"The Flamenco Academy" (13 page)

“What does it mean? The song?”

“Mean? I’m not sure. Let me see.” He nodded
his head as he whispered the Spanish words to himself. “Okay, this
isn’t an exact translation but something like this.”

By the light of a candle

I wept without shame;

The candle went out.

The tear is greater than the flame.

I couldn’t be Didi, couldn’t be cool. “It’s
beautiful,” I whispered. “So beautiful. And so sad.”

“Tragedy in the first person,” he said,
studying his hands. “That’s the best definition I’ve ever come
across for flamenco.”

Flamenco
. I’d heard the word before,
but it hadn’t had anything to do with me. Now, here it was, inside
my head, presented to me by an angel prince enthroned next to a
pyramid of beer cans.

He kept playing, not looking up. “This”—he
pointed at the dried curls of pizza in greasy boxes, at the pile of
beer cans, the noise bludgeoning us from the back room—“this is my
tragedy.” He played some more, each chord sadder, more wistful than
the last. “Sorry, I’m not usually like this. Okay, I’m not
always
like this. You caught me on a bad night. A really bad
night. Possibly the worst night of my life.”

“What’s wrong? What happened?” What I meant
was
What can I do? Tell me. Anything. I will do anything for
you. I will spend my life fixing whatever is wrong. Tell me what
the problem is. I’m good with details. Just ask Didi. Tell
me.

“It’s complicated,” he answered.

“I’m good with complications. I got an A in
calculus.” For the first time, he smiled a real smile and stared at
me for a long time. The smile and the stare were gone in the next
instant when a blinding light filled the room. It bounced crazily
off all the walls, exploding in flashes of blue and white. Before I
could even figure out what the light meant, he was on his feet. An
amplified bullet of static crackled, then a voice on a bullhorn in
the fake country drawl of an airline pilot boomed out from the
parking lot three floors below, “Come on down, boys. Party’s
over?”

“Of course,” he said, shaking his head
wearily as if he’d been expecting the party to get busted.

The music was silenced and a barrage of
voices coming from the other room followed. “Hey! What the fuck
you—?”

“The fucking cops are outside,
fuckhead!”

“Fuck! No!”

“Shit!”

“Get rid of the shit!”

The door to the back room burst open. The
guy in the floppy straw hat ran out, emptied a ziplock bag of pot
and a handful of pink, red, and blue pills into the toilet, then
flushed. Band members, groupies, roadies followed him stampeding
out of the bedroom heading for the bathroom. A fog of smoke
enveloped the suite.

“Didi!” I screamed, but could barely make
myself heard above the panicked voices. I tried to get back to the
other room, but the fleeing revelers pushed me aside. “Didi!” I
screamed again.

Suddenly, a hand grabbed me and I was
dragged away from the back room, away from the frenzy of bodies.
The stranger, his guitar slung over his shoulder by its strap,
pulled me to the far corner of the room where mustard-colored
thermal curtains hungover a set of sliding glass doors.

I pointed frantically to the bedroom. “My
friend, Didi, is back there.”

He jerked me away. “We’ve got to get out of
here. Now.” I hesitated and looked back at the door where pierced
and tattooed heads churned through the smoke. He caught my eye and
asked with a glance if I was coming or not. When I didn’t move, he
released my arm and, moving with the assurance of a cat burglar,
flipped up the lock on the glass door.

“Move it on out, boys,” the cop downstairs
said in his amplified shit-kicker accent. “Don’t make us come up
there and drag you out. That’ll put us in a real bad mood.”

The stranger paused at the glass door and
held out his hand to me. The gold-colored motel curtain was pushed
back over his shoulders like a cape. The clang of heavy shoes
pounding up the metal staircase rang through the room. “Now!”

“Didi! I have to find Didi!”

He shrugged, stepped outside, and let the
curtain drop. I rushed into the back room. It was empty. A hand
hammered at the front door. “Open up!” I ran back to the spot where
the curtains had just closed over the open door and stepped
through.

Outside, beyond the smoky room, the evening
was cool, the air fresh. The balcony was lighted from the tubes of
ruby, emerald, and topaz neon glowing on the motel sign. The
lights, buzzing and popping, disoriented me. I couldn’t see past
them, into the dark night beyond. I was alone on the balcony. He
had already left.

Inside the room, a voice, menacing,
fake-friendly, asked, “And what do we have here. Not
drug
paraphernalia
!”

It would be only a matter of seconds now
before they found me hiding on the balcony. I wondered if the
police would be able to track my mom down. If they would call
HeartLand to tell her that I’d been arrested. I wondered what I
would break if I jumped the three stories down to the asphalt
parking lot below.

“Down here.” The words were a strangled
hiss.

I shielded my eyes from the neon glare and
looked down. The guitarist hiked out from the balcony on the second
story and opened his arms.

“Lower yourself down. I’ll grab you.”

“I can’t. I’ll never...”

“Do it. Now! I’m out of here in ten
seconds.”

I stepped over the black wrought-iron
railing. In the ruby glow from the neon, I noticed puddles of rust
stain around each of the iron pickets. As I lowered myself over the
edge of the balcony, the concrete scraped against my leg and the
railing gave slightly in my hand. I stretched my leg down into the
darkness. No hands reached up to receive me. The neon swam around
me in flashes, darting in and out like fish fleeing from a
shark.

Up above me, the scary-friendly cop barked,
“Trujillo, get the bedroom! I’m checking the balcony!”

I reached with my whole body toward the
second-story balcony, but my feet found nothing but air. I heard
the railing beneath me rattle and knew it was the sound of the
stranger swinging easily from the balcony to the ground below. I
had made a mistake. I had gone too far. I wasn’t Didi after
all.

I didn’t have the strength to pull myself
back onto the balcony. My arms quivered. I hoped he was gone, that
he wouldn’t see me fall and end up sprawled in a broken heap on the
asphalt below. The fingers on my left hand gave way first. Next,
the fingers on the right uncoiled. I started to slip. Hands grabbed
me. Arms hugged my legs, guided me down, clasped me around the
waist and set me down safely on the second-floor balcony.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” My panicked whimper
was silenced by his hand pressing against my mouth. The long nails
of his right hand dug into my cheek as he drew me into the
shadows.

Over our heads, the gold curtain covering
the patio doors was pushed aside and light from the motel room
spilled down through the railings. It striped the hand he pressed
against my mouth. The cop stepped onto the balcony and a rain of
rust flakes fell onto our upturned faces. He clamped his hand even
more tightly against my mouth. It tasted of sweat and metal and
smelled of marijuana.

The cop stood on the metal grating of the
patio above us and turned on his flashlight. A beam of light spiked
past. The beam wove about, illuminating the alley below, then
slashing across the parking lot and up the side of the building
until it fell straight down on my face. I was so convinced that the
cop standing on the grating above could see us that I would have
stepped forward and given myself up, but he held me back.

A second later, the cop turned the
flashlight off and went inside. The gold curtain fell back and the
light was blacked out. On the floor above our heads, footsteps
moved from the bedroom to the living room, then out through the
open door. A dozen or more heels clanged as the cops herded their
captives down the metal stairs.

A rumble of voices reached us, band members
and roadies protesting their arrest.

“Yeah, yeah,” a cop sneered in reply. “We
already heard all about your two Grammy nominations. Ah, yes, you
did already mention that the governor’s daughter is a ‘giant,
giant’ fan. Come on, move it along. We don’t want to have to cuff
you.”

I strained to pick out Didi’s voice, but all
I heard were harsh male intonations. Then there was a flash of
movement at the far end of the alley and Didi appeared at the
corner. Her face was in shadow but I recognized her skirt. I
started to call out to her, but the guitarist pressed his hand
against my lips, the long nails on his right hand furrowing the
side of my nose and cheek. Didi clung to the edge of the alley and
peeked around at the scene in front of the motel. Bursts of cop-car
light strobed the dark alley. More cars pulled up. Radios broadcast
static.

Didi backed away and the mercury vapor
street light on Central Avenue painted the top of her head with a
violet halo. A cop stepped into the alley and grinned as he caught
Didi in the beam of his flashlight. “Well, well, well, what do we
have here? Snow White. I wondered where you went to. We already got
your Seven Dwarfs out front.” The cop clicked off the flashlight
and moved toward Didi, singing, “ ‘Hi ho. Hi ho. It’s off to work
we go,’ ” in a tuneless voice.

Didi backed away as the cop approached. She
glanced around, searching for an escape route. A chain-link fence
blocked off the alley behind her.

“So? What about it?” the cop asked, jerking
a thumb toward the parking lot. “You wanna go with your little
friends out there?”

Sounds of the arrested being loaded into
patrol cars echoed back into the alley.

The cop in the alley moved close to Didi.
“Or you wanna pay your fine right here? It can be arranged.”

“A statutory rape charge can also be
arranged,” Didi shot back.

The cop coughed out a snort of laughter. “We
drag you out of a room, one girl and a bunch of dopehead
degenerates, and you’re gonna cry statutory? Gotta do better than
that, princess.”

“I wasn’t doing anything. Maybe you didn’t
notice? I had all my clothes on?”

“Fuck it, you don’t wanna work with me on
this, let’s go.”

Didi gave an exasperated gasp, hissed,
“Shit,” then followed the cop into the shadows at the end of the
alley. As she walked, her skirt floated around her slender legs
like wisps of smoke. I heard the scrape of his zipper being pulled
down. With one hand, he fumbled inside his fly. With the other, he
shoved Didi down until she kneeled in front of him. The matador
skirt settled around her in a perfect circle, like a small, round
cloth thrown on the grass for a picnic. His hand reached into the
violet light above her head, threaded his fingers through her hair,
and jerked her mouth toward him. His fingers stretched spastically,
then clawed more deeply into Didi’s hair.

The clang of the chain-link fence took on a
staccato urgency and I looked away, looked back at the most
handsome man I had ever known. He leaned forward so that I breathed
in his smell of marijuana and beer, sharpened and made dangerous by
lust. The rattling of the chain-link accelerated, then stopped.

Didi got to her feet and the skirt folded
back around her like a closing umbrella. She pivoted and vomited on
a pile of old roofing shingles. The cop pulled out a handkerchief
and, with a surprising delicacy, wiped himself off. “Okay,” he
said, folding his handkerchief in half, then fourths, then neat,
pocketable eighths. “Let’s go.” He motioned toward the parking lot
with his chin.

Didi pivoted slowly. Her body was tense with
rage. “You fuck. I blow you and you’re still going to arrest
me?”

“You are addressing an officer of the
law.”

“I am addressing a child molester with a
dick the size of worm.”

The cop sprang forward, bristling.

“Did I mention that? That I’m only
fifteen?”

For a second, the muscle beneath the cop’s
flab made itself known and the saggy black uniform encased a hard
and volatile creature. The cop’s hand clenched spasmodically over
the baton slapping his side.

“Yeah,” Didi sneered. “Do it. That’ll look
good on the report.”

Even from the second floor, I heard the
angry snort of the cop’s breath. My vision vibrated with an image
of Didi’s skull cracking open in the violet light.

The cop’s held breath exploded out of him in
one grandly, dismissive exhalation. “Get the fuck out of here.” He
gestured toward the dark end of the alley.

“No,
you
get the fuck out of
here!”

The cop studied her a moment, started to say
something, then laughed, shook his head, and walked away. “Have a
good life, princess.”

Didi waited a moment, then darted to the
corner of the building, and peeked around. When the strobing light
faded away, she left. A moment later, the Mustang throbbed to life
and gravel spattered as Didi spun the car around and drove off.

The guitarist took his hand from my mouth,
vaulted over the railing, landed on the side of the motel with a
crunch, and held his arms up to me. Without a second thought, I
dropped into them. He took my hand and led me around behind the
motel, where we watched and waited until all the cop cars left and
the permanent residents of the Ace High motel came back out to
stare at the empty lot and drink from stubby green Mickey’s malt
liquor bottles.

“Where’d you park?” he asked.

“I came with”—he didn’t know Didi, didn’t
know that the girl in the alley was my friend—“I got dropped
off.”

“Yeah, the guys I was hitching with just got
arrested. Oh well, good night for a walk. I guess. Which way you
live?”