The Friendship Song (6 page)

“Yeah,” I told him. “I heard about you too.”

“I bet you did. Listen, I still feel like people are playing a joke on me. I couldn't have been lost in there for two days. It only felt like a few hours.”

“At nighttime?”

“Sure, it was night. I mean, I went in there to see what I could liberate. You don't do that in the daytime.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“Huh? No. Nothing special.”

“See anything?”

“Huh?”

Rawnie had caught on and started helping me out with her own questions. “Did you see, like, colored lights?”

“I wish there would have been a light! I couldn't see a damn thing. That's why I couldn't find my way out.”

“Could you find your way
in
?” Rawnie asked.

“Huh?”

I tried. “How far did you get?”

“Not very. I was stuck the whole time like in a damn maze, if you know what I mean.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

“Do me a favor,” he told us when we got to his house. “Don't say hi to Spooky McCogg for me. I want her to forget I ever lived.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay,” Rawnie said. “Bye, Benjy.”

She and I walked on to the next block, where we lived, and then she told me, “Don't always expect Benjy to talk with you like a real person. When he's around here he's okay, but when he's with the other heads he's a jerk just like the rest of them.”

“Why do boys do that?”

“I don't know. They just do.”

“Girls sort of do that too,” I said. “Especially once they get in high school.”

“Tell me! Me'n my sister used to be real close. But now she'll just turn against a person. If there's a boy she wants, she'll turn against her best friend to get him.”

I was curious. “Does she usually get the boy she wants?”

“Yeah. If you can believe her. Harper, that makes me think. How did your dad and Spooky McCogg get together? Did she go after him?”

“Sorta looks that way, doesn't it?” I complained.

“C'mon!” Rawnie did a little dance. “Tell me how she did it.”

“How should I know? He took this found-objects art class she was teaching, and next thing I noticed they were practically married already.”

“You don't like her much, do you?”

“Well …” A week before I would have said no duh, I didn't like Gus a bit. But now I wasn't sure.

The thing was, as I had told Rawnie, I had research to do. I was starting to spend time with Gus, trying to figure out what was going on in her head and her backyard. I had been helping her with stuff after school, talking with her after supper, kind of spying on her. And the more time I spent around her, the more I got interested in her and all her junk. If being interested in a person is the same thing as liking her, then I had kind of sort of started to like Gus.

I had been telling Rawnie that the junk Gus had in the yard was nothing compared with the stuff she had in some of the sheds. They used to be for cows or something, but now they were full of things like a calliope from a circus, and elk antlers, and a cadaver bag with a broken zipper, and big old wooden radios, and big old jukeboxes full of colored glass tubes.

“She's kind of fun,” I told Rawnie. “Come on over tonight and you'll see what I mean.”

So she did. As soon as she got in the front door she stood and stared at the hanging sofa, the plow-blade ship in a bottle, the fancy tin ceiling, and all the rest of it. “Radical!” she exclaimed.

“Haven't you ever been in here before?”

“No! How would I?”

“Come on in,” my father called from the kitchen. “Would you like some pizza, Rawnie?”

She had eaten her supper, but a person can always fit in a slice of pizza. It was good, and she said so.

“Don't tell me, tell Gus.” Dad looked smug as a cat. I'd never seen him as mellow as he was these days. He hardly ever growled at me even when I growled at him.

Gus called over, “I bought it at Safeway all by myself.” She was working on one of her art projects. The kitchen was sort of half her studio. It was a big room with skylights and a huge table, and we ate at one end and she messed with her junk on the other end. Right now she was mounting weird stuff on an old board like from barn siding. She had a beat-up eagle from the top of a flagpole on there, and a smashed Pepsi can, and an old license plate, Texas 231959. “What else do you think I should put on, Groover and company?” she said to Rawnie and me. “Tell you what. Let's do this one by committee. Why don't we go scrounge around and see if we can find something?”

“
Ex
cellent,” Rawnie said.

So next thing we were all down in the basement poking around, Dad too, poking in boxes and saying, “What's this?” one after the other to Gus.

“What's this?” I had found a metal thing shaped sort of like a seashell.

“Squirrel cage blower.”

“Huh?” Who would blow on a squirrel in a cage?

“It blows air. That other one's a biscuit blower. Don't ask me.”

“What's this?” Dad held up a circle of glass something like a bike reflector, only white.

“Bott's dot. They used to put them in along the line in roads.”

“What's this?” I had a sort of wooden pyramid with a metal pointer.

“Metronome.”

“Ew! What are these?” Rawnie held up a handful of pinkish things like marbles, only they weren't marbles.

“Rubber eyeballs.”

“Ew, sick! What are they for?”

“Biology class, I guess. I dunno. Ammunition? You girls want them for school?”

We looked at each other and started to smile, but Dad said, “No. Gus, behave. You'll get them in trouble.”

“Hey!” I had found a box full of wide silvery tape.

“Duck tape.”

“
Huh
?”

“You've heard about people getting their ducks in a row? That's how they keep them that way, with duck tape.”

Dad said, “It's
duct
tape. Don't pay any attention to her, Skiddo. She'll lead you astray.” The way he was grinning said the opposite.

Gus turned away and snapped on the radio. She was always doing that. She would go for maybe about three minutes talking with you, and then her eyes would sort of fog over and she had to have her music. There was a radio in every shed and just about every room of the house, and they were all tuned to—not oldies, exactly, but something a little bit better. She called it classic rock. It always had a cookin' beat, and this time was no different. Rawnie heard it for about one second and started to dance.

“You like my music?” Gus said.

“Yeah, but I like Neon Shadow better!”

“You too?”

Gus and Dad knew how I felt about Neon Shadow. Gus said that back when she was a kid, girls screamed over the Beatles. Before that it was Elvis. I didn't see what was so great about any of them.

“I hear Neon Shadow is coming to the Arena next week,” Gus said.

It didn't take Rawnie and me long to make it clear to Gus and Dad what we thought of the fact that Neon Shadow was going to be practically in our front yard and we didn't have tickets. Between the two of us I guess we made a lot of noise. In fact I remember going, “
Waaaah
!” like a baby, which made Gus blink several times rapidly, looking half-worried and half-laughing, the way she did a lot of the time.

“Well,” she said, “listen. I have a friend who has a friend who has a friend. Howsabout if I try to get some tickets.”

Now Rawnie and I were jumping up and down and screaming. Dad sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Hey, I can't promise,” Gus said. “But I'll try.”

It took us awhile to get back to scrounging. Then Dad found a bone wrench and a moon wrench, some lamp parts, and a broach, whatever a broach is, but nothing Gus wanted to use. She led the scrounging expedition out to the sheds, where Rawnie saw the calliope and a ton of other stuff besides. There was an electric violin, which was really just a plug-in board with strings. There were old record players, a stove shaped like a Chinese dragon, a tin whistle, an eyecup, and a Dobro. There were boxes of grommets and gaskets and car parts and the glass reflector plugs from old telephone poles and flutophones.

“I give up,” Gus said, meaning she didn't know what to put on her folk art. “I'm just going to have to think about it.”

“Hey, Gus, what is this?” I said. It was a thing sort of like a miniature piano, but it had some kind of machine instead of a piano back.

“That's a Mellotron. You know how you hear violins in the songs on the radio? Most of the time they're not really violins. Nowadays they're usually synthesized, but it used to be they used a Mellotron.”

“Huh?”

“Huh, my eye. The back houses a bunch of tape loops of violins sounding different notes. You press the keys, the violins play.”

“Huh!”

Rawnie was looking across the yard, which wasn't easy to do, considering how much stuff was in the way. “What's in that little shed with the big hex sign?” she wanted to know.

“The pigeon coop? Dead axes, mostly.”

“Dead axes?”

But Gus wasn't listening. She had folk art on her mind like a bug in her ear, and she was heading back toward the house. Dad went to stick a load of wash in the machine, and Rawnie and I went up to my room so she could see what it looked like, and by the time Rawnie was ready to go home, Gus had disappeared somewhere again.

“Tell your—tell her thanks for the pizza and everything,” Rawnie said to me. I watched her go across the street. She never walked anywhere, and she didn't exactly run either. This time she was doing the Locomotion.

Tell Gus thanks for the pizza and everything. “And everything” meant trying to get tickets for the Neon Shadow concert. It wasn't going to be easy, because she had to get three or four. Neon Shadow was a clean group, no drugs in the parking lot or anything like that, but it was still a rock concert and it would still be wild, not something Rawnie and I could go to by ourselves. I knew my dad—he would never let it happen. We would have to have at least one parent with us, and if Gus could get enough tickets for that many people, it would be almost a miracle.

Tell her thanks? I hadn't thanked her myself, and I should have. I should be nicer to her. She was nice to me. And it wasn't her fault if she was built like a truck or fell in love with my dad.

Right that minute before I lost my nerve I went looking for her.

It was getting dark and the weird guitar music was due to start, but I didn't care. I just wanted to find Gus and be nice to her for a minute or two before I forgot and started wise-mouthing her again. She was out in the backyard probably, so that was where I went. I checked each shed. Nothing. The farthest one from the house was the pigeon coop with its big hex sign, which wasn't a regular star hex but a sort of swirl pattern in all colors. The hex faced the yard, which was odd. Most people liked hexes to face the road so people could see them. But there was nothing on the street side of the pigeon coop except the door.

Anyway, I went there last and looked inside. Nothing except a bunch of old electric guitars, bent up and stripped down until they were nearly skeletons.

Dead axes?

Then I blinked hard, because one by one they were floating up off the shadowy floor, and fading like ghosts, and—

Disappearing into the wall. Right in front of me. It was totally gonzo, yet I stood there and watched and felt like it all made sense, like I knew what was happening. Dead axes, and they were not disappearing, exactly, they were going through a sort of twilight door to another place. Another dimension.

On the far side of the hex-sign wall I heard the music starting.

It was just a clicking, like a drummer setting a rhythm with his sticks, and a strumming, like a guitarist tuning. Concert night, and I was backstage. Wow, there was no time to be afraid. I had to see what was going on, and by then I felt sure that I wouldn't need to go any farther than the other side of the pigeon coop.

I went outside to look, and I was right.

The lights were on, all colors like the hex sign. Somebody was setting up the drum kit. I could tell because washtubs and buckets and old hubcaps and things were lifting off the ground and floating through the air to where the drum riser was, the plywood platform on top of the big red Caddy, and then they'd disappear. Actually they were fading and disappearing the whole time, as they moved. But I could see them. The world was getting dark, but the lights blazed brighter all the time and it seemed as if I could see more every minute. I could see a Mellotron settle down and turn into a concert keyboard. I could see bare-bone guitars flying out of the hex sign, coming right through it, coming out to play. The music in the air was louder than I'd ever heard it, and since I'd forgotten to be scared of it, I was dancing where I stood, my feet going like Rawnie's always did, before I realized how much I liked it. What a rhythm! I could hear the drums, the axes, the deep notes on the keyboard. And voices. For the first time I could hear voices singing, dark and hot.

People. The band. Who were they?

I could just barely see them. They were like cloud wisps in the air. But I could hear them, and I could see their instruments a little, and I could tell what they were doing. They were playing lead guitar and bass and organ and drums and tambourine and sax, they were filling in with vocals, they were making music. And it was some of the best music I'd ever heard. Almost as good as Neon Shadow, though I couldn't quite make out the words.

My feet still wanted to dance, but my brain took over and started sputtering, and I stood there with my mouth open. Then all the music stopped at once, and the people—had there been people? Now I couldn't see a thing. Just old metal pails and upside-down washtubs and a hubcap or two on top of the convertible's plywood cover where I thought there had been drums.