, whose fingers would no longer let her play. But, she said, she would love to listen, because she said that when she closed her eyes and he was playing—just that small keyboard with its twelve black keys and seventeen white—she felt like she was right there with him.
His first vintage keyboard buy had been a Hohner Symphonic 320, a real nasal-sounding and nasty-ass bastard found in the back of a garage. If those old brutes weren’t the heart and soul of rock, he didn’t know what rock was.
And now, he was minutes away from seeing—touching, playing if he could—the legend of legends, Lady Frankenstein.
“There’s the sign,” he said, and he heard in himself the excited voice of a little boy.
Blue Chalk, it read. True noted that it was defaced by a pair of close-set bullet holes. He took the exit off Route 66 and started north along a cracked and uneven asphalt road. Ahead stood a mesa, purple above the burnt brown of the desert floor. True drove sixty feet and slowed the Scumbucket to a halt. He peered into the sideview mirror.
“What’s the problem?” Nomad asked. True was acting shady this afternoon; something was up, and it wasn’t just because of the second security team leaving, as True had told the band at lunch.
True was holding his breath. In his lap was the leather bag that held his pistol. He watched the exit curve very carefully.
“True, what is it?” Ariel had awakened when the van stopped, and now Berke opened her eyes and removed the earbuds.
“Where are we?” Berke asked.
True could see cars speeding by on the highway. He watched the curve for a white car that might suddenly take the same turn to Blue Chalk.
Nobody said anything else, because they realized True was not only working, he was a two-hundred pound tuning fork that had just been struck into vibration.
He saw the white car pass.
Then he let his breath go.
He gave the Scumbucket some gas and it rumbled onward.
“What was that about?” Nomad looked back, but of course could see nothing beyond the trailer’s bulk.
“I wanted to make sure we weren’t being followed.”
“Why?” Berke’s voice was tight. “Did you see something?”
“We’re good,” he told her, and drove on toward the distant mesa.
The road began to undulate, to rise up on small scrub-covered hillocks and then to fall into rock-walled gullies. Here and there were trailers with external generators because the power poles that marched this way no longer held electrical lines. They passed several houses that had collapsed under the weight of time. Maybe this had been a community when Route 66 was a leisurely scenic road, the theater of Buz and Tod in their red Corvette convertible, but now it was a footnote to progress.
The road curved in and out. If there was any blue chalk in these red walls of rock, it was hiding under camouflage paint. This place was so far off the track it was refreshingly clean, not a beer can or broken bottle or spray of graffiti to be found. An undiscovered country, True thought. Well, it had been discovered once, but in the end nature always won.
They rounded a curve and there stood the brown stone building Eric Gherosimini had told Terry to watch for in his letter. It was a hollow shell, really. An abandoned gas station. Long abandoned, from the looks of the two rusted-out antique pumps in front. A few tires that might have been perfect for a 1959 Ranchero lay in a dust-whitened stack.
“Damn!” Berke said, looking out her window. “Was gas ever twenty-five cents a gallon?”