Voice (6 page)

“What a goddamn disaster.”

Outside, a soft breeze blew over him, but instead of cooling him down, it made him unnaturally aware of his clammy, sweaty skin.

The scent reached him before he saw the man—cigarette smoke covering something nastier, more elemental. John turned, and though he knew what he would see, he still gave a start when he saw the old guy, the ex-rocker, leaning against the wall as he’d leaned against the bar two weeks before.

“What are you doing here?” John asked.

The guy exhaled a cloud of smoke that curled and writhed in the air. “Your band did good tonight, Johnny,” he whispered.

Those few kind words blunted the edge of John’s misery, and he started to relax. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Not you, Johnny. The band.” The guy looked directly at John, his eyes gleaming black caverns in his skull, and the corners of his lips curled up. “You sucked.”

“Hey, asshole, I—”

The guy flicked his cigarette to the sidewalk and walked toward John. “Yeah?”

John looked down. “I wasn’t asking for your opinion,” he muttered.

Cold, damp fingertips touched his chin and pushed his head up to meet the man’s eyes. “It’s not gonna get any better, you know. They’re good. Your guitar player is
real
good. She’s gonna get up on stage and shake her ass, and you’re gonna be left outside, watching them clamor for her attention every time.”

“That’s . . . that’s not really fair,” John said. “She works hard.”

“The band’s got the magic, Johnny. Believe me, I know. They’re gonna be the real deal. How long do you think it’ll be before they figure out you’re holding them back? Half a dozen more shows? Maybe a dozen, at most? You looking forward to starting over when they shitcan you?”

“They can’t fire me,” John protested, but he heard the whine in his own voice. “It’s my band. Danny’s my brother, for Christ’s sake.”

An awful sound clawed its way up from the man’s throat, as if he were coughing up jagged metal hairballs. It took John a second to recognize it as laughter.

“Sure,” the guy said. “Sure.”

“What do you want from me?” John shouted. “I’m doing the best I can, dammit! Did you follow me all the way up here just to make me feel like shit? You’ve got that much time on your hands?”

“I’m telling you how it is, Johnny. And like I told you before, I can help you. If you’ve got the guts for it.”

“How are you going to help me? You can’t even fucking talk.” That got another hideous laugh from the man, so John kept talking to drown it out. “And what do you know about me? How did you know my name? How did you know about the money? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

The guy put out a pale hand. “Call me Douglas. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Johnny. You’re going to do great things.”

John reluctantly shook the man’s hand, then pulled away, fighting the urge to wipe his hand on his pants. The wind picked up, and without the cigarette masking the smell of decay, John’s stomach rolled over. “Yeah, I’m off to a hell of a start.”

“Everybody was nobody once.”

“Most of them stay that way.”

“Come with me, and I promise you won’t.” The man’s words hung heavy in the air, the whisper seeming to echo and scrape in John’s ears. This seemed like such a crock of shit, and yet—

The door to the student union swung open behind him, letting the yammering of the small crowd out into the night. It seemed to violate the silence somehow, and John clenched his fists.

“Hey, there you are.” It was Quentin. “We’re going to a party, come on.” Quentin’s eyes glanced over at Douglas, then quickly back to John. “Come on,” he repeated.

Douglas spoke before John could answer, his nasty whisper carrying on the night air. “You having a good time, Quentin? Meet some nice girls in there?”

“Come on, John.”

A lurking green anger flared to life in John’s heart. “Answer the man’s question,” he said. “You meet some nice girls in there?”

Quentin reached one hand back and rested it on the door handle. “Yeah, I guess so. You coming or what?”

“Nope. You have a good time.” He turned to Douglas.
This is crazy!
part of him thought.
You don’t know this guy from Adam!
But it was burned raw by the sudden release of anger. “All right. Let’s go.”

Douglas nodded and started walking. After a moment’s hesitation, John followed.

Quentin rushed forward and grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts? Who the hell is this guy? What do you want with him?”

John shook Quentin’s hand away. “Just business. Go have a good time. I’ll call you later.”

Ahead of him, Douglas was still walking, boots tapping a regular rhythm on the sidewalk. John rushed to catch up.

He could feel Quentin watching them until they turned the corner.

***

“Get in,” Douglas said.

John stared, openly gawking at the sleek black car parked at the curb. He didn’t know from cars, but this one was forty years old if it was a day, and yet it was so pristine it glistened in the moonlight. It had a hungry look to it, poised to leap though it wasn’t even running yet. “This is your ride?”

“Yeah. Nineteen-seventy Charger. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. Get in.”

The car started with a throaty growl, and John barely got in before Douglas peeled away from the curb. The lights of Wichita Falls, Texas, faded in the rearview mirror, and in a surprisingly short period of time, they were in the middle of nowhere. No streetlights, no house lights, no lights of any kind other than the stars and a fat, pale moon. This country seemed somehow slippery in time. Away from the road and the power lines, it could have been yesterday, or a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred. Perhaps the illusion would disappear in the daylight—there’d be a tractor in the fields, airplanes overhead, something—but right now he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had invaded an earlier era. The few houses they passed with their electric porch lights seemed to shrink against the surrounding darkness.

John’s cell phone rang, and he jumped. He took it from his pocket, looked at the small screen. Danny. John turned the phone off.

“Where are we going?” he asked at last.

Douglas’s face was ghostly in the light from the dash. “You’ve heard of Robert Johnson?”

“Yeah. Blues guy.”

“
The
blues guy. He inspired Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix—all those guys. You know the story they tell about him?”

“Sure. Everybody knows that one. He went down to the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil.” John tried to laugh, but it died in his throat.

Douglas nodded. “He was nobody once, just like everybody else. Just a kid living on a plantation who wanted to play the blues more than anything else. He worked like hell, but it came slow.” His mouth twitched in a smile that was gone a second later. “You know how it is.

“He heard stories, though. If you wanted something bad enough, you went down to a certain crossroads at night, and you waited. There was a price to pay, of course, but there’s always a price to pay.”

“Nobody gets out alive,” John muttered.

“Yeah.” Douglas pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, separated one from the pack, and stuck it in his mouth. He offered the pack to John, but John waved him off. Douglas pushed the round knob of the car’s cigarette lighter into the dash.
Wow,
John thought.
You don’t see those anymore.

Douglas continued, his hoarse voice sharp over the rumble of the engine. “So, one night, Robert put his guitar in the case and went for a long walk. Down to the crossroads. He waited around, and before too long he heard the sound of footsteps on the packed dirt behind him.

“He turned around, and there was a man there—a big man, in a black suit. The man didn’t say anything. He simply held out his hand. Robert put the case on the ground and took out his guitar. He looked from the guitar to the big man’s hand and back, and then he handed the guitar over.

“The man in the black suit tuned the guitar. He played just six notes, one for each string, and twisted the tuning pegs until each string seemed to sing all by itself. Then he handed the guitar back and walked off down the road.”

The lighter popped out of the dash, and Douglas lit his cigarette. The tip glowed redly in the darkness.

“When Robert woke up the next morning, he was the best blues player the world had ever known.”

“Cute,” John said. “He didn’t exactly live happily ever after, though.”

“Nope. He died when he was twenty-seven.”

“Like Kurt Cobain,” John said.

“And Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.”

“And Jim Morrison.”

The man grinned. John shuddered and stared out the window. A possum glared up at him from the side of the road, its eyes reflecting an eerie, baleful yellow-green, its thick, grotesque rat tail curling around behind it.
What the hell am I doing here?
he asked himself without much conviction.
This guy’s nuts.

The possum slipped off into the ditch. The car streaked by, and Johnny tried not to look into the darkness after the creature. He was suddenly convinced there would be other things out there looking back.

“So we’re going to Mississippi,” John said. The sarcasm tasted like dust in his mouth.

“No. There are other places where the world is thin. I think I know all of them by now.” Douglas stared forward still, his eyes shrouded and blank. “But we are going to the crossroads. How’s that grab you, Johnny?”

John turned back to the window. Douglas was nuts, he knew. But suppose John took him seriously. Suppose they were headed to the crossroads. How
did
that grab him?

The coffin was inevitable. Even at twenty-two, John knew that. You lived your allotted span and then they dumped you into a hole. And after that? He found it difficult to credit an eternity full of harps and angels and hosannahs. Nothing in the world he’d seen suggested that such was likely, while the alternative seemed evident in every headline, every atrocity, and every petty act of duplicity around him every day. John had never believed much in God, and he didn’t see any reason to start now. The devil, though? That guy had his hand in everything. Might as well take it when it was offered and get the most you could out of your threescore and ten.

Or even one score and seven?

Yeah. Even that.

“Just drive,” John said.

***

It was nearing midnight when Douglas slowed the car and turned onto a poorly marked side road. A sick tension hummed to life in John’s head, not exactly audible but just at the edge of sensation, like the shrieking noise he sometimes heard when somebody left an old television on.

Ahead, in the headlights, he could see a line perpendicular to the road, halfway up a low rise. A road.

Douglas slowed the car down as they approached. The road crossing theirs was another badly kept asphalt road. Aside from the drainage ditches to either side and the slight rise ahead, the ground was featureless. High grass, wet with dew, rippled in a slight breeze.

The tension in John’s head ratcheted up a notch. This place felt really bad in a way he couldn’t adequately describe, but it also felt . . . not quite right. Like two notes that were supposed to be in harmony, except one of them was out of tune.

Douglas turned the key in the ignition, and the car growled once before going to sleep. “Here we are.”

“I . . . think this is the wrong place,” John said slowly. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“Smart kid. But this is as far as I go.” A spasm of something—pain? sorrow? regret?—crossed Douglas’s face, and then it was gone. “What’s up ahead is . . .” He exhaled heavily. “It’s not for me. Not anymore.”

John waited for an explanation, but Douglas stared ahead, silent and waiting.

There seemed to be no more delays to be had or excuses to make. It was time to go on ahead, or tell Douglas that, sorry, this had all been a waste of time, and can we please go back now?

John grabbed the door handle and pulled. The door swung open smoothly, and he got out. Stones ground into the pavement under his shoes. He took half a step, then turned around. “Hey, kill the lights, would you?”

The headlights went dark.

There was no noise here. Nothing. No crickets, night birds, or even wind. He couldn’t bring himself to slam the car door in that oppressive silence, so he pushed the door until the dome light went off and left it like that, unlatched. Now that he was out of the car, he could see that the high grass here looked strange, wrong. It was too dark, almost black, and oddly twisted, with ragged edges along the blades. It seemed to conceal something horrible, and he moved to the center of the road.

He took another step, and that faint, awful dissonance ratcheted up in intensity, humming in his head, in his belly, in his chest. Two notes, sickeningly out of tune, pulsing and thrumming. It set up a resonance, an ache in his bones, and he thought if he stayed here for any length of time, it would slowly tear him apart. His heart would rupture; blood would blossom in his brain, seeping into his tissues even as his life drained away.