The Future Falls (3 page)

Most people preferred to sit where the band couldn't see their reactions,
but Charlie wasn't most people. She tucked her guitar under one of the open tables by the stage, caught the waitress' eye and ordered a Fat Tire as the song ended and the bouzouki player moved to the front microphone.

“I want to thank you all for coming out tonight, we're Four Men Down . . .”

There were five of them. The fifth was a woman with blue streaks in her hair and a smile that could probably be seen from space.

“. . . and we call Baltimore home.”

He waited until the crowd's cheering died down a bit before continuing. “I'd like to take a moment now to introduce the band. On guitar, Dave Anders. On electric bass, Mike Carter. On fiddle, our mistress of the bow, Tara McAllister. On drums, Paul Stephens. And I'm Gary Ehrlich on bouzouki.”

“Can you do that in public?” someone yelled from the back.

“We can't get him to stop,” the bass player responded.

Gary dipped his head and grinned, adjusting his tuning pegs as the room filled with laughter and innuendo. When he drew a fingernail across the strings, Charlie set her beer down and took notice. He'd re-tuned to FCDG, one tone below standard, in a noisy bar, by ear. Not too shabby. Bouzoukis usually played an interwoven accompaniment—a mix of open-string drones, two-note intervals, bass lines and melodic play—but Gary took the lead, fingers flying into “Boys of Blue Hill,” a popular Irish session tune, familiar, given the reaction, to many of the people listening.

He played a double drop style, two adjacent strings struck simultaneously, one with a flat pick and the other with his first fingernail. More importantly, at least as far as Charlie was concerned, he played like he was exactly where he wanted to be, doing exactly what he wanted to be doing. She drank her beer and drew petty, inconsequential charms in the condensation. Charms that said,
I want what he has
and were wiped away again before they could take
.

Damn, he was
good.
This music didn't cleanse, it moved in and made itself at home, leaving little room for anything else and that made it totally worth the crap she'd catch from Allie when she finally got back to Calgary.

By quarter to one, the three tables by the stage had been pulled together and O'Connell's had emptied but for Charlie, the band, the band's extended family, and Brian and Kevin Trang-Murphy who'd kept the original name when they bought the bar. No one remembered or cared that Charlie was a stranger—the universe arranging itself to fit the needs of a Gale girl.

“Specials didn't do so well tonight.” Brian set two platters of wontons stuffed with cheese and potato down on the tables then dropped into an empty chair. “We might as well eat them, they won't keep.”

“No bacon this week?” Dave asked. When Brian assured him they were as close to kosher as Vietnamese/Irish bar food got, he smacked Tara's fingers away from the wonton closest to him and popped it in his mouth. Tara cradled her hand and declared she'd never play the piano again. Someone pointed out she was a fiddler. Someone else said violinist and all fourteen of them got into a discussion about the difference, arguments tumbling over and wrapping around each other like puppies.

Charlie kept at least part of her attention on Gary, who sat drinking a coffee and eating his share of the wontons. When he spoke, she heard so many layers in his voice it took her four wontons and half a beer before she managed to separate the parts. Granted, less beer earlier on might have made the separation a bit easier, but since the beer also blunted a few other edges, screw it.

She heard contentment. As when he was playing, he was, right now, exactly where he wanted to be.

She heard love. For these people, these friends in general, and for Sheryl, his wife, in particular. When he spoke to Sheryl, that layer overwhelmed the others, obvious to anyone with working ears and half a brain.

She heard sadness. It sounded as though he were counting down the days to loss. Half of what he said had good-bye as the subtext.

He had a secret, Charlie realized with a sudden sense of kinship. He'd made his peace with keeping whatever it was to himself, but every now and then he wondered if he'd made the right choice. Every now and then, he'd shift his shoulders as though he were shifting the weight of the world.

He wasn't dying. Charlie'd heard Death join in every conversation she'd had with Auntie Grace last spring—they'd buried her in June—but Death didn't lurk behind Gary's laughter. Although death did. It was a subtle difference that seemed a bit emo for the bouzouki; it wasn't an instrument that lent itself to eyeliner and studded wrist bands.

She heard fear and anticipation. Doubt and joy.

“So, Charlie, got any advice about the whole itinerant musician gig?”

“Learn to depend on the kindness of strangers.” Charlie snatched the last wonton out from under Mike's fingers and saluted him with it. “Why? You planning on trying it?”

“Not likely,” Mike's wife Rhianna snorted. “And speaking of the kids . . .” She pushed her chair out and stood, one hand smacking her husband's shoulder. “. . . we should get back to them before my brother sells them for scientific experiments.”

“Nothing's open this late,” Mike told her, then turned back to Charlie as he got to his feet. “I'm not trying it, Gary is. Well, Gary and Sheryl. They sold the townhouse, bought an RV, loaded the cats, and are heading off to see the world.”

“Or as much of it as you can reach in an RV with a cat,” Paul added.

“This was in the manner of a good-bye gig,” Kevin said, stacking the empty platters. “Next week at this time, they'll be hell and gone away from here.”

“You can't get to hell in an RV,” Dave pointed out. “Even with cats.”

“I have a few gigs lined up.” Gary ducked his head, adjusting and readjusting his glasses. “We'll be fine.”

“We have savings,” Sheryl added.

While that wasn't his secret, quitting a secure job for the road certainly explained the fear, anticipation, and doubt as well as the undercurrent of good-bye. Charlie helped sort cables and listened as Gary talked about finding their wedding DVD when they packed up the townhouse.

“We have no idea how it ended up behind the hot water tank.”

“I suspect the cats,” Sheryl sighed.

Charlie'd already bought both the band's CDs and when Gary tried to give her a copy of his EP, she paid for that, too. “This is your living now, dude. Don't give it away.”

Half an hour later, they all stood out on the sidewalk in front of the bar as Kevin locked the door and Brian waved good-bye from inside the nearer front window. There were hugs and some tears and promises to stay in touch then, as Dave and Tara headed south, Charlie fell into step on Sheryl's right, heading north.

“My ride's this way,” she explained, glancing up at the sky. It looked as though the clouds were resting on top of the streetlights and, as little as she wanted to be caught out when the storm finally broke, she could feel a small park or a large yard a block or two away—either less likely to attract attention than waving good-bye and jumping back into the planter outside the optometrist's.

“So, Charlie . . .” Gary shifted his case to his left hand and put his right arm around Sheryl's shoulders. “. . .
do
you have any words of wisdom about the whole itinerant musician gig?”

Her itinerant musician gig wasn't exactly typical, but most of her friends walked the same road without her advantages. And some things were universal. “Getting called for three months' session work in Vancouver while your cousin's twins are teething is a godsend.” In more ways than one. She'd even managed to slip away before Jack could beg to go with her. Deciding to drive rather than drag half a dozen instruments through the Wood had meant she hadn't been able to use her inability to shift his scaled size as an excuse to leave him behind.

“Uh . . . Teething's not really an option. Anything a little less specific?”

Charlie waited for her phone to ring with one of Auntie Carmen's random bits of advice about clean underwear. When it didn't, although Auntie Carmen seldom missed so obvious a cue, she said, “Like anything else, music can be as much who you know as what. You'll have to work your contacts.”

“Contacts? He was an engineer until two weeks ago,” Sheryl laughed. The theme from
Jaws
ran under her words.

Ever since that summer in Cape Breton, Charlie had picked up a personal, albeit intermittent, soundtrack. Background music for the inside of her head. It had started as fiddle music, specifically Cape Breton fiddle music, but had branched out into multiple instruments and genres. Usually, although sometimes obliquely, pertinent to the matter at hand. Movie themes were new. “So you're thinking you might need a bigger boat?”

“I guess . . .”

Charlie could hear the worry behind Sheryl's confusion and suspected Gary could hear it, too.

“It's just,” he began without prompting, “that this . . .” He patted his bouzouki case with his free hand. “. . . is something I've always wanted to do. I finally realized I had no good reason not to do it. This is my chance, my one chance to let music have its place in my life, and I'm taking it.”

There was the joy.

Only the secret left.

“Fortunately,” he bent and kissed the top of Sheryl's head, “my wife loves me enough to give up heated tile floors in the bathroom.”

“I gave up the entire bathroom,” Sheryl reminded him with a laugh.

Charlie considered bluntly asking what his secret was. Not the secret of why Sheryl loved him more than heated tile floors—less impressive in Maryland than in Alberta where it sometimes snowed in July—but why he'd decided to finally give music a chance. He'd tell her, Charlie could make sure of that, but, bottom line, his secret had added music to the world—which Charlie was all in favor of—and they were all—Gary, Sheryl, and the secret—thousands of miles and an international border away from her family. That made it none of her business. She suspected the whole not telling his wife thing would come back and bite him on the ass, but that was even less of her business and, as she was quite possibly the worst person she could currently think of in regard to relationship advice, all she said was, “Good for you.”

He frowned. “Good for me?”

“Hey, Sheryl gave up heated floors. Good for both of you.”

“Most people think we're crazy.”

“First, I know
crazy
.” Auntie Ruby had been insisting the chickens were flying monkeys for long enough even the chickens had begun to believe her. “Second, I'm not most people. Me, I'm all about people following their dreams. My family is a big believer in dreams.” And, occasionally, in reading entrails. “I don't know of any bands looking to sign on a bouzouki, and I haven't heard about anyone who might need one for session work, but I do know someone who pays more attention to that sort of thing than me.” When Gary and Sheryl stopped to wait for a red light, Charlie looked up and down the empty street, shrugged, and waited with them. She pulled a pen from the front pocket on her gig bag, and, after a little digging, managed to find a crumpled receipt. “If anyone's recording or gigging folk or Irish in North America, Dave Clement will know about it. Actually,” she added thoughtfully, scrawling his number, “he's got a decent line on what's happening in the UK, too. Tell him I told you to call and he'll know you're worth his time.”

Sheryl began to protest, but Gary stopped her.

“And this . . .” Charlie paused, decided she might as well go big since she still hadn't gone home, and wrote another line of numbers. “. . . is my cell. Call if you need me. If you're ever in the Calgary area, maybe we can throw a band together for a couple of local gigs.” She couldn't promise more than that. A band would tie her to a place, and she needed to be free to run.

“Calgary, Alberta?” Gary shook his head. “Canada? That's a bit of a distance. What are you doing in Maryland?”

Charlie grinned. “Being itinerant.”

Sheryl turned the receipt over, twisting it so it caught the spill of light from the streetlamp. “The Derby Girls?”

“My youngest sisters are on a team in the local roller derby league,” Charlie told her as the light changed. She flashed a smile at a very pissed-off cabbie trapped behind the red, the only car in sight, and started across the street. “Gale Force Eleven and Gale Force Twelve. Our last name is Gale,” Charlie added as both Gary and Sheryl looked confused. “Gale force eleven is a violent storm, twelve is a hurricane.”

“Isn't Roller Derby a little . . . dangerous?”

Not as much as staking vampires in the Paris catacombs. Or beheading zombies in New Orleans. Or whatever the hell they'd been up to in Peru before Auntie Jane got a call from an old friend and sent Charlie to haul their butts home.

“Please,” she snorted, “it's Canadian Roller Derby. It's all ‘sorry about the kidney shot and excuse me, coming through.'”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. This is where we turn.” Gary pointed west at the barely visible sign for a public parking lot. “You're . . .”

“Still heading north.” She could feel trees on the other side of the big brick church. “Best of luck following the dream.” As there'd been enough beer and music for hugs, Charlie took the opportunity to trace a charm on the bouzouki case, protecting the instrument within from rough handling, sudden changes in the weather, and cat urine.

“If we're in Calgary . . .” Gary grinned, all of them aware of how unlikely that would be. “. . . we'll be sure to . . .”

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
rang out from Charlie's pocket. “It was gangster Shakespeare or Katy Perry,” she explained, pulling out the phone.