Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

by Sarah Pinsker

  “Who the hell cares? Did I ask you to critique my drumming?”

  “No, but if you did, I’d tell you you’re behind on the kick, too. My two-year-old niece keeps a better beat than you do.”

  The other guy’s face reddened, and I saw him clench a fist. Silva had an arm across Jacky’s chest by then, propelling him toward the door. We made eye contact, and he nodded.

  I tossed my twenty on a dry spot on the bar, still hoping for a quick getaway.

  “We don’t take cash,” said the owner, holding my bill by the corner like it was a dead rat.

  Dammit. I squared my shoulders. “You’re legally required to accept US currency.”

  “Maybe true in the US of A, but this is the US of Starker’s, and I only accept Superwally credit. And your blue buddy there owes a lot more than this anyway for those spilled drinks.” She had her hand below the bar. I had no clue whether she was going for a phone or a baseball bat or a gun; nothing good could come of any of those options.

  I snatched the bill back, mind racing. Silva kept a credit transfer account; that wouldn’t be any help, since he was already out the door. I avoided credit and devices in general, which usually held me in good stead, but I didn’t think the label “Non-comm” would win me any friends here. Jacky rarely paid for anything, so I had no clue whether he had been paying cash or credit up until then.

  “I’ve got them, Maggie.” My new friend from the booth stepped up beside me, waving his phone.

  He turned to me. “Go on. I’ve got this.”

  Maggie’s hand came out from under the bar. She pulled a phone from behind the cash register to do the credit transfer, which meant whatever she had reached for down below probably wouldn’t have been good for my health.

  “Keep playing,” he called after me.

  Jacky was unremorseful. “He started it. Called us disease vectors. I told him to stay right where he was and the whole world would go on turning ’cause it doesn’t even know he exists. Besides, if he can’t air drum, he should just air guitar like everybody else.”

  Silva laughed. “You should have pretended to cough. He probably would have pissed himself.”

  He and Silva sprawled in the back together as I peeled out of the parking lot.

  “Not funny. I don’t care who started it. No fights. I mean it. Do you think I can afford to bail you out? How are we supposed to play tomorrow if our drummer’s in jail? And what if they skip the jail part and shoot you? It’s happened before.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Jacky said.

  “Not funny,” I repeated. “If you ever call me ‘Mom’ again I’m leaving you on the side of the road. And I’m not a Chauffeur. Somebody come up here to keep me company.”

  Silva climbed across the bed and bags and up to the passenger seat. He flipped on the police scanner, then turned it off after a few minutes of silence; nobody had put out any APBs on a van full of bill-ducking freaks. I drove speed limit plus five, same as the occasional Chauffeurs we passed ferrying their passengers home. Shortcutting onto the highway to leave the area entirely would’ve been my preference, but Daisy would have triggered the ramp sensors in two seconds flat; we hadn’t been allowed on an interstate in five years.

  After about twenty miles, my fear that we were going to get chased down finally dissipated and my heartbeat returned to acceptable rhythms. We pulled into an office park that didn’t look patrolled.

  “Your turn for the bed, Luce?” Jacky asked. Trying to make amends, maybe.

  “You guys can have it if I can find my sleeping bag. It’s actually pretty nice out, and then I don’t have to smell whatever that blue crap is on your clothes.”

  “You have a sleeping bag?”

  “Of course I do. I just used it in . . .” Actually, I couldn’t think of when I had used it last. It took a few minutes of rummaging to find it in the storage space under the bed, behind Silva’s garage-sale box of pulp novels. I spread it on the ground just in front of the van. The temperature was perfect and the sky was full of stars. Hopefully there weren’t any coyotes around.

  I slept three or four hours before my body started to remind me why I didn’t sleep outside more often. I got up to pee and stretch. When I opened the door, I was hit by an even deeper grease smell than usual. It almost drowned out the funk of two guys farting, four days unwashed. Also the chemical-alcohol-blue scent Jacky wore all over his clothes.

  Leaning over the driver’s seat, I dug in the center console for my silver pen and the bound atlas I used as a road bible. The stars were bright enough to let me see the pages without a flashlight. The atlas was about fifteen years out of date, but my notes kept it useable. The town we had called Nowhere was actually named Rackwood, which sounded more like a tree disease than a town to me. A glittery asterisk went next to Rackwood, and in the margin “China Grove—Mike Sun—grease AND food.” I drew an X over the location of Starker’s, which wouldn’t get our repeat business.

  I crawled inside around dawn, feeling every bone in my body, and reclined the passenger seat. Nobody knocked on the van to tell us to move on, so we slept until the sun started baking us. Jacky reached forward to offer up his last leftovers from the night before. I sniffed the container and handed it back to him. He shrugged and dove in with his fingers, chopsticks having disappeared into the detritus surrounding him. After a little fishing around, I found my dinner and sent that his way as well.

  Silva climbed into the driver’s seat. I didn’t usually relinquish the wheel; I genuinely loved doing all the driving myself. I liked the control, liked to listen to Daisy’s steady engine and the thrum of the road. He knew that, and didn’t ask except when he really felt the urge, which meant that when he did ask, I moved over. Jacky had never offered once, content to read and listen to music in his backseat cocoon. Another reason he fit in well.

  Silva driving meant I got a chance to look around; it wasn’t often that we took a road I hadn’t been down before. I couldn’t even remember how we had wound up choosing this route the previous day. We passed shuttered diners and liquor stores, the ghost town that might have been a main street at one time.

  “Where is everybody?” Jacky asked.

  I twisted around to see if he was joking. “Have you looked out the window once this whole year? Is this the first time you’re noticing?”

  “I usually sleep through this part of the country. It’s boring.”

  “There is no everybody,” Silva said. “A few farmers, a Superwally that employs everyone else within an hour’s drive.”

  I peered at my atlas. “I’ve got a distribution center drawn in about forty miles back and ten miles north, on the road we usually take. That probably employs anybody not working for the company store.” There wasn’t really any reason for me to draw that kind of place onto my maps, but I liked making them more complete. They had layers in some places, stores and factories that had come and gone and come and gone again.

  Most backroad towns looked like this, these days. At best a fast-food place, a feed store, maybe a run-down-looking grocery or a health clinic, and not much else. There’d be a Superwally somewhere between towns, as Silva had said, luring everyone even farther from center or anything resembling community. Town after town, we saw the same thing. And of course most people didn’t see anything at all, puttering along on the self-driving highways, watching movies instead of looking out the windows, getting from point A to point B without stopping in between.

  We weren’t exactly doing our part either. It’s not like we had contributed to the local economy. We took free dinner, free fuel. We contributed in other ways, but not in this town or the others we’d passed through the night before. Maybe someday someone here would book us and we’d come back, but until then we were passing through. Goodbye, Rackwood, Indiana.

  “Next town has the World’s Largest Saltshaker.” I could hear the capital letters in Jacky’s voice. He
liked to download tourist brochures. I approved of that hobby, the way I approved of supporting anything to make a place less generic. Sometimes we even got to stop at some of the sights, when we could afford it and we weren’t in a hurry. Neither of which was the case today.

  “Another time,” Silva said. “We slept later than we should have.”

  “I think we’re missing out.”

  I twisted around to look at Jacky. He flopped across the bed, waving his phone like a look at the world’s largest saltshaker might make us change our minds. “It’s a choice between showers and saltshaker. You decide.”

  He stuffed his phone into his pocket with a sigh. Showers trumped.

  About an hour outside Columbus, we stopped at a by-the-hour motel already starred in my atlas, and rented an hour for the glory of running water. The clerk took my cash without comment.

  I let the guys go first, so I wouldn’t have to smell them again after I was clean. The shower itself was nothing to write home about. The metal-booth kind, no tub, nonexistent water pressure, seven-minute shutoff; better than nothing. Afterward, I pulled a white towel from the previous hotel from my backpack to leave in the room, and stuffed one of the near-identical clean ones in my bag. The one I took might have been one I had left the last time through. Nobody ever got shorted a towel, and it saved me a lot of time in Laundromats. I couldn’t even remember who had taught me that trick, but I’d been doing it for decades.

  We still had to get back in our giant grease trap, of course, now in our cleanish gig clothes. I opened all the windows and turned on the fan full blast, hoping to keep the shower scent for as long as possible. I could vaguely hear Jacky calling out visitor highlights for Columbus from the back, but the noise stole the meat of whatever he was saying. I stuck my arm outside and planed my hand against the wind.

  I didn’t intend to fall asleep, but I woke to Silva shouting “Whoa! Happy birthday, Daisy!” and hooting the horn. I leaned over to see the numbers clicking over from 99999.

  Jacky threw himself forward to snap a picture of the odometer as it hit all zeroes. “Whoa! What birthday is this?”

  I considered. Daisy only had a five-digit odometer, so she got a fresh start every hundred thousand miles. “Eight, I think?”

  Silva grinned. “Try again. My count says nine.”

  “Nine? I thought we passed seven on the way out of Seattle two years ago.”

  “That was five years ago. Eight in Asheville. I don’t remember when.”

  “Huh. You’re probably right. We should throw her a party at a million.” I gave her dashboard a hard pat, like the flank of a horse. “Good job, old girl. That’s amazing.”

  “Totally,” said Jacky. “And can we play ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ tonight? In Daisy’s honor? I love that song. I don’t know why we don’t play it more often.” He started playing the opening with his hands on the back of my seat.

  “I’m on board,” Silva agreed. “Maybe instead of ‘Manifest Independence’? That one could use a rest.”

  “‘Manifest Independence’ stays,” I said. “Try again.”

  “’Outbreak?’”

  “Deal.”

  Jacky retreated to make the changes to the set list.

  Our destination was deep in the heart of the city. Highways would have gotten us there in no time, not that we had that option. We drove along the river, then east past the decaying convention center.

  We hadn’t played this particular space before, but we’d played others, mostly in this same neighborhood of abandoned warehouses. Most closed up pretty quickly, or moved when they got shut down, so even if we played for the same crowd, we rarely played the same building twice.

  This one, The Chain, sounded like it had a chance at longevity. It was a bike co-op by day, venue by night. Cities liked bike co-ops. With the right people running the place, maybe somebody who knew how to write grants and dress in business drag and shake a hand or two, a bike co-op could be part of the city plan. Not that I had any business telling anyone to sell themselves out for a few months of forced legitimacy.

  Our timing was perfect. The afternoon bike-repair class had just finished, so the little stage area was more or less clear. Better yet, they’d ordered pizza. Jacky had braved the Chinese leftovers, but Silva and I hadn’t eaten yet. It took every ounce of my self-restraint to help haul in the instruments before partaking. I sent a silent prayer up to the pizza gods there’d still be some left for us once all our gear was inside.

  I made three trips—guitars and gear, amp, swag to sell—then loaded up a paper plate with three pizza slices. I was entirely capable of eating all three, but I’d share with the guys if they didn’t get their gear in before the food was gone. Not ideal dinner before singing, anyway; maybe the grease would trump the dairy as a throat coating. I sat on my amp and ate the first piece, watching Jacky and Silva bring in the drums, feeling only a little guilty. I had done my share, even if I hadn’t helped anyone else.

  The bike class stuck around. We chatted with a few. Emma, Rudy, Dijuan, Carter, Marin—there were more, but I lost track of names after that. I gave those five the most attention in any case, since Rudy had been the one to book us, and Emma ran the programming for the bike co-op. We were there because of them. We talked politics and music and bikes. I was grateful not to have to explain myself again. These were our people. They treated us like we were coming home, not passing through.

  More audience gradually trickled in, a good crowd for a Wednesday night. A mix of young and old, in varying degrees of punk trappings, according to their generation and inclination. Here and there, some more straight-laced, though they were as punk as anyone, in the truest spirit of the word, for having shown up at this space at all. Punk as a genre didn’t look or sound like it used to, in any case; it had scattered to the wind, leaving a loose grouping of bands whose main commonality was a desire to create live music for live audiences.

  The first band began to play, an all-woman four-piece called Moby K. Dick. They were young enough to be my kids, which meant young enough they had never known any scene but this one. The bassist played from a sporty little wheelchair, her back to the audience, like she was having a one-on-one conversation with the drummer’s high hat. At first, I thought she was shy, but I gradually realized she was just really into the music. The drummer doubled as singer, hiding behind a curtain of dreadlocks that lifted and dropped back onto her face with every beat. They played something that sounded like sea chanties done double time and double volume, but the lyrics were all about whales and dolphins taking revenge on people. It was pretty fantastic.

  I gave all the bands we played with a chance to win me over. They were the only live music we ever got to hear, being on the road full time. The few friends we still had doing the same circuit were playing the same nights as us in other towns, rotating through; the others were doing StageHolo and we didn’t talk much anymore. It used to be we’d sometimes even wind up in the same cities on the same night, so we’d miss each other and split the audience. That didn’t happen much anymore with so few places to play.

  Moby K. Dick earned my full attention, but the second band lost me pretty quickly. They all played adapted console-game instruments except the drummer. No strings, all buttons, all programmed to trigger samples. I’d seen bands like that before that were decent; this one was not my thing.

  The women from the first band were hanging out by the drink cooler, so I made my way back there. I thrust my hand into the ice and came out with a water bottle. Most venues like this one were alcohol-free and all ages. There was probably a secret beer cooler hidden somewhere, but I wasn’t in the mood to find it.

  “I liked your stuff,” I said to the bassist. Up close, she looked slightly older than she had on stage. Mid-twenties, probably. “My name’s Luce.”

  She grinned. “I know! I mean, I’m Truly. And yes, that’s really my name. Nice to m
eet you. And really? You liked it? That’s so cool! We begged to be on this bill with you. I’ve been listening to Cassis Fire my whole life. I’ve got ‘Manifest Independence’ written on my wall at home. It’s my mantra.”

  I winced but held steady under the barrage and the age implication. She continued. “My parents have all your music. They like the stuff with Marcia Januarie on drums best, when you had the second guitarist, but I think your current lineup is more streamlined.”

  “Thanks.” I waited for her to point her parents out in the room, and for them to be younger than me. When she thankfully didn’t volunteer that information, I asked, “Do you guys have anything recorded?”

  “We’ve been recording our shows, but mostly we just want to play. You could take us on the road with you, if you wanted. Opening act.”

  She said the last bit jokingly, but I was pretty sure the request was real, so I treated it that way.” We used to be able to, but not these days. It’s hard enough to keep ourselves fed and moving to the next gig. I’m happy to give you advice, though. Have you seen our van?”

  Her eyes widened. She was kind of adorable in her enthusiasm. Part of me considered making a pass at her, but we only had a few minutes before I had to be onstage, and I didn’t want to confuse things. Sometimes I hated being the responsible one.

  “It’s right outside. They’ll find me when it’s our turn to play. Come on.”

  The crowd parted for her wheelchair as we made our way through. I held the door for her and she navigated the tiny rise in the doorframe with practiced ease.

  “We call her Daisy,” I said, introducing Truly to the van. I searched my pockets for the keys and realized Silva had them. So much for that idea. “She’s a fifteen seater, but we took out the middle seats for a bed and the back to make a cage for the drums and stuff so they don’t kill us if we stop short.”