“Leave him alone already,” his wife said. “The man has to work.”
“What? I’m not work?”
“Believe me, you’re work.”
Ben escorted them to the door, repeating meticulous instructions about what papers they needed to bring in to be signed, as Stein came in.
“Nice to see you, Mister Stein. What can I do for you today?” Stein slid the deposit slip at him. “Need to cash some out.”
“Did somebody hit the Pick Six?”
“I wish it were that legitimate.” A few months earlier Stein and Ben had discovered their mutual affinity for the ponies and since then their small talk had been about big payoffs and what horses had done what. Ben returned to his cubby. His manicured fingers tapped with astonishing speed across the keyboard. “You’ve got to excuse me. It’s crazy today. They’ve got me all meshugah.”
“That’s cute. You’re learning Yiddish.”
“ Meshugah is a Japanese word. It means crazy.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Hmm,” Ben said. It was not a good Hmm. “There seems to be a Stop Payment on this check.”
“No.”
Ben made his face do what Mary Tyler Moore’s did when she was really, really sorry.
“Ben, I need it to be unstopped.”
“Only the stopper can do that. Not the stopee.”
Stein’s mind whirled. If Goodpasture had stopped the check it would mean that Schwimmer had spoken to him, prevailed his negative view upon him. But on the positive side it would mean that Goodpasture was intact. “I need to know who stopped the payment, Ben, and the exact time.”
“I can’t access that information.”
“Golly, Ben I’d hate to tell your manager that you’ve been diverting bank funds to the race track.”
“I’ve done no such thing!”
“And I’m sure after the long internal investigation they’ll come to that same conclusion and you’ll get your job back,” Stein said with straight-faced cheer.
Ben looked to see where the branch manager was. “This machine is very temperamental,” he whispered. “If you ask for the wrong information it gets very protective.” He zapped his mouse around the pad. Screens of numbers appeared. Then there was a loud electronic pop and a blip and all the figures swam away. “You see?”
“All right. Just…” Stein gestured impatiently, which meant fix this. Get these numbers back.
Ben shook his head indicating a more serious realm of difficulty. “I need my manager to reboot.”
Stein realized what a mistake it had been last night brandishing Goodpasture’s check at Alton Schwimmer. Was he ever going to learn anything? He left Ben at the bank, went outside and found a pay phone that worked and called the hotel, where three hours earlier he had delivered his surly passenger. But despite giving the desk clerk and then her supervisor four possible alternate spellings, they could find nobody registered there under the name of Dr. Alton Schwimmer.
NINE
In the pictorial dictionary of rock and roll there’s a drawing to illustrate the word ROADIE: open vest, shaggy blond Buffalo Bill hair, droopy moustache, shoulders slumped from hauling amps, personality of an onion soaked in tobacco juice and Drano. The real-life model for that illustration was Stein’s long time pal and co-conspirator, Winston Frenneau. High in the mountains in Katmandu in the early seventies and high in a mescaline haze, Winston had allowed some girl to stick a pair of earring studs into his lobes. It turned out they were loaded with mercury. When he got back to civilization the bottom half of both of his ears had to be amputated below the pinna.
Stein had hung out with him for the full month that his head was wrapped in bloody bandages. And since the name Winston sounded so much like Vincent, and he had lost both his ears, Stein thought that pluralizing the name Van Gogh and calling him Winston Van Goze was pretty damn witty. Most of life’s ironies are horribly cruel, but on rare occasions sweet fruit grows out of bad soil and Winston’s story was one of them. After the operation on his ears, once the gauze and dressings were removed, those little stubs on the side of his head could differentiate variations of pitch on a guitar string to a hundredth of a VPS. Where he had not given that much of a shit about music before, he turned his gift into an avocation and then a most lucrative way of life. Every serious acoustic player wanted one man to tune his strings and that man was Winston Frenneau.
McKarus’s Folk Emporium was the last surviving acoustic club from back in the day. The Long Timers called it “McFolks.” Martini bars and chic clothing stores were lately popping up on all sides as another neighborhood gentrified. With rents going into the stratosphere, McKarus’s future was tenuous.
It was just past noon when Stein got there. The box office hadn’t opened yet. Posters were up advertising the group that was coming in tonight, The Ravens Family Four. These were five generations of Appalachian fiddle players, ranging from Grandpa Cyrus, who was somewhere between ninety-four and the age of rocks, down to three-year-old Baby Raven, who (as the story goes) pulled her daddy’s guitar down off the kitchen table at the age of eleven months and hammer-picked “Shady Grove” in E-flat.
Stein knocked a few times and hallooed but got no answer. He tried the front door, which to his pleasant surprise was unlocked. It was dark inside. The vestibule contained the box office and a display of tapes and CD’s. Its musty walls were covered with posters for shows, some dating back twenty years. Unoccupied. Stein continued down the narrow corridor that led to the stage. The interior walls were lined with hundreds of guitars, mandolins and banjos; an acoustic cathedral. Once his eyes acclimated to the dark, he saw Winston sitting on the stage, his back to the door, his hair down to his shoulders, stringing Baby Raven’s fiddle.
From twenty feet away, Stein rumbled in the stylized gravelly voice that they used to use with each other. “Van Goze.”
Winston didn’t look up from the fret he was filing and answered back, “I can hear you man. You don’t have to yell.” He turned around to face the interruption, affecting an aura of casual annoyance. “Shit, that couldn’t be who I think it is. I heard he was dead.”
“Reports of his demise have been exaggerated,” Stein said as he climbed up the three steps to the stage. Winston appraised his flaccid body. “Not by much, I can see. What the hell happened to you?”
“Fame. Fortune. The love and admiration of my fellow man.”
Winston took the long drag of his Marlboro and blew out a voluminous cloud that made its way across the room in shafts of brilliant stage light to engulf Stein.
“They let you smoke in here?”
“They let me do whatever the fuck I please.”
Winston tightened the string just so, touched it with his index finger and laid his ear across its sound plane.
“You think you could put the thing down and say hello?”
Winston adjusted the string, touched it again and held it to his ear. Stein got the message and wheeled around to leave. “Swell. Nice seeing you, too.”
“Don’t be a putz. Have a carrot juice.” Winston grabbed a half-pint bottle out of the ice chest and lobbed it underhand across the twenty-foot stage. Stein caught it in one hand. “Sounds like a slogan for the Carrot Advisory Board. Don’t Be A Putz. Have a Carrot Juice.”
Winston nodded without pleasure. “You got that slick ad-man thing going pretty good.”
“Yeah that’s me. Mister Madison Avenue.” He twisted off the cap and took a swig of the juice. It was surprisingly cold and sweet. “This is great. Did you make it?”
“Why does everything you say sound like complete bullshit?”
“How about fuck you. Does that sound sincere?”
“Not bad.”
“Says the man who’s making the world safe for the Beverly Hillbillies.”
“It’s music. What are you doing?”
“Making a living. Just like you, Vincent.”