He opens with “Loggerhead Blues,” a slow, walking blues that segues into the syncopated upbeat swing of “Dip and Rise,” before bringing it back down to the tragic release of “Minamata,” with its images of deformed infants drawn back into the amniotic sea whence they came till the methyl mercury vanishes from the environment, from their mother’s eggs and their father’s sperm, and they can emerge again, whole and clean and waving their tiny unclenched fingers and toes in a salutation of pure joy. She sways in her seat. She’s not thinking, just feeling, because here’s a man who understands, who fights for the environment, who if he only knew would rise up in all his power and influence to back her and Tim and everything they’re trying to accomplish.
And then she is thinking, even as the band slips out of the wings to join him onstage and he ducks under the strap of his electric guitar and the drummer counts off the beat with his two shining sticks, wondering if he’s ever visited the islands, if he knows the gravity of the situation and what’s at stake. She glances at her mother, who’s enjoying herself, or seems to be. Then she’s focused again on the stage, the opening chords of “Swamp Savior” coming down like an atmospheric phenomenon, but she’s not in the auditorium any longer — no, she’s out on the island, Micah Stroud at her side, assessing the pig damage, bending low to gaze in at the captive foxes in the tranquillity and safety of their cages, asking him if he wouldn’t maybe write a song for them, an anthem to salvation, and he’s leaning in close, hovering over her with the sun caught in his eyes and drawling, Of course, and I’ll go one better and donate the whole proceeds to the cause. How’s that? Good enough for you? No? Well, I’m going to write a check too. . but only if there’s a quid pro quo here, because did anybody ever tell you how irresistible you are? Hey, you ever take time off? I mean, would you want to go on the European leg of the tour with me? Stockholm? You ever been to Stockholm. .?
Four songs with the band, then the stage goes dark but for the spotlight. He turns his back a moment, ducking into the shadows to change guitars — back to acoustic — and then sidles up to the old-fashioned standing mike that’s become his trademark to wonder aloud if anyone out there’s having a good time. Well, they are. All of them. Even Alma’s mother, who lets loose with a war whoop right out of the 1960s as the crowd roars its affirmation. “Hot town,” he murmurs, wiping the sweat from his face with a limp towel. “And I surely do appreciate that on a cool autumn evening out here on the California coast where a poor boy from the bayou can always wrap himself up in the heat you good folks generate”—whistles, applause—“and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
He bows his head a moment in acknowledgment of the applause, his hair fallen loose in a sweated tangle, and when he straightens up and the light catches his face again, she sees that he’s grinning. “But do we have a treat for you tonight, folks, one of your very own”—he raises a hand to shade his eyes and peer out into the audience—“a supremely gifted singer-songwriter who’s going to join me on the next number. Anise? You out there, sweetheart?”
That’s when everything seems to swirl and rush as if she’s caught in a vortex, an open drain sucking her down and taking the whole section of seats with her, her mother an illusion, the sneezing man vanished, hipsters in their trailing coats and scarves and photochromatic lenses all sieving past her as Anise Reed rises from a seat in the front row — how could she have missed her? — in an expanding mushroom cloud of kinked-out hair. But that’s not all. Because Dave LaJoy is there too, in the seat beside the one she’s just vacated, bringing his hands together in praise as the whole auditorium takes it up, Wilson Gutierrez at his elbow, stamping and whistling, while Alicia lifts her pale expressionless face to the light flooding down off the stage and the woman next to her with the big hair shocked with gray. . beams with. . with the pride of a mother. Anise’s mother. Anise Reed’s. And before Alma can even begin to process that revelation, here she is, the supremely gifted singer-songwriter herself, mounting the steps to the stage, her bare feet palpitating, toenails shining, as a lackey darts from the wings with her guitar held aloft in offering.
Nearly sixty years earlier, in September of 1946, when the Lobero was just beginning to fill its seats again after the lean years of the war, Alma’s grandmother brought her baby to term at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica — a healthy girl of seven pounds, seven ounces, who showed no ill effects of her mother’s ordeal on Anacapa Island. Beverly was then living with her own mother, having no way to meet the rent on the apartment she’d shared with Till beyond the end of that first catastrophic month when she missed him through every minute of every day as if he’d gone off to war all over again. So they were two widows in that house she’d grown up in, her father ten years’ dead, her mother on her feet all day long, working the cash register at a grocery on Lincoln Boulevard though she suffered from varicose veins and her ankles sagged till they were like layer cakes collapsed over the edges of the pan.
At first, when she awoke in the hospital and the nurse brought her daughter into the room, Beverly thought there must be some mistake, so convinced was she that her child would be a boy, Till’s son, his reified image come from out of the void to stand in for him — Till Jr., who would grow into a man with both his arms pliable and intact. She hadn’t thought of any girls’ names. But when her mother, still in her uniform, came straight to her from work and took the baby up in her arms with a look of ecstasy, a new name darted into her head — Matilda, she would call her Matilda, Tillie for short — and she said it aloud, pronounced it for her mother in the echoing room while the woman in the bed beside her looked on with her twin boys and a placid smile. “Tillie, what do you think of Tillie?”
Her mother, staring into the baby’s face as if the baby were an embodied message from an unknowable place, clucked her tongue. “Do you really want to live with that for the rest of your life?” she said, without looking up.
“Live with what?”
“If you don’t know, then I can’t tell you. But think about it. Just think.”
She fought the notion through the hushed course of that first day, through the changings and the feedings and the trip in the taxi that came for her next morning, stubborn, seeing Till as he was before the war, Till in his uniform, Till without it, in bed, pressing his urgent body to hers. For the first two weeks, right up to the eve of the christening, the baby was just the baby, but finally, sitting there in the rocker by the window of the only house she’d ever known until her husband came along, her daughter sucking placidly at the rubber nipple of the just-warmed bottle and her mother, tired on her feet, shuffling into the room to offer her a cup of tea, she came to herself — she had a daughter, not a son, and Till was a spirit now. In that moment the baby had her name — she would call her Katherine, after the gentle woman with the suffering face and sweet compressed smile who balanced the teacup on its saucer as if it were a feat of legerdemain and never took her eyes from her all the while.
Men came round, men cut from the same mold as Warren, but Beverly never gave them the slightest encouragement, and eventually they stopped coming. There was no question of remarrying, even for the sake of her daughter, because she was a one-man woman, then and always, and she was prepared to die alone at the end of her life to keep herself for Till when they met in heaven. If Katherine (or Kat, as they began calling her because she wouldn’t part with her stuffed tabby except in the bathtub, and then only reluctantly) grew up without a father, she wasn’t the only one, what with the divorce rate and the toll the war had taken, and she never seemed any the worse for it, at least not while she was in school. Of course, Beverly had no choice but to go back to work within a month after her daughter was born, reversing roles with her mother, who quit the grocery to stay home full-time.