Seeing Red, page 10
"Then put it back. I didn't get the call letters of that third station."
"You put it back. You're the oldies fan." He was cranky now. He crushed his empty one-handed and pitched it behind his seat. "We still haven't got a title for the song, Lester. We're almost to the state line." His lower lip was stuck out petulantly, and it looked comical.
"No Deposit, No Return Blues."' I covered my grin with a pull from my own beer.
"How juvenile," he said in such a serious tone that I cracked up completely. He ignored that and wrinkled his upper lip at the radio. "Hell, I can't find it. You try."
"It's all in the fingering, m'boy," I said in a passable W.C. Fields. But it took me a whole minute to relocate the third station, and when I found it, a jock was running his lines: ". . . venerable Elvis, 'Glory Oscy' from yours and mine, the Bouffants, and Buddy Holly's 'Tia Maria'—"
"I like your idea of calling it Somethingorother Blues," Jake interrupted. "But what? How about 'Lonewolf Blues'?"
"Wait a minute, quiet!" I waved my hand to shut him up, but the mystery station picked that moment to phase out again. Dead silence. I ran the pointer all the way back to KPLA, then across. More nothing.
"Well, what?" Jake took both hands off the wheel to exaggerate his shrug.
"Must've heard it wrong," I muttered. "Damn!"
He was clearly short on patience now. "Heard what?"
"Guy just said . . . well, Buddy Holly never did any song called 'Tia Maria.'"
"To your knowledge. So you're wrong. I was wrong once. A long time ago—"
"No, no way. He never did it, Jake. And this jock also said the Bouffants. The Bouffants were on Rooster Records. They went out of business Christ, before 1963."
"So what? They re-formed."
I shook my head. "Not unless two out of three of them just rose from the dead." The facts came back to me. Bus wreck, late 1962, a bad bridge and a Minnesota blizzard. Two of the female trio had died when the bus nosedove into a frozen creek.
"Somebody borrowed the name, Lester." Jake liked to rag me about my weakness for oldies, and the scholarly approach with which I filed them in my head.
I hadn't heard either song clearly enough to make a positive ID. "What about Buddy Holly?" I said after half a mile.
"A fake. There's only a thousand Holly imitators making the club rounds, along with a thousand Elvises. Rain does the Beatles; Strange Daze does the Doors. Or maybe it's a made-up Holly song, you know, like the ones in that movie. Like 'Cindy Lou' was."
I had sat through The Buddy Holly Story fifteen times, and I knew two things about it: Gary Busey's performance as Holly was astonishing even if the plot was dumb, and there was no song called "Tia Maria." No maybes. "Maybe you're right," I said, mostly to shut Jake up. I'd just have to find the bloody frequency again and investigate.
But Jake pressed onward. "Or maybe it's from that disc that MCA released of the demos Holly cut in New Mexico in '56. The album you wore out our stylus on. Come on, Lester, admit you're wrong!"
"It's not on the album, fake!" My hands gathered air in front of me as though I was hefting a double armload of Jake's bullshit. I was in the dark and it bugged me.
"You're right, actually. I know because you played the goddamned album so much I know it inside out." My fists closed methodically and he said, "Okay, okay, truce. So what do you think of 'Lonewolf Blues'?"
I mulled it over; it wasn't that bad. "Sounds kind of Hoyt Axton-ish. Too many wolfs in blues songs for my palate. Maybe that's natural—the music lopes along, it's heavy on alienation or rejection, it's slow and cool, but it can tear you apart, too. Real hobo music, raw and urgent, but not at all in a hurry because it doesn't have to be . . . if you get my drift." I think we were both surprised at what had just dropped out of my mouth, but I added, "I think if you can encompass that feeling in your title, you'll have it."
"Hobo music?" Jake said histrionically. He knew I was still worrying the Holly conundrum in my head.
I put on my snide face and said, "Or why don't we just call it 'Wash and Wear Wolf'?" We both got a giggle out of that, slopping our beers. I bent back to the radio again, tracking the dial to the left until I skipped across something noisy and electric—really psychotic lead guitar riffs done by somebody with octopus dexterity. We both shut up to listen. It sounded like permutated Hendrix. Or maybe, following Jake's earlier thought chain, it was Hendrix mimicking Randy Hansen, or one of his thousand clones. Either way, the work piling out of the Kickers was impressive. I saw Jake's lips whistle in a kind of sobered reverence.
We were back on the mystery station, and now the throaty voice of the deejay was copying through as clear as a Malibu sunset. "You're hooked into KXKVI and goes without sayin' to those that knows that Jimi has just given us his rendition of 'Battle Banner'—"
"Wait a minute! Hendrix never did a song called 'Battle Ban—'
"I've never heard of a station with five call letters befo—"
We paused off at the same time and looked from each other to the dashboard grille, smallest of the Kickers . . . nearly daring something else new to come out.
A glowing green highway sign flashed past us on the right: LAS VEGAS 15 MI./24 KM.
"Jesus, I think we lost it again." Jake spun the dial between KORC and KPLA and got ghostly shadow tunes and static from both. Nothing between. "You found it, Lester; try again. If you catch it, I'll pull over so we can stop and listen without the wind noise . . ."
I knew how Jake idolized Hendrix, so I spared him the speech I'd prepared in order to avenge my Buddy Holly fixation. I searched for KXKVI instead. A few more dead miles blew underneath the Trans Am; thousands of white highway stripes dashed out from between our tailpipes like tracer bullets. I thought of the raggedy-assed coyote we'd almost vaporized earlier. What the hell had he been doing bopping around in the middle of this big, dead sandbox—if not for the purpose of providing us with inspiration? That was how Jake would've viewed it. Hell, he regularly expected these sorts of things to happen! "How about a coyote instead of a wolf," I said. "Lone Coyote Blues."
Jake denied his automatic denial mechanism. "Not bad, Watson. Needs to be more alienated. How about 'Lonesome Coyote Blues'? How's that grab ya?"
"Maybe, baby." It sounded right for the nonce.
"Toss me another beer, wouldya, Lester?" The fringes of civilization were within our sights. We were breasting a slow upgrade in the road, marrying up with the two-thousand-foot elevation of the West's gambling Mecca. Over the hump to Vegas. I was still trying to relocate KXKVI. "Take that friggin' bill, McCluskey!" Jake shouted into the wind, and laid the pedal down in order to pass a mobile-home rig that was crutching up the hill just ahead of us.
We both turned to grab for the beer cooler at the same time. Jake was always impatient. I was the first to glance ahead and see the blazing highbeams of the Safeway Express nailing us, dead bang. Our third surprise of the night.
"Oh, holy . . . !!"
The last thing I felt was the slam of impact as Jake's beloved Trans Am lurched into a billion pieces all around us. They really aren't built very well.
When my eyes slitted open the first thing I saw was Rudy's lopsided pachuco pompadour. He was staring at me the way he might at the steaming remains of a steer hit by a freight train, but there was a hopeful glimmer in his dark eyes, and the makings of his ready grin were in place to greet me. Then I saw glaring white light, and all the hoses darting in and out of me, and the beeping machines, and my eyes rolled ceilingward and I didn't see anything else for two more days.
Sensation mostly pain hammered in the next time I woke up. I was in traction, and chunky casts ran from the underside of my chin to the soles of my feet. I looked like a mummy caught in a white canvas spider web. I took Rudy's word for it that there was an aluminum brace immobilizing my head. I asked for something to drink and a good-looking middle-aged nurse said no liquids and rolled a lemon-flavored swab across my tongue. I was very nearly the hospital's first victim of moisture euphoria.
"I might have a little trouble playing 'Boomtown Shuffle' tonight, Rudy," I croaked, and regretted it. My face was not mobile or healed enough to smile.
"That club date was fifteen days ago, my man." He shook his head slowly from side to side. "We didn't know if you were going to make it . . ."
Thud. Thud. "Who says I made it?" Ouch.
He lowered his voice. "I don't think these medicos are sure, Lester. That's why this joint looks like Frankenstein's West. They almost didn't let me or Leroy or Texas come in."
"What about Jake, Rudy?"
His mouth tightened. Then he gave it to me as the driver of a huge Kenworth truck and trailer had given it to him.
A veteran eighteen-wheel cowboy with several safe-driving citations, he, too, had been fooling with his radio when he looked up, saw Jake's Trans Am straying well over the line, and tried to evade. There had been no time or ditching room. The chromed steel crash bumper and the highballing tonnage behind it had instantaneously compressed the left side of the Trans Am into one third the size before drop-kicking the whole car backward, end over end. We were in the air a long time. I hadn't yet blacked out when we met the pavement in a torquing spray of junked Detroit steel and fiberglass. The truck jackknifed and fell over on its side like a brontosaurus with a snapped neck. Its knobby wheels had still been cranking lethargically around when the driver burrowed up to his CB and called in the highway patrol. Pieces of us had been scattered a hundred yards beyond the strike point. The driver mentioned the broken guitars and caved-in amps, prostrate on the road like the aftermath of a Who concert.
I had been buzz-sawn out of the wreck because I was still alive.
A male nurse bustled in and briskly asked Rudy to leave now please. I think there were tears on my face but I honestly couldn't tell. The nurse had brought another lemon-flavored swab, and that was really all I gave a damn about.
I spent twelve eternities in that cursed hospital bed flat on my back. My guardian angel turned out to be Leroy's father, the guy with all the pull in the microchip racket. He had interceded in the matter of jurisdiction and medical coverage. Rudy, Leroy, Leroy's dad, and their pals visited me every day for a while. Then every other day.
At my request Rudy lugged in a huge Panasonic ghetto blaster that I parked on the edge of my rollaway table. My right hand was about my only fully functional part, and I spent most of my waking time tuning it between 96.2 and 97.4 011 the FM band. And listening. Where KXKVI was supposed to be, there was only a deep-space hiss.
Sometimes I thought I'd found it. They were constantly spiking me with morphine for the pain, so I was never positive. But I did have Rudy do some rock 'n' roll research for me—and Hendrix never recorded any song called "Battle Banner," or any variation thereof, not even on the twenty or thirty necrophiliac compilations assembled on the engineering boards after his death. Elvis never cut a track about anybody named Wanda. Ditto Buddy Holly and "Tia Maria." None of them, not even on bootleg recordings. And Rudy said there was no such animal as KXKVI, even given outlandish assumptions that maybe the VI was a Roman numeral six, or the whole episode was a sham rockshow spinning deceptively faithful parodies.
Trying the radio one more time became my sole self-imposed ritual, performed on the half hour—that is, once for every two checkups on my vital signs. The hospital staff voted to remove the radio; they could all see it was upsetting me. I threatened a coronary and they relented over a period of days. Truthfully, I had no idea whether I had anything left to bust; perhaps they thought I'd start leaking if I held my breath. They laughed too enthusiastically at my wan jokes, and that was a bad sign. So I did what I wanted. I didn't really want to talk to them anymore.
So I talked to the radio whenever they were gone.
Not to the radio—that would be bonker time. I talked to Jake, in the arid whisper that was all that remained of my harmony voice. It had sounded the same since my first lemon-flavored swab. I could take fluids now, but never enough. Nurses popped by to change my baggies; I could see that I was putting out twice the fluid I was taking in, all of it tinted varying shades of red.
"God damn you, Jake," I rasped at the radio. "You fucked up again. You left me behind just to embarrass Rudy and that piss-poor trucker and Leroy's dad and everybody else. No fair." I used my thumb to make the radio needle crawl across the band. Zero. "You didn't even say goodbye, you son of a bitch," I said, staring past the radio. "What the hell are buddies for?" That was the one slip I could not forgive him.
I conked out; woke up suddenly. My short sleep periods were more like blackouts, and creepy, but I didn't bother troubling anyone with that new wrinkle. So far as the dope would permit, I used my wakeup time to play sleuth.
About sixty seconds ago I figured it all out.
I can't prove KXKVI exists, but I know it does. Its playlist is all unborn music—never taped, never cut, never exposed to airplay. You don't hear it until it's your turn to take the big jump into the void. I lucked out; I happened to be with Jake when his ticket came up for punching, and I heard. I think we were both supposed to go. But Jake always had to make a production number out of everything.
I know this because I came awake in the dark a second ago, and there was music registering feebly on the radio. I turned it up a hair. It was a slow, honeyed blues tune, electrified.
Know the words? Hell, I helped make up the title!
And to nudge me along the deejay came on when the tune finished, and repeated his call letters, and the song title. Granted, that might have been the morphine talking, too.
I'd thought the reason I didn't die with Jake in the trash-compacted wreck of his Trans Am was my own stubborn empiricism; my need for some argument to realistically convince me I was dead. Jake, of course, never worried about rationalizations or safety nets. He never lost sleep over the lack of next month's rent.
But now I think the real reason I was left behind was to give Jake another chance to show off. He would have wanted me to hear his radio debut, playing a tune we had both come to love. That was what buddies were for.
My only real regret is that there's no time to let Rudy in on it. I mean, I tried reaching for the nurse buzzer on its vinyl cord, but my restricted hand never made it.
You know, it's a funny and unsettling thing to watch your own heart monitor go flatline and stay there. But not scary; not for me.
I just hope Jake has made room in the band for a bassist.
NIGHT BLOOMER
Steven Keller hated all the bitches at Calex.
When not weathering their stupidity as marginally attractive cogs in Calex's corporate high rise, he resented the living foldout girls flaunting it in the commercials for Calex Petroleum products that clogged up prime-time television. He had pulled far too few consummated dates out of the female staff on the twenty-second floor to suit him; sometimes he went more than a week without getting laid, and that fouled his optimum performance workwise. At home he was perpetually short on clean socks. Most of his dress shirts did too much duty, and had gained skid tracks of grime on the inner collars.
This was not Steven Keller's idea of the joys of upwardly mobile middle management.
That fat old bastard Bigelow had elevatored down this afternoon just to ramrod him. Business as usual. The cost estimates that had sputtered from Steve's printer had displeased Bigelow. That was the word the old lardball had used—displeased. As though he was not one vice-president among many, but a demigod, an Academy Award on the hoof, a fairytale king who demanded per diem groveling in exchange for meager boons.
Displeased. Steve had watched his manila folder slap the desktop and skid to a stop between his own elbows. Before he could lift it or even react, Bigelow had wheeled his toad bulk a full one-eighty and repaired to his eyrie on the thirtieth floor. Steve's own office was illusory. A work area partitioned off from twenty others exactly like it by dividers covered in tasteful brown fabric. His M.A. in business administration hung on a wall that was not a wall, but a reminder that he was just one more rat dressed for success inside the Calex Skinner box. Displeased meant his Thursday was history. The nine-to-five running lights on the twenty-second floor were dark now, and because of the change in illumination levels, Steve could get a different perspective on his slanted reflection in the screen of his word processor. He laboriously reworked the quote sheets on his own time. He looked, he thought, ghostly and haggard. Used.
He punched a key and the revised lists rolled up. Bitches. Bastards. You could say those words on TV nowadays and nobody blinked. Their potency as invective had been bled away by time, and time scared the shit out of Steve. At thirty-five his time was running out. He had passed the point in his life where failure could be easily amortized.
He had spent his life living the introduction to his life. So far it had been all setup and no payoff. It had been a search that at times grew frantic, a dull joke with a foregone punchline. As he watched the printer razz and burp and spit up the new tabulated columnar lists—pleasing, now—he reviewed his existence as a similar readout. As an index of significant events it ran depressingly thin.
Apart from his degree there had been two wives, one at twenty-one and another at twenty-nine. Both were a matter of record now. To Nikki, Steve had suggested what was now called a summary dissolution; the cut-rate legal beavers at Jacoby and Meyers had split them for about two hundred bucks plus tax. With Margaret, the roles had been reversed. She never suggested anything. She simply sought out more sophisticated counsel, and did for Steve's assets what Bigelow's nightly shots of Kaopectate did for the old fart's Sisyphian regularity.
Calex recruitment had been the goal of his entire college career. The dream had been first class; the reality, a budget tour, via steerage.
The face on the screen did not yet require glasses. He supposed that was something. Apart from beaning the class bully with a softball during Phys. Ed at twelve, he could recall no other little victories. He would always remember the sound the ball had made when it bounced off the bigger kid's anthropoid skull—twock! Like a rolling pin breaking a thick candle in half. Steve Kelowicz, school shrimp, did not suspect the full savor of this victory until a week later. The lunchtime poundings ceased. The berserker had shifted his tyranny to less reactionary targets. No vengeance ever came.
