“What is your favorite song, Drum? Drum?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Don’t you have a favorite?”
“Not for all time I don’t. The one about the blue jeans, maybe.”
“Why don’t you have regular titles?”
“Never had no need for them.”
“You will when you make a record,” Evie said.
His eyes flicked over to her again; she felt them in the dark. She moved his guitar slightly so as to speak straight at him. “Someone is going to make a record of you that will sell a million copies,” she told him. “What will they put on that little center label? You’ve got to think up some titles.”
“She’s right,” David said.
“What’s so hard about that?” said Drum. “I’ll name them what I call them—’The Walking Song.’ ‘The Blue Jeans Song,’ nothing to it. Wait till they ask me, first.”
“You think they won’t ask you?”
“They haven’t yet, have they? I been sitting in that dump for seven months now. Haven’t got nowhere.”
“You will,” Evie said.
“How? When? You seen any talent scouts around?”
After a show he was always like that. She had seen girls clustering around him three deep at the end of a set, paying him compliments and brushing bits of nothing off his shoulder while Evie frowned fiercely into her beer and thought, “Now he’ll find out; they’ll show him he’s too good for Pulqua and the Unicorn and me”—although she had always counted on his becoming famous. But when the girls left he would only seem more uncertain. His proud cold envelope of air temporarily left him. “You sound better than anyone I hear on the radio,” Evie would tell him, and he would stun her by turning on her suddenly and saying, “You think so? Is that what you think? Ah, but what do you know?”
“I know if it sounds good.”
“I don’t know that. How do you know?”
Those were the only times they met face to face. They were the only times Evie lost the feeling that she was tugging at Drum’s sleeve while he stood with his back to her, gazing outwards toward something she couldn’t see.
Early in July, the Unicorn began hiring Drum for Fridays as well. People were asking for him, the proprietor said. Joseph Ballew was no longer enough. But Fridays Drum worked late in the A & P, bagging groceries. “The only solution,” said David, sitting in the Jeep with one of his lists on the steering wheel, “is for me to pick you up first, Evie. Then we’ll get Drum at the very last minute. Even then it’ll be close. Does that suit you?”
“Of course,” Evie said.
“Or you could keep coming just on Saturdays, if you wanted.”
“Why? Do you think I’m not working out any more?”
“No, Lord, you’re working out fine. But if your father starts worrying, you being gone two evenings and all—”
“No, I’ll come,” Evie said. Although it did seem that her father might begin to wonder. She frowned down at her skirt, gathering it in folds between her knees, while David made more lists on more scraps of paper.
The next Friday they drove to Farinia to pick up Drum. Evie had been through Farinia often, but without really noticing. She stared out her window now at the town’s one paved street, with its double row of un-painted stores covered in rusty soft-drink signs. On a corner next to a shoe repair shop, a service station sat under a tent of flapping pennants, its lights already shining. David drove in and honked his horn.
“You haven’t run over the bell thing yet,” Evie told him.
“Bell thing? Oh. No, I don’t want gas, this is where Drum lives.”
“Here?”
Then she saw that the service station was an unpainted Victorian house, its bottom story tiled with shiny white squares. Above, lace curtains wavered in narrow windows. “What the hell,” David said. “I’ll run up and get him.”
“Can I come too?”
“If you want.”
She followed him across the service area and up a flight of rickety outside steps. The door had a card thumbtacked to it saying “ObeD E. CAseY” in pencil. David knocked. “Who is it?” a woman called.
“It’s me, David. I’ve come for Bertram, tell him.”
The door opened. After the rickety steps and the penciled card, Drum’s mother was a relief — a plump, cheerful woman in a bibbed apron, smile lines working outward from Drum’s brown eyes. “Evening, David,” she said. Then she saw Evie, and she raised her fingers to her lips. “Oh, my Lord,” she said. “Why, you must be — my Lord. Come in, honey. I hate to say it but I’ve forgotten what they called you.”
“This is Evie Decker, Mrs. Casey,” David said.
The name on Evie’s face, of course, was Mrs. Casey’s own — something Evie hadn’t thought of before. But Mrs. Casey didn’t seem to mind. She only looked worried; she shepherded Evie to a chair and hovered over her while Evie sat down. “Here, honey, put a cushion at your back. It’s much more comfortable. My!” she said, staring openly at Evie’s forehead. “I never thought it would be so, so large!”
David, still beside the door, shifted his weight uneasily. “Where is Bertram?” he asked. “We’re running late.”
“Oh, he’s just now changing. I’ll hurry him along.”
She disappeared, looking backward one last time, and David sank down in a flowered armchair. The room was dim but clean, with a line of vinyl plants on the window sill and stiff plastic antimacassars on every piece of furniture. Over the mantel was a picture of a cross with a radiant gilt sunset just behind it. The glass-faced bookcase contained three books and dozens of photographs in white paper folders, which Evie rose to look at more closely. Towheaded boys scowled out at her, three or four to a picture. One was Drum, his hair turning darker and longer as he grew. In the most recent picture he was posed all alone with his guitar held vertically on one knee. “Would you believe that he was ever blond?” Mrs. Casey said behind her. “Then one day it seemed it all turned black, surprised the life out of me. The others, now, they’re turning too. Bertram’s daddy says his did the same.”
“It’s a good picture of him,” Evie said.
“Would you like it?”
“Oh, no, I—”
“Go on, take it, we have more. It’s the least I can do. Honey, I feel I owe you something. ‘Bertram,’ I said (I never call him Drum), ‘that little girl has put your name in the paper and started you on your way. Now don’t you forget that,’ I said, and sure enough, here they are having him work Fridays too and I just know you had a part in it. Oh, how can you sit up at your little table that way? I heard all about it. ‘She is doing you just a magnificent service, Bertram,’ I said—”
“I’m sure they’d have started him on Fridays anyway,” Evie told her. “He’s the best singer I know of.”
“Now aren’t you sweet? Well, I can’t say it myself, of course, being his mother, but deep down I know he has a wonderful career in front of him. He is what I am pinning my hopes on. ‘You remember,’ I tell him, ‘that wherever you go, you are carrying my hopes around with you.’ And it’s on account of me that he’s not just a filling-station attendant like his daddy. ‘Boy’s lazy,’ his daddy says. ‘Nineteen years old,’ he says, ‘and spinning out his days plucking music, only pumping gas when it suits him.’ I tell him I won’t stand for that kind of talk. ‘You just remember,’ I tell him, ‘that Bertram is going to be famous one day. He’s carrying all my hopes,’ I say. There’s a spark in Bertram, you know? He gets it from my side. My father played the banjo. Not just being musical but a sort of, I don’t know—”