The Friendship Song (9 page)

Around the middle of the afternoon my dad ordered me into the kitchen and made me eat something. And when I got back to the TV, they were saying that Ty Shaney had left the city. He and the rest of the band members were continuing the Neon Shadow tour.

That didn't make any sense. Ty Shaney was supposed to be like a blood brother to Nico. He shouldn't leave him lying in a hospital alone.

I called Rawnie. It was probably the tenth time that day I'd talked to her, but this time I was so upset I could barely make sense. She said, “Save it, Harper. I'm coming over.” Then when she did come over, and I told her what the news had said, she thought I must have heard wrong. She had to see it on the next bulletin before she'd believe me.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, Ty. You traitor. You dirty rat. We thought you were one of the good guys.” Her voice sounded like she wanted to cry.

I said, “So now Nico's lying there—”

“I am going to rip up every picture I have of Ty Shaney.”

“That won't help Nico. He's all by himself and somebody's got to help him somehow.”

My father had come in to hear the news, and we had forgotten he was there. He was listening to us, and he said, “I bet his folks are there with him.”

I said, “I don't think Nico has a mother or a father.” I don't know why I knew that. Maybe I'd read it somewhere. Maybe it was just because I knew who he was, the desperado, the dark stranger passing through town, and that kind of person has no family. However I knew, it turned out I was right.

Rawnie and I went outside so we could talk by ourselves, and she said, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, what are we going to do? We can't let him just lie there and die. It's up to us if we're going to do something.”

I looked around as if that could help. Weird junk everywhere. Pipe cactus. Whirligig going round and round. Wind chimes. It would be getting dark soon, and I knew what would happen then.

I said, “I guess we both know who we ought to talk to.”

“Yeah. So are we going to go do it now?”

“I guess.”

“You ready?”

“I don't know if I'll ever be ready, but we're going to do it anyway.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Gus,” I said, “at the concert, just before Nico fell, there was a, like, a snake hanging over him. A huge snake with scaly wings.”

She was out back, still trying to find something that would go with a flagpole eagle, a Texas license plate, and a smashed Pepsi can. When I started she was bent over rooting around so I was talking to her butt, but by the time I was done she was standing bolt straight and facing me. And that was the first time she looked old to me. I mean I always just assumed she was around my dad's age or maybe a little older, but to look at her most of the time she might have been twenty or fifty. She just didn't show an age for sure. But this time she looked kind of gray all over.

She asked Rawnie a question with her eyes, and Rawnie nodded and said, “I saw it too.”

“Are you all right? Nightmares?”

“I haven't slept enough to have nightmares yet.”

“At least you can joke about it. Groover? You okay?”

“It's not the snake that bothers me, it's worrying about Nico.”

“Well, I'm worrying more about you two,” Gus said in a soft voice. “You aren't supposed to be able to see the Dark Serpent, either of you.”

She knew all about it. “Then you did send it.”

“No. No, I don't choose who is to go. I just—provide a place for them.” At first I didn't recognize the look on her face, because it was the first time I'd seen her really upset. “For God's sake, Harper, what do you think I am? If I'd known something like that was going to happen at the concert, you girls wouldn't have been there.”

We stood staring at each other. Rawnie was the one who said, “What place?”

“Huh?” Gus looked at her.

“Where do they go? Once the Dark Serpent comes for them?”

“These days? Here, mostly.”

I felt like there were bugs crawling all over me. I wanted to yell, but all I could do was squeak it out: “All the dead people in the world are in your backyard?”

“No! No, the Dark Serpent only comes for heroes and great lovers and poets.” Gus still looked old, but she was starting to get back her pink face and her smile. “The rest of us have to slip out in the more usual way.”

I had a feeling she could have told me all the details, and I didn't want to know them. I stood shivering. Rawnie said, “But the ones the Dark Serpent brings—they are here, they make music.”

“The ones you are aware of make music. You can't see or hear the others. You two aren't supposed to be able to hear my backyard band either.” Gus did not sound sorry that we could, though. In fact she seemed kind of proud. Of us.

I was still hung up on one real basic fact. “Because they're dead,” I said. Just trying to make sure.

“Dead, yet not dead.” Which didn't help me any. But Gus was not seeing me. She was standing tall and staring far away, and now if I couldn't tell her age, it was because she would never grow all the way old. That scared me a little. When she spoke, it scared me more. She didn't sound like herself. She didn't even sound like a woman. Her voice had gone deep and strange, as if it came out of the center of the earth, as if somebody else was talking through her mouth.

She said: “I am Aengus. I am the master of the afterworlds where heroes dwell. Those who come to me are the ones who will not quite die. I have hosted the feasts at Valhalla, I welcomed King Arthur to Avalon. I was the god of the Blessed Isles, and poets and warriors came to me on horses that ran atop the waves. I was the sunset, and Wyatt Earp rode into my arms. I was on a mountaintop in California, and James Dean and a hundred others came to me there.”

I didn't like being scared. It made me mouthy. Too loud, I said, “And now you're
here
?”

“Yes. Why not? All places are under the same holy sky.” She looked around at her backyard full of junk, and her eyes were bright as a hawk's. “They lived for metal,” she said, “and for the city, and for excess.”

I didn't care. “Dead is
dead
,” I said. “What's going to happen to Nico?”

“Once he dies, it will depend how long people remember him.”

“No!” He couldn't die. I started to cry, and Rawnie put her arms around me, and Gus stooped down to face me.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she had her own voice back, she was just an ordinary person again, a funny-faced woman in a baseball cap. “I'm sorry, I was forgetting what it's like for …”

She didn't finish the sentence. I glared at her over Rawnie's shoulder, sniffling. For regular people, she meant. For people who don't have one life after another.

“Harper,” she said, real gently this time. “I think he is going to die. He's letting go now. His spirit is already here with the others. It sits and watches and will not sing, but it is here.”

It wasn't just that I wanted to help Nico, or save him, or meet him and talk with him. That was partly it, that I felt like Rawnie did, that I would have died to say hi to him and tell him I loved him. But even more it was that I wanted to be something besides what I was, which was an overgrown twelve-year-old girl with not enough guts to tell her father she needed a bra.

We were back at Rawnie's house. She had not ripped up every picture she had of Ty Shaney. It was like we were just too tired. The two of us were flopped on her bed and listening to her radio, numb, waiting for the bad news. We didn't want to eat or talk or anything.

But after a while the want-to-be-something feeling started coming together inside me, and I said to Rawnie, “Listen, if we were—” Then I stopped, because I couldn't say Nico and Ty anymore. They had turned out to be not what we thought they were. Ty anyway. All the Neon Shadow dreams we had made up were lies.

“If we were what?”

“If we were somebody else besides us. If we were heroes, like in a song. What would we do?”

“Just tell me what you're thinking, Harper.”

“We'd go get Nico and bring him back.”

She turned her head and looked at me in that cat-staring way she had, and after a minute she said, real low, “How?”

“I dunno. How did we get to see the dark snake?”

“It was just—I was all the way into the music.”

“Me too. Like I was lost and the whole world was music. Like I was swimming in it.”

We looked at each other a minute longer, and then she said in a soft, calm voice, “Go home. Pretend to go to bed. Then sneak out and meet me at the corner of the front porch, where the whirligig is.”

I understood. We didn't need to say another word. I just nodded at her and went down her stairs and outside to where the sky was turning silver gray, like a Dobro's belly.

The music started one faint note at a time, coming at us out of the night like it was echoing from someplace very far away. Not so far away in distance, we knew now. We were sitting on the porch, and we just had to go to Gus's backyard. But in another way it was the longest walk anybody could ever take. The Aengus McCogg Backyard Band was performing in a stadium as big as eternity.

“Close your eyes,” I whispered to Rawnie. “Listen.”

I did the same thing myself and sat and tried to let the music into me. It was hard, because I was afraid. But at the same time it just had to happen, because the music was calling, calling, and it was so beautiful, and I wanted to know what song the band was playing, and I wanted to hear the words.

And slowly, gently, the way dusk turns into dark, it happened, and I could hear the drums clearly, and the quick bell-clustered notes of the guitars, and organ roar, and saxophone wail, and the voices blending and shouting.

The angel came and said, Hey, little baby boy

I'm gonna give you a kiss, gonna let you sing

Like a devil in the fire, like a god in the sky
.

We said, Daddy don't stop, don't stop
,

Don't quit with a taste, we want the whole thing
,

Hey, give me your threads, hey, give me those wings

We're gonna dance on the shore while the tide keeps coming
.

So we took it all, and we bounced it off the mountaintop

And every Coke Classic, we drank it to the last drop
.

The angel came and told us, Now say good-bye
,

We said, Hey, Daddy, we're not about to die
.

I felt somebody touch my hand. I didn't have to look, I knew who it was, but I couldn't exactly remember her name. Or my own. I was me, all right, but also somebody else, somebody more, in this place.

Whatever place this was.

I opened my eyes and looked around at a gray meadow full of strange, steely trees with bare branches. Ahead was the dark path that led toward the concert, toward the stadium, but between me and the path stood a deer with its head up, watching me. It was a tall deer with strong shoulders, a stag, and it had long, pointed metal antlers, the sharpest I had ever seen.

I stood up, and my comrade stood up with me. I looked at her. The smooth tawniness of her face told me nothing, yet everything.

“You don't have a mother either,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. “She was in the army, she got killed in an accident. What about yours?”

“She took off right after I was born. I've never even met her. I guess Gus is my mother now.”

That name out of nowhere seemed to put something back into sync in me. I blinked at her and knew who she was. “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Rawnie.”

“Yo, Harper.” She looked me over like she was checking to make sure I had my fly zipped or something. “Where's your harp?”

She was making one of her straight-faced little jokes. But I really felt like I should have a harp, like I'd left it somewhere, and where was it?

“Come on,” I said, and took a few steps. The deer snorted and menaced with its antlers.

“Whoa!” Rawnie exclaimed, grabbing at my arm. “Those are sharper than spears.”

“Let us pass,” I said to the deer. “I am the daughter of Aengus Mac Og. Let us pass.” It looked at me for a moment, then stood back and cleared the way.

I looked at Rawnie and asked her, “You ready for this?” We both knew we might never come out. Once a person goes into that place, they're not supposed to come back.

“I might not ever be ready,” Rawnie said, “but let's do it anyway.”

We walked to where the shadowy path began and knew right away that we still had a long way to go. There were bouncers everywhere. The first one was Gus's old gas pump. I mean, I knew it was the gas pump, just as I knew the deer was the pipe-and-pitchfork deer from her front yard. But that didn't mean the deer couldn't spear us with its horns, and it didn't mean the gas pump couldn't stop us either. It was a tall white lady with a round glass head, and she said to us in a rusty voice, “Tickets. You need tickets to get in here.”

“C'mon,” I whispered to Rawnie, and we ran past her. But she had rubber arms ten feet long, and they shot out like tentacles and snapped around our waists with her heavy steel hands hitting our backs. We screamed and spun our way out of them and kept running and ran into somebody or something else that laughed like a machine and had a face like a carnival freak and threw the long shadows of its uplifted hands on the ground. We screamed again and knocked it over, getting away. Then we ran like rabbits. Half a minute later, though, we knew we were lost and had to stop and stand and listen, panting.

The band was playing, “Walk tall, walk tall, into the darkness of the longest night of all.”

“That way,” Rawnie puffed, and we headed toward the music, trying to do what it said. Which was hard because at the same time we tried to stay in the shadows and dodge the bouncers. Some of them were just regular people patrolling the place, a lot like the security guards at the Arena except I knew that in daylight and in my right mind I wouldn't have been able to see them. Maybe feel their hands pushing me away from places I wasn't supposed to be, yes, but not see them. There were other kinds of security guards too. Rawnie and I saw a Chinese dragon snorting fire through its metal nostrils, a giant pigeon flying over with eyes that glowed like night-lights, a shadow that grew hands. No wonder nobody bothered Gus's property. Aengus Mac Og's backyard was full of guardians to keep the living out.