Cavedweller (3 page)

“Rock and Roll is DEAD!” the crowd shouted repeatedly all evening. The drunks got angrier by the hour. People wandered through the house, picking up mementos and just as often setting them down. Around midnight someone dropped the crystal guitar Randall had been given after Mud Dog passed the half-million mark with
Diamonds and Dust.
The accident sparked a general melee, people smashing things just for the satisfaction of watching glass fly.

“Where’s Delia?” one of the drunks demanded.

“Oh, she’s pretty broke up,” he was told.

“Well, goddamn it, so am I!”

Ignoring the weeping girls and cursing men, Rosemary went upstairs to look through Randall’s closets. The seventeen-year-old who had been on the back of the bike swore at her awkwardly with her broken mouth but could do nothing with her pitiful hands encased in casts. Rosemary went about collecting what she had come for: all the pictures of Delia and Cissy, and a few pieces of jewelry from the big teak box on the burl table where Randall had always thrown his things.

Downstairs, a late-news repeat of a Reagan speech came on the television after the videotape of the funeral coverage clicked off. Those thin lips moved soundlessly while the roadies roared obscenities and poured beer into the back of the big-screen television set. When it finally blew up, everyone laughed helplessly as sparks sprayed the rug. Rosemary skirted the smoldering carpet as she left. The fire that flared up just before dawn probably started in that rug, abetted by the thirty or forty candles set up all over the living room with its gossamer curtains. The revelers swore the fire was Randall’s creation, the flames trailing behind the ghost they saw walking the rooms in that dawn hour.

“He took his house,” a roadie told the reporter from Rolling Stone. “He took it right down to hell.”

Already Randall was becoming a legend, magnified into what he had never been, the Doomed Prince of Rock and Roll. Snakeskin boots and suede jacket, dark glasses and flashing teeth—the ghost of Randall Pritchard took the house down, his last act leading that crippled girl onto the lawn before he sparked out in the smoke and stink of the morning. The record company knew what it had. They quickly issued a memorial edition of
Diamonds and Dust
that sold far more than the first printing. The new cover was all Randall, snakeskin and teeth and night. Delia and the band were cropped and gone.

 

 

“R
andall would have loved it,” Delia said when Rosemary finished her account of the wake. She was sorting Cissy’s clothes and drinking black coffee, her face puffy from tears and pale from lack of sleep. Since Randall’s death, her talisman songs had sunk to wordless hums and whispers, snatches of folk and Laura Nyro and Spanish lullabies Randall had taught her when Cissy was born. She still hadn’t had a drink, but there was no sense of accomplishment in the act. It felt to Delia that if she did not get on the road, the beast would reclaim her and she would go down to the beach with a bottle. Going home was the answer. Making amends, getting her girls, that was the answer. It was all she could think about, all she would let herself think about.

“Cayro,” she told Rosemary. “When I get to Cayro, I’ll be all right.”

Rosemary nodded, knowing better than to argue with a desperate woman. Somewhere in Delia, grief was waiting, and when it hit, she would wilt like all those flowers in the heat of the church. Then she would need someone to prop her up, and who was there in Cayro to take that on? Rosemary shuddered. No, not even for Delia would she move to Georgia. Whatever was going to happen would just have to happen.

“Hell, girl,” Rosemary drawled in a deliberately exaggerated Valley accent, “you and I both know Randall would have preferred that all of Venice Beach go up.” She gestured at the Times, where a news photo showed the blackened frame of Randall’s house. “Man always did have a taste for that scorched-earth scenario. If the Columbia building burned down, he’d probably come back to piss on the pyre. ”

Delia laughed, then shot a guilty look at Cissy, who was sitting on the couch in a daze, sucking on a strand of her dirty red hair and hugging a silver-framed photo of her daddy that Rosemary had brought her. She had sworn she would not cry anymore, though that was all she wanted to do. She had also decided to ignore Delia, but that was proving harder still. Her mother had been packing like a madwoman, stripping the books off the shelves and the prints off the wall, giving everything that would not fit in the car to Rosemary. She talked continually about going home, as if Cissy was supposed to be happy at the idea. Now she came over to the couch and began her litany again.

“Don’t worry, baby. It will all be different in Cayro,” Delia said. “It an’t like here. People are different there. They care about each other, take time to talk to each other. They don’t lie or cheat or mess with each other all the time. They’re not scared, not having to be so careful all the time. They know who they are, what is important. And you’ll be with your sisters. You won’t be alone, honey. Not being alone in the world, that’s something you’ve never had. That’s something I can give you.”

“I won’t go,” Cissy said, the same futile words she had hurled at Delia when they moved to Venice Beach.

“You’ll be happier there.” Delia’s eyes glittered like the rocks near the ocean. “It will be like I always wanted it to be. You and me, Amanda and Dede, all of us together. Your only living kin in the world are in Cayro, yours and mine, your sisters, your granddaddy.”

Cissy hugged Randall’s photograph tighter and looked at Rosemary like a cornered animal.

“Your sisters,” Delia said fiercely. “Your sisters are going to be amazed how much you look like them. You won’t believe it yourself.” A tear glistened at the edge of her left eye, hovered briefly, and slipped down her cheek.

Cissy kept her focus on that wet streak. Her sisters. Amanda and Dede. Dede and Amanda. There had never been a time when Cissy did not know their names, how terribly Delia grieved for them. The lost girls, the precious ones. Delia was always saying that Cissy’s hazel eyes were the mirror of Amanda’s, her red-blond hair the exact shade of Dede’s when she was an infant. Birthday presents, Christmas presents, Easter baskets, back-to-school packages, all testified to the same legend: “From your sisters.” “From Amanda.” “From Dede.” “Until we see you.” “See you soon.”

What was Cissy to believe? That the sisters she had never met dreamed of her, wrapped those presents, and signed those cards? No. The same packages and tokens were sent in her name, and Cissy knew how little she cared. She signed at Delia’s direction, printing out the message Delia dictated in careful block letters, impersonal and precise. The tears, the passion were all Delia’s. She never seemed to notice how Cissy turned her face away at the mention of Amanda and Dede.

“Oh, Cissy.” Delia’s voice was thick and husky. “It is going to be so good to get home. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

Cissy put her lips to the metal edge of the picture frame, tasting the sweet alloy with the tip of her tongue. She had loved to climb up Randall’s back and press her face into his neck. Her daddy had always tasted smoky and sweet, like no one else in the world. When Delia had hugged her tight at the funeral, her neck tasted like flat beer. She could stay sober forever and it wouldn’t matter. Bitter and mean, that was how Delia tasted. Cissy looked over at her mother and sucked harder at the metal against her tongue.

“When we get to Cayro, I’ll call you from Granddaddy Byrd’s,” Delia was saying to Rosemary, who was looking at Cissy’s blank face, as empty as the wall behind her.

Cissy knew about Cayro. Cayro was where her crazy mother was born, the back end of the earth. Cayro was the last place Randall Pritchard’s daughter ever wanted to be.

“I won’t go,” Cissy murmured again.

Delia put her arms around Rosemary’s neck. “Oh God,” she said. “This time I’m going to make it right.”

 

 

R
ock and roll, in Delia’s opinion, might as well have died back in 1976, when Mud Dog stopped touring. That was the year Randall trashed his agent’s office and spent a couple of weeks drying out at a sanitarium in Palm Springs. By 1978, the year the Rolling Stones cut a disco track, Randall had gone off whiskey and settled into what he called his Keith Richards solution, boosting his heroin with just enough speed to keep himself mobile and charming. Columbia was coaxed into putting Delia back on contract and financing another studio rental, but that spring Randall flipped the T-bird in Topanga Canyon, nearly blinded Cissy, and broke the last of Delia’s love for him.

When she decided to leave Randall, Delia told him to his face. She thought of writing him a letter, but what she wanted to say would sound absurd on a page. Dear Randall, you almost killed us. Dear Randall, you’re on your own. Dear Randall, you’ve broken my heart. Instead she tracked him down at the studio annex, where he had one of his girls with him, a child not even twenty and stoned out of her mind.

“You got a name?” Delia said when she came to the door.

The girl just blinked.

“Go get Randall,” Delia told her.

A few minutes later Randall came out, his pupils huge and glassy. He stood in the sunlight and gave her that grin of his.

“What’s up, sweet thing?”

“I’m moving out.”

“Moving?”

“We can’t live with you no more.”

“Damn, Delia.” He squirmed inside his loose denim jacket. “Don’t I take care of you? Don’t I treat you and Cissy right?”

Delia looked at him until he blushed, but his smile never faded.

“There’s that house in Venice Beach,” he said finally. “That one Booger and me bought. It’s pretty messy, but it’s empty. Booger didn’t like the neighborhood. We could clean it up. You could go there.”

Delia hesitated and looked away. The girl was watching them from the annex. “All right,” Delia said, “all right.”

“Do you need anything?” Randall asked, one hand pulling money out of a pocket.

She shook her head.

“Ah, Delia.” Her name was thick in his mouth. “Honey,” he said, slurring even that.

For a moment Delia hated him. She wasn’t just another girl he’d picked up on the street. She was the mother of his child, the woman who had thrown everything away for him. He had no right speaking her name with that sleepy smile. She stood there and let him see the contempt on her face.

Randall held out the bills. Delia slapped him hard, then bent forward to kiss his cheek. The smell of his skin startled her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The whole time she was packing, Cissy sobbing in her bedroom, Delia kept wiping her face and remembering how Randall smelled that day, the tang of him. What surprised her was how little pain his death caused her. He had been dead to her so long that it was hard to mourn all over again, hard to keep in mind that all the time when they had so rarely seen him he had been going on with his dying. Somehow, in the middle of everyone else’s living, Randall had given up on his own life and started dying. That he had nearly taken Delia and Cissy with him was what stayed with Delia, the memory of shattered glass burning her skin, and the smell of the man she loved turning bitter. He had never expected her to get sober or leave him. He had never expected anything to change.

Delia taped a box shut and kicked it hard. She had loved Randall from the first time she saw that angel smile bright under the spotlights. It had seemed a miracle when he pulled her up into his tour bus, the blood from her abraded palms black on his cream shirt.

“Girl,” he had said. “Lord, darling, look at you.”

Delia’s memories of that moment were as golden and smoky as two inches of whiskey in a thick tumbler. Jim Beam in a bar glass, a mound of crushed ice in a hand towel, the pervasive aroma of marijuana and patchouli oil. From the instant Randall helped her into the bus, Delia felt numbed and fragile. The whiskey he gave her warmed her belly, while the icy glass soothed her bruised temple. But it was Randall’s soft embrace that made the difference, the open, easy way he wrapped her around. She shouldn’t have trusted him, shouldn’t have been willing to let him touch her with the mark of Clint’s rage darkening steadily along the line of her face and neck. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was the bus wheels spinning clean and sure, taking her away from the nightmare behind her. Maybe it was that she had been wanting to run away for so long. But maybe it was just Randall and the way he had about him.

Delia wanted to scream at the figure in her memory, at Randall’s body so long gone, so much of him wasted even when he was alive. He had been so beautiful when he took her in his arms, so strong and tender when she was so hurt. He had felt like the one man on earth she could hang on to and be safe with. How could she not have loved him? She loved him more than her life.

After the accident in Topanga Canyon, trying repeatedly to get sober, Delia stopped going over to Randall’s place at all. Even when she slipped back into drinking, she wouldn’t let herself be cajoled into climbing into one of the limos sent around by record companies hoping to sign her to sing on her own. She didn’t like the parties anymore, and she’d never enjoyed talking business. Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

Once they moved to Venice Beach, Delia tried to behave as if it were just another small town too, a place like Cayro. It did not matter that behind her house loomed thousands of others, postage-stamp boxes layered across Los Angeles County up from Santa Monica or south to Long Beach and all the little suburbs that trailed down to San Diego. Delia rarely went outside her neighborhood, and as long as she stayed off the highways, she could pretend they were cut off from the world. When she took Cissy over to Randall’s place in West Hollywood or went to the studio annex in Santa Monica, the sight of greater Los Angeles stunned her. The glass structures along Wilshire, the grotesque mansions in Beverly Hills, the interlaced freeways that Randall prowled, none of that was Delia’s world. Her world was the cottage and its tiny garden, the convenience store a few blocks west, and Cissy’s school two blocks past that, with the occasional trip down to Rosemary’s in Marina Del Rey.