Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  “So now wait a minute,” Lewis huffed. “You get to wear what you want, and Tami gets to wear what she wants—” He had a deficit in this not-taking-yourself-too-seriously quality.

  “Not in this band,” Tami jumped in, pointing at her head. “Hubie? Not complaining either.” Tami looped a finger into the ring on Doobie’s collar and pulled him forward to pet him. He made whining noises. “It’s what you do for your band.” She turned to me. “Told you. Susan knows the chords. She can provide rhythm.” Then she turned to Lewis. “They don’t need you.”

  “Wait, now,” I said. Sometimes, Tami went too far. “She can’t learn the arpeggios in a—”

  “Well, how do you even know she’s going to be there?” Lewis said. He was so easy.

  “Susan Critcher,” Tami said, laughing an I-Just-Busted-Your-Ass laugh. “Artie’s sister. Just where else do you think she’s going to be?”

  “Guess I didn’t catch her last name,” Lewis said. I laughed. We were back to good.

  As I neared the Bokoni’s corner, Lewis suddenly decided to spring some news of his own. “Maggi’s already got a ride, by the way. Said she’d meet us there,” he said.

  “Now you tell me?” I said, doing a U-turn.

  “Sorry. You distracted me with your, um, wardrobe demands.”

  “Whatever. All right, you guys. Better get ready,” I said. “Almost showtime.” Lewis sighed, taking his T-shirt off and pulling the cool satin shirt over his bare chest, buttoning it. “Don’t be a dork.” Did I have to do everything for this guy? “Leave the top three undone. You’re supposed to seem hot.”

  “I will be hot. This shirt is heavy! I’m going to sweat through before we even get there.”

  “You’ll be fine. It’s polyester, not real silk. Doesn’t breathe as well.” They looked at me like they just discovered I’d been moonlighting as a saleslady at Penney’s. “Jerseys are made of the same material! I had to learn about it if I was gonna learn how to do repairs. Jeez. You pinheads act like a guy can’t sew!”

  “Carson, there’s a lot of people here,” Doobie said as we got close to Artie’s. “What if we suck?” He read my mind. Artie’s house wasn’t too far off the Rez, and we could have almost parked on our side of the border, the road was so packed.

  “Yeah,” Lewis pushed. “What if we suck?”

  “That’s a given you will,” I said, laughing, trying not to spook us. “Kidding. Kidding! Look, we’re fine. We killed at The Bug’s party. And Doobie’s got his real bass instead of a caution cone.”

  Lewis took in a breath to “yeah, but” so I cut him off.

  “Plus, we got a short set list,” I continued. “And the people who hired us? Their kid’s in our band now. No one’s giving us grief. If Artie’s folks change their mind, we don’t play. And we eat and drink for free. What’s the worst that can happen? We suck in front of strangers we’ll never see again.”

  I didn’t push it. I knew it was kind of tough for Lewis to come to Artie’s house. You could see, just down the way, the group of almost identical houses that made up the Red-Tail Manor compound for air force families. I didn’t know which one Lewis’s buddy George Haddonfield had lived in, before his dad got transferred and the one white guy Lewis had ever trusted left here without a trace.

  The proximity of this party to those houses was one of the details I’d left out when trying to get Lewis to commit. He called my justifications “Jedi mind tricks,” but he still fell for them often enough that they were worth a try. Truth? I really was looking out for him. If we were gonna be a band, and have any reasonable shot at winning the Battle, that meant performing in public, with a sense of presentation.

  “Put your collar on before you get out.” Lewis tucked the shirt into his regular jeans. I passed him my little Pignose while Tami and Doobie got out. “And take the Pignose. I got this,” I said, grabbing my Orange amp, which carried way more juice.

  “Wait,” Lewis said, stopping. “If you two are both amplified, no one’s gonna hear me.”

  “Relax. Would I do something like that?” I asked, continuing to walk. Making him feel like he was missing out was the easiest of my alleged Jedi mind tricks, but it wasn’t working. “The Pignose is for you. I’m assuming you don’t have an amp.”

  “Why would I need an amp? My guitar’s an acoustic,” he said, as if I had not known this.

  “There’s a pickup inside the Pignose housing. You just slide it up inside the sound hole, tighten the bracket in place, and you’re fine.”

  “And what’s Hubie using?”

  “Mine’s already here,” Doobie said. “I left it the last time I was hanging with Susan.” Even a year behind us, Doobie was still Older, which made him inherently more interesting to sophomores and freshmen. Were he and Susan going out? Who else hangs with someone using the excuse “I want to play my bass for you”?

  Artie waved to us as we came up the driveway. I’d never been so relieved to see a white person recognize me. He wrapped his arm around Tami’s waist when we reached him. While everyone said hello, I glimpsed us reflected in a house window. We looked like a band.

  “See Maggi yet?” I asked the group. We looked awesome but only three members of our band were visible—the three who’d arrived courtesy of my Chevelle.

  “There,” Doobie said. She was talking with Susan. “Who’d she come with?”

  “Dunno,” I said. “You know, Lewis?” He was the world’s shittiest liar. Well, my world’s worst anyway. You could almost see the nonsense he was gonna tell you forming over his head.

  “No,” he finally said. All that working up to one stubby “no.” “She didn’t tell me anything. And I haven’t seen Marie.” And there was the rest of the story, which of course meant: I know how she got here, she told me, but I am not sharing that information with you.

  “ ‘No’ would have been fine,” I said. “Weirdo.”

  Some guy in a baseball cap, easily in his thirties, flew toward us. His clothes were too tight, begging anyone to notice. Why did he seem so familiar? He looked like most of the white guys under fifty who lived in Sanborn, but still, there was something. His mustache split in a grin as he reached into the chain loop in Lewis’s collar, but there was nothing friendly in this gesture. “Lassie! Welcome to the party. You paper-trained? Or am I gonna have to rub your nose in it if you have an accident?” He let go of Lewis’s collar when he was done with his version of a greeting. His breath reeked of keg beer and cigars.

  “Hey, you made it,” Susan said to Lewis, running over, Maggi trailing her. “Hubie said they’d convince you, but I had my doubts. Come on. You’re gonna be near me onstage.”

  “Lassie here’s in your band?” the guy asked, bugging his eyes out like he was onstage in a play, making a “surprised” face so big the back row could see. “What’s he play, the skin—”

  “Jim!” Maggi said, pushing her shoulder up against him. “Cut it out. You’ll scare him away. We both just joined recently. We’re the rhythm section.”

  “I’ll bet he’s got his rhythm down,” the guy named Jim said. Lewis’s ears deepened to brick, and Susan’s soft pink features turned almost Pepto-Bismol pink.

  Susan tugged at Lewis’s arm as I made my way to the keg. Tami gave Artie a thanks-for-having-us-crazy-Indians-here kiss. “Have you been using tabs?” Susan asked Lewis. He told her he had. We were doing songs we’d rehearsed, but on the chance he might freak out and lose his place, I’d given him sheets. Playing at The Bug’s for a Rez crowd was one thing. This party? Something else. “We set you near my keyboard so you can look on. You need them tonight?”

  “If the chords are on top of the bar, I’m good,” he said. “As long as I stick to the basics. And I guess that’s my job here anyway.”

  “You’ll do fine,” she said, and smiled, touching her fingers up and down his arm. “I like the way this feels.” Maybe now he’d listen.

  “I’m mostly worried about playing with others,” he said, getting his tuner out.
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  “’Cause usually you’re playing with yourself?” that guy Jim said, sitting near the bandstand. He might be a problem. Lewis concentrated on tuning his guitar, trying to ignore that guy. Susan grabbed the pickup from the Pignose case, and attached it for Lewis in a minute.

  “Aren’t you nervous?” he asked her as she handed the guitar back to him. “I mean, particularly since you’re just learning the keyboard chords today? I couldn’t be that brave.”

  “I can sight-read. I’ve been playing piano since I was six.”

  “Nice! I love piano, but my fingers are so stubby,” he said, holding them up as evidence. Always smooth, Lewis, charming the ladies. “Affects me on the guitar too. I don’t bother with some songs I’d love to play. The tabs … I swear, you need fingers like that monster in Alien.”

  “You’ll be fine. Just look to me for changes if you get lost. Don’t trail. Look a bar or two ahead and join in.” Good, she was on the same page as us. “I modified my sheet music so you should be able to see from where you’re standing.” We all headed to the stage.

  “You put this all up yesterday?” Lewis asked Susan.

  “No big deal,” she said. I could almost hear Lewis bitching about the way I could persuade people to help me out, even people who barely knew me. “Only took me a half hour, so saying yes was easy. Say no to everything, people just tune you out.” She put on her collar.

  “So you already knew about these?” he asked, tugging at his.

  “Tami gave me a heads-up last night.” She then dropped her voice, but I could still hear her. “Carson thinks they have ‘cousin secrets,’ but Tami and I have gotten close since she started going out with Artie. I know all kinds of ‘Rez-Only Gossip.’” She used “gossip” instead of “Eee-ogg,” so she couldn’t know as much as she thought.

  “Good to know,” Lewis said, smiling wide and earnest. He was glomming onto her already, somehow missing the signals Doobie had already sent us. Susan was maybe replacing Marie for Lewis.

  From the platform, I looked out. There were easily a hundred strangers here. People can ignore a good band, put them in the background, but if you’re a bad musician, everyone notices. I peeled off my dad’s billowy shirt, and pulled a new one out of my guitar case. I put it on, facing the band, to get their reactions. My new shirt had my bright red cartoon devil across the front. It was professionally done, like a concert shirt. I turned to the audience.

  “We’re the Dog Street Devils,” I said into my microphone. Everything seemed to work—Artie and Susan must have sound-checked before we’d gotten there. I closed my eyes and knew I had about thirty seconds to win them over. So I launched into a crazy screeching sound and then repeated it a couple more times, starting to dance fast. I’d been practicing in front of my mirror at home so I could do it and still look like it was intentional.

  Maggi heard the first cue and began a decent imitation of bongos on her dual water drums, into her mic, catching her rhythm before my second screech. For basic instruments, they were alive and breathing in her hands. There were only a few minor variations in this song’s chords. Lewis shouldn’t need the tabs. It was one of the few rock songs The Bug actually liked.

  I wasn’t sure how the crowd was going to take to a group of high school kids playing the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” but my job was to sell it. They didn’t need to believe we were as good as the Stones. They just needed to enjoy it enough to fill in the gaps with their memories. The crowd started moving, kids coming closer to the stage, adults nodding and smiling to music they’d grown up with. Even the grandpa types seemed familiar with it.

  Doobie shared Maggi’s microphone, and Lewis leaned into Susan’s. They began their “Woo-Hoo” chorus right on time. At my lead guitar solo, we all locked eyes for a couple seconds each, grinning like we’d been performing together a thousand years. For this first song, we were on fire! I’d been playing this alone for two years. The set was going to get tough, but it was a great moment to be alive. I was leading a band, in public!

  When we made a hard cut at the end, people clapped and whistled. The only stone face I saw was that guy Jim. He was leaning against a tree, lighting a fresh cigar off the butt of his old one, eventually grinding embers out under his heel as he stared at me. I didn’t even know this guy. What the hell was his problem?

  We moved into “We Can Work It Out” after the opener, which Lewis had wormed into becoming one of our signatures despite my best efforts. We smoked on this song too. The longer we played, though, and the more everyone else dug our set, that guy seemed to focus more on me, and not in a good way. Were Lewis’s troubles going to follow me around all the time? First that thing with Albert, which I couldn’t stop thinking about, and now this. Lewis might be more liability than asset. This was a familiar feeling, but the stakes were higher these days. Our band was for real, convincingly coming together. After all my hard work getting him to this point, was I gonna have to unleash my rhythm player and find someone else to wear that collar before the Battle of the Bands?

  When most of your audience was a little drunk, I wondered how good you had to be. Still, their clapping transformed my terror into excitement, and, in the end, satisfaction. I’d played for strangers at our Vendor Table, but those were Traditional Social songs. And at The Bug’s party, I was kind of a semi-stranger. These people, though, were mostly strangers, and they believed we were a band.

  I still didn’t even really feel like a part of this band. I’d even snagged a ride today from some Rez guy, not wanting to ride with Carson. Any favor from him seemed to come with something you owed. I was the only one with an “I AM FROM THE REZ!” type instrument, even though I’d lived there the least (with the exception of Susan, but you couldn’t count her).

  The crowd was dense for a family Get-a-Day-Off-From-Work party, but I was watching two unhappy people ignore me—the only two guests I knew. At a Vendor Table, tourists know you’re trying to sell them something and refuse to look at you, even sideways, for fear of you making eye contact. This avoidance felt different. Jim Morgan, who usually smiled widely at me, didn’t even look my way once. Instead, he moved his eyes between Lewis and Carson. Benfriend was here all by himself, his Trabant parked along the road.

  Marie and our mom were down at the Falls, entrenched with the Vendor Table right until school started. Before the rest of the band arrived, I hung out with Susan and Jim. I noticed people come up to Benfriend, and he’d be friendly, in that fake friendly way he used on me (you recognize an obligation smile), and then he’d shake hands or pat the other person on the back to let them know their conversation was over. Once we started, he didn’t look my way, even once.

  “You did great,” Susan said as we closed our set. She hugged me and Lewis, stage-whispering as the crowd cheered. “I’m really glad. We sound so much fuller this way.” I’d thought she was a last-minute addition. Lewis seemed as puzzled as I felt. We silently wondered if Susan’s “filling out our sound” was another in Carson’s endless supply of lies. We didn’t sound fuller because of my water drums. Her synth pads had that concern covered. I was the Doubted Extra, not her. And Lewis knew he was doing rhythm parts Carson normally had covered between solos.

  “Careful. Kind of sweaty,” Lewis said with an embarrassed smile when she hugged him, making sure no one contacted his skin. He grabbed a shirt from his guitar case and headed behind the garage.

  “Say, who is that?” I asked Susan (fake casually), nodding at Benfriend.

  “Ben Gaward,” Susan said immediately. “Kind of cute, huh? Very smart. I can introduce you, but be sure you don’t call him Ben. He likes—”

  “Benjamin,” I said.

  “Worse,” she laughed. “He likes the German pronunciation, might even correct you.”

  “The German pronunciation?”

  “Ben. Yaw. Mean. Can you even believe it?” she said, conspiratorially whispering. (I instantly loved this more than Benfriend and vowed to use it on Marie as soon as I saw her.)
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  “Whatever,” I laughed. “Okay, so who is Ben-Yaw-Mean Gaward?”

  “Dad’s some official for the city schools. Ben-Yaw-Mean teaches German and eleventh-grade English at the city high school. Didn’t Lewis tell me you used to go there?”

  “We moved back to the Rez when I finished ninth,” I said (suddenly remembering Marie’s excellent eleventh-grade English grade, even though she hated books, and finally realizing why Ben-Yaw-Mean seemed so familiar. I’d seen him in the school hallways my whole freshman year).

  “I overheard Dad telling Mom Ben-Yaw-Mean’s going through a messy separation. High school and college girlfriend. He says she’s a different person; she says he refuses to grow up.” Susan shivered. “God, I hope I never say such things. Which is worse?” She laughed.

  “Couldn’t really say.” A lie. We’d faced questions like those, twice. People asked if we were Rez Indians that City Indians didn’t like, or City Indians deciding to try out Rez Life. Apparently there was a right answer, but I didn’t know which girls we were. Even Marvin was stuck in between. He’d adapted to the fifty channels on city TV and now he was stuck with rabbit ears and a dozen channels (three of which were public TV and one in French, beaming in across Lake Ontario).

  “Mom thought it was a good idea to invite him. Mom and Dad know almost everyone in all the schools around here, including all the single ladies. They thought he might find someone.” I had a hard time thinking of my sister as a “Single Lady,” since I was the only one who knew she still loved the stuffed armadillo (plush, not taxidermy) permanently staked out on her bed.

  “Adults. Kind of creepy,” Susan finished, shivering. “Soon-to-be ex or not. At least wait until you’re really hanging your clothes in a different closet, before you start scouting for new girls.”

  The sun had gone down, and I really wanted to wash the heavy air from my face. But the Critchers had tents up and their garage strung with party lights. All food and drink was in the garage, and they had rented a sani john at the far end. These arrangements were a polite border barrier saying, We like you but we don’t like you that much. Please stay outside of our home.