The Devil's Metal (23 page)

It was weird to hear Sage wax poetic about
someone else. Like he envied him.

“Can’t you do the same?”

He laughed, quietly. “I’ve tried. That’s
what Molten Universe was all about. One last attempt to do what I
want.”

I raised my brow. “One last attempt?”

He cleared his throat. “I mean, it hasn’t
gone over well with the band. Critics love it, but the fans are a
bit iffy, I can tell. They don’t want us to play the new tracks
live, they want the old tracks. They want what we are known for. If
I branched out and did stuff on my own…oh, I doubt the fans would
follow me.”

“I’d follow you,” I admitted.

Silence. Tom Waits went onto dulcet piano
tones.

Finally he said, “Thank you, Dawn. I really
should be happy for the support I do get…it’s the curse that comes
with success, I suppose. At first you want anyone, just anyone, to
listen to you. Then you get that anyone, you get mostly everybody,
then you want the critics to pay attention to you. Then you get the
critics, but it’s not good enough. You want more. You want to push
the boundaries and damn if the world decides to not watch.”

You’d think I wouldn’t be able to relate to
the gripes of a rock star, yet I could. Deep down inside it was
about being validated. I needed my own validation as much as he
did.

We elapsed into pensive thought and watched
the remainder of the show. He never stopped stroking my leg.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After Tom Waits played to a quiet close, I
reluctantly climbed off of Sage’s shoulders and onto the soft, dewy
grass below.

“Thanks for that,” I said, suddenly feeling
awkward in his presence. It probably had to do with the
increasingly naughty thoughts I had during the concert, like my
libido was being woken after a long hibernation. Or maybe for the
first time ever. I could still feel his calloused hands on my
calves.

He gave me a small smile, one that barely
pulled on his lips, and nodded at the main stage. “Want to head
back? See how everyone else is doing?”

“You don’t want to meet Mr. Tom Waits? I’m
sure you can arrange that,” I pointed out.

He shook his head. “It’s dangerous to meet
your idols. You’ll always be disappointed.”

I chewed on that as we made our way back to
the main stage. It was getting late and the last act was going on
to a packed crowd. We didn’t really notice anything was amiss until
we saw the flashing lights coming from the trailers and a group of
people at the security gates trying to see what was going on.

A terrible, sinking feeling dropped in my
stomach. This wasn’t good. I knew it.

Sage and I exchanged a panicked look. He
grabbed my hands, and in moments we were running through the crowd,
trying to fight our way to the gate. The closer we got, the more
chaotic the scene. There was an ambulance on the other side, parked
outside of our trailer. Through the chain link gate I could see a
bunch of people standing around it. Anguished cries filled the air.
In the distance was the eerie sound of another emergency
vehicle.

Once we managed to get past the onlookers
and the head-up-his-ass security guard, we broke into a run
straight for the Hybrid trailer. Musicians, big and small, famous
and not, roadies and special access people were all huddled around,
talking gravely to each other. I ignored them and we made our way
to the open door where medics and first aid officers were milling
about.

“What’s going on?” Sage asked a medic, the
terror in his voice squeezing his vocal chords.

“Are you part of the band?” he asked,
blocking the door.

I could tell Sage wanted to say, “I am the
band!” but before he could Mickey’s voice rang out from inside.

“Sage! Let him in, he’s our guitarist.”

The medic looked chagrined as we pushed
through. I could tell he wanted to stop me from going in but
decided against it.

I wished he had stopped me.

I wished I could scrub clean my eyes from
what I saw next.

In the middle of the floor was Emeritta. She
was lying on her back, arms sprawled above her. Blood pooled
beneath her nose. Her once alive and alert eyes were rolled back in
her head. She was pale as death. She was death.

I put my hand to my mouth and felt
everything go in slow motion. It wasn’t a sudden sense of loss or
grief but a shocked unfeeling, like someone had applied a numbing
agent to my heart. There was Emeritta, dead on the floor of
Hybrid’s trailer and all I could do was blink. Finally I took a
seat at the table beside Noelle who was watching everything with a
dazed expression. I couldn’t tell if she was high or in the same
boat as I was.

Mickey was in the corner of the trailer, his
arm around Robbie who was crying. Seeing tears flowing from the
bloodshot eyes of one of the more affable men around delivered a
jab to my insides, causing my breath to hitch. I hated it when men
cried. It reminded me too much of my father.

“What happened?” Sage cried out.

A first-aider pushed him back as he tried to
get to Robbie.

“She overdosed,” the first-aider said.

“That’s a lie!” Robbie cried out. “She never
touched the drug. I left her to use the bathroom. I was only gone a
couple of minutes. She wouldn’t have used it. She was against
drugs!”

He collapsed into a fit and Mickey had to
calm him down again. Sage was absolutely bewildered as he looked
between Robbie and the body on the floor. For all intents and
purposes, it looked exactly like Emeritta had overdosed, but I too
heard what she said to Robbie earlier, that she didn’t do hard
drugs. Perhaps that was just a front and she was an addict deep
inside. Maybe she wanted to do it to impress Robbie. There was no
way of knowing.

The police didn’t look at it that way. The
minute they showed up, shoving their way into the trailer, you
could tell they were itching to arrest a few rock stars. Even
though the festival was packed with likeminded people, most people
in the South weren’t at all accepting of long-haired rock
musicians. At one conservative diner we stopped at it was a scene
straight out of Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”:
You always seem
outnumbered; you don’t dare make a stand
. You knew the cops
were going to make hell for Hybrid, just as they made hell for
Zeppelin years before.

The first thing they did was grab Robbie and
Mickey and haul them out of the building for questioning. Despite
Noelle’s cries of protest that she and Mickey weren’t even around
when it happened, they weren’t going to let the shaggy-haired,
bearded Mickey out of their grasp. They almost got Sage too, one
cop asking if they should question the “half-breed hippie” until
the medic told them he and I had just showed up.

Sage’s face flared with indignation—whether
it was because he was called a hippie or a half-breed, I don’t
know—but he couldn’t do anything, and if he tried, he’d be
questioned too. So we could only watch while two members of Hybrid
were taken away and only he and Noelle remained. Soon the cops
cleared out everyone who wasn’t a coroner or a paramedic, and we
found ourselves surrounded by the local media and questioning
onlookers. Sage refused to deal with anyone except for Jacob, who
took him off into the darkness to talk. One reporter with a camera
in tow tried to approach them, and Jacob grabbed the woman’s
microphone and tossed it on top of Ted Nugent’s trailer.

I stayed behind, trying to blend into the
black surroundings. By now all the musicians had retired to their
own areas, perhaps paranoid of impending drug searches. I found no
comfort in the gossip of the people who remained, talking about
Emeritta like it was inconsequential for a groupie to die, like she
had asked for it. I had only known her a day but it still burned
deep inside. And if I was being honest with myself, something just
didn’t sit right. Though it was totally possible, I didn’t believe
she had actually died of an overdose. It was too bad you couldn’t
convince people on your own gut feeling.

I hugged myself, feeling the humidity shift
to chilled air. I had nowhere to go, so I wandered around the back
of the trailer, trying to compose my thoughts. It was too fresh and
her body was still inside the trailer—it was going to take a long
time before the reality of it all would sink in. I remembered what
had happened when I found my mother dead in the bathroom all those
years ago—I was in a delirious stupor for weeks. The blocking
mechanism in my head was busy at work again.

I was alone in the dark back here. Or so I
thought. The crime scene investigator’s flash caused light to burst
from the tiny windows, and in one illumination I caught the face of
Graham standing at the rear of the trailer, a few paces in front of
me. In that flash I saw his pale face smiling gruesomely. It went
black again, and in the next flash, he was gone.

***

It was lucky we didn’t have a show the next
day, seeing as we had to wait around in Charlotte until Robbie and
Mickey were released from custody. We all slept on the bus—Bob had
parked it in an empty department store parking lot on the outskirts
of the city since Sage wanted us off the festival property and as
far away from it as possible.

No one slept well. The bus echoed with deep
swallows, sighs, and the occasional murmur. Ironically, the only
person who did seem to sleep was Graham. But after seeing him
smiling in the dark like that, nothing about him surprised me
anymore.

I tossed and turned all night, staring up at
the roof, trying to come to terms with things. My heart and my
brain were having a battle over what to focus on. My heart ached
for Emeritta, and her death was hitting me harder than perhaps it
should have. Part of it was just the shock, the other part was the
loss of someone I really liked. Then my brain came in and started
dwell on the hows and the whys. And when all was said and done, it
wanted to think about Graham. The goateed man sleeping on the
couch, snoring heavily, seemingly unaffected by any of this. It
wanted to think about the things he had said to me, that he was a
debt collector. It wanted to think about what I saw when I looked
at him. That image of his face contorting into one of a monster’s
rolled over and over again in my head. It didn’t matter how many
times I told myself I imagined it, that it was a product of stress
and lack of sleep and repeated exposure to very loud music. I kept
seeing it. My brain wanted to tell me something.

It turned out that by 10AM, Robbie and
Mickey had been released, but we didn’t pull up into the police
station until noon. They both climbed onto the bus, solemn and
embarrassed. Robbie looked like he had been to hell and back, with
puffy eyes and sallow skin. Mickey seemed on edge, eyes bloodshot
and buzzing with indignation, fingers tapping wildly on his
knee.

I made them some instant coffee and gave
them bananas and crumbly muffins to munch on. As the bus roared out
of the city toward Georgia, Jacob decided to call a meeting. I sat
in the booth, my knees curled up to my chest, feeling more like an
onlooker than anything.

First we heard from Robbie and Mickey, what
had happened to them in jail. They told their stories over and over
again to the police, with cross-examining from all angles. Robbie
had to lie and tell them they were just fooling around in the
trailer before he went to the bathroom. If he admitted at all that
he had used drugs or supplied the drugs that she ODed on, he would
have been in some major trouble. Those cops were looking for any
excuse to lock rock and roll hippies away. He then told us the
truth; that after he came back from the bathroom—and he had been in
there for ten minutes having the coke shits—he found Emeritta on
the floor. The drugs were nowhere to be found, presumably all in
her system, and even the cigar tube he kept the drugs in was
gone.

“Well isn’t that a bit weird?” Noelle spoke
up. “I didn’t see it anywhere in the trailer.”

“I know,” said Robbie. “I can’t even think
straight. I know, I
know
I left her with the cigar case. It
was right on the table damnit. I trusted her because she said she
didn’t do drugs. When I came out and found her there…well, maybe
the tube was still there and I didn’t see it. I wasn’t looking for
it. How could I when there was a fucking dead groupie on the
ground!”

“She wasn’t a groupie,” I said bitterly.
Everyone turned to look at me. I brought my gaze to the tops of my
freckled knees. “She was a lover of rock.”

“Anyway,” Robbie continued, “maybe she had
it in her hand. I don’t know. But when I look back I don’t remember
seeing it.”

“I think the cops took it,” Mickey said.

“If the coppers took it, they would have
questioned you about it,” Jacob pointed out. He was leaning against
the kitchen, his burly arms folded.

“So where is it?” Noelle pondered.

We all fell into silence and shrugs.

“Does it matter?” Sage asked, bringing his
eyes around to meet everyone else’s. “The girl is dead. It’s not
directly our fault, but it wouldn’t have happened had it not been
for us.”

Robbie glared. “Thanks Sage, real
supportive.”

Jacob sighed. “What Sage means is that it’s
all done. And to be honest, we’re lucky that we’re all sitting here
on the bus. And I mean all of us. This could have been a lot
worse.”

I snorted angrily. “How could it have been
worse? A girl fucking died in our trailer!”

“Oh, it’s your trailer now,” Mickey cut in.
“Since when are you part of the band?”

I narrowed my eyes. “I’m not, but it doesn’t
mean it’s not affecting me. Seems I’m the only one who actually
liked the girl.”

“You didn’t even know her,” said Noelle,
rolling her eyes.

“I think we should cancel the Atlanta show,”
Sage said quietly. That got everyone’s attention.