The Friendship Song

by Nancy Springer

  “Excellent,” Rawnie said.

  So next thing we were all down in the basement poking around, Dad too, poking in boxes and saying, “What’s this?” one after the other to Gus.

  “What’s this?” I had found a metal thing shaped sort of like a seashell.

  “Squirrel cage blower.”

  “Huh?” Who would blow on a squirrel in a cage?

  “It blows air. That other one’s a biscuit blower. Don’t ask me.”

  “What’s this?” Dad held up a circle of glass something like a bike reflector, only white.

  “Bott’s dot. They used to put them in along the line in roads.”

  “What’s this?” I had a sort of wooden pyramid with a metal pointer.

  “Metronome.”

  “Ew! What are these?” Rawnie held up a handful of pinkish things like marbles, only they weren’t marbles.

  “Rubber eyeballs.”

  “Ew, sick! What are they for?”

  “Biology class, I guess. I dunno. Ammunition? You girls want them for school?”

  We looked at each other and started to smile, but Dad said, “No. Gus, behave. You’ll get them in trouble.”

  “Hey!” I had found a box full of wide silvery tape.

  “Duck tape.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve heard about people getting their ducks in a row? That’s how they keep them that way, with duck tape.”

  Dad said, “It’s duct tape. Don’t pay any attention to her, Skiddo. She’ll lead you astray.” The way he was grinning said the opposite.

  Gus turned away and snapped on the radio. She was always doing that. She would go for maybe about three minutes talking with you, and then her eyes would sort of fog over and she had to have her music. There was a radio in every shed and just about every room of the house, and they were all tuned to—not oldies, exactly, but something a little bit better. She called it classic rock. It always had a cookin’ beat, and this time was no different. Rawnie heard it for about one second and started to dance.

  “You like my music?” Gus said.

  “Yeah, but I like Neon Shadow better!”

  “You too?”

  Gus and Dad knew how I felt about Neon Shadow. Gus said that back when she was a kid, girls screamed over the Beatles. Before that it was Elvis. I didn’t see what was so great about any of them.

  “I hear Neon Shadow is coming to the Arena next week,” Gus said.

  It didn’t take Rawnie and me long to make it clear to Gus and Dad what we thought of the fact that Neon Shadow was going to be practically in our front yard and we didn’t have tickets. Between the two of us I guess we made a lot of noise. In fact I remember going, “Waaaah!” like a baby, which made Gus blink several times rapidly, looking half-worried and half-laughing, the way she did a lot of the time.

  “Well,” she said, “listen. I have a friend who has a friend who has a friend. Howsabout if I try to get some tickets.”

  Now Rawnie and I were jumping up and down and screaming. Dad sighed and rolled his eyes.

  “Hey, I can’t promise,” Gus said. “But I’ll try.”

  It took us awhile to get back to scrounging. Then Dad found a bone wrench and a moon wrench, some lamp parts, and a broach, whatever a broach is, but nothing Gus wanted to use. She led the scrounging expedition out to the sheds, where Rawnie saw the calliope and a ton of other stuff besides. There was an electric violin, which was really just a plug-in board with strings. There were old record players, a stove shaped like a Chinese dragon, a tin whistle, an eyecup, and a Dobro. There were boxes of grommets and gaskets and car parts and the glass reflector plugs from old telephone poles and flutophones.

  “I give up,” Gus said, meaning she didn’t know what to put on her folk art. “I’m just going to have to think about it.”

  “Hey, Gus, what is this?” I said. It was a thing sort of like a miniature piano, but it had some kind of machine instead of a piano back.

  “That’s a Mellotron. You know how you hear violins in the songs on the radio? Most of the time they’re not really violins. Nowadays they’re usually synthesized, but it used to be they used a Mellotron.”

  “Huh?”

  “Huh, my eye. The back houses a bunch of tape loops of violins sounding different notes. You press the keys, the violins play.”

  “Huh!”

  Rawnie was looking across the yard, which wasn’t easy to do, considering how much stuff was in the way. “What’s in that little shed with the big hex sign?” she wanted to know.

  “The pigeon coop? Dead axes, mostly.”

  “Dead axes?”

  But Gus wasn’t listening. She had folk art on her mind like a bug in her ear, and she was heading back toward the house. Dad went to stick a load of wash in the machine, and Rawnie and I went up to my room so she could see what it looked like, and by the time Rawnie was ready to go home, Gus had disappeared somewhere again.

  “Tell your—tell her thanks for the pizza and everything,” Rawnie said to me. I watched her go across the street. She never walked anywhere, and she didn’t exactly run either. This time she was doing the Locomotion.

  Tell Gus thanks for the pizza and everything. “And everything” meant trying to get tickets for the Neon Shadow concert. It wasn’t going to be easy, because she had to get three or four. Neon Shadow was a clean group, no drugs in the parking lot or anything like that, but it was still a rock concert and it would still be wild, not something Rawnie and I could go to by ourselves. I knew my dad—he would never let it happen. We would have to have at least one parent with us, and if Gus could get enough tickets for that many people, it would be almost a miracle.

  Tell her thanks? I hadn’t thanked her myself, and I should have. I should be nicer to her. She was nice to me. And it wasn’t her fault if she was built like a truck or fell in love with my dad.

  Right that minute before I lost my nerve I went looking for her.

  It was getting dark and the weird guitar music was due to start, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to find Gus and be nice to her for a minute or two before I forgot and started wise-mouthing her again. She was out in the backyard probably, so that was where I went. I checked each shed. Nothing. The farthest one from the house was the pigeon coop with its big hex sign, which wasn’t a regular star hex but a sort of swirl pattern in all colors. The hex faced the yard, which was odd. Most people liked hexes to face the road so people could see them. But there was nothing on the street side of the pigeon coop except the door.

  Anyway, I went there last and looked inside. Nothing except a bunch of old electric guitars, bent up and stripped down until they were nearly skeletons.

  Dead axes?

  Then I blinked hard, because one by one they were floating up off the shadowy floor, and fading like ghosts, and—

  Disappearing into the wall. Right in front of me. It was totally gonzo, yet I stood there and watched and felt like it all made sense, like I knew what was happening. Dead axes, and they were not disappearing, exactly, they were going through a sort of twilight door to another place. Another dimension.

  On the far side of the hex-sign wall I heard the music starting.

  It was just a clicking, like a drummer setting a rhythm with his sticks, and a strumming, like a guitarist tuning. Concert night, and I was backstage. Wow, there was no time to be afraid. I had to see what was going on, and by then I felt sure that I wouldn’t need to go any farther than the other side of the pigeon coop.

  I went outside to look, and I was right.

  The lights were on, all colors like the hex sign. Somebody was setting up the drum kit. I could tell because washtubs and buckets and old hubcaps and things were lifting off the ground and floating through the air to where the drum riser was, the plywood platform on top of the big red Caddy, and then they’d disappear. Actually they were fading and disappearing the whole time, as they moved. But I could see them. The world was getting dark, but the lights blazed brighter all the time and it seemed
as if I could see more every minute. I could see a Mellotron settle down and turn into a concert keyboard. I could see bare-bone guitars flying out of the hex sign, coming right through it, coming out to play. The music in the air was louder than I’d ever heard it, and since I’d forgotten to be scared of it, I was dancing where I stood, my feet going like Rawnie’s always did, before I realized how much I liked it. What a rhythm! I could hear the drums, the axes, the deep notes on the keyboard. And voices. For the first time I could hear voices singing, dark and hot.

  People. The band. Who were they?

  I could just barely see them. They were like cloud wisps in the air. But I could hear them, and I could see their instruments a little, and I could tell what they were doing. They were playing lead guitar and bass and organ and drums and tambourine and sax, they were filling in with vocals, they were making music. And it was some of the best music I’d ever heard. Almost as good as Neon Shadow, though I couldn’t quite make out the words.

  My feet still wanted to dance, but my brain took over and started sputtering, and I stood there with my mouth open. Then all the music stopped at once, and the people—had there been people? Now I couldn’t see a thing. Just old metal pails and upside-down washtubs and a hubcap or two on top of the convertible’s plywood cover where I thought there had been drums.

  And Gus standing beside me with a big old twelve-string guitar hanging by a braided strap from her neck.

  She was looking curiously at me. Then she strummed the twelve-string a little, and I could tell right away she really knew how to play it. She made that big old guitar sound like a roomful of rockers jamming. For half an instant I wondered if she had been the one making the twilight music all along. And I knew that was what she wanted me to think. But it wasn’t like she was trying to fool me, really. It was more like she was offering me a chance to back away, to tell myself, Okay, I just heard Gus messing around on her guitar.

  Forget that. I knew what I had seen, what I had heard. There had been a band. A hot hot hot happenin’ band.

  “I heard them,” I said to Gus, kind of loud—I had forgotten all about thanking her or being nice to her. “I saw them. They were good. Who are they?”

  She just stood and looked at me with her fog gray eyes wide open. When she got her mouth under control and said something, it wasn’t exactly an answer.

  “Groover,” she declared, “you are something else. Girl, you sure must love rock music.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Gus is going to teach me how to play guitar,” I told Rawnie next time I saw her, which was Saturday afternoon.

  “She plays guitar?”

  “Yeah.” I hesitated. “I think it’s sort of been her we’ve been hearing.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Well, yeah. Sort of. I dunno.”

  I didn’t mean to lie to Rawnie. But Gus never had really given me an answer about what I had seen and heard. And it had been so beautiful, the music and the feeling around the music, that I had dreamed neon rainbow dreams all night, and I didn’t know how to describe to anybody what had happened. I wasn’t afraid of what was in Gus’s backyard anymore, and that made me feel lonesome. Different, as if I had put myself on the wrong side of a wall from everybody else. Apart from other people, the ones I couldn’t tell. Well, how was I supposed to explain something I didn’t understand myself? But maybe that was why—feeling strange, I mean—maybe that was why I acted so dumb in school on Monday and let Rawnie down.

  It started when Aly Bowman asked me to sit with her at lunch. Rawnie always saved me a seat at lunch-time, and the kids at our table were lots of fun. But there was something about Alabaster. I guess she wasn’t pretty, because she had kind of a beak of a nose, but she was so cool. She acted like she didn’t care about parents or teachers or what they thought of her, and I kinda wished I could be that way. I liked the cool way she dressed too. She was real thin, and she had her hair dyed bright blond and cut real real short, only about an inch long, except she’d left a forelock of long spiral-perm bangs in front. She always wore black, like a black bomber jacket and a black leather skirt. She even had her fingernails painted black. And she had one ear pierced in three places. Altogether she seemed a lot more sure of herself than any kid I ever knew, and she was a couple years older than me too. So I was excited that she wanted to be friends with me, and I sat with her.

  The girls at her table were okay. We played a game called MASH, which stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. It’s a kind of fortune-telling game about who you’re going to marry, what sort of place you’re going to live in, and whether you’re going to be divorced. And how many kids you’re going to have, and where, like in the bathroom sink or what, and whether they’re boys or girls, and whether they’re black or white. That last thing seemed dumb to me, but the girls giggled over it a lot. They made me put Brent, the one who had pinched me, on my MASH as one of the boys I might marry, but he got crossed out right away, thank God.

  Rawnie was kind of quiet when we walked home together and to school together the next morning. So when Aly asked me to sit with her at lunch, I said, “I’m going to sit with Rawnie today. I think she’s mad.”

  “That’s dumb.” Then Aly giggled. “But I guess she would be dumb, wouldn’t she?”

  I didn’t know what that meant and I didn’t want to ask and look stupid. Thing is, I should have stood up for Rawnie right then, but I didn’t. I just said, “I’m going to sit with her today anyway.”

  “No, you’re not. You sit with me all the time or you don’t sit with me at all.”

  I had been figuring I could sit with Aly one day, Rawnie the next. And I didn’t like what Aly had just said. It didn’t seem fair. But then again, I sort of did like it because not being fair was part of the way she was cool.

  Anyway, I thought, I got to see Rawnie before school and after school and on Saturdays, wasn’t that enough? I only got to see Aly in school. So I sat with her and her gang again.

  We had a lot of fun. Those girls didn’t care what they said. They mocked everything and everybody and made me laugh and laugh. When it was time to go back to class Aly said to me, “See, wasn’t that better than sitting with a certain little jig?”

  I just stood there with my mouth open while she walked away. I mean, of course I knew Rawnie was black, but it had just never occurred to me that it should make any difference. I don’t usually think about people that way, like being Jewish or Italian or Vietnamese or Puerto Rican or whatever is all that important, except that it’s nice to know where you come from. Or at least I never used to think about it much until I came to this school. But that afternoon I kept thinking about the differences between people and I started to wonder if maybe I was missing something. Having attitude about other people seemed to be part of being cool. Aly always had a name for everybody, like “He’s a zipperhead” or “She’s a crotch watcher,” or whatever.

  On the way home Rawnie was real quiet again, but I was still thinking so much about what Aly had said that I blurted out, “Are you all the way black?” I mean, it wasn’t real obvious. Calling her black made about as much sense as calling Nico Torres Korean, or calling me French because my one grandmother came from France.

  Rawnie looked at me and her mouth was pressed into a flat thin line. She said, “Does it matter?”

  “No, not really. I just—”

  “You don’t want to be friends with me because I’m black, is that it, Harper Ferree? You’d rather hang around with the skinheads? Well, forget it. Forget everything. You can just walk by yourself from now on.”

  She took off running, and she really knew how to do that. I couldn’t have caught up with her even if I’d tried, which I didn’t, because she’d just made me really mad. What did she think I was, some sort of baby? I could choose who I hung around with, and I could take care of myself. I yelled after her, “I don’t need you to walk with me!”

  I really didn’t. I walked to school and back by myself the next three days, a
nd I wasn’t afraid of the street corner guys, even when they hollered at me. I was too angry and miserable to feel afraid.

  Rawnie and I weren’t speaking. If we met each other in the hall at school, we looked past each other. I hadn’t gone over to her house and she hadn’t come over to mine. At lunch on Wednesday I sat with Aly and her friends and made it a point to laugh hard so Rawnie would hear me. By Thursday I wasn’t laughing at all.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Aly wanted to know. She didn’t ask it like she cared—more like she wanted me to get out of her face. But I told her anyway. I needed to talk to somebody, and she was the only friend I had now.

  “Rawnie’s the matter,” I said. “She makes me mad.” What I really meant was that I felt awful that she was mad at me.

  “So, who cares about her? You just stick with us white girls, babe. We’re better.”

  I wish I could say I got up and told her off, but I didn’t. I just sat there and felt like my brain wanted to scream. If I went against Aly, I wouldn’t have any friends left at all. But Aly didn’t seem so cool anymore.

  Really Aly wasn’t my only friend, there was one more. Only she wasn’t anywhere near my age, so I hadn’t thought of her right away. It was Gus. All the time I wasn’t going to Rawnie’s house she’d been teaching me to play guitar, and she was so funny and nice I wondered why I hadn’t liked her before. We didn’t go out in the backyard to play though. We didn’t go anywhere near where the red Cadillac convertible was. We just sat in the house.

  That night we tried to get my stupid fingers to do a G chord, but they wouldn’t stretch. Nothing was going right. I said to her, “Gus, what’s a skinhead?”

  She gave me a worried look. “Well, it depends,” she said. “There’s skinheads and there’s skinheads. Which kind do you mean?”

  “Whatever kind we’ve got around here.”

  Gus sighed, not like she was annoyed but like she was sad. She said, “Around here we’ve got the Nazi kind.”

  “What’s that?”

  “White supremacists. People who say all other people are inferior to white people. People who are bigoted against most of the world and want to take it over, the way Hitler wanted to take over.”