The One-in-a-Million Boy (33 page)

“And they're a man short. Right?”

“I've got a contract to sign, lawyers to consult, and Doug is being a complete ass, hiding out at the hospital, for all I know forcing people into brain surgery just to fill up his time. It's not that I can't handle it, Quinn, I just”—her voice dropped, and he realized she was not scared, as he'd once thought; she was terrified. “You're the only one I can think of in this business who isn't a shark with dripping teeth. We need you over here.”

Hope flamed in his throat. “I get off at four,” he said. “Relax, Sylvie.”

“I can't relax! I wish my kids had never gotten on this train. They have this sense of—invincibility. Anything they want, presto, it happens.” She paused. “Frankly, I blame you.”

Even for Sylvie, this was rich. He said, “Whoops, I guess you forgot who bought them a Winnebago.”

“I'll ignore that,” Sylvie said. “I will just ignore that. I was referring to your
example.
Your stellar, living-proof, inspirational
example
to these impressionable little—
marmots
that it's possible to make a life out of music.”

Quinn went dumb. This was the kindest thing Sylvie had ever said to him, though she hurled it as an accusation. She hung up before he could say thank you. And before he could remind her that he did not wear—had not once worn, not even in the eighties—leather pants.

He swung into the GUMS employee lot, which was bordered by small, architecturally notable trees.

“Welcome, Porter,” Dawna sneered, clipboard tapping at her hip. “What a pleasure to see you.” She scribbled his name on the daily agenda, then handed him a job nobody wanted: hand-stuffing slippery, high-gloss inserts into four thousand brochures for a company that sold hiking gear. The hand-stuffing was a corrective measure that, according to Dawna, resulted from a slip-up on a shift last week, which
would not have occurred at all
had Quinn reported to his station
like he said he would.

“I was helping a little old lady,” he said.

Dawna laughed out loud. Quinn didn't care; he was internally repeating every word of his conversation with Sylvie.
We need you over here.

If there's a God,
he prayed,
please let him be a guitar player.

“I called in,” he reminded her. “Rennie gave me the day off.” But Dawna had a long, malevolent, photographic memory that would not delete the now-weeks-old road trip with Resurrection Lane, the first time he'd ever missed work—any work—without calling first. He realized belatedly how juiced he must have been, how eager to step into Zack's tainted shoes.

Around ten thirty, Rennie showed up, ostensibly to check the run. “Hey,” he said, hoisting himself onto a worktable. The pockets of his pants poofed open like a girl's skirt.

“Sorry about last night,” Quinn said.

Rennie looked around. He wasn't known as a ball buster and his presence on the floor barely registered. “Gary says I should apologize. Not that I'm saying it wasn't your fault. It
was
your fault, you're the one who's not supposed to let crap like this happen, but I feel like a jackass for losing my temper.” He surveyed his noisy empire. “I don't know what came over me.” He lowered his eyes. “Playing there is the only fun I ever have.”

“Forget it, Ren.”

“You get home all right?”

“Belle's new husband gave me a lift.”

“Huh. Sounds civilized.”

“Seems I'm buying his Scout troop a new van.”

Baffled, Rennie looked away. “I know it's been rough,” he said. “If I lost my kid I'd kill myself.”

“I talked to Sal,” Quinn said. “We're back, next Sunday, just like always.”

“No way!” Rennie smiled all the way up to his eyeballs. “No freakin' way! Did you tell the guys?”

“You get the pleasure.”

“I'll call them,” Rennie said. Twenty years slid from his face. “Right now. I'll call everybody.”

He hopped down, hitting the floor with an old man's
ooof,
then all but skipped off the floor. From the back, not counting the waistline melting like candle wax over his belt, he could still be the neighborhood kid from Sheridan Street, the band's cool black guy, albeit a black guy with flaming acne and high-water pants.

“That was your break,” Dawna said.

After lunch she instructed him to feed the reassembled brochures to the ink jet, a machine that made sounds like indigestion amplified through a bad PA. The noise bothered him, even with earplugs, which Dawna told him was pretty ironic considering his normal line of work. She'd been married to a musician once and seemed to hold Quinn responsible.

As he stuffed the machine's gullet long into afternoon, Dawna brooded at the foot of the conveyer, catching the coded brochures and slamming them into the tying machine. She wore skinny jeans and a yellow top that looked like underwear. Despite her avian features, she wasn't a bad-looking woman. She sweated fetchingly, crossing her arms to wait for the next laggardly batch, rolling her heavily inked eyes.

“It'd be easier on your eye sockets to just tell me to hurry up,” Quinn shouted over the machine.

Dawna raised her viciously plucked eyebrows. “Really?” She picked her way around the cartons and mailbags, her wiry, Nautilized arms impressively tanned. She arrived within two inches of his face, smelling of cough drops. “Hurry. The fuck. Up.” Her lips made a little pop on the final consonant.

To nail her point, she hoisted a stack of brochures from the bottomless vat, counted them by feel, squared them up, flattened them onto the conveyer, and as they
shupped
into the machine she squared up the next batch. This job meant something to her. This job, and her gym membership, and maybe a new boyfriend, and probably a kid. A four-cornered life, one that she cherished.

“I've trained you twice,” she said. “Are you too good for it, or just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill screwup?”

“Jesus, Dawna, can you give me a break already?”

“You had your break.”

“I meant metaphorically.”

“My ex was a big fan of metaphor. It came in handy when he was running up my Visa bill.”

“
Touché,
” he said, honestly hurt now. “
Touché
to you, Dawna the Supervisor.”

“What is your
problem,
Porter?”

“Life is short,” he said. “That's my problem.”

“Tell me something I don't know.”

“Literally?”

She challenged him: “Yeah.”

“I'm sorry I screwed you up that time. And I'm sorry the brochures didn't get done last Friday. Because I just noticed that you pretty much run this place.”

He had to shout over the shop noise, so the compliment sounded more fulsome than he intended. Stunned into silence, Dawna deliberated as the machine belched and gargled, empty of cargo.

He spent the lunch hour on the phone with the State of Maine, which, as it turned out, had no problem whatsoever with his driver's license and implied that any suggestion otherwise had been a misunderstanding—on Quinn's part, of course, not the officer's. When Quinn returned to the floor, Dawna was still there. They worked in silence for an hour, then two.

Then Quinn said, “Now you.”

“What?”

He raised his voice: “Tell me something I don't know.”

Dawna thought a minute. She plucked a brochure from the stack and said, “See this? Somebody's gonna get sued.” At first he thought she said “soup.” The machine made the kind of noise that mashed consonants.

“Look at this thing,” she said, flapping it in his face. “Take a look at this guy.”

Quinn saw nothing but a fake-looking image of children in adorable clothes hiking beneath a sky in which clouds spelled out
SALE
. “What guy?”

“
This sky.
Hello. Take a look at
this sky.
Are all musicians deaf? My asshole ex was deaf.”

“What's your point, Dawna?”

She flicked the offending brochure. “I'm saying this looks exactly,
totally
exactly, like the Lands' End sale flyer from last summer. Exact same layout, exact same color, exact same cloud writing in the exact same sky. They want you to think their cheapo crap is from Lands' End.”

Dawna was on a roll now, declaiming with the pride of experience exactly how the hiking-gear company was going to get its ass handed to itself in a lawsuit. As she scorned this outrageous rip-off, flapping
this color
and
this image
and
this font
and
this sky
at him, Quinn hatched a sickening realization about words.

For years it had tried to make itself known to him, but he'd tucked it away, refusing to see it or feel it or name it. He felt it now. Saw it now. Named it here, now, on the noisy floor of GUMS where Dawna was instructing him on the finer points of copycat marketing.

Her disquisition had made her looser, almost indulgent. “Shoot, it's almost three,” she said. “Call it a day, Porter. I kind of shorted you this morning.”

He made it to the lobby and pulled out his earplugs and took the landscaped pathway that led to the road that led to Lot C and the bus stop beyond. He began to hurry and then to run, and when he reached the road he was out of breath, knees on fire, the misheard words still pinballing through him, bright and electric.

Look at this guy!

An easy enough mistake—people misheard words like this all the time. This guy; this sky. Easy for a hearer to mishear. Especially if perceived through the lips of David freakin' Crosby and filtered through a gabbling outdoor crowd, a billion gallons of ocean smashing against a cliff, and your own grateful chords vibrating through a bank of speakers. Especially if these words were the very words your wishful ears most wanted to hear.

Look at this guy!
Quinn had heard those words. He'd nodded, smiling, eyes on his own flying fingers. But they were not, not exactly, the words that had so giddily exploded from David freakin' Crosby's mustachioed lips.

Look at this sky! This sky's amazing!
As it indeed had been on that magical evening, broad and high and midnight blue and flooded with stars.
I love this beautiful place,
ol' Dave had said. Meaning a real, geographical place. Meaning: This water. This cliff. This outrageous house. This amazing sky. This sky's amazing.

The bus pulled up and took him in and he sat in the back with his eyes shut, looking inward, surprised to find his mother there, his mother whose memory over the years had dimmed nearly to nothing.
I could listen all day, honey,
she marveled, as his father snorted into his newspaper.

He had fast, nimble fingers, an ear for harmony, and spotless timing.
You must be quite talented,
Ona had said, and he was. But even talented people, sooner or later, cracked their heads against their own personal ceilings, as Quinn did now, and he nearly cried out against the seismic blow. He could improvise in the style of a hundred players, but musical invention, the kind that made listeners stop in their tracks—
This guy's amazing!
—was not Quinn's gift.

He was not a dreamer, no matter what Ona thought. He was a striver. A striver who loved music. All of it: the sublime inventions of his idols, yes, but also the two-chord folksongs, the hair-band medleys, the Delta blues, the Jesus music, the Gypsy jazz, the big-band horns, the classic rock, the Macarena, the chicken dance, the Electric Slide. He loved it with a sweltering, headlong, irrational affection, as if music—all of it, the best and the worst—were a child given over to his care.

“You all right, fella?” came a voice from across the aisle. A man in an orange bowling shirt, a regular rider. Small, rabbity, sympathetic eyes, and raging boils the length of his neck. Another regular sat just behind him, a misshapen wretch with shivering limbs. Down front, a young teenager nestled into the tiered misery of his own blubber. A busload of pilgrims today on journeys they never chose, having once believed themselves born for more than this.

He'd played a hundred songs, five hundred, a thousand songs that made people bite their lips and bob their heads, recalling a place they once lived, a person they once loved, a version of themselves they'd forgotten. “Rock of Ages” and “I Am a Rock” and “Rock Around the Clock.” “The Long and Winding Road” and “Roadhouse Blues” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” “Born to Be Wild” and “Wild Thing” and “Thing Called Love.” Was it really so foolish to have loved it all? The muddy acoustics and pit-stained tuxedos, the flat-footed brides and their chubby husbands, the grannies and uncles-in-law jamming the dance floor? The sun-weary crowds at the county fairs, the kids at the prom in their cheap-shiny clothes, the corporate drones who clapped on the downbeat, the beer-swilling pub crawlers and their ribboning laughter?

He loved that they loved him. He loved the hollow he filled.

It was the boy who'd understood this. The boy, whose lists and lists filled his own hollow, the one his father had left behind.

A loosening in his chest, like sliding rocks, took him so abruptly that he doubled over, trying to hold it in.

The boy, of all people.

The boy, who listened to music in puzzlement and pain. The boy, with his razored clippings and neat beads of glue, dogged and watchful, arranging his father's story, preserving and tending it, page after page after page.

 

SUCCESS

1. Highest rank achieved by law-enforcement camel. Reserve Deputy Sheriff. Bert. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Country of USA.
   

2. Highest jump by a rabbit. 18 inches. Golden Flame. Owned by Sam Lawrie. Country of UK.
   

3. Tallest snowman. 113 feet and 7 inches. Country of USA.
   

4. First father and son to finish first and second in the Daytona 500. Bobby and Davey Allison. Country of USA.
   

5. Last surviving giant tortoise. Lonesome George. Country of Ecuador.
   

6. Biggest snowflake. 15 inches by 8 inches. Year of 1887. Country of USA.
   

7. Oldest billionaire. John Simplot. Age 95. Country of USA.
   

8. First father and son to become president of the United States. John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Country of USA.
   

9. Farthest distance eyeballs popped out of head. 0.43 inches. Kim Goodman. Country of USA.
   

10. Most merit badges earned by one Boy Scout. 142. John Stanford. Country of USA.