Nine Volt Heart (30 page)

“Thanks, Dan. This is one to sing when you leave the church
at night and head on down the road.”

He sang “Lovesick Blues,” his smoky tenor reverberating
through the monitors so that it felt like it vibrated up through my boots to my
very core. When Jason finished and most of the audience was clapping, Pete
introduced himself and explained about the Sunday night service, inviting the
audience while his hand rested on Jason’s shoulder.

When the audience finished expressing appreciation for our
homegrown mountain music, Pete put his arm around Jason’s shoulder and mine,
and invited the audience to stay to hear the Jason Taylor Band for their first
performance before a live audience.

The band began with a mountain song about lost love, the
kind I just don’t understand.

JASON

W
E DID IT. WE STEPPED in front
of the most personal of audiences, and they didn’t boo me off the stage. Let’s
ignore the fact that I hid behind Susi’s very short skirt. The sweet mania of
Angelia’s fiddle and Toby’s mandolin kept the audience from pondering the
nature of my past offenses. Starting with Susi leading on mountain songs, and
working our way down to the psychedelic hillbilly boogie of lower Wallingford,
most people seemed to forget about what they thought of me last year. They
called us back for two encores, even though we’d shifted from familiar songs to
the hybrid Celtic wails in our new material.

Afterwards, plenty of people stayed to get autographs and to
say, “Glad you’re back.” Only one person said, “I used to hear Stoneway all the
time, back before you sold out,” and no one spit on me.

Quentin Henderson played a mild-mannered Clark Kent,
scratching notes. I didn’t have to ask him what a heavy-duty indie rock fan was
doing at MOHAI, because Arlo was also there, snapping pictures, an
old-fashioned mini-recorder strapped to his chest, which meant someone would be
downloading MP3s with Arlo’s heartbeat keeping rhythm.

Angelia and Susi signed with the rest of us, and we ended up
late in heading out for the landmines benefit—a benefit against mines, not for
them. It was a black-tie affair where people paid a thousand bucks a ticket or
bought whole tables for fifteen thousand, and then begged their friends to come
and enjoy the no-host bar.

“I hate playing rooms like this,” Ian said. “The sound
shoots for the ceiling and then bounces back to shatter on the floor.”

We had just enough time for a sound check before they shooed
us out to let in the paying customers to dine on catered chicken. White sauce
or green sauce, I don’t remember.

~

“She says she doesn’t want it, but then can’t get enough.”

Cynthia said, “Lordy, Jason, I don’t want to hear about your
sex life. Too much information.”

“I meant singing in front of an audience. She loves it.
She’s fearless.”

“Then maybe we can stop worrying about whether she’ll tour
with the band. I’m going to take a risk while I’m booking gigs and demand a
no-smoking policy, without waiting to find out whether she’s in the band.”

We sat eating sandwiches in the dressing room they gave us
at the hotel. That is, other people were eating sandwiches. I had to give the
waiter fifty bucks and beg for egg salad or cheese for Susi and me. While we
waited for food, Cynthia let me cry on her shoulder, metaphorically speaking.

“What’s she talking to Sonny about?” The two of them had
been laughing at the other end of the room ever since they let the last waiter
in.

“Fishing. It’s what they always talk about.” Cynthia was
filing her new fire-orange nails.

“How did they get to be best friends?”

“She’s best friends with everyone in the band. You’re
pouting, Jason. It’s not a cool look on you.”

Everyone decided to go for a walk or a smoke, since we had
thirty minutes before we went on. As people milled around the door, the
jerk-face pretty boy who drove her home in that BMW last Sunday night stood in
the doorway, and I realized it was his car she had now. Susi was all over him,
hugging, kissing, laughing. I would have blown my own brains out, except I
don’t believe in carrying personal firearms. He was prettier than I’d
recognized—if Susi was an angel, then he was of a related tribe of seraphim. He
seemed affable, and Susi had every effing Judas in the band shaking his hand as
they walked past. Then there was just us three.

“Jason Taylor, this is my brother, Steven Neville.”

That Jason is an unbalanced bozo who has a
moth-to-the-flames attraction to your sister, she did not say. He could read it
in my face, the way that I read recognition in the clenching of his jaw.

She said, “I’m dying for you two to meet, but I’m also dying
of hunger and I have to change clothes. I’ll go change, find that waiter, and
then be right back.” Susi ducked out, as if it were safe to leave me with her
relatives.

Her big brother, for all his sophisticated élan, said, “What
the hell are you doing with my sister?”

“I’m in love with her.”

“She doesn’t know who you are. What kind of love is that?”
Steven was so much like Susi that seeing fury on that face was disconcerting.

“Could we just talk?” I sank into one of the club chairs,
hoping he’d sit down too, so it would be more difficult for him to kick me in
the face if he felt so inclined.

“Our father thinks she’s dating a music scholar.” Steven stood
with his hands on his hips. “Are you lying to both of them?”

“I haven’t lied to either of them.”

“Don’t hurt her. She’s been jacked around enough in this
life.”

“We had a mutual misunderstanding about each other. I told
her my name, but she didn’t recognize it. It was a rush, finding that she liked
me without knowing that I’m somebody who—”

“If she read the paper or Googled your name, she’d know who
you are.”

“She’s been in front of audiences with me all day. She must
have noticed that we aren’t just some bar band. She doesn’t care. Ask her.”

Steven shook his head, still staring at me with the same
intense grey eyes as Susi. “Play your little game if you want, but she needs to
know about your drug bust.”

“What drug bust?” Susi stood in the doorway, the cowgirl
mini exchanged for her formal black tunic, her laughing smile exchanged for a
pale, frightened mask. I looked away from Steven, who in my romantic fantasies
will be my brother-in-law when Susi and I begin to live happily ever after.

“I went to jail last year, Susi. Twice. I don’t tell this
story because it is ugly from start to finish.”

“I suppose all such stories are ugly.” Susi’s voice was flat
when she said this, so I couldn’t hear the tone or color of her feelings. “How
do you know about it, Steven?”

He glared at me. “It was in the papers last year. Everyone
in Seattle knows about it.”

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “I don’t read
the Seattle papers. Tell me.”

I said, “My uncle Beau—there hasn’t been time yet to tell
you much about him.”

“He died. I understood that from your song about him.”

“Beau took me on after I lost my mother, acting as my
manager and mentor. Last year, he went out on the streets of Tacoma to buy
narcotics. I came along to protect him, because I felt sure someone would
fleece him or beat him.”

“Your uncle was a junkie?”

“No. He was dying of stomach cancer, and his doctor didn’t
give him enough morphine to kill the pain. He said he wanted to shop for more,
and I pretended to believe him.”

“What do you mean, pretended?” Steven asked, still scowling,
still wanting me to crawl in a hole and die.

“He wasn’t looking for pain control. He wanted to end it. I
went along because I didn’t want him dying alone.”

“So you were helping him commit suicide?” Steven stood ready
to pin any crime on me. In spite of my fantasies about our future familial
bliss, he was pissing me off such that I felt ready to meet the challenge.

“Is that what you’d call it? Until I’m in the same position,
facing certain death in great pain, I can’t judge whether it’s morally wrong. I
just didn’t want Beau to be alone.”

“Please tell the rest of the story.” Susi offered no clues
about what she thought.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t protect him. Beau scored from a
dealer who was under surveillance, and we all went to jail. When I couldn’t
reach Karl—he’s my attorney—I called my wife. But she did nothing. It was the
Friday night before a three-day weekend, neither of us was carrying ID, and no
one was in a hurry to find me an attorney. So I sat for days in jail until Karl
came home and found my message on his answer service.”

“What happened to your uncle?”

“They put us in different cells. Then Beau got so sick they
took him to a hospital. He wouldn’t tell anyone his name, so it wasn’t until I
got out and went to find him that we could get him back under the care of his
own doctor. He was never fully conscious again. He died a couple of days
later.”

“I’m sorry,” Susi said. Yet I couldn’t tell if she
understood. She just stared at me, as if her eyes could bore a hole into my
soul.

“He would have died anyway.” I have to shrug about that
fact, but I have no illusions about it. “There were only two days left to hold
his hand, with nothing more to say. All because my wife didn’t want to find an
attorney for us.”

“Why would anyone do that?” Steven asked. Instead of the
angry cynicism he had expressed so far, he now sounded amazed. Susi looked
solemn, her one eye brow raised, questioning me.

“I don’t know.” This is so true that my mind whirls whenever
I think about it. “She didn’t like Beau’s influence on me, and had developed
some bizarre hatred for him. She wanted him out of the band and out of our
house, though I had insisted he live with us when he fell ill.”

“What about the second time you went to jail?”

“I went into a rage. I’d learned before then that my
so-called wife had been holding bedroom auditions for a better partner. I
couldn’t swallow what happened to Beau. So I ended up arrested for domestic
violence, though all I did was stand on the street and yell at her when she
wouldn’t let me in the house.”

“You told me about that earlier.”

“Afterward, I just stayed away from Seattle. I didn’t see
her again until a few weeks ago. All rumors to the contrary, I am not a wife
beater.”

She didn’t speak, looking instead at Steven, as if his
reaction mattered. He said, “That story matches the public record.” What he
didn’t say aloud—the qualifying “however”—hung like a pall. He didn’t like me,
and he wouldn’t excuse me for anything.

I said, “Susi, if you want someone to tell you what’s true,
Karl is inside at the benefit.”

“No, I don’t doubt you. I just wish I didn’t know,” she
said. “I never wanted to know your secrets, and I still don’t want you to know
mine. I wish that Steven had minded his own business.”

“You don’t have to tell me your secrets, Susi. You can ask
me anything you want to know.” A bubble of hope choked my ability to say more.

She glanced at Steven, but he just shook his head and looked
away. If I were to try to guess what he thought, he just wanted me to disappear
off the face of the earth.

She looked back at me. “Do you use drugs?”

“No. Years ago I did enough to understand what trapped my
father and then I stopped. A very long time ago.”

“You used to be so well dressed, and now you don’t even
shave some days. You are so distracted. What happened? What do you do all day?”

“I work on music. I start at seven or eight in the morning
to finish production on some older music. Then I work with Ian and the others
to finish an album we have to deliver in June. At night we rehearse our back porch
music with you and Angelia. After you leave, I try to solve musical problems I
found during the day. What else do you want to ask, Susi?”

“Your life seems so flakey. Like living in Ian’s basement. Plus
all these people you owe money to everywhere.”

“Flakey because I’m a musician?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know anyone else so odd. Except
Arlo.”

Ian popped his shaved head in at the open door. “We’re on in
twenty minutes. They want you at the sound board now, Jason.”

I touched her hand, scared out of my wits that she’d push me
away. “Susi, will you still sing with us?”

“Yes, of course. I said I would.”

When I left, I said goodbye but did not shake Steven’s hand.
That would have to wait until we were all living happily ever after.

SUSI

“Y
OU GOING TO LET that bother
you, SusiQ?”

“Hi, Sonny. I didn’t know you were out here.”

Sonny was handsome in a dinner jacket, almost unrecognizable
except for his ponytail. His ruined teeth showed when he smiled.

“Just grabbing a smoke and taking a look-see. I shouldn’t of
been listening, but how the fuck could I help it? It happened just like Jason
says. I was there.”

“You were in jail with him?”

“He didn’t do what they said he did. He is such a fucking
nice guy, he could hurt himself. Pretended that whole time in the cell that he
didn’t recognize me.” Sonny tossed the burning end of his cigarette down the
alley and then took out another and lit it. “But Jason played the club scene
for so long, how could I help recognizing him? Everyone in Seattle knew him. Me
and my buddies did what we could, but it was a rough time. Jason worked bars
long enough that throw-up didn’t bother him, though he’s such a freaking
hand-washer, you’d think he’d flip when a couple of the guys in the cell got
dope sick. Jason just had a hell of a time staying mad and trying to deal with
these people at the same time.”

“Was it his wife’s fault he spent time in jail?”

“Yeah. I ought to send that witch some goddamn roses. If he
hadn’t been stuck in there, I’d be freaking dead by now. Oh shit, don’t tell
him I know.”

“Know what?”

“He saved my fucking life. After Jason was sprung free, he
got lawyers for some of us, got us into treatment. Me and Bobby Smith, we’d
have fucking hosed ourselves by now if it wasn’t for him. We aren’t supposed to
know, but I’m not stupid. No way the fucking fairy godmother was going to step
in and save my ass.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Bobby is around, going to meetings. Gary’s dead. Mike Dee
is still using, or maybe he’s dead. That’s pretty good, fifty percent. Pretty
stupid of Jason to invest his money in junkies. Very poor return on your
capital.” He stopped and took a drag on his cigarette. “Though I shouldn’t call
myself saved. It’s just a day at a time.”

“My husband used. Ex, I mean. I don’t have one now.”

I could feel him studying me though I couldn’t see anything
in the dark except the glowing end of his cigarette.

“Then you know a worthless son of a bitch when you see one.
And Jason ain’t it. Yeah, he’s been around, but his uncle kept him out of the
worst of it, even living on the road most of his life like he has. Can you
figure? It ends up being Beau Rufus gets him landed in jail? Can’t send that
sucker roses no more though, so it’ll have to be the bitch bride that I thank,
begging your pardon for the rough language.”

He took another drag, and then looked at me. “My smoke
bothers you, doesn’t it? Even out here?” He tossed the cigarette far down the
alley. “I’d quit to please you, but I done all the quitting I can manage in the
last year.”

Sonny put his arm around me and we started back in.

Randolph stood at the door, watching us, his hand jammed in
the pockets of his tuxedo.