Hot Springs (28 page)

They did “Spoonful,” and “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and then a way-too-fast “You Don’t Love Me,” during which Freddy kept giving him
looks. Peering out into the dark, squinting against the hard, bright lights, CC saw the regular faces in their seats, carrion birds waiting for their chance. Tonight the problem was going to be harmonica players. There was the waiflike deaf guy, who honked anemically, occasionally by lucky accident on key. There was Night Train, who had the kind of physique you can only earn in a prison exercise yard. He was an egotist and mean, and always seemed to think he was headlining his own band at a real money gig instead of just sitting in on jam night at a crummy dive that most decent people were afraid to go into. There were two other guys with harps out, too, though CC didn’t recognize them. One looked like a college kid—a few wandered down from time to time—and the other looked like a standard over-the-hill stoner: beard, long hair, tie-dyed T-shirt bulging over a pronounced gut. There were a couple of guitar players waiting, too, skulking in the shadows at the back, smoking and pacing.

Mike had descended from his apartment above the bar, the command center from which he looked down onto the street below, monitored the drunks and partiers, and attempted to guide them through the bar’s doors by psychic will and the focused power of sheer greed. He stood now near the front, talking to Max Lucca, who had hung around after his set. CC knew that he was interrogating him, asking him who the hell he was.

He and the band finished playing “Cold Shot,” and CC mopped the sweat from his face with the tail of his shirt. The air-conditioning was barely doing anything, and with the lights, it seemed as if it were a hundred degrees onstage. Suddenly, Mike was sticking his fat, mutton-chopped face up at him.

“I told Max he has to bring in ten people next time he comes,” he said. “He brings in ten people, all of them buying drinks—at least two—he can play here again. That’s fair, right?”

“Sure, if you think charging musicians to play in your bar is fair.”

Mike chose not to hear him. “Skate is here,” he said. Skate Evans, a huge Aussie, stood toward the center of the bar, working on a double whiskey. A regular, he was also part of the investment group that had bought the tax lien on the Harborview. “He’s going to play a few songs.”

“Let him wait in line with the rest of these guys,” said CC. “It’s early yet.”

“Sure, sure,” said Mike. “Only get him up in a song or two, OK? You know how he can get.”

“Did he bring a guitar?” asked CC, knowing the answer. The last time he’d loaned Skate his guitar, the man had been so drunk and so involved in the ear-splitting solo he was playing, he’d fallen backward over an amplifier.

“I don’t know.” Mike looked over his shoulder. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, then he can’t play. It’s a jam, Mike. He knows that. You want to play, you bring an instrument.”

“Let him play yours.”

“We’ve been through this.”

“Please?” Mike looked as if it hurt him to ask, and CC was reminded—as if he needed to be—that the man’s situation was not good. Still, he didn’t like what this represented, and he didn’t like how it made him feel.

“Night Train,” he called. Night got up from the table where he’d been drinking a beer with an attractive redhead in a low-cut dress. He hopped up onto the stage without a word and began putting on a bandolier containing all his various harps over his muscle T.

“Send Skate over,” said CC to Mike. “It’s OK.”

A minute later, Skate was onstage, strapping on CC’s Tele. He was even drunker than usual, and thanked him profusely for the loan.
“Birthday, mate,” he said, with a wink. Something about the way Skate peppered his speech with “mate” and “no worries” made CC wonder if he were from Australia at all.

CC hopped off the stage. Looking up, he saw it starting already. Skate could barely plug in. Freddy was shaking his head at CC, as if to say,
Don’t do this
, but he’d done it, and he wasn’t backing off. He felt bad for Freddy. Zimmer would hold it together enough to keep him happy, almost certainly. Zimmer was using the short break to run some impressive scales and do some snapping and popping, and didn’t seem to notice the drunk across the stage from him.

CC got himself a beer and took a position at the end of the bar, under the television. He felt a tug on his arm, turned, and found Bernice.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re just in time for the show.”

“I saw Max,” she said. “He seems pretty fired up.”

“He did good. Invents his own lyrics on the spot. You hear about the sinkhole?”

“I came to tell you I quit,” she said. “Sorry.”

“That’s OK. You were never particularly hired in the first place. I mean, there was nothing official about it. And Mike was never going to go for changing the walls.”

She gestured toward his beer. “Can I get one of those?”

He went back behind the bar and pulled a Rolling Rock from the cooler, conscious that Mike was watching him. He brought it back to her. “That guy on the left? He’s going to hate that guy on the right.”

“The black guy?”

He nodded. “They might just kill each other.”

“It’s like this,” she said. “I have a boyfriend.”

“So? I have a girlfriend.” He looked toward the door, just in case Fiona might come in, but then remembered she had a catering gig in
Cockeysville. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. Why the hell did you come down here in the first place?”

“I think I just wanted to show you that I’d changed.”

“You can tell me anything you want to tell me. You know that?”

Bernice made a face. “Like what?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Like about how that’s my kid.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What most men know about reproduction, you could fit on the back of a postage stamp. You honestly believe our one night together knocked me up?”

“It didn’t?”

“Think about it like miniature golf. You’ve got a long, thin stretch of fairway, then a big old windmill with barely enough space between two of the blades for a ball to slip through, and then on the other side, there’s more green, with a little tiny cup, except that cup is up on a rise. You think that you took
one putt
and sent that ball right through the windmill and right up onto that hill and into the cup? That’s what you think?” She took a big sip of beer.

“You
have
changed,” said CC.

Night Train was talking to the audience. “All right now,” he said. “I feel the love out there.”

“See, this guy, Skate, he plays loud. And a lot of the time he’s out of tune, especially when he’s drunk. And Night Train, he couldn’t tell you what key he’s in most of the time, but he does know when things sound bad, and he gets really angry.” She didn’t seem interested, so he stopped. “I just thought you might like a little background.”

“And you set them up together?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m in charge. Because I can.”

“Well, there’s a philosophy to live by. So, anyway, it was a mistake, and I’ll be going.”

He hopped off his barstool when she did, and they stood looking at each other. Her hand was out, and he took it in his; they shook. He wanted her, he thought. Or maybe not. He wanted
something
, he knew that. He felt bad about Eve, didn’t entirely understand what had happened there, only knew he hadn’t been equal to the task of keeping up with all her moods. When he’d heard the news, he’d walked over to her empty apartment and stared at the door for a while, then decided it was none of his business. Done was done; everyone had to go sometime. But here she was again, in a way, a younger version, one that seemed to show up at regular—albeit infrequent—intervals, and he thought maybe some higher power might be trying to tell him something.

“Listen,” he said. “I don’t know about this boyfriend, but I’m quitting, too. I’ve got contacts down in New Orleans. Family. We could go there together.” As he said it, he saw a yard with a swing set, saw himself and Bernice on a porch, sipping beers.

“I’m impressed.” She looked around her approvingly. “You’d leave all this for me?”

“It’s not about you. I need to move on with my life.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Let me show you something. He walked her over to the front wall of the room, back in the corner. There, hanging somewhat crookedly against the cracking, black-painted plaster wall, was a photo of him in a dark shirt, open at the collar, a leather hat all but obscuring his face.

“I remember that guy,” she said.

“Me, at my peak,” he said.

The music was already coming apart badly, with Night Train trying to sing “Born in Chicago,” and Skate stepping all over his voice
with guitar riffs. The deaf harmonica player had surreptitiously found his way onstage and was hiding in the shadows, tooting away in the wrong key. CC saw that Mike, seated at the front end of the bar near the door, was nervously peering back into the other room, trying to get a fix on what was going down.

“That girl is going to need a father.”

“You are assuming an awful lot.”

“She looks like me.”

“She looks like
me
. And what kind of father do you think you’d make, really? You seduce the daughters of your girlfriends.”

“I’m still living in the same place. It’s just a couple of blocks from here,” he said. “You want to take a walk?”

“Aren’t you working? Isn’t this your job?”

“I told you, I’m done.” He looked toward Mike again, but he had apparently removed himself to the upstairs.

“You have anything to drink?”

“Everything,” he said. “You name it. Jack Daniels, right?” He noticed the muscle coming up from her shoulder to her neck, thought how he’d like to kiss its graceful curve, considered that he had probably already done this at that hotel—what, six?—years ago, though he couldn’t remember for sure.

“What about them?” As she gestured toward the stage, the song they’d been trying to play came clattering to a halt. He heard Freddy smack a few drums with an indifference that told him he’d gone into his I’m-not-really-here mode. Zimmer was at attention, face like a pit bull, framed by his thinning long gray hair, his
Little Shop of Horrors
T-shirt—he’d done a road tour—soaked through.

Skate stepped to the mic. “Now we’re going to do some
fucking
blues,” he said. He began soloing, without communicating anything to anyone else, leaving his fellow jammers all looking slightly baffled
as to what song he was starting, although eventually they managed to fall into a kind of lurching accompaniment behind him. Night Train was clearly at a decision point—he could leave the stage and admit defeat, and possibly appear never to have been in control, or he could ride out this spell of bad weather as if nothing were wrong at all and assume that, somehow, all would be fixed. Choosing the latter, he put his face to his harp, affecting the kind of intimacy CC associated with a Rastafarian and a big spliff, closed his eyes, and breathed away.

“The street is crying,” sang Skate. “Look at the tears rolling down the sky.”

More than a few of the waiting musicians had their eyes on CC, nervously wondering how he was going to restore order, and if they were going to be on next. It was nearly eleven, and this thing ended at two.

“Take a walk with me,” he said. “Come on.”

“Do you have a view from that rooftop deck of yours?”

“You were never up there?”

“No,” she said. “I never was.”

“Of the harbor, yeah. You can see straight across to the Domino Sugar sign.”

“
Sugars
. You can see it from your house, and you still don’t know what it says?”

There were now three harmonica players onstage, as the guy in the tie-dyed shirt, apparently sensing a free-for-all, had simply climbed up and commandeered a microphone. He was swaying as he played, and ignoring everyone else. CC recognized him as one of Jerry’s kids, those lost souls living out their days in search of the perfect drum circle, arguing the merits and fine points of different Dead shows like wine connoisseurs or theologians. Night Train had stopped playing his harp and was standing with hands on his hips, uncertain what to
do next. Skate, who had never stopped soloing, was on his knees in front of his amp, back to the audience, encouraging feedback from the thing, Hendrix-style.

“Let’s get,” said CC, taking her hand, and he was pleased when she followed along. He figured whatever happened, his guitar would probably be all right. Those Fenders were made tough as baseball bats.

L
andis wished there were a television to watch. Emily was in bed, and it was his job to—well, he wasn’t sure what his job was. To be patient. To expect Bernice to do the right thing. Which seemed, given her history and their current situation, a fairly thin hope. He’d already combed through the basement. There were some decent power tools, a radial-arm saw and a table saw, and stacks of unframed paintings against the walls. The brick was crumbling, leaving little piles of red dust in places on the floor, and there were cobwebs everywhere. He found all kinds of boxes and old appliances—a toaster oven, a Mr. Coffee that looked like one of the original Joe DiMaggio ones—but no television. He’d tried all the closets. Nothing. He didn’t even want to watch anything in particular; he just needed to get outside of himself for a while. A baseball game, an old movie, hell, even the shopping channel. Just something
to keep his mind off how Bernice had gone back to see this guy again.

He stared at himself in the mirror over the dining-room mantel. Behind him, he could see the chandelier, and the parlor to one side, the long entrance hall leading to the front door on the other.

He got a beer out of the refrigerator and sat at the large dining table, which was an old, farmhouse kind of thing, very beaten up and not at all in keeping with the grandeur of the room’s original aspirations. There wasn’t even a radio anywhere. His thoughts echoed in his head. Anyone else would have walked by now. Making him get his own place—this was ridiculous. Earlier, after he’d driven Tessa Harding all the way downtown to her hotel, he’d come back to find Bernice dressed up to go out again, the kid put down for the night.