Читать книгу Captive Audience - Dave Reidy - Страница 6

THINGLESS

Kyle woke up to a terrifying realization: he would start high school in two weeks and he had yet to find a thing. He hadn’t had a thing in junior high, and that had worked out okay, but El Dorado High had almost thirteen-hundred students. Kyle was sure that if he showed up on the first day of high school without a thing, he’d be swept up in the swarm and lost for good.

He’d seen it happen. Two years ago, Kyle’s next-door neighbor, Starlee, had started high school knowing exactly what her thing would be. She’d been co-captain of the dance team in junior high and spent three years choreographing, rehearsing and performing routines. Watching her lithe, precise movements during the halftime shows of junior-high football games, Kyle had marveled that Starlee, who’d begun to get her body, was the same girl with whom he’d spent so many summer nights playing Ghosts in the Graveyard. Back then, Kyle had considered himself Starlee’s equal—her better where running and choosing hiding places were concerned—but by junior high, running and hiding weren’t the yardsticks anymore. The year Kyle was in sixth grade and Starlee was in eighth, they spent every day at the same small school, and evenings and weekends in homes just fifteen feet apart, but they rarely said a word to one another.

Two weeks after enrolling at El Dorado High, Starlee was cut from the dance team. After that, she stopped doing her hair and putting on makeup. She was home from school by three-thirty most every day and emerged from the house only to smoke cigarettes on the crumbling slab of concrete at her back door. Kyle could not remember the last time he saw Starlee smile. If not having a thing could bring a creature like Starlee so low, Kyle shuddered to think what thinglessness would do to him.

Kyle had supposed that his thing—the thing he was meant to have—would manifest itself somehow, perhaps as a hand-me-down from an older cousin or a gleam in the mud of a creek bank. Such a revelation was still possible, Kyle figured, but he could no longer afford to wait for it.

For some time, Kyle had thought that the guitar would make a good thing. He liked the look of a guitar, the bowed symmetry of the body and the slight angle at which the head emerged from the neck. Guitars looked cool in a way that Kyle didn’t. But more importantly, guys who made the guitar their thing put themselves outside the usual pecking order. They didn’t sit around wishing they’d made the football team or been elected to student government. They hung out in each other’s backyards and carports, playing and singing. Kyle knew he wasn’t going to top the pecking order at El Dorado High, and he didn’t think he would want to if he could, so getting outside it seemed like good idea.

With time running short, Kyle didn’t bother to consider other options. He dressed without showering and walked a mile and a half in the South Arkansas heat to the music store near the community college, carrying all of his graduation and lawn-mowing money—150 dollars—in the right hip pocket of his shorts.

When Kyle pushed open the store’s front door, rusted bells rang above him and a sweet-and-sour combination of resin and cigarette smoke filled his nose. An older man sat on a stool behind the glass case that served as the store’s counter. He smoked a cigarette. On the pegboard walls to his left and right and behind him, dozens of guitars hung vertically from rubber-coated brackets.

“I’d like to get a guitar,” Kyle said to the older man.

“OK,” the man said. He did not get up from the stool.

“What kind of guitar should I get?” Kyle asked.

“That depends. How much money do you have to spend?”

“A hundred and fifty.”

The man extinguished his cigarette and slid gingerly from the stool. He sidestepped out from behind the glass case and walked toward the wall to his right. Kyle eyed the guitars in the man’s path. Would he pull down the black one with the mother-of-pearl inlays? Or the one with the Mexican drawings on the front? Near the front door, the man reached up for a standard spruce-top model and lifted it gently from its bracket. He held the guitar’s body to his chin, closed one eye, and looked down the neck as if checking a rifle sight. Then he handed the guitar to Kyle, who leaned away a little when he took the instrument, afraid that he might hit himself in the mouth with it somehow.

“What kind is it?” Kyle asked.

“A Dean.”

On the Internet, Kyle had been reading about Gibsons and Martins and Taylors. “Are Deans good?”

“They’re good for the money,” the man said. “This model’s worth two-fifty, but it’s on sale for one-thirty-five. That sale price means no returns, so you’ll have to be sure you want it.”

Kyle looked the instrument over, turning it awkwardly and feeling its weight in his hands. “I want it.”

“You sure?” the man said.

Kyle nodded. He handed the guitar to the man, pulled a wad of bills from his shorts, and set it on the counter.

After giving Kyle his change and a receipt, the man sat down on his stool and tuned the guitar one string at a time. Then he began making shapes on the fingerboard with his left hand and strumming them into sound with his right thumb. Kyle wanted to be able to make one of those shapes, but the man didn’t hold any one of them long enough for Kyle to memorize it.

“You know any chords?” the man asked.

Kyle wasn’t sure what a chord was. He shook his head.

“You want to be a rocker?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll teach you a good rock chord. Once you know this one you can play a half-dozen others.” The man flattened his left index finger against all six strings at the first fret, then placed the callused tip of his middle finger on a string at the second fret and his ring and pinky fingertips on separate strings at the third. Then he ran his thumb down the strings over the sound hole.

“Which chord is that?”

“F,” the man said.

Kyle liked the sound of F.

“You try.” The man stood up and offered the guitar to Kyle. When Kyle had the guitar body secured between his elbow and his side, the man pulled Kyle’s left index finger straight and mashed it against the strings at the first fret. Then he placed three of Kyle’s fingertips on the strings, digging the phosphor bronze into the soft pink skin. Kyle began strumming while the man’s fingers were still on his.

“Hold on a minute, now,” the man said. Then he took two steps back. “Now try.”

Kyle pulled his thumb down over the strings. His F didn’t sound like the man’s. He felt the fourth string vibrating beneath the tip of his pinky and pressed it harder, but the center knuckle buckled and muted several strings, so he stopped.

“There you go,” the man said.

The man threw in a black chipboard case for free, so Kyle walked out of the store with a guitar, a case, ten white plastic picks and four dollars. As he carried home his soon-to-be-thing, Kyle bounced on the balls of his feet just a little and clenched his jaw to keep himself from smiling.

Until that summer, Kyle had thought that Starlee didn’t have any friends. But since July, two guys who looked a little older than her and a lot older than Kyle had been pulling up in front of Starlee’s house every day around lunchtime in an older-model Camaro. Starlee would let them in and almost immediately turn up her music—all fuzz and feedback and whiny singing, not the dance music she’d listened to in junior high. Kyle could hear it clearly through the open double-hung window in his parents’ room, where he whiled away summer days on his father’s computer. The guys were always gone before Starlee’s mother got home from work. When they left, the music would stop, and Kyle could hear the crows cawing in the tall pines down the block.

The day after getting the guitar, Kyle spent the afternoon on the edge of his parents’ bed strumming F chord after F chord. Most sounded better than the one he’d played in the store, though none rang as clearly as the one the man had played. When the fingertips of his left hand began to burn, Kyle would blow on them and examine the dents he’d pressed into them with the strings. Starlee’s music blared out her open windows, but it registered with Kyle as white noise, like a box fan or a dryer running. All he heard was the F chord the man had played at the store. When the burning had subsided, Kyle would lay his index finger over the first fret, fit the strings back into the grooves in his fingertips, and try again to make the sound he heard in his head.

Around four, the rumble of the Camaro accelerating down the block swamped Kyle’s F chords. As the rumble faded, Starlee’s music cut off abruptly. Through his parents’ bedroom window, Kyle saw Starlee step onto her back step and light up a cigarette. An oversized white t-shirt nearly concealed her short red nylon shorts. Both the base and the tips of her ponytail were gathered high on the back of her head with a single rubber band.

Kyle could only play one chord—hardly enough to have made the guitar his thing—but he felt quite a bit different than he had just a few days ago. He wondered if anyone else could see the change in him. He wondered if Starlee could see it.

He laid the guitar down gently on his parents’ bed and scampered down the hall, stopping to gather himself before opening the screen door. Then he stepped out onto the rotting wood porch, hopped down from the top step, and walked with his hands in his pockets to the fence that divided the fifteen feet of gravel, dirt, and patchy crabgrass between his house and Starlee’s. Starlee blew smoke up and away, as if aiming for the tall pines. Her screen door was closed, but the thick white door behind it was open.

“Hey, Starlee.”

She finished exhaling her smoke and glanced at him. “Hey, Kyle.”

The up-and-down lilt that Kyle remembered in Starlee’s voice had flattened out. What remained of it sounded like an accident of muscle memory, or a put-on.

“How you been?” Kyle asked.

“All right,” she said.

“Good.” Kyle tried to keep his eyes off of Starlee’s long legs and was almost grateful that her t-shirt shrouded the rest of her shape. For her part, Starlee seemed to be staring into the thick mess of vines and scrub trees that made the back boundary of her mother’s lot all but impassable. He and Starlee hadn’t had a conversation this long in years, so Kyle didn’t waste any more time on small talk. “What kind of music do you listen to?” he asked.

She shrugged. “All kinds of stuff.”

“What kind of music were you listening to today?”

Starlee glanced at Kyle a second time. She nibbled at a cuticle, then examined it while the cigarette burned slowly in her other hand. “Neutral Milk Hotel,” she said.

“Oh,” Kyle said.

“Have you heard them?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Well, I’ve never heard them and known it was them.” Kyle smiled. “Maybe I should listen a little closer to what’s coming out your windows.”

Then Starlee looked squarely at Kyle. She tossed her cigarette on the gravel driveway, opened the screen door, and pushed past the white door with a long, purposeful stride. Before Kyle could figure out what he’d done wrong, Starlee reemerged from the house, walked to the fence, and held a CD over Kyle’s side of the property line. “You can have this,” she said.

She’d gripped the disc in the creases on the undersides of her first knuckles, and Kyle grabbed it the same way, momentarily interlacing his fingers with hers but never touching them. The bottom side of the disc shone purple and green in the sunlight. On the title side, “Neutral Milk Hotel” had been scrawled in green laundry marker above the spindle hole. “On Avery Island” was written below it in the same hand.

“Don’t be listening to anything going on in my house,” Starlee said. She stared at Kyle, as if waiting for him to acknowledge the order.

“OK,” Kyle said. He knew he could manage not to listen, but he wondered how he’d keep from hearing anything with both houses’ windows open and Starlee playing her music so loud.

Starlee went back inside her house. The screen door slapped twice against the wooden frame, and the thick white door closed behind it.

Kyle went into his parents’ bedroom, put the Neutral Milk Hotel CD into his father’s computer and clicked the on-screen play button. The songs sounded like mistakes at first—recordings that should have been thrown away and done over—but after hearing the first few tracks Kyle figured out that the fuzzy songs were supposed to sound fuzzy, and the clear songs were supposed to sound clear. Fuzzy or clear, each song seemed sad if Kyle listened to the words, so eventually he ignored them and absorbed only the music: chords strummed on a guitar that didn’t sound much better than Kyle’s own, and melodies carried by organs, horns and the raw, vibratoless voice of the singer.

The music evoked feelings of otherness in Kyle: this isn’t for me, he thought, by which he meant that he was neither as cool nor as weird as he perceived the music to be. But he kept listening, and as he listened he thought about Starlee. When the album ended, Kyle could not have told you for certain whether Starlee seemed melancholy because of her music or the music seemed melancholy because of Starlee.

Though he’d listened to twelve songs, Kyle found, in the near-silence of his parents’ bedroom, that he couldn’t shake the beat and melody of the album’s first song. He hummed some semblance of the tune and kept time slapping his thigh. Then he listened to the song again. The lyrics—about pornography and drugs and fires—scared Kyle a little. He couldn’t tell what was a joke and what was deadly serious.

Kyle googled a phrase from the lyrics, hoping he might understand them better if he could read them. The first page of search results all pointed to a song called “Song Against Sex.” Kyle didn’t recall hearing those words sung together and, though it was partly about sex, the song didn’t seem to be against sex, exactly. Kyle clicked on the second search result. “Song Against Sex” was indeed the song roaring out of his father’s computer speakers. On screen, the words were easier to comprehend and even more unsettling.

The letter F and a word Kyle had never seen before—“Bbmaj”—were written above each line of the lyrics. Kyle scrolled up to the top of the page and realized that these were the song’s chords: F and B flat major. He could hardly believe that a song this full could be made with only two chords, one of which was the only chord he could play. The page included two crude, typographic diagrams—x characters on a lattice of underlines and vertical bars—that showed how to form each of the song’s chords on a fingerboard. Kyle copied the B-flat-major diagram into a new document and printed it. Then, with “Song Against Sex” still coursing through his head, Kyle took the guitar in his hands.

For the next week and a half, Kyle spent at least a few hours a day in the den, a small, dark room at the corner of the house farthest from Starlee’s back step. First, he worked on his transition from the F chord to the B flat major right below it. Getting his fingers into the right shape from a resting position was one thing; going from F to B flat major and back again proved quite another. To play “Song Against Sex,” Kyle had to slow the song to a fitful crawl. He hardly recognized it.

When he could execute each chord change in a second or two, Kyle started singing the song as he played it. After a few days, he had the lyrics memorized. He was still singing and playing the up-tempo rocker at the pace of a country ballad, but he was playing it through without any stops and starts. And when his voice strained to reach a high note or his fingers touched strings they shouldn’t have, Kyle’s version of “Song Against Sex” captured some of the rawness of the original, and he felt something surge inside him.

After ten days, Kyle knew he had “Song Against Sex” down well enough to play along with the recording. But the family’s only CD player was in his father’s computer, within earshot—and eyeshot—of Starlee’s back step. That fact made him hesitate, but Kyle decided he’d worked too hard not to hear his guitar backed by the drums, bass, vocals, and trombone of Neutral Milk Hotel, and that, when he got down to it, he wanted Starlee to hear him play. So he sat on his parents’ bed, waiting for those guys to leave Starlee’s house and for her music to stop. The boldness of it all excited Kyle. What are you doing, man? he asked himself, smiling. There were reasons not to make such a bald attempt to impress Starlee, and Kyle was aware of them, but he convinced himself that school’s beginning—just three days away—offered a kind of clean slate. With bells and homework and rumors and football games, would Starlee even remember whether or not he’d played? Would Kyle?

Kyle wondered who had made the music that filled the air between Starlee’s house and his own today. He was pretty sure it wasn’t Neutral Milk Hotel. I’ll ask her later, Kyle thought. But then he remembered that Starlee had told him not to listen to anything going on in her house, and asking would mean admitting he’d been listening. Before Kyle could lift a phrase from the lyrics and search for it, the music stopped. A minute later, the Camaro started up and rumbled away.

Kyle sat motionless on the bed, breathing through his mouth, waiting for what would come next. He heard Starlee’s back door squeeze out of its heat-swollen frame and the screen door creak on its hinges. Her bare leg hit the concrete first and the rest of her followed. She was wearing red shorts and a gray t-shirt one size too small. She lit a cigarette, and when she’d exhaled her first deep drag, Kyle pushed himself to his feet and turned up the volume on his father’s computer speakers. Then he grabbed his guitar, sat down on the rolling desk chair, and rested the guitar on his thigh. As he moved the cursor to the play button with his right hand, he made the shape of an F chord with his left.

During the ten seconds of feedback and chatter at the beginning of the recording, Kyle took his white Fender pick in hand and held it above the sound hole. The drummer clicked off the rhythm with his sticks, and the guitarist began to play. And when the singer came in four bars later, Kyle played his own guitar, spreading a layer of clear acoustic tones above the fuzz of the recording. He stared hard at the fingerboard, making sure to hit only the strings he was supposed to this time. He wanted Starlee to hear he could play.

After verse one, Kyle wondered if she could hear him at all. He’d set the volume loud enough to get her attention, but was the recording drowning him out? What if she thought he was simply blasting her own music back at her through his father’s computer speakers? What would she make of that?

Kyle looked out the window and found Starlee leaning her shoulder against the back of her house and facing his own. Then he mangled an F and returned his eyes to the fingerboard until he was back in sync with the song. When he looked up again, Starlee was staring at the ground between their houses. Her forelock hung in front of her face, keeping Kyle from getting a look at her eyes. She wasn’t smoking anymore. She was just standing on her back step, listening.

As the final verse began, Kyle’s stomach flooded with emotion and he strummed so hard he worried a string might break and blind him. “Song Against Sex” built to its climax—the speaker’s threat to light himself on fire—and Kyle played loud and hard and clean until the song petered out with three lazy descending notes from the trombone.

When he looked up, Starlee was gone.

Kyle leaned his guitar against the desk and wiped his sweaty face with the front of his t-shirt. Now he was the kind of kid who taught himself strange songs and slyly serenaded older girls. Maybe he always had been but hadn’t known it. Maybe his thing made him who he really was.

Kyle spent the following morning playing B flat major and F chords without any rhythm or purpose. He glanced out the window every few minutes, hoping Starlee would come out of her house to smoke or cool off or take out the garbage. He was sure that she would see him differently now and wanted to feel her eyes on him.

By that afternoon, Kyle still hadn’t been seen by Starlee, and he feared that whatever good his performance had done him was waning. To take the edge off his impatience, Kyle carried his guitar to the den, leaned it against the arm of the yarn-upholstered couch, and turned on the television. Every few minutes, he muted the sound, hoping to find that Starlee’s music had stopped. At four-thirty, it was still blaring. What can be taking so long? Kyle wondered.

Too antsy to sit any longer, Kyle walked out the back door and around to the front yard. The Camaro was still parked in front of Starlee’s house. It was painted in a matte-finish black, and two hubcaps were missing. All the driver’s money must be going into the rumble, Kyle thought. That must be his thing.

Suddenly Starlee’s music cut off right in the middle of a song, and her front door opened. Her two usual guests stepped out. The bigger one—they were both big—closed the door behind him. Kyle watched them as they walked toward the Camaro. When they noticed him and stopped, Kyle shifted his gaze to the house across the street.

“What are you looking at, boy?” the smaller one asked.

“Nothing,” Kyle said. He’d never noticed that the house across the street was peach-colored until now. He’d always thought it was yellow.

“Show’s over,” the bigger one said. He lowered the curved brim of his ball cap over his eyes and pulled a ring of keys from the left hip pocket of his jeans. “Run along now.”

Kyle didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either. He didn’t want to run along. He was in his own yard.

The bigger one took a step toward him. “Did you hear me, boy?”

Kyle knew the two guys would have no qualms about leaping the chain-link fence and giving him hell, so he walked toward his backyard, but slowly. The bigger one said something under his breath and the smaller one laughed. Then the engine started up, and the Camaro rumbled away.

When Kyle reached the backyard, Starlee was standing at the fence holding an unlit cigarette in her hands. Kyle felt himself get scared, more scared than he’d been of her friends.

“What are you doing talking to them?”

Her tone made him wince. “I wasn’t. They were talking to me.”

“What were you doing so close to my house?”

“Nothing.” Had he been that close to her house? “I was just walking around ’cause I was bored.”

Starlee shook her head and smiled bitterly. “Well,” she said, “I bet you’re not bored anymore.” Then she stalked off, throwing open the screen door and disappearing inside her house. The thick back door thudded shut, rattling her kitchen windows.

Kyle could feel the humid air between his lips as he stared at the spot where Starlee had just been standing. He replayed the confrontation in his head, trying to figure out what he’d done. He’d been threatened and scolded in the space of two minutes and, so far as Kyle could tell, standing in his own yard had been his only offense.

He retreated to the den and lay down on the couch. Every chord he’d strummed to show Starlee how he’d changed sawed at his insides like a jagged blade. Maybe she would forget everything he’d done when school started, but Kyle knew he never would.

After a few minutes, Kyle rolled onto his feet. He wrapped his hands around the neck of the guitar and picked it up. Then he swung it slowly in front of his waist like a batter waiting for a pitcher to get a sign he liked. He imagined how it would feel to bring the body down on the arm of the couch, driving through until whatever was left in his hands had hit the floor. He wondered how many swings it would take to shatter the body like an eggshell.

Kyle sat down on the couch and rested the guitar’s curve on his right thigh. He strummed an F chord, then a B flat major. Then he started to play “Song Against Sex” at full speed, without any accompaniment. He sang, too, filling lines he couldn’t recall with words from other verses. He had to try like hell to remember the lyrics and keep the rhythm and make the right shapes with his hand, but through it all, Kyle realized that playing the guitar felt different than it had the day before. He was playing—at least in part—because of what had just happened with Starlee. But he wasn’t playing for her. He wasn’t playing for anyone else, either. He was just playing. Playing was just what he did. The realization buoyed Kyle somehow, and the buoyancy came through in his playing. He stomped his left foot on the carpet with each beat and strummed as hard as he could without losing all control. Even his head swiveled with the rhythm. And as he sang the melody of the trombone solo over the jangle of his messy chords, Kyle thought, This is what it feels like to have a thing. This must be.

Around noon, Kyle sat down at his father’s computer, determined to learn at least part of another song before school started the next day. He maxed out the speakers’ volume to drown out Starlee’s music and listened to the Neutral Milk Hotel album two times through with the guitar by his side, waiting for something to hit him the way “Song Against Sex” had. Nothing did. So Kyle picked a song that sounded simple. By Kyle’s count, the slow, plaintive, “Someone is Waiting” had only three chords. A tablature site confirmed the number of chords and named them: F, B flat major, and C. Kyle couldn’t believe his luck. Though he likely could play dozens of chords, the guitarist for Neutral Milk Hotel was partial, it seemed, to the two Kyle knew already.

The song’s tablature included diagrams for open C and barred C, which was just B flat major played two frets further up the fingerboard. But from the moment he realized that a C chord could be played without flattening a finger against a fret and bending his wrist around the guitar neck, Kyle focused only on open C. Following the diagram, he placed the tips of his index, middle and ring fingers on the strings. The shape felt natural, almost ergonomic. Kyle’s choice was rewarded again when he dragged the pick across the strings. The open C rang out in a way that even a perfectly executed barred chord, with so much flesh on the strings, could not. Kyle hadn’t known his guitar could sound that good. He played open C after open C. With each strum, the strings wobbled wildly, settled into a tight blur, and came to rest as the chord faded into Starlee’s music.

When he had the C down, Kyle played an F, a B flat major, and an open C in succession. Getting his fingers in the right places and sounding each chord once took almost half a minute. “Someone is Waiting” was a slow song, but not nearly slow enough for Kyle to play it—not today, anyway.

As Kyle sat in the rolling chair, struggling with the chord progression, a melody from Starlee’s house pierced his concentration. Starlee was listening to “Someone is Waiting.” Had she heard him listening to the song? Had she heard him butchering Fs and Cs and B flat majors? Was she sending him some kind of message? An apology, maybe?

Kyle stood up and traced the music’s path with his eyes through a dirty steel screen that made everything inside Starlee’s living room look pixilated and gray, like images read from a pirated videotape. Kyle saw those two guys kneeling on the carpeted floor, facing each other with their jeans bunched around their calves. Starlee was on her hands and knees, moving—or being moved—back and forth between them. The guys were smiling at each other, as if Starlee weren’t even there.

It took Kyle a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. Then he turned and stood with his back to the window, feeling his heartbeat in his ears. Even with his back turned, his parents’ bedroom seemed too close to it all. He closed the window, keeping his eyes on his bare feet. Then he walked to the den, sat on the couch, and gripped the sweaty hair above his temples.

But sitting in the den didn’t reduce Kyle’s sense of alarm. I should be doing something, Kyle thought. But what? Ringing her doorbell? Making a ruckus? Starting a fire? It occurred to Kyle that what he should be doing—what other guys he knew would be doing—was watching through the window, imagining themselves in place of one of those guys, or both of them. But Kyle didn’t want to. It occurred to Kyle that not wanting to watch might make him queer, but he didn’t see that there was anything he could do about that right now.

Eventually the Camaro rumbled away, and Kyle knew it was over. But he stayed in the den until it was time for dinner, ate with his back to Starlee’s house, and went straight to bed. He didn’t want to see Starlee on her back step, confirming with her calm, smoky exhalations that what had happened today—or something like it—had happened many times before.

Kyle lay awake, helplessly generating more questions. Did Starlee like doing what he’d seen her doing? Did she love one of those guys, or both of them? Did everyone at school know about this? If they didn’t, Kyle figured they would by tomorrow afternoon. Those guys wouldn’t see any reason to keep their mouths shut and, if high school was anything like junior high, word would spread in a hurry. Part of Kyle couldn’t even blame those guys for blabbing. If he had done what they’d done today, wouldn’t he have felt compelled to tell someone? But the thought that this was what kids at school would think of when they saw Starlee—that this was, in effect, her thing—made Kyle roll over on his side and groan.