Steel Guitar (15 page)

I shrugged out of my raincoat for the fourth time. I'd decided to dress down, as usual. Most of my shoes have flat heels, since at six one I don't need to emphasize my height. In good beige slacks and a turquoise shirt, with a tapestry vest, and a gold chain around my neck, I looked, to my eye at least, like a stock analyst, or a lawyer. Somebody who'd arrived early and was waiting for the rest of the group.

I eyed my watch conspicuously to go with my cover story, comparing it with the wall clock. Ten minutes to twelve. Then, with a sigh, I took a seat at the bar. I ordered my club soda from a man with hairy arms and an anchor tattoo. The TV was tuned to the Red Sox game, which was still in rain delay. The umps would call it at one if the rain didn't quit by then. The sportscasters were drowned out by music, somebody's mushy version of “Kind Woman.” The control panel for the stage amps was behind the bar along with the rest of the sound system. Lights flashed as the volume of the music rose and fell.

The stage was an irregularly shaped platform in the far corner of the music room, lit by three baby spots fastened to a low-slung horizontal iron pipe. Loops of cable wrapped the pipe and disappeared into the false ceiling.

I asked the hairy-armed barkeep who was playing tonight. He made a show of staring at a sign posted behind the bar, a calendar with print so small he had to squint.

“Windshear,” he said. “New group. First set coming up. Start in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes.”

I sipped and crowd-watched until a young man came out and fiddled with the microphones, making sure all the cables were plugged into the right jacks, checking the amps on either side of the stage.

He had long pony-tailed hair, black jeans, and a faded black T-shirt. He looked familiar, but that was because I'd talked to somebody just like him at the past four bars.

The crowd had changed from the office escapees of the earlier hours. They were younger, dressed more for display than the muggy August night. There were a couple of serious drinkers at the bar, maybe businessmen far from home, nobody who looked smashed. A few regulars called the bartender Artie.

The pony-tailed man brought out a guitar and placed it on a stand, stage left.

I got up and checked out the brand name.

“Hey,” he said, “careful.”

“That a DeArmond pickup?” I asked, taking a step away from the guitar, which was a nice old Gibson SJN, electrified for the occasion.

“Yeah,” the guy said.

“Yours?”

“I wish.”

“You with the band or the house?”

“The band,” he said, starting to preen a little. “I'm the boards. I play synth, mini-Moog, the whole thing.”

“I'm guitar.”

“Play local?”

“Yeah. Some.”

“Got an ax as nice as that one?”

“Pretty good,” I said.

We traded brand names and who-do-you-knows until I'd established my bona fides. I asked him if he'd heard Chris Smither play at Johnny D's, and when the last time the Zydeco band had been through, and then I asked him if he knew a Davey who played a big old whanging Gibson Hummingbird.

If Davey had kept anything from his pre-alcoholic life, that would be it. He loved that guitar.

Maybe I'd have to try pawnshops, used instrument shops.…

“Hey,” the guy said, “this a joke?”

“No.”

“I know a guy plays a Hummingbird, but he ain't no Davey.”

“Who?” I said.

“Plays bass mainly,” he said. “Cal. Some kind of Cajun last name. He's with the band.”

Twenty-Two

I ordered a quick double bourbon from the hairy bartender and carried it to the most inconspicuous table I could find. I slid one of the two chairs over to a table for six, hoping they could seat seven and I could have privacy. Plunk your butt at a table with an empty chair, guys tend to come over to chat. It's almost a formal invitation.

I took a gulp of whiskey. I wanted to be alone when the lights dimmed, and not entirely sober.

If he'd had plastic surgery I'd have known him. I could watch those hands on that bass, just the hands, and know them.

The startling thing was how little he'd changed. His hair was short, his beard gone. Why had he kept the mustache? I wondered irrelevantly.

Why had I assumed I'd know if he were back in town? Why had I assumed Dee would know, would tell me? “He left a long time ago,” she had said; that's all. I'd made up the rest, embroidered my own acceptable tale: he'd walked out on tour, settled on the West Coast. Why had I placed him in California? Maybe he'd mentioned it once or twice, wanting to go to Los Angeles, play studio stuff, bask in the sunshine.

I ordered another drink from a waitress with waist-length brown hair. It took me a while to get her attention. She was scouting the band, eyeing Cal. I'd never gotten over that in the short time we'd been married, the way women would watch him, the way I was watching him now.

He wore a black short-sleeved T-shirt, tight enough to show muscle and rib. I checked his arms carefully. He never wore short sleeves near the end, not after he'd started shooting cocaine. He still held his left arm oddly, awkwardly, to give his thumb more reach, he always said, more strength on the frets. During his first solo break, the spotlight picked up the mother-of-pearl inlay work on his bass. It was the same bass he'd always had. I was surprised he hadn't hocked it to pay for dope.

He could have been playing alone in the bedroom. That's the way he always played, like he was the only one alive on a desert island, just him and the song. His eyes were half open, but they might as well have been blind. He didn't see the waitress. He didn't see me. He was just there in the music.

I sat through three long sets. The lead guitar, a guy with a kerchief headband and a reedy tenor, was too gimmicky by half, in love with his technology. He leaned on the whammy pedal, distorting all over the place, bending notes that didn't ask to be bent. He was the kind of guitar player who wants to show off his sixty-fourth notes when sixteenths would suit the song.

Windshear didn't impress me; they didn't seem to have a sound yet, just four players: guitar, bass, boards, and drums. No lightning sparked. They did steady twelve-bar blues, a little classic rock and roll.

Nothing caught fire until Cal's last solo break, and I wasn't sure if the heat transferred to the rest of the audience or if it started and stopped with me, rising slowly from my toes to my cheeks. I've long since given up on Prince Charming, but if mine ever comes calling, he's not going to tote a glass slipper or ride a white steed. He'll play bass like Cal Therieux. Sing close harmony in a grumbly baritone, always right on key.

Trying to wrench my mind back to business, I wondered when Cal had bought Davey's old Hummingbird.

No way to tell unless I asked.

Twenty-Three

Near the end of the final set I found myself wondering what Miss Manners would advise about consulting an ex-husband on a business matter.

Probably to avoid watching him in concert if his bass playing still turns you on. I tried not to watch Cal's hands, which was impossible.

When the encore ended to scattered applause, the stragglers shuffled through a haze of cigarette smoke, hesitated at the doorway, yanking out umbrellas. I listened to the rain pelt the sidewalk. The waitress yawned as she bused my table.

Cal was arguing with the lead guitar. He reached over and plucked the man's A string, grimaced at the flat twang. The pony-tailed keyboard player gave me a glance when I stood, and murmured something to Cal, who turned to look at me, shading his eyes from the spotlight glare.

“Carly?”

Nobody calls me Carly. Nobody ever did except Cal.

“Hi,” I said, expelling a deep breath.

There was a pause. He hadn't read Miss Manners on chatting with ex-spouses either.

“So how are you?” he said finally, taking twice as long as necessary to unhook his bass strap. It was intricately tooled leather. I'd given him that strap.

“Okay.” I walked up the two steps to the stage, taking extra care not to trip over a cable. “You?”

“Okay.”

Another pause. Cal tucked his bass into a hardshell case.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.

“No.”

“Just no?” I asked.

“Not here,” he said. “They lock up so fast, sometimes I get my foot caught in the door.” Then he lowered his voice so the curious keyboard player couldn't overhear. “Not anyplace.”

Stung, I said, “Last time I saw you, you wouldn't turn down a drink.”

“Yeah, well, I'm clean and sober now,” he said. “Stone-cold. Two years, two months.”

“Good for you,” I said, meaning it. “Look, I don't care about the drink. I want to talk.”

“Not here. And not at my place.”

I wondered if he was living with somebody, married even.

“You have an unlisted number.”

“I don't have a phone,” he said.

“I wish I'd known you were in town. Would have made my life easier,” I said.

“Yeah, but that's not my job, is it?”

Two waiters piled chairs on top of tables. The waitress swept underneath as fast as they stacked them. The bar-keep checked the clock.

There aren't too many joints to hit in Boston at two in the morning. It's not New Orleans.

“Maybe we could take a walk,” I said.

“Okay.”

I'm a late-night walker. Rain doesn't deter me. A downpour does. The wind scooped water off the sidewalk and dumped it into my shoes, turned my umbrella into a useless sail. Cal, with no umbrella or raincoat, zipped up his denim jacket and stuck the hand that wasn't holding the bass into his pocket.

“Do you know any place that's open?” I hollered into the gale. “A doughnut shop? A diner? All the after-hours places I know are cop hangouts.”

“It's your call,” Cal said impassively, rain dripping off his chin.

I always try to flag a Green & White out of company loyalty, but this time I grabbed the first available cab, a Yellow, piloted by a Haitian who crept along at half speed.

Cal, sharing the backseat, his knees straddling his bass, seemed like a stranger; everything I remembered about our marriage seemed like something I'd read in a book, like it had happened to somebody else.

I gave the cabbie my address.

“How'd you get clean?” I asked.

“AA.”

“I thought you had to believe in God for AA.”

“A Higher Power. Bothered me some at the beginning, but it turned into an easy choice: believe in something, or wind up dead in some stinking hole with a needle in your arm. AIDS scared the hell out of me. I always thought I'd die young, but that's sure not the way I want to go.”

“Motorcycle crash,” I suggested with a lifted eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he said. “Blast of glory. James Dean. Dick Farina. Instead I go to AA.”

“Good for you,” I repeated.

“And I play bass with whoever pays,” he said.

We didn't talk during the rest of the ride. The windshield wipers slapped out a squishy rhythm. I paid the fare.

I'd stuck my duplicate keys into my back pocket. My hair was drenched by the time I got all the locks open.

“Yeah,” Cal said, dripping on the foyer rug. “I remember this. Nice place. Big.”

I stuck my umbrella in the stand, stepped out of my soaked shoes.

“Okay if I take my shoes off?” Cal asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can I leave the bass here? Case is wet.”

“Just leave it,” I said. “I'll get towels. Be right back.”

“Your aunt would have yelled a blue streak, water all over her floor.”

“Yeah, well, I'm not her.”

I raced upstairs to the linen closet, yanked out two turquoise towels. I bent at the waist to secure one of them around my head, turban style, and headed toward the bathroom.

It was the first thing I saw when I stepped through the door. Across the mirror, someone had printed the words crookedly: “Back off” in blood red. Lipstick, I realized. The floor was littered with broken medicine bottles, assorted tablets. Cough medicine trickled across the tile.

I ran downstairs.

“You always looked good in towels, Carly,” Cal said.

I pushed past him into the living room. The sofa was upended; its weak leg finally split. Cal must have followed. I heard him gasp.

“Call 911,” I said.

“Somebody might still be here.”

“Call 911,” I repeated.

“What the hell are you gonna do with that thing?”

While he was dialing, I'd opened the lower-left-hand drawer of my desk, quickly unwrapping my .38 from its undershirt shroud.

“I had to make sure it wasn't stolen,” I snapped.

“Is anything gone?” he asked.

I turned in a slow circle, the .38 pointing at the floor. Aunt Bea's mahogany end tables had been smashed. The Oriental rug looked like it had sprouted a new pattern. From the emptied food jars nearby—peanut butter, mustard, ketchup—I could guess the artist's medium. The room smelled; he'd used worse. Urine. Feces, maybe.

“T.C.!” I called, while Cal was giving my address to the Cambridge police.

I took off upstairs, gripping the gun. There aren't a lot of things I care about in that house. T.C., my cat, is one of them. It's odd that I thought about him before Roz. Maybe not. Roz, with her karate training, can look after herself. And Roz was the one who was supposed to have had the damned locks changed.

I did a room-by-room search, aware that it ought to be left to the cops, aware that I was taking reckless chances. I felt like taking reckless chances. I felt like catching whoever had smashed Aunt Bea's carefully polished end tables into splinters, turned her prized rug into a spoiled canvas—catching him and hurting him.

Not killing him. Hurting him. Badly.

I heard a noise on the staircase, pivoted. “Carly, they're on their way.”