Her best guess was that carelessness was the prerogative of sons and daughters everywhere, at every age. After all, she hadn't called her parents since she arrived in Texas, and she waited to phone Tyner's office until last night, when she was sure of getting the machine. There were times when one was in too much of a hurry-or too much in love-to stop and talk to anyone.
It was after ten and they were walking north along the street that bordered the west side of the UT campus when Maury said: "You want to stop and get something to eat? I'm dragging. There's a good place not too far."
"Vegetarian?" Tess asked skeptically. She was dragging, too, although not from hunger. It had been depressing, going from music club to music club, showing photos of Crow-one as Tess had known him, with his dyed dreadlocks, and the one in the newspaper clipping. Have you seen him? Have you seen him? No one had.
"Barbecue."
"Barbecue? I thought you had given up red meat."
"Sure, at home. But I can eat what I want when I'm out-as long as I brush my teeth before I come home. I can come home smelling of marijuana, but if Dad catches a whiff of burger on me, I'm grounded."
The thing was, no one here knew Crow or Edgar or Ed or Eddie. They had started with the better places, along Sixth Street, where the local headliners played. And, as Maury kept telling her, a local headliner in Austin was a pretty big deal in the city that was home to Willie Nelson, Shawn Colvin and a lot of other people that Tess had never heard of. Then they had worked their way out and out and out, in ever-widening circles, until they were checking depressed little bars where some kid might be allowed to play in the silences between televised sporting events. Still, no one remembered a guy named Ransome, with or without a doll-like girl.
Now she and Maury were walking through the university section, just in case Crow and his band had been reduced to playing for handouts.
"Or we could go to Sonic," Maury offered. "Get a chili dog."
Tess could accept that no one had hired Crow, although she had always thought Poe White Trash as good as any punk band she had heard. It was harder to believe that no one remembered him. Crow had been so vivid, so alive. He had always made an impression on people.
"Can't you even remember if he ever came in here looking for work?" Tess had asked one club manager.
The manager was the kind of person who never made eye contact, keeping his gaze riveted over one's shoulder, in case someone more interesting might appear on the horizon.
"You know how many kids I see in a typical week? Everyone who gets off the Greyhound thinks he's going to be Austin's next whatever. The place is like Hollywood in the forties. Everyone wants to live here."
"Really?" Tess had said. "I don't."
He met her eyes then, in order to scoff properly. "As if you could."
"So what do you say?" Maury demanded.
"To what?"
"Barbecue or chili dogs. Ruby's is right up here at the top of the Drag, if you don't mind walking a little ways."
"The Drag?"
"Guadalupe Street, the very concrete beneath your feet. Hey, is there anything you want to see on campus? We could cut through there, if you like. Maybe you could post WANTED signs or something on the community bulletin boards."
Tess looked at the utility poles of Guadalupe Street, so covered with fliers that they might be made of papier-mâché. "I don't think so."
"Don't you want to see the campus, anyway? See the Tower?"
"The Tower?"
"Charles Whitman, baby." Maury's eyes lighted up. "Did you know that there was, like, this whole family that was shot inside the Tower that day and they lay there-lie there? lay there-throughout the whole thing and one of them was alive."
"How interesting," Tess said. Still, she understood why Maury would find such a tale fascinating, as long as it was in the abstract. Paradoxical as it might sound, it was often the very lack of experience that made people calloused. She considered telling him some of the things she had seen in the past year. A couple gunned down in their bed. A body in a ditch. A cab coming out of the fog to dispatch a young man in the prime of his life. All the "reality" shows on television couldn't make you understand what it was like to be there at the exact moment when life ended, when someone's soul, for want of a better word, ebbed from the body. But Maury was a boy, a handsome, happy boy who sold comic books for a living. He wasn't remotely interested in reality, which made him a strangely agreeable companion.
As she and Maury walked, she continued to scan the faces of the buskers and hustlers along the Drag. A young woman played her violin, a lovely classical air soaring over the street, but she didn't even look up when coins dropped into her open case. They passed a little open-air market with glass and beaded jewelry, a textbook store crammed with burnt orange and white accessories. A young man sat on top of a trash can, whaling away on a set of bongos.
A young man she knew. Well, she was overdue for one brilliant moment of plain, unadulterated good luck.
"Gary!"
It took him a second to register that someone was calling his name, and there seemed to be far too much subtext in the changes his expression went through on its way to recognition. Confusion, the momentary joy of spotting a familiar face in a land of strangers. Finally, he settled for something petulant and sulky.
"Tess Monaghan. Fancy meeting you here."
"Ditto."
"So, what's up?"
"Maybe you can tell me. I'm looking for Crow."
"Good luck." He unfold his legs, crawled down from the top of the trash can. "I haven't talked to that fucker in weeks."
"What about Poe White Trash?"
"Deader than its namesake. The name never did go over down here. The few times we got a gig, usually at some freebie festival, someone would call the Chronicle and complain about our name. ‘Inherently racist in its implication that other cultures don't meet the same standards of normative behavior.' Someone actually wrote that in a letter to the editor. Normative behavior. I thought it should be our new name."
"You're kidding me."
"About the name, not about the letter. Welcome to PC city, hon, and I'm not talking about the computer industry."
"So the band broke up? Where did everyone go? Where's Crow?"
"Crow broke up the band. Said he was going in a new direction, literally and artistically, but it was really her fault."
Crow's mysterious female companion again. "Blond girl? With features like a china doll?"
"Blond, sure, but I don't know about any doll," Gary said, rubbing his chin, as if trying to stimulate growth in the wispy, halfhearted goatee there, a new affectation. "Unless you're talking Chuckie, from those slasher movies. She Yoko'ed us but good. Once Crow met her, it was like I didn't even know him anymore. He suddenly wanted to do all this indigenous shit. He even asked me if I could learn to play the accordion. I told him he could take that Lawrence Welk shit and shove it up his ass."
"When was this?"
"Summer, I guess. Like it's not summer now. I remember it was hot. Then again, it's been hot since we got here in May. July? August? I don't know. A while. The other guys went back to Baltimore. I thought I'd give Austin a try. I mean, the winters here gotta be better, right?" He was pleading, his voice as urgent as any panhandler's. "A whole summer gone, and I haven't had a single steamed crab."
Tess had no patience for seafood reveries. "Where is Crow now? Is he in a new band? What's the name of this blond girl?"
"You know, I never knew her full name. She called herself Emmie, just one fucking name, like Madonna. She was performing under the name Lady M when we met her. But she had a place out in the Hill Country, I know that much. She and Crow crashed there sometimes. She said Austin wasn't the place to be anymore, and he believed her. He believed every stupid shit thing that came out of her mouth."