Dying.
Rain hit on the roof. Wind blew across the open window like it was the top of a beer bottle. That was it: we kept ourselves quiet. “Dazed and Confused” was long done. Steve took a breath. Swallowed his beer in two big gulps.
There was a wide plastic bucket under the sink. Steve took the bucket, lowered it into the tub so it filled with water. Trout swam into it. Steve lifted it out with both arms.
“Trout didn’t mean be quiet.” Steve, on his way to the front door. “Meant what it said.”
Vincent: “Keep it down?”
“Keep what down?” Dave.
“Same thing trombonist asked you about. Not the music, either. More.” Steve, outside now. “But it’s too fuckin’ late.”
The rain soaked us fast under storm-black sky. Squinting, hand sheltering eyes, it was hard to see where the lake started.
We made for the dock, empty now. Walked out to the end of it. Dave had been right: should have taken fish back to the lake right away. Claw-footed bathtub was no place for a six-pound lake trout. Dave helped Steve lower the bucket to the water, dip it below the surface. Splashed. Trout jumped out, scales breaking surface in a broad arch. Lightning flashed, dazzlingly close. Trout corkscrewed deep into the black.
“Be free!” Vincent, arms up in the air. Steve, lowering himself to sit on the soaking dock. Dave, standing, half-finished beer in his right hand, held shoulder height; left hand, absently noodling the strings of his invisible axe; head bobbing to the rhythm of an inaudible drummer.
The rain was cold and hard but not unpleasant. Not on any of us. Vincent reminded us of the St. Patrick’s Day set, back at the Rook, that year. Dave wrapped tight in blue spandex culled from the ladies’ section of the Goodwill. Wailing out “Misty Mountain Hop” like we owned it. Steve smiled, blinked away the water running down his forehead, pasting thinning hair into his eyes. Looked out at the water, black stipple frosted with misted rain. He flipped over the bucket, started tapping. Vincent, pointing back at the house. Door wide open. Light spilling out. Three gentle strums across the worn strings on Dave’s acoustic, warming up for a run on “Black Mountain Side.”
“The tape?”
Dave shook his head. “Missed that bridge last time. Off my game. Listen.”
A shadow moved across the door. “Black Mountain Side” took shape. “He’s in there.” Vincent. Started back.
Not just him. Another lightning flash. Close — thunder right away. There was Dave, hunched over the guitar. Fingers in their intricate dance. Head bobbing. Behind him: Steve. Tap-tapping on the wood block. Head bobbing in time with Dave. Vincent was there too. But hard to see him through the door. Didn’t matter: the noodling acoustic of “Black Mountain Side” doesn’t have much to do for a bass player. Less still for a trombonist.
He stepped outside. Just a step. Onto the stoop. Palm cupped outward to catch some rain, horn resting on his shoulder so the slide caught even more, making little round jewels on the golden finish, running tributaries ’round the bell, feeding the torrent running off the bottom to the trombonist’s toe.
“I was wrong,” said Steve, and Vincent frowned and thought and said, “Yeah,” in slow drawl, and Dave asked Steve, “What?”
And he shrugged horn from shoulder, set mouthpiece to lip, and he blew that long, sad note, and Dave saw what we were talking about:
Black plywood stage underfoot, lights hot as noon, air humid with beer-fume and lung-smoke. Us.
“You were wrong about the Rook.”
“Yeah.”
And we looked at each other through the thick air of the Rook on that night, and Dave turned to the microphone, and swung fingers over string, barely touching, and that note — that same long note — it rose up behind him, behind everything, and Steve thought: Stare into the abyss. The abyss stares back.
Sing to it. It might just join in.
Rain came harder again. No end to the lake now. No start, either. And trombone fell from lips. But the song remained.
And so we slipped through it, a flash of scale in the deepening dark, while Steve and Dave and even Vincent finished the Side, and the deep and incongruous moan of the trombone carried us back.
The Inevitability of Earth
When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimetre camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly lightweight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a tonne. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.
The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing — flapping his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long, beakish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin, middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his neck. Grandfather’s apparent foolishness was compounded by the face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved, and Michael was gone—
And so was Grandfather.
The view shook and jostled for an instant, and the family garden became a chaos of flowers and greenery. Finally, Uncle Evan settled on the pale blue equanimity of the early-autumn sky. A black dot careered across the screen, from the left to the right and top to the bottom. Then there was a momentary black, as Uncle Evan turned the lenses from wide-angle to telephoto. The screen filled with the briefest glimpse — for the film was about to run out — of grandfather’s slender figure, his white shirt-tails flapping behind him, all of him held high above the ground by nothing more substantial than the slow beating of his arms; the formidable strength of his will against the Earth.
Michael groaned and lifted his hand from the cool plastic covering of the armchair. He reached over and flipped the switch on the old projector. The end of the film slapped against the projector frame and the light in the box dimmed. The slapping stopped and the screen went black, and the ember at the tip of his grandmother’s cigarette was the only light source in the basement rec room.
“I remember that day.” Michael’s voice sounded choked and emotional, near to tears, and it surprised him. He wasn’t an emotional man as a rule, and he hadn’t cried since… since who knew when? Maybe the day that film was made. It also dismayed him — sentiment was a bond, and he couldn’t afford more bonds. Not if he wanted to follow Grandfather.
“Do you?” said Grandmother. Her voice was deepened by smoke, surprisingly mannish in the dark. “You were very young.”
“It was a formative moment,” he said. “It’s not every day one sees one’s grandfather fly,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I should think no one would forget such an event.”
In the dark, Grandmother coughed, and coughed again. It took Michael a moment to realize she wasn’t coughing at all; she was laughing. “What is it?” he said irritably.
“Your formality,” she said, and paused. The end of her cigarette glowed furiously as she inhaled. “I’m sorry, dear — I don’t mean to laugh at you. You come to visit me here, and I’d hate you to think I’m not grateful for your company, after all these years without so much as a phone call. But I can see how you’d like to find him.”
“Can you?”
Michael felt a cloud of smoke envelop him and he choked again — this time, he thought, with more legitimacy. Grandmother was a rancid old creature, stale and fouled with her age; he’d be glad, finally, to be rid of her along with everyone else when he finally took to the sky.