Gossamer Axe (8 page)

Where a lesser musician might have found terror enough in Christa’s talent and abilities, anticipating the day when he would be surpassed by this woman who, by the look of her, was barely out of girlhood, Kevin felt that he had already been surpassed, and his fear stemmed from a sense of uselessness and futility.

Christa had the feeling. She had the passion. “Black Star” had never sounded so fluid and yearning as when she had played it in his office at the guitar school. He had no doubt that, had he that very day plugged her guitar into an amplifier, he would have wept.

So what could he teach her beyond a few techniques that she would probably figure out on her own if given the time? why had she come to him? Was this some kind of cruel joke?

The next week, she again came prepared, this time with a set of fiendishly difficult solos by Randy Rhoads. And again her guitar sang, the notes rippling out, the strings stretched and vibratoed with a crystalline purity that he had never heard before. Even Frankie had not sounded like that. The black man’s music had been dark, earthy, pried from his heart and presented to his listeners gleaming with his life’s blood and the sweat of his hands. Christa floated, spinning strands of gossamer through space, her hands light, her music clear and graceful.

When she finished, Kevin pretended to look over the tablature of the piece. “You changed a few notes,” he said, trying to be useful. “Did you know that?”

“Do you mean when I shifted the second section from aeolian mode to plagal mixolydian? The energy was wrong. There’s no telling what—” She caught herself and was silent.

“Huh?”

“It… would not have sounded right to me.”

He watched her for a moment. Why should the energy be wrong? There was no telling… what?

What kind of training had this girl been given? Blood on the harpstrings? Energy?

“Yeah… well, that’s okay.” He tried to keep the shaking out of his voice. “Just so long as you know. After all, you’ll be developing your own style. If you… haven’t already.”

Frightening. He thought about her when, as darkness fell across the eastern face of the Rockies, he drove home. Malmsteen was plugged into his car stereo and everything was cranked, as though with sufficient volume he could drive feeling and intensity through whatever armor plating was covering his heart and soul.

Christa seemed almost fragile—a slender young woman with the faintest hint of the old-fashioned in her English. But the fragility was deceptive, for he sensed about her something violent, something that would drive her to practice until her fingers bled… and think nothing of it.

Music and blood. Frankie had died of an ulcer that had festered in his belly for over fifteen years. Kevin had lost count of the number of times the old man had played with sweat starting out from his forehead from the pain. He had fallen down in Detroit, leaving a dent in his guitar. He had wailed in his sleep in a seedy motel room near Hyannis Port, sixteen-year-old Kevin sitting up frightened in the other bed and peering through the darkness to discover the source of the childlike weeping. But Frankie had neither money nor time for doctors.
The music, Kevvy. That’s where it is. I go to the doctor, he tell me to stay at home and drink milk. And what do I do then? Go crazy, that’s what
.

“Are you sure you’re getting something out of these lessons?” he asked when, for the fourth straight week, she had come with an intricate lead flawlessly prepared.

She blinked at him. “I don’t understand. Is my work not satisfactory?”

“It’s damned satisfactory.” He stood up, folded his arms, studied the halftone dots of the Jimi Hendrix poster. “I simply don’t believe what I’m hearing, Christa. What the hell do you need me for?”

“I need you to teach me.” Her voice was patient.

“You already know it all, girl.”

Her eyes flashed a little. “I? Know it all?”

“Look,” said Kevin, exasperated and fearful both, “I wouldn’t normally talk to a student like this, but you’re not really a student. If you can do one tenth on the harp what you’ve been doing on guitar, I’m scared to hear you play. You’ve got technique and feeling down cold. All you have to do is learn the songs.”

The patience remained in her tone. “And all you have to do, Kevin, is teach them to me.”

“What can I teach you?”

“It’s a strange thing, music, in this place.” Something about her choice of words struck him as peculiar. “I studied harp in Cor… in Kerry, and we learned there to pay attention to each note, to each sound we made or did not make. Here…” She cut loose a blinding flurry of licks that screamed from one end of the fingerboard to the other in less than a second. “… notes seem to be merely a means of filling up time. There are some lovely melodies buried among them, to be sure, but it’s little attention I’ve heard anyone give them. I try to treat them with reverence. That’s all. And because of that, you say you have nothing to teach me ”

“I can’t teach you that.”

“I know.”

He flinched. He had said too much. She knew. He was a fraud. He no more knew how to make music than did a player piano.

Christa watched him with her bright blue eyes. If she had guessed his secret, she gave no sign. “No one can teach that,” she said softly. “You have to listen, Kevin. You have to listen to everything. But I don’t know what songs there are to learn. I don’t know which ones I should listen to, and my tendencies will always be to interpret them as a harper. I need to make sure that I stay within the feel of heavy metal.” She looked at her guitar, stroked the neck. “I have a lot to do. You can save me a great deal of time.”

You have to listen, Kevin
. Her words made sense, but there was a meaning lurking about their edges that eluded him.
You have to listen to everything
. Listen?

She lifted her head. “What should I learn for next week?”

“It depends.” Kevin struggled to find his words. Glib little Irish boy—where was his blarney now? “Where do you want to go with this? You want to get into a band?”

“I believe that I will need to.”

“And then what?”

She was silent.

“You want to be a rock star?”

She did not answer at first. Finally: “I have something that I must do, Kevin. Rock and roll will help me do it.”

He was absolutely certain that he did not want to hear what it was. “Okay, you need to start listening to a lot of rock and roll, and you need to get some equipment together. Amplifier, effects, all that stuff. I’ll put together a song list for you to learn, and I’ll fish around out there to see if anyone’s looking for a lead guitarist. You’re hot. You’ll have no trouble.”

She smiled thinly. “I hope not.”

Blood. Listening. That night, driving home along 285, he mulled over Christa’s words as the mountain air cooled and the sky turned into a field of stars. Frankie’s life and his music had been intimately bound up with blood, whether it was of the ulcer that ate at him or that which frequently spattered the floor of the cheap, violent bars in which he played. Blood. passion. It was not noble, nor was it sublime: it had no claim to immortality. It was the blues. It was human, common, slippery with the grease of skin oil and sweat, fragrant with the ripe odors of life.

And Frankie had died, unknown.

Was that tragedy, Kevin began to wonder, or was that life? Did music have to be something for all time, something that built for itself an imperishable cathedral of sprit and adamant? Or was it more important that the music simply be played, that in a thousand common homes, a million apartments ranging from tenement to penthouse, someone with a guitar or a flute or a harp was letting the melodies flow straight from the heart, with no pretensions, no delusions of grandeur, no hope of permanence. Just the music. Just the honest blood, transformed into sound and sent forth into the world to exist for a moment, and then to fade away… until some other hand took up an instrument.

He turned his Beetle onto the stretch of dirt road that led to his door and pulled up in front of his dark house. When he shut off the engine, the quiet mountain sounds rushed in at him.

You have to listen to everything.

Everything. He got out of the car and stood on the earth, straining his ears. Crickets. An owl. Wester’s mare whinnied uneasily across the fields.

And behind those sounds were others. Pine branches rustled, and aspen leaves made little papery noises. A mallard in the pond stirred the water with a webbed foot, and the ripple lashed at the borders of hearing.

And beyond that was the sound of mountains: the half-heard, half-felt ppresence of tree and rock and water that blended imperceptibly into the heartbeat pulsing quietly within him.

The sounds were always there, always changing. It was not important that they endured; it was important that they were made, that they continued to be made.

He realized that he was holding his breath, and he let the air out of his lungs in a long sigh that entered the nocturne being played about him, twined with the music as though it were a growing thing, and cadenced softly as a mockingbird took a brief solo.

Christa continued to practice in the dark; and as her hands loosened, the flow of magic increased. She began to experiment with the irridescent energies, playing passages at different speeds, changing individual notes within licks. She had much to learn, in spite of what Kevin had said, but her progress was steady and rapid, driven forward relentlessly by thoughts of her beloved.

Where was Judith? What was she doing? Did she play the harp still? Did she… did she sing? Christa found herself wandering through her house before she went to bed, examining the furniture, the appliances, the carpeting and wallpaper. Judith knew only the wicker houses of the Gaeidil and the glass palace of the Sidh. How would she react to all of this?

Possibility tore at her imagination, at her dreams. Starting up from sleep, she would search frantically among the sheets and pillows for Judith, knowing with all the befuddled confusion of the half-awakened dreamer that her lover was near, that the Sidh had hidden her, that if she only knew how to look, she would find her. But her senses would return, and sleep would flee, and she would spend the rest of the night curled up with the avocado Strat, practicing.

And perhaps it was because her thoughts were so intent upon her goal that, one night in late July, as she practiced in the darkness of her studio, she sensed a thin place in the warp and weft of the mortal world. It was some distance away, perhaps several hundred miles, but it was real: a potential doorway into the Realm.

The lands of the Sidh were everywhere, and yet they were normally accessible only when a combination of chance, magic, and will created a passage to them. In 1869, Christa had come to America because of an unmistakable feeling that the gates into the Realm were leaving the Old World and reforming in the New; and eighty miles north of New York, where folklore and superstition had invested the Catskill Mountains with an aura of the unreal and the impossible, she had found one. But she had never tried it. Orfide had nearly killed her by the shore of Lake Levin, north of Edinburgh, and she had become reluctant to battle the bard again without a greater hope of victory. She could do little for Judith if she were dead.

But at Midsummer each year, she had made her way out to the Catskills. There, within sight of a waterfall that had sent a long tendril of froth down the face of a bare cliff, shrouding the scene with an opalescent mist that seemed more of old Eriu than of America, Christa had put off the dull, stiff garments of the nineteenth century and had, once more, become a woman of the Gaeidil. Clad in the white mantle of a novice harper, her hair long and unbound, she had lifted a chalice of wine to the woman who lived just out of reach, in a castle of glass on the other side of the mist.

Heartbreaking gestures, futile commemorations. Later on, with the turning of the century, the gate had vanished, and she had followed her feelings to Colorado. But the grief had been building in her, and she no longer had the strength to confront the impossibility of what she wanted. The gate was… somewhere. She had not sought it out.

But what she wanted no longer seemed so impossible.

The Strat was flickering with energy as she backtracked through the scale she was playing—a plagal variant of the dorian mode—and found the notes that emphasized her perception of the gate. Carefully, she pieced together a lick that contained them and, letting her hands move of themselves, repeated the sequence with machinelike rapidity.

She had a sudden vision of a mountain lake surrounded by pine forest. Behind it was a cliff with a distinctive mineral vein. Above the water was a faint, dark turbulence, as though the fabric of reality was slightly frayed.

She pushed herself, added chromatic fire to the lick, dropped in bleak, uncompromising pieces of the locrian mode to add weight to the spell. Her vision expanded. She saw miles of forest backed up by tall mountains that could only be the Rockies. The dusty thread of a fire road snaked through the trees, but there was no sign that people lived in the area.

A gate. A palpable gate. Somewhere to the… southwest. With the power she anticipated from amplification, she was sure that she could smash a portal into the Realm wherever she liked, but with a gate already in existence, her task would be easier. She would be able to concentrate on battling Orfide.

She had not yet mastered the guitar: after a minute, the vision shifted, faded, and dissolved in a sheet of pale fire. She blinked, saw the dark outlines of Ceis against the faintly glowing windows of the studio.

*visit*

“Not now, Ceis. Later. perhaps at Lugnasad.” She fingered the Strat. “It’s enough that I know the gate is there.” She pinched a harmonic and jerked up on the tremolo bar until it shrieked, then pushed the bar down and let the string drop into flaccid silence. “I need to talk to Melinda,” she said. “I need equipment.”

Devi stayed away from the guitar department at the Proshop. Her specialty was keyboards, and she had little reason to go to the other end of the store, especially since the boys in charge of Guitar had told her a week after she was hired that, in their opinion, keyboards were suitable only for firewood.

Their opinion meant nothing to her, though. If they wanted to bang away on their gaily colored bits of metal and plastic and annoy the neighbors, so be it. If they were gratified by the admiration of vacant-faced girls, fine. They knew volume and distortion—that was all. She had no use for them.

The essence of music—of everything—was control, the precise, exacting specification of each parameter to the third decimal, the willful shaping of frequency, waveform, attack, decay, and amplitude into a realization of what had been inwardly heard. Devi knew the touch of electronic keyboards, the intricacies of computer programs, the heady blending of passionate music and dispassionate microprocessors. She knew the fierce joy that came from evoking a storm of sound from a PA system driven to peak, a cresting wave of volume that obeyed the slightest touch of her fingertips.

“…so I’ll tell you, I got her upstairs to my room, and when I started coming on to her, I got this weird feeling…”

She looked up from the operating manual she was reading. Two young men were passing by on their way back to Guitar. One of them carried a cased instrument. They did not notice her.

“… and I asked her how old she was,” said the taller of the two, “and she told me
thirteen
.”

“What did you do?”

He laughed. “I told her that she was going to get one hell of a musical education.”

“You mean you…” The conversation faded to inaudibility, and in the next room, someone began battering on a set of drums.

She slammed the manual closed. “Bastard.”

It was a slow day: she had nothing but the manual to distract her thoughts, and that was insufficient for now. She looked out through the smoke-gray windows of the store, watched a light blue 4x4 wagon pull into the lot.

Too many memories. A girlhood full of them. Even before she had stood on tiptoe to reach the high keyboard of the old upright piano in the living room and pick out the organ solo from “Light My Fire”—her chubby, nine-year-old fingers faltering through the chords and the riffs that had come so easily to Ray Manzarek’s adult hands—even before she had heard those seductive melodies seeping from the radio and had decided that she wanted to do that too, the memories were there: dark brown shading into the scummy black of an unwashed sink; her father, tall and strong, bending over her with a beckoning finger:
Come be daddy’s little princess
…

… or daddy’s little slut, which was what he told her later. No one would ever touch her, he said. She was polluted, corrupt. Bad girl.

And life went on. Sure it did. A six-year-old turned into a whore among her stuffed animals and the pink sheets with the print balloons. A thirteen-year-old taken for whatever she had to give in an upstairs motel room off Santa Fe Drive. Boys will be boys. It takes two to tango.

Control. Pull those faders down, Devi. Change those parameters. Make it go away.

Out in the parking lot, a woman got out of the wagon, her waist-length red hair as eye catching as a blue mohawk. Devi watched her, absently fingering her own dense black curls. The woman’s movements were graceful, deliberate, proud. She climbed out of an AMC Eagle as though she had just bought the whole city of Denver.

The woman opened a back door of the wagon and pulled out a rectangular guitar case. Devi stared. A rocker? She was distracted from her thoughts and did not even notice the woman’s companion until they had entered the store.

“Hi, Devi,” said Melinda.

Devi recognized her. Years before, they had played in rival, all-girl bands. They had run into one another occasionally since then, but she had not seen Melinda in months. “How are you, Mel?”

“Doing all right.” The standard lie, unless frustrated poverty was all right.

“Working?”

“Not in a band. The guys were giving me shit, so I quit. I’m in office supplies for now. What about you?”

Devi spread her hands to indicate the store. “This is it. I was playing out until a few weeks back. Got tired of the hassles.” This was also a lie, though not so innocent as Melinda’s. It had been an ugly night in the club, and during a break she had been cornered in a dark alcove by two drunks. They had not touched her, but something had snapped, and by the time the bouncer had arrived, Devi was nine again, and screaming.

She had spent the last set hiding behind her keyboards. White-faced, staring but seeing nothing, she had taken refuge in her music, in control, just as she had when “Light My Fire” was the only song she knew.

The red-haired woman was standing off by herself, looking over the electric pianos and the synthesizers. She carried the guitar case a little awkwardly, as though new to the instrument, but even her awkwardness was sure, and proud.

Devi envied her, refused to show it. She shrugged. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah.” Melinda looked over her shoulder. “Hey, Christa,” she called. “This is Devi. We’ve known each other for years.”

Christa came forward and offered her hand. “Hello. I’m Christa Cruitaire.”

Devi flinched and pretended not to notice the hand. “Nice to meet you, Christa. I’m Devi Anderson. Welcome to the Proshop. What can we do for you?”

Christa dropped her hand with a soft smile. “I’m after taking up heavy metal,” she said, “and I need an amplifier for my guitar and some equipment to go with it.”

“You should hear her, Devi,” said Melinda. “She makes the guys look sick.”

“Most guys look pretty sick anyway,” Devi said bitterly. She caught herself. “Excuse me.”

Christa examined her for a moment. Her blue eyes were frank, without judgment. “There is no problem,” she said.

“As far as amps and the rest go,” said Devi, changing the subject, “you’ll have to go to Scott in Guitar. Straight back. Don’t let them give you any bullshit.”

Christa nodded. “I understand.”

And as Christa and Melinda made their way to the back of the store, Devi found herself with the feeling that Christa did indeed understand. A great deal. About almost everything.

But before she could dwell on the thought, she had to help a customer. The tall black man seemed at first a little perplexed by a woman who knew about FM synthesis and digital sampling, but once she had put several keyboards through their paces, he settled down to the serious business of talking music.

While Devi worked with him, though, she was hearing the sound of an amplified guitar from the other end of the store. Shimmering bends, runs that were anything but uncontrolled: the antithesis of the heavy-handed metal she usually heard from the boys. Melinda’s friend?

When her customer tried out one of the synths, she took a moment to peek around the tall speaker enclosures that formed a wall around her department. Christa was standing in front of a cheap amplifier, a light-green guitar in her hands. She played a little, talked with Melinda, adjusted a knob or two, and played a little more. The sounds she made were graceful, lyrical; but Devi detected an edge, as of a hidden threat, behind them. Christa’s sweetness was an illusion.

“Miss?”

“Oops, sorry,” she said, turning back to her customer. She gestured toward Christa. “That’s some guitar player.”

“Yeah, I was listening too.”

Devi made the sale, but she was only half conscious of it. She wanted to hear more of that guitar. She wrote up the ticket, pulled a boxed synth from stock, and, in violation of her custom, absently shook the man’s hand before she sent him up front to pay. She hardly noticed the contact. Nor did she notice the incredulous look that Scott gave her when he saw her in the guitar department.

“What do you think of this, Melinda?” Christa was saying.

Melinda shrugged. “Not sure. It sounds okay, I guess.”

“I can’t help but think that it could be richer. Right here.” She played a flash of notes in the middle register of the guitar. “It’s a little weak.”

“Maybe…”

Devi eased her way over to the counter. Scott was listening. “pretty good, huh?” he said.

“How come you’ve got her on that piece of shit?”

“The DL-5? It’s budget, sure, but it’s good.”

“Not that good.”

“Stay with your keys, woman.”

“You want to make a sale today? She’s not going to take that. She’s hearing the dropout in the midrange. That thing shelves down five dB per octave from one to five kilohertz.”

“What do you want to show her?”

“The Laney A.O.R. Fix her up with a hundred-watt head and a 4-12 cabinet. She’ll love it.”

“What?” He finally stopped looking at Christa and turned to Devi. “She doesn’t want stuff like that.”

“Did she say so?”

“Well… no. But you know that kind. She’s no rocker. Look at the way she’s dressed. She’s probably trying to impress her boyfriend.”

Devi felt herself bristle.

“Or something,” he added quickly.

Devi folded her arms and watched for a few more minutes as Christa tried to force the DL-5 to do something it could not. The midrange simply was not strong enough. Christa finally looked at Melinda and shook her head.

Devi turned to Scott. “Do you want to spell her the Laney half-stack, or shall I?”

“What the hell do you know about guitar amps?”

“Zip. Zilch. But I know sound, I’ve heard what those Laneys can do, and I’ve read the fucking service manuals.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. Go ahead, Devi.”

In two minutes, Devi had Christa plugged into a one hundred-watt Laney head and a cabinet containing four twelve-inch speakers. “It’s a good solid rock setup,” she explained while they waited for the tubes to heat. “And with the stacked preamps, you can vary the amount of sustain and distortion you get by punching them in and out with the footswitch.”

Christa looked dubiously at the half-stack; then, with a shrug, she turned up the volume knob of her guitar. The amplifier tubes finished heating, and the speakers hissed faintly. “I suppose I have a great deal to learn,” she said. “Whoever thought that a harper from Corca Duibne would come to this?”

And then she played. The middle register was solid, rich, the notes flowing like honey left out in the warm summer sun. Christa broke out into a bright smile, closed her eyes, and let the music come.

Devi was hearing control. It did not matter that Christa could not alter the substance of her sound, that she was limited to electromagnetic pickups, steel strings, and glowing tubes. Her expression and her hands made up for that.

Christa stopped, looked at Scott and Devi. “May I turn this up?”

“Crank it,” said Devi.

“I don’t know how.”

Devi adjusted the Laney until Christa’s guitar was overloading the reamplifier circuitry enough to produce a smooth, violin-like sustain. “If you turn this knob,” she said, “you’ll just get louder. Turn this other one, and you’ll increase the distortion. Step on this switch, and you’ll kick in another preamp.”

Christa turned up and hit a chord that was like a spatter of bright metal. The air in the guitar department was suddenly alive, trembling. She flipped the pickup selector switch on the front of the Strat, adjusted a tone knob, and then went off into a series of cascading arpeggios that ranged from despairing to joyous in the space of a few seconds.

Nodding, she worked across the entire fingerboard, feeling out the response of the amplifier. She struck and held a chord. The rich harmonies shouldered their way through the room. Devi leaned her elbows on the vibrating counter and cupped her chin in her hands, watching, listening.

Christa stepped on the footswitch and increased her sustain. Her blue eyes narrowed as she went back into rapid-fire arpeggios and licks, and she seemed to be thinking of something that angered her. Sounds tumbled over one another, and Devi suddenly felt afraid. Who was this woman? Where had she learned to play guitar like this?

Devi had grown up with guilt and with shame, and those emotions had come to seem natural to her, an integral art of womanhood. Here though, holding a guitar and reeling off power chords and runs with a tight precision that was drawing a small crowd, was a woman who seemed to know nothing of either. Christa was proud—not arrogantly so, not with the posturing of the hundreds of would-be guitar heroes that Devi saw each month, but with a firm, inner conviction. No one, it seemed, had ever told Christa that femininity was a curse, that a woman’s form was a weak vessel, a temptation, a burden. The idea had apparently never occurred to her.

Christa was lost in her music, in the waves of sound that she called up out of the Laney. Another sustained chord while she adjusted the sound, and she was off again. The air in the room felt charged, ready to erupt.

And in a way it did. For as Christa powered out a series of odd-sounding scales, lingering over occasional notes in a strange, deliberate pattern, Devi opened her eyes and saw a roiling, turbulent sheet of gray mist where there should have been a wall hung with guitars. It seemed to stretch off into the distance, as though a hole had been partly torn in the universe.

She gasped, looked back at Christa. The guitarist slammed home one more chord and then allowed silence to return. The gray mist vanished. The wall came back.

People were applauding. No one else had noticed. Christa turned off the amplifier and bowed to Devi. “I’ll take it. Thank you. You have helped me greatly.”