Drums: a Novel

  “Uwe should be here soon,” Tish said, bored with watching me cook.

  “You know him too?” I said.

  “He’s such a clod. He owes Eddy about $600 for coke, but Eddy doesn’t make him pay because Uwe kisses his butt and makes excuses. I think my brother’s kind of afraid of him.”

  “Does Uwe ever say anything about us?”

  “You kicked him out, right? I heard him tell Eddy that.”

  “That’s not exactly what happened.”

  “Who cares?” Tish said. “I swear he’s so ugly. When he tries to come on to me – it’s like, totally gross.”

  “Maybe he won’t be able to find his way here in the dark,” I said.

  “The less people the better. I’ll bet the Blue Max won’t be back for a while. You and I should lie down together. Ooooh, it’s so cold.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable. What about your friend? How long do you expect her to blow chowder?”

  “You’re not as fun as you used to be.”

  I gave her a friendly pat on the rear, happy, actually, for the chance to cop a quick feel. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Tish swung her wonderful little behind toward me again and batted her eyes. “Do it again, Danny. Tee-hee. Harder!”

  That’s precisely when Abbey appeared and wanted to know how the barbecue was going.

  We ate when the rest of the gang returned from their post-sunset boat ride. Somehow sand had gotten into everything.

  Gritty hotdogs, hamburgers, and buns. Gritty ketchup and mustard. More whiskey. Burnt marshmallows. More shouting and wallowing in the sand. No end in sight.

  Abbey needed to get Hector to the cabin, so I shuttled them back to Oz. I tried to explain that Tish and I were kidding around.

  “I don’t give a hoot about you and that little bitch. I know you screwed her. She tells everyone.”

  “That was before –”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No I don’t.”

  She placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed firmly, without affection. “For the time being, you and I have no strings attached, remember? I have to get things sorted out. Go on and have a little roll with Tishy. That’s your problem.”

  I turned onto the dirt road near our cabin. Hector was fast asleep in his mother’s arms.

  I parked the van. Before Abbey started along the trail to the cabin, she moved her hand through a bunch of dark pine needles on a low, bushy branch. “I told Domino about Hector.”

  I said nothing.

  “He’s coming to hear us play at the Lake Club. He and I are back together, and I want him to meet his son.”

  It was late, but what the hell. I drove back to Sand Cove.

  “Welcome,” Uwe exclaimed when I reunited with the gang.

  “You made it. I’m thrilled.”

  “Likewise, I’m so honored to get to party with you bozos.”

  He was hogging the whiskey bottle, trying to catch up with the rest of the drunks. He wore dress slacks and a necktie underneath his jacket.

  “I like your monkey suit. Just get out of your cage?”

  He frowned, then turned and yelled to Zoe, “Hey, baby, I told you to come over here. Come and see your old friend, Uwe. Don’t be shy, honey-child!”

  Zoe was stumbling around in the darkness from person to person, checking up on everyone as if she were a party hostess or something. Zoe Cleopatra Hash was ripped. I probably should have taken her home with Abbey.

  Uwe put his greasy face next to my ear. “Hey, Vikker, what do you think my chances are for getting Zoe wet between the legs?”

  “You’re sick, donkey,” I said. “She’s got way too much class for you.”

  Zoe wandered over. “Hello, boys. How are you doing? Oh my, someone’s got to make the rounds. Are you having a good time? I am. Oh my, let’s see, how are your drinks?” She put her arms around each of us and kissed our cheeks. She burst into a Bandit original—singing horribly off key.

  “Why don’t you let me take you home. This party’s a dud,” I said.

  “Oh my, have another drink, Danny. Just because Abbey left, you aren’t going to be a spoilsport, are you?”

  Uwe snorted.

  “Very funny,” I said. I pulled Zoe away from Uwe, who was fondling her back with his big, dopey hand. Uwe sailed over to flirt with Tish and her little friend, who seemed okay now, except that her breath smelled atrocious.

  Uwe didn’t have much luck with Tish, and I watched him walk over to Eddy. The two clowns grabbed the last bottle of whiskey and headed to the waterline. “Hey, crew,” Eddy yelled, “Last call. Who wants to go on a midnight cruise?”

  No one responded. It seemed like it was getting about five degrees colder every second; the bonfire was the place to be.

  “Come on,” Eddy persisted. “I’ll make it a short one.”

  Zoe buttoned the top button on her jacket. “Oh my, what the heck,” she said. “I’ll go.” She ran down to the Blue Max. The rest of us stayed behind.

  I rubbed my hands together in front of the fire. The lights on Eddy’s boat drew an arc in the darkness, toward the entrance of Emerald Bay.

  Some of us grew sober, some of us did not. Seth lay passed out alongside the coals of the bonfire; he snored loudly. Tish’s friend was barfing again; so was Tish. Jay lay in the granite-sand like a corpse with his arms crossed X-fashion over his chest; Sly mumbled at his sleepy face. I sat on the piece of driftwood which the girls and Hector had occupied earlier on. My mind roamed through memories of me and Abbey. The fire slowly died.

  Quite a bit later, Jay propped himself up on his elbows and said groggily, “Where the hell are those guys? We oughta split. The ranger’s gonna come or something.”

  Eddy, Uwe, and Zoe had been gone for at least an hour. Get your boat back here, Eddy, I thought. Damn.

  We waited. We froze. The Blue Max returned at approximately 1:30 a.m. Three silhouettes, even blacker than the night, stood in the boat as the bow rode up onto the sand. The engine quit, and the searchlight and running lights popped off.

  Zoe stormed out of the darkness biting her lip—her hair looked windblown, and her scarf was wound around her neck like a Band-Aid; there were so many turns that no end hung down.

  “I want to go back to the cabin,” she said to me. “I want to go back NOW.” Her voice was sober and blank. Her eyes aimed sideways to avoid looking at me dead-on.

  Eddy and Uwe walked up from the shoreline. Eddy seemed nervous. Uwe was in a hurry.

  “I gotta split,” Uwe said. He kept walking toward the parking lot.

  “Hold on,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Uwe didn’t turn around. He started to run.

  Jay caught Uwe and held him by the collar of his jacket. He kicked Jay in the leg, but Jay hung on. “Tell me, dude,” Jay said, more soberly than he’d said anything all that day and all that night, “What the fuck’s going on?”

  Zoe stood frozen. “What’s up?” I asked. “Were these guys being jerks, or what?”

  Eddy fell to his knees in the sand, as though there was a tremendous pressure which caused him to whither. “I didn’t do nothing. I swear. Nothing,” he said. “I was all messed up. I just held her.”

  Jay grabbed a handful of Uwe’s hair. “Hey, dude, what’s up? Cough it up.” Sly latched onto Uwe’s jacket. Uwe spit in her face.

  I collared Eddy. I shook the hell out of him. “Did what, Eddy? Did what?”

  “You don’t have to tell them anything,” Uwe said. “She’s not going to tell them anything, either. It’s our secret. I made her promise.”

  “Did what?” I repeated.

  “Nothing,” Uwe barked. He tried to wrestle free from Jay and Sly, but they held fast.

  Eddy started sobbing. “We were both just kidding around at first. You know, to scare her or something. Uwe screwed her, man.??
?

  “Ah shit.” I pushed Eddy’s face into the sand. I felt like kicking him, but something inside stopped me. I threw up my hands and went to Zoe.

  Uwe screamed wildly, “I should have done it to Abbey. Zoe was the next best thing. You guys fucked me. So I had to fuck you back.” He broke loose and punched the side of Jay’s head. Jay staggered, then surged. He grabbed another handful of Uwe’s hair, this time forcing Uwe to his knees.

  “You sonofabitch,” I yelled at Uwe.

  Uwe spit on Jay’s leg. He laughed. “You bunch of losers. Fuck you. Fuck all of you. She has a nice cunt, did everyone know that? Real nice.”

  That was the only time I ever saw Jay Wong completely lose his cool. “Shut your dirty, low down mouth, dude.” He bunched together his fist and slammed it into Uwe’s face. I was standing nearby, and the impact was sick and hollow, like the sound of a dog or cat being hit by a car. Drops of what, at first, I thought were rain, appeared on the tops of my hands; examining them closer, I discovered they were droplets of blood.

  * * *

  “What a pair, sport. What a pair,” Domino said, regarding the two girls with a long glance.

  “Yep,” I said. “What a pair.” Him calling me “sport” still bugged the hell out of me.

  We sat in the Lake Club in a terrace overlooking the stage. In the chair beside me, Domino glistened. He wore a silky white suit with aqua-green stripes, and gray sharkskin boots. The boots gave the friggin’ shrimp some altitude, I thought smugly. The bangs of his long, blonde hair were trimmed perfectly straight; a thick application of hairspray held every strand in place.

  “Don’t worry about getting upstaged tonight, sport. It’s been suggested that I sit in for a song or two. Boy oh boy, wouldn’t I love to? But I‘ve decided to keep a low profile tonight and give you all the glory. Think you can handle the responsibility, sport?” His expression displayed shades of arrogance, camaraderie, sympathy, and compassion – layer upon layer of plastic, enigmatic, Hollywood bullshit. “Just remember to keep it simple and steady up there, sport,” he added. “You’ll probably do okay.”

  On the stage below us, Abbey and Zoe fussed with the setup, making sure the instruments and amps were plugged in, working, and perfectly arranged. Normally the girls didn’t have anything to do with this menial duty, but this was not a normal gig. Seth Collins was also fiddling with our equipment, but then, Seth always did that. The girls kept having to straddle Seth as he scooted along the stage floor on his hands and knees, ducking under keyboards and dodging amps while he searched for loose cord to secure; Seth had bought a brand new roll of silver duct tape for Bandit’s Lake Club debut. Zoe pointed to Abbey’s electric piano, then drew some sort of diagram in the air; the girls attacked the slim but weighty instrument, and, with much exasperation, relocated the piano a foot or two from where it had been.

  Still looking down at the girls and Seth, Domino said, “People are funny, aren’t they, sport? They’re kind of like rubber bands. They snap back, you follow? Take old Cleo for instance, boy oh boy, all the crap she’s been through—and she’s down there joking around.” He nodded his head philosophically.

  It was my turn to intimidate.

  Science. Numbers and equations, that was my turf – when one plus one equaled two.

  “People are resilient – just like a rubber band, as you put it – only to a point,” I replied. “Sometimes you can pull a person past their elastic limit. Hooke’s Law, then, no longer applies. Do you understand the concept of non-linear stress versus strain?”

  “Furthermore,” I continued, “This rubber band you speak of inside a person. Therefore, when it breaks, sometimes the person doesn’t know it. An external observer – like you or me – is even worse equipped to detect a broken rubber band. Good God, we don’t have X-ray eyes, do we?”

  I was very pleased with myself. Your move, Domino.

  Domino merely ignored what I had said.

  “Cleo’s a tough kid. That much is obvious, sport,” he said reflectively. “Even so, I’d love to get my hands on that jerk-ola, Uwe. I never did like him. He’s a shitty musician, and he has a bad attitude. He’s a loser, man.”

  The haunting scene played again in my mind.

  Uwe lay crumbled and motionless after Jay had busted open his face. No one tended to him, and no one hurt him anymore. Eddy kept crawling around in the sand like a big baby. Everyone kept telling Eddy to shut up.

  Jay’s rubber band had stung him when it snapped, and Jay got mean; he didn’t strike Eddy like he’d struck Uwe, but each time Eddy tried to cower up to the people standing around Zoe, Jay chased Eddy off. Eddy finally got the message when Jay kicked a bunch of hot coals from the bonfire at him.

  Zoe’s rubber band didn’t snap; it disintegrated. We stood around her in the eerie darkness as she cried. She couldn’t seem to wrap enough blankets around herself. Her weeping was the kind of weeping that hurts to have to listen to. It made me start to cry, too. And Zoe’s painful crying made all of us – including Tish – kick at least one dollop of sand onto Eddy, whimpering several yards away in his cold, gritty purgatory. Uwe lay unconscious.

  The days immediately following the incident at Sand Cove had been tough on Zoe, too. Zoe was a lot like Abbey in the way she tried to act brave and tough when the chips were down. But she couldn’t hide it; the people in the cabin called Oz knew she was badly injured inside. She gutted out the days; when the door to her and Abbey’s bedroom closed at night, the crying began. It was soft, muffled crying. At night Zoe let her pain leak out, not all at once, but steadily like air spilling forth from a pinhole in a tire.

  Zoe was a virgin before Uwe came along. Not many girls, these days, are still chaste at age twenty-one. Zoe knew this. That’s why she kept it private.

  She had been waiting for true love, just as a lot of the women did in Zoe’s history books. That summer and fall, the new Zoe Cleopatra Hash got closer to the point of finding Mr. Right; she hadn’t seen him, but she sensed that he was near. Zoe was independent; she loved to make plans; she loved for her dreams to come true. Uwe Vladt messed up everything.

  And then, there was the business of Uwe disappearing. We had thought he was out cold when we left him to take Zoe to the van. Seth drove Zoe home to Abbey and Hector, and Jay and I returned to the waterfront to mop up Uwe and take him to the cops. Instead of Uwe, we found Eddy sprawled in the darkness. Tish was screaming at him, “You wimp. You spineless wimp. I’m embarrassed to have you for a brother.”

  Tish turned to Jay and me. “You’re too late,” she said. “That sneak, Uwe, wasn’t as bad off as you guys thought. He just let my brother have it. I guess I should thank you guys for coming. He was about to hit me.”

  Jay and I watched the lights from the Blue Max disappear out on the lake. We didn’t see or hear from Uwe again. The cops couldn’t find him, either. Zoe decided not to file charges against Eddy. I thought she should have.

  Domino was baby-sitting Hector as he and I sat in the Lake Club in a terrace behind chrome chain-link fence. No more talk of rubber bands. Our conversation grew sparse.

  Little Hector wasn’t any trouble at all. He sat on his father’s lap, preoccupied with a baby bottle full of Coca-Cola. Hector sucked on the bottle with the slow cadence of a resting heart, making the sound: ba-glurp, ba-glurp, ba-glurp.

  Domino held his son with cool authority; occasionally he addressed him, saying things that tended to indicate something temporary about their arrangement. “There’s your mom down there. See her? Boy oh boy, she’ll be back real soon.”

  When Abbey cared for Hector, she became enthused about every utterance and every movement the kid made. He was prime entertainment for her – but a dull fact of life for Domino.

  “So tell me. How is it to be a father?” I asked.

  Domino patted Hector on the head, then stared penetratingly at me. “Let me be honest with you, sport,” he sai
d. “In some ways this thing with Abbey, me, and the kid is a kick. In other ways, it’s a plot.” The drummer’s gray-blue eyes swept down to the stage and the girl, and remained focused on her. “I really do love her, and I suppose I ought to marry her. That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it, sport? So that, my friend, is what I’m telling you.”

  * * *

  The beat I played was a simple one, eighth notes with the bass drum on one and three, interspersed with quarter note rim shots on the snare drum on beats two and four (1&2 3&4). Thud-thud-swack, thud-thud-swack. We were playing our most popular original slow tune – a ballad, the music written by Seth, the lyrics by Abbey. It was called “Mr. In-Question.”

  I could float on this big, blue lake

  Forever—thinking of you.

  Red roses, red candles, red tears.

  Oh dream-boy, why must I always run ahead

  Looking back, dodging years?

  It’s me Mr. In-Question, ain’t you.

  It’s this pain I have. Gotta

  Hide it, save it, brave it.

  It’s not enough for me to lay down for you.

  I’m twisted fir, you see, no one’s chick.

  Sorry Romeo that fate’s so damned.

  I think of ways to make it better,

  Money, I think or Big Bang – What, man?

  It’s question after question, Mr. In-Question.

  Lover, I just can’t give ya my passion.

  I pretended that Abbey Butler’s voice was my one-person audience, as I played my drums. I felt patriotic. I saluted the voice and the song’s sweet irony by playing as solidly as I possibly could. Deep, loving concentration. Pure, precise movements.

  Thud-thud-swack. Thud-thud-swack.

  The harder I beat on my drums, the more satisfaction they gave back, satisfaction like a person feels when you pound on a thick oak door and the wood makes a tenor-humming, satisfaction like hitting a tennis ball in the sweet spot of the racket so that the ball sails low and fast and the racket sings. In the pocket, in the groove, playing solidly—that was where it was at.