THEY PILED amps and cords and guitars and drums back of the hearse and drove it over to the American Legion a few hours before the show started. It was their first one. He rode with Louden and John Quality and Isaac Calendar and Carly and a girl named Roxanne. She wore fire engine red lipstick, and her black t-shirt read CRIB DEATH.

The building was in the woods out past the county airport. There were pictures on the walls of old men sitting at tables in the same building. They had small heads, and big glasses, wore army or navy or marine or air force hats, and pins and ribbons and wings at their shirts.

Roxanne Crib Death unhinged one of the pictures and laid it on the table. She spilled two blue pills on the glass and crushed them with the bottom of a beer bottle. She put her nose to the old men’s faces past the glass and the powder. Terry went down on it next. He came up fast, and tried to move his eyes far back in his head. He wiped his nose and sniffed.

He went back over to the wall and looked at the pictures some more and took out a cigarette. He patted his chest. One could do a lot with pilot’s wings. He thought about his grandfather, how he was dead.

The place filled up with smoke and bodies, the smell of wet mouths, punk kids from Echota and the spent towns nearby He wasn’t ready to play in front of people, not even a little. Isaac said he was fine. If he fucked up no one would hear anyway.

He meant to come down a little. He walked laps at the room. He smoked a joint with Isaac and Roxanne Crib Death under the pictures of old men. The two of them left, and Terry stayed looking at the pictures. The cigarettes piled at his feet.

He took most of the skin from the index finger on his right hand by the fifth song. He drug it over and over against the strings on a down pick. The tips of every one save the pinky on his left bled. Louden jumped off the stage on the eighth song, and then he saw him at the small crowd up front, shouldered through a swarm that crashed one another. He moved through the bodies. He parted them.