Bombed Page 9

  “That’s sure blunt. Anybody ever tell you you’re lacking in social skills?”

  He stretched out his legs, and like her, he was wearing shorts today. She couldn’t help but notice his legs. They were long and lean—runner’s legs—not what she wanted to be noticing right now.

  “I haven’t yet decided if I want a booker,” she said.

  “Still awfully blunt.” He tipped up his beer, and when he brought it back down, he was doing his annoying grin again—the one that seemed to say, how could she not see what a great-looking guy he was.

  Okay, she did see that, whether she wanted to or not. She saw the impish crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and the boyishly tousled hair cleverly offset by the manly stubble.

  But he’d made his choice at the record store.

  “I need to know what you saw my uncle doing,” she said.

  His grin only got wider. “Take all the time you want to decide about the booker thing, but you don’t have to be so hostile, do you? It’s a beautiful day. We’re sitting in this lovely backyard. Looks like you got a gopher problem though.”

  She looked out at the pock-marked lawn rather than keep looking at him—his legs, his shoulders, his grin, or any of the other stuff he clearly knew he had. “I don’t know if it’s gophers. I tried to put the dirt back. It hasn’t happened again.”

  “But see, we could just talk, the way we did before, get to know each other more. Like we could talk about Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and what would Elvis Presley have done without Big Mama Thornton and her?”

  “Hey, this is important.” She turned back to him to emphasize how important it was and immediately felt that Reggae thing fluttering in her chest again. In an effort to steady herself she said, “I thought you made it clear that other than maybe being my booker there was no point in the two of us getting to know each other better.”

  “I did?” His grin turned into an incredulous look that was way too cute not to have been practiced in front of a mirror. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

  She was about to throw her beer at him. “I said this is important. Did you really see my uncle get out of a van?”

  “Yeah. So that’s a problem?” Maybe he was looking halfway real now, surprised anyway.

  “Well, it’s unusual. You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Guess I should’ve written down the license plate. Let’s see . . .” He closed his eyes and frowned. “Idaho, a Y. . . and an 8 . . . maybe two 8’s. Or they could’ve been 3’s. Sometimes I can do this eidetic trick.”

  Clearly he had a lot of tricks.

  He opened his eyes. “Chrysler, Town & Country.”

  “Forget it. That’s not the point.”

  “So what’s the point?” Now came a serious look, softness in the eyes, firm jaw.

  She would have drenched him with her beer except she needed a hefty swig of it. “The point is he hasn’t had any friends. He hasn’t seen anyone, or gone anywhere in anybody’s car, no matter what make or model, for maybe forty years. Except for with his mom, of course. And his sister. Sisters. And me.”

  “So . . . okay, but he does go out. You said he goes to that strip mall.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you’ve been on the road for the past three weeks. You don’t know what he’s been doing while you were gone.”

  “I guess.”

  “So he’s gotten better with age, right? He could’ve made some friends.”

  What was that? He was familiar with Michael’s condition? She felt a spookiness at the back of her neck. But she’d just told him her uncle hadn’t had any friends since he was in his twenties. If Wes was at all knowledgeable about mental illness, that would make him guess schizophrenia, which often became less severe with age.

  “You’re right, he could’ve made a friend,” she said.

  “Friends, I think, as in more than one. He got out of the back of the van. There were probably two people in the front.”

  She worked on her beer some more while taking this in. “He did tell me he’d made some friends. Last week. And he met them at that strip mall.” Now she remembered. She hadn’t exactly believed him at the time.

  “Then it isn’t necessarily anything to be concerned about, right? Although his friends could’ve dropped him off in a safer spot.”

  No, maybe it wasn’t important. Except something did seem to be wrong with Michael, the way he’d become so closed in on himself, Friday and again today. And Friday he’d said he’d had a big lunch. With his new friends?

  “It has been a long time since he’s had any friends,” Annie said. “Maybe he could use some help with it. Maybe I should make an appointment with Dr. Kortge.”

  “Good idea.” Wes drained the last of his beer and gave her another grin, but now he didn’t seem quite so full of himself. There was even a hint of apology in his blue eyes, as if he knew he’d been kind of an ass when she’d been worrying about her uncle. “Bet you’ve been listening to those records you bought. I’m envious. No stereo in my motel room. I’m going to have to wait till I get home.”

  “Which is where?”

  He seemed to hesitate. Why? “Seattle,” he said.

  “That’s not far.” She played Seattle a lot. A booking agent from there might have become interested in her band. And he was obviously successful. Just look at his car.

  Plus he’d helped Michael when Michael had apparently needed help.

  All these thoughts ran through her head, but the part of her that kept noticing his eyes, his legs, and the way his chest and shoulders filled out his Tom Waits T-shirt, knew these were only excuses for what she wanted to do. “You don’t have a stereo at your motel? You must have an MP3 player, or something.”

  He laughed. “I bought records. No turntable.”

  “What would you like to hear?”

  Chapter 12

  As soon as Wes came into her living room, Annie could see him light up in a kidlike almost guilty way. Like he’d sneaked into a toy store and any minute his parents might find him there and drag him out. She’d built shelves that completely filled one wall. CD’s were on the higher shelves, but the bottom two held vinyl, packed so tightly Wes was clearly struggling to read the spines.

  “They’re alpha,” she said.

  “Then let’s start at the A’s and work our way through!”

  She had to laugh. “I tried that once. The problem wasn’t just that it would’ve taken the rest of my life. A record up in the B’s might make me want to hear something way down in the R’s.”

  “Okay, we’ll go for random then and let that free association thing work.”

  He pulled one out. It was Junior Kimbrough, someone she hadn’t played for years. Probably everybody got into ruts, and it was always nice to be jogged out of hers so she could hear an artist she hadn’t heard for some time.

  While she was putting that record on, Wes kept reading spines. “You’ve got country and western back into the thirties? Old delta blues, jump blues. You’ve even got the Harry Smith anthologies of American folk!”

  “A lot of the older stuff I inherited from my parents,” she said.

  Then Junior Kimbrough was settling into his mournful groove, and she went to get a couple more beers. When she got back, Wes was sitting smack in the middle of the couch since that was the best place for the speakers. So she had no choice. She had to sit right by him.

  Also, he’d turned up the volume. She’d left it fairly low since many people liked to talk over music. It was hard to tell if they were really listening at all. She preferred, at least when she was alone, to play it as loud as it would be if the musicians were there in the room and then listen with that same respect, as if the performers were standing right in front of her. Wes must have shared this philosophy. He thanked her when he took the beer but otherwise didn’t say a word except between cuts, and even then the clever repartee that had been one of his more annoying traits was replaced with what seemed much more genuine responses to the music, like
, “That’s almost eerie, isn’t it? The way his rhythms suck you in!” Or simply, “Amazing!”

  She’d inherited not only many of the records but a lot of the stereo equipment. You could hardly buy huge rock and roll speakers like these anymore. Her parents had left her an equally over-powered amp but a subtle subwoofer by today’s hip-hop standards. She’d added some tweeters and a state of the art turntable since theirs had become hopelessly marginalized by years of dust.

  Judging from his enthusiastic between-the-cuts comments, Wes appreciated all of this. When the Junior Kimbrough came to an end, he went searching for—and found—T-Model Ford. During that longer gap in the music, while he was finding the T-Model and putting it on, he raved some more about her record collection. He also went into a kind of academic spiel about Junior Kimbrough’s African roots and his influence on Keith Richards. Then, when Annie was beginning to expect him to stay with black blues, he put on the New York Dolls and had things to say about their “protopunk” sound too.

  She decided he couldn’t help it if he looked like a young Jude Law. Anyone who looked like that was bound to develop a lot of confidence with women, confidence that you might take for obnoxious arrogance. He seemed to love music as much as she did even though he came to it in a more analytical way.

  Which fit a booker. And some of his comments were interesting. She hadn’t known the New York Dolls had gotten their break by opening for Rod Stewart, another example of how a band could benefit from an opening slot. That got her to wondering again if he could really jumpstart her career, but it also made her want to hear Rod Stewart’s “Mandolin Wind,” and then, since Wes hadn’t known about the Everly Brothers’ cover of it, she played that too. Next she played the records she’d just bought—not the Towns Van Zandt because it was in fact depressing, but the other two.

  And their conversation began to flow the way it had in the record store—before she made her ultimatum and brought it to a screeching halt.

  But that had been the right thing to do. It really didn’t work to mix business and sex. Plus the way Uncle Michael was acting, she should probably pay more attention to him right now. And even though she was no longer delivering LSD, when the Cayenne guy made his next move, that might create problems for anyone who happened to be close to her.

  So she would ask Wes to leave as soon as the needle began to swish at the end of this side. She would say that to herself, but then each time she would forget—or something—and either he or she would put on another record instead.

  He’d taken off his boots, she’d slipped out of her flip-flops, and once she braced her bare feet on the coffee table—a kind of absurd-looking Queen Anne piece of her grandmother’s—he braced his bare feet on it too. Four sets of toes twitching to the beat. Two sets of bare legs so close they sometimes touched—sending aftershocks all through her.

  Maybe a woman her age couldn’t completely turn off the part of her that wanted the touch of a man.

  Still, she kept intending to ask him to leave, and then Michael came out of his bedroom. She’d completely lost track of the time. She found it was seven o’clock.

  Michael headed for his computer. She got up and went to him. “I was planning to fix fajitas for dinner,” she said. “That won’t take long.”

  “You don’t have to. Not for me,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Because you had another big lunch?”

  “Thai food.”

  “That sounds nice. You ate with your new friends?”

  “Yeah.” He was sitting at his computer by then, wiggling the mouse, watching the screen come back to life.

  “I’m glad you’re making friends. What are their names?”

  No answer. Because he’d zoned in on the screen? Or was the secretiveness and evasiveness that used to be so much a part of his illness coming back. There had been a time when he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even her grandmother, anything about himself, where he’d gone if he went for a walk or even what book he was reading.

  “I’d like to meet your friends sometime.” She knew this sounded exactly like a mom badgering her teenage son about his social life, but if being with these friends was upsetting Michael, then she did want to know more about them.

  He scrolled down the screen, still not responding at first. Then eventually he said, “I’ll think about that.” It was the best she was going to get.

  She started for the kitchen.

  But there was Wes still on the couch. So she told him she was going to fix dinner and he was welcome to stay. Not inviting him would have been rude, right?

  “Sure,” he said. “Can I help?”

  It turned out he could cook. It turned out he was very smooth with a knife and peppers and onions. And he seemed a bit miffed that she not only wasn’t making the tortillas from scratch but didn’t have the ingredients for him to make them.

  “You need to do your own salsa too,” he said. “Later, when the local tomatoes and peppers are ripe.”

  “Sure. You can teach me then.” She said this without thinking, obviously, just because this was so nice, working shoulder to shoulder with him, meat and veggies sizzling in the frying pan and filling the kitchen with tangy steam. Laughing at the way the tortillas she heated turned into cardboard while his always puffed up so beautifully.

  By August he would be long gone—unless he’d become her booker.

  She didn’t want a relationship. He didn’t want a relationship. They were in total agreement on that.

  When the food was ready and set out on the kitchen table, she went to tell Michael. Wes turned the stereo down and put on the gentle acoustic guitar of Elizabeth Cotton. Annie could tell Michael was about to say he still wasn’t hungry, but then Elizabeth Cotton seemed to change his mind.

  “Is this the record with the song she did with her granddaughter?” he asked when he came into the kitchen.

  “No. That’s a different album,” said Wes. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “I like it, but I like this one too.”

  “Then we’ll play it next,” said Wes.

  A breeze was coming through the open windows. The kitchen seemed brighter than it usually did, and even though Wes had complained about the limited resources in her kitchen, he’d brightened the fajitas too. Michael apparently noticed and ate quite a few. No matter how big a lunch he’d had, Annie thought this was good, as skinny as he was, as little as he was willing to cook for himself when she was gone.

  Wes had not only improved the food, he added to the table talk—and drew Michael into it. Most people, when they were with both her and her uncle, spoke only to her. This was partly her fault. She would respond much more quickly than he, and her responses were more what a person would expect. Even she found it hard to engage her uncle in a conversation of any length. Most of their meals were spent silently chewing, with the stereo on to keep the kitchen from being completely silent.

  But Wes spoke directly to Michael and then waited for him to answer. Somehow he also knew what topics might interest him. Like buying on eBay. He asked Michael, “Have you figured out how to snipe?”

  Michael had been assembling another fajita, but he stopped to answer proudly, “I got the One Second Snipe!”

  “Then you’re an expert.”

  “I’ve almost received the One Second One Penny Snipe.”

  “Those are two different things?” Annie didn’t even know what they were talking about.

  “Sure,” said Michael. “You usually have to pay more than a penny when you snipe.”

  “Really,” she said.

  “And you can snipe any time in the last minute. If you win it in anything less than ten seconds, you get a Pure Snipe. I get those all the time.”

  She decided she didn’t need to fully understand this, but Wes kept asking Michael about eBay. He said he often went there for records and CD’s. “But for the best stuff I’m always getting sniped.” And Michael, who apparently bought guitar parts and woodworking tools as well as th
e wood itself there, seemed to love telling all about his process. He spoke eagerly, looking straight at Wes, and with much more animation than Annie had ever seen him show with anyone other than family.

  “Okay, I’ve got two tabs open. One on the auction, one on the bid history. I’ve got my bid set up, but I don’t send it. Not yet. I’m watching. The trick is to watch and wait as long as you can.”

  “You must have more patience than me,” said Wes.

  “You’ve got to have your clock synched to eBay time.”

  Wes expressed an interest in the wood Michael was buying too. “I know a guy, he goes out into the forest, on the Olympic Peninsula. He’s looking for trees with burls on them. These huge growths. They look like cancers.”

  “But they’re beautiful,” Michael said. “I’ve done a couple of guitars out of maple burl. But some people, maybe not your friend, but some people steal those burls. Sneak onto other people’s land and cut them right off the living trees. And I like the more unusual woods, the Dalbergias and Diospyros.” With Wes’s encouragement, he went on to explain all the different properties of the various woods he liked, displaying a knowledge of botanical nomenclature that Annie had never suspected.

  But he had been a science student once.

  The meal culminated with him taking Wes to the basement to show him his most recent purchase, a Diospyros, she learned. When Wes was running his hands along the glassy surface of the board and Michael was proudly pointing out every squiggle in the grain, she wasn’t sure if she should be impressed by Wes’s sensitivity or his ability to play people.

  But her uncle had opened back up, and she had to thank Wes for that. Michael even joined them in the living room after they’d dealt with the dishes—Wes doing the washing while she dried and put them away. “I’m not going to try to guess where anything goes here,” he said.

  And the music evolved—or devolved, depending on your point of view—into fifties rock and roll. Okay, the chords and rhythms were simple, many of the lyrics were idiotic, but, as Wes pointed out when he first put it on, it had been the conduit that had brought Appalachian music and black blues together creating all the rock and roll that had come after that. Plus it was a lot of fun.