“I’ve seen you hanging around town the last few days?”
The woman’s accent was Canadian, sing song to an East Coast ear only latterly corrupted by the more laid back drawl of Southern California. Sam Brenckmann was a sucker for a woman with music or with any hint of the melodic in her voice.
Until that moment Sam had been gazing morosely out of the window of the bar at the brightly lit sign — MOUNT BAKER THEATRE — across the darkened street for some minutes idly replaying the week old debacle of his final appearance with the Limonville Brothers Family Strummers. The ‘brothers’ were a bunch of rednecks who struggled to play half-a-dozen chords between them, and never ever in the right order or time signature with instruments they spent so much time tuning and retuning — on account of the fact that they were all virtually tone deaf — it was a wonder that they were not completely exhausted before they got on stage. The brothers had badly needed somebody who could play the key riffs and add a little soul and grunt to the vocal lines. Ideally, they had needed and wanted somebody who looked like them — somebody with a fair chance of passing Edgar J. Hoover’s haircut and dress standards test — who went to church on Sundays, who worshipped in the same Southern Democrat segregated church that they worshipped, and who thought that William Tecumseh Sherman had actually been the Devil’s right hand man. Well, that was never going to be Boston-born, Massachusetts-raised wishy washy Kennedy faction liberal Samuel Brenckmann!
Things had been boiling up nicely in the four weeks after Sam and the Limonvilles hit the road. In retrospect he was amazed it had not come to fisticuffs sooner. The ‘brothers’ had taken an instant dislike to the ‘beatnik weirdo’ Johnny Seiffert had parachuted into in their tight-knit, xenophobic little family band. When Sam had confessed to having ‘good’ black and Hispanic ‘friends’ back in LA the ‘brothers’ had looked at him as if he had just admitted to having had sexual congress with a goat. Which, of course, was probably more their bag than his but he had held out nearly three weeks on the road with the assholes before he had said as much…
The woman touched his elbow as if she was afraid he had not heard her the first time.
“I’ve seen you hanging around town the last few days?”
Sam half-turned and instantly blinked out of the melancholy circle of his brooding thoughts. The woman was in her thirties, frowsy almost blond. She was wearing a waitressing uniform under her coat. Not over tall she had a housewifely, kindly intelligence in her green grey eyes that momentarily distracted him from his brooding in a way the woman’s mostly hidden figure did not. He guessed her coat hid a comely, perhaps moderately plump figure. There was no shame in briefly contemplating her unclothed; he was a red blooded twenty-four year old unattached male with an entirely natural and very healthy curiosity about these things, except tonight he was oddly distracted and in the wake of recent events his libido was unaccountably subdued.
He smiled crookedly and nodded down at his battered guitar case on the floor at his feet under the lip of the bar. Otherwise, he was silent, as if that nod said everything as he raised his glass towards his lips. He was not drunk yet but he meant to be before he ran out of money. In the morning he hoped to hitch a ride south. It was completely the wrong time of year up in the North West but he would try busking in Seattle, make a few calls while he was in the big city. Maybe he would get a gig or two in some club. Jazz, blues, folk, Hell he would even get a haircut and pretend to be a younger version of Jim Reeves if that was what it took to earn a few greenbacks! He ought to have moved on days ago but he had not run out of money then. Such was the romantic life of a wandering minstrel. The self-deprecatory thought burrowed deep into his head like a weevil. Ma and Pa had been right all along; if you wanted something you had to work for it. But oh, no, he had known better!
All things considered the life of a wandering minstrel had not worked out that well so far.
“A musician, yeah?” The woman mirrored his smile. She joined him at the bar, clambering awkwardly onto the stool next to him, initially waving away the bartender. “I’m okay, Tyler,” she said. The man behind the bar was old and grey, and had the look of an Indian two or three generations removed from his native roots. She returned her whole attention to the shaggy haired, unshaven younger man beside her. “I hear you boys had a falling out after last week’s show?”
She sounded sympathetic and Sam’s life had been distinctly short on sympathy lately. He looked at his new companion again. Yes, she was thirty maybe. The memory of freckles lingered on her cheeks. She was no beauty but pretty and she looked vaguely familiar. He had eaten a couple of times in the diner down the street before he started running out of money. The service was quick, the food wholesome and nobody hassled a guy back onto the street when it was raining or a cold wind was blowing, which was most of the time in the fall in Washington State. Mercer’s? Mercer’s Diner? Was that where he had seen her before?
Sam Brenckmann put down his glass and fingered his right eye socket. The swelling and the bruising had mostly gone away; the last discoloured flesh would take another few days to clear. Whereas, his father and brothers were sparsely built, compact and shorter, naturally dapper, as if they had been born to wear natty suits and crisp Navy uniforms with their hair cropped and their chins freshly shaved, he took after the men on his mother’s side of the family. They tended to be raw boned, taller, broader types, like light-heavy weights a couple of months out of the ring rather than natural lightweights in training like his two older brothers. Not that he could ever imagine a situation in which either of his brothers, or his Pa, would be dumb enough to get into a bar room brawl with three angry rednecks…
“Artistic differences,” Sam explained, grinning ruefully.
“What sort of artistic differences?” The woman very nearly giggled.
Sam suspected she had a really sexy, infectious giggle.
“I’m an artiste, and they’re three good old boys from Texas,” he explained. He might have said it with a dash of genuine rancour and a calculated sneer of contempt but he was no good at holding grudges and the Limonville Brothers had had a point. He had been high on stage and he had made them look bad once too often — well, bad as in worse than they usually looked — and if he had been in their place he would have been royally ticked off too. In retrospect he probably ought not to have called them what he had called them either. Just because they were ‘tone deaf talentless rednecks’ that was no reason to actually say it to their faces. “And I was smashed,” he confessed ruefully. “Were you there in the hall?”
The woman shook her head.
“I work most Saturday nights.”
“Oh, right. The diner down the street?” Sam remembered his manners. “Let me buy you a drink?”
The woman shook her head.
“I’m Judy,” she declared.
“Sam Brenckmann.”
The man stuck out his hand and the woman, after hesitating, shook it timidly and retrieved her fingers shyly.
“I used to sing in choirs and suchlike,” Judy explained, losing her confidence in a moment. “There’s a club two blocks away from here where they do floor spots all night on Saturdays.”
Much as Sam Brenckmann was tickled by the notion of being saved from an evening of solitary drinking by the intervention of a pretty woman, he honestly could not think of anything intrinsically less appealing to him than choir singing in ‘a club’ in the back end of nowhere. Coincidentally, that was when he noticed the wedding ring on Judy’s finger.