LOUDEN LIVED in a house connected to four others, skinny and high, each one painted grade school crayon; blue, purple, pink, and yellow. The hearse was parked in the drive, back end facing the road, and there was a brown Firebird missing wheels and set on cinder blocks. Louden asked if he could play a bass guitar, and he couldn’t, even a little, but he thought maybe he listened to enough records. The bass player, for some reason, had just stopped showing up.
We need one, Louden said. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or not.
Alright, Terry said.
Louden scooped a wooden head driver from the yard. He focused, still, and swung the club. He cut a square of grass. The clod jumped a few feet, then fell back down and broke apart when it hit.
You just stand there is all, Louden said.
He stuck his boot at the club hole.
I should have been a goddamn golfer, he said. A real pro. A jock. A looper.
They went up the front stoop to the tattoo artist’s house and pushed a jagged screen door to go inside. The same people from before sat in the front room, on the yellow couch, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from blue and silver aluminum cans. Terry sat down between two of them. Louden lapped the length of the room and pulled a smoke, exhaled a stream that trailed behind. He stopped halfway on the second lap and lifted a guitar high at the neck, black lacquer, sharp pointed ears. He plugged the cable to a small amp.
Can you hold down a string? Isaac said.
He wasn’t sure at all. Isaac got up and went over to some tangled cables. The drums sat stacked in the corner, apple red bass leaned to the wall beside the kit. Terry went over and put a hand to the fat neck, touched the strings with the underside of a thumb, thick wound gray metal, like power lines. He picked it up, draped it to his right shoulder.
Isaac Calendar fixed small pieces of masking tape at the frets, etched letters there in black pen. One named John Quality sat at the drums. Isaac tuned his guitar and looked at Terry standing in the middle of the room, bass at his shoulder like a rifle turned over. He slung the guitar to his back, neck down, and walked over to pick up a cable head. He jammed it to a hole near the foot of the bass, and then passed Terry a string pick, big as a half dollar. Terry pressed the top string at the first fret with his left index finger, did the same at the third fret and then the fifth. The amps hummed, the room filled with blind static. The singer, one called Conrad Frankenstein, held a microphone in one hand, black cable wrapped on both, hands like a boxer’s, like Christ’s. The drums, and then the guitar went loud; Conrad Frankenstein delirious at a scream. Terry watched Isaac and Louden, and he started to get the hang of how things worked. He felt the drums on his back. He felt monsters in his chest.
Merriam sat on one end of the yellow couch. He hadn’t seen her come inside, didn’t consider, even, that she’d come to such a place. After a while Terry’s fingers bled. He yanked the plug and propped the bass to one amp and sat on the floor next to her. Isaac and Louden, John Quality and Conrad Frankenstein kept going, two songs, then four more. Merriam handed down a joint, leaned at Terry’s ear and spoke muffled. He shook his head and held up both hands, and she bent down again, mouth against his ear, and she kept it there.
Terry turned on the light in the bathroom and locked the door, heard the band through the walls, an old scream, cymbal crashed brass sharp, and he thought about Merriam, her lips against his ear. He washed his hands and dried them on a yellow hand towel. The knob rattled loose and twisted on the door.
Someone’s in here, he said.
Merriam closed the door behind her and leaned against it, hair light brown and limp at her shoulders. Her t-shirt was green, and read HUGS,
NOT DRUGS.
That lock doesn’t work, Merriam said.
She pulled the shirt up over her head and dropped it on the floor, hummed a song he didn’t know. He thought about Alice Washington, how she made her voice very big while singing. He thought about how he’d never seen a girl just take her shirt off like that.
Come here, she said.
She hummed again. Terry got an erection, put his hands to it and pressed it down, drew his hips in and kept his hands there.
I don’t know if I’m ready for that just yet, he said.
He stumbled at the lip of the bathtub and almost fell back. Merriam put her hands on his shoulders and turned him around, and then she pushed him back against the door.
You ever been with a girl like this?
No.
He thought of Alice Washington, her finger in his mouth.
Lay down, she said.
He did. She put a leg on either side of him, sat down and pressed herself against his chest.
You don’t have to do anything, she said.
He felt her hand undoing his belt, then his zipper.
Nothing?
Just lay there, she said.
He was inside her, then, and she rocked on top of him, eyes down at his face, then back up. She got his hands at the wrists.
You can put them right here, she said.
She led his hands to where her thighs met her stomach.
Like this?
He closed his eyes, but did not want to; Alice Washington pointing at the great owl; Alice Washington at the movies; Alice Washington kissing his neck; Alice Washington beneath the Indian head penny bar sign; Alice Washington through the station wagon’s back glass; Alice Washington turned over; Alice Washington held with a seatbelt; Alice Washington gone ash; he was crying; Merriam was moving faster.