Chapter 6: The Orange Guitar

The shop smelled like green soap, ink, and hot metal from the sterilizer. Hollis had been booked solid all week, which meant a needle in his hand and no patience for anything with a pulse and an opinion.

Quin came in off the street, washed his hands at the sink — still sticky from the chocolate and the bus — and dragged a stool over to the two chairs by the front window. Then he sat down and watched.

Most of the time Quin wore a face for the public: hands in his pockets, hair going wherever it wanted, eyes half shut, a big lazy cat in a jacket out looking for something to knock over. People forgot what was behind the half-shut part. Then they remembered all at once, because when he stopped talking and opened his eyes the whole way, there was a lot of black in them and no floor under the black, and he could aim those eyes at a man and not let up, and the man would begin to want to be somewhere else.

The man on the table was face down with a towel over his hips, four hours into a piece that started at his belt and climbed. He had gone very still, and not from the needle.

“Is he—“ He lifted his head off the paper. “Is he next?”

“Him? No.” Hollis didn’t look up from the machine. “That’s my oldest friend.”

“Oh.” A throat cleared. “Can he go be your oldest friend somewhere else? He’s been staring at me for twenty minutes.”

Quin blinked, slow, and smiled with his whole face. “Man. I’m his oldest friend. I’m not the mob.”

“Out,” Hollis said. He stopped the machine, wiped his hands down his jeans, dug his keys out of his pocket, and threw them at Quin’s chest. “Do something for me. I think I left my wallet in the car this morning.”

“Sure, boss.”

Quin stood, crossed the room, and bent down close to the man’s ear.

“Take your time,” he said, very quietly.

Hollis kicked at him. Missed.

He was still humming when he got to the car — the clapping song from class, stuck in him for six hours with no sign of leaving — and he kept humming while he pulled the door open and sat down sideways in the driver’s seat with his feet out on the asphalt.

The wallet wasn’t on the seat. It wasn’t under it, or in the door pocket, or wedged down between the console and the rail. It wasn’t in the back, or under the mat, where Hollis dropped things when he was in a hurry, which was always.

“So you’re a liar now.”

He reached for the console. “Fine. Then I’m smoking all your cigarettes.”

He popped it open. No cigarettes. At the very bottom, under the registration and a coiled charging cable, there was an envelope.

He got as far as the return address.

West Virginia.

It was like somebody reached into the car and turned a dial all the way down. The street kept moving on the other side of the windshield and none of it made any sound, and the light through the glass went flat and gray.

The handwriting on the front was crooked — the particular, stubborn crooked of somebody who had been taught how letters worked and had never been told they should all lean the same direction. He knew the handwriting before he knew anything else about the envelope.

Then he was in the shop three days ago, and two days ago, and yesterday: Hollis asking whether anybody had come around about the money, whether the collectors had been by the apartment, starting a sentence and losing the end of it, saying he’d tell him later, saying it was nothing. Quin had figured it was about the show. The contest, the contract, the whole circus. He could hear himself not asking.

The envelope had already been opened. He slid the paper out with two fingers. Two sheets.

The first was a drawing. Pencil, on a page torn down one side out of a notebook. Mountains, drawn the way a kid draws mountains: a stack of triangles with snow on the tops. At the bottom, a loose half circle of children around one tall person, and the tall person was him: the curly hair, the eyelashes drawn so long and so thick he looked like somebody the kid had made up, a dot on one cheek, both arms up. Over their heads, taking up the rest of the page, dozens of music notes, floating up.

Somebody had pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the page. He could feel them with his thumb.

The second sheet was the letter, and the letter was short, and the letter was about one of the kids.

A heart problem, and shock.

He read the two words twice, and then a third time, and then they were up in front of his face like moths, too many to catch, too many to ever be done with.

And then the sound came in.

He heard them. Not a memory of them — the room: a basement with a concrete floor and one bulb and a room full of kids, and the clapping song, the ends of the lines dragged, the claps landing early, one voice out in front of the rest. He heard it the way you hear a room through a wall. It got colder the longer he listened, and then something in his chest stepped off an edge and there was no floor to land on.

He sat in the car. The light went orange, then gray, then gone. The streetlight over the lot buzzed on. Somebody walked a dog past the back bumper. The shop door opened and closed twice. He didn’t turn around.

Hollis found him at dark.

The car door yanked open, and Hollis was already shouting. “Did you die out here? Are you dead? Three hours. I sent you for a wallet. I thought somebody picked you up—“

Then he saw what was in Quin’s hands. He stopped, and it was a while before he said anything else.

“Oh,” he said. “Don’t be mad at me for not telling you. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“How long were you going to carry it?”

It came out of Quin flat, with no edge on it at all.

“Then you tell me what to do!” Hollis caught himself, dropped his voice, and it didn’t hold. “It’s not a cold. All right? Heart stuff isn’t a cold. It’s years. It’s doctors every couple months, it’s driving into the city, it’s money every time you turn around. And you—“ He stopped, but most of it was already out. “You can’t keep your own head above water. Where’s that money supposed to come from? You think it’s still like it was? You think you can still just—“

He stopped again, and this time it stuck, there on the sidewalk, in the dark, in front of the car.

Hollis would have taken the last sentence back with both hands if there had been a way. There wasn’t.

The quiet after that had weight to it. Quin laughed — a short one, nothing in it — and that broke the quiet.

“You’re right.”

For a second Hollis didn’t seem to understand what he’d agreed with. Quin got out past him with the two sheets in one hand and pushed the door shut with his hip.

“I’m going home.”

“Hold on—“ Hollis was already coming around the front of the car. “Let me front you something. Just enough to get the kid into the city. One appointment. We figure out the rest after.”

“I’ll think about it.” Quin raised his hand over his shoulder without turning around, walking toward the mouth of the alley where the light stopped. “I’ll figure something out. Get some sleep.”

His apartment had a table, a chair, a bed, and a lamp next to the bed, and he turned on the lamp.

Then he got down on the floor and reached under the bed with his right arm and pulled the case out by the handle. A gray blanket of dust came out with it. He blew across the top of the case, got a mouthful, and coughed until his eyes watered.

He opened the latches. The orange one.

Bright orange, the kind of orange that shouldn’t work on a guitar and did. The lamp laid a stripe of light down the body, and it came up looking new.

He lifted it out with his right hand and set it across his knee. His left stayed on the floor beside him.

There had been a time when he had a room full of guitars, on stands and on the wall, tuned and ready, like a store that only he shopped at. Most of them were gone now — sold, given away, two or three in the back of a closet somewhere. This was the one he’d kept, and he’d kept it for a reason that had nothing to do with how it sounded.

He had gotten it for his eighteenth birthday, at the end of July. His mother had spent most of that year explaining what a guitar was going to get him, which was nothing. She had a whole speech. He had stopped arguing about it around the spring, because arguing only made her go longer.

She bought him the one he’d been pointing at for a year anyway.

She didn’t wrap it. She didn’t give it to him at dinner. She didn’t say a word about it. She put it at the head of his bed while he was asleep.

In the morning he carried it down the hall, walked into her room while she was at the mirror doing her face, and stood behind her and played “Jingle Bells.”

“What is wrong with you,” she said, to the mirror, with the lipstick in her hand.

“I found out two things today.” He played the last bars and stopped on a chord that didn’t belong there. “Two huge things.”

“What.”

“One.” He raised the hand with the pick. “Turns out they do Christmas in the summer, too.”

He waited, because he remembered exactly what her face did then — one eyebrow up, lipstick half on, a woman deciding whether her son was joking and deciding she didn’t have the time to find out.

“Two,” he said. “Santa Claus is a woman.”

The memory ran out there, the way most of them did, at his mother’s back and a mirror.

Sitting on his own floor with the case open, he got the headache.

He got up, took a can out of the fridge, drank most of it standing in the kitchen light, and sat back down on the floor.

Then he typed it out.

[Fish: Wes — you had somebody sell a guitar for me back in the spring. I’m clearing the apartment out and I found another one.]

He read it, deleted it, typed it again, read it again, deleted that one too. The third time he hit send before he could get to the end of it and threw the phone onto the bed like it had gotten hot in his hand.

[Fish: Sell it for me. Please.]

He woke at four in the morning with his stomach in knots.

He didn’t get back to sleep, so he got up and called Hollis, as if the two of them hadn’t been standing in a parking lot a few hours earlier saying all of that.

“You have something wrong with you,” Hollis said. He picked up on the first ring and he was already loud. “It’s four in the morning. Are you dying? Did you call me to die?”

“Yeah, probably.” Quin put four antacid tablets in his mouth, chewed them, and talked around them. “Hey. Hollis.”

Neither of them said anything about the letter. The letter was on the table with the drawing under it, and they both knew exactly where it was.

“You remember that festival I played?” he said. “The one at the beach. That summer with the storm.”

A pause with a lot of sleep in it.

“You played a hundred festivals, man,” Hollis said. “Which one?”