A Slipping-Down Life

  While she waited on the front porch, clutching her books to her chest, disapproval hung like a fog up and down her street. A lady in a gardening hat clipped her hedge, throwing Evie sharp, sidelong looks with every snick of her shears. Blank-faced houses watched her sternly. Behind her, in her own house, Clotelia slammed doors and shoved furniture and muttered to herself, although Evie couldn’t hear what it was she said. Once she came to stand behind the screen with a crane-necked watering pitcher in her hand. “I’ve a good mind to call your daddy,” she told Evie.

  “What would you tell him?”

  “You know he don’t want you seeing that trash.”

  “I’m not doing anything wrong,” said Evie. She straightened, throwing a sudden smile at the gardening lady. Her father had banned Drum Casey as if Drum were storming the front hedge, bearing flowers and a ladder, begging to be let in. She could almost pretend that her father knew something she didn’t. But when finally Drum drove up, in a battered black Dodge with upside-down license plates, all he did was lean out his window and give her a long, unsmiling stare. Evie hugged her books tighter and started toward him.

  “You going somewhere?” he asked.

  “I have to get to school. I thought you could drive me there while we were talking.”

  “Funny time to go to school.”

  “I know. I’m late.”

  She opened the car door and climbed in beside him. The car had a hot, syrupy smell in the morning sunlight. Instead of the black denim that he sang in, Drum Casey wore blue jeans and a T shirt with sleeves rolled up past his biceps. The soft colors gave him a gentler, faded look. He was leaning on the steering wheel, the shock of hair falling forward over his face. He slid his eyes past her forehead without ever quite looking at it. “I ain’t got much time,” he said.

  Evie only smiled. “I thought you might have a motorcycle,” she told him.

  “Me, a bike?”

  “A motorcycle.”

  “Naw, they’re too dangerous.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Evie. She watched Drum set the car into motion, steering easily with his forearms resting on the wheel. He wore a wristwatch with a silver expansion band, which gave her a smaller version of the shock she had felt when she heard him call his mother. Did he wind his watch every morning, check its accuracy, try to be places on time like ordinary people? “How old are you?” she asked him.

  “Nineteen.”

  “I’m seventeen.”

  Drum said nothing.

  “If you’re nineteen,” said Evie, “do you go to school?”

  “No.”

  “What, then.”

  “I don’t do much of nothing.”

  “Oh.”

  The car turned onto Main Street. They passed a clutter of small shops and cafés, the bowling alley and the Christian Science Reading Room. Evie pressed tight against the window, but there was nobody to see her.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” Drum asked.

  “Well, I had an idea this morning.”

  “Is this where I turn?”

  “No, one block farther.”

  “Only been here once before, but I’m good at directions.”

  “We got written up in the paper. Did you see it?” Evie asked.

  “Yeah, I saw it. Just a picture, though.”

  “Well, it’s better than nothing.”

  “Sure.”

  “Somebody sent me a copy in the mail.” She rummaged through her notebook until she had found it: a plastic-sealed photograph of her in her hospital room, rising from a wave of strung-out sheets, and Drum scowling beside her. Taped to the plastic was a printed message. “Congratulations on your recent achievement. And when it’s the tops in achievement you want, just think of Sonny Martin, Pulqua Country’s Biggest Real Estate Agent.” “This rightly belongs to you,” Evie said. “Here. Keep it.” Drum took his eyes from the road a minute to glance at it, and then he nodded and put it into his back pocket.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s good publicity.”

  “Sure, I reckon.”

  “How do you usually get publicity?” she asked him.

  Drum gave a sudden short laugh, as if it had been startled out of him. “Well, not that way,” he said.

  “Do you put in ads?”

  “I got a manager.”

  “Oh. I thought only fighters had managers.”

  “Well, no,” said Drum. “Well, them too, of course.” He had drawn up before the school by now but sat frowning, tapping one finger on the wheel, as if he were no longer sure that a manager was what he had. “Of course, he’s only my drummer,” he said finally.

  “Does he put in ads?”

  “Sometimes. Or talks around, mostly. Goes to see people.”

  “Wouldn’t he like it if you got more publicity?”

  “What you getting at?”

  “I was thinking if I started coming to all your shows, where people could see me. Wearing my hair off my face. Wouldn’t it cause talk? They’d say, ‘You see what she did for him. There must be something to him, then.’ Wouldn’t they?”

  “Oh, I reckon,” said Drum. “Until you got healed up.”

  “Healed up? What are you talking about? I’m not going to get healed up.”

  He didn’t react the way she had expected. He stopped tapping his fingers and slumped back in his seat, staring at the windshield. After a minute he said, “What?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Are you going to have, um—”

  “Scars,” said Evie.

  A line of girls in gym shorts crossed the playing field, followed by Drum’s darkened eyes. “Jesus,” he said.

  “Well, it’s done now. Wouldn’t you like to have me sitting there while you played? People would say, ‘We better go hear Drum Casey, there’s this girl who cut—’ ”

  “Are you out of our head?”

  “Why? What’s so crazy about that?”

  “For you, maybe nothing,” said Drum. “But I ain’t going to sing under those conditions.”

  “What conditions?”

  “How do you think I would feel?”

  “Well, I don’t see—”

  “Go on, now,” said Drum. “Get out. I’m real sorry about what happened, but I got my own life to live.”

  “Nobody said you didn’t.”

  “Will you go?”

  “You can live your own life all you want,” said Evie, but she could feel her words fading away from her. Drum had reached across her to open the car door. His arm was covered with fine brown hairs, dotted with the faintest sheen of sweat, and for one motionless second she stared down and mourned it, just that isolated arm which she had only now started to know. Then she said, “All right. If that’s the way you feel.” She stumbled out onto the sidewalk, clutching at slipping books and smoothing the back of her rumpled skirt. Her face felt heavy, as if some weight at her jawline were pulling all her features downward.

  Yet when she started up the front steps of the school, two girls in gym shorts were staring past her at the disappearing Dodge. They looked at her, then at the Dodge again. Evie smiled at them and went inside. If two people saw, the whole school would know by noon. They would pass it from desk to desk and down the lunchline: “That girl who slashed the singer’s name in her face, well, now she’s hanging out with him. He drove her to school. Sat a long time in the car with her. What were they doing in the car?”

  She smiled at a boy she didn’t know and set her books down in front of her locker. If the boy stared at her forehead, she didn’t notice. The letters stood out clear and proud, framed by damp hair, finer than any plastic rectangle a surgeon could have pasted there.

  6

  Drum Casey’s drummer’s name was David Elliott. Some people had tried calling him “Guitar” for a joke, just rounding things off, but David was the kind who slid out from under nicknames. He was not light-minded enough. He played the drums intently, watching his hands, sitting very straight i
nstead of hunkering over the way other drummers did. This made him seem childlike, although he was a good six feet tall. He had white-blond hair that fell in an even line, hiding his eyebrows. His face was fine-boned and his eyes transparent, the color of old blue Mason jars. Yet girls never took to him. They liked his looks but not his seriousness. He spoke too definitely; there was a constant, edgy impatience in the way he moved, and he planned ahead too much. “We’re good. We’re going good,” he told girls. “I want to hit a night club next. We’re getting up there. We’re ready to move.” Drum, beside him, was slow and cool and dark. He made plans too; but while David talked about up, Drum talked about out. “When we get out of this place, I want me a custom car. Going to go so far I’ll lose the way home, forget the name of the town, mislay the map. Also new singing clothes; I want me something shiny.” Girls understood what he meant. They fluttered after him when he drifted off, and David stayed behind to think up more publicity.

  David solicited clubs and roadhouses and church organizations. During the day he sold insurance policies door to door, but he never forgot to work the conversation around to music. “Spring is here. Are you going to have a dance? Do you know of any dances? You’ll need a band, records aren’t the same. What about Mrs. Howard, the one in the house on the hill? She gives a dance every May. Won’t she need a band? Ask her. It’s cheaper to hire the two of us; those big groups can get out of hand.” He believed in gimmicks, little eyecatching traps for people to fall into while they were making up their minds. Bright red cards with gilt lettering on them—“Drumstrings with guitar, David with the sticks, 839-3036”—were thumbtacked to every bulletin board. David’s Jeep was painted with psychedelic swirls and a purple telephone number. In December, he had sent Christmas cards picturing an orchestra of angels to every leading businessman in Pulqua, Farinia, and Tar City. He instructed Drum to carry his guitar slung over his shoulder at all times, but Drum didn’t. (“In the pharmacy?” Drum said. “At the liquor store? You’re putting me on.”) And when Evie Decker slashed “Casey” across her forehead, it was David who called the newspaper photographer. “This is why you need a manager,” he told Drum. “Would you have thought of it by yourself? You haven’t got the eye for it.”

  “You’re right, I ain’t,” said Drum. “I got to hand it to you.”

  Drum got along well with David, better than other people did. He liked riding on the tail of all that energy, letting someone else do the organizing, listening to the rapid, precise flow of talk which he thought came from David’s having spent half a semester at Campbell College. But it was only words that should be so precise, not drums. David’s drums never skipped a beat, and yet somehow the spirit was missing. Other drummers went into frenzies; David remained tight, expressionless, speeding faster and faster without so much as bending forward. “You drag,” said Drum. “Oh, I feel it.”

  “I don’t drag. I’m there all the way.”

  “Well, but you’re holding me back somehow. Tying me in. I don’t now.”

  “Get another drummer, if you feel like that.”

  But he never did. Together they went over each new piece, juggling lines and bickering and giving little wheezes of disgust at each other. When it came to music, Drum always won. He had the feel for it. “What’s this talking out in the middle of a piece?” David once asked. “Where does that get you? Most of what you say is not even connected.”

  “I ain’t going to argue about that,” said Drum. “I just do it. If you have to ask why, you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Oh, all right. I don’t care.”

  He had the sense not to go against Drum on things like that. He believed that Drum was a real musician, someone who deserved to climb straight to the top. When an audience talked instead of listening, David muttered curses at them all the while he played. When Drum hit one of his low moods, David followed him around rescuing scraps of songs from wastebaskets. “What call have you got to slump around like this? What you throw away those other cats would give their teeth to write. You’re nearly there. You’ve almost made it.”

  “You reckon so? I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,” Drum would say finally.

  David paid a visit to Evie Decker on a Saturday afternoon during finals. She was on her front porch studying. She lay in a wooden swing with her head on a flattened, flowered cushion, one foot trailing to the floor to keep her rocking. When she heard the Jeep, she turned and blinked. Swirls of color chased around its body and across the canvas top, where they blurred and softened. And there came Drum Casey’s drummer out of the little tacked-on door, smoothing down his bangs with his fingers. “The Missouri Compromise,” Evie went on out loud, “was supposed to maintain a …” but her eyes were on David. She watched him cross her yard and climb her steps, rifle-straight and full of purpose. Because of the edgeless shimmer of his hair in the sunlight, he seemed only another daydream, nothing to get nervous about. “Afternoon,” he said.

  “Afternoon,” said Evie. She sat up, laying a finger in her history book to mark the place.

  “You Evie Decker?”

  But he would have known, having seen her forehead by now. She didn’t answer.

  “I’m David Elliott. I play with Drum Casey.”

  “I know, I recognized you,” said Evie. She waited for him to go on, but he seemed to be getting his bearings. He gazed at the dim white house, at the lawn twinkling beneath a sprinkler, and finally at Evie herself, who wore a billowing muu-muu and no shoes. Then he said, “Mind if I talk with you a moment?”

  “All right.”

  He sat on the top porch step, with his forearms resting on his knees. Now that he was in the shade he had lost his shimmer. He was made of solid flesh, damp from the heat. Evie began swinging back and forth very rapidly.

  “I’m also his manager,” said David.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I do his publicity, line up parties and things. I think we got a good sound going.” He flashed her a look. “Drum has.”

  Evie stopped swinging.

  “Drum has really got it,” he told her. Why was he watching her feet? She curled her toes under. “Don’t you think so?” he asked.

  “Well, yes,” said Evie. “You know I do.” She brushed a loose piece of hair off her forehead. David peered at the scars and then lowered his eyes—something that usually made her angry. “What was it that you wanted to talk about?” she asked him.

  “Oh. Well, you spoke to Drum the other day about a plan you had. Plan for publicity.”

  “Tuesday,” said Evie.

  “Was that right, you had a plan?”

  “I thought if I went to his shows, and sat up front. You know. People would say, ‘This boy has got to be good, look at what she did because of him.’ Only your friend said—”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” said David.

  “Your friend said no.”

  “Ah, he don’t know. That’s why he has me.”

  “He said he couldn’t sing under those conditions.”

  “What does he know?”

  “He knows if he can sing or not,” Evie said.

  “Look. Do you want to try it? Just once, just tonight. If people take notice, you can stay. If not, you go. All right?”

  “What, try just sitting there?”

  “That’s right. Tonight. I’ll give you a lift, pick you up at eight. Three dollars and beer. Only don’t drink a lot, you hear? It wouldn’t look good.”

  “I never have but one beer anyway.”

  “Though on second thought, nothing wrong if you did drink a lot. It wouldn’t hurt anything.”

  “I never have but one,” Evie said.

  “Oh, well.”

  He stood up and Evie stood with him, clutching her book. “Wait,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t thought it out yet, really—”

  He paused, not arguing, just waiting. “About your friend,” she said. “Drum, I mean. Well, I hate to go again
st him this way. Riding right over what he said to me. What will he do? Did he say anything about you coming here?”

  “He didn’t know about it,” David said.

  “Oh,” said Evie.

  “He leaves this kind of thing to me,” David told her. He looked up suddenly, straight into her eyes. “You can’t ever listen to him. Then where would he be? Playing in a room to himself, wasting all that music alone. I hate to see things wasted.”

  It seemed more settled then. Evie nodded and let him go.

  At eight o’clock that night Evie came down the front steps in a skirt and blouse, her vinyl sandals, and a blue plastic headband that kept her hair off her face. The Jeep was already parked outside. In the back seat, behind David, Drum Casey sprawled out with both feet up and his guitar in the crook of his arm. It hadn’t occurred to Evie that he might be there. She froze on the sidewalk, gripping her purse. Then David said, “Nope. It’s not what I was thinking of.”

  “What?” she said.

  “You need something black. Dressy.”

  “No one dresses up at the Unicorn.”

  “You do. You want to stand out. We’ll wait.”

  “What? You want me to change now? I can’t do that, my father will start wondering. He thinks I’m at a friend’s.”

  “We’ll wait around the block then.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Drum. David shooed him away with one hand.

  “You leave this to me,” he said. “I’ve got it all clear in my mind. We’ll be over there, Evie.”

  Evie ran back to her room. She changed in a rush, mislaying things that had been right at her fingertips and tearing stockings, jamming zippers, tripping over cast-off clothing. If she took one minute too long, she felt, the Jeep would vanish. It would drift off like a tiny, weightless boat, piloted by careless people with short memories. She put on a scoop-necked black blouse and a black skirt. Then she picked up a pair of pumps and ran down the stairs in stocking feet. “Back in a while, Daddy,” she called. Her father didn’t answer. He might not even have heard.