Voice (3 page)

“Invaded her personal space, I think.”

“Note to self.”

John laughed again. “No kidding.”

“Well, looks like this place is all partied out. I’m gonna go get the car,” Danny said. “See you out front?”

“Yeah.”

Danny headed for the door. John nursed his beer, staring at the row of bottles at the back of the bar and thinking.

Stephanie Case. So that was her name. She didn’t remember him—why would she have?—but he’d seen her band once before, playing some hole in the wall downtown. The band had been okay. She had been amazing. She played scorched-earth guitar, taking no prisoners and leaving smoldering ruin in her wake, and John had been enthralled. He’d watched nothing but her for the whole set, and then panicked and run like hell out of the bar before she got off the stage, afraid he’d say something unutterably stupid if she passed close enough for him to say hi.

And then she’d walked in just before his set tonight. He wished he hadn’t recognized her. In the time it took him to place the face—and that had not been long at all—he’d gone from singing for the fun of it to singing for her, and he didn’t need anybody to tell him how incredibly fucking stupid that had been. He’d tried to turn the performance up to eleven just for her, but his nerves had worked their peculiar evil, and instead of delivering a transcendent performance he’d been even worse than normal. What had he been thinking, that somehow he’d magically impress her and by the end of the set she’d be clamoring to join his band?

Actually, that was exactly what he’d been thinking, he admitted. A whole series of increasingly fantastic scenarios had slipped through his head while he tried to perform. None of them were realistic, but by the third song, he had known he was going to fire Seth.
He needed killin’,
as they said here in Texas. How he was going to convince Case to join up he hadn’t had the foggiest clue. The friction with her own band had been a near-miraculous stroke of good luck, and then the invitation to play the college show had jumped into John’s head while he was talking to her.

Yeah, and that had its own set of problems he’d have to navigate. He shook his head, put his empty bottle on the bar, and started toward the door. There’d be time to worry about all that later.

Outside, the street was dead—midnight downtown on Easter Sunday dead. The shops and clubs were mostly dark, and the parking meters stood, lone sentinels in front of empty spaces. The only movement was a plastic cup lid skittering along the sidewalk, blown along with a small cloud of grit.

To John’s right, a man leaned against the brick wall of the bar, cigarette burning down in his hand. Tight blue jeans, white silk shirt unbuttoned at the throat, black cowboy boots. He gave off the vibe of an old rock-and-roll guy, his years long past. The kind of guy who’d missed fame and fortune by a hairsbreadth, the kind of guy you might catch at some hole-in-the-wall blues dive playing his ass off, and you’d walk away thinking,
Fuck! He’s good! Why haven’t I heard of him?
Maybe John
had
seen him somewhere—that might account for the vague sense of familiarity he got from the guy. The guy had been inside watching the set, but John couldn’t help feeling he’d seen him somewhere else.

The guy gave John a thin smile and took a drag.

John nodded absently and looked down the street for Danny’s car. Nothing moved anywhere.

“You don’t have the money, do you?” the guy said. His voice was a low, hoarse whisper, the sound of an oily rasp dragged across wood.

John’s attention snapped to the man. “What did you say?”

The guy took a step closer, and an awful scent, fishy and ripe with decay, hit John’s nostrils, faint but foul beneath the smell of cigarette smoke. The guy grinned without humor. His face was sharp, angular, and though he was getting on in years, age had done nothing to soften those angles, and his grin was that of a hungry animal. Strings of greasy black hair, shot through with white, tumbled to his shoulders. “Don’t get me wrong,” he whispered. “I think you did the right thing. She’s the piece you need.”

“I don’t know who you are, but—”

The guy narrowed his eyes, and John simply trailed off. What was that stink? Was it carried on the man’s breath, or did he sleep in a trash bin behind a sushi restaurant? Christ! “There’s the other thing, of course,” the guy said, “but if you’ve got what it takes, I can help you with that.” He trained his eyes on John’s, and there was something dark and deadly in them. “And, Johnny my boy, I think maybe you do.” He put his hand on John’s shoulder and leaned in toward him.

John opened his mouth, grasping for some kind of reply, and Danny’s car pulled up. The tires squeaked against the curb. The guy took his hand off John’s shoulder.

Danny got out. “All right,” he said. “Let’s load up.”

John glanced at him and then back to the guy, who was already walking away, the heels of his cowboy boots clacking against the concrete.

“Yeah,” John said to his brother. “Sure.”

***

They loaded the car in silence. Quentin and Seth had already taken off, so there was just Danny’s drum set to load up—an appreciable amount of equipment, but at least none of it was very heavy. They crammed it into Danny’s little hatchback and headed toward John’s place. It wasn’t far.

They pulled up outside the little shack John was renting, a tiny hovel with barely basic amenities stashed on a lot between a bunch of four-bedroom historic houses. The shack was a placeholder for the lot, and it was evidently so ungodly old that it had been grandfathered in despite the neighborhood’s now-stringent neighborhood-association rules. It should have been bulldozed twenty years ago.

“You doin’ all right?” Danny asked him, as usual. “Making ends meet?”

“I’m okay.” John hopped out of the car without looking at him.

“Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” John shut the door. “See you at practice,” he said through the open window.

“Yeah. You bet.”

Danny pulled away, and John walked up the sidewalk to his humble shack, set way back on the lot. He fumbled with his keys in the streetlight for a moment before finding the keyhole. The idea of locking the door was kind of a joke—a good hard kick would probably tear the door right off its hinges, and if it didn’t, a good hard kick three feet to the left would almost certainly put a hole in the wall—but it was habit. That, and he was worried that if he made it
too
easy, he’d come in one day to find that a dozen homeless people had taken up residence.

He got the door open and went inside, not bothering to turn on the light. Electricity cost money, and the grungy yellow streetlight painting the blinds was bright enough for now. He walked through the small, empty living room and down the short hall to his bedroom. He threw his notebook on a shelf made of cinder blocks and scavenged lumber, already groaning under wobbly stacks of magazines, books, CDs, and DVDs—his whole exhaustive collection of rock history. The souvenirs of half a dozen college road trips and other expeditions were lined up neatly along the top shelf. A broken drumstick from a Steve Earle concert he’d driven three hundred miles to see. A ticket stub from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A shot glass he’d smuggled out of the Whisky a Go-Go, that epic landmark of LA’s rock scene, a place that had shocked him by turning out to be about the size of a large bathroom. He even had a stick of Elvis lip balm, all he’d been able to afford on his short trip to Graceland. One day he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Jeff Buckley’s grave and collect a stick or a rock or a handful of dirt. Something.

It was a good collection of stuff, and he had visions of talking about it in an interview one day in the not-too-distant future when he was rich and famous.

John lowered himself to the mattress on the floor and sat against the wall. Usually he’d crack open his journal after a show and write down a few thoughts, but he felt a mean headache coming on. The shakes, too. He always had a post-show adrenaline high, even if they played just for the sound guy (which was typical), but his anxiety this time had been thrumming like a string that had been wound too tight, and his mind was so revved up now that he doubted he’d get any sleep tonight.

Stephanie Case was going to play in his band. Fantastic.

His stomach twisted and did an unpleasant flip-flop. What had that guy said outside the club?
You don’t have the money, do you?
John didn’t know how the guy knew that, but he was right on, eerily enough. Case thought she was going to make two hundred bucks, the guys thought the show paid two hundred bucks total, and the reality was that it paid forty dollars plus tips. John had been so excited about the possibility of playing a real show instead of new band night for a change that he’d guessed what the guys would accept for doing the show and put up the remaining one hundred and ten bucks to pay them himself. It would clean him out, but it would get them in front of a college crowd. At some level, he realized it was stupid and he never should have done it, but he
had
done it, and he had no intention of backing out.

Except now he’d promised Case the whole two hundred bucks—fifty of which he didn’t even have, because that would have been his imaginary share of the take.

Tomorrow’s problem,
he thought.
Or the next day’s.

He swallowed and started to feel a little better. The show had sucked, there was no question about that—but somehow he’d managed to snag one hell of a guitarist.

Now he’d just have to figure out how to keep her.

Practice was held in a rented practice room that was just like all the other rented practice rooms Case had ever seen. Four people and all their equipment were jammed into a room the size of a modest walk-in closet, one of dozens packed into the carved-up space of a defunct elementary school. The walls were lined with grey egg-crate foam that did nothing to dampen the sound of the speed metal band rehearsing in the next room. Why was it, she wondered, that there seemed to be a speed metal band next door to every practice room she set foot in? It was like a malign cosmic law, proof that there was no God.

At least there was no porn on the walls. That was a welcome change.

She arrived early, as she always did, reasoning that practice was supposed to start at seven, so she should get there beforehand and set up. Be ready to
play
at seven. It never seemed to work out that way, so she was pleasantly surprised when John and his drummer were there waiting for her. John had already made a spare copy of the key, which he handed to her without a word when she came in.

She paid the two of them little attention, setting up her gear while Danny set up and tuned his drums and John fiddled with the PA.

The bass player—Quentin, she recalled—walked in at about five minutes to seven and did an honest-to-god double take when he saw her.

“Uh . . .” he said stupidly, looking back and forth from Case to John like he had some kind of twitch.

Oops,
Case thought. She leaned over her amp to plug in a cable, letting her hair fall across her face and hide her grin.
Somebody forgot to let Quentin know the score.

John didn’t seem to even notice. He gave Quentin, still standing in the doorway, a puzzled look and motioned him inside.

Danny caught it, though. He put his drum key down on the snare. “Aw, hell, John. You didn’t call Quentin?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Quentin, this is Case. She’s, ah, she’s our new guitarist. Case, Quentin.”

Quentin looked like he wanted to say something, but he cast her a nervous glance and let it drop. “Meetcha,” he mumbled, and went over to his amp.

Case put on her guitar, a battered goldtop Les Paul that she wore slung as low as she could handle. It hung below her waist, which was a little awkward for her fretting hand sometimes, but it made things a hell of a lot easier for her picking hand. Besides, if it was good enough for Jimmy Page . . .

She tuned up, and, shockingly, the whole band was ready to go by seven.

First time I’ve ever seen that happen.

“Okay, we’ll start with ‘Aftermath’
and see how it goes,” John said. Danny counted it off almost before she was ready, but she jumped on it just in time.

It was an easy song, like all the songs John had sent her. Straightforward chord changes, no solo, no bridge, nothing fancy. It was an unfuckuppable song. Hell, the chorus had the same chord progression as the verse—it was like a meaner, less inspired version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” the same four chords for three and a half minutes. It was so easy that the real challenge was keeping her mind from wandering. She varied the rhythm a little bit, tried to syncopate it some, and threw in a few different chord voicings to spice it up, but it was like lentils—basically bland, no matter what you threw on top of it.

She looked around the room, watching and listening to the other musicians as her hands went on autopilot. Quentin wouldn’t look at her, and he seemed to be trying to push himself into the wall. Danny was grooving, though. The song was so dull that the dynamics changes were the only thing carrying it, musically, and he pushed and pulled those through effortlessly. She found herself edging closer to him, embellishing a little bit around his rhythm, and the two of them eased into a back-and-forth that almost had a little
spark
to it. By the end of the second chorus, she was starting to feel good, and she lit into a solo that hadn’t existed in the song before.