Petrogypsies (28 page)

“So, these Kaydets tried not to get you boys in trouble,” Doc finished. “I talked to one of the cops, and he says they practically had to drag the story out.”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “That was because they was making it up as they went along.” Then me and Stevie took turns explaining what really happened the night before.

* * *

When we got to the House of Pancakes, the place was almost full, with students visiting each other freely between the booths. We were still waiting near the cash register before being shown to our booth, when the crowd shifted and gave me a clear sight of a face in the booth in the far corner.

It was Billy Bob. I nudged Stevie with my elbow.

“Look who we found,” I said happily. “You want first crack at him?”

He glanced at Billy Bob, then looked at his feet. I nudged him again, but he wouldn’t look up.

“No,” he muttered. “I just want to forget about last night.” It hadn’t occurred to me that Stevie might actually be afraid of Billy Bob. I realized suddenly that life might be a lot harder in ways I’d never thought of, for a short, puny guy like him. After awhile somebody like him might just decide to quit fighting back, boxing lessons or no, because all it brought was more torment.

I had my problems, but that wasn’t one of them. I knew just how to convince Billy Bob that the way him and his friends treated us last night was bad manners.

“Forget, hell!” I took a couple of steps toward Billy Bob’s booth before Doc snagged my elbow.

“That’s him, Doc! You remember. You saw him talking with Star at Jon-Tim’s. He’s one of the ones that done us dirty.”

“Henry Lee, we’re in the middle of the goddam House of Pancakes. You ain’t been out of jail for a half hour yet.”

I reconsidered my plans for a second. “You’re right. Okay, I won’t bust up the place. How about if I merely set up an appointment with Mr. Dartmouth so we can talk later on? Someplace private. Like the parking lot out back of here, in two minutes.” I took another step, and then the crowd opened up a bit more. Billy Bob wasn’t alone in the booth. She was sitting with her back to the room and us, but I recognized her from seeing no more than her long dark hair.

Billy Bob looked up from saying something to her and winked at me.

I turned and ran out of the House of Pancakes. I jostled a couple of people who had been waiting in line behind us, but I hardly noticed. All I could think of was I had to get out of there before she turned around and saw me. If she saw me it would be more than I could handle.

Doc found me a minute or so later. I was sitting on the curb down the street, staring at the dust in the gutter. I felt like I had a golf ball stuck in my throat right beneath my Adam’s apple. It wouldn’t go down, no matter how hard I swallowed.

“I’m sorry as hell, Henry Lee,” he said. “If I’d known they was in there—”

“Hey, it’s all right. No problem. No problem.” I swallowed again.

Stevie came up behind Doc. I couldn’t stand the look of sympathy on his face, so I stared into the gutter some more. “We all went to Jon-Tim’s for a while last night,” Doc went on. “After the Grand Prix performances. Him and a friend of his come sniffing around. Must have been after their run-in with y’all. I guess he already knew you were in jail by then. Invited Star out dancin’ to another club. I didn’t know she spent the night.”

“You saw them?” I said. “And you let him take her off like that? You didn’t stop it?”

“Stop it? What was I supposed to do? Hog-tie her?”

I stood up. “You could have done something!”

“Dammit, she’s a grown woman. I ain’t her keeper.”

“Fine. You’re right.” I started to cross the street, looking both ways for cars. “Thanks a bunch, buddy.”

He called out behind me. “Hey, Henry Lee, where—”

“Just leave me alone for a while, okay? I’ll see y’all later on.” I stumbled on the street divider, but recovered and kept walking.

I walked for hours. I kept wishing it would rain, but it didn’t.

* * *

I fished a nickel out of my pocket and closed the door of the phone booth behind me. I’d written a letter home every couple of weeks and called every couple of months since Papa got the phone lines extended out to the farm.

I had to go through a lot of stuff with the operators, but he picked up at his end on the third ring.

“Papa?”

“Henry Lee? Damn, it’s good to hear your voice. How you doing? When you coming to visit? You know we got a room set aside just for you in the new house.”

“That’s good. I was thinking of coming home for a while, if I could.”

“Are you all right, son? Is something the matter?”

“I’m not feelin’ too well, Papa.”

“Well, come on home. Your family’ll take care of you. Let me send you some money. I can telegraph it this afternoon.”

“No, I’m fine on the money part. I got some stuff to wrap up here, but I’ll take a bus in a couple of days. Uh, you know Sprocket …”

“Sure as hell do. He’s half of what you write home about.”

“Well, he’s, uh, he’s hurt. It ain’t for sure yet, but he might not be able to drill any more. Could we maybe pasture him if need be?”

“Hell, yes! Wasn’t for him, we’d all prob’ly be livin’ under a bridge someplace by now.”

“I’m sorry, Papa.”

“Hush. You just get here quick as you can. Bring that critter with you. Everything’ll be fine.”

* * *

I had a vague memory of having left my ax at Stevie’s apartment the night before. Stevie answered the door in his underwear after I banged on it for five minutes.

Neither one of us talked much. I found my ax and the Pignose behind his couch. He made me take a shower while he fixed coffee and a real late lunch for us both. Then he took a shower while I stared out the window, sipped coffee, and thought rotten thoughts.

When he got finished dressing and started on his third cup, he told me about his wonderful morning after we split up. He had been seriously eat on by the Stone Magnolia. She nearly exploded, he said, when he revealed that he had run off the dactyls. She let him know in her usual direct manner that as soon as she could put the paperwork through, he would no longer be employed at P&A, and after she made some phone calls, his prospects at any other school in the country would be as dim as she could possibly make them.

* * *

We cut past the football stadium on the way to the amphitheatre. The parking lot was completely full of cars.

“I forgot,” Stevie said. “The big exhibition game with TU is tonight. P&A’s favored by ten points.”

“What I needed to hear. We’re screwed, but ol’ Billy Bob’s gonna come out ahead all the way around, ain’t he?”

“Yeah. I guess.” Stevie stopped and pointed upward and over to the left.

“That’s the Allbright Bell Tower over there, Henry Lee.” About two hundred yards off I could see it outlined by the setting sun, a narrow stone spire with a bell enclosed in the top.

“Wow! Great!! C’mon, we’re gonna be late.”

Stevie just stood and stared at the tower.

“Sometimes I feel like that guy myself.”

“What guy?”

“You haven’t heard about the bell tower and Scott McCullar?”

I sighed. “Nope. I’m just a ignorant ol’ country boy, remember?”

“Aw, heck, sometimes I forget. Anyway, a couple of years ago, a sophomore named Scott McCullar climbed up inside the tower one October morning. He was a Kaydet, as a matter of fact, just like our friend Billy Bob.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Well, Scott brought his Corps-issue M-16 carbine with him, as well as half a dozen boxes of ammo. He’d sighted in a sniperscope on the carbine.”

I looked at the tower again. It offered a great view of practically the whole campus. I had a sick feeling I knew what was coming.

“He didn’t—” I started.

“Uh-huh. He opened fire. Shot at everything that moved, for almost two hours, before the cops got to him.”

“Oh, my God!” I breathed. “That’s terrible, Stevie.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Tragic. Could have been worse, though.”

“Christ, how could it have been worse?”

“Well—he was an Aggie. He missed everybody he shot at.”

After a few seconds, I finally said, “How can you make jokes like that at a time like this? You’re a very sick person, you know?”

I think he was still chuckling and wheezing too hard to hear me. Finally, he straightened up and looked at me soberly. “It’s either laugh or cry, Henry Lee. Laugh or cry.”

* * *

The Rebecca Matthews Memorial Amphitheatre had been designed to look as natural as possible. From the low wooden stage, the grass-covered ground sloped gently upward in an acoustically perfect curve for about a hundred yards. Dozens of oilfield critters circled the rim of the bowl. Most of them looked to be asleep. I spotted Sprocket and kept myself from going and stroking him for awhile.

The ground was covered with blankets and people, and the crew was tuning up their instruments when we got there. Doc looked surprised when I marched up to the mixing board and plugged in. I got my sound levels checked out and my ax tuned and my fingers warmed up without having to look at Star more than a dozen times.

We began. Doc’s was the last composition of the evening, and the last one of the whole competition. It was a compliment; the school knew Doc’s work and figured we would turn in one of the better performances, so we got to provide the finale.

I guess I played okay in the first and second movements. I didn’t blow any notes, mostly played rhythm anyways. But it wasn’t your olympic-class guitar playing. Doc’s composition was strong enough that it didn’t matter, and the smooth work of the rest of the band covered my small part.

The last quarter of the second movement was a violin solo by Star. It was a slow, longing segment, but in the rehearsals it had never come across painful. She played it different this time; though she hit all the notes according to the score, they hurt. I never knew a violin could cry like that.

When she sat down, tears were on both our cheeks. She stared at her violin in her lap, wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I almost missed the beat when the tempo speeded up. The final movement was a return to joy and good spirits. Out of the corner of my eye I saw shadowy motion on top of Sprocket. The white tube of his tongue slid out of his drilling mouth, and, strangely, snaked along the top toward his back. A minute later, it cracked forward like a whip. Sprocket hurled two dark balls high in the air. As they passed over the orchestra, leathery wings snapped open and they exploded upward into the night sky.

The balls were Sonny and Maureen! They had been hiding out with Sprocket. The audience gasped, and so did we, but we kept the music in time, although we were a little ragged for a measure. They looped high, then screamed over our heads again, side by side, both flapping in perfect unison with the tempo of the third movement.

I tried to figure where they could have been and immediately thought of Razer’s empty room. They could have hid in there without anybody noticing. And Sprocket’s trick with his tongue was ingenious, slingshotting them to airspeed velocity.

They swooped overhead again, still in tempo, and broke into song. I almost dropped out of my chair, and I wasn’t the only one. The only sounds they’d uttered before was a series of unmusical, scratchy squawks. They must have listened carefully to our rehearsals earlier, not to mention being natural-born musical geniuses, because they accompanied and embellished on a thoroughly complicated classical score like it was a simple three-note repeat riff.

They owned voices like angels, and they sang the ecstasy of heaven. Maureen was a high, clear operatic soprano with infinite breath. Sonny echoed her, occasionally running counterpoint in tenor saxophone, his voice never burred, but enriched by undertones one and two octaves lower than the melody line.

Together they made a music unheard on earth for millions of years. We all got caught up in it. Somehow our horns sounded brighter, our strings sweeter, the notes they produced crisper and more enmeshed, together creating a music Doc later said improved on the perfection that he heard inside his head when he wrote it.

* * *

Stevie slid down Sprocket’s side a hundred yards away and made his way toward the stage. The dactyls stayed behind, preening and showing off their scraggly plumage to the admiring crowd that milled around Sprocket.

“It could go either way,” Doc said beside me. “Either the jury disqualifies us entirely or they admit it was the damnedest performance they’ve ever seen, and they hand us the Grand Prix.” He took a gulp out of his champagne glass. “Either way, I’m glad it went down the way it did. I think us and the dactyls created a new kind of music tonight.”

Star sat on the edge of the stage talking to some gypsies from one of the bands that played earlier, and I leaned against my amp and smiled emptily. I figured I’d probably best wait until tomorrow morning before I told Doc I was bailing out and offering to pasture Sprocket in case he didn’t get over his phobia.

Stevie’s grin was wide and sincere enough to make him look halfway handsome. Him and a cute, bouncy-looking little blonde linked arms on the way to the stage and started chattering at each other.