Nine Volt Heart (17 page)

JASON

“P
RESCOTT PREPARATORY SCHOOL.”

“This is Angelia Ferran’s cousin, Jason. Can you help me get
through to her by phone?”

“She’s teaching in the music lab right now. May I take a message?”

“I want her to send me a copy of her grant application.
Perhaps you can ask her to send it to me by email. The teachers have email,
don’t they?”

“Yes, though not everyone uses it. I think that Miss Ferran
uses hers.”

“Let me leave my address and phone, in case she doesn’t have
them.”

“Do you want me to send you a copy of the grant, Mr. Ferran?
I have the file on my hard disk.”

“That would be kind. Please have Angelia call me, too.”

OK, I lied, though I did have familial feelings for Angelia
when we played together the night before. She’s quite good. I thought it
beneficent that we were almost related, because otherwise it wouldn’t have
occurred to me to look for a classically trained musician who could play
bluegrass and both Cape Breton and Cajun fiddle styles. Hey, I’m from Seattle.
Cajun fiddle players aren’t standing on the corner looking for a gig. You have
to know their booking agent. Or pick up her agent by accident in Neumo’s.

~

Although I said before that Seattle is a small town, it’s so
tiny that there are only about thirty-four people and they are all vibrating in
a tight, intense orbit. When the police came—the day after we called—one was
Officer Lee Page, the cop who cuffed me when Dominique called the police last
year. He’s big as a linebacker, but has a baby face and a quick smile that his
job hasn’t burned down yet.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Taylor,” he said when I showed
him a picture of the National Steel from my wallet. I am not, by the way, a
weirdo with a guitar fetish. The picture was of Uncle Beau, who originally
owned the guitar. Officer Lee was writing down the details as we talked, remaining
politely restrained about dealing with me.

“I got to be a real fan after I met you, Mr. Taylor. My wife
loves the new album, so I hear it all the time. Reminds me whenever I hear it
how you didn’t get a fair shake. When women get mad like that, it’s always best
to just get your distance.”

I explained about the stalker, but Officer Page and his
partner didn’t have much to help me.

“Make sure you have good locks. Get an alarm if you don’t
have one already. If it gets to be a problem, you can consider private
security.”

“Like bodyguards?” This was way too much for me.

“Just protection. My brother-in-law is in the business. I
can give you his number.” Office Page said. “You know, I was a big Lost Sons
fan in high school. So I like your earlier stuff better than the new album.”

He left the card with Martha.

That morning, I spent my time working over some live
recordings, which took only a certain kind of attention, so I applied
visualization techniques while I worked: seeing myself surrounded by the
football players who beat me up in junior high but who would keep me safe now,
and seeing my guitar come back through the door. Hard to say which image was
the most unrealistic fantasy. Before lunch I went for a run, where I settled
for my usual visualization of the way Susi’s brow arches up so that she always
looks curious and surprised. When I ran, I had an urge in my fingers to provoke
that surprise, the same way my fingers want to feel out a melody that isn’t
actually playing anywhere.

~

 
Chas1933: Did you hear Greg Vandy on KEXP last week? He did a short Lost Sons
retrospective.

Sebastián: No I was working that night.

Chas1933: Well, did you see that post on the Lost Sons site
today? Looks like the Rufus estate is about to settle. I’m going to find the
attorney and get access to the papers. I’m betting no other archivist has
tackled that trail. I heard that Jesse Rufus’s papers have been sealed up for a
dozen years.

Sebastian: I’ve been avoiding the Internet the last couple of
days. So I don’t know. There are a lot of liars out there. No reason that
anyone should know more about it than you or I.

Chas1933: It isn’t going to do me a lick of harm to waste time
writing to some attorney who has a box full of musical history sitting in his
vault and isn’t doing squat with it.

Sebastian: Go for it.

Chas1933: Want to hear my other good idea? I’m going to poke
around for song rights that have been abandoned by record labels and
publishers. I bet I could buy some old lost gems, and maybe find a new
publisher.

Sebastian: Where are you going to look? People aren’t posting
them on eBay.

Chas1933: I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. Shoot, I got
nothing but time on my hands.

~

“Karl, can’t you answer my texts, so I don’t have to stop
what I’m doing to call you?”

“It is bad enough with phone calls, Jason. When you’re in
town, I have your voice in my head all the time. Like that girl on your fan
site who says your songs cause her to have auditory hallucinations.”

“You were looking at the fan sites? I thought you used the
Internet only for Lexis searches.”

“I have an assistant to do that. I have an assistant to do
almost everything, and managing them drives me cuckoo. However, I wanted to see
for myself what your stalker was up to. I wonder how he knew I filed to close
Beau’s estate? It was just a couple of days ago.”

“Maybe he works for you. Do you have anyone on your staff
that looks like Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
?”

“Everyone who works for me had a background check, is
bonded, and has too much to do just to keep track of your business. I looked at
the stuff this guy posts about you. Even though he uses different names, I think
I can see which ones belong to him. This guy is wacko. Listen to what he said
this morning.”

“I think maybe I don’t want to.”

“He wrote, ‘Since my brother came back home, he’s romancing
an angel. She sings like one. She looks like one. After taking us all to hell
with the devil he married, now my brother is going to take us all to heaven.
Does that sound—”

“Yikes. How could he know without following me everywhere?”

“I think you should get personal protection.”

“Walk around with goons all the time, like Dylan or
something? I don’t think so.”

“OK, you won’t listen to my unsolicited advice. Did you call
for a purpose? What am I supposed to tell Dominique about the band name?”

“Tell her to take a flying leap. There’s a friend of mine
who wants research access to Jesse Rufus’s papers. When he contacts you, say
yes.”

“What is his name?”

“Chas.”

“Chas what?”

“I don’t know.”

“How in hell can he be your friend if you don’t know his
name? You know Quentin Henderson, and you made me tell him no when he asked for
access.”

“I met Chas through one of my blogs.”

“Where you pretend to be someone else?”

“Where I pretend to be myself, using my middle name.”

“That’s not being yourself. Who you are is in fact someone
famous—both good and bad kinds—and you can’t hide from it.”

“So write to [email protected] and ask him his name.”

“He must be related to your Susi, who also has no last name.
Have you got her name yet?”

“Yes, it’s Neville. I forwarded you the grant application
she submitted, so you can read all about her. Check your email once in a while.
Or at least get your staff to.”

“Are you still seeing her?”

“We rehearse at her house every night. You should come sit
in. It’s just your style. We don’t hardly even use electricity. We start
recording tonight.”

“Oh shit and shoepolish. Let me fax you a release for her to
sign.”

“Lord, Karl. Do I need a note from my attorney to play
guitar in the company of friends?”

“Yes, you do. Friends or strangers, it’s all the same from
my viewpoint.”

SUSI

O
N WEDNESDAY, I HAD to take a
nap in my car during lunch break. I fell asleep at my desk during the notation
test in Music Appreciation, but I don’t think anyone noticed. Zak was absent
again.

When I got home, I just went to bed for a couple of hours
and got up feeling much better, just in time to let my new friends in. Toby
brought pizza from Pagliacci’s, and Ian brought new strings for my dad’s
Martin. Jason seemed moody and almost unpleasant, but when I asked, he looked
at Toby and sighed.

“We want to record the sessions,” Toby said.

“But you have to sign something if we do,” Jason said. “If a
label picks up our work, you need to have agreed to what we’re doing.”

“That’s cute,” I said, thinking of what I knew about how
easily record labels ignore or break contracts. “So am I in your band now?”

Jason looked at Toby and Ian, who both said, “Yes.”

“What’s our band’s name?”

Toby said, “We will have to think of one.”

“I can’t sing in bars,” I said, as if that’d ever happen,
but the whole idea seemed so cute. “The smoke hurts my throat.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Jason said. “Smoking has been
banned almost everywhere we play.”

After they were so nice as to let me be in their band, they
decided that the sound shattered on the glass bookcases, which would have to be
muffled while we recorded. So we draped my entire living room in quilts, like
building forts on rainy days in the second grade.

When Angelia came later in the evening, she and Toby tuned
with each other instead of with the piano.

~

On Thursday, Jason took greater pains than he had before,
over every little thing. While we waited for him to position mics and approve
everyone’s tunings, I asked Toby to go with me on Sunday night to play
bluegrass gospel. He’s such an excellent musician that I thought he might enjoy
it as Jason had. Toby shook his head, saying he didn’t do church and he had to
finish his laundry and jamming wasn’t his style, though I don’t know what he
thought we’d been doing all week if it wasn’t jamming.

Jason fussed more, changing guitars and stopping everyone
multiple times in the first song we tried to do together.

Ian said, “Take it out of the bag, man. Or go home.”

What Ian meant, it turned out, was that Jason had a new song
but felt nervous about wanting us to learn it. It had Celtic influences, so the
tonal range and rhythm were easy for me, but we had to work through the whole
piece a dozen times to get it the way that he liked. The lyrics were about
rusty angels and poems for which rhymes could not be found. On the page, they
made no sense, but that’s true for half of the history of lyric song in the
west, isn’t it? Once the layers of music were added, it was rather pretty in a
spooky sort of way.

When I was making more coffee and the others went out onto
the deck to take a break, Angelia came up behind me.

“I’m not used to musicians who can express themselves,
Susi.”

“That’s what music is about. Communication.”

“Horse pucky. You might say that in music appreciation, but
you know it isn’t true. It’s about movement. Getting high. What we’re doing
here.”

“All we’re doing is enjoying ourselves with music.”

“Excuse me for snorting when I laugh. This is just sex and
drugs and rock-and-roll, Susi.”

“That’s crazy. There’s no sex, and certainly no drugs. And
we aren’t singing rock-and-roll. It’s folk music.”

“You don’t see what’s going on? Jason has us all enrolled in
a weird sort of foreplay. We are supposed to make sure you get high on music so
he can have sex with you.”

“We are just singing his pretty little song.”

“That song is about you, Susi.”

“It is just some images and sounds. It doesn’t even have a chorus.”

“It is such a come-hither song. I don’t know how you can
resist him.”

After we drank coffee, Jason wanted us to learn another
song, but he didn’t have lyrics for it yet, so I had to improvise an old-timey
version of scat singing. More typically he just looks at his instrument while
he’s playing, or he keeps an eye on Toby or Angelia. Yet he watched me the
entire time we worked over that song with no words.

~

Friday morning, after four nights of playing into the wee
hours, Jason and Ian were both asleep in their chairs when I woke. Toby and
Angelia had departed. Which had become their usual thing.

I dressed for work and started the coffee for Jason and Ian.
It was a borderline possibility, but it seemed like I might get to work on
time.

“Hey, Susi,” Jason whispered, looking up at me. His whiskery
face reminded me of early Monday, which seemed like a year ago, and I reached
out and touched his lips without thinking. He caught my hand and kissed my
fingers, softly, slowly. “Can we have a date tonight? Go out to dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like my song? Will you marry me now?”

“Yes. I’m flattered. But no, I’m not going to marry again.”

“Susi, I’m not the kind of guy who has children without
marrying their mother first.”

“I’m late for work. I have to go.”

“Don’t you feel anything, Susi? After all of this?”

“I feel like Snow White in reverse.”

“Like the touch of your fingers awoke Prince Charming?”

“Like I have to go to the mines while the Seven Dwarves get
to sleep in my charming cottage in the woods. Heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go.”

I’m getting to be a really good liar.

~

The whole time the principal reprimanded me for tardiness,
Randolph sat pursing his lips like he was trying to keep from speaking. Don’t
vice principals have to recuse themselves the same way that judges do when they
have a personal investment in the issue under judgment?

Zak was absent from all his afternoon classes. I begged
Angelia and his English teacher to ignore it. It’s too late in the year to be
honest on the attendance rolls.

To cap a bad work day, that bastard Logan left a message
with the secretary for me to call him, like the wicked witch leaving a poison
apple. I will not bite.