Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  I found her in the parking lot, in her old, rust-colored Ford jalopy, a car that almost needed a stick to prop it up. Heard that thing drive off, it was as if a bucket of bolts was being stuck by a hammer.

  Belinda was bent forward in the front seat, crying, head and hands on the steering wheel, windows steamed. I tapped on the glass at the driver’s side, but she didn’t sit up. I tapped again, louder this time. The way her muscles tensed I knew she’d heard me that time, but still, she didn’t move. I walked around to the passenger side and tugged the door open gently, slid inside. It closed behind me with a grinding sound.

  Now normally in this type of situation, I would find something funny to say, to break the ice, but I could tell by the way she refused to meet her eyes with mine, this was far beyond what a few off-color jokes could cure.

  “What’s wrong? What Happened?”

  She pointed over her shoulder and into the back seat.

  There was a mass of splinters and strings in the backseat.

  “What is that? Is that your guitar?”

  “What’s left of it,” she said between sniffles. “That was my daddy’s, from 1933. The only thing he ever gave me, and now look at it. It ain’t worth kindling.”

  I sat back in the seat and stared ahead. She’d told me all about her daddy, and from what I could tell, he wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow him up, but he was still her father and that was her only piece left of him. One day he got up, said he was going to put gas in the car, did just that, and kept on driving.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Was Chris and those two stupid girls that are always following him around like puppies. Sharon and Dee.”

  “Damn, them,” I said. “How’d it happen?”

  “I was going to the car. Sharon and Dee said their usual crap, and I guess I said mine, and then I saw Chris walking back from my car. The guitar was in my car. You know I never lock it. When I got to the car, it was like that. Sharon and Dee distracted me, and Chris did the damage. Goddamn it, Ronald, that guitar made me feel special. Wasn’t any call for that.”

  I sat in the car with her and put my arm around her and held her while she cried. It was a long deep cry, and I tell you, I felt like crying too, but I held it in. Back then, a man tried not to cry, and if you didn’t cry, whatever grieved you, coiled up in a knot, way down deep, angry and sad, and lived there.

  I don’t know exactly how it happened, but our lips touched, and then there was fire inside of us, and we ended up at a parker’s lane, and then she said, “Let’s go to my house.”

  I wasn’t sure that sounded like such a good idea, but away we went, and when we got there it was a little rattle-trap place near the railroad tracks, and when we pulled up in what passed for a yard, got out and made it to the porch, a train passed by and the whole place shook so hard I thought it might tumble down.

  “In this house,” she said, “I always tremble when the train goes by.”

  “How could you not,” I said.

  It was dark inside, and it had a damp odor, like laundry had been left out, and when she turned on the light, there wasn’t much to see. The furniture looked old enough to have been brought over on the Mayflower, in the bottom of the deck where it was damp. Roaches didn’t so much scuttle as strolled. They weren’t worried.

  “No one here?” I said.

  “You know about Dad, but last week . . . Last week I came home and there was twenty-five dollars on the table held down with a salt shaker along with a note. Note was from Mama, said, ‘I couldn’t make it, but maybe you can. I left you what I have, but the rent comes due in a month, and you’ll have to figure it out from there. Sorry. All my love.’”

  “That was it?”

  “Well, she left me a pair of emerald earrings, but yeah, that was it.”

  That night in her unmade bed, we made love, and from that point on, we were an item.

  ***

  THOSE KIDS AT SCHOOL, when they saw her now, without her guitar, they held their hands like they were playing an instrument, or made guitar noises, and moved on down the halls with a smile, now and again, throwing back the words, “Be-bop-a-lula, baby.”

  It wasn’t a torment they abandoned or delayed. It was every day, several times a day. I wanted to set them on fire.

  That guitar had meant so much to Belinda. Something of her father’s, a piece of her dreams, an instrument to carry her high to the moon, but those privileged jackasses were like weights on her rocket, dragging her back to earth, spiraling her down into an explosive crash.

  And it didn’t get better. Sharon and Dee made special effort, they prodded her daily, made fun of her hair, made fun of her look, laughed at her shoes, even shoved her books. They were like ten-year-olds high on caffeine and too much sugar.

  But there was a beam of light, a small one, and I like to think I was the one that found it, pointed it out to Belinda, and said, look here. It was the band queers. That was what they called all of us in the band, the ones who didn’t fit in, didn’t know the right things to say, and saw the world in different colors.

  I was a band queer myself, played guitar in a little quartet the bandmaster led. We played at special events. There was Clifton on bass, James on sax, and Mary Sue, a little girl of Asian descent, they called Jap. She played drums.

  It was an odd bunch, Clifton with his harelip, James with a face only a dog could love, and Mary Lou, the product of a Japanese war bride and a father who was a Jew. All of them, and me and Belinda for that matter, were as strange to the rest of our world as peanut butter spread on a cloud.

  But together, when we played, there was something there, right from the start. I gave Belinda a spare guitar, but she looked better holding it than playing it, but there was something in her voice, something different from any voice I’d ever heard. It was a freight train, swallowing razor blades, coughing and bellowing out smoke and spurts of fire.

  At first, she was hesitant, but then she’d let that voice go, and everything that had ever hurt her, disappointed her, saddened her, came out in a beautiful wail from that tiny 4’8” frame that made the air vibrate like a guitar string.

  I remember the first time she let it loose. Everyone quit playing, just stood there amazed, Mary Lou with her drum sticks cocked, as if she’d been frozen in time by an icy blast of wind.

  Belinda stopped singing, turned red.

  I said, “No. It’s great. Hit it again.”

  And we started the music over, one of our own compositions, mostly written by Belinda. A thing called “Tremble,” then known as “Tremble to the Moon,” and away she went, singing the lyrics, building it up like she was stacking bricks, and then it was like she let loose with a tornado siren, only melodious, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise like coffin nails, and the front of my head seemed to swell, and my whole body went weak as wet straw and those bricks she had stacked came apart in a torrent of anger, need, disappointment, and pain.

  We worked our way through, the sax calling out like a dying bird, the base thumping along like a pain in the heart, me bending strings, and those drums beating it out to bring down the sky.

  And Belinda’s voice. My, oh, my . . .

  Had this feeling she had touched the sky, but had yet to rip it open wide. But I knew she could. I could feel the muscle in that voice the way you might squeeze the biceps of a weight-lifting man who had only half-flexed.

  ***

  NOW, I’M GOING TO STOP HERE. I’m going to warn you. This is the odd part, this is where I’ll get the look, I know that, and that’s all right. Here it is straight as an arrow, bright like the sky. That voice of hers, it came from some place that no one else could go. Not then, not now, and maybe not ever. No one could find the places she found and come back from them with a sound like a banshee’s cry.

  In Belinda’s house, she had a family bible, and in it were lists of ancestors, and they went way back. She said before the bible was even written, things had been collected b
y her ancestors, and finally they found their place inside that book, written down from notes and memory. On her dad’s side were the singers, but all of them women. Her dad, he played guitar, she said. But the women were the singers, none of them ever recorded, singing at fairs and all manner of spots, pulling in crowds. There were rumors of dancing men and crying women, and finally Belinda’s ancestors were run out of town, even burned at the stake, and that was long after Salem, after witches were thought to be myth, and those burnings in the thirties didn’t make the history books. But the way those women sang, Belinda’s ancestors, they cued something reptilian inside of the listeners, something they regretted feeling in the end.

  Yeah. Those women went way back. All the way to Greece, and before it was Greece, at least according to all the notes Belinda said were in the bible, written in a tight spidery hand. And then before that were other notes, and then things she couldn’t understand in shapes that made no sense.

  She told me all of this as we lay in bed on a cold, clear night, the trains coming and going, shaking the house.

  “I know how this sounds,” she told me, but I’m descended from some powerful women on my father’s side. That’s why he left, I think, because he saw I was unhappy, and angry, and rumor is, that’s where the power comes in. Anger fuels it. I try not to be angry, Ronald, but I am. Maybe it’s because I don’t fit in. Maybe it’s because I inherited it, but I boil like a kettle and foam like a rabid dog inside.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can feel it when I hold you. It scares me a little.”

  “I get those feelings I can’t see the sky, but I can feel the dark, even if it’s bright as a blue jay outside. That dark is like a shadow, and it climbs up me, from way, way down in my boiling belly, and it comes out of me in a voice like a storm. And here’s the thing, Ronald. I know there’s more.”

  As I said earlier, so did I.

  I didn’t know exactly what to say, but finally I said, “That sounds like a song.”

  “It’s like Armageddon, Ronald. And you know why? Because I am a descendent of those long-ago sirens that tried to lead Odysseus into the rocks . . . I’m feeling your arm go slack. You’re not holding me the same way as before. You think I’m crazy.”

  “No. I just don’t know how you mean it.”

  “I mean that before the Greeks were called Greeks, even before the stories of Jason and his Argonauts, and Odysseus and his crew met the sweet wails of the Sirens, there were stories of them. Women, who by inheritance, or some strangeness no one has ever defined, had a voice that called to those who would listen. Only the deaf or the ones with plugged ears were safe. It was like those Siren voices had hooks in them, and lines, and the voices pulled those who heard them toward their doom, into the rocks. And I know the source of our voice, for in a way, it’s all one loud voice. It’s rage, Ronald. It’s about women made small, pushed down and lost, like my mother. Without her husband, without a man, she couldn’t stand it, even abandoned her daughter. Didn’t know how to be herself by herself. She knows, too, what I am on my father’s side, and maybe that’s the real reason she left. She didn’t want to be here when it all goes wild.”

  “Damn, Belinda,” I said. “I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say you believe me,” she said.

  I tried not to think too long, tried not to mince what I had to say, but right then I told a lie. “Sure, Belinda. I believe you. Why would I not?”

  It’s all she wanted, even if she might have thought I was lying, and she slept sound, but I didn’t. I got up hungry, vastly confused. I thought my girl had more than her heart and guitar broken. I thought her head had a crack, and maybe her soul too.

  I looked in the ice box, but there was nothing there, not a crumb, not water, just what looked like in one corner a clump of hair. I closed the door and prowled in the cabinets, assisted by the light of the moon through the window. I found a box of stale crackers, and ate half of what was there, left the rest for Belinda’s breakfast.

  I sat on the couch with a lukewarm glass of water, next to a shelf of books so old I could smell the past. One was hanging out, and I turned to push it in, and that’s when I thought: Maybe.

  I pulled it out. And that’s how I came across the bible she told me about, so ancient perhaps it had been bound and stitched into place by Adam and Eve. I went over to the sink, where the moonlight was strong, and laid it out on the counter, and looked. In the back were pages of what had once been white space, and they were filled with names, and the farther you went back, the stranger those names became. Greek names.

  I felt something stir in me, like a creature thought dead shifting its weight, trying to lie down.

  Back at the bookshelf I replaced the bible, saw a large roll of what appeared to be leather tucked inside the corner of the shelf, pulled it out, went back to my spot at the sink. It was bound up with a cord made of leather. I removed the cord and smoothed out the leather scroll. Stitched into it, tight and small, were more of what I assumed were names. It was hard to know. It might have been an extensive list of the long, long dead, and it might have been an ancient shopping list, because I was sure it was indeed ancient. There were also symbols and drawings of ships on the sea, of women on the rocks on either side of the ships. They stood with mouths wide open, like little, dark caves, and there were images inside their mouths, and though they were small, I thought they looked like some kind of creatures. Staring at it made me feel uncomfortable.

  I thought about what Belinda had told me, the sirens, ancestors burned at the stake. I rolled up the leather text and put it back.

  ***

  MONDAY MORNING, BACK AT SCHOOL, Clifton came running toward me and Belinda in the lunchroom, nearly skated past us before stopping to catch his breath. When he spoke, that cleft palate voice, excited and strained, wrestled over words like a puppy grappling with a dinosaur bone.

  “You won’t belie—fe—it,” he said.

  “Believe what, Cliffy, slow down,” Belinda said. “Your words are getting all jumbled up. Just calm it down, what’s going on?”

  “We’re hire . . . hire . . . hired.” Clifton said, then grunted afterward, something he did from time to time when he got too excited and couldn’t get the words out. “We have a . . . a re . . . real gig.”

  “What’re you talking about, man?” Belinda asked.

  “My cousin,” he said, and followed it with a growling noise. “My cousin needs a ba . . . aand for her swee . . . sweet . . . sixteen party this weekend.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “What are we supposed to play?” Belinda asked. “We don’t even have an hour’s worth of music ready.

  “Then we’d better hurry,” I said. “Or we’d better be able to play the same songs twice with different notes.”

  ***

  BELINDA, CLIFTON, MARY LOU, James, and myself, all met up that afternoon after school in the band hall to formulate a plan.

  “What about ‘Peggy Sue’? Belinda, you know that one?”

  “Blueberry Hill?”

  Belinda nodded, and by the time we went down the list we realized that collectively, we had more music than we’d thought, but we still needed something to close out with. Something killer.

  “What about the one you wrote, Belinda?” Mary Lou said. “Tremble to the Moon.”

  “What about it?” Belinda asked.

  “We could use that one as our closer. The way you were hitting those notes the other day at practice, well that ought to knock ’em all dead.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Belinda said. “I don’t think the song is done and I—”

  “Then I guess you better finish it,” I said, and smiled at her.

  We reconvened at Cliff’s home, in his garage, to see what Belinda had come up with and we weren’t disappointed.

  “It’s just called, Tremble now,” she said. “Just follow my lead.” Belinda looked at me and said, “It’s in E.”

  Thank God for small favors.


  Belinda tossed her head back, opened her mouth, and let out a note so guttural, it sounded like there was a saxophone stuffed deep inside of her.

  It feels just like a hurricane

  Blowin’ hot wind

  It’s a cosmic rumble

  Your love that makes me tumble

  And I tremble.

  Tremble, to the moon

  Your kisses driving me insane

  Tremble

  When I think of you, I know just what to do

  Look out baby, the storm is passing through

  Blowing hot wind

  Tremble, to the moon

  The heat it’s building up inside

  Look out baby, gonna blow the world aside

  Tremble

  Cause there ain’t no place for you to hide

  Tremble, to the moon.

  Hear the Siren song, take you along

  Don’t fight it baby, you know where you belong

  Tremble

  Into my arms . . .

  And tremble.

  Tremble, to the moon.

  Belinda stopped singing, looked around at everyone. We had all stopped playing.

  “Shhh . . . shhh . . . it,” Clifton said.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Belinda asked.

  “Hardly,” I said.

  She had no idea what had just happened. The lyrics weren’t Shakespeare, by any means, but her voice. She hadn’t heard Clifton’s water glass shatter or Mary Lou stop the music, nor had she seen us all sag like wet rags, but we all had. It was the first time I realized that what Belinda suspected she could do was merely the tip of the iceberg. Her voice that day was like three hundred gallons of spit and vinegar and rattlesnake venom forced into a two-quart jug.

  “I think that’s enough rehearsal for one day,” I said. “My soul’s worn out and my ears hurt some.”

  ***

  WHAT HAPPENED LATER is what everyone is interested in, of course. It’s less known than the day the music died, because the Hurricane Hunters became famous by word of mouth. That’s what we called ourselves, the Hurricane Hunters. We never recorded but the one song, but if the list of people who claim to have seen us perform was really the number of people who actually saw when we played at all those little small ass gigs, it would have been the entire population of the United States.