Desperation

  "Not a problem," Steve had said.

  Harris ignored this. He had his speech, and he intended to stick to it.

  "Second, thou shalt not score drugs for him. Not so much as a single joint.

  "Third, thou shalt not score women for him ... and he's apt to ask you, particularly if some good-looking babes show up at the receptions I'm setting up for him along the way. As with the booze and the drugs, if he scores on his own, that's one thing. But don't help him."

  Steve had thought of telling Harris that he wasn't a pimp, that Harris must have confused him with his own father, and decided that would be fairly imprudent. He opted for silence instead.

  "Fourth, thou shalt not cover up for him. If he starts boozing or drugging--particularly if you have reason to think he's doing coke again--get in touch with me at once. Do you understand? At once."

  "I understand," Steve replied, and he had, but that didn't mean he would necessarily comply. He had decided he wanted this gig in spite of the problems it presented--in part because of the problems it presented; life without problems was a fairly uninteresting proposition--but that didn't mean he was going to sell his soul to keep it, especially not to a suit with a big gut and the voice of an overgrown kid who has spent too much of his adult life trying to get some payback for real or imagined slights he had suffered in the elementary-school playground. And although John Marinville was a bit of an asshole, Steve didn't hold that against him. Harris, though ... Harris was in a whole other league.

  Appleton had leaned forward at this point, making his lone contribution to the discussion before Marinville's s agent could get to the final commandment.

  "What's your impression of Johnny?" he asked Steve. "He's fifty-six years old, you know, and he's put a lot of hard mileage on the original equipment. Especially in the eighties. He wound up in the emergency room three different times, twice in Connecticut and once down here. The first two were drug ODs. I'm not telling tales out of school, because all that's been reported--exhaustively--in the press. The last one may have been a suicide attempt, and that is a tale out of school. I'd ask you to keep it to yourself."

  Steve had nodded.

  "So what do you think?" Appleton asked. "Can he really drive almost half a ton of motorcycle cross-country from Connecticut to California, and do twenty or so readings and receptions along the way? I want to know what you think, Mr. Ames, because I'm frankly doubtful."

  He had expected Harris to come busting in then, touting the legendary strength and iron balls of his client--Steve knew suits, he knew agents, and Harris was both--but Harris was silent, just looking at him. Maybe he wasn't so stupid after all, Steve thought. Maybe he even cared a little for this particular client.

  "You guys know him a lot better than I do," he said. "Hell, I only met him for the first time two weeks ago and I've never read one of his books."

  Harris's face said that last didn't surprise him at all.

  "Precisely why I'm asking you," Appleton replied. "We have known him for a long time. Me since 1985, when he used to party with the Beautiful People at 54, Bill since 1965. He's the literary world's Jerry Garcia."

  "That's unfair," Harris said stiffly.

  Appleton shrugged. "New eyes see clear, my grand-mother used to say. So tell me, Mr. Ames, do you think he can do it?"

  Steve had seen the question was serious, maybe even vital, and thought it over for almost a full minute. The two other men sat and let him.

  "Well," he had said at last, "I don't know if he can just eat the cheese and stay away from the wine at the receptions, but make it across to California on the bike? Yeah, probably. He looks fairly strong. A lot better than Jerry Garcia did near the end, I'll tell you that. I've worked with a lot of rockers half his age who don't look as good."

  Appleton had looked dubious.

  "Mostly, though, it's a look he gets on his face. He wants to do this. He wants to get out on the road, kick some ass, take down some names. And ..." Steve had found himself thinking of his favorite movie, one he watched on tape every year or so: Hombre, with Paul Newman and Richard Boone. He had smiled a little. "And he looks like a man who's still got a lot of hard bark left on him."

  "Ah." Appleton had looked downright mystified at that. Steve hadn't been much surprised. If Appleton had ever come equipped with hard bark, Steve thought it had probably all rubbed off by the time he was a sophomore at Exeter or Choate or wherever he'd gone to wear his blazers and rep ties.

  Harris had cleared his throat. "If we've got that out of the way, the final commandment--"

  Appleton groaned. Harris went on looking at Steve, pretending not to hear.

  "The fifth and final commandment," he had repeated. "Thou shalt not pick up hitchhikers in thy truck. Neither male nor female shalt thou pick them up, but especially not female."

  Which was probably why Steve Ames never hesitated when he saw the girl standing beside the road just outside Ely--the skinny girl with her nose bent and her hair dyed two different colors. He just pulled over and stopped.

  2

  She opened the door but didn't get into the cab at first, just looked up at him from across the map-littered seat with wide blue eyes. "Are you a nice person?" she asked.

  Steve thought this over, then nodded. "Yeah, I guess so," he said. "I like a cigar two or three times a day, but I never kicked a dog that wasn't bigger'n me, and I send money home to my momma once every six weeks."

  "You're not going to try to slap the make on me, or anything?"

  "Nope," Steve said, amused. He liked the way her wide blue eyes remained fixed on his face. She looked like a little kid studying the funnypages. "I'm fairly well under control in that regard."

  "And you're not like a crazy serial killer, or anything?"

  "No, but Jesus Christ, do you think I'd tell you if I was?"

  "I'd prob'ly see it in your eyes," the skinny girl with the tu-tone hair told him, and although she sounded grave enough, she was smiling a little. "I got a psychic streak. It ain't wide, but it's there, buddy. It's really really there."

  A refrigerator truck roared past, the guy laying on his horn all the way by, even though Steve had squeezed over until the stubby Ryder was mostly on the shoulder, and the road itself was empty in both directions. No big surprise about that, though. In Steve's experience, some guys simply couldn't keep their hands off their horns or their dicks. They were always honking one or the other.

  "Enough with the questionnaire, lady. Do you want a ride or not? I've got to roll my wheels." In truth, he was a lot closer to the boss than the boss would maybe approve of. Marinville liked the idea of being on his own in America, Mr. Free Bird, have pen will travel, and Steve thought that was just how he'd write his book. That was fine, too--great, totally cool. But he, Steven Andrew Ames of Lubbock, also had a job to do; his was to make sure Marinville didn't have to write the book on a Ouija board instead of his word processor. His view on how to accomplish that end was simplicity itself: stay close and let no situation get out of hand unless it absolutely couldn't be helped. He was seventy miles back instead of a hundred and fifty, but what the boss didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

  "You'll do, I guess," she said, hopped up into the cab, and slammed the door shut.

  "Well, thank you, cookie," he said. "I'm touched by your trust." He checked the rearview mirror, saw nothing but the ass end of Ely, and got back out on the road again.

  "Don't call me that," she said. "It's sexist."

  "Cookie is sexist? Oh please."

  In a prim little no-nonsense voice she said: "Don't call me cookie and I won't call you cake."

  He burst out laughing. She probably wouldn't like it, but he couldn't help it. That was the way laughing was, sort of like farting, sometimes you could hold it in but a lot of times you couldn't.

  He glanced at her and saw that she was laughing a little too--and slipping her backpack off--so maybe that was all right. He put her at about five-six and skinny as a rail-a hundred pounds max, and probab
ly more like ninety-five. She was wearing a tank-top with torn-off sleeves. It gave an awfully generous view of her breasts for a girl worried about meeting Ted Bundy in a Ryder van. Not that she had a lot to worry about up there; Steve guessed she could still shop in the training-bra section at Wal-Mart, if she wanted to. On the front of the shirt, a black guy with dreadlocks grinned from the middle of a blue-green psychedelic sunburst. Bent around his head like a halo were the words NOT GONNA GIVE IT UP!

  "You must like Peter Tosh," she said. "It can't be my tits."

  "I worked with Peter Tosh once," he replied.

  "No way!"

  "Way," he said. He glanced in the rearview and saw that Ely was already gone. It was spooky, how fast that happened out here. He supposed that if he were a young female hitchhiker, he might ask a question or two himself before hopping willy-nilly into someone's car or truck. It might not help, but it sure couldn't hurt. Because once you were out in the desert, anything could happen to you.

  "When did you work with Peter Tosh?"

  "1980 or '81," he said. "I can't remember which. Madison Square Garden, then in Forest Hills. Dylan played the encore with him at Forest Hills. 'Blowin in the Wind,' if you can believe that."

  She was looking at him with frank amazement, unmixed -so far as he could tell--with doubt. "Whoa, cool! What were you, a roadie?"

  "Then, yeah. Later on I was a guitar tech. Now, I'm ..." Yes, that was a good start, but just what was he now? Not a guitar tech, that was for sure. Sort of demoted to roadie again. Also part-time shrink. Also sort of like Mary Poppins, only with long brown hippie hair that was starting to show some gray along the center part. "Now I'm into something else. What's your name?"

  "Cynthia Smith," she said, and held out a hand.

  He shook it. Her hand was long, feather-light inside of his, and incredibly fine-boned. It was a little like shaking hands with a bird. "I'm Steve Ames."

  "From Texas."

  "Yeah, Lubbock. Guess you heard the accent before, huh?"

  "Once or twice." Her gamine grin lit up her whole face. "You can take the boy out of Texas, but--"

  He joined her for the rest of it and they grinned at each other, already friends--the way people can become friends, for a little while, when they happen to meet on American back roads that go through the lonely places.

  3

  Cynthia Smith Was clearly a flake, but Steve was a veteran flake himself, you couldn't spend most of your adult life in the music business without succumbing to flakedom, and it didn't bother him. She told him she had every reason to be careful of guys; one had nearly torn off her left ear and another had broken her nose not so long ago. "And the one who did the ear was a guy I liked," she added. "I'm sensitive about the ear. The nose, I think the nose has character, but I'm sensitive about the ear, God knows why."

  He glanced across at her ear. "Well, it's a little flat on top, I guess, but so what? If you're really sensitive about it, you could grow your hair out and cover it up, you know."

  "Not happening," she said firmly, and fluffed her hair, leaning briefly to the right so she could get a look at herself in the mirror mounted on her side of the cab. The half on Steve's side was green; the other half was orange. "My friend Gert says I look like Little Orphan Annie from hell. That's too cool to change."

  "Not gonna give them curls up, huh?"

  She smiled, patted the front of her shirt, and lapsed into a passable Jamaican imitation. "I go my own way--just like Peter, mon!"

  Cynthia Smith's way had been to leave home and her parents' more or less constant disapproval at the age of seventeen. She had spent a little time on the East Coast ("I left when I realized I was gettin to be a mercy-fuck," she said matter-of-factly), and then had drifted back as far as the Midwest, where she had gotten "sort of clean" and met a good-looking guy at an AA meeting. The good-looking guy had claimed to be entirely clean, but he had lied. Oh boy, had he lied. Cynthia had moved in with him just the same, a mistake ("I've never been what you'd call bright about men," she told Steve in that same matter-of-fact voice). The good-looking guy had come home one night fucked up on crystal meth and had apparently decided he wanted Cynthia's left ear as a bookmark. She had gone to a shelter, gotten a little more than sort of clean, even worked as a counsellor for awhile after the woman in charge had been murdered and it looked as if the place might close. "The guy who murdered Anna is the same guy who broke my nose," she said. "He was bad. Richie--the guy who wanted my ear for a bookmark-he only had a bad temper. Norman was bad. As in crazy."

  "They catch him?"

  Cynthia solemnly shook her head. "Anyway, we couldn't let D & S go under just because one guy went crazy when his wife left him, so we all pitched in to save it. We did, too."

  "D & S?"

  "Stands for Daughters and Sisters. I got a lot of my confidence back while I was there." She was looking out the window at the passing desert and rubbing the ball of her thumb pensively along the bent bridge of her nose. "In a way, even the guy who did this helped me with that."

  "Norman."

  "Yep, Norman Daniels, that was his name. At least me and Gert-she's my pal, the one who says I look like Orphan Annie--stood up to him, you know?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "So last month I finally wrote home to my folks. I put my return address on the letter, too. I thought when they wrote back, if they ever did, they'd be righteously pissed-my dad, especially. He used to be a minister. He's retired now, but..."

  "You can take the boy out of the hellfire, but you can't take the hellfire out of the boy," Steve said.

  She smiled. "Well, that's sorta what I expected, but the letter I got back was pretty great. I called them. We talked. My dad cried." She said this with a touch of wonder. "I mean, he cried. Can you believe that?"

  "Hey, I toured for eight months with Black Sabbath," Steve said. "I can believe anything. So you're going home, huh? Return of the Prodigal Cookie?" She gave him a look. He gave her a grin. "Sorry."

  "Yeah, sure you are. Anyway, that's close."

  "Where's home?"

  "Bakersfield. Which reminds me, how far are you going?"

  "San Francisco. But--"

  She grinned. "Are you kidding? That's so cool!"

  "But I can't promise to take you that far. In fact, I can't absolutely promise to take you any farther than Austin--the one in Nevada, you know, not the one in Texas."

  "I know where Austin is, I've got a map," she said, and now she was giving him a stupid-big-brother look that he liked even better than her wide-eyed Miss Prim gaze. She was a cutie, all right ... and wouldn't she just love it if he told her that?

  "I'll take you as far as I can, but this gig is a little weird. I mean, all gigs are kind of weird, show-business is weird by nature, and this is showbiz ... I guess, anyway ... but ... I mean ..."

  He stopped. What did he mean, exactly? His span of employment as a writer's roadie (an ill-fitting title, you didn't have to be a writer yourself to know that, but the only one he could think of) was almost over, and he still didn't know what to think of it, or of Johnny Marinville himself. All he knew for sure was that the great man hadn't asked Steve to score him any dope or women, and that he'd never answered Steve's knock on his hotel-room door with whiskey on his breath. For now that was enough. He could think about how he was going to describe it on his resume later.

  "What is the gig?" she asked. "I mean, this doesn't look big enough to be a band truck. Are you touring with a folkie this time? Gordon Lightfoot, someone like that?"

  Steve grinned. "My guy is sort of a folkie, I guess, only he plays his mouth instead of a guitar or a harmonica. He--"

  That was when the cellular phone on the dashboard gave out its strident, oddly nasal cry: Hmeep! Hmeep! Steve grabbed it off the dashboard but didn't open it right away. He looked at the girl instead. "Don't say a word," he told her as the phone hmeep-ed in his hand a third time. "You might get me trouble if you do. 'Kay?"

  Hmeep! Hmeep!

  She n
odded. Steve flipped the phone's mouthpiece open and then pushed SEND on the keypad, which was how you accepted an incoming call. The first thing he was aware of when he put the phone to his ear was how heavy the static was--he was amazed the call had gone through at all.

  "Hello, that you, boss?"

  There was a deeper, smoother roar behind the static-the sound of a truck going by, Steve thought--and then Marinville's voice. Steve could hear panic even through the static, and it kicked his heart into a higher gear. He had heard people talking in that tone before (it happened at least once on every rock tour, it seemed), and he recognized it at once. At Johnny Marinville's end of the line, shit of some variety had hit the fan.

  "Steve! Steve, I'm ... ouble ... bad ..."

  He stared out at the road, running straight-arrow into the desert, and felt little seeds of sweat starting to form on his brow. He thought of the boss's tubby little agent with his thou shalt nots and his bullying voice, then swept all that away. The last person he needed cluttering up his head right now was Bill Harris.

  "Were you in an accident? Is that it? What's up, boss? Say again!"

  Crackle, zit, crackle.

  "Johnny . . . ear me?"

  "Yes, I hear you!" Shouting into the phone now, knowing it was totally useless but doing it anyway. Aware, out of the comer of his eye, that the girl was looking at him with mounting concern. "What's happened to you?"

  No answer for so long he was positive this time he had lost Marinville. He was taking the phone away from his ear when the boss's voice came through again, impossibly far off, like a voice coming in from another galaxy: "west ... Ely ... iffy."

  No, not iffy, Steve thought, not iffy but fifty. "I'm west of Ely, on Highway 50. " Maybe, anyway. Maybe that's what he's saying. Accident. Got to be. He drove his scoot off the road and he's sitting out there with a bust leg and blood maybe pouring down his face and when I get back to New York his guys are going to crucify me, if for no other reason than that they can't crucify him--