Gossamer Axe (17 page)

“I’m not kidding you, Carl. These girls know what they’re doing. If you miss this chance, you’re going to be kicking yourself for the next ten years.”

Carl Taylor sighed and drew the last of a cigarette into his lungs. “Ten years you say, huh?” The smoke floated up toward the white ceiling to gather in a hazy inversion layer.

“Damn straight. It’s not everyone who gets a chance to start the next Van Halen.”

“Titty bands aren’t Van Halen, Kevin.” Carl was playing hard to get, and he knew it, but owning a club could turn anyone into a cynic. Agents called him every day with the next Van Halen.

But he reminded himself that it was not an agent on the other end of the line, it was Kevin Larkin. Kevin had taste. He would not recommend anything unless it were really something. Maybe even the next Van Halen.

“It’s not a titty band,” Kevin insisted.

Carl’s cynicism remained. “You said it was all girls.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s the deal? You sleeping with the lead guitarist or something?” Carl covered the mouthpiece and waved to catch the attention of the man across the room. “The oak bookcase, Dennis. Third shelf. Behind the Karnow book on Vietnam. Help yourself. But watch out: it’s good stuff.”

“The lead guitarist,” Kevin was saying, “makes anything you’ve ever heard sound like shit.”

“What’s her name?”

“Christa Cruitaire.”

“Weird name. Never heard of her.”

“Look, man, will you just give them a listen? I sat in on one of their rehearsals last night, and they blew me away. Their covers are perfect, and their originals are… are—”

“They playing anywhere?” Across the room, Dennis had located the Karnow book. He reached behind it, extracted a slab of glass and a small tin box with a tight lid.

“Good stuff, you say?” Dennis gestured with the box.

Carl nodded. “The best. There was this girl last week—”

“You listening, Carl?” said Kevin.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m listening. Have them get me a demo, will you? It’s not like I don’t trust you, Kev, but… shit, man, if I hired every band that plays InsideOut on the basis of someone’s word, I’d lose my customers. And my shirt.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Kevin. “Like you don’t have any other sources of income, Carl.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“I’ll get you a demo. Thanks for the listen.”

“Anytime. Bye.” Carl hung up and propped his feet on the desk. There was a disadvantage to working out of your home: everyone knew where to find you.

Dennis was transferring white powder from the box to the slab with a small gold spoon. “You’re generous, Carl.”

“Hey, friends are friends.”

“Who was that?”

Carl leaned forward. “Hey, go easy on that stuff, will you? I said it was good. We’re talking ninety-five percent pure.”

“You’re kidding.” Dennis looked down at the white caterpillar that he had scratched into shape on the glass.

“No shit. Like I was saying, I picked up this girl last week, and we spent the evening having a fine time. She didn’t think she wanted to fuck at first, but that stuff changed her mind real quick.”

“Okay, okay.” Dennis closed the box, scratched the caterpillar into two halves. “But who was that?”

“Kevin Larkin. Remember him?”

“The guitar player? Sure do.” Dennis pulled out his wallet and fished through the bills. “Good stuff? Let’s make this an occasion, then. You got anything big?”

“In the Karnow book. Page one hundred.”

Dennis went back to the book. “Whoa. Big time.” He took out the bill and rolled it into a tube. “Anyway, the guy who worked A & R before me called him the next Hendrix. No one at the label could figure out why he turned the contract down.”

“Some people are crazy.”

Dennis paused with the tube. “He managing a band now?”

“No. He’s just a friend of one of the girls. He says they’re the next Van Halen.”

Dennis blinked and set the tube aside. “Kevin Larkin said that? What’s this band called?”

“Gossamer Axe.”

Dennis stared at the rolled-up bill, lips pursed.

Carl rubbed at the back of his neck. Screwy business. He got up and strolled to the window, his hands shoved into his pockets. Snow was coming down hard, and the cold seeped off the glass in an invisible sheet. “Come on, man, you’re out here for the skiing, not to find a band.”

“But don’t you see? Kevin Larkin isn’t the kind to go on like that unless there’s something there. Remember what Hendrix said about Billy Gibbons.”

“He’s probably balling the guitarist.”

Dennis settled down with the rolled-up bill again, held it poised above the white line of powder. “Tell you what, Carl,” he said. “If you get a demo from them, you get me a copy. Okay?”

“Whatever.” Snow. Heavy snow. Carl liked the snow and the cold—the girls coming into the club wrapped in coats and jackets and then shedding them to reveal clinging spandex and jeans, fishnet tops, female flesh fragrant with musk and rosy with blush and makeup…

The mid-November skies were vicious with snow, and the streets were icy as Kevin edged his Beetle through the evening traffic. It was tense, white-knuckled driving, and when he finally pulled up in front of Christa’s house, he had to sit for a few minutes before his heart stopped pounding. Beyond the bare maple trees in the front yard, her living-room windows glowed yellow, and he could make out the wall clock ticking away, telling him that he was a little late.

Carrying his Strat and Frankie’s old guitar, he made a slippery path up to her door and rang the bell. He was expected. Christa smiled as she held the door open. “How is it that it’s always snowing when you come to my house?”

“Just another kind of blarney.” He set the guitars down as she shut out the cold. “If it’s snowing, I look more pathetic, and you’re more inclined to take me in.” His smile was crooked.

She stared at him curiously, and he felt as though she were looking through him. As usual. He thought of his healed hand and wondered at his courage.

“And is it pity I’d need to ask you into my house, Kevin?”

He shrugged and tried to see her merely as a woman, a friend. He found that he could not. “Sorry. My Catholic guilt is showing.”

“Guilt?”

“Well, you know.”

She shook her head, and her hair moved softly. “I don’t. You asked me out tonight, and I accepted freely. There is no guilt.”

Would she say the same thing, he wondered, if she knew that he still dreamed of her in his bed, flushed with the glow of recent lovemaking? Well…

He managed to look at her face and was shaken. probably even so. And he—oh, Divine Fool!—had actually been permitted to hold her in his arms for a moment.

He felt a blush rising, looked for something with which to rechannel his thoughts. “You… uh… have any thoughts about that demo for Carl?”

As though she understood the change of subject, Christa nodded. “I called Melinda. She’s booking some time at a studio. She says it has good rates.” She indicated the guitar cases. “Did you want to jam tonight? I thought we were going to a movie.”

“I didn’t want to leave them out in the cold.”

“It’s that bad out, is it?”

“Driving’s terrible. Black ice all over the place.”

“Hmmm.” She went to the front windows and peered out at the storm. “Did you have your heart set on a movie?”

“You have something else in mind?” It was his date, his offer, but thoughts of bald tires and glassy asphalt were not at all inviting.

She turned around with a wry smile. “Why don’t we just send out for a pizza and relax? My last student was going on about what she called
real music
. As opposed to rock and roll, you understand. I was about ready to scream, so I’m not up to driving either.”

“Fine with me.”

While she made the call, he took off his coat and hung it on a peg by the front door. The snow dripped from the soaked denim and smacked into the carpet below. From the kitchen, Christa’s clear voice carried to him as she ordered dinner.

He did not think that he was very far off when he called Gossamer Axe the next Van Halen. His own nerve and his music had failed him, but if he had needed a success in his life to balance that defeat, he had it: he had guided Christa Cruitaire into rock and roll.

I knew her when
.

When she was a harper. When he could dream that she might someday be his lover. When he could stand in her front hall and listen to her order a pizza on the phone. Even though he had found that his own music—though still halting, like a language long unused—had broken free, she would always outdistance him. He could not predict what would become of her, but as surely as he had, dreaming, seen her in his bed, he knew that it would be glorious.

Christa came back into the hall. She was wearing a sweater and jeans, and her figure was young and shapely with the soft mortality of human flesh. Whatever else she was, Christa, like the blues, was for a short time only. Years would pass, and she would be gone. But, again like the blues, like music, the importance of her existence was not the duration, it was the bare, simple fact that she was, that she, once upon a time in Denver, had touched his life, had touched the lives of others, had made music, songs, melodies that lilted from her harp and screamed from her guitar.

And on this particular night of that once-upon-a-time, she apparently thought it good to spend some time with him—talking, laughing, lounging on the living-room sofa with a fire burning on the hearth, her hair spilling over the upholstery like a copper wave.

She said nothing about her girlhood or her family. He did not recall that she had ever mentioned anything to him about such things. Her references to her birth or to her past were always reluctantly made, inevitably prefaced and followed by an almost embarrassed silence; and for all that she had revealed about herself, she might have sprung forth fully grown like a Goddess, a harp in her hand and a guitar slung from her shoulder.

Tonight, she asked him of his past, and he told her about growing up in Cheyenne, about getting thrown out of the house at fifteen, about Frankie, about the road. He tried to keep the tale light and flavored with humor, but toward the end his voice began to catch in the middle of sentences, and he had to lubricate the words with frequent pauses.

“You’ve never been back home?” she said when the ticking of the wall clock had grown loud in yet another silence.

“No.” He finished the last piece of pizza, washed it down his tight throat with a swallow of beer. He was unnerved to discover that his other arm was about Christa’s shoulders. “I… uh…”

Her eyes were kind and blue. He decided to leave his arm where it was.

“I never went back,” he said. “I guess I feel about as far away from Cheyenne as you are from Ireland.”

She shook her head slightly, but said nothing.

“All that bullshit they’d handed out to me just ate at my guts for years,” he said. “Still does, I guess. My sisters all toed the line—nice little Irish girls, all lined up to get married and have more babies than they could ever manage—and my brother Danny wanted to be a priest from the beginning.”

Christa was slender, but strong too. He felt her strength as his hand tightened on her shoulder: a lean, focused power, with nothing extra, nothing superfluous—like everything else about her.

“But me…” The beer touched his laugh with bitterness. “I couldn’t leave anything alone. I had to push. I had to show off.”

He finished the bottle and set it aside. “I was an arrogant little snot, wasn’t I?”

Christa’s eyes were elsewhere. Nowhere in the room, he was sure. Nor anywhere in Denver. “And you lost everything,” she said.

“Well… yeah. But I found other things. I found Frankie.”

The look in her eyes was still distant, and it suddenly told him something about her, about the past of which she did not speak.

His voice caught again, and when he freed it, it was only a whisper. “What did you find, Chris?”

A tear pulled itself together at the corner of her eye. “I found friends. I think. Maybe another family.”

“Does that make up for it?”

He waited for her answer, hoping. He had no family. He had walked away from its ties, its burdens, its heritage. But, he wondered, how much of his disdain was only more blarney, the idle creation of a beer-soaked tongue? How much of a past did he want… or need?

Christa let her head fall against his shoulder, and he gathered her into his arms. She was crying. And if he was still in any way afraid of her or of what she could do, that fear melted now in the wash of her tears. She was human. She was mortal. Regardless of her music or her magic or her past, she was as fragile—and as needy—as he himself.

“Never,” she said. “Never.”

The atmosphere of the recording studio was as rarefied as one of Sruitmor’s exacting quizzes on the precise symbolic meanings of the fourteen modes. Although the decor was relaxed, even sensuous—thick shag carpets, dim lighting, textured walls of wood and rock—it could not disguise the fact that the studio was a laboratory in which sounds were created specifically to be recorded, scrutinized, and, if necessary, rejected and rerecorded. Through the thick glass window, Christa saw the engineer in the control room nod to her. Her headphones hissed. “All right, Chris,” he said. “If you’re ready, I’m rolling four measures before the break.”

Precision. Everything was precision. The demo that the band recorded would be its representative in the back rooms and offices of club owners and booking agents throughout Denver. It had to be right.

Christa reached up and freed a strand of her hair from the headphones. “I’m ready,” she said.

Behind the engineer, Melinda waved, and Devi watched intently. Christa smiled at them, turned up her Strat’s volume, and readied herself. Her new guitar would not be ready until March, on the Equinox, but the Strat was a friend, and she did not doubt its abilities.

Suddenly, her headphones were filled with music: Lisa implacably beating out the rhythm, Devi interrupting with staccato bursts of suspended chords in unison with Christa’s guitar track, Melinda thumping away on bass. Monica was snarling: