Blues for Zoey (19 page)

“Wait,” I said. “She'll want to know what you'll give her for it.”

He shrugged. “How 'bout fifty?”

I couldn't believe it. After everything he just said, I almost laughed. “That's it? F
ifty bucks?”

Myers threw his head back and belted
out another gunshot whoop of laughter.

“Not fifty bucks.
Fifty thousand bucks
.”

60

Th
e Three Words That Played
on Repeat insid
e My Head for
Hours afte
r Andrew Myers Left

Fifty! Thousand! Dollars!

61

A Sampling of Unanswered Texts
I
Sent to Zoey That Morning

Seriousl
y
,
my
boss
gets
he
r
e
@
12:30
L
A
TES
T
.
Your
thing
cannot b
he
r
e!!

What
if
i
had
a
way
4
u to
go
to
any
music
school
you
wanted?

Would
u txt
me
then? WHERE
R
U??? Should
i
b
worried?

You
cud
at
least
answer
me

Ok,
so
I'm
worried
no
w
.
PLS
call
or
txt.

That
'
s
it.
I
cant
w8.
My
boss'll
be
he
r
e.
Im
moving
the
thing upstairs.
Txt
me
when
u come
to
get
it.

62

A
Surpris
e
Gi
f
t

“What's
that
?” Nomi asked as soon as I was inside the entranceway.

“It's nothing,” I lied. “Just a thing.”

Nomi ran for a closer look but then stopped. “Are those …
bones
?”

“Shh, you'll wake Mom.”

“She's in her room but I don't think she's asleep.”

“Well, don't tell her about this. It's a surprise.”

Nomi star
ed wide-eyed at the rattler. “You bought that for her? Like a present?”

“It's an antique. Really valuable.”
At least that much was true.

Nomi wasn't convinced. “Looks like a whole bunch of garbage to me.”

“It's a musical instrument.” I tugged on one of the strings and
got a shivering note. “You know ho
w before you were born, when Dad was alive, w
e used to have a real piano?”

Nomi hung her head. “Yeah, I know. But now it's gone
.”

“I thought Mom might like something new. There's no room for a piano, so … ” I shifted the rattler on my shoulder. The bones rung lightly together. Nomi nodded, but after a moment's thought, she looked on the verge of tears.

“What's wrong?”

“I didn't get her anything!” she said, her voice starting to crack.

“No, it's cool. This is from both of us.”

“It is?”

“Help me take it to my room. We'll hide it under my bed, but quick, I gotta get back to work.”

Nomi kept the chains and cogs from rattling and we carried it down the hall. It nearly fit under my bed, with just the bottom sticking out. The initials were carved clearly into the bottom.
S.C.
I covered it with my gym bag.

“When are we going to give it to her?” Nomi asked.

I had to think about this. After Zoey and I sold it to Andrew Myers, I would have to explain to Nomi why it had suddenly disappeared. I could already hear her questions:
What happened to Mom's present? Whe
re did it go?
Then again, once we sold it, we'd have so much money, no one would care. I could buy Nomi her very own violin. That ought to cheer her up.

“Let's wait until Mom's feeling a bit better,” I said. “Maybe after she goes to Beauhaven.”

Nomi agreed. “She always feels better after she goes there.”

I hadn't been upstairs for
long, but when I returned to the Sit 'n'
Spin, I knew I was in trouble. Mr
. Rodolfo was there, arms folded, red faced, standing
behind the counter. A trio of DIYers crow
ded around, shrugging in bewilderment as he interr
ogated them about something. I had a hunch he was grilling them about wher
e I was.

“
There
he is!” Mr. Rodolfo shouted, pointing
at me with the flat of his hand. “You might as well turn around and leave.
You're fi
red!
”

“I just needed to go upstairs for, like,
one sec
, because—”

“
No-no-no!
” Mr. Rodolfo shook an
angry finger at me. “No excuses! This is a
business
establishment.” He pointed to the cash register. “What w
ere you thinking? There's
money
in he
re, you understand?”

“I just … ” A new and perfect lie popped into my head. “It's my mom. She
came back from the hospital and she needed something.”

M
r. Rodolfo paused to look up at the ceiling. “She okay?”

“She is now.”

“Good, because we're not finished here.” He pointed a thumb backward over his shoulder. “I want to talk to you.”

“Where?”

“Downstairs.”

He turned and led the way, not
bothering to see if I followed. He took the stairs sideways, his shoulders r
olling heavily with each step. Why had I never noticed that befor
e? He lumbered downstairs like an old bear.

The door to his office was locked. He opened it up and ushered me into the room I'
d seen a few days earlier.

“Have a seat, Kaz.”

I sat in one of the plastic chairs.

“I'm only going to ask you this once, okay?”

“I told you, my mom's sick. I had to bring her something.”

Mr. Rodolfo shut his eyes. “It's not that.”

“So what is it?”

“Are you trying to steal from me?”

“
What?
”

“Don't lie, Kaz. It's too late for that.”

“I would never,
ever
steal from you.”

“But y
ou
would
let your freaky girlfriend contaminate the shop? Is that it? Because even if you'd never steal f
rom me, I'm pretty sure
she
would.”

“She? Who?”

“The Jesus freak,” he said, making a face. “I know you put that thing in with the dry cleaning. I saw you.”

How?
I thought.

“What if one of my customers gets some disease?” He shook his head. “Talk about bad for business!”

I was still speechless. I had made sure we were alone when we hid the rattler. How could he know?

“Is that why you tried to break in here? Into my office? Did she ask you to steal from me?”

“
No!
” He knew about me coming down here.
How?
In a tiny, sullen voice I said, “Zoey isn't like that.”

“What do you know?”
He looked at me like I was a worm, like I had no brain to top off my rubbe
ry spine. “Why do you think that door was open when you
came down here, snooping around like a thief? I
left
it open. It was a
test
, y
ou get it? I wanted to see what you'd do.”

My head was spinning, again.
The
whole room
was spinning. “Wait—how do you know I came do
wn here?”

“In here.”

He pushed out his chair and went to the other door in the corner, the one I'd knocked on just before Andrew
Myers showed up. When he opened it, I
saw that it was nearly empty. The only thing inside
was another shelving unit, full of old video recorders. I knew what the blinking
red lights meant.

“You're recording,” I whispered.

“Me
and the brothers installed them a couple weeks ag
o.”
He pointed to a shiny gray dome hanging from the corner of the ceiling. “So many weirdos coming around. I never thought you'd be one of them.”

He pressed a button on one of
the recorders and flicked on the old TV on top of
the filing cabinet. The screen showed a black-and-white image
of upstairs. There I was—with Zoey—on the night of
our date at What the Pho. We wer
e carrying the rattler into the dry-cleaning booth.

“I don't get it,” Mr. Rodolfo said. “Why'd you wanna bring that in here?”

“It wasn't for long.”

He pointed at the screen. “I can't believe you let a freak like that in here.”

“She's
not
a freak! She's just … ” What was she, really? I didn't know anymore.

“You gonna tell me what you were looking for down here?”

“I was just … ” How could I tell him
the truth? How could I tell him I was checking to see where he had hidden B-Man's body? Obviousl
y, it wasn't down here. “I was just curious.”

“Good, you can get curious about finding another job.”

“Fine then,” I said, and I meant it. I was sick of Mr. Rodolfo, the way he wrote people off just because of how they looked. I was sick of how obsessed he was with running his shitty little business—a dead-end laundromat in fucking Evandale. I was especially sick of how the whole world got cleaved down the middle: good for business and bad for business.

Of course, it was easy not to give a shit about your job when these th
ree little words kept marching through my
head:

F
ifty! Thousand!
D
ollars!

63

Ten Million Hit
s in 0.15 Seconds

I needed to find Zoey, but she wasn't answering her phone. I texted her for the zillionth time.

Please
call
me.
I
have
good
news.

Upstairs, Nomi wondered what I was doing back
so soon. I told her I had the day off.
In my room, I pulled out the rattler. The initials star
ed me in the face.

S.C.

What if I sold the rattler
without
telling Zoey? How could she mind, especially if I
split the money with her? With that kind of cash, she
could buy a whole orchestra. Better than that, she could
fly off to whatever music school she wanted. Anywa
y, the rattler—or whatever it was really called—wasn't even hers in the first place.

Then again, the thought of her on a plane gave me a stab of regret, and I knew if I sold the instrument without telling her, she would hate me.

On the other hand,
it was just so much money
.

That got me thinking. If Andrew Myers was willing to shell out
Fifty! Thousand! Dollars!
for a long-lost Shain Cope instrument, maybe he knew something I didn't. Maybe it was worth even more.

I googled “rood rattler,” but nothing came up
. It was probably a name Zoey had made up. Shain Cope could have dubbed it something completely
different, so I searched for the man himself. Ther
e were
ten million hits
.

I went through fan sites,
lyrics, Wikipedia entries, grainy videos of live performances, and zillions of photographs, many of which featured strange, other
worldly instruments, but nothing that looked like what was under my bed.

It was odd to see so many images of the man. Generally, I didn't gi
ve much thought to the CDs Dave Mizra
brought over. Some were good, some were
n't; but Shain Cope was different. In every way. The
singer's ghost was haunting every aspect of my life.

In the pictures, he was perpetually shy, always
looking away from the camera, rarely granting the photographer
a clear view of his face. Getting his features steady in your mind was like piecing together a puzzle, shifting the angles from different images. His st
rong jaw and a jutting brow gave him a slightly concave face. He heightened the effect
with a grisly pompadour and matching goatee. It made him look only half human. Onstage, his teeth gleaming as he sang, he was more like a wild animal, a starving wolf.

Cope
's Wikipedia page said he was known “not
only for his distinctive, rumbling voice but also for constructing his own instruments, several of which he used on his final, most famous album,
Fr
eudian Slap
.” I learned that no one saw it coming when he shot himself. He didn't leave a suicide note. Later, probably
because his house was empty and his death was so w
ell publicized, there was that break-in. A
link sent me to a scanned newspaper article published that same summer:

* * *

The vacant home of idiosyncratic musician Shain Cope, who took his o
wn life in April, was last night the site of an opportunistic robbery. Thieves gained entrance through a ground-floor
window some time before three o'clock in the morning, making off with a number of valuables.

“This was a heinous, cynical crime,” said Los Feliz chief of police Raymond Saunders.
“These are criminals who took advantage of a man's death to enrich themselves, acting at a time when his family was already dealing with so much pain.”

Local authorities would not specify what had been stolen, but Cope's mother,
Eleanor, confirmed that at least one of her son's most valuable instruments is currently missing. “It's really the only thing w
e want back,” she said. “It was so much a part of who he was.”

Cope's career as a singer-songwriter began in 1970 with the release of his critically acclaimed debut album
Four Lane Road
. By the end of the decade, he had proven himself not only as a musician, but also as a gifted craftsman, designing and building the unusual instruments that gave him his unique sound. Among these were a steam-powered organ and a multi-sto
ry drum kit made from the engines of classic cars. Although the value of the stolen articles is unknown, all of Cope's pieces were one of a kind.
Their value is thought to be considerable.

Shain Cope died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 18, 1983. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean b
y friends and family, in accordance with his wishes.

* * *

After reading the article, I wanted
to hear the music again. I put on some headphones, shut
my eyes, and listened. I wanted to see if I could hear it. The rattler.

I did
.

The
hollow chinks of bones and chains. The rough
whine of a bow chafing over taut strings. Thumps like
a felled tree come to life, trying to stab itself back into the earth. In my head, I saw Shain
Cope, a howling wolf-man, clawing at
the very
same instrument that now lay dead on my bedroom carpet.

When the final strains of “Get Me Home” faded, I lay there in
the dark. I thought about all the places Z
oey had lived. Europe, Mexico City, M
ontreal, New York, California.
LA was cr
azy
, she had said. What did that mean? The rest
were just names of places, but LA—she had paused
when she mentioned LA.
LA was crazy
. But no, Zoey wouldn't hav
e even been born in 1983. But there were those times her voice sounded so old.
How old?
I had never asked her
.

No, I thought, it was impossible. Anyone could
see she was my age, or at least somewhere in the ballpark. Even if she was one or two years older—even
fiv
e
years older—there was no way she could have robbed an LA mansion
in 1983
. So how did she
get it?

The question hung in my head, words coiling like smoke abo
ve a dark stage, one where Shain Cope had just folded his last bow.

My phone buzzed.

What
good
news?
z