My darling son
My darling son
On the beach
And the meadow run
Follow a dream
Follow a dream
And when you return
A man you will be
But until then darling son
You are my darling son
Goodnight to you
You and the stars tonight
Goodnight
Then suddenly the Tejano song butted in and took over, as if it were jealous of Erin’s attention elsewhere. She struck the notes of melody on the grand with her left hand, and scribbled down the words in her notebook with the other. It was a song about a young man racing home to his lover on a dark night and he’s driving way too fast, and he gets pulled over by a highway patrolman. The patrolman locks him in the back of his cruiser and gets on the radio. The song is the young man’s plea to be let go because his woman is so good and sweet and he hasn’t seen her in a very long time. The more the young man brags about her, the more astonishingly beautiful, but less believable, she becomes. But the cop lets him go and in the end the young man makes it home and she is plain and poor but in his mind every bit as lovely as he had said she was.
Time passed. She wrote and rewrote, played phrases one way and then another. She collected them all on the little recorder because sometimes you didn’t hear a jewel the first time through. It was hard to free her heart to feel the words and the stories because of the great black hole in her universe that was her captivity, and the lesser one that was her husband.
Later she saw Armenta looking at her through the window of the control room. Heriberto stood behind him with a large black rifle of some kind strapped over his shoulder. Armenta looked weary and absent as he lifted a cup of something to his mouth and gave her a slight nod. She turned back to her notepad and a moment later when she looked back for him both men were gone.
Later Armenta came into the tracking room with his accordion case and set it down next to one of the instrument booths. He was clean shaven and groomed, barefoot, in shorts and a blue wedding shirt. He wore a wide military-style belt outside the shirt, hung with phones and weapons. Barefoot and in shorts and a festive shirt he looked like a tourist arriving at a resort.
“I need to play.”
“It’s your studio.”
“Are the songs coming to you?”
“They are trying.”
“I will not be a distraction to you.”
“How can a man playing accordion not be a distraction?”
Erin saw Heriberto looking through the glass at them from the control room. He sat at the mixing board on a stool, his weapon peeking over his shoulder from behind him. He said something, but of course she heard none of it. He shrugged and he yelled this time but it made no difference. Looking down at the mixing board he finally found the talk-back button.
“Do you want more coffee, Mrs. Jones?” asked Heriberto.
“No, thank you.”
“Do not speak to her,” ordered Armenta. “She is creating. She will get her own coffee when she wants it.”
Heriberto nodded.
“Why is he here? Are you expecting another attack?” she asked.
“I am always expecting another attack.”
“You have less men to protect you now.”
“What do you mean by this?”
“I don’t mean anything. Only that maybe you need more men.”
“More are coming. Why would they not come?”
Erin felt her muses scattering, flushed by Armenta and the suspicion and violence that followed him. Don’t go, she asked them, please stay. “Play the accordion. Sometimes chaos is good.”
“Yes, it becomes collaboration.”
“Not quite, but one thing can lead to another.”
He looked at her lugubriously and set down his accordion case and removed his phone-and-weapon-studded belt. He slid one pistol into the back of his waistband. Then he hung the belt over a stool where it clattered and clanked and tried to slide off until he balanced it. Then he brought the gleaming instrument from the case and worked the tooled leather straps over his shoulders and settled the heavy thing against his chest. He stepped into the instrument booth and pulled on the headset and muttered something into the mike to Heriberto.
Erin turned her back to him. She flipped on the recorder and tapped out the melody of the lullaby on the Yamaha keys. It was a waltz and she loved waltzes of any kind. The three-quarter time soothed her darkness and when she considered her circumstances her heart did not fall, even though she expected it to crash right down through the floor. No, she thought. I am okay. I can do this. Bradley was not involved in the Zeta attack. He was not arrested by the Army. He is alive. He is coming. He is close. Very close. Mike would have gotten word to Owens if it was otherwise. Right?
Behind her thoughts she heard Armenta’s accordion and it seemed pleasant and thousands of miles away, foreign and of another world. The lullaby grew a bridge and another verse and it felt right. She arranged the chords beneath the melody and for a moment she had that old feeling of transportation, of tagging along on a wonderful ride that required very little of her own energy. And every pinch of energy she put forth came back in ounces of music and this music made her energy grow stronger. Minutes flew, but made no sound that she could hear.
A while later the accordion came piping softly again from what seemed miles away, Armenta finding the fills between the lines of the lullaby. My darling son/My darling son. Just as with the Jaguars of Veracruz, he played simply and directly and without great style or ego.
Erin dug in and gave the piano chords some authority, playing the song through once and then again. She looked up and watched Armenta come from the instrument booth, the big accordion wheezing in and out and she had to smile at his shorts and his short thick legs and pale-bottomed feet and the razor-cut hairstyle that barely gave shape to his gray-black thatch. He moved in small steps to the waltz time, left then right then left again, toward her but not directly. He was concentrating on the playing. He stopped and turned his back to her, looking through the glass at Heriberto, and Erin saw the lump of the gun beneath his shirt, and his arms stretching the bellows of the accordion in and out.
He turned and regarded her for a long beat with an expression she’d never seen, nodded, and looked back down to his keyboard. In that moment she saw him differently, not only as Benjamin Armenta the violent drug lord, but as a man who knows that no matter how much money he gives to his Church, or how much treasure he might amass, or how many lepers he might care for, he will never get his sons back and he has not one true friend on Earth. Erin suspected that he would give up his world if he could. To make music, she thought.
She sang to herself, softly at first. But as she read the lyrics off the notepad she believed her baby should feel them too, so she filled her lungs and primed her diaphragm and raised the volume to complement the Yamaha. Armenta was standing across the piano from her now and he stopped his playing and watched her, sleepy he looked, his eyes closed and his face down and just the hint of a smile on his face. When she came to the end of the song she started the first verse again and he glanced at her and she nodded. The accordion notes came aptly and with some joy, and Armenta fitted his chords to those of the piano, and together they formed a firm bed on which to lay her voice.