Forests of the Heart (6 page)

He couldn’t fault the music; the trouble lay with him and nothing seemed to help. Not the music. And certainly not the weather.

Early this morning the latest cold snap had broken, but now it was snowing again. Big lazy flakes drifted by the display window, blurring the view he had of Williamson Street. For the way he was feeling, it should have been raining. A steady, depressing downpour—the kind of relentless precipitation that eventually overwhelmed even the most cheerful soul with its sheer volume and persistence. The snow was too postcard-pretty. It hid the ugliness, rounding off all the sharp edges until even a heartless behemoth like this city could seem to hold something good in it. But the softness, the prettiness … it was all a lie. Maybe you couldn’t see them, but the sharp edges remained under the snow nevertheless, waiting to catch you unawares and cut you where it hurt.

Ria had still moved out. Four weeks and counting. He had a Christmas present for her, wrapped up and sitting on a shelf in his office at the back of the store, that he doubted he’d ever give to her now.

He was still in a rut—the same one he’d been in before he’d even thought of buying the store a few years ago—only now it ran deeper.

Buying the store. That had been a mistake.

Gypsy Records got its name from John Butler, a short barrel of a man without even a pretense of Romany blood running through his veins. Butler had begun his business out of the back of a hand-drawn cart that gypsied its way through the city’s streets for years, always keeping just one step ahead of the municipal licensing board’s agents. The store carried the usual best-sellers, but the lifeblood of its sales were more obscure titles—imports, and albums produced by independent record labels. They still carried vinyl, new and used, and they did brisk business with best-sellers, but most of their sales came from back-catalog CDs: country and folk, worldbeat, jazz, and whatever else you weren’t likely to find in the chain stores.

Buying the store hadn’t seemed like a mistake at first. Music was in his blood and he’d been working here for years. A true vinyl junkie, he’d always dreamed of opening his own place, so when John made him the offer that couldn’t be refused, it had seemed like the best thing that could ever have happened to him. But on a day like this, when he faced slumping sales and his footsteps rang hollowly in an apartment he no longer shared with the person he’d been expecting to be with for the rest of his life, it all seemed so pathetic. He was thirty-eight years old and all he had to show for his life to date was a bank balance that edged precariously towards the red and a store that had become the proverbial millstone hanging round his neck.

Maybe he was only having a mid-life crisis. Though if that were the case, shouldn’t he be out looking to buy a nice red sportscar? Not to mention finding some sweet young thing to drive around in it with him. He sighed. All he really wanted to do was dig a hole, crawl in, then pull the dirt in behind him.

He lifted his gaze from the clutter of invoices and looked for solace in the world that lay outside the display window. What he got was one of his staff materializing out of the falling snow—the diminutive and inimitable Miki Greer. He watched her approach the front door, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She spat the cigarette out and ground the butt under the heel of her Doc Marten before backing in through the door, holding a large Styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand. They’d agreed long ago that if she was going to keep going out for smoke breaks, she could at least make herself useful. So she made the runs to the bank, to the post office, to The Monkey Woman’s Nest a few doors down for coffee and lunches.

“Hey, grumpy,” she said as she put the cups on the counter.

She stepped back and shook herself like a terrier, spraying melted snow from her leather jacket and short-cropped hair. This week it was bleached an almost white blond.

“I’m not grumpy,” Hunter told her. “I’m depressed. It’s not the same.”

“I’m sure. And you’re welcome.”

“Thanks.”

She grinned. “But really. Grumpy, depressed—what’s the difference?”

“Grumpy means I’d be snapping at everyone. Depressed means I just want to go slit my wrists or something.”

“Cool. Am I in your will?”

Hunter shook his head.

“Then I’d think this whole thing through a little more carefully before you do anything that drastic.”

“You’re so sweet.”

Miki nodded. “Many people say that.”

She joined him behind the cash and stuffed her jacket under the counter. The black T-shirt she wore was missing its sleeves and sported a DIY slogan, carelessly applied with white paint: “Ani DiFranco Rules!” Surrounding the words were splatters of the same white paint, as though she’d flicked a loaded paintbrush at the shirt after scrawling her message. She perched on the stool Hunter wasn’t using, popped open the lid on her coffee and took a sip. Hunter returned his gaze to the snowy view outside.

“I know it’s hard,” Miki said after a moment. “I mean, Ria leaving you and all. But you can’t let it take over your life.”

He turned to find her studying him, her bright green eyes thoughtful.

“What life?” he said.

“This life. You know, where you’re a living, breathing human being in charge of your own destiny.”

“How old are you, Miki?”

“Twenty-two, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

Hunter could only sigh.

“Oh, please,” Miki said. “Don’t go all ancient on me.”

“It’s not. It’s just you’re …”

“What? Too young to fully appreciate the bummers of life? As if. I know all about heartbreak. Been there, done that.” She plucked the fabric of her T-shirt. “Brought back the merchandise.”

“I thought you liked DiFranco.”

“I do,” Miki said. “Stop being so literal.”

“You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

“But I know what you’re going through,” she went on. “When the bad times come rolling in, it doesn’t seem like anyone else could possibly understand. Or that they’ll ever go away.”

Hunter nodded. “That’s exactly how I’m feeling.”

“See? And I’m only twenty-two.”

Hunter had to smile. It was hard not to be cheered up by one of Miki’s pep talks. As her brother Donal had said to him once, she could make a stone laugh. But there was too much wearing him down these days and he couldn’t hold onto that smile for more than a moment.

“It’s not just Ria,” he said, “though that’s a big part of it.”

“C’mon,” Miki told him, immediately figuring out what else was bothering him. “It’s still early in the year. Sales never start to pick up until the
turistas
hit town.” She waved her hand around the store. “Besides, what’s to buy? New product’s not exactly flying in the door these days.”

“And it wasn’t exactly flying out over Christmas either, and those are the bills I’m still trying to pay.”

“This is true. But everybody was down.”

“Not this down,” Hunter told her.

That gave her pause.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

Hunter shrugged. “I won’t know till the end of the month. But I’m going to have to cut some hours.”

“Is this your way of saying, maybe I should be considering a secondary career?”

“Not
your
hours,” he told her. “It’s just… nothing seems to be going right lately. Between Ria, the store, the weather …”

They both looked up as the front door opened and Titus Mealy came in, stamping the snow from his boots. A dour, mousy-haired man with the body shape of a stork, he was the store’s shipper/receiver, an occupation that suited him well since it allowed him to spend the greater proportion of his time in the back room, packing and unboxing shipments, instead of out on the floor where he’d have to deal with customers. It wasn’t that he was deliberately unfriendly—he could be quite charming on occasion—but for him to open up to you, first you had to pass some indecipherable Titus Mealy respect-meter test.

Most people didn’t. But he had a regular contingent of pale-faced and soft-bodied misfits that came in to see him, usually buying up to a half-dozen CDs per visit, and he was a hard worker, so Hunter tended to leave him to his own devices.

“Now that’s what I call perfect timing,” Miki said.

Titus looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We were just talking about things that bum us out.”

“Ha, ha.” He turned his attention to Hunter. “Any new shipments?”

Hunter shook his head.

“Then I guess I’ll keep working on the returns.”

He headed off towards the back room with the awkward gait of someone not entirely comfortable in his own body.

“See,” Miki said. “Now that’s grumpy. And probably depressed, too, though with him I’d say it was clinical.”

“Are you ever going to stop ragging on him?” Hunter asked.

“I don’t know. Do you think he’ll ever learn any social graces?”

The phone rang before Hunter could reply. He picked up the receiver. “Hello. Gypsy Records.”

“Do you have any Who bootlegs?” a high, nasally voice asked.

Hunter sighed and hung up the phone without replying.

“Who-boy?” Miki asked.

He nodded.

There were two daily occurrences they’d come to count on—if not look forward to. One was that the anonymous caller with what had to be a put-on voice would phone asking for Who bootlegs. He called at least once a day and had been doing it for years—not only to Gypsy Records, but to record stores all over town. The first time Who-boy phoned after the store got call display, they’d all crowded around the telephone to finally see who he was, or at least where he was calling from, but the liquid display had only read “Caller unknown.”

The second thing was Donnie Dobson, a large, pink version of the Pills-bury dough boy in a polyester suit who came in and/or called the store on a daily basis looking for new country and easy-listening releases by female artists. But he at least bought music. Like Who-boy, Gypsy Records wasn’t the only recipient of Donnie’s interest, but since they went out of their way to bring in whatever album he was desperately looking for that particular week, he tended to give them most of his business.

For the longest time Hunter had no idea what Donnie did with everything he purchased—he couldn’t possibly listen to it all, there was simply too much of it. Donnie had been doing this for years—long before Hunter got into the business, and Hunter had been working in music stores for almost twenty years now. But then one day Titus made an offhand remark about having been over to Donnie’s house and how weird it was that he was still living with his mother. It was Titus who explained that Donnie listened to each new purchase once, then carefully put it away in one of the boxes that literally filled his mother’s basement.

“But what were
you
doing over there?” Miki had wanted to know.

“I was looking for a Brenda Lee cut for this tape I was making,” Titus had replied in a tone of voice that left one with the sense that it explained everything.

In a way, it did. He and Adam Snipe, Hunter’s other full-time employee, were forever making compilation tapes, arranging and rearranging the order of the cuts with a single-minded focus that went far beyond obsession. They often seemed willing to go to almost any length to get exactly the right version of a song. “See,” one of them would explain in the middle of yet another obscure song search, “I need something to put before this cut by Roger Miller and I figure it’s got to be by Stealers Wheel because Gerry Rafferty went on to produce that version of ‘Letter from America’ by the Proclaimers and they covered ‘King of the Road.’ You see how it all connects?”

Hunter did, where most people wouldn’t, but while he loved music, he liked to think he wasn’t that obsessed by it. And neither were his other employees. Fiona Hale, the store’s part-timer and resident Goth, all tall and pale, with lanky black hair and a chiaroscuro wardrobe, might love her Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins CDs, but she had a life beyond them. And as for Miki, well, she was Miki, and who could figure her out. She looked like a punk, played button accordion in a local Celtic band, and when it was her turn to choose what they’d play on the store’s sound system, inevitably picked something by an old horn player like Bird, Coltrane, or Cannonball Adderly. Her musical enthusiasms were great, but then she had the same broad enthusiasm for anything that interested her. Sometimes it seemed that everything did.

“So Adam said you’re going to let his band play in the store some Saturday,” Miki said.

Hunter nodded. “Have you heard them? I’ve got this awful feeling I’m going to regret this.”

“They’re okay—kind of lounge music set to a reggae beat. Imagine ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ sung by Peter Tosh.”

Hunter winced.

“No, really,” Miki assured him. “It’s fun. Except their horns are all sampled and that sucks.” She cocked her head to look at him. “How come you’ve never had my band in to play?”

“You never asked.”

“Adam says you offered them the gig.”

“Adam’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”

Miki nodded slowly. “And wouldn’t you know … it worked.”

They fell silent, listening to the CD. Casey was singing now about a hare hunt in the low country of Creggan.

“So do you want to play here some Saturday?” Hunter asked when the song ended with a fade-out of a flute playing against the lilting rhythm of a bodhran.

“Nah. I wouldn’t want to mix my store and band groupies. That’d be just too weird.”

Hunter had to laugh. Both Miki and Fiona acquired small clusters of teenage boys and young businessmen on a regular basis, earnestly hovering around them in the store, buying their recommendations while working up the nerve to ask for a date. Fiona’s were rather predictably Goth, but with Miki, anything seemed to go, from skateboarders and headbangers to lawyers in three-piece suits.

“There, you see?” Miki said. “If you can still find something to smile about, your life’s not over yet.”

“What do you do when you’re depressed?” he asked.

Miki took a sip from her coffee. “Well,” she drawled, “sometimes I do like in that Pam Tillis song and ask myself, ‘What would Elvis do?’ “