Byrd (3 page)

“You came,” Roland says. “I didn't know if you would.”

He puts on the Allman Brothers,
At Fillmore East
, and plugs in his guitar. This is how he practices, playing along on “Whipping Post” using Pet's brown glass Valium bottle as a slide. He sits on a bar stool, bent over, his dark bangs hiding his eyes, as if he has to go to some secret place to find the song. He plays fast, putting in lots of extra notes, filling every space with sound.

Addie slips off her shoes, draws up her knees, and basks in the moment—sun slanting in, the plush celery armchair, Roland playing for her. A moment as unlikely as it is perfect.

It's a long moment. “Whipping Post” is a twenty-two-minute jam, all of side four. When the song ends, the tone-arm on the stereo retracts, and Addie applauds. “You're amazing,” she tells him. She feels like a Beat woman, except Roland really
is
amazing, worthy of applause.

He sets his guitar in its stand. “Too much, wasn't it? I got a little carried away. I'm not used to an audience. I need a cigarette.”

She follows him out onto the patio, into the yard, to a shady spot behind a tall row of boxwoods. He lights a Camel, takes a drag and passes it to her.

“Who do you listen to?” he says, casually exhaling a plume of purple smoke, as if the question were casual, which Addie knows it is not.

She wants to say the right thing. She could humor him and say Dylan or the Stones or Howlin' Wolf. None of those would be a lie. She could be ingratiating and obvious and say the All-mans. “Joni Mitchell,” she says.

“Right,” he says, “of course,” and laughs.

“She's a genius.”

“She's got that fluttery voice. It gets on my nerves.”

They finish their cigarette and go back inside and Roland starts the song again from the top. This time he relaxes into it, holding notes, bending them. He turns up the distortion on his amp to get a bluesier sound, more like Duane. That raw, run-down, lied-to sound.

Addie closes her eyes. The less he tries to impress her, the better he plays.

He's almost at the end—it's all double-stops and chords now, loud, wailing, building to the full-on heartbreak of the final chorus—when they hear a pounding overhead.

Pet.

“Roland,” she calls from the top of the stairs, “you have homework.”

He stops abruptly, without protest, without complaint, as if he'd been expecting the interruption. He turns off his amp, takes off his guitar, wipes the neck with a chamois cloth, then lays it gently in its case, the way you'd put a child to bed. He turns off the stereo, lifts his album by its edges and slides it into its cover.

“I like listening to you,” Addie says.

“I like playing for you,” he says. “You and me, we're not like everybody else.”

That night she lies awake in her blue bedroom with her headphones on, listening to Joni, whose high, sad voice drowns out everything. She tries to imagine
being
Joni—brilliant, beautiful, always in and out of love, able to write and sing and paint about it. Joni even has her own music company, Siquomb, a word she made up, an acronym for “She Is Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty.” Addie tries to imagine herself as queen undisputedly of anything.

Flower Street is quiet. Every now and then a car drives by, flashing its headlights through the dotted swiss curtains. Addie imagines it's Roland coming for her in his father's Buick. She imagines him parking along the curb, lighting a cigarette, waiting. There's no time to get dressed. She will slip out in her nightgown, run barefoot across the grass. Her feet will get wet from dew. She won't be able to see his face in the dark, only the glowing orange tip of his cigarette. He'll push open the passenger door and say to her,
Come on, let's drive to the lake
. And they will, they'll drive to Old City Lake and park near the dam, and the night will be spacious and peaceful with only the lapping of the water, and she'll lean against him and point at the trees on the far bank and say,
Look, lightning bugs
.

“I love how you're not afraid to speak up,” Roland says. They're at the wall, sharing a smoke between classes. “I love all the shit you know. How do you know so much?”

“I read,” she says.

“I don't. The only book I've ever read start to finish is
On the Road.”

“Too bad you didn't pick a better one,” she says.

His laugh is like a dry cough.
Huck-huck-huck
. Self-conscious, like he's laughing at the sound of himself laughing. “I had a head injury when I was young. My brain hurts when I read.” He tells her the swimming pool story. He tells it as if he's letting her in on a secret he's never told anyone, and she pretends she's hearing it for the first time.

“Music is how my brain works,” he says. “Ever since I hit my head, the only way I can think is in music. Which is cool when you're playing guitar, but not when you're not.”

“Most people would kill to play like you.”

“I just wish I knew how to do anything else,” he says.

She reaches over and touches his hand. If she were a Beat woman, this is when she might kiss him. Not a real kiss, no big deal. Lips lightly brushing lips. A suggestion of a kiss.

“I love how he lets me hear his mistakes,” Addie tells Shelia. This is the first time they've played cards since she started spending afternoons at Roland's.

Shelia plays the ten of spades. “You're such a groupie.”

“Girls, hush,” Betsy says. She is frying fruit pies and watching the Watergate hearings on the little TV she has moved into the kitchen. Watergate is Betsy's soap opera. She knows all the characters. Her heroes are Senator Sam from North Carolina, with the gavel and the eyebrows and the deep drawl, and Howard Baker from Tennessee. Two Southern gentlemen politely bringing down the government.

“I don't get it,” Shelia whispers. “It's not like he's Eric Clapton.”

“He's good,” Addie says, “but that's not the point.”

On TV, Senator Sam bangs his gavel. Betsy turns off the frying pan. The kitchen smells like apples and brown sugar and grease. “Shelia,” she says, “take a dollar out of my purse and you and Addie take my car to the Winn-Dixie and pick up a carton of ice cream to go with our turnovers. Vanilla or butter pecan, you girls decide.”

A Saturday like every Saturday. Bryce is up early for his golf game, which means the whole house is awake. Addie pads into the kitchen, where Claree is serving Bryce's breakfast: scrambled eggs, soft, with a dash of Tabasco. She sets his plate on the table, and his coffee. She watches him butter his toast like it's his dying act. Addie knows what she's thinking: this is the last time today they will see him sober.

Sam comes in and pours himself a bowl of Lucky Charms, carries it to the living room, sits down on the floor in front of the TV and turns on Road Runner cartoons. He's wearing his idea of a golf outfit: knit shirt, khaki shorts with long pockets for collecting golf balls, Hush Puppies, and white socks with red rings around the top. He has worn a spot on the carpet from camping by the front door. He studies the TV screen, his face bright, hopeful, his whole body tense, as if maybe Wile E. Coyote's latest Acme device will be the one that finally works; maybe this time he'll trap the Road Runner. Sam is so intent, he seems not to notice when Bryce comes through the room. Bryce has to step over him on his way out. “So long, buddy.”

Sam doesn't answer. On TV, Wile E. Coyote gets blown up. Again.

Outside, Bryce's car pulls away. Sam finishes his cereal, takes his bowl back to the kitchen and rinses it, then heads outside to play kickball with the kids across the street. Their noise fills the house—high-pitched voices yelling made-up rules, the rubbery thumping of the ball.

Half an hour later Sam is back, red-faced and wheezing, his golf clothes dirty.

“Are you okay?” Addie asks.

He drops into Bryce's chair and puffs on his Primatene inhaler until he has enough breath to talk. “He never takes me golfing.”

“Why do you even want to go?”

Addie pictures Bryce and his friends on the golf course, humming around in their little carts. Sun pounding, dew boiling off the grass, the hot green smell of everything. After every hole they tip their flasks and wipe their mouths on the backs of their hands. Bryce tells a joke and they all laugh. He tells the punch line again and they all laugh again. Bryce laughs hardest. He's glad to be away from home, glad not to know about Sam getting red dirt on his chair, or Claree in the back yard in her pedal pushers, hair piled on her head, sweat streaming down her face, trying to start the mower, or Addie, who's about to desert them both and escape out the front door, just like he did.

Pet and Roland's sister have gone shopping in Greensboro, his father is out buying gas for the lawnmower, and Roland's been getting high, Addie can tell. His eyes are bloodshot and he smells smoky-sweet.

She follows him downstairs. He opens the stereo, puts on an album and sits down beside her on the sofa. The sofa is fat and soft. Roland is wearing his Saturday clothes: white T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and crew socks with spent elastic. He props his feet on the coffee table. His socks bunch around his ankles.

There's a crackle from the stereo, then a swell of strings.

“What's this?” Addie asks.

“A surprise.”

The music is lush, an orchestra, nothing like what they usually listen to. Roland sits closer. His leg touches hers.

“Want to dance?” he says.

They get up and he puts his arms on her waist. The music rises and falls. They stand close, swaying gently, barely moving.

“What
is
this?” she asks again. Not that it matters. He's holding her. Music to be held by.

“Percy Faith. ‘Theme from A Summer Place,' the old man's favorite. Romantic, isn't it?”

She rests her head on his shoulder. No more talk now. Only the swelling orchestra. Only the dance.

Until, from above, a roar—a car in the carport. A single slam of a car door.

Roland doesn't lose the rhythm. He keeps swaying, not letting go.

More sounds from the carport. Clanks, thunks, sputtering, and a small explosion—Roland's father starting the mower.

Roland stops. “I've got an idea,” he says.

She always imagined sex would be mysterious. That it would happen in a dark, quiet place. Not in Roland's parents' room on a bright Saturday with the sun squeezing in through closed blinds and a towel on the bedspread to keep it clean. Not with Roland's father's lawnmower making loud circles around the house, growling past the bedroom window.

She thought Roland would say things. Kiss her.

She thought it would take a long time. She didn't know it was possible for him to finish so soon: the minute he touched her, before he was even inside her.

She thought that afterwards she would be the shy one, that he would be the one to hold her and ask if she was okay.

She thought he would tell her not to leave, not yet, instead of rolling off the bed and scooping up his clothes and ducking into the bathroom and turning on the faucet and calling out over the water that it's too bad she can't stay.

“Sex changes everything,” Shelia says.

“It wasn't really sex,” Addie says. “We stopped before it got that far.”

“Good thing,” Shelia says.

They are in Betsy's pushbutton Dodge, driving to the health clinic, a flat brick building on the highway. They pull into the gravel lot and park in back so that no one can see the car from the road.

Before they can get their pills they have to sit through a class with girls they don't know while a nurse explains their bodies. The nurse puts diagrams on an overhead projector. She passes around a big doll to show them how to check their breasts for lumps. When it's Addie's turn the other girls break out laughing. “Them doll baby titties bigger than hers,” one says.

“Class,” the nurse says.

If sex changes everything, not-sex changes everything even more.

This is what Addie learns in high school. If you're a guy, if you're Roland, it might be okay to fail French or algebra, but it's not okay to fail at sex.

And if you're a girl, if you're Addie, there's nothing you can do or say to make it okay. She would like to tell Roland,
Please, it doesn't matter
. But it does matter, all of it—the dance, him watching her undress, their bodies touching while his father's lawnmower rattled outside, his bare, slender ass when he rolled away from her. What happened between them was as intimate and daring as she imagines sex could ever be.

They don't talk about it. Every day, they sit together in counterculture class, they share cigarettes at the smoking wall, and they don't talk about it.

She doesn't want to go back to his basement without an invitation and he doesn't invite her, so they don't talk about it there.

Weeks go by and they don't talk about it.

She asks about his music.

He's putting together a band, he says, a blues trio. They practice in the drummer's garage. “We're going to play for senior assembly.”

“That's great,” she says.

He doesn't invite her to the drummer's garage.

He doesn't ask to read her new poems.

They don't write a song together.

A Friday night in late May. The air is warm and humid, full of the smell of cut grass and burning charcoal, almost too thick to breathe. A thunderstorm would be a relief, but no one wants rain for the party, which is a cookout because Pet doesn't want Roland's friends coming in the house.

There are two long tables pushed together in the carport with “Happy Birthday” tablecloths and plates and napkins and streamers and balloons. Addie sits at the far table, across from Danny Brewster with his stringy ponytail and too-tight “Keep On Truckin'” T-shirt. He keeps glancing out at his car parked along the curb. Danny's car is his life; it's all he talks about. A shiny banana-yellow Barracuda with a black 440 decal, fender fins, chrome wheels, wide tires. He sat in it for his senior picture.