Driftless (19 page)

Inside, the band was midway through the final set. The main amplifier had been turned up to compete with the tumultuous din of shrieking, laughing, and howling. Twenty dancing couples were interspersed with travelers passing between the bar and tables, carrying drinks. A layer of smoke, colored blue, green, and red by the band’s blaring lights, hovered beneath the low ceiling.

The evening poised somewhere between as-good-as-it-will-get and closing time, and everyone tried to maximize his or her advantage before all advantages expired. For some this meant pushing the spirit of a discussion beyond the usual boundaries, and a fistfight broke out between two clean-shaven men in knit shirts, broken up by bigger relatives in work jackets. Three bartenders hurried to supply beer, cigarettes, and change to a steady flow of outstretched hands. A man in a baseball hat fell over backwards, where he remained, laughing, on his back as others stepped over and around him. The mating component of dancing became more obvious. Single men openly approached the remaining available women, who were noticeably less guarded, less coy than earlier in the evening. In the middle of the
room a short brunette in a halter top and shorts climbed onto a table and danced to rhythmic applause without moving her feet. A pitcher of beer spilled. Glasses broke. Three young men huddled together at the bar and appeared to be working up courage to approach Gail at the end of the set. Marijuana and other illegal substances passed freely among friends, and friendships were easily joined.

Earlier in the week, Gail had practiced several new bass riffs, more complicated than anything she’d tried before, with string-slapping and a flurry of fast, double-string crescendos. During the next applause break she asked the drummer if she could have a solo on the last song.

Buzz looked up from his stool, took both drumsticks into one hand, and drank the last of his whiskey sour. “Hell, I don’t care.” He hollered at the keyboard player, “Give Gail a verse just before the chorus—at the end. We’ll all back her.”

The first part went well, all the way through two phrases. The dancers at once recognized the new style. Several started clapping and whistling. Then the guitar player hit a wrong chord and the dissonant notes invaded the rhythm. Gail overran a fret and the keyboard player backed out of his chord progression too early. Soon, none of the musicians knew where the others were, and the whole enterprise was quickly falling apart. The living melody was dying and everyone in the room knew it.

At this juncture, a party of large people sat down, opening a line of sight beyond the dance floor, and seated in a booth along the wall was July Montgomery. Across from him sat a woman with short, jet-black hair, her eyes flashing like blue diamonds. Sipping from a bottle of water, she stared at Gail as though from out of a vision, and Gail recognized the regal, olive-colored face from her CD: Barbara Jean.

Gail’s mind exploded. She made a heroic effort to second-guess her first impression and convince herself that the person in the booth was not Barbara Jean. What would she be doing sitting in this shabby place with that old farmer? It couldn’t be true.

But no one else could look
that
perfectly serene yet frighteningly beautiful. No one else could take up the whole room in that way. Gail’s memory of her voice and the airy heights of ecstasy attained
through listening to it enhanced Barbara Jean’s physical appearance to the point where she looked mythic—a modern day Helen of Troy for whom ten thousand expendable rubes like Gail would gladly sacrifice their lives just for the privilege of sitting next to her.

Gail watched in horror as Barbara Jean’s splendid mouth curved into a cruel smile, and she turned away from the stage in a movement that succinctly communicated both frivolous amusement and dismissal.

There could be no doubt: the world had conspired to humiliate Gail in front of the only person in it who mattered. All the forces of evil had been mustered to reveal her in an apoplexy of aesthetic collapse. Her mediocre band was crashing and she with it. She had been mercilessly undone, mocked and ridiculed, cast into an open pit.

In her moment of free- falling humiliation, Gail looked down at her fingers as they plucked ineptly at the thick strings . . . and thought they had a rather nice appearance. They were slender without being too thin and functional but not utilitarian. This judgment led to a further thought: she might be defeated, as all people eventually would be, but never conquered. There may be better people in the world and all of them might have a talent denied to Gail, but fundamentally it made no difference. No one would ever stand over her and gloat. The light might go out of the world, but even darkness had rules. She could feel the dancers moving, the noise, heat, and smells, and she welcomed their combined spirit. This was her element: she was an entertainer.

Her finger curled around the volume knob on the front of the bass and turned it up. She tossed her head, stamped her foot, stepped forward, and cried into the microphone something between a rebel yell and the scream children make when they’re starting down the steep side of a roller-coaster run, where joy and fear jump into one expression.

The scream reoriented the other musicians toward the deep sounds marching out of the bass amp—the familiar notes leading up to the chorus. The drummer slammed his cymbals together; the keyboard player pounced with all ten fingers on the black and white keys, and the guitarist hit a high, quivering seventh chord. All four leaned into
the microphones and finished the chorus, nearly drowned out by the crowd’s drunken roar.

At the conclusion of the set Gail did not look up, pulled the bass from around her neck, and set it inside the case. She and Brad took the speakers down while Jim and Buzz went to the bar for drinks. She carried her amp out to the van.

Already, the parking lot was half empty, the night cooler.

“Hello, Gail,” said July. “Gail, this is Barbara Jean. Barbara Jean, this is Gail Shotwell.”

“Hello, Gail.” A hand with a small turquoise-in-silver ring on the second finger extended toward her, its grip firm and brief.

“Hi,” said Gail.

“Look, I’m going to visit the corn rows,” said July. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Men love to piss outdoors,” observed Gail.

“All men aren’t the same,” said July.

“To women they are.”

Gail’s eyes met Barbara Jean’s and the ceaseless industry of her irises made Gail look away. The magazines said she was forty, but Gail was sure she wasn’t that old.

“You play and sing well,” said the woman. “I wish I had a recording of that scream.”

At first Gail thought she was being made fun of, but the older woman’s expression reassured her. Then she couldn’t find anything to say. All she could think of were stupid things like “You can hear me scream anytime you want,” “What’s that odd chord in ‘Shades of Sorrow?’ ” or “Where did you get the ring?” She finally gave up and just said, “Really.”

Barbara Jean laughed, as though she understood everything about her. “Let’s go inside, Gail. You’ve been standing for over an hour. Let me buy you a drink.”

“I guess we really messed up that last song.”

“It happens. Your keyboard player was so drunk it’s a miracle he could stand up.”

“How do you know July?”

They sat across from each other in a booth near the bar. Gail
leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table. She was experiencing some success in looking into those oceanic blue eyes without self-consciousness, and this surprised her. Barbara Jean crossed her legs under the table and pressed the small of her back against the wooden booth, folding her hands on her lap. A small turquoise ear-ring was almost completely hidden beneath her glossy black hair.

“July sold me some hay for my horses. I have a summer place not far from here. He asked if I wanted to hear your band.”

“I can’t believe I’m sitting here with you.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s unbelievable. It’s like being in my own private heaven. Drat, I’ve still got this stupid hat on.”

Barbara Jean laughed in a sudden burst of melodic delight, showing her teeth. She leaned forward and touched Gail’s hand. “What did you say, darlin’?”

“This dumb old hat—I forgot I was still wearing it.”

“No, before that—you said ‘drat.’ My sister and I used that word when we were little. It was the only way to swear without being spanked by our parents, and now I can’t get rid of it. I didn’t think anyone used it but me. I’m always embarrassed when it comes out of me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“On a Thistlewaite County sheep farm on the other side of the Heartland Reserve.”

“I don’t believe it.”

July Montgomery returned from outside and sat with them for several minutes before announcing he needed to return home. There was a freshening heifer he should look after. He asked Gail if she could make sure Barbara Jean had a ride home.

Gail’s heart stopped beating as she nodded her head. No power on earth could prevent her from getting a car to drive the woman sitting across from her home. Nothing was too great a price to pay for that privilege. The two of them alone in the front seat—

“I better go too, it’s late,” said Barbara Jean, rising out of the booth and standing next to July.

“Wait, can I get you something else to drink?” asked Gail. “I’m sorry, I forgot to ask before.”

“I’m afraid the bar’s closed,” said July.

“They’ll sell to me. I know they will.”

“I’d better be going,” said Barbara Jean, smiling. “It’s been nice meeting you, Gail. Bring your bass over to my house some afternoon when we’re practicing.”

“You’ve never had an electric bass in your band.”

“True, but when you’re finished trying new things, you’re finished.”

Once again, Gail could think of nothing to say.
You’re finished
seemed to mean so many things, and before she could respond Barbara Jean had left with July, and Gail watched the old white pickup leave the parking lot.

She returned to the booth to review everything that had just happened, to linger inside what remained of the event until it had been completely exhausted. With some effort, she could still feel the older woman’s touch on the back of her hand and see her white teeth inside her laugh. She wondered how long it had been since she’d experienced such supreme joy. She felt twice as alive, twice as good, twice as important as she had only minutes before. A candle moved about in a room that for too long had been empty and dark.

But the new light also allowed her to look around, and hanging on the walls were memories of earlier times when this same joy had proved neither reliable nor beneficial. Feeling alive, good, and important had only served to make her vulnerable.

She didn’t know where Barbara Jean lived and didn’t believe she really meant what she said about playing with her. The wild felicity Gail experienced was not mutual, not understood.

Several men came over to her booth and she drove them off with a withering stare.

In the remaining hour before leaving, she added to the band’s bar tab. By the time they had loaded all the equipment in the trailer, she
could entertain only one clumsy thought at a time, as if she were balancing a nickel on the point of a pin.

On the drive back, she asked Buzz to pull over and she threw up in the ditch.

“Never drink without eating,” said Jim, holding her by the shoulders.

“Shut up.”

WORK BEGINS

R
USTY SMITH ARRIVED AT THE HOME OF ELI YODER ON MONDAY morning, the tops of the trees glowing from early, reflected sun. Thick billows of smoke rose from the chimney, white against the sky, and Rusty smiled at the thought that they had just built the fire.

“Probably went out overnight,” he said to himself. He remembered winter mornings in his childhood after the stove had gone out during the night—how the house filled with smoke before the chimney warmed up, the metal sides popping and groaning as yellow flames licked the cool inside.

A corner of a blue window curtain turned up momentarily. The back door opened and Eli stepped outside with two youths, dressed identically, carrying lunch pails and wooden toolboxes.

Rusty rolled his window down.

“This is Isaac and Abraham,” said Eli.

Rusty nodded.

“You boys ride in back,” said Eli, and the youths clambered behind the cab. Eli handed them his toolbox and lunch pail. “Did the lumberyard deliver the materials?” he asked.

“Yup,” said Rusty.

On the way through Grange, Eli said, “If you don’t mind I need to stop here by the garage. I got shoes to pick up.”

“They sell shoes at the garage?”

“No, the man who lives behind the garage repairs shoes.”

Rusty pulled in the drive and Eli got out of the cab. “You boys stay here,” he said, and the youths sat down again on the truck bed.

Rusty watched as Eli knocked on the back door of the stucco house and disappeared inside. He felt awkward sitting in the cab with the boys in back. He also wondered what the man who lived inside
the stucco house looked like and how he happened to be a cobbler. Rusty’s uncle had once owned a shoe store. Rusty and his brother, Carl, stopped there on the way home from school. He remembered the sounds of belt-driven sewing machines and tack hammers striking brads. It had always seemed dark in the shop, but this only added to the place’s appeal.

Without knocking, Rusty followed Eli inside the house and found him in a workroom off the kitchen, holding a lumpy paper sack. Rows of shoes and boots stood on shelves along the wall. Other leather items, including a child’s riding saddle and a leather- covered chair, were also in the room. Strips of flypaper dotted with sticky, perished flies hung from the ceiling next to the windows.

“That smell,” said Rusty to the bearded man behind the card table. “What’s that smell?”