War for the Oaks (11 page)

She winced and picked up her own guitar. "Ever heard Bram Tchaikovsky's version of 'I'm a Believer'?" He shook his head, but continued to watch her, his fingers poised over his strings.

"Start it," he mumbled finally, and Eddi shrugged.

The song did kick off with only guitar. Then Carla dropped in after a few measures with a series of snare drum punches, and Dan's synthesizer yowled across it all.

Then, in precisely the right place, the bass came in. It began as if the Rocky Mountains had begun to walk. It sounded like the voice of the magma under the earth's crust, and it picked up the whole song and rolled it forward like water exploding out of a breaking dam. They
were suddenly tight, all four of them, as if they were a single animal and that monster heartbeat was their own. Eddi listened wonderingly as they played the complicated stop beats in the chorus with respectable precision. She was dimly aware that she was playing some of the best guitar of her life.

When they were done, Eddi looked around and saw her own amazement on Carla's and Dan's faces. "Well," she said, and, unable to think of anything to add, said it again.

No one declared the newcomer to be the band's bass player. It would have been beside the point. Eddi only wanted to see if they could make other songs sound like that. She had no idea if he could sing; given his willingness to talk, it seemed unlikely. But for bass like that, she could sacrifice a harmony voice.

When they took a break she asked him, "Um, do you . . . I don't think I ever heard your name."

He looked up—he was about Eddi's height, but he always seemed to be looking at the floor, or his feet, so any time he looked at her, it was up. All she caught of what he said was "hedge."

"Hedge?" she repeated desperately.

He nodded, and his smile seemed cautious, but satisfied.

When the ads they'd composed appeared in the two weekly entertainment papers, the phouka accompanied her downtown every day to check the reply boxes. At last, she'd sorted out three guitarists to audition, and asked them to show up on the third floor at scattered hours on Thursday.

Four o'clock's candidate had superb technique—he was one of the fastest and cleanest lead players Eddi had ever heard. But he didn't seem to listen to the rest of the band, and his lead breaks, though complex and flashy, were too often just a collection of notes in the right key, as if he despised the melody.

The six-thirty guitarist intruded his riffs on other band members' showcase bits, and wanted to do most of the lead vocals. (He told Eddi that club owners in Minneapolis didn't like to hire bands with female lead vocalists. Eddi smiled and told him she didn't think he'd fit in. He left angry.)

Eight-thirty was the best choice, Eddi decided: a woman with cropped red hair and a white Stratocaster whose solemn expression had seemed older than her face. After she'd left, Eddi called a break. Carla ran down to the Qwik-Stop for take-out coffee, Dan settled down to work over the patches on a synthesizer, and Hedge went for a walk. Eddi sat down on the edge of the carpet and resolved to liberate some seating for the place—if they found a guitarist and became a band.

The phouka dropped down with his usual boneless grace beside her. Tonight he had chosen, from whatever mysterious closet he conjured his clothing, a double-breasted shirt of black-shot red, slim black brocade pants, and snakeskin boots. "So the tale is told? These are the three choices?" He'd found a Hershey bar somewhere; he held it out, and she broke off a chunk. She remembered to not say thank you.

"Mmm. Either we go for the third one, or we run the ad for another week," Eddi said.

"What did you think of her, then?"

"She had the chops, and she seemed like a decent human being. A little young, maybe. I'm tempted to go with her just for the sake of having three women in the band."

"But. . . ?"

"I don't know. She had something missing. Maybe a lack of imagination or something." Eddi sighed and fell back onto the rug. "Maybe I'm being too picky," she said to the rafters.

"No. You can afford to wait. Find precisely what you want."

"All of today wasted, then."

"Why do you feel so pressed for time?" he asked. His voice was a little sad, and she looked at him in surprise. "If the band distresses you so, then you need not have one. I only threw in my lot with Carla because you seemed to want work."

Eddi shook her head. "Carla knows me better than I do. I would have gone bats without this. It's the only thing I really know."

"But it seems to swallow you up. You've gone forward like a horse in blinders, seeing only ahead, only the band."

She frowned at him and looked away into the shadowed rafters. She realized with a rush of fear that there might be room there for something to hide—and knew the answer to the phouka's question.

"What is it?" he said.

"What's what?"

"I thought I saw you shiver."

Eddi shook her head. "Oh, hell," she said finally. "Why act brave? If I think about the band all the time, you see, I don't think about . . ."

The phouka looked stricken. "Ah. About my people's little quarrel, and your part in it. Are you so frightened, then?"

Eddi discovered that ignoring the problem for several days only made her feel worse now. "Oh, for godsake, a bunch of people out of a horror movie want me dead! And I'm not supposed to be scared?"

The phouka took both of her hands in his. His grip was hard, but not painful.

"Eddi," he said, "I will protect you. They will not—they cannot—get past me to strike at you."

She laughed hollowly. "You know, a girl learns to tell when a guy is making her a promise he can't keep."

"Haven't I kept it thus far?"

"I don't know. Have they made any more tries at me?" He scowled and looked away.

"Have they?"

He nodded, a curt bob of his head.

She drew her hands out of his. "Oh."

"I hadn't meant to tell you. I thought to spare you the worry."

"Wouldn't it be easier," Eddi asked after a moment, "if you didn't have to guard me
and
keep me in the dark about it?"

"Yes," he agreed, but hesitantly.

"Well, then," Eddi said, "let's get all the skeletons out of the closet."

The door to the outside swung slowly open.

The phouka was on his feet blindingly fast, standing between Eddi and the door. She looked past his kneecap and saw a man framed in the doorway, caught in the darkness between the outside and inside lights.

"Excuse me," said the man, "I should have called first. A friend told me you were looking for a guitarist . . . ?"

His voice was the first clear impression Eddi had of him. It was low, resonant, and musical, with what seemed like a pleasant accent, until she realized that it was an
absence
of accent. Then he stepped into the room and the light. Eddi thought for a moment of porcelain, but she had never seen anything made of porcelain that looked delicate and rugged at once.

He was tall and slender and interestingly pale. His face was longish, with high, wide cheekbones and a pointed chin, and his eyes, under black lashes and brows, were a breathtaking green. Shining blue-black hair spilled over his forehead in appealing disarray, and Eddi saw that what she had at first taken for reflected light was a wide white streak in his hair, a little off center. He wore a black leather jacket and tight black jeans. Somehow they seemed to bring color into the room.

"Come in," Eddi thought to say, once she could speak at all.

The man looked at the phouka, who hadn't moved since the door opened, and nodded. Then he turned away to bring in the things he'd left on the landing, and the phouka stirred and flexed his hands. Eddi wished she could see his expression.

The man in black returned with a scuffed guitar case, a good-sized amp, an accessory bag, and a smaller case that he carried under his arm. He set them down and came over to Eddi, who scrambled to her feet. The phouka stepped to one side.

"My name's Willy Silver," the new arrival said. "I don't know how my friend got this address but—are you looking for a lead guitarist? Have I come at a bad time?"

"No! Not at all. You want to audition?" Eddi recognized it as a silly question, and hurried on. "Go ahead and set up. The drummer and the bass player should be back any minute." That reminded her of Dan, and she looked for him in his little fortress of equipment. He was staring at Willy Silver as if the latter were a famous sculpture that had just appeared, and Dan hadn't decided whether to admire it or worry that someone would accuse him of stealing it.

Carla came rattling up the stairs with four cups of coffee. She stopped at the sight of Willy Silver unpacking a guitar made of some dark red wood, and looked as stupefied as Eddi. The phouka took the tray of cups away from her gently, and Eddi made the introductions.

By the time Willy was set up and in tune, Hedge was back and hunched over his bass. He seemed as oblivious to Willy as he was to everything, and barely nodded when he was introduced. Eddi found that comforting.

Willy took off his jacket to reveal a high-collared, creamy white shirt that Eddi suspected was silk. He rolled the sleeves up to mid-forearm and hung his guitar on again. Then he looked at Eddi, an open, dazzling gaze from his green eyes. "Where shall we start?"

Eddi resisted the temptation to tell him, and said, "Do you know, 'Thrill of the Grill'? Kim Carnes?"

"Well enough."

Eddi left her guitar in the stand and went to the mike. Carla gave Willy a pair of four-beats, and he led off with a fast rhythmic fuzzedout riff. Carla spiked it with her high-hat cymbal on the two and four counts, and it sounded so fine that Eddi almost forgot to sing. He cut way back during the verse to leave room for her vocals and Dan's vaguely demented repeating melody between the lines of lyrics. Between them they gave the first verse a feeling of breath-holding anticipation. Then Carla kicked in with the drum fill that signaled the chorus, Hedge and his bass came into the mix, and the waiting was over. Willy's voice added new weight to Carla's and Dan's harmonies. The bridge, when they got to it, was nice and tight, and Willy's lead break was manic, crisp, and tasty. Eddi could feel them all catching fire off each other, responding to each other's experiments. Carla ended the whole thing with a Keith Moon-like percussive frenzy.

"Ah," said Carla, when the last chord had faded. "Better than sex."

Eddi found herself blushing.

"Speak for yourself," Dan said. "But yeah, that was all right."

"All right? Come on, Rochelle, loosen up." Carla sighed. "We were terrific. We charmed the bolts out of the rafters." She turned to Eddi, and pointed at Willy Silver. "Where did you find this guy?"

"Just lucky, I guess." Eddi looked at Willy and looked away, feeling unaccountably shy. "Still interested?"

"Maybe—but you haven't heard it all yet." He opened the smaller case at his feet and lifted out an electrified violin.

There was a question in his face, a challenge. He wasn't asking if she wanted him to play the violin; he was daring her to think of something for him to play it on.

"Oh, let's do some nice cobwebby David Bowie," Eddi said, and picked up her guitar. "Can you play 'Suffragette City' on that?"

A fierce, lopsided grin washed across his face, and he propped the violin under his chin.

It was superb. Willy and Dan worked out the balance between fiddle and synthesizer by what seemed telepathy, and Eddi kept her own guitar playing at something just beyond percussion. They were demented, they were loud, they were ridiculously theatrical. Carla threw her sticks in the air and caught them on the fly. Dan hunched over the keys like Frankenstein over his monster. Hedge wrinkled his nose and showed his teeth occasionally, which for Hedge was the rim of hysteria. Eddi did Joan Jett cheerleader leaps. And Willy . . . he jumped, he swaggered, he danced, he mugged shamelessly. He was beautiful.

When it was over, Eddi flung her head back and laughed for sheer excess adrenaline. Then she saw the phouka.

He was standing very straight against the right-hand wall. His chin was a little tucked, in a way that made him look wary. His black tilted eyes were wide, and they met hers before his gaze slid downward, before he could shutter away his look of dread and longing behind his eyelids.

Her mood faltered as the phouka walked out of sight behind a hanging sheet. Then Dan started up a sustained, electric gospel chord on the synthesizer, and intoned, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life. . . ."

Willy laughed, set down the violin and grabbed for his guitar. He shot Eddi a sideways glance and a teasing grin as he slid the strap over
his shoulder. Eddi's insides gave a curious, not unpleasant lurch. Then they both turned to watch Dan ham his way through the introduction to "Let's Go Crazy."

Carla started the drumbeat, and they poised for the leap into the song. Dan got to, "In this life, you're on your own!" and with a pointing finger, handed the lyrics off to Eddi as Willy and Hedge began the slashing low-end rhythms of the guitar intro.

Willy had turned to watch her, playing everything to her. It egged her on. She matched his guitar riffs, then let him split off into a burst of single notes, then matched him again. She began to mimic his movements and he noticed and responded, until they'd established an improvised choreography. Sometimes they were shoulder to shoulder, the necks of their guitars parallel as railroad tracks, and she thought she could hear him breathing. She sang into whichever mike was nearest, and on the choruses they sang into one mike, their faces close to keep within the pickup range. They mugged at each other, baring their teeth like a pair of snarling cats. His green eyes glowed like deep water.

They led the band through the song as if it were a circular staircase they ran up. At its peak Eddi let him go, let him tear into a solo that seemed to rend the air apart. His whole body went into it, arching backward like a parenthesis, and she could see the moment at which he became unconscious to anything but sound. The last chord was both the resolution they had rushed eagerly toward, and the bittersweet end of it.