SEVENTY-THREE
THE VENUE WAS STUNNING. A NATURAL STONE-WALLED AMPHITHEATER in an elevated pocket canyon. The only way in was a stone access tunnel no wider than 10 feet across. Delicate work to trailer the piano through, and it took seven of them to lift the Steinway onto the stage. The audience capacity was in the thousands, but only a few dozen milled beneath the stars in loose groups, talking, laughing.
Another engine boomed from the tunnel.
Headlights flickered, then emerged. The MoleMobile. It rolled in fast, stopped sharp just short of the stage. Marilyn flung herself out, cables crisscrossing her shoulders like bandoliers. She lit up the sound boards, shoved cables into jacks. The Mole dropped his stone feet onto dust and said:
“Thomas, we got your speaker rigged up.”
“Great,” Thomas said from the stage. “Marilyn, could you light up microphone one?”
“It’s hot,” she said, thumbs up.
Thomas clapped his hands three times.
Beyond the tunnel, green light blazed.
The Eternal Encore. The cheer in the Paths was immediate—a full-throated roar. It rolled around the amphitheater walls like a wild boulder.
“People might come,” Thomas said softly.
Toward the back of the stage, Marilyn yanked coverings from racks of instruments: guitars, mandolins, banjos, a corner of cajónes, bongos, bata drums, a towering fiddle shelf on wheels, rows of brass, woodwinds—how many of them were there?
Would the Band come?
Griff desperately hoped they would.
The Mole said it right before they started:
“No recording. No preserving.”
His voice bounced around them. The crowd did not come suddenly, in a single great wave. They came steadily. Persistently. Poured into the amphitheater the way they described the flooding of Clade City in ’64. Like a bathtub, slowly filling up with water.
Playing music with Charity, it felt like it was still their dance.
Their sacred place in the stone cave. Charity had never stopped singing. Never stopped building her gift bigger and brighter. Her voice rang clear against the tall stone walls of the amphitheater like it belonged there, mingling with the steady chirp of the incoming crowd:
Chi-chi-chirrup! Chi-chi-chirrup!
Griff let her drive the songs. She could hold the whole space. A giddy, nauseous adrenaline, trying to keep up. He punched through the false floor of how deep he could go. He talked out the last ten months of anguish through the keys and pedals of this glorious instrument—such power, like it might buck him off. He sounded better than he was.
The audience came running. Then someone leapt on stage. Griff froze and two more came—bolting for the instruments. Adrenaline made his legs shake. What to do? Charity just kept singing. More came up! Marilyn was not rushing them off.
When the song concluded, he hissed:
“Is that the Band?”
“What do we do?” Griff asked.
They kept playing. The song they’d played at the Urchin, in which Charity sang like the wind. A prickling in his guts when they started, but her voice smoothed it all out. Beautiful. Better than before. Whole and rolling through the space, held aloft by the crowd’s eyes and upturned faces and then a small group rushed the stage. Griff would not let this be ruined—he stood to defend the space but Thomas was on it. Leaping up. Going for—what? Their feet? Gently? He was setting up footer mics. Marilyn plowed up with a silver condenser mic on a stand and the couple peeled hair back from their faces. The group joined Charity’s song.
Their song.
Their voices slipped in, a haunting counterpoint to the gale in Charity’s voice, and Griff found himself bending along to the new voices. The sound of strings slipped in along with the soft brass of a horn, a cello. Charity carried them all, lifting her voice like wings, and the audience stopped chirping and began to roar. Their gathering had become a crowd and the song did not stop. It grew. Swelled around them until they were playing with ten or more. Maybe a dozen, and when Charity gave him the right look, Griff brought them to a thundering climax and the crowd made his ears ring.
“Amazing,” Griff said to Charity. He was breathless. “We’d better go.”
“Why?” she asked.
He looked around. Real musicians. Cocked hats and swagger. Their experience written firmly in their posture and the flash of their eyes.
“To make room for the Band,” Griff said.
“Griff,” she said. “We are the Band.”
The crowd applauded. A Black man with a peacock-feathered hat winked at him, played a lick like—c’mon then. A girl with a shaved head rapped on her tom-toms, waiting for his cue. The sudden explanation for rotating singers and impossible ensembles. Every work song in the Paths had been a rehearsal. Lyrics painted on lean-tos and lofts, their sheet music. Like the piano, the stage here belonged to everyone. But beneath the audience, Griff heard the old song echo:
You don’t belong.
He’d just wanted it so badly.
He looked at his hands on the keys. Bare wrist. His dim reflection in the fall board.
He’d rushed ahead again. Who would have to die this time, so he could be first?
Griff stood, and dropped down the front of the stage.
Still time to fix it. He kicked his way out, shouldering through the crowd. What had he gotten wrong this time? He’d put Rumblefish at the ladders, Moondog patrolling the Paths, Simon wrangling crews—PooperScoopers to guard bathrooms and Electrolytes to keep the Encore fed with energy, Malachi on the final sweep. So what had he missed?
The access tunnel was packed. Air thick, like breathing through a washcloth. The Encore pulsed color from singing voices—a psychedelic chapel of song and bodies—then he was back in the air, sweat cooling to a prickle on his skin.
The edges of the plateau were mobbed.
A buggy boomed down in the Paths, sound pulsing up the canyon’s sides. A final few clambered up from ladders. The chi-chi-chirrup had given way to a low murmur, like they knew what was coming. Malachi stood at his post near the tallest ladder, as promised.
On the surface, it all looked good.
But Griff had trained eyes. He knew better. Strangers tried to stop him.
“Hey, brother, Paths are closed—”
“Yo, bro—”
“Bro!”
Griff shoved and twisted his way to Malachi, who looked surprised.
“Hey,” Griff said. “What’s the status?”
“Handled,” Malachi said. “Just did a final sweep.”
Malachi looked confident. Like nothing could go wrong. Griff tapped his monocular in his pocket. He twisted past Malachi and grabbed the ladder.
“Whoa, what are you doing?”
“Making sure.” Griff knew. He could feel it.
“Bro,” Malachi said. “I can’t let you go down.”
“There’s still time,” Griff said. “It’s not too late.”
Malachi gave him a strange, steady look.
“Can I see your scanner?” Griff asked.
“We did what you said. We’ve gone down there with six full crews,” Malachi said, pulling out his Bug Detector. “I’ve run this thing three times. I’m telling you. There’s no one down there.”
Griff took the scanner from Malachi. He pointed it down one dark corridor of the Paths. Another. A slight flutter. An underwater shiver. Because it took a practiced hand to find it. A well-trained eye to see. To tune in, you had to live every day knowing you should’ve been down there. It should’ve been you.
A tiny light.
The signal he’d chased all the way to the desert.
“No—” Malachi began.
Malachi got in his way. Shouted, and tried to stop him, but Griff moved fast. Stumbled and leapt, and threw himself down into the Paths.