Gina looked over with interest.
Please don’t ask for an introduction,
Danny thought.
I don’t think I’d survive that.
But that would have been unlike Gina, and thankfully she didn’t ask.
Danny got Gina a glass of water, and they waited. He checked his watch. It was twenty minutes to nine, which meant an hour and twenty minutes until they went on—if they started on time, which never ever happened. He held Gina’s hand and resolutely avoided looking down the row of tables for any reason. Johnny chattered for a while, but he petered out when nobody seemed interested in taking any of his conversational gambits.
One hour, fourteen minutes.
After another half hour of stilted conversation and awkward silence, the club started to fill up. It didn’t take much. The Cavern was crammed in between a couple of other buildings, and it was much longer than it was wide. There was seating for maybe thirty people, Danny guessed, and a hundred might fit standing up, if they all got real friendly with each other. The stage was small and cramped, and, at about eight inches off the ground, hardly worthy of the name. Danny thought that was just fine with him. If there was enough of a crowd, it would be tough to see much of anything onstage from most places in the bar, and the less Gina saw of him and Case in close proximity to each other, the happier he’d be.
Thirty-six minutes.
A clot of people—young men, mostly—started to form around Case’s table. Danny tried not to look over there, but Johnny kept turning around. He looked tired, Danny noticed. Alert, but physically drained.
My idiot brother,
Danny thought. What had he been trying to accomplish by getting Gina to come here? Maybe it was his dumbass way of trying to look out for Danny, but more likely it was his equally dumbass way of trying to keep Danny and Case from tearing up the band—in short, looking out for Johnny’s interests, as usual. Danny sighed.
At five after ten, the sound guy came over to get them to do their sound check.
Danny gave Gina a pair of earplugs and went to the stage. The drum kit was backed up as close to the wall as he could get it, and he had to squeeze in around the floor tom to get behind it. Case’s and Quentin’s amps were also crammed in back, right next to him. Case and Quentin themselves had to stand close, with little room to move, and Johnny had only a little more. If Johnny moved too much to the right, Case would end up hitting him with the headstock of her guitar.
Cozy.
Danny did his part of the sound check (three thumps of the bass drum, three whacks on the snare, and five seconds of playing the whole kit), and when he looked up, Case was onstage, four feet away. He could have stood up, leaned over, and touched her hand.
Danny busied himself adjusting the tension on his snare so he wouldn’t have to look at her. He could see her move in his peripheral vision. The sound guy had just asked her to turn her stage volume down, and she was twiddling knobs on her amp. She finished, and Danny got the sense she was looking quizzically at him.
He looked back at her and felt that headrush, that uneasy vertigo that had become so familiar.
She raised her eyebrows.
Ready?
He nodded, and she went straight in to the opening riff of “Rust.”
Here we go!
***
The band came in hot, a little too fast but steady and tight. Johnny smiled. The energy was good, and he was ready.
The near-constant muttering in his head swelled into that question he’d come to love:
Now?
Fuck yeah.
There was that rushing sense of power, and his voice poured out,
roared
out, the words filling the room and bursting among the crowd like bombs.
Gonna be hoarse tonight,
he thought, and he grinned crazily.
This
was how it was supposed to feel. The eyes on him didn’t bother him now. Let ’em look, by God!
Nothing was going to ruin his night. He had arrived.
***
Quentin had to hand it to Johnny—he was really putting his back into it tonight, really going all out. The skinny, unsure kid Quentin had been playing with for over a year had been replaced by a confident frontman, and tonight he was
killing
it. He howled and screamed and sang—sang like a motherfucker, to use his own word. With the jacket, the slicked-back hair, and most of all the brash confidence, Quentin doubted Johnny’s own mother would have recognized him if she’d been there. She would have sat in the crowd, patiently waiting for her son to come on—which would hopefully be right after this loud, nasty band got off the stage.
Case caught Quentin’s eye and grinned, nodding at Johnny’s back like,
Do you believe this guy?
Quentin grinned right back—he couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just Johnny who was killing it tonight. They all were.
The band
was. Whatever his misgivings about Johnny’s newly discovered vocal prowess, this was rock and fucking roll the way it was meant to be played.
Johnny leaned out over the people at the front of the stage, reaching for their hands, dripping sweat on them, screaming at them. They screamed right back.
He was exultant, and fire flashed in his eyes. After the third song, when a few loudmouths in the crowd yelled “Burn!,” he turned to Case, flushed and grinning maniacally.
“Let’s do ‘Burn,’” he said, off the mic. Quentin could see her gaping at him in surprise. “Burn”
was their most popular song, the one everybody seemed to want to hear, and he hated it. The last couple of times people had shouted for it, he’d just scowled. It wasn’t even on the set list this time.
“Looks like somebody ate their Wheaties this morning,” she joked.
“Fuck yeah, I did. Let’s hit it!”
She hit it, and Danny and Quentin followed her in, Danny with a nice little flourish he’d never played before. Case shot Danny one of those electric smiles, and Quentin grinned at the two of them. They plowed through most of the rest of the set, unstoppable.
Quentin was tuning his bass right before their second-to-last song, their one down-tempo number, when he saw the old rocker in the crowd. Once again, the guy’s dark, hooded eyes scanned the room, and Quentin saw that his mouth was open slightly, as if he held his breath in anticipation of something.
Then Danny was counting off the song, one of Johnny’s tunes called “Watching the World End.” Case had worked it into an odd, almost jazzy progression, strange for the band’s usual repertoire, but it worked. Quentin usually liked playing it, but something about the man’s appearance in the crowd had unsettled him, had rendered the song eerie.
“The sun slides from his sky
Like a drunk man slides from his chair
But he ain’t gettin’ up this time
He ain’t goin’ nowhere.
And when the bar closes, baby
And the paramedics come through
The doc shrugs his shoulders
As he looks down,
Says ‘There’s nothing I can do.’”
A song about a dead man, about a dying day and a sun that would never rise again. Quentin hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the lyrics in practice, but now they gave him the creeps. Or maybe it was Johnny’s voice. There was a dark note in it, a sort of perverse glee that he hadn’t heard before, and it clashed with the grim subject of the song in a way that was deeply unsettling, like clown makeup on a corpse.
It wasn’t just him, either, he noticed. Most of the movement and conversation in the crowd had stopped. A few people swayed eerily back and forth, but most of the spectators stood still and silent, casting nervous glances at each other. The creepy guy stood stock-still, finally staring at the stage, at Johnny, and the expression on his face looked like some unholy species of religious ecstasy.
Nausea churned Quentin’s gut, and it seemed that the stage had gotten brighter. Fresh sweat popped on his brow. Had the sound guy turned up the lights? What the hell? It had gotten much darker in the club, too. The back of the room near the bar was completely gone in the darkness, though there must have been some tiny trace of light since Quentin thought he could see even darker shapes twisting and writhing back there, midnight on black. He felt sick—really sick, like he was going to chuck his lunch right onstage.
Even Johnny didn’t look so hot all of a sudden. He twisted around in the middle of the song, and though he met Danny’s eyes and nodded, Quentin got the impression that hadn’t been why he’d turned. For one instant, there had been naked fear on his face, and Quentin was sure that Johnny had turned because he thought there was
somebody else
back there. Behind him. He looked so convinced that Quentin himself looked to the back of the stage. There was only Danny.
Then the song ended, and Johnny stopped singing. The bar faded into view, the lights dimmed to normal. Quentin’s nausea was gone as suddenly as it had gripped him, like a cramp that had eased.
There was silence, then a tidal wave of applause, thunderous but solemn.
***
The set came to an end, and Case flipped off her amp even before the last chord finished ringing out. The sound died abruptly. She knew it was better for the amp if she let it cool down for a minute before turning it off, but just then she didn’t give a damn. She yanked the plugs out of their sockets, threw the cables in the black duffel bag she used for miscellaneous gear, and started to get her shit off the stage. “Watching the World End” had turned into a nasty surprise, like finding cockroaches in her breakfast cereal, and though that weird unpleasantness was already fading, she just wanted to be gone. Johnny looked her way with a grin on his face, but he looked elsewhere when he got a good look at her expression.
She hauled her amp off the stage and shoved it to the side. There was nowhere to put it here, other than to try to get it out of the way.
“Hey, good show!” somebody yelled.
“Right,” she said without even looking up. She slid her guitar case in next to the amp and walked away.
Erin gave her a tentative smile and a questioning look as she approached the table. Case sat down. The question would wait—she really didn’t feel like talking.
“Hey! I said ‘good show’!”
That guy again. Case turned. Slim guy, tall. Nice eyes. Nobody she recognized. He wore a ridiculous flower print and paisley shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest.
“You go out like that in public?” she asked.
He hesitated. It looked like he was trying to decide whether she was actively hostile or just giving him a hard time. “I was only telling you that you played well,” he said finally. “Not looking for fashion advice.”
Behind him, a small mob of people were lining up. They were already waving at her.
“Be nice,” Erin whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong—we can talk about that later—but these people are your fans. Don’t make my job any harder than it already is.”
Case frowned. Erin was probably right. She looked back at the “good show” guy. “Thanks,” she said, without much enthusiasm. Erin elbowed her. “I mean, thank you!” She tried on a smile, but it felt like a sneer.
“I’m Brad,” the guy said. “You play a mean guitar.”
“It’s easy. I’m a mean person.”
He laughed, though again there was some uncertainty. “How mean are we talking here? Kicking puppies mean, or just cutting off old ladies in the passing lane mean?”
Now she did smile, a little. “
Eating
puppies mean,” she said.
Brad nodded. “Now that’s mean.” He looked so serious that she had to laugh.
“Better watch your ass,” she said, still laughing.
Brad wasn’t so bad, once you got past the wardrobe. He talked to Case passionately about his band and his music—some kind of funk punk he described as a cross between Prince and Rancid that she couldn’t imagine but now had to hear once, just to know what that would sound like. In fact, his band was going into the studio soon, and he wanted to get her to record guitar tracks on two songs where he thought a nasty guitar solo would be just the thing. His guitarist was an awesome rhythm player, he said, and he took care of everything they usually needed, but once Brad had heard Case playing, he’d immediately thought of a couple of places on the recording that could use her talents.
From there, conversation roamed—Brad’s last band, Case’s opinion of Dallas, dumb stories from shows they’d each played.
“Oh, I
hate
playing there,” Case said after he finished one of his own horror stories. “One time we were waiting around after load-in and the fucking sound guy came in and told me to get the hell out. ‘Band members only. No girlfriends.’”
“Ouch.”
“I told him we could go out in the parking lot, and he could find out which one of us was somebody’s girlfriend.”
“You didn’t.”
“The hell I didn’t.” She gave him a wry grin. “Of course, he fucked our sound up that night. Turned me
waaaaay
down.”
Brad laughed. He had a warm, easy laugh that Case liked, and he was fun. The only thing wrong with him that she could see was that godawful shirt, and she thought she might be able to get rid of
that
problem. She was starting to feel pretty good, no matter what weird turn the show had taken.