Moonlight Water (3 page)

Robbie did, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke toward Grandfather Angus's ashes. He offered a cigarette to the caretaker but got a smiling shake of the head.

“Does he ever speak to you?”

Robbie stubbed out the cigarette, thinking. Somewhere in this caretaker of the dead burned an ancient and mystic flame twisted wrong. “Not directly. No. But right now he'd probably like a little piping.”

“The bagpipes?” asked the caretaker. “I don't know much about them.”

Robbie said, “Perhaps you could read a Robbie Burns poem for him. He loved Robbie Burns. Don't all Scots?” He heard the skepticism in his own voice.

The caretaker whisked Robbie's comment aside. “I know. Some people think I'm crazy. But I've found that if I'm to spend my days among these dead, I must befriend them. Maybe it keeps me sane. And it seems essential. Their lives continue through me, through my stories of them. I yearn to pass them along to other pilgrims who come here.”

Those eyes gave Robbie the willies.

“You said he's your grandfather. Were you close?”

Robbie took in a deep breath and let it out. “Lived with him when I was a teenager. My mother's father. Grandfather Angus.”

“You don't say now.”

What the hell! The weirdo was doing a bad Scots' brogue.

They looked into each other, one man a hungry skeleton, the other a car wreck and wandering soul.

“My grandma,” Robbie said, “she died early on. Then it was just me and Grandpa Angus—my mother was off chasing romance. Pretty soon she married an accountant and moved to Ohio. Me and Grandpa, we lived in the old apartment, rented out the downstairs for a shop, made ends meet. We were the gravity of each other's lives. When I think of him, I start striding big, like him. Scots all the way, he was, with a fighting spirit.”

Somehow Robbie wanted to talk about his family, and this man had the need to taste these lives and swallow them whole. Robbie looked at the caretaker and understood. The man was less a guardian of the dead than a spirit cannibal.

“I'm a musician,” Robbie said, as if that were a shield. Looked at the strange man once more. “Think I'd better go now.”

“Glad to hear your stories, Mr. Macgregor.”

Robbie's stomach went into a double knot. How'd this ghoul know his name? “I won't be seeing you again,” Robbie said.

“Everyone comes back, sooner or later.”

Robbie leveled him with a gaze. “Give me a moment alone with him, will you?”

“Certainly.” He wafted away.

Robbie turned back to the canisters.

Deep breath. He relit the Balkan Sobranie and blew smoke toward the canisters. “So long, Grandpa.” Robbie kissed his fingers, touched them to the glass, and strode out. There was a friend to see, things to do.

*   *   *

Revulsion. Walking into Gianni's law office, Robbie realized he couldn't talk with his friend here. Deep rugs, polished wood, gleaming metal, a receptionist decked out for show—the room oozed glitter and luxury. Gianni owned this law business with a single partner, and they specialized in keeping tax money out of the hands of the government by setting up living trusts. They had two young lawyers who did most of the actual work. A wealthy man's enclave. The ambience writhed around Robbie like a serpent.

Gianni strode into the outer office, steps long, arms wide. For a little guy he acted big. “Hey,
paisan
.” His Italian ancestry served him well in San Francisco. He'd been born Johnny Montella to the only Catholic family in a tiny Mormon town, but now he called the upper echelon of a great city
paisan.
And he was Robbie's oldest friend. They grabbed each other in a bear hug. Gianni's head came up to the middle of Robbie's big chest.

“What brings you to the city?”

Robbie let out a big breath. “I need to borrow your cabin for a few days, maybe a few weeks.”

It was a big request. Gianni had a one-room house on a hill above Stinson Beach. He called it his cabin, perhaps to minimize its luxury. On weekends he used it as his personal refuge from the world. He invited almost no one there, and even Robbie had never stayed overnight.

“I'll need to hang out alone, except for tonight. Tonight we need to talk.”

“What's going on?”

“Too big. I'll tell you when you get there.”

Gianni handed over the keys. “I'll bring cartons of Thai.”

He was the best of friends.

*   *   *

Robbie spent the rest of the afternoon in a chaise longue on Gianni's deck, looking out at the Pacific and toward the Farallon Islands, just beyond the horizon. As a devoted weekend sailor Robbie knew those waters well. But he didn't think about sailing. He didn't think about anything at all. He was not an analytical man. His way was to sit with something, whether a new song or a personal problem, and just keep it company until he had a feeling about what to do.

So now he lay back and sucked the ocean into his lungs. He felt the sun on his skin and the wind in his long, thick red hair, now streaked with gray. He deliberately left his mind a blank. There were some comings and goings inside there, faces, remembered bits of talk, and wisps of music, some of it his own, some that belonged to other people, some he'd never heard before. But he let it all come and go.

When the sun went down, he went inside and wandered around the single, open octagonal room of the cabin. Funny, he'd never realized how many beautiful objects Gianni had gathered here. He had Navajo rugs, probably because his hometown was mostly Navajo, right on the border of the rez. The rugs were large and, now that Robbie looked, extraordinarily beautiful. There were baskets, woven with motifs similar to the rugs. There were wood carvings of dancing figures that must be mythological. For whatever reason, all of it pleased Robbie. He felt no need to know what it was, who made it, or what the various designs might symbolize. He stretched out on an eight-foot leather sofa and let his mind roam.

In good time Gianni arrived with the Thai.

Over full plates, Gianni went right to it. “Give. What's going on?”

Robbie told him. First, and in full, about Georgia losing the baby. Then, bluntly and briefly, about Georgia and Nora kicking him out.

He let the information sit between them, no comment. He didn't know any more about what it meant for his future than his buddy did.

Gianni got up and brought them snifters of an Armagnac that probably cost a hundred bucks a bottle. “Where now?”

“Gianni, I have no idea.” He wanted company but wasn't ready to bat ideas around. He turned away from Gianni and pretended to study the room. “Would you tell me something about this collection of art? I've never really paid attention. Extraordinary stuff.”

Gianni led him from piece to piece. Later Robbie half-remembered terms like
eye-dazzler
and
Two Gray Hills
for the rugs and
ceremonial
for the baskets, but not much more. He fingered a basket woven of sumac and sealed with pine pitch so it would hold water. Robbie listened as Gianni explained that he tried to support young artists doing traditional Navajo art in new materials, letting the art change with the times while paying tribute to the past.

Making conversation, Robbie asked about Hopi art.

“I love the Navajo people, because I grew up among them. I don't do other Native art, not Pueblo, not Anasazi, nothing.”

Robbie suppressed a yawn.

“Friend, you need some sleep.”

“Gianni, I see a bit of the way ahead. Tomorrow I go to the house, get my clothes and a few instruments. Then I need to hide out here until I can see things clearer, figure out what I want to do.”

“What do you need to do in this world, except play music, make a little art?”

Robbie held his friend's eyes. “I don't know. Everything. Something. I'm in the dark here, Gianni. That's why I need time. Time to be alone long enough to figure it out.”

In other words, I need to take over your private space.
It was a lot to ask.

“Anything I have, anything I can do, it's yours.” Gianni walked to the door and turned back. “Meanwhile, I'm still protecting your ass. Georgia and Nora can get half your money, but not the house. It was bought with your money before you met Georgia, payments came out of your money, so it's yours.”

“I don't want to talk to them.”

“That's what you have me for.”

*   *   *

Robbie made two last trips to the house that was now a stranger to him, carefully avoiding Georgia and Nora. He slipped away with his favorite instruments—the Fender Stratocaster, an old Martin D-28, his accordion, and two harmonicas. His collection was a lot bigger, but these he wouldn't do without. Then he got his keyboard. Final thought, urgent, he remembered both laptops. His music-writing programs, the digital versions of all his lead sheets. Someday, maybe, he'd want to write music again. And what about the years of sketch pads stacked in his office, fewer filled as time had passed? He took one that had only a few drawings in it and shoved a Rapidograph pen in his pocket, fine point. Black ink.

Back at the cabin he lounged through the evening, thoughts drifting by, big and small. He decided to quit drinking for a while. The next day he mostly walked the beach. Thoughts came to him like driftwood, the same way his music came. On the second day he discovered that mixing a little jazzy movement in his steps across the sand fertilized his imagination and fed his body. Nothing like the athletic moves he made with the band, but it didn't matter why dancing helped—you don't take a cardiogram of the heart and soul of music, art, or dance. A sign above his desk back in the old house quoted Nietzsche, something like, “Those who can't hear the music think the dancers are crazy.” True.

So he walked and napped and remembered and dreamed, and every once in a while he pulled out his pen and sketch pad. Didn't flow like it used to, but it pleased him. Letting his hand do the drawing, he tossed around what had gone right and wrong for twenty years, and the many times he had been sound asleep during his waking life.

Gianni. How clueless and how wonderful we were.

Robbie threw himself into a deck chair and ticked back over their friendship—right now it was an anchor. They'd enlisted, met in the army, one city kid and one country kid, working-class young men, gung ho to help their country in the first Gulf War. By the time they finished basic training, the war was over, and the army assigned them to duty on Okinawa. Turned out the Okinawan occupation was the embodiment of the Japanese government's pretense at complying with the World War II treaty granting America a military presence in Japan—the island was nowhere near the real Japan. They spent their enlistments doing drills, and all they learned, really, was bar fighting.

Except one other thing—they played a lot of music. Robbie scrounged up a guitar and a harmonica and created nice backups for Gianni's lyric tenor—he had a fine voice and an encyclopedic memory for lyrics. They got back to the States ravenous to become big-deal musicians.

They put together several Bay Area bands. They tried everything they thought might sell, and some of the music sounded pretty good. But Robbie wasn't comfortable. He started writing songs for his own big voice and acoustic guitar. He drove up the coast highway to Tomales and sat with Ramblin' Jack Elliott, wanting to learn folk, but that didn't work for Robbie, either.

Then the Elegant Demons came into his life. When the lead guitarist and keyboard player of the Demons got sick before a concert, Robbie sat in for him. The gig was simple—play in Golden Gate Park on a midsummer Sunday afternoon and do old Grateful Dead songs, nothing else, just covers of the Dead.

They only had two days to rehearse, and what they got into surprised them all. The Dead, known for its long jams, hooked into a current and explored it, exploited it. The crowds rode the wave. A Dead concert was a journey into far-flung musical galaxies.

Robbie and Kell had that kind of rapport from the first chord. The Dead songs were great, but they wanted to try their own stuff. During rehearsal, their lyrical tunes turned into dervishes. They took phrases from each other, transformed them, and shaped them into new verses and choruses.

Kell was a special performer, slender and pretty, a gravelly tenor who reminded people of a male Janis Joplin in the rawness and pathos of his expression. Onstage he was pure emotion, and a perfect partner. At the end of the last rehearsal, he said to Robbie, “We're in the
center
of it!”

In person Kell was entirely different. He had almost nothing to say to anyone, just packed up his guitar and left after rehearsals and concerts. He came for the music—he lived to sing—and he gave nothing of himself anywhere else. In some odd way Robbie understood, though he couldn't have explained it. Couldn't have lived it.

When they played live that first time, instead of pulling back to the straightforward renditions on Dead albums, Robbie and Kell let it fly, filled their musical sails, and followed wherever the winds blew. The crowd went with them. Wild, crazed, happy, all good things.

At the end of that concert Gianni said to Robbie, “Hey, I can't do what you guys do. Haven't got the juice for it.” Gianni liked to sing music that was written down and stick with it. “You guys are tight, though. Go for it.”

Robbie had looked at the hastily printed program sheet Gianni had put together. “This calls the band the Elegant Demons and me Rob Roy.” He pursed his mouth. “Are we stuck with those names?”

Gianni gestured at the crowd, still milling around, no one ready to leave. “I wouldn't exactly call this being stuck.”

Soon they had all the Bay Area gigs they wanted. They added songs Robbie or Kell wrote, improvising, dancing with their skewed joint muse in epic jams.
Rolling Stone
took notice: “Kell sings lead vocals that break your heart wide open, and Rob Roy puts his soul into everything—composing, playing, and madman crash-dancing. The Elegant Demons are riding the edge of something brand-new.”