She didn’t tell anyone about the show. Tim surprised her by inviting her to the movies to see Mission Impossible(that he was a big Tom Cruise fan was part of her evidence about his sexuality), but Bernice said she wasn’t feeling well. She almost didn’t go out, because she really wasn’t feeling well, but at ten she put on a short skirt and heels and a jeans jacket and walked the half mile to the bar.
She paid her five dollars, managed to find a spot to stand, pretended to be interested in the music. It was violently loud and hurt her ears. She imagined her mother joining her, breathing drunkenly on her as the two of them watched CC, a big leather hat pulled down over his eyes, his guitar reminiscent of a low-slung machine gun. You see, her mother said. You see what got me interested? Bernice ignored her, just as she’d ignored her on the nights when she would come up to her room, late, and stand in the doorway, a glass of wine in her hand, staring at her. Then Bernice had pretended that she was asleep, modulating her breathing to sound that way, the only other sound in the room the ticking of the ancient steam radiators, the rattle of the windows in their frames.
At the break, she found him. He seemed genuinely pleased about it. They stared at each other, the enormous thing between them something neither of them cared to address. What did it matter? The smoke staining the air was bitter, and the three drinks she’d downed felt like nine. She was conscious of the stares of other girls trying to figure out how this not particularly special-looking chick could have the attention of someone in the band.
“You want to party later?” he asked.
“Your place or mine?”
“You live alone?”
She shook her head, batted her eyelashes.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a hotel room.” Then he leaned forward and kissed her ear, at the same time slipping a hand around and giving her ass a quick squeeze.
When the band started again, she plugged bits of napkin into her ears to muffle the music. There was an inevitability to this evening that Bernice wasn’t going to stand in the way of. Some things were destined, and she and CC were one of them. She’d always known this, and if she resisted, she’d never move forward, never find out what was next for her.
A few yards away, there was a small commotion as two guys started pushing at each other, and then one threw a punch. It was hard to tell what was going on, as the people in their immediate vicinity backed away, blocking her view in a brief retreating wave of sweaty, cigarette-smelling humanity. CC’s guitar spat out notes, a high-wire act of shiny, fast noise, and Bernice felt special and chosen and lucky, perhaps the most important person in the room.
She drank a lot—so much she lost count. She had no idea how they got to the motel, or where it was, though later she remembered the smell of the magnolias, and the sound of a highway overpass nearby that hummed with the weight of the occasional truck. She made him take a shower because he was sweaty and his feet stank, and while he was in there, she tore a bunch of pages out of the Gideons Bible and stuffed them into his pillow as a joke. They did it, and she didn’t think it went too badly, considering all the alcohol.
“Mistake?” he repeated, after she whispered the word to him.
She nodded. She was crying.
“What the hell?” He pulled the crumpled papers out of the pillow.
It didn’t seem all that funny to her, either.
And then it was light and she was in a cab, her clothes unpleasant against her skin, the humidity a damp towel thrown over the city. Downtown Atlanta was visible ahead of her, its shiny buildings like Oz, or a child’s vision of paradise. She smacked her forehead with her hand. The stupid shit you did when you were fucked up. She thought back to health class and to her mother’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, trying to remember how that all worked. The way her head felt, the way every nerve she had was crying out for water and sleep, she doubted she was even remotely capable of conception, anyway.
The driver was a white guy with a shaved head and wraparound sunglasses, and he had the radio tuned to a rock station, currently playing “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.” Stripped of everything was exactly how she felt. She thought how there were a million soundtracks out there, going on all the time. How were you supposed to know which one was yours? She thought that when she got home, she was going to sleep until dinner. She thought, Well that’s over with.
EIGHTEEN
CC Devereaux watched the TV over the bar, on which a reporter was explaining a sinkhole that had appeared in the middle of Cathedral Street, and wondered why it had taken so long for his past to catch up with him. Tucked away in the back of his top dresser drawer there was a small book in which he’d listed the names of every woman he’d had sex with. The total was fifty-one. The last name, written in a year ago, was Fiona Cooper, the former exotic dancer who now worked part-time as a caterer. Sometimes fifty-one seemed like a lot; other times he figured it was probably just about right. He was a man, after all. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten them—on the contrary, the very fact that he’d inscribed their names seemed proof to him that he cared about them. Once a year, usually when he’d had a few drinks, he brought out the book and went through them, trying to reassemble circumstances, remember faces. Some had faded with time, while others, like Eve’s, were still vivid as a photograph. He’d known a lot of love, but none of it had stuck and, remarkably, there had been no consequences. He’d always feared that one day, some woman was going to bust in on his life and say, “Here he is; here’s your kid. What are you going to do about it?” He’d just never thought it would be Bernice.
“Sinkhole,” said Freddy, who was nursing a large Coca-Cola at the bar and smoking a Newport. “What about that? You’re walking down the street one minute, the next you’re fifteen feet below street level looking into them sewer pipes.”
“Big, huh?” said CC.
“You could lose a truck in that thing, man.”
Apparently a sewage pipe had broken, and the surrounding sand and dirt, no longer supported, had sifted downward. At street level there had been, initially, a small puckering of asphalt. A smirk. Over the course of several hours, this had developed into a smile, a laugh, and the present deep guffaw.
“How are you feeling?” CC asked Freddy.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Freddy said. He was the house drummer, and moody.
“I mean, tonight, are you going to play like you mean it, or are you going to phone it in like last night?”
“Can’t say.” He took off the leather baseball cap he wore to hide his baldness—CC never understood why Freddy didn’t just shave what remained of his hair—scratched his head, replaced the hat, then stared menacingly at him through the small, midnight-blue disks of his sunglasses. “What are you so touchy about?”
Maybe it wasn’t true. He’d seen the little girl, and he’d thought he’d felt something, some connection. But that could just be vanity on his part.
“I’m a sinkhole for you baby,” sang Max Lucca, the kid he’d hired to play seven to ten. He was set up about twenty feet away at the front of the bar, in the window, and he currently had an audience of one, a man so drunk—he’d come in that way—that he probably had no idea where he was. “A stinking hole of sinking road.”
“‘Stinking hole?’” said CC.
“I like this guy,” said Freddy. “He’s feeling it.”
“You got any kids?” he asked. He’d known Freddy seven years, but if it had ever come up before, he’d forgotten the answer.
“Nope, no kids.”
“Married, ever?”
Freddy continued to look up at the TV. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m interested in you. You’re a mystery.”
“That’s a good thing. You want to have some mystery in your life.” He tapped out another cigarette from his pack.
“I don’t know. Mystery might be overrated.”
“Like this sinkhole,” he said. “Mysterious. You’re just walking along the street one day and then
—wham!—sucked right down into the bowels of the earth.”
“So you said.”
“We have no idea what’s down there,” said Freddy. “Tunnels and pipes and ducts and wiring—it’s like science fiction.”
“Not to mention mole people,” said CC. “Don’t forget the mole people.”
“I’m an earthquake, baby,” sang Max Lucca.
“Now he’s an earthquake,” said Freddy. “He’s moving up.”
“He’ll be a volcano, next,” said CC.
“Tidal wave,” said Freddy. “Hurricane.” He pulled a pack of matches from the dispenser on the bar and lit the cigarette, then examined it. “What happened to the old ones?” he said.
“Printing matchbooks is a cost,” said CC. “It’s an expense. And there’s no point, not with the place closing.”
“Damn,” said Freddy. “You know what? Until this moment, it didn’t seem real to me. That fat sonofabitch been saying he was going to close this place for years. But the matchbooks just kept on coming, you know? This seems serious.”
“Oh, it’s serious.”
“I might have to start looking around.”
“For what?” said CC.
“Another job.”
“You think this is a job?”
They sat in silence, watching the television for a while. “You know who called me?” Freddy asked.
“No. Who?”
“Bootsy Collins. I was on the phone with him this afternoon.”
“What drugs are you on?”
“Bootsy and me go back a long time. We’re talking about a project out in LA. Maybe I’ll just have to go out there.”
Freddy needed an ample fantasy life to make up for the rather close horizons of his actual one. CC worried daily about what he, himself, was becoming.
“I’m a manhole,” sang Max Lucca. “A hundred pounds of solid steel.”
“Now he’s a manhole.” Freddy tossed the matchbook back into the dispenser.
“I don’t much care for the image.”
“No, no. He’s good. I like him.”
“They aren’t steel, are they?”
“What?”
“Manholes. Aren’t they like iron or something?”
Freddy sucked more smoke. “That new bartender last night was interesting.”
“Interesting how?”
“Sassy. You planning on doing anything about her?”
CC shrugged. He’d made a point last night of letting Jimmy do most of the interacting with Bernice, and she’d acted as if this were exactly what she’d expected. But he’d also been aware that she was watching him a lot. It had been a quiet night, with just a few jammers showing up. Around eleven, he’d had to run over to Fiona’s to help her kill a mouse. She lived two doors away from the Latin Palace, where it was ladies’ night, and the street outside had been full of idling cars with fancy hubcaps and darkened glass.
“Who you got playing bass tonight?” asked Freddy. The usual house bass player, Porkpie, had been banned for life two nights earlier by Mike for pouring a drink out onto the bar, something he’d done slowly, dramatically, and while standing on a bar stool. Last night, the gynecologist guitar player from Hopkins had come down, and CC had played bass on the house instrument, a black Korean item with mismatched strings that looked like a reject from a Kiss video, until an actual bass player had come by and taken over. Then he’d gone to Fiona’s.
“Steve Zimmer.”
“You did that for me?”
“I called him and he was free.” CC was beginning to think that all bass players came with mental problems. Zimmer’s prodigious bass chops were matched only by his ego and inability to control himself, which was why he kept losing gigs and was occasionally available to work a job as lame as jam night at the Harborview, where every night was now jam night, meaning that Mike got all his entertainment—however amateur—for free. Porkpie had lately been prone to picking fights and stubbing out cigarettes on the walls, and then he’d pulled the stunt the other night. It amazed CC that this was what his musical career had descended to.
“Thank you,” said Freddy.
“You’re welcome.” CC stared at him. “But you think I’d be a good dad, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Freddy. “You’d be peachy.”
At ten o’clock Bernice still hadn’t shown up. CC went onstage and led Zimmer and Freddy through a few tunes. As soon as he got a guitar in his hands, he felt more relaxed, more himself. It was as if there were two of him, one the guy who muddled through his day-to-day life trying to pay the bills and keep his girlfriend happy and maybe improve himself a little—to this end he’d recently bought a subscription to the New Yorker—but who was basically no one special and who, like the Harborview itself, was simply marking time. The other, exceptional CC, normally unconnected to his corporeal self, stepped into it, wraithlike, when he slipped on a guitar. What troubled him was the lack of a significant audience. When Texas Flood had ended—the gigs for a Stevie Ray Vaughan cover band had basically dried up—he’d settled in at the Harborview. He knew how good he was. He’d played up and down the East Coast, and had once even opened for the Allman Brothers. Tourists wandered in, complimented him, gave him tips. They were full of stories of the blues bars in their hometowns. He should come there sometime! And he grinned and played host. But what he mostly thought was, These people don’t know shit.
They did “Spoonful,” and “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and then a way-too-fast “You Don’t Love Me,” during which Freddy kept giving him looks. Peering out into the dark, squinting against the hard, bright lights, CC saw the regular faces in their seats, carrion birds waiting for their chance. Tonight the problem was going to be harmonica players. There was the waiflike deaf guy, who honked anemically, occasionally by lucky accident on key. There was Night Train, who had the kind of physique you can only earn in a prison exercise yard. He was an egotist and mean, and always seemed to think he was headlining his own band at a real money gig instead of just sitting in on jam night at a crummy dive that most decent people were afraid to go into. There were two other guys with harps out, too, though CC didn’t recognize them. One looked like a college kid—a few wandered down from time to time—and the other looked like a standard over-the-hill stoner: beard, long hair, tie-dyed T-shirt bulging over a pronounced gut. There were a couple of guitar players waiting, too, skulking in the shadows at the back, smoking and pacing.
Mike had descended from his apartment above the bar, the command center from which he looked down onto the street below, monitored the drunks and partiers, and attempted to guide them through the bar’s doors by psychic will and the focused power of sheer greed. He stood now near the front, talking to Max Lucca, who had hung around after his set. CC knew that he was interrogating him, asking him who the hell he was.
He and the band finished playing “Cold Shot,” and CC mopped the sweat from his face with the tail of his shirt. The air-conditioning was barely doing anything, and with the lights, it seemed as if it were a hundred degrees onstage. Suddenly, Mike was sticking his fat, mutton-chopped face up at him.
“I told Max he has to bring in ten people next time he comes,” he said. “He brings in ten people, all of them buying drinks—at least two—he can play here again. That’s fair, right?”
“Sure, if you think charging musicians to play in your bar is fair.”
Mike chose not to hear him. “Skate is here,” he said. Skate Evans, a huge Aussie, stood toward the center of the bar, working on a double whiskey. A regular, he was also part of the investment group that had bought the tax lien on the Harborview. “He’s going to play a few songs.”
“Let him wait in line with the rest of these guys,” said CC. “It’s early yet.”
“Sure, sure,” said Mike. “Only get him up in a song or two, OK? You know how he can get.”
“Did he bring a guitar?” asked CC, knowing the answer. The last time he’d loaned Skate his guitar, the man had been so drunk and so
involved in the ear-splitting solo he was playing, he’d fallen backward over an amplifier.
“I don’t know.” Mike looked over his shoulder. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, then he can’t play. It’s a jam, Mike. He knows that. You want to play, you bring an instrument.”
“Let him play yours.”
“We’ve been through this.”
“Please?” Mike looked as if it hurt him to ask, and CC was reminded—as if he needed to be—that the man’s situation was not good. Still, he didn’t like what this represented, and he didn’t like how it made him feel.
“Night Train,” he called. Night got up from the table where he’d been drinking a beer with an attractive redhead in a low-cut dress. He hopped up onto the stage without a word and began putting on a bandolier containing all his various harps over his muscle T.
“Send Skate over,” said CC to Mike. “It’s OK.”
A minute later, Skate was onstage, strapping on CC’s Tele. He was even drunker than usual, and thanked him profusely for the loan. “Birthday, mate,” he said, with a wink. Something about the way Skate peppered his speech with “mate” and “no worries” made CC wonder if he were from Australia at all.
CC hopped off the stage. Looking up, he saw it starting already. Skate could barely plug in. Freddy was shaking his head at CC, as if to say, Don’t do this, but he’d done it, and he wasn’t backing off. He felt bad for Freddy. Zimmer would hold it together enough to keep him happy, almost certainly. Zimmer was using the short break to run some impressive scales and do some snapping and popping, and didn’t seem to notice the drunk across the stage from him.
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