The Devil of Echo Lake (34 page)

*  *  *

Billy flew home to San Francisco. He left his gear to be packed and shipped by Jake and the runners, with the sole exception of the red Les Paul, which he’d bought a seat for and carried on the plane. Until the day he flew home, it had rested in its case beside the control room couch where he had set it down before calling the police. Billy wasn’t quite sure he knew why he had taken an electric guitar with him into the woods that day. Because the Devil made him do it? That excuse was starting to feel a little worn out. Because the spirit of the wood, buried in his poet’s heart, disguised as a horned god by his tired mind, had deigned to save his life?

Maybe. 

He had, in rare moments, felt that some songs had a life of their own—that they were hatched whole in the ether, merely waiting for someone with a guitar and pen to catch them and set them down. There had been far too few of these in his career, until perhaps recently. Guys like Dylan seemed to have a better butterfly net.

Still, he knew what it felt like to catch one and to be sure that he had no claim to the title of creator. It felt like being a vehicle for some greater voice. So maybe the god of song worked in strange ways. Maybe he rewarded the scribe with a commuted sentence every now and then, on a whim. Maybe God was a hoary old goat who liked wine and women and something you could dance to. Some sane people believed stranger things.

Billy restrung the Les Paul and hung it on the wall of his writing room, glad he hadn’t told the detectives about it. They would have wanted to dig the slug out. He wanted to keep it.

Jake hadn’t been around the last time Billy went to the church to pick up his guitar and pack his suitcase, but Eddie gave Billy Jake’s home number and they talked one more time before Billy flew home. As soon as he heard Jake’s voice, Billy regretted that it was only a phone call and not face to face. He was calling from the airport while he waited at the gate.

He’d wanted to go to Jake’s apartment but was afraid of drawing attention to the kid if there were still reporters lurking around. Jake’s last name was still unknown to the media because Rachel had never bothered to learn it, and the paparazzi didn’t need to know that Billy had an interest in the address. Nonetheless, after all they’d been through together, after drawing blood from the kid, this felt like a shitty way to say good-bye.

“How’s your arm healing?” Billy asked.

“It’s fine, just itches a little.”

Billy didn’t know what to say next, but he stayed focused on Jake’s interests, even though he had a favor to ask. “I asked Danielle to go to bat for you and squeeze a higher engineering fee out of Gravitas. So you should be getting a fat check.”

“Okay.”

“They would have tried to shortchange you since it’s your first time and they know you’re hungry for the credit, but Danielle’s good; she’ll get you what you deserve. Besides, they don’t want you talking to the media.”

“I wouldn’t do that anyway.”

“Yeah, I know that, but they don’t.”

“Well, thanks. And there can’t be a credit if there isn’t a record, right?”

Billy laughed, sending a short burst of distortion through the line. “True,” he said. “They’re still a little sore about that.”

“I imagine they would be. They have nothing to show for what they’re paying me, and that’s still nothing compared to what they paid Eddie.”

“Yeah, well… They’re looking into having Bob Ludwig master your rough mixes just so they can put something out while there’s a buzz.”

There was silence on the line for a beat. “Don’t scare me, Billy. They’re not good enough. That’s why we call ‘em
rough
.”

“It never crossed my mind I’d need to destroy those too. Now Danielle has them. It’s out of my hands.”

“Billy, they can’t put it out like that.”

“Well, they might. I thought you should hear it from me. I kinda don’t think they’ll do it, but right now, they know they could sell almost anything with my name on it.”

“
Almost
anything?”

“Anything dark and fucked up.”

“So not the acoustic record at the back of my closet.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’d like you to keep sitting on that. Forget about it for a while. The company would shelve it anyway, but if they knew I recorded it on their dime, I could never release it on my own.”

“You can’t be sure they wouldn’t put it out if they heard it.”

“They’d shelve it just to spite me after what I did. Think about it. They wouldn’t let me produce my own record, they made me work with Rail because they wanted something heavy and dark, something consistent with my image. That’s the image they think they can market. Now more than ever.”

“I guess so.”

“Now that I’m a hot topic, they’ll want more of the same. They wouldn’t put the acoustic stuff out unless it was the last thing I ever recorded.”

“If they decide not to release the roughs, do you think they’ll send you right back into another studio in L.A. where they can keep an eye on you? Crank out something quick with another producer?”

“Probably try to.”

“What’ll you do?”

“I don’t know, but I won’t do that. I don’t have it in me.”

“Well whatever happens, take care of yourself, Billy. No one else will.”

“You too, Jake. It was good getting to know you.”

“Hey, Billy, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about what other people want from you?”

“Hmm. Good question. I don’t know, man. I’d be an asshole to complain about my lot. I got what I wanted and most people don’t.”

“That’s why I’m asking. Is it still what you want? I don’t know what I want anymore and I’m just getting started. It looks like the sacrifices in this business are big ones, and maybe the freedom isn’t really freedom at all.”

“I know what you mean. I can’t even go to the supermarket or take a quiet walk in the park. I’ve seen the world, but I haven’t really seen it. I’ve seen dressing rooms and airports. They all look pretty much the same. Maybe I’d go somewhere no one knows me. Someplace I’ve never been, and really see it, hear it, smell it. Get outside of myself. That’s what I’d like to do: get outside of myself, get away from everything.”

“Sounds escapist.”

“Hey, you ask an honest question. This way of life look sane to you?”

“No.”

“So maybe the urge to escape it is healthy.”

“Could be.”

“My uncle taught me my first three chords. He spent some time in India. Had some stories to tell. Maybe I’d go there or the Mediterranean islands or something. If I can ever get released from my contract.”

“They were ready to drop you a few months ago. Now they won’t let you go.”

“Yeah. My biggest problem is I keep getting what I think I want.”

After talking business, the conversation dried up. Billy tried a few stabs at inquiring about Jake’s life outside of work, but they both knew he didn’t have one. In the end, there was simply a hesitation on the part of both men to end the call. They felt like blood brothers now, soldiers bonded by a friendship forged in painful and confusing circumstances, now saddened that those circumstances were all they had in common. Both seemed to sense that when they hung up, it would be the last time they ever talked.

It was.

*  *  *

Jake showed up at the main building at ten in the morning the following Monday. Eddie was on the phone as usual. He looked Jake over as he wrapped up the call, then waved him in to the office and told him to have a seat. “What are you doing back so soon? I figured you had about two weeks’ worth of sleep to catch up on.”

“Actually, I wanted to give you two-weeks’ notice.”

Eddie grinned and said, “Jake, you handled yourself well in an ultra fucked-up situation. If you’ve had enough, you don’t have to sit around inhaling solder fumes for two weeks. When two people die on your project, you’re excused. I’ll give a good reference to anyone who calls.”

Jake looked out the window at the snowy woods.

Eddie said, “If you need the money, you can hang around and do busy work. Do you?”

“Not really.”

“Well then catch the first Greyhound outta here.”

Jake laughed. It was a joyless sound.

“Do you know what you’re gonna do?”

“I’m not sure yet. Go back to Florida for starters.”

“Call me before you skip town. We’ll have a beer.”

But Jake didn’t call; he just loaded the Pontiac with his scant possessions and dropped the apartment key in his landlord’s mailbox with a check. He didn’t have any idea what he was going to do next and didn’t think telling Eddie that over a beer would make him feel like anything but a quitter. All he had to show for his brief moment of glory was a heap of student loans and two albums that couldn’t be released.

Eddie was a true studio vet. The man had burned out years ago, and still he kept going. Surely he’d seen his share of overdoses and mind games. And even though he hadn’t piloted a console in a long time, he still fed on the urgent energy of the place and seemed to loathe going home at the end of business hours. That Jake was opting out of a future that was Eddie’s life seemed like a distance that couldn’t be bridged, even for a drink. What would they talk about, sports?

When Brent the runner asked Jake why he was leaving the job, the best he could do to explain the move was to tell him, “You may find that records are kind of like hot dogs. You enjoy them a lot more before you know how they’re made.”

*  *  *

Back in Florida, Jake crashed on the couches of various friends for a few weeks. His old buddies were happy to see him and curious to hear his story, but respectful that he wasn’t ready to tell it. He circled ads for apartments and went around looking at them in the afternoons. Even though his stint at Echo Lake had been relatively short-lived, it still took some time to get used to the absence of the encircling mountains on the horizon. It was also strange to not see a million stars at night.

The check from Gravitas found him, and he was able to rent a small apartment in Winter Park without having to worry that it might take a while to find work. The place was nice, with a mango tree and a little back yard. Maybe he would get a dog after all.

In the months that followed, Jake adjusted to civilian life. Sleeping at night, going out in the daytime, listening to the radio, and following the news. In June of that year, Shawn Fanning launched Napster at Northeastern University in Boston. It would be some time before Jake found out what that was all about, and by then the rug would have been pulled out from under the music industry before anyone knew it was even being tugged.

In less than a decade, artists would be giving music away for free instead of suing for copyrights, bands that used to fill stadiums on their own would be teaming up for double bills in smaller venues, and most of the big studios, including Echo Lake, would be shut down. In the end, Billy Moon would be among the last of the big rock stars.

Jake put off most of his unpacking, living out of boxes and digging for things as the need arose. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the time, he had all the time in the world, but he just didn’t know if he was staying or only squatting until he figured out what was next. When he finally did make a focused effort to unpack, he found the journal that he and Ally had shared. That night he forgot to eat and stayed up late reading it.

After a short bout of restless sleep around dawn, he waited for the clock to reach a decent hour and then nervously dialed her parents’ house. Her mother answered. When her tone remained warm even after he’d said his name, Jake found himself breathing easier. She put Ally on the phone.

“I’m back in town,” he said.

“Really?”

“I’m living right back in Winter Park.”

Silence.

“Could I see you some time?”

“Yes,” she said so fast it overlapped with the end of the question.

*  *  *

Her beauty was amplified by absence. Especially when she smiled through her sadness. Sitting with her in a big wooden booth at an old favorite restaurant, he didn’t care that he didn’t know what to do with his life. There was this one thing he knew. Everything else was just details. He couldn’t tell her that, not yet, so he talked about what he could remember from reading her journal entries.

She’d forgotten her own jokes from some of the earlier pages and hearing them now made her laugh and then cry a little. Then they both were crying and wiping their noses with the two paper napkins they’d been allotted, then swiping more napkins from a vacant table and holding hands. Neither one cared if they were making a scene.

*  *  *

Jake didn’t cry again until two months later in September, watching the evening news. The lead story was about a victory for the tobacco industry in a state appeals court, next up a story on a recall of SUVs for a faulty fuel sensor. Jake was scarcely paying attention to the newscast in between chatting with Ally, who was chopping zucchini and summer squash in the kitchen. The majestic here-comes-a-commercial-break music climbed to a cadence under a panning shot of a small Coast Guard vessel below the Golden Gate Bridge, and Peter Jennings said, “When we return… rock singer Billy Moon is missing and presumed dead today, after a fall from the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Jake sat bolt upright, flipped to the other networks and found synchronized commercials in progress, then flipped back to ABC where the inane sales pitches seemed to go on forever.

When the program resumed, a headshot of Billy filled the swirling graphics-framed square over the anchorman’s shoulder. This was soon replaced by another face Jake recognized: Flint.

Twenty-five

It is the witching hour in San Francisco. The city is as close to sleep as it will come this night—the club hoppers have thinned out to the few with real endurance or chemical assistance, the working stiffs and early morning joggers have not yet risen. The bridge is quiet, traffic slowed to an intermittent drizzle of headlights across its pale maroon girders. A dense cloud of fog swirls in the cables like a tsunami hovering over the deck of a battleship.