I Was There the Night He Died (10 page)

“Anyway,” the voice to my rear says, “in case you forgot, you smoke weed too. On doctor's orders, if I recall.”

“I'm starting to think that the cure is worse than the disease.”

“You should listen to your doctor.”

“Do you?”

I pull on my bottle, she sucks on her joint. It's started to snow.

“I'd listen to a real doctor,” she says. “My doctor's not a doctor, she's a shrink.”

“I'm sure she knows what she's doing. And if she's not helping you, why do you go then?”

“Duh. Do you really think it's my choice?”

Actually, no, I hadn't thought about it. “Why wouldn't it be?”

Samantha sighs. Ordinarily, only people in hauntingly lyrical novels or daytime television dramas sigh. Samantha sighed.

“Who died tonight?” she says. “In your book, I mean. What musician died that you wrote about and what important moral lesson will we all no doubt glean from it.”

Sarcasm—even when directed at you—is always preferable to sadness, particularly Sara sadness, so, “Buddy Holly,” I say. “Buddy Holly died tonight.”

“The plane crash guy?”

“The plane crash guy.”

Fine snow drifts across the road, like the snow that fell that night fifty years ago and blew across three bodies scattered across an Iowa cornfield. But the story of the rise and fall and 40,000 foot crash of Buddy Holly isn't happening tonight. Crashes of any kind are definitely not on tonight's agenda.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what's so special about Buddy Holly?”

“You've got ears, listen for yourself.” Reminded of her brother, “Your brother and you—you were signing pretty intensely.”

“You won't tell me about Buddy Holly, but you know what people are saying when they're signing?”

“I know when people are intense.”

I drink. The wine is cold in my mouth but warm in my stomach.

“He's a little shit,” she finally says.

I consider answering, but lift the bottle again instead.

“But the little shit is my brother, which makes him twice the asshole he already is when he acts like such a … ”

“A little shit?”

“You know, if that whole writing thing doesn't work out for you, you could have quite a future in family counselling. You really do have the knack.”

Undeterred, “I thought being a little shit is what younger brothers did.”

“Haven't you got enough dysfunction in your own family?”

I nod before realizing she can't see me. “Point taken.”

“So tell me about Buddy Holly. He's got to be more interesting than our stupid families.”

“What I want to do is listen to Buddy Holly.”

“What's stopping you?”

“I don't have my record player.”

“You mean like what DJs use, in clubs?”

“No, not like DJs use in clubs. Like in sound. Like in superior sound.”

“I thought records were supposed to skip and stuff.”

“And stuff, yeah. Stuff like a vinyl record being an analog recording and CDs and MP3s and all the rest of them being digital recordings, meaning that digital recordings take snapshots of the analog signal of a musical waveform and measures each snapshot with only a certain degree of accuracy, which means that by definition a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave, is only approximating it. Stuff like since a record has a groove carved right into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform, no information is lost. Which means that the waveforms from a vinyl recording can be much more accurate, which can be clearly heard in the richness and warmth of the resonance.”

“You mean records sound better.”

“You could put it like that.”

Lifting the bottle—even fanatics needs fuel—“You're right, though,” I say. “There is a downside. Any specks of dust or damage to the record, like scratches, can end up as skips or pops or static. Digital recordings are like robots: they're quietly effective and they never get old. Records are like people. They get noisy. They get noisy and then they get hard to hear and then they die.”

I let the back-to-back honking announcement of a locked car half a street down double dot the end of my sentence. I hadn't noticed any automobile pass by. Paying attention to what's important tends to make one blind to everything else.

“If it's so important, why didn't you bring your record player and some of your records with you then?” Samantha says.

“I guess I didn't think I was going to be here long enough for it to matter.”

“I guess you were wrong.”

“I guess I was.”

My bottle is almost empty and her joint has to be dead. There's nothing left to do for either of us but go home.

“I've got Creature Speakers,” she says.

I turn halfway around on the bench, rest an arm across its back. “That's either the beginning of a confession I don't want to hear or the first line of a joke I don't understand.”

“That's what I have to hook up to my iPod. I can go home and get them and download some Buddy Holly and we can listen to him.”

“At my parents' house, you mean.”

“It's not as if they're coming back any time soon, are they?”

“No.”

“And it's what you said you wanted to do, isn't it?”

“Yeah.”

“I could be back in ten minutes, probably more like five.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?

“Okay.”

I know I've made a mistake as soon as I stand up and have to sit right back down. A semi-drunk forty-four-year-old man plus a stoned eighteen-year-old girl plus the greatest hits of Buddy Holly can't add up to anything but something you shouldn't be doing. “Samantha,” I call out.

She turns around. She's smiling. It's the first time I've ever seen her look happy.

“Don't take all night, all right?”

“Ten minutes, tops.”

Inside the house there's nothing to tidy up or put away because there isn't anything. The only things that would indicate I've even been here are the abandoned Discman lying on the couch where I left it and my laptop on the kitchen table. I go into the bathroom to take a pee and splash cold water on my face, use the same towel I've been using all week to dry off. It smells how I feel: used-up and mildewy. Because I worked from home and my schedule was more flexible, I was in charge of laundry. Even Sara's dirty clothes smelt good. Mine, you'd be wise to use surgical gloves to get them from the laundry basket to the washer, but hers weren't even really dirty, just more like Sara.

The doorbell rings, the first time since I've been here. Doorbells still make me jumpy, a part of me still expecting Barney to charge the door, fangs bared and barking. Especially if you were asleep or reading, this could be disconcerting, the near-heart attack you endured not quite worth the advance warning that the mailman was delivering the gas bill. No fatal coronaries were ever suffered, however, and Barney felt needed and we felt protected and what's a little uproar among loved ones? Clamour and clatter are the inevitable byproducts of a happy home.

I answer the door and Samantha pushes past me to the living room with a Holt Renfrew bag drooping full of brand-new-to-me technology. I move out of the way like a matador who's lost his cape. I watch her set up her equipment on my mother's mahogany coffee table and I pour what's left of my wine into a milk glass. It's a good thing the dead only haunt you for things done to them when they were alive—my mother didn't allow even coffee on her coffee table, let alone an iPod and Creature Speakers. The number of new fingerprints Samantha's responsible for alone would be enough to necessitate an exorcism.

“Do you want a Mountain Dew?” I say.

Samantha is on her knees on the carpet, finishing her setup, still in her coat. She stops what she's doing and looks up, pulls off her hood while considering my question, a revelation of long brown hair released from underneath. She has chestnut brown eyes and a plump, lipstick-less mouth, and although still a little baby-fattish in the face, is just one appetite-arresting bad break-up away from being what anyone would call beautiful. “You get wine and I get Mountain Dew?”

“I thought you didn't … ?”

I pull another milk glass down from the cupboard and am pouring what there is of my wine into it when, “I don't drink,” she says, and goes back to work. I transfer her wine back to my glass and wonder how much music we have to listen to before I can ask her to leave. Now that I suddenly need fifteen thousand dollars and fast, I've finally made an appointment with a real estate agent who's coming by tomorrow morning at ten, and I am way behind on my packing, and—

“We're all set,” she says, popping up from the floor to the couch. I stay where I am in the kitchen.

“You can take your coat off if you want,” I say.

“I'd just have to put it back on later.”

“That might be the single laziest thing I've ever heard.”

She looks around the room. “Besides, it's freezing in here.”

“It's the furnace.”

“What's wrong with it?”

“It's not on.”

“Of course not. It's February. Why would it be?” She touches a fingertip to the palm-sized, pinky-thick piece of white plastic propped up on the coffee table and out of it miracles the ring of Buddy Holly's white Fender Telecaster closely followed by his hollering hiccupping voice and “That'll be the Day,” yes, that'll be the day—when I die. By the time “Oh Boy” begins I find myself standing in the middle of the living room, and when “Rave On” comes on, I'm three-chording rhythm air guitar accompaniment to Buddy's brush-and-broom stroke lead. If I wasn't old enough to be her father, I'd ask—no: insist—that Samantha stand up and join me and dance. Instead, I look over and see her holding a framed picture of Sara and me at our wedding.

“Turn it off,” I shout.

“What?” The music's not so loud she can't hear me; as suspected, I've startled her, she wasn't listening.

Jabbing at the iPod with the forefinger of my strumming hand, “Turn it off. If you're not going to listen, just turn it off.”

“I was listening.”

“I said turn it off.”

“Fine. Whatever.” She slams the picture back down on the end table and does what I asked; looks at me; crosses her arms; glares at the iPod. The house is quiet again. I wish I could remove the air guitar still slung over my shoulder without anyone noticing.

“You didn't have to yell at me,” she says.

“I didn't yell at you. I just asked you to turn the music off.”

“I would have turned it off if that's what you wanted. You didn't have to yell.”

“I'm telling you, I wasn't yelling.” Realizing I'm probably yelling, I sit down on the coffee table across from her.

“Look, I'm sorry, all right?” I say.

She looks off into the corner of the kitchen, in the direction of my mother's miniature spoon collection hanging on the wall. The slits that were once her eyes tell me she's about to either slug me or cry. I hope it's the former. Anytime Sara would cry, she could have made me do anything. She knew it, too, so she never did.

“Look,” I say, “you're right, I shouldn't have yelled. Between the wine and where I was earlier tonight and what … Anyway, that's not your problem. The point is, I shouldn't have yelled.”

She wipes away her scowl with the sleeve of her jacket. I can tell she's looking at me to determine if I'm telling the truth.

“So what's the big deal with Buddy Holly?” she says.

I shake my head. “You don't give up, do you?”

She buries her hands in the pouch of her hoodie, shrugs.

“Buddy Holly died,” I say.

“What's so special about that?”

“Nothing,” I say. “There's nothing special about it all.”

 

* * *

 

At 4:11 AM it's not the things
you adored about her that you remember.

It was how when she sneezed it was always three times, each sneeze separated by precisely three seconds. It was how when she was tired she'd get cranky and deny it was because she was tired, that it was me saying she was cranky that was making her that way. It was how we could watch the same movie together and yet in six months she'd suggest watching it all over again, having forgotten nearly everything about it. It was how although I was the stay-at-home one and not-just-a-little-bit proprietary-proud to be in charge of the laundry and the mopping and the dishes, when for whatever reason she took it upon herself to do any of them, she did a better job than I ever did. It was how Barney followed her around the house like a hundred pound black lab baby duck, never bothering to visit me in my downstairs office unless Sara led the way. It was how she'd only eat the tops off muffins and expect me to eat the rest and would always leave the last inch of milk in the carton for me to finish. It was how she understood Bob Dylan's music better than I do but couldn't name more than ten song titles if her life depended on it. It was how at bedtime she'd complain that I kept the thermostat too low but by morning her feet would be sticking outside the blankets. It was how if she said a tree in our front yard needed trimming—otherwise one of its branches might fall on the house—and I said she worried too much, that you couldn't spend all of your time trying to out-guess life's next move, the branch would invariably fall and hit the house. It was how she'd confuse John Cale with J.J. Cale and the Flying Burrito Brothers with the International Submarine Band and not be bothered by it in the least. It was how she wouldn't want me to use aspirin when I had a headache (bad for my liver) or how Drano was a no-go when we had a sink clog (bad for the planet) or how plastic bags weren't good enough for picking up after Barney, we needed pet store-purchased bio-degradable pooch-poo pouches (better for the planet). It was how I'd periodically resign myself to a loving but understandably lust-reduced long-term relationship and then spot her in another aisle at the grocery store or coming home along the sidewalk with Barney from their walk and have my body remind me that my brain didn't know what it was talking about.