Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (20 page)

We went one more time on the chorus, held up on the root while Leo scratched out a descending pattern starting on the fifth, clanged out the root chord, and waited for a
buh-duh-dum
on Billy’s rack and snare and we were done. As the MC announced that we’d be right back after a short break, the stage floor began to shake with deep, rolling feedback. Nick trotted up to the stage to see what was wrong.

I leaned my bass in its stand and turned off the power switch on my amp. I didn’t want it to overheat.

&&&

I hung my jacket on a hook in the dressing room, toweled off with a sour-smelling bar rag, and let Leo bum a cigarette. Ray and Billy ducked out ahead of us, and the tiny dressing room was soon as empty as it was ugly. The set had gone well, but there was either too much or too little that the four of us could say to one another at that point in time.

I walked Ladonna to her car.

“You sound good tonight,” she said. Michael skipped on ahead of us.

“Thanks,” I said. “And you look damn good. I don’t usually line anything up during breaks, but maybe I should get your number, sweet thing.”

She laughed, tugging my arm, walking briskly through the parking lot. She was tired and Michael needed to get to bed, but she wasn’t anxious to leave. Maybe she hadn’t been able to see the way that Vick was looking at Leo, or the way that

Bingo was looking at the two of them, but she knew I’d seen things in a way that I hadn’t seen them before.

“And there’s something else,” she said as she unlocked her door and got in. “You’re hard, Martin, like you’ve taken a drug. But I know you don’t take drugs, so I know what it is.” I didn’t deny I had a gun.

“A gun is a bad idea waiting to happen, Martin,” she said. “Statistically, just carrying a gun increases your chances of getting shot.”

“A gun is a gun, and it’s just there, in my guitar case. I’m here, I’m me, and I’m not a gun-toting maniac.”

She gave me one of her long meaningful looks, then put the keys in the ignition and made sure that Michael had fastened his seat belt. After accepting a kiss, she locked the doors and said, “You’re going to see Vick after?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve got to. Don’t worry.”

“OK.” But she didn’t mean it. We kissed again, and she put her meaning there.

&&&

We rushed through the last set. It wasn’t sloppy or soulless, but it lacked. It lacked a bit of funk as the rhythms stumbled over the groove, and the tempos rushed along feverishly, like we were running from something.

But midway during the instrumental section of “Nails in My Heart,” Leo’s tone began to soar. He overcame the sluggishness of his right-hand attack by squeezing more vibrato-strangled sound out of his fretting fingers. The notes seemed to be crying out a painful confession. High up on the neck the fingers climbed, feedback threatening, sweat pouring off his face. He climaxed with a long, four-note wail wrenched out of the same fret position, then raked his pick down the neck to the nut, whanged an open chord, and fell back against his amp. Ray growled out the melody on his sax for the last twelve bars, and we ended the song. After a round of applause and a muttered thank you, we launched into the last song and a perfunctory encore. But they were ordinary and as earthbound as most of the rest of the set had been, and once again, I felt like we had cheated our audience.

We got paid anyway, of course, and I divided the cash into equal amounts after deducting Nick and Steve’s cuts, minus their advances. Billy marked down the amount in his ledger, Ray folded his share in a gold money clip and started to walk out to his Buick, where Kate would be sitting impatiently, her nose in the air, punching the buttons on the radio with black lacquered nails. I hadn’t paid Leo yet. I asked Ray to wait up.

He stopped in the tracks of his creepers just long enough to spit over the padded shoulder of his jacket: “What?”

“Is that it, Ray?” I asked. “If you’re walking out, I’d like to know why.”

“Ask Leo.” With that, he started walking again, and didn’t look back.

Leo, pale-faced and sweaty, was coming out of the dressing room. Nadine was still in there. He saw the look on my face and started to turn back. I hurried over and grabbed his sleeve. “What is it, Leo?”

“What is what?”

“Why does everybody say,
Ask Leo
?”

The dark circles didn’t soften the panic in his eyes, and the surliness in his voice didn’t pass for bravery. “Maybe they think I know everything.”

“How’d you get that Flying V?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“You got a new guitar, and I know you didn’t come off the road with enough money to buy one. You also got a broken hand and a very upset girlfriend, all in one day. And I saw the way that Vick was looking at you. Is Vick your banker, your boyfriend, or what?”

“Fuck you, Martin,” he blurted, and pulled away so that his sleeve ripped off in my hand. He looked at the damage, then me. “You guys, man. Ray’s a goddamn West Texas puritan and you’re a goddamn hardass. Just a rock solid dude. Aren’t ya? Even after some chick gets bashed up with your guitar.

You don’t know shit, you don’t understand a goddamn thing.” He leaned into my face. “Not a goddamn thing.”

Then he backed away toward the dressing room door. He looked like he wanted to say something else as a big fat tear ran out from the corner of his eye and shot down by his nose. He spun and hit the exit door and bolted through it. I held it open and looked out and saw him sprint across Guadalupe, dodging cars, then disappear around a corner.

The club was empty except for a couple of guys with mops, the sound man, and Clifford Antone, hands in his pockets, asking Nadine if she wanted him to call a cab. I gave her Leo’s money. I felt bad for her. She grabbed my hand.

“Did you see his cast?” she said, sobbing.

“What about it?”

“Bingo made him let him sign it. He wrote, ‘Another gift from Vick Travis.’ A heart around it and everything.”

She put her head down in her hands and cried. Clifford put his arm around her and nodded at me. He’d take care of her.

I got out of there as quickly as I could. I felt soiled by shame--Leo’s shame, for sinking so low that he would get his hand broken over a debt, and my shame, for not catching his fall.

When I got to the car with my bass, Barbra Quiero was in the passenger seat.

&&&

“I had to know,” she was saying, “I just had to know.”

The traffic was light but awkward, the drivers overly careful as they left the clubs smelling like DWIs. Some of the traffic lights had switched over to blinking amber or red after midnight, making the city seem like it was sleeping with one eye open. I was wary, too, a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking.

My damp clothes clung. In the morning they’d smell like a million cigarettes. The three a.m. air felt leaden, even with the top down, peeled back on a murky sky. Barbra’s words seemed to fall into a deadened void quickly after she spoke them, as if the night were too tired for resonance.

Six days before I’d taken a ride with her friend after my first gig back in my hometown. Hometown. I’d felt like a stranger here. Now it was feeling a bit more familiar again as we took Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, then Red River back into downtown. But instead of a cozy feeling, it felt like a bad
déjà vu
.

“That flashy Mexican guy,” she was saying, “was Bingo Torres?” I nodded yes, that was his name. “One of the guys who was with him is one of the guys that have been following me the past few days, off and on.”

We pulled up at the Radisson. “Well, now we know,” I said. “You’d better stay in your room.”

“I will,” she said. She grabbed me and pulled me to her. She was shaking, her body cold and clammy. She wouldn’t let go.

Finally I pried her away. “Maybe I should go up with you,” I said. She nodded. I put the hazard lights on, got out and opened her door for her, and escorted her through the lobby, to the elevator, and down the hall to her room. I unlocked the door for her and checked out the room. It was empty.

“OK?” I said.

“OK.” I started to give her room key back but she wouldn’t take it. “Maybe you’ll want to come back before tomorrow morning.”

“Now look . . .”

“Martin,” she began, then hesitated. She grabbed my arm and pulled me to her. “I’ve got a feeling. I don’t know, it’s a bad feeling.”

“Relax. I think I know what this is all about now. I’m going to Vick’s. I’ll be back in the morning.”

She relaxed her grip, but not before grinding her crotch into me and biting my ear. When I pulled away, she had that don’t-forget-about-me look. I left her room in a hurry.

A bell captain was giving the Ghia a dirty look when I got downstairs. I turned it around and headed over to Vick’s.

I stuffed my gun in the back of my pants before I went in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Just don’t try to analyze everything,” said Vick, sitting at the card table. “Take it easy. Have a drink. We’re your friends. You go around asking questions all the time, you’re never gonna hear the answers. Come on, have a cigarette. I just sold my record company, man. This is the end of an era.” A fat pearl of sweat crawled down the side of his face. His damp curly hair was freshly clawed back on his head, but one strand had already broken loose, hanging over his left eye like a dead tree limb. He blew at it from the corner of his mouth as he poured another shot of Cuervo, sloshing it, laughing silently, waving the bottle at me.

“End of an era, Martin. End of a goddamn era.”

I poured a slug and knocked it back. Vick slid his cigarette pack at me. I shoved them back and lit one of my own. He closed his hand over his pack, shook one out, put it between his lips, and set fire to it. He closed his eyes as he filled up with smoke, gradually letting it curl out from his nostrils and stream out between his teeth.

Ed the Head stood off to the side, his shirt still buttoned up to the top, a knotty Adam’s apple moving up and down above it. He was monkeying around with the tape deck, adjusting the bass level until the low woofs rattled the room. He bobbed his head to the beat, eyelids drooping down, head lolling back, body convulsing slowly in a dance that was part “Hullaballoo,” part epilepsy. Just as it looked like he was going to teeter over backward, he’d open his eyes wide and give us a goofy grin and wheezy giggle. He was just playing.

I sat on the other side of the table, slowly sipping another shot of Cuervo in the hopes that it would make my heart stop charging up against my rib cage. I looked over to the poster of Keith Richard nodding out, oblivious to everything except the movie playing on the inside of his eyelids. What was that like, I wondered, to be totally anesthetized? To have everything blotted out, every pain, every responsibility. Was that like being dead? Was that what everyone craved? Escape—temporary but total—in convenient doses?

A few shots of Cuervo did no more than coat the rough edges. Everybody needed a little something to help them get through, but the serious escape artists had to have something to get them all the way through to the other side.

Vick sat smiling like a truck-stop Buddha, tequila glistening on his lips, eyeing me like I was a long-lost friend, petting his stomach like it was a child napping on his lap. Maybe I had died and gone to hell.

The music from Antone’s still throbbed in my head and rang in my ears. My plucking fingers tingled, and my shoulder burned where the strap had cut in. I had a vague sensation that I was floating. Maybe music was a form of death too. People wire themselves up to your beat, plugging into a common consciousness. The melody soothes the pain, the rhythm massages the soul. They escape, maybe for three minutes, maybe for a few hours, then they’re back in the cold world again, not dancing. And I was here, in this ugly place, knowing that things were about to come to an ugly head.

The thoughts of death and anesthesia were a side issue. I knew I was in that insular, sweaty little room to get at the truth, the ugly hard kernel of facts at the center of all the trouble I’d stumbled into since our van had rolled back into town. But getting at the truth was tough because everyone was running from it, shrugging it off, or trying to buy protection from it. Donald Rollins had ducked out from under it with a dose of heroin. Leo was running from it, trying to drink it into submission. Ray snubbed it and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Bingo Torres tried to bully it with his smarmy machismo. Retha had confronted it somehow, only to have it come crashing down on her. Vick had bought a little time away from it, then came out seeming practically unscathed. And that just didn’t seem right.

I looked at Keith Richard and felt irritated at him for being asleep on the job, nodding out through the disintegration of rock and roll. I thought about the fat lady with the thirty-pound tumor, relieved to find that the problem was
something else,
something that was now apart from her and had never been her fault to begin with. I looked at Vick and Ed and shook my head with disgust.

The tape segued into an Albert Collins song, and Vick grinned with satisfaction on hearing it. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that there is some good music.” He looked at me for acknowledgment. “Huh? Am I right?”

He knew I wasn’t going to argue with that. I just sat there, sipping the tequila, smoking, feeling ready to explode.

Vick tilted his head back as if the guitar player were playing overhead, suspended from the ceiling. “Oh, man, that man can play that guitar. You know? No wonder they call him the
Ice-picker
. It’s almost like there’s no tone on that ax, no treble, no bass, just the naked sound of those top strings thwacking against the neck.” He brought his gaze back down to eye level, smiling at me. “Almost sounds like he’s spanking that guitar, pinching it to make it go
ouch.
You know what I mean, Martin?”