Scratch Fever

1

JON, ON STAGE, sweating, singing, mouth against the wire mesh ball of the microphone, hands on the black keys of the keyboard, looked out across the underlit, crowded dance floor, smoke drifting like fog, and saw somebody who was supposed to be dead.

He blinked the sweat away and looked again.

She was gone.

But he had seen her. Recognized her. He shouldn’t have been able to — her hair was different, still long, brushing her shoulders, but streaked blonde now, heavily so — and she wore tinted glasses with dark frames. He’d never seen her in glasses before, but she had the kind of face that a change of hair and the addition of glasses made no less distinctive.

It was mostly her mouth, he supposed: full lips that wore a faint, permanent pout, like Elke Sommer, but cruel, somehow. Smug. A feature that attracted and repelled, promised and threatened. As did that shape of hers — big boobs, tiny waist, wide hips, perfect ass. She was a sexual exaggeration, a Vargas girl come to life. She was Julie.

Julie, in white skirt and jacket and black cardigan, looking like a businesswoman, coldly chic, talking to Bob, the club manager, a six-four former farmer who was sitting with her over at the bar, stage right, handing her a drink.

Only that had been before Jon blinked.

Now Bob was sitting next to an empty stool, looking toward the back of the room, the drink in his hand extended toward nobody.

Shit, Jon thought; she saw me, too, recognized me. He felt a chill, despite the heat of the stage lights, the row of alternating red/blue/yellow spots strung on a pole above him, the system the band carried with them.

No. She wouldn’t have recognized him; she wouldn’t expect to see him playing on stage with a rock band. She wouldn’t know him with his hair cut off. He was just another musician, short, muscular, curly haired; there were hundreds of people who looked like him.

Yeah. Sure.

The song was over, he suddenly realized (“Pump It Up,” by Elvis Costello), and he should be introducing the next one, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He glanced over at the list of songs taped to the monitor speaker next to his portable organ (an old Vox Super Continental double keyboard), but the salty sweat in his eyes kept him from being able to focus on it.

The rest of the band, Les, Roc, Mick, Toni, stood and looked at him, waiting, and there was one of those two- or three-second pauses that most audiences don’t notice but seem an eternity to the people on stage, and then his eyes focused and he saw on the typed song list “Accidents Never Happen” just below “Pump It Up.”

“We’d like to do one by Blondie,” he heard himself saying, his voice echoing across the hall, “featuring Toni. She isn’t blonde, but she’s more fun.”

Toni did a little Debbie Harry salute/smile at the audience, and the faces out there smiled back at her, accompanied by a few laughs, and they went into the song.

The band — which was called the Nodes — did a lot of Blondie material, because Toni did resemble Blondie’s Debbie Harry just a little, though her hair was brunette (but then again so was Debbie Harry’s, really), and she had a similar busty little figure and could mimic Ms. Harry’s voice to perfection, as well as half a dozen other women’s, from Ronnie Spector to Pat Benatar to Lene Lovich, which was no small feat. Toni was the most popular member of the band, and Jon didn’t mind. But Les, Roc, and Mick did, and that was probably the major reason this was the band’s last gig.

After seven very successful months — they’d been playing the Wisconsin/Iowa/Illinois club circuit and pulling down $1500 a week, which for a band without a hit record was good money — the Nodes were going their separate ways. Or at least Les, Roc, and Mick were going one way, staying together as a trio, while Jon and Toni went another, to a tryout in St Paul, next week, with a new band. Girl singers and keyboard players were always in demand.

Besides, there was a split in musical tastes among the band. Jon and Toni both liked new wave rock, like the Elvis Costello and Blondie numbers that dominated the song list; but the rest of the band (who had been together for years under various names, among them Eargasm, Fried Smoke and Deep Pink) were into heavy-metal rock, and it was at their insistence that material like Aerosmith and Ted Nugent stayed on the list, much to Jon and Toni’s distaste.

The club they were playing was called the Barn, and it was in the country, between two cornfields, ten miles outside Burlington, Iowa. Part of it actually was a barn, or had been before it was turned into a restaurant, with the rough wood and red and white checkered tablecloths and barbecued ribs you’d expect of a restaurant that used to be a barn. A huge tin shed had been erected next to the restaurant and in this, still in a rustic manner, an Old Town setting had been created, with fake storefronts lining either side of a big dance floor. Between storefronts and dance floor were more tables with red and white checked cloths, and there was a bar on either side, plus another in back, in the area that connected the restaurant and the club.

The audience here was a young one, teens to late twenties, with enough people in their thirties to make it a difficult mix for a band to please. The drinking age was twenty-one, but fake I.D.s were more common than real ones in clubs like this one. The manager, Bob Hale, insisted that the bands he booked in play “nostalgia,” which meant fifties and sixties rock, and the Nodes carried plenty of songs in that area. And the band dressed like a British sixties group: sportcoats and skinny ties and short hair. Even Toni had a Beatle haircut and wore a skinny tie with her white shirt — of course, the white shirt and tie were all Toni wore, that and pantyhose, the shirt hitting her mid-thigh, like a mini-skirt, which was Jon’s idea of “nostalgia.”

Jon knew that to exist as a band in the Midwest it was necessary to cater to slightly crazed club owners, like Bob, who wanted bands that could appeal to everybody. The Nodes’ tongue-in-cheek clean-cut look helped accomplish that, and the songs by the Stones, Kinks and Beatles, plus sixties camp like “96 Tears,” “Dirty Water,” and “Woolly Bully,” pleased the patrons in their thirties as well as the eighteen-year-olds.

At the end of “Accidents Never Happen,” tall, skinny lead guitarist Roc went into “Cat Scratch Fever.” Several male voices, out in the smoky crowd, yelped and hooted. It was a popular song. It was also Jon and Toni’s cue to step offstage for a break; neither her vocals nor his keyboards were required on that opus, and besides, they hated it.

There was a little room off to stage right, behind one of the fake storefronts, where he and Toni went to wait out the song.

He could hear Roc’s toneless voice echoing out there: “Make her pussy purr...”

“Why do they like that shit?” Jon asked.

Toni was sitting on one of the hard black flight cases a guitar amp was carried in; her short, nice legs were crossed as she unscrewed the cap of a bottle of Cutty Sark.

“You mean Les and Roc and Mick,” she asked, “or the crowd?”

“Both.”

“Beats the fuck out of me,” she said, and took a swig of the whiskey; her little-girl face lit up as it rolled down her throat “Then again, this is Iowa,” she added.

Out in the other room, Roc’s guitar whined; people whooped.

“If Iowa sucks so bad,” he said, “why’d you leave New Jersey?”

It was a question he’d asked many times these past months.

The answer he got he’d heard before: “1 thought maybe I’d stand out in a cornfield.”

He usually laughed at that, but this time he didn’t. He was thinking about the woman he’d seen — in the white skirt and black sweater. He was thinking about Julie.

“Something on your mind, Jonny?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Cat scratch fever...”

“I thought you looked like something threw you on stage there for a second — couple songs ago. Something to that?”

“Maybe.”

She smiled; she really looked like Debbie Harry when she smiled. “Bet you spotted somebody in the crowd. An old girlfriend. Am I right, Jonny?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, these are your old stomping grounds, aren’t they?”

“Cat scratch fever... Cat scratch fever...”

“Not really. I’m eighty or a hundred miles from home.”

Home was Iowa City. Or it used to be, before he and Toni had met in a music store; she’d been playing with Dagwood, a group that did nothing but Blondie material, formed by the ex-members of Smooch, a band that had imitated Kiss in full makeup and regalia till the Kiss fad faded. It was driving Toni nuts, as they had insisted she dye her hair blonde, with a brunette patch in back, so she’d become a Debbie Harry clone. And even though she knew it was her fate, right now at least, to sing a lot of Blondie songs, enough was enough. Jon had grabbed her, had somehow got together with Les, Roc, and Mick, and had turned Deep Pink into the Nodes and hit the road.

“We got a week to kill,” Toni was saying, “before the tryout in St. Paul. We going to visit your pal? What’s his name?”

“Nolan, you mean.”

“Yeah. Nolan. I’d like to meet that guy. We going to stay with him in Iowa City this week, or what?”

“He doesn’t live there anymore. He moved.”

“Oh, yeah? What about that place of yours, that antique shop your uncle left you?”

“I leased it to an old girlfriend of mine. She sells water beds.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember her. The thirty-year-old hippie.”

“All hippies are thirty years old now. Anyway, Karen’s all right. She’s got a kid I hate, but she’s all right.”

Roc’s guitar screeched out there; guys in the audience hollered.

“Christ, his guitar playing bores me,” Toni said, making a face, swigging some more whiskey. She drank a lot, but Jon never saw it take any noticeable effect.

“I did see somebody out there, you know,” Jon said.

“Oh? If it’s a girlfriend, I’d be jealous, if you and me were still an item.”

“Two weekends ago we were an item. Kind of.”

“Yeah, well, we’re still friends, Jonny. If you don’t have anything lined up, and I don’t have anything lined up, we can still be an item anytime you feel like, far as I’m concerned. But you and I both know there’s nothing serious in it for us.”

He smiled. “You got nice tits, Toni. I’m real serious when it comes to your tits.”

She uncrossed her legs, smiled at him. Gestured at him with the bottle of Cutty Sark. “C’mere, handsome.”

He went to her. Gave her a little kiss. She draped her arms around his neck; the whiskey bottle was against his back.

“Want to be an item tonight?” she asked. “Want to be an item all next week? I got nothing better to do. How about you?”

“I got nothing planned.”

“Unless it has to do with that old girlfriend you spotted.”

He moved away from her.

“Hey,” Toni said. “Something is wrong. What?”

Roc’s guitar was screaming at the audience; the audience was screaming back.

“Nothing. I don’t know. You know what I told you about? About me and Nolan, I mean.”

“You told me a lot about you and Nolan.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“Well, you did.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I think I do. The robberies.”

“The robberies and what went with it.”

She screwed the cap back on the whiskey bottle, then hopped down off the amplifier flight case. “The guns and stuff,” she said.

Jon laughed. “Yeah. The guns and stuff. Right. Well, I saw somebody from one of the things Nolan and I were into. One of the robberies.”

“Somebody you robbed, you mean? Somebody who could recognize you?”

“Somebody that could recognize me, all right. Not somebody we robbed. Not hardly.”

“Scratch fever... Cat scratch...”

“Somebody that was in it with you,” she said. “Right.”

“So?”

“So it was somebody that was supposed to have died in a car crash, a year ago.”

“Jesus. What’s that mean?”

“It means... I don’t know what it means.”

“Maybe your friend would. Nolan.”

“Maybe.”

“You thinking about calling him?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“You better do it on the break. Those assholes are almost finished ‘making pussies purr.’”

Out in the other room, on stage, the trio was doing its big finish, which amounted to lots of sliding up and down on the bass neck for Les, some horrible high squealing lead up on the neck of the Gibson Explorer for Roc, and a frantic series of trips around the drum kit for Mick.

“Let me have a sip of that,” Jon said, nodding at her whiskey bottle.

“You never touch this shit,” Toni said, unscrewing the cap again.

“I know,” Jon said, taking the bottle, swigging it. “But Nolan does.”

Soon they were back on stage doing a song called “Die Young, Stay Pretty.”

2

IT WAS that kid, it was that goddamn kid!

Dammit!

What the hell was he doing here, playing in a rock band, for Christ’s sake? His curly hair was shorter, but otherwise he hadn’t changed; it was him, all right. Standing behind a portable organ, singing some unintelligible lyrics into a microphone, his voice booming out of the PA system.

The ironic thing was that it was this band — the Nodes — that had brought her here. She had heard the group was breaking up after this engagement, which meant they wouldn’t have anything booked for the following week, which meant hopefully she could convince them to stay together long enough to play Tuesday through Saturday at her club, the Paddlewheel. She’d had a cancellation and needed a band, and this group, the Nodes, while not precisely the sort of group she usually booked in, had a reputation in the Midwest. So she’d come to hear them, and to talk to the leader.

Whose name, it turned out, was Jon.

“Yeah,” Bob Hale said, as they sat at the bar on one side of the dance floor, yelling to be heard above the band, “it’s that kid on the end, playing the organ.”

She had looked at the kid, and he immediately seemed familiar to her.

“Nice enough kid,” Bob was saying. He was a big, florid man in his forties, with reddish-brown hair and a childlike manner that gave him a certain immature charm. “You wouldn’t know it to look at the squirt, but he’s strong. Judas Priest, you should see him carry those amplifiers around, like they was pillows. The girls seem to go for him.”

“Do they.”

“Sure do.” Bob grinned at her; he had big teeth. “Get you a drink, honey?”

“What did you say his name was?”

“Jon. I don’t know what his last name is.”

“Jon.”

“Yeah. They’re booked out of Des Moines. Or they were. Like I said, this is supposed to be their last night. But maybe I could talk to ’em for you and convince ’em that...”

She didn’t hear anything else Bob said after that; she was walking away. Before that kid on stage got a good look at her.

Not that it mattered, at this point; she’d seen the flash of recognition — or something — on his face. He shouldn’t have been able to recognize her, not at that distance; not with the blonde-streaked hair, the glasses, the business-like suit and sweater she’d worn. But the feeling in her stomach said he had recognized her. Goddammit. Goddammit!

Now she was out in the bar that connected the restaurant and club, which, like the rest of the Barn, was rustic — lots of rough barnwood decorated with an occasional horse-collar mirror and bogus wanted posters with Bob Hale’s name and face on them. There were booths with baskets of peanuts and popcorn on either side of the dimly lit room, enclosed on three sides and affording enough privacy for people to sit and neck if they liked. Several couples were doing that now, and there were a few people sitting up at the bar, but otherwise the action at the Barn was clearly in where the Nodes were playing, rather obnoxiously, she thought. Which made her smile, and the smile felt like cement cracking. If they play loud shit like that, she thought, I wouldn’t have hired them anyway.

She was sitting in a booth. The man she’d come with, Harold, looked over from the bar, where he was nursing a Scotch and water.

Harold was a big man, even though he stood only five-eight. He had the shoulders and thick arms, big hands, of a football player specifically a guard, which was the position he’d played in high school and college, before he dropped out. His face, however, was surprisingly sensitive: heavy-lidded gray eyes behind black-rimmed glasses; a bulbous, flat-bridged nose that had never been broken; a full-lipped, sensual mouth, kept wet by nervous licking.

He came over to her. He was wearing a tan suit with a dark tie; his hair, a sandy brown, was thinning on top and cut short on the sides. He looked like a high school football coach who quit to sell insurance; but what he was was her business partner, co-manager of the Paddlewheel, their club in Gulf Port.

“What’s wrong?” Harold said. He had a soft, hoarse voice.

“Sit down,” she said.

Harold had left his Scotch and water behind; he sat across from her, hands folded. He licked his lips. He had that look she hated: the look as if he were about to cry.

“I should’ve gone to fucking Brazil,” she said. She was sitting shelling peanuts but not eating them.

“I see.”

“Give me one good reason why I should ever have gone back to you.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“Shut up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me, then.”

“You saw somebody. Somebody who knew you, before.”

“How could you know that?” She never failed to be surprised by the big jerk’s perceptiveness.

“It was bound to happen,” he said with a shrug, hands still folded, “sooner or later. We’re not that far from where you lived before.”

She tore the shell off a peanut, rubbed the skin off the nut within. Added it to the little pile she was making.

“You should leave,” he was saying. “Have you spoken to this person?”

“No.”

“Then you should leave. Leave while he or she still is wondering whether it was you or not It’s that simple.”

She threw a shell at him. “It’s not that simple. God, you make me sick sometimes.”

“Who is it? Who recognized you?”

“A kid in the band.”

“A kid in the band?”

“A kid in the band. Remember the guy Logan I told you about?”

Logan was the name she knew Nolan by.

“Of course I remember.”

That kid in there, the organ player, that’s Jon.”

“Logan’s partner.”

“That’s right.”

“Who was in on the Port City thing.”

“Right.”

“I see.”

“Quit saying that!”

“All right. What do you want me to do?”

“Go in there and see which kid I mean. Go in and get a look at him. He’s the short kid with curly hair and a good build.”

“Okay.”

“Then come back and sit in this booth and watch the door.” The double doors between the bar and dance area were just a few feet away. “If he comes out and tries to use that pay phone during the band’s break, stop him.”

“How?”

“Just do it. But don’t come on like a strongarm. Say you’re expecting a call or something.”

“All right. Then what?”

“Then nothing. Just keep an eye on him, when he isn’t on stage. The band only has one more break. They’re playing their third set now, which means they have one more set to play.”

“After that, what happens?”

“We’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

“How?”

“However we have to.”

He reached for the ashtray and with one thick hand brushed the pile of peanuts and shells she’d been making into it. Then he reached out and touched her hand. Held it.

“I don’t kill people, Julie,” he said softly. Eyes and lips wet.

“I know you don’t.”

“I’ll do anything for you but that”

“I know you will.”

“Anything.”

“I know.”

“But if it comes to... if it comes to that, I don’t even want to know about it.”

She smiled at him sweetly, squeezed his hand, thinking, Fucking hypocrite! You don’t care if somebody else does the killing, though, do you? Just so you don’t have to do it; just so you don’t have to know about it.

She let go of his hand. “Give me some change. I have a long-distance call to make.”

He half-stood in the booth, dug for some change, and gave it to her.

“Who are you calling?”

She got out of the booth. “You just stay put.”

He licked his lips and nodded, then reached for the basket of peanuts.

She went over to the pay phone and dialed a number in Illinois direct.

It rang six times, then a slurry baritone voice came on, saying, “Yeah, what?”

“Ron?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Julie.”

“I know it is.”

“I need you.”

“Do you?”

“I have a problem.”

“No kidding.”

“I’m serious, Ron.”

“So you’re serious. I ain’t heard from you in three weeks, and you’re serious.”

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Why should I be surprised you’re in trouble? You only come to me when you’re in trouble.”

“That isn’t so.”

“You only come to me when there’s some shit job that old numb-nuts Harold won’t do for you.”

“Ron, you have to come here right away.”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“The Barn. Outside of Burlington.”

“Yeah, I know the place. They got good rock’n’roll there sometimes. Isn’t this the Nodes’ last weekend? That’s a good band. Better than the shit you book in, anyway.”

“Ron. This is serious.”

“Yeah, okay. I can hear it in your voice, it’s serious. Do I need to bring anything?”

“I think so.”

“That serious, huh? It’ll cost you.”

“Money’s no problem.”

“Who’s talking about money?”

“Ron. I’ll make this worth it for you. I promise.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m on my way.”

The phone clicked dead.

She shivered and hung up.

She went back to the booth and sat across from Harold, who was eating peanuts, slowly, methodically.

“Ron’s coming,” she said.

“I see,” he said. He pushed the basket of peanuts aside.

“Well, I can’t depend on you, can I? If something ugly has to happen, Ron’ll be up to it.”

“How can you...”

“Because I have to,” she said, biting off the words. “I’m supposed to be dead, goddammit... I ended up with $750,000 because Logan and Jon thought I was dead. If that kid gets to his friend with the news that I’m alive, that S.O.B.’ll come looking for me, and his money.”

“I could handle him.”

She laughed. “You couldn’t handle Ron.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Julie.”

“Harold, I’m sorry. You just don’t know this guy Logan. He’s like something out of a Mafia movie. Really scary.”

“You’ve got money, Julie. Give him his share.”

“He wouldn’t be satisfied with just his share.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a killer. He tried to kill me, once, remember?”

That was a lie, of course; it had been the other way around, but Harold didn’t know that.

Harold was balling those thick hands into fists the size of softballs. “If he tries to hurt you, I’ll...”

“What? What will you do? You don’t kill people, remember?”

They could hear the muffled blare of the band in the other room: “Scratch fever... Cat scratch...”

“That would be different,” he said.

“Would it?”

“You know it would.”

“We’ll let Ron handle it.”

“But who’ll handle Ron?”

“I will.”

“Good luck.”

She could handle Ron, all right, but the price was high: letting those hands rove across her body; letting those lips do what they wanted to. Sharing a bed with Harold was bad enough. Getting in bed with Ron was flat-out disgusting.

And, deep down, she was afraid of Ron. She was afraid of few human beings on this earth, but Ron was one of them.

But then, so was the man she knew as Logan.

3

THE LAST SONG of the third set was “19th Nervous Breakdown,” an old Stones song that Jon sang, and that tonight he was really identifying with.

He came down off the stage covered with sweat — not from nervousness: he was always wringing wet by the end of a set — and headed for the stage-right cubby hole behind the fake storefront, where he and Toni had spoken earlier. He grabbed a towel from the stack the Nodes always brought along with them. He wiped his face with it, rubbed his hair. Took off his shirt and ran the towel over his chest and back and arms, then put on a clean shirt. He went through at least three a night, and his sportcoat was always sopping by the end of the first set, discarded midway through the second. He worked hard at rock’n’roll.

So did Toni, but she didn’t seem to sweat at all. She stood in the doorway of the little room, leaning against the jamb, perverted pixie smile on her face. “How you doin’?” she asked him.

“Okay.” Jon smiled back.

She came in and reached behind the amp and drum cases for her bottle of Cutty Sark. “Still got that old girlfriend on your mind?”

“Yeah.”

She unscrewed the cap, swigged at the bottle. “Really sure it was her, are you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t.”

Toni put the Cutty Sark away and took him by the arm. “Let’s go have a look around.”

Jon and Toni went out into the club and walked onto the dance floor. Les, Roc, and Mick were at a table, huddled together, making plans for the next incarnation of their band. The two factions of the Nodes didn’t even exchange glances.

Their sound man/roadie, a twenty-year-old ex-DJ named Tommy, approached Jon and Toni. He looked like a pudgy, slightly dense Paul McCartney; he wore jeans and a T-shirt with the band’s logo on it — the nodes — in Art Deco lettering.

“Good set,” Tommy told them, smiling and nodding, on his way to join the Les, Roc, Mick faction, of which he was a part. Since he got his paychecks from Jon, however, Tommy stayed civil where Jon and Toni were concerned.

From the back of the hall, where the stage was, to the other end was nearly the length of a football field, and Jon and Toni were stopped a dozen times as they walked along the edge of the dance floor, by the crowded tables. The Nodes had played the Barn three times before, and had a following here; word had gotten around that this was the band’s last night, and the fans were complaining.

A table of girls who had all gotten in on fake I.D.’s grabbed at Jon as he passed; arms, hands reached out for him, like Night of the Living Dead, only pretty.

“You can’t break up,” a little blonde in a red satin warm-up jacket and Clash T-shirt said. She had him by the arm.

A pudgy but cute brunette in a blue satin warm-up jacket and T-shirt that said “Wanna Party?” had him by the leg; she was saying something too, but Jon couldn’t make it out

Two guys dressed like urban cowboys (and looking ridiculous, Jon thought, probably a couple of high school teachers who ditched their wives for the night) were standing talking to Toni, saying much the same thing the girls were saying to Jon, but without the touching. Relations between men and women may have changed, Jon noted, but it was still the women who did the touching without permission.

Bob Hale was still sitting on a stool over at the bar, stage right. Jon pulled away from the table of girls and went over to him, leaving Toni behind with her admirers in cowboy hats.

Bob extended a big, rough hand, which Jon shook.

“We’re gonna miss you boys,” Bob said. Considering the way Bob was always pursuing Toni, it was amazing he had included her as one of the “boys.” Then, with a conspiratorial wink, Bob leaned in and said, “No other band pulls in the pussy like you guys.” Bob was grinning like a junior high kid who’d just discovered Hustler magazine.

“I appreciate that, Bob,” Jon said, sitting on the stool next to him. “You know, the other guys in the band’ll still be together, under another name.”

“I don’t give a shit about those guys. They play too fuckin’ loud. It’s you and little Toni that go over. The pussies like you, and the guys go for her.”

That was nice to hear, and was true enough, but Roc, Mick, and Les had a following, too. But Jon went along with Bob, saying, “Well, Toni and I may have a new band ourselves in a while.”

“You just give me a call when you do, and you got a booking.”

“Thanks, I will. Say, Bob. Who was that good-looking blonde you were talking to?”

“You’ll have to narrow ’er down,” Bob said, grinning even wider; he was the kind of person who could make a caricature out of himself without trying. “I talked to half a dozen good-looking blondes tonight already.”

“This one is old enough to be in here legally.”

“Yeah, but is she old enough for me to be in her legally?”

“She was about thirty, wearing a white jacket and dress, black sweater. Nice tits.”

“Oh, yeah, her. She’ll never drown.”

“Right, well, I didn’t get a good look at her from the stage. Aw, but you know how it is, Bob. Sometimes the closer you get...”

“The worse they look! Damn if that ain’t the truth.”

“How does this one look, close up?”

“Well she ain’t a ten.”

“No?”

“She’s a thirteen.”

“No kidding. Who is she? Do you know her?”

“Yeah, I know her. Wish I could say I could fix you up with her, but I never been able to get anywhere with her myself, believe it or not. That’s a high-class cunt. She’s got money.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Name’s Julie something. She runs a place called the Paddlewheel, near Gulf Port.”

“Illinois, you mean? Across from Burlington?”

Gulf Port was a wide-open little town where the bars stayed open all night. When clubs on the Iowa side shut down at two, the “Wanna Party?” die-hards headed for Gulf Port.

“Right,” Bob said. “Quite a place. Big gambling layout and everything.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I wouldn’t shit a shitter. Little Las Vegas, they call it. You oughta see the place. Maybe you will — she wanted to talk to you about that, in fact.”

“This Julie did?”

“Yeah. She needs a band. Somebody cancelled out on her. She was hoping you guys might want one last job, ’fore you call it quits.”

“No kidding. Well, maybe I ought to talk to her.”

“That’s the funny part. She was asking me about the band — asked about you, in particular — then she just walked away. I wasn’t even through talking yet.”

Jon smiled at Bob; inside his head sirens were going off and red lights were flashing. “Well, be honest, Bob — when are you ever through talking?”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Bob said, and slapped the bar, and drinks all down the line spilled a little.

Jon thanked Bob and went back to Toni, pulling her away from her admirers.

“I was right,” he said, taking her by the arm.

“About what?”

“It was who I thought it was.”

“The woman?”

“Yes.” And he told her what Bob had told him.

“So what now?”

“Now I call Nolan.”

The pay phone was in the bar, on the wall around the corner from the pinball machines. He got change from the bartender. Toni was right with him.

“Do you have this guy’s number?” she asked.

“Yeah. I memorized it.”

“Memorized it?”

“In case something like this came up.”

“Oh.”

He had the receiver up to his ear and the coins poised to drop, when a hand settled on his shoulder, like a UFO landing. It was a hand that made Bob Hale’s hand seem dainty.

Jon turned and looked at a guy just a few inches taller than he was but infinitely bigger. A sandy-haired man with sad grey eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses, and shoulders you had to look at one at a time.

“Excuse me,” the man said. He licked his lips.

“Yeah?”

“I’m waiting for an important call.”

“My call won’t take long.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d not use the phone.”

It wasn’t a threat, exactly; the tone was rather kind — Please do me a favor. But the favor was being asked by a man who looked like the son of Kong in a business suit.

“Look,” Jon said, “this is a public phone. You can’t keep people from using it.”

Which was a ridiculous thing to say. This guy could obviously keep people from using the phone. He could keep the state of Iowa from using the phone.

“I have a sick kid,” the man said. Softly. “I’m waiting to hear about my sick kid.”

Toni spoke up. “What the fuck are you doing here, then?”

Jon raised a hand to quiet her. “It’s okay, Toni.” He smiled at the guy. “It’s no emergency on my end, mister. You can wait for your call. Be my guest.”

Toni stood with fists on hips and glared at Jon, who pulled her away from there by the arm.

“Jon, why are you letting that asshole...”

“Shut up,” Jon said, and took her back into the club.

He pulled her off into another of the cubbyhole rooms behind the storefronts; a couple was making out in this one, so Jon dragged her into the cubbyhole next door. She was fuming.

“Why d’you go along with that bullshit?” she demanded.

“I think somebody told him not to let me use the phone.”

Toni thought about that

“Look,” he said. “I got to find out if that woman is still around. My guess is she split, but if she’s still around, maybe I could corner her or something. I don’t know.”

“What good’ll that do?”

“Maybe I can avoid a violent confrontation. I know how this woman’s mind works. She’ll figure if Nolan finds out she’s alive, he’ll come looking for her.”

“Is she right?”

“Yeah.”

“So what good does talking to her do?”

“I’ll lie. I’ll tell her Nolan’s dead or in prison or something. That she has nothing to worry about from him.”

“But what about from you?”

“I’ll tell her I don’t give a damn, personally, about her or the money she took.”

“Is that true?”

“No.”

“Well, let’s go look for her, then.”

They went back out through the bar, and noticed that the sandy-haired guy was sitting in a booth near the double doors to the club area, well around the corner from the pay phone, not an ideal place for somebody waiting for a call. Jon looked at him with a smile and a silent question, and he looked back and shook his head no, indicating that the call hadn’t come yet. Jon shrugged at him, smiled again, and walked on with Toni.

Around the corner, a drunk in overalls was leaning against the wall, talking on the phone, slobbering at the receiver.

Jon said, “Looks like I’m the only one the worried papa wants to keep off the phone.”

He and Toni casually walked through the bar and up through the restaurant, both floors of it, and the woman with streaked blonde hair and tinted glasses wasn’t there.

“She either split,” Jon said, “or she’s outside, ducking me. In her car in the parking lot, maybe.”

“You want to go looking for her?”

“Not in a dark parking lot.”

“You’re not scared of her?”

“Of course I am.”

“Why?”

“She almost killed me once. With a shotgun.”

“Oh.” Toni swallowed and followed Jon back into the club, where they immediately headed for Bob Hale, still perched at the stage-right bar.

“Bob,” Jon said, putting a good-buddy hand on the big man’s shoulder, “some drunk is tying up the pay phone.”

“Well,” Bob said, smiling, hauling himself off the stool, “let’s kick his ass off, then.”

“No, no. Listen, I have a kind of private call I’d like to make. Can I use the phone in your apartment?”

Bob grinned at Jon, then at Toni, then back at Jon. “You two can use my apartment for anything you want, if I can watch.”

Toni laughed — a little tensely, but she laughed. She liked Bob, Jon knew. Considered him harmless, a teddy bear with a hard-on.

“No, really,” Jon said, “I need to use the phone. How about it?”

“Sure,” Bob said, and led them back around the bar to a hallway. They followed him down it.

Bob lived at the Barn. So did a German Shepherd about the same size as Jon. It stayed in the bedroom Bob kept, on the lower floor of the barn part of the Barn, in the rear, a bedroom Bob referred to as his apartment.

Bob unlocked the door, and the dog began to growl. It sounded like Mt. St. Helen’s thinking it over. Bob reached a hand down and grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled him away from the doorway, back into the bedroom. The dog was still growling, but that only made Bob laugh. Amid the laughter, he gave the dog a sharp command, and the dog sat, teeth bared, Rin Tin Tin with rabies. If Bob hadn’t been there, Jon and/or Toni would have been dead by now.

It was a big, messy room: plush red carpeting with underwear, shirts, other clothing carelessly wadded and tossed; a queen-size canopy waterbed with red satin sheets and black plush covers over at the right. No rough barn wood here: dark paneling, with built-in closet. At the near end was a bookcase wall with no books in it, just thousands of dollars’ worth of stereo equipment, as well as a 19-inch Sony with videotape deck, and a library of XXX tapes.

Also the phone, which Bob handed Jon as he marched the dog out into the hall, closing the door as he went. Toni stood and watched as Jon touch-toned Nolan’s number.

On the third ring, he heard Nolan’s voice: “This is Nolan.”

“Nolan! Listen...”

“You’re talking to a machine. Leave your message at the beep.”

Jon just looked at the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Toni said.

“An answer machine,” he said. “Now I’ve heard everything. Nolan’s got an answer phone! I don’t believe this.”

The phone said, beep.

Jon left his message, Bob locked his dog back in the bedroom, and they all went back into the club, where Jon and Toni headed for the stage.

For the last set.

4

WHEN SHE blew the words on “Heartbreaker,” Toni knew she was scared.

Certainly not stage fright — she’d been singing with rock bands since junior high — but some other kind of scared, something in her stomach that was far worse than butterflies.

Something cold.

Something alive.

Fear.

When the song was finished, she rushed over to Jon and whispered, “Fill in with something. I need a few minutes.”

Jon nodded, and away from the mike, stage-whispered to Les, Roc, and Mick to “forget the list — do ‘Light My Fire’ next,” a song Toni didn’t do anything on, which would give her a chance to take a break.

She stood inside the cubbyhole room stage right as the band went into the old Doors classic, Jon doing right by the elaborate pseudo-baroque organ break at the beginning. She was breathing hard. She wanted a smoke. She’d given it up two years ago and rarely had felt the urge since the first hard months, but now she wanted a smoke. She went out and bummed one off Tommy, the roadie, sitting at his sound board halfway down the dance floor, over stage left. Then she returned to the cubbyhole, sucking in smoke as if it was food and she was starving.

Mick was singing. He didn’t sing very well, and in fact was incurably flat, but the Doors tune lent itself to that: the late Jim Morrison was known for many things, but singing on key wasn’t one of them. Then the band went into the instrumental section of the song, Jon taking the organ solo, a sing-song thing that climbed the scale in mindless little would-be Bach progressions.

She wondered if that big sandy-haired guy — Jesus, was he big — was still in his booth, waiting for his mythical phone call. She decided to find out. She’d have plenty of time; this song went on for nearly ten minutes. She wandered back through the club, nodding as fans touched her arm and made comments about the sad fact that the Nodes were splitting, and then she was in the bar, where the big sandy-haired guy was sitting in the booth, talking intensely with a woman.

A woman in white with a black cardigan and tinted glasses and a beautiful face and — even seated in a booth it was obvious — a beautiful body.

Suddenly the cigarette was burning her throat I knew there was a reason I quit these fucking things, she thought, and went up to the bar and put the cig out in an ashtray up from the bottom of which a little picture of Bob Hale stared. Standing next to her at the bar were two young women.

Toni had seen these women before; they had been to hear the Nodes at the Ramp in Burlington a few months ago, part of a group of half a dozen hard, hoody-looking bitches, one of whom had been attracted to Jon, and vice versa. She was one of the two at the bar, a lanky brunette about nineteen, in jeans and jeans jacket and a Nodes T-shirt; lots of eye makeup, and smoking a cigarette.

The other woman was in her early twenties, medium height, boyish build — nothing remarkable, other than the close-set beady eyes, the lump of a nose, the thick lips with permanent, humorless sneer, the dishwater blonde hair greased back in a ducktail, the black leather jacket and red T-shirt and jeans, cigarette dangling from the Presleyesque lips, a hand on the other girl’s shoulder.

Toni couldn’t remember their names, but she did remember that the night Jon and the brunette had spent a break in the band’s van, the beauty with the ducktail had come up and smiled at Jon during the next break and, cleaning her nails with a switchblade, told Jon if he ever touched Darlene (that was the first girl’s name; what was the second one’s?) again, she would cut his balls off and hang ’em over her rearview mirror. Jon hadn’t argued with her. He’d tried to make a joke out of it later, about what a cornball creep that dyke was, doing her Sha Na Na routine. But it hadn’t come off: Jon knew the dyke had meant what she said.

Terrific, Toni thought It wasn’t enough somebody shows up from the part of Jon’s past that included that thief Nolan; the dyke and Darlene had to turn up, too. Wonderful.

She ducked back into the club. Jon was still playing his organ solo, getting ready to let Roc take over on guitar.

“Light My Fire”—the baroque opening, anyway — had been the first thing she’d ever heard Jon play on the organ. She’d been in a music store in Iowa City — the Sound Pit — looking at PA equipment with some of those jerks in her old band, Dagwood, and Jon was playing a Crumar portable organ, asking the clerk if he knew anywhere he could find an old Vox Super Continental. The clerk was trying to sell Jon a Moog synthesizer, telling him nobody played combo organ anymore, and Jon was saying, “Bullshit, the punk and new wave bands are all using old Vox and Farfisas.”

When she heard that she knew she’d found a kindred spirit. She started up a conversation with him, and soon they were having a drink at the Mill, a bar in downtown Iowa City, and then they were in bed at his apartment, or anyway the room he kept on the bottom floor of the antique shop he’d inherited from his uncle, a shop that had been closed since the uncle’s death.

Rock’n’roll, it seemed, was not Jon’s first love. He lived in a cartoonist’s studio, with drawing board, boxes of comic books, posters of comic strip characters like Dick Tracy and Batman and Tarzan, some framed original strips, making a gray-walled, cement-floored former storeroom a four-color shrine to comic art. Even the finely carved antique headboard of the bed they were in had some drawings tacked to it — Jon’s own work, and good work it was, at that.

“Are you a musician or a cartoonist or what?” she’d asked him, letting the sheet fall to her waist as she turned to look at his drawings; she liked her breasts and liked having him look at them as she looked at his art.

“I don’t know if I’m either anymore,” he said. He was sitting up in bed with a pillow propped behind him. His chest was almost completely hairless, she noted.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve been at this cartooning shit for as long as I can remember.”

“Oh, and you’re all of twenty.”

“Twenty-one. I’d guess that’s about how old you are, too. And I bet you aren’t finding rock’n’roll an easy life, either.”

“You’re right,” she admitted. “I been at it eight years, and it’s a hard go, even if you’re good at it, and I am.”

“Yeah, well, I’m good at cartooning and I’m not making it.”

“It’s hard to make it in any of the arts.”

“No kidding. Oh, I’ve had a couple of things published in the undergrounds. Ever hear of Bizarre Sex?”

She smiled. “Try me.”

“That’s the name of an underground comic. I’ve done a couple of science fiction parody things for ’em. Doesn’t pay much.”

“It’s a start.”

“But it isn’t a career. I don’t know. I don’t have much interest in commercial art, and the comic book field doesn’t appeal to me; the pay sucks and they’re doing the same old superhero junk, only badly.”

“What about a newspaper comic strip?”

“Landing a syndicated strip is almost impossible, particularly if you don’t do humor, which I don’t.”

“I thought you said you did two parodies for that underground comic.”

“Yeah, but I doubt many newspapers would want to carry ‘Dildos in Space.’”

“You may have a point. So where does music come in?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard you play the organ. You’re good.”

“Aw, that’s nothing serious with me. I played off and on with some bands when I was in junior high and high school. I don’t think I could make a living at it. And I’m not sure I’d want to, if I could.”

“Why?”

“My mother was in ‘show biz,’ and she had a shitty life, playing piano and singing in bars, on the road all the time, dreaming of being on Ed Sullivan someday, only he’s dead now, and so is she.”

“Do you have any kids?”

“Kids? Me? Hell, no.”

“Then you wouldn’t be doing anybody a disservice leaving ’em behind when you went on the road, would you? If that’s what your problem is.”

He thought about that a while. Then he said, “What kind of band would I be in? I hate disco. I hate country rock. I hate heavy metal. There isn’t much I could stand to play, except old sixties stuff and maybe some of the new wave music coming out of England and the East Coast.”

And that had been the beginning of it. She had told him about her mock-Blondie band, Dagwood, which she wanted out of, and together they made plans to launch what became the Nodes. She knew about Roc, Mick, and Les, and they all got together in a friend’s garage and jammed through some material, and two weeks later they had relocated in Des Moines, to be with the booking agency that had handled the now-defunct Dagwood.

Leaving Iowa City for Des Moines seemed to be slightly rough for Jon. He didn’t say much about it but he was apparently very close to this guy Nolan, though they seemed to have had a minor falling-out of some kind lately, which made it easier to Jon to leave. So he said, anyway.

She had only seen this Nolan a few times. Actually, he seemed to be using the name Logan, but Jon always referred to him as Nolan. She didn’t know if Nolan had ever even noticed her, really; to him she was probably just some twat Jon was shacking up with. They’d never exchanged a word.

But she had noticed him, all right. Looked him over good.

He was handsome, in an ugly way. A big, lean man with the slightest paunch, with dark, somewhat shaggy hair that was graying at the temples, and widow’s peaked. He had high cheekbones, a mustache, and a mean look, but those eyes, those narrow, squinting eyes, had something else in them besides meanness. Intelligence, for sure. Humanity? Humor? Maybe not.

At the time, Nolan had been running some sort of restaurant in Iowa City, in which Jon was a partner, it seemed, though he didn’t say much about that. When she saw Nolan, he’d be dressed in a sportcoat and turtleneck and slacks, something casual, in a country club sort of way, and the guy looked good, looked right. Only something was wrong; something about him made her think of a gangster.

She used to kid Jon about that.

“I wonder what your gangster friend’s doing right now,” she’d say, sitting up in bed in a motel room, watching TV, on the road with the Nodes.

“Probably sticking up a bank,” Jon would answer, with a funny smile.

She and Jon had continued to share a room on the road, even though their romance had turned into a friendship, albeit a friendship that included sleeping together (but only occasionally screwing) and getting out of each other’s way when an attractive member of the opposite sex came along. She had a feeling Jon could have been serious about her if she let him, but her insistence that she was not a one-man woman, that marriage and whatever were not in her plans ever, cooled him off a bit.

And he did seem to like the freedom to go after the bitches, like that Darlene she’d spotted out in the bar. Jon was a weird kid, in a way, so goddamn straight. He didn’t even smoke dope — no drugs at all; no booze to speak of, either.

There was that one time, however, that he got good and plastered. It was at a party at some trailer out in the country, where a guy had a hog roast at three in the morning after the Nodes had played a particularly long night at a particularly rowdy bar. The girl Jon was with, a short little blonde in halter top and jeans, was the sort who wanted to drink but would not drink alone, and so Jon drank with her and later crawled off into the woods with her, too. But by the time he ended up back at the motel with Toni, he was plastered — plastered in the way that only someone who doesn’t get plastered often can get plastered. And he started to talk.

And he told her the damnedest things.

About him and Nolan.

And bank robberies and shooting somebody called Sam Comfort, some crazy old man who was a thief himself who Jon and Nolan were looting, and wild goddamn things about some girl getting her head blown off by somebody called Gross, and shoot-outs in lodges up in Wisconsin. And the next morning Jon asked her to forget all that stuff he told her last night, and there had never been a word about it since.

Till tonight.

“Light My Fire” was almost over.

She got back up on stage, and Jon gave her a little smile and she gave him one back, nodding, and they went into the next song.

Playing tambourine and singing back-up, she glanced over at Jon, and he was into the music — not a sign of worry. And she felt better. Jon had left a message for Nolan, and the woman in white and her big sandy-haired stooge didn’t know that. And that made Toni feel better; the cold feeling at the pit of her stomach was gone.

Then she noticed Jon flubbing the words on “Jailhouse Rock.”

And at the back of the room, standing by the double doors, the big sandy-haired man waited and watched.

5

THEY GOT called back for two encores. One encore was typical for the Nodes; they were good enough to expect that. A second encore indicated to Jon that the word had spread through the crowd that this was the band’s last night.

Some of Roc’s followers were shouting for “Cat Scratch Fever” again, and even though Jon and Toni weren’t featured on it, making it inappropriate for an encore, Jon went ahead and announced it and went off with Toni into the stage-right cubbyhole to wait it out.

“That fucking thing again,” Toni said, shaking her head. Still not sweating.

“No accounting for taste,” Jon said, smiling back.

“We better do one more and put this turkey out of its misery.”

Jon nodded. “You okay?”

“I think so. I blew some words.”

“I know you did. That’s not like you.”

“Yeah, well, I started thinking about the words, and that’s deadly. As soon as you start thinking about ’em, you lose ’em.”

“Right I blew a few myself. Lots of hamburger tonight.”

Hamburger was garbled singing with the mouth right up against the mike, sounding like words but not words at all.

“Jon, that big guy’s still hanging around. When I took that little break midway through the set, he was still sitting in his booth. Then he came and stood in back and watched for a while.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw him.”

“Yeah, well, your girlfriend was there, too.”

“No kidding?”

“The one with the white outfit and the big tits? Yeah. Still here. Or she was twenty minutes ago, anyway.”

“Jesus. So she didn’t split.”

“Nope. Somebody else was out there, too.”

“Who?”

“Darlene.”

“Who the fuck’s Darlene?”

“You mean, which fuck’s Darlene, don’t you? Burlington, a couple of months ago? The Ramp? Lanky with brown hair and lots of eye makeup?”

“I think I remember.”

“Had a dyke girlfriend who wanted to cut your nuts off?”

“I remember.”

“Well, she’s out there, too, cuter than Rod Stewart’s mom. What’s that dyke’s name, anyway?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Me either. So, Jonny. Tonight’s a real stroll down memory lane, for you, huh? Maybe they’re all here ’cause it’s the Nodes’ last night.”

“Maybe.”

“Are you scared?”

“A little.”

“Yeah. Me too. I’d take another hit of Cutty Sark if I thought I could keep it down. What should we do?”

“Get back on stage and play one more song, I guess.”

They did—”Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.

And it was the last song the Nodes ever played together, because the audience was too worn out and drunk to work up the applause for another encore, and Jon and Toni and the rest of the band came down off the stage and mingled with the crowd, as the Barn would be open for another half-hour before the lights would come up and the band’s equipment would get torn down. The jukebox started up and an Olivia Newton-John record came on, a mild protest by someone not into the Nodes’ brand of hard-core rock’n’roll. Couples slow danced. Singles who hadn’t scored shuffled toward exits, looking around one last time to see if somebody was left to come onto.

First order of business at the end of a performance was getting paid, and since Jon was listed as leader on the union contract Bob Hale had signed, it was Jon who followed Bob back behind the bar again, through a hallway and into a small office. Bob paid Jon in cash, shook his hand, reminded him to keep in touch if he and Toni put another band together, and went back to the table out in the club where a short-haired brunette waitress with a slender figure and a tired, pretty face waited to be the queen of Bob’s waterbed this winter night.

Usually Jon waited till later to pay off the band members, but tonight he gathered them in the stage-right cubbyhole and gave them their shares, holding back his one-and-a-half shares (he owned the PA equipment and van and so got an extra half-share) as well as the agent’s commission. These five people had worked and lived together for some seven months, and despite their differences, this was an awkward if not exactly poignant moment.

Roc scratched the side of his narrow, faintly pockmarked face; he had some eye makeup on, which had always looked silly to Jon before. Now, for some unknown reason, Jon felt touched by the guitarist’s show-bizzy affectation, out here in the Iowa sticks.

Roc extended his hand, and he and Jon — the two strong ones in the group, whose conflicting tastes had made this split inevitable — shook hands in a sideways, “soul” shake.

“It’s been real,” Roc (whose real name was Arnold) said, with a small, embarrassed smile.

“It’s been real,” Jon agreed, giving him back the same kind of smile.

There was a brief round of handshakes; the boys, except for Jon, each gave Toni a hug. Mick advised her to “watch the sauce — it’ll catch up with you someday,” and she advised him to “watch that dope you smoke or you’ll wake up even dumber some morning,” and they all laughed.

“We’re not going to tear our stuff down tonight,” Roc told Jon. “Bob said we could come back tomorrow and do it.”

“I figured as much,” Jon said. He knew that they planned to rent a trailer to haul their amps and guitars away. Usually the band traveled in two vehicles: Jon’s van, with all the major equipment and room for two riders (invariably, Jon and Toni) and Roc’s station wagon, which held the other band members and a few odds and ends of equipment

“We’ll help take the PA and mikes down, of course,” Mick added. “Help you load your organ and stuff, if you want.”

“I appreciate it,” Jon said, and everyone left the little cubbyhole and wandered out onto the dance floor, where the lights had just come up, bringing the usual groans and moans from the crowd, who, like a mole caught in the headlights of a car, preferred the dark.

“What now?” Toni asked Jon.

“I think I’ll see if the phone’s free.”

“You already left your message, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. But I’d like to see if I can get through to Nolan, and not his machine. I’d also like to see if Julie and the Incredible Hulk are still around.”

They walked toward the outer bar.

“What if they are?” Toni asked.

“If Julie’s here, I want to talk to her. Like I said, maybe I can defuse this thing. If that guy’s still around and she isn’t, I’m curious to see if he’ll let me use the phone.”

“And if he won’t?”

“I’ll talk to Bob. He’s got a dog and a shotgun.”

They entered the bar; people were getting one last drink, but the booths on either side were empty — nothing but moisture rings and ashtrays full of peanut shells.

No Julie.

No Hulk.

“Let’s look around some more,” Jon said.

“Like outside?”

“Like outside.”

They went out on the wooden sidewalk that ran in front of the building. The night was cold; they could see their breath. It was November and it hadn’t snowed yet. People were getting into their frost-frosted cars, most of the couples hanging onto each other, some because they were drunk, others because they were horny, and in a lot of cases both. No sign of Julie or her Hulk.

“Let’s go back in,” Jon suggested, and they did.

They took a booth.

“I don’t know what to make of this,” he said. “I know she spotted me. Shit.”

“You got word through to your friend,” Toni said, sounding as though she were trying to convince herself as much as Jon. “Why worry about it?”

“What, me worry? Look, let’s go tear down the stuff and get the van loaded; the guys’ll help us, and maybe Bob and his people’ll pitch in, and we can get it done fast and head for Nolan’s.”

“Maybe he’s already on his way here.”

“You got a point. I’ll try him again.”

He went to the phone. He had a dime poised to drop in the slot when a hand rested on his shoulder. Not a big hand this time, but a smaller, softer one.

He turned and looked at Darlene, whom he suddenly remembered very well. Her long brown hair was in a sixties shag, and she did have lots of eye makeup (even more than Roc); she reminded him of Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders. A smiling, skinny girl, taller than he was, with pert little breasts bobbling under a Nodes T-shirt; he couldn’t remember that logo of his looking better.

She stroked his bare arm; he was wearing only a T- shirt, now, himself, also a Nodes T-shirt. She poked at the design on his chest, traced it with her finger.

“We look like twins,” she said.

“Not quite,” Jon said. “Hiya Darlene.”

An image of that shaggy brunette hair buried in his lap flashed through his mind; the van back behind the Ramp. Oh yes.

“I’m sorry you guys are splitting up,” she said. “You got a good band.”

“We had a good band. It’s over now.”

“I’m sad.”

“No big deal.”

“I need a shoulder to cry on.”

Your makeup’ll run, he thought, annoyed with her and with himself, because she was making his jeans tight.

“You still got your van?”

“Sure, but right now I gotta help tear down, Darlene.”

“This won’t take long.”

She had a whory mouth, but in a nice way, and though her teeth were faintly yellow, from smoking no doubt, they were nice teeth, and her tongue peeking out between the parted teeth was nice, too.

“How about another time?” Jon said. Polite smile.

“No time like the present.” She had hold of his arm, hugging it, tugging at him.

He glanced back at Toni, in her booth; she was smiling at him, amused. But then she mouthed something at him. He couldn’t make it out and squinted and Toni tried again: What about the dyke? she was silently saying.

Jon turned back to Darlene, said, “What about your friend?”

She was still tugging him along, toward the door. “You’re my friend, Jon boy.”

“Please don’t call me Jon boy. This is not ‘The Waltons.’ This is definitely not ‘The Waltons.’”

She laughed, as if she understood him. “Come on. I got a present for you.”

Jon didn’t smoke. Jon didn’t drink. Jon didn’t do dope. But Jon did have a weakness. And Darlene was definitely part of that weakness.

He went outside with her.

“I said, what about that girlfriend of yours?” he said, pulling loose from her, getting an arm’s length between them.

“She’s not here.”

“Well she was here,” he said. “I saw her.” He hadn’t, really, but Toni had.

“So she was here,” she said, “so what? She’s gone now.”

“Well, isn’t she your...”

“She’s just another guy to me.”

“So I gathered.”

“Come on, I got something for you,” she said, tugging him toward the van, which was parked way down at the end of the tin shed that was the club portion of the Barn. The Nodes logo on their T-shirts was also on the side of the van, painted there, frosted over at the moment. Hugging his arm, she pushed herself against him, snuggled against him. As they walked, their footsteps sounded hollow on the wooden sidewalk. When they spoke, their cold breath hung briefly in the air, as though the words themselves were hanging there.

“What’s her name, anyway?” Jon said.

“Who?”

“Your girlfriend?”

“Who cares?”

They were at the van. Jon unlocked the side door and they got in. There were some blankets on the cold metal floor of the van, which were used as padding between the amplifiers and such when the van was loaded for travel, and were also used for occasions like this, with Jon and Darlene falling on top of each other in the back of the van.

“It’s a little cold,” Jon said, reaching over and locking the door they’d just come in. “Maybe I should turn on the heater.”

“It won’t be cold long,” Darlene said, pulling her T-shirt off. Her nipples were two red bumps in pink circles riding small, high breasts above a bony ribcage; Jon put his hands on the breasts, kissed the breasts, but his heart wasn’t in it. His hard-on wasn’t, either. It was, in fact, gone.

Because all he could think of what that dyke, whose name he couldn’t remember, not that it mattered. He wasn’t even thinking about Julie and that Hulk of hers, really, it was that goddamn dyke...

Then she was at his fly, and her head was in his lap again, and he was suddenly getting back into it when the side door of the van opened and Jon, angry, confused — I locked that! — said, “Shut that fucking thing!” and then saw who it was who opened it.

The dyke.

Terrific.

“Put your shirt on,” the dyke said to Darlene. A low, but not exactly masculine voice.

Darlene, still blasé, did so, saying, “I only did what you told me to.”

Like unlock the goddamn door when he wasn’t looking, Jon thought, as the dyke crawled inside the van and shut the door behind her. In a black leather jacket and dishwater blonde ducktail and Elvis sneer, she was a fifties parody. A fifties nightmare.

“You don’t scare me,” Jon said, zipping up, scared. “Now just get out of here. Take your friend with you.”

The dyke pulled at either side of her leather jacket, and the metal buttons popped open, and she took something out of her waistband. It was a gun. A revolver with a long barrel. Just like the one Nolan used.

“What is this?...” Jon started to say.

Just as the dyke was swinging the gun barrel around to hit him along the side of his head, the damnedest thing happened: he remembered her name.

Ron.