Fitz

by Mick Cochrane

  He does a quick walk-through of the downstairs. In the kitchen, Fitz feels the weird vibe of Pompeii, the Roman city they studied in Global, buried by a volcanic eruption so quickly that everything was perfectly preserved, daily life flash-frozen, an archaeologist’s dream come true. There is his cereal bowl and spoon in the sink. A jar of peanut butter on the counter where his mom made her morning toast, a knife balanced across the top. On the table is the multivitamin she laid out for him and he forgot to take. It looks sort of forlorn and sad sitting there, a little still life reminding him how much his mom loves him and what a rotten person he is.

  There’s one message on the answering machine, just as Fitz expected, received a little after nine o’clock that morning, about the time he was introducing himself to his father. It’s from the attendance office at school, reporting Fitzgerald’s absence, with a reminder that he’ll need a note of excuse when he returns. Fitz has been planning all along to forge a note. He doesn’t have the skills or guts to pull off a fake phone call. But he has discovered that with very little practice, he can reproduce his mom’s signature reasonably well. She hardly signs her name the same way twice, but there’s always a big Eiffel Tower A and an equally tall double-peaked M—the rest is squiggles.

  Fitz deletes the message. For the first time today, maybe, he really feels that he’s being dishonest with his mom. He doesn’t feel good about lying to her. He’s done just what Dominic and the rest of the detention crowd do every day—pull the wool over their parents’ eyes. Turns out, he’s pretty good at it, being sneaky. It’s not that hard to do, Fitz is learning—except for the queasy feel of betrayal in his stomach.

  Just then there’s a noise from near the front door—a click and a soft scraping. Fitz turns, startled and frightened, his hands rising slowly, a man apprehended in the act. But it’s not his mom, not the attendance police, it’s just Caleb’s cord snaking its way from the mail slot across the tile floor of the entryway. It seems alive, curious. He walks over to it slowly, grabs it by the pronged head, and plugs it in. He remembers what he came for and heads up the stairs and into his bedroom.

  The guitar is poking out from under his bed, half-buried in dirty clothes. It supposedly belongs to Uncle Dunc, who bought it a year ago and conveniently left it in Fitz’s custody. It’s a dark mahogany, and he loves everything about it, even the smell. He strums a G chord. It has such a rich and beautiful tone, Fitz sometimes feels unworthy of it.

  Before he heads back out, he takes a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. His hair may not look frightened, but it doesn’t look good either. He scratches at it a little, moves it around his forehead. It doesn’t seem to make much difference one way or the other. He holds his guitar up and makes an album-cover face, his best approximation of the Beatles’ stare on Rubber Soul. He wants to look profound, he wants to look deep, but really he just looks worried—he looks constipated. He wonders whatever led him to hope that Nora might find this kid attractive, that his father might find him interesting.

  35

  When Fitz comes out of the house, guitar in hand, Caleb is sitting in one of the lawn chairs, playing scales, his father standing back a little, leaning on the porch railing, arms crossed, looking on approvingly. So often Caleb looks awkward and out of place, hunched and squinting, always at the edge of something, the perpetual square peg, but when he’s cradling his guitar like this, bent over it, coaxing something out of it, speaking some special language to it, like a mother to her baby almost, he seems perfectly at ease, when he is most himself.

  That’s when Fitz notices her. It’s as if his stomach knows who it is before his brain does: it does one of those little elevator drops. She is walking a black cruiser bike up the sidewalk, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, a cascade of beautiful red hair spilling out from beneath her helmet. Nora Flynn!

  She drops her bike, unbuckles her helmet, and comes up the porch steps, just as casually as if she did this every day. “Hey, guys,” she says generally, taking in Caleb, Fitz, and his father, too.

  Caleb, never really famous for his social skills, looks up and makes some rudimentary introductions. It’s Fitz’s house, but he’s grateful that Caleb is willing to play the role of official greeter. He’s not sure he could trust himself to do it right.

  “Hey, Nora,” Caleb says. “This is Fitz’s dad.” He motions with his head, his hands still on the guitar, playing something weird way up the neck, some unworldly chords, like the sound track for the slightly bizarre indie film they’re all starring in right now.

  “Hi, Mr. McGrath,” she says, which is not his name, though there’s no way she would know that. “I’m Nora.” Her face is flushed from the effort of riding her bike, Fitz sees, and there are tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip. On a man it would be disreputable, but on her, it’s adorable.

  Fitz’s dad is unfazed. He steps forward, smiles, and gives her hand a respectful shake. He doesn’t correct her. “Nice to meet you,” he says, and goes back to his perch on the edge of the porch.

  To her he must seem like some garden-variety dad, home early from work or maybe taking the day off. He looks the part. For a guy with zero experience, he’s not bad. He can pull it off.

  “Hey, Fitz,” she says, and he hears some sound come out of his mouth.

  36

  “So you dig Ruth Brown?” Caleb asks Nora.

  “I dig every inch of her sound,” she says. “Big-time. I’ve listened to that song about a million times. That girl can sing. I love her voice! She is so, what? Feisty? Is that the right word? Sassy? That tune has been in my head all day.”

  Nora scat-sings the first line of the song “Teardrops from My Eyes”: “Dee de dee de dee, de dee de dee.” She’s blown in like some sort of meteorological event, a high-energy front Fitz can feel on his skin, transforming the weather on the porch from drab and testy to fun with a chance of joyous.

  “I’m getting obsessed,” Nora says. “Can you tell?”

  Caleb smiles proudly. He’s all about obsession. He gives Fitz a kind of one-of-us nod of approval. “Miss Rhythm,” Caleb says. “That’s what they called her. The girl with a tear in her voice.”

  “But there’s no way you guys can play that song, is there?” she asks. Fitz wonders the same thing. There are horns playing on that recording, a whole big band backing her up. How in the world are the two of them—two kids on a porch with just a couple of guitars—going to reproduce that?

  Caleb says, “We have our own way of playing a song like that, don’t we, Fitz?”

  Fitz nods and says, “Sure,” noncommittal. He has absolutely no idea how they might play a song like that.

  “Okay,” Caleb says. “Take a seat.” Fitz settles into the lawn chair next to Caleb, acoustic on his lap, and Nora pulls over the small bench. It’s something Fitz’s mom garbage-snatched last summer and painted a dramatic green. It’s where she puts her book and tea when she reads out here. The three of them make a tight little grouping. There’s no campfire, but it’s got that feel. Fitz’s father, meanwhile, is leaning on the porch rail. He’s present, but distant, too. He’s managed to make himself, if not invisible exactly, then at least inconspicuous. Caleb and Nora don’t seem to think it’s odd or creepy that he’s here. They’re not paying any attention to him, so neither does Fitz. If his father walked away, Fitz doesn’t know what he’d do. But right now he looks fixed, he looks planted—doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.

  “Standard jump blues,” Caleb says. “I’ve got some ideas. We do it in E, okay with you?” he says to Nora, and she nods.

  Caleb noodles around a little on his guitar, adjusts something on his amp. He tunes his high-E string, then tunes it again. He fusses with his pickguard. By now, Fitz is used to his tics and rituals. He thinks he understands what this is all about—it’s connected to his sense of awe for the music, his sense of his own unworthiness. Before the altar of the blues, in the shadow of Muddy and Wolf, Lightnin’ and Sonny Boy and Little Walter and all the others,
he gets the yips. He fiddles around some more, and finally, just about when Fitz is afraid that Nora is going to start to wonder what’s wrong with him, he strikes a chord.

  Before long Caleb is bouncing back and forth between E and A, getting a catchy little rhythm going, and Fitz can hear it, the verse of the song. It’s happy and quick, which is surprising because the words are all about heartbreak and tears.

  Nora is leaning forward, into the song, her head tilted a little. Caleb says the lyrics, feeding them to her in a kind of dull monotone. Nora repeats them, her lips moving, forming the words of the song, singing them, but so quietly Fitz can just barely hear her:

  Every time it rains, I think of you

  And that’s the time I feel so blue.

  They play it together a few times, Nora’s singing gradually getting stronger and more confident, Caleb adding a little embellishment to his turnaround. It’s some new riff, Fitz can tell from the look on Caleb’s face, something he must have been working on. They sound good. Fitz admires the way they’ve hit it off, just how good their chemistry is, and he feels left out, too. It’s like Caleb has whisked her away on the dance floor and left him on the sidelines, back at the punch bowl.

  “Okay, dude,” Caleb says then. “Give me something like the horn part on the record. See if you can mimic that.”

  Fitz remembers the song, those horns, a little bit, but he’s not like Caleb, he doesn’t have a freakish memory for tunes. He’s too embarrassed to ask for help, though, not here, in front of Nora and his father, so he goes searching for those notes.

  He quietly tries out a couple of combinations, but they’re not only not right, they’re not even close. It’s like he’s playing the bass part for some other song, in some other key, on some other planet. He tries something lower, something higher. Fitz feels as if he’s blindfolded, lurching around a strange room, searching for something small and precious—he keeps banging and crashing into things. He’s lost. Hopeless. It would be funny if it weren’t happening to him. Nora glances in his direction, and now his father seems to be watching him with special attention. He feels himself starting to sweat. Bass Line Fail, he thinks. Epic Bass Line Fail.

  And just then, almost as if he can feel Fitz’s desperation, Caleb comes to the rescue. He sings the part, just two notes, the bass notes he wants Fitz to find. He keeps singing them softly, and it’s all Fitz needs. He takes a deep breath. I can do this, he tells himself. I can totally do this. He goes up the neck and finds the first note right away. And after just a little bit of hunt-and-peck, he’s got the other. Caleb gives him a nod. Fitz gets the tempo, and just like that, he’s on board. He’s in the pocket.

  They play it through a few times, and just about when Fitz starts to forget the strangeness of the situation and finds himself feeling drawn into the music, Caleb raises his hand and calls a halt. He wants them to tackle the next part of the song.

  “The chorus is a little tricky,” he says. He tries out some chords. He mutters a little—to himself, to the guitar, maybe to the song. It’s what he does. Fitz is tempted to explain, but Nora doesn’t look disturbed.

  Finally, Caleb’s got a progression he likes. He runs through it slowly, his torso half-twisted so Fitz can see what he’s playing—A, B-flat, and E. Nothing too exotic. Maybe Caleb was right, maybe they do have a way to play a song like this.

  After about their eighth or ninth time through the chorus, Nora gives a little smile. “That’s it,” Caleb says. “That’s totally it.”

  You wouldn’t think you could smile while you’re singing, but Nora can—she is. Her mouth is busy forming the words, but her whole face is alive with pleasure. It’s like she’s standing back a little from her own voice, from the song, listening and enjoying herself, catching Fitz’s eye, as if to say, isn’t it something?

  Her voice isn’t exactly like Ruth Brown’s on the recording—how could it be?—but it has a certain attitude, sass, maybe that’s what it was, maybe something all her own. She has a little bit of a tear in her voice, too.

  Just then a brown delivery truck rolls down the street, slows, and stops next door in front of the Wilkersons’. The deliveryman—brown shorts, black socks and shoes, curly hair and mustache—emerges with a package. Fitz recognizes him, their regular guy. Somehow Fitz knows his name: Clay. Maybe it’s stitched onto his shirt.

  Clay jogs a package up to the Wilkersons’ porch, deposits it there, and heads back to the truck. But halfway down the walk, he stops and pivots and turns toward them, toward the porch, toward the song. It’s maybe the only time in his life Fitz has ever seen this man standing still.

  They’re coming around to the chorus again, and this time, maybe because they have an audience, Nora seems to give it a little extra:

  Every single cloud would disappear,

  I’d wear a smile if you were here.

  So, baby, won’t you hurry, because I need you so

  And it’s raining teardrops from my eyes.

  “I’m feeling it,” Clay the UPS guy shouts at them. “I’m really feeling it.” And then he dashes back to his truck, puts it in gear, and pulls away.

  Fitz is feeling it, too. The it—he could never spell it out, he could just point in its general direction, but that’s okay. That’s what music is for—to say things you can’t put into words. It’s got to do with his father, of course, and everything that has happened today, and his understanding that it’s almost over. But it’s also got to do with the music, the pleasure he feels in playing it, the connection he feels to them.

  It occurs to Fitz that if he somehow got stuck here, forever playing his simple little part, tapping his foot to Caleb’s jazzy rhythm, listening to Nora sing, watching her, he wouldn’t mind a bit. To be able to sit so close to her and not have to say anything—it’s wonderful. To hear her sing, to see joy and humor in her eyes—it’s so much more personal, more intimate, really, than some chatter between classes.

  He loves the feeling of collaboration, of teamwork. Each of them is contributing something—he maybe least of all, his simple little two-note bass line, but still. They’re making something, together. Even his father seems necessary somehow. He’s their audience, a witness.

  37

  That’s when his mom’s little red car comes tearing around the corner. There’s no siren, of course, no flashing lights, but the car itself seems to exude a kind of 911 urgency. She pulls up right behind Curtis’s car across the street and doesn’t seem to park the car so much as drop it there.

  Fitz should have anticipated this. He should have seen it coming. Because he didn’t respond to her texts, because she hasn’t heard from him after school, she’s assumed the worst—the house is on fire, he’s been abducted, he’s fallen and he can’t get up. In fact, nothing terrible has ever happened to Fitz, he’s never been lost, endangered, or damaged, he’s suffered barely a scrape or a bruise, but still, his mom can imagine catastrophe all day long.

  Nora stops singing in the middle of a line. Fitz drops out, too. Only Caleb keeps playing, but softly now, shifting into some other progression, something ghostly.

  Fitz’s mom moves slowly, cautiously, up the sidewalk, steps around the abandoned bike, taking it all in, this little after-school party on her porch. She’s wearing her usual casual work getup—a white T-shirt, jean jacket, sunglasses perched on her head—but her body language is tense and wary, like a cop responding to a domestic.

  Fitz tries to imagine the scene from her perspective, to see what she’s seeing. There’s Caleb, guitar in his lap, playing something quiet and slightly ominous now in a minor key. He’s plugged in today, but other than that, there’s nothing really remarkable here, nothing she hasn’t seen many times before—Caleb picking on the porch. But there’s the girl. She’s new. A redhead with a helmet in hand, nervously twisting the chin strap, who must belong to the bike, smiling, a little apprehensively, even guiltily.

  And there’s the man. Leaning on the porch rail, well dressed but disheveled, expensive hai
rcut ever so slightly askew, his nice slacks and shirt looking sort of smudged and wrinkled, as if he’s slept in them, flecks of Como Park mud on his wing tips. The guy is loitering, looming, he is inexplicably lurking on her front porch in the company of her only son and his best friend and some unknown girl. Fitz can see her taking it all in—no beer bottles, no contraband, everybody fully clothed—performing a kind of instantaneous damage assessment. Still, it could be bad, some low-level immorality in progress, maybe, a very peculiar sort of hostage situation.

  She comes up the steps.

  “Hi,” Nora says. Her tone says, please don’t kill me. She may not know exactly what’s going on, but she seems to understand immediately that Annie is the alpha female. Caleb doesn’t say anything, but he nods. Or maybe just bobs his head to the music in a way that suggests a greeting. No matter what Annie decides is going on, Fitz is pretty sure she won’t blame Caleb. He’ll get immunity. He’s one of her underdogs, like the kids she works with—in her eyes, Caleb can do no wrong.

  Just a few minutes ago, there was something almost magical happening here. That’s gone now. Vanished. Now the whole vibe is busted, it’s party over. Annie fixes her glare on Fitz’s father. He’s clearly the ringleader, the most dangerous character, troublemaker-in-chief.