Bitter Root

Vicki took the ramp down at fifteen miles an hour and hated every second of it.

The Hollows Festival ran underneath a dead salt mine two hours outside the city. Nobody told you that in the gig listings. They just said "unique underground venue" and left the rest to your imagination. Her imagination had been doing fine until the tunnel mouth swallowed her headlights whole and the walls started closing in.

Salt. That was the smell. Old salt and diesel and somebody's weed. The rig fit the tunnel with maybe a foot to spare on either mirror. She checked both mirrors anyway. Twice.

"Easy," she told herself. "It's just a basement with delusions of grandeur."

The loading dock showed up on the right, painted numbers on wet concrete, two guys in hi-vis vests waving her in with the bored enthusiasm of men who'd been waving trucks in for eleven hours. She backed it in on the second try. First try, if you didn't count the little kiss of the curb that made one of the vests wince.

She killed the engine and sat there in the sudden quiet.

The quiet didn't last. Somewhere down the tunnels, a soundcheck was happening. Bass, mostly. A low, nagging throb that came up through the floor and into the seat and into her back teeth. She knew that bass. She'd know it drunk, deaf, or dead.

"Well," she said to nobody. "Spite delivered."

That was the honest version of tonight. This morning her dispatcher had offered her this run. Festival load, heavy gear, night delivery, double the miles she wanted. She'd said no. Then she'd seen the venue sheet. The Hollows. And a band name she recognized, because she'd spent two years of her life hauling amp cabinets for that band for free, back when she was twenty-two and stupid in the specific way you're stupid at twenty-two.

She'd called dispatch back and said yes so fast she nearly bit her tongue.

Jerry's band was playing here. She was delivering the stage the band would stand on. There was a poetry to that. A bitter, stupid poetry, and she'd driven two hours with it sitting shotgun.

She climbed down from the cab and found the paperwork guy. Signed, got a lanyard, got a map of the tunnels that looked like a roadkill diagram. Then she walked past the crew board by the dock doors, the one with all the set times chalked up in a scrawl that suggested chalk had been winning a fight with damp.

Her eyes went down the list. Standard festival stuff. Then the nine o'clock slot on the Deep Stage.

Jerry Mata and the Wreckline.

Vicki's palm hit the board flat. The sound cracked down the tunnel. One of the hi-vis guys looked over. She laughed, and it came out raw, nothing funny in it.

"Nine o'clock," she told the board. "You absolute son of a bitch."

Because here was the thing, and she'd admit it to a chalkboard if not to a person: the load was done in forty minutes. Unloaded, signed, done. She could be back in the cab and gone by eight. She could miss the set entirely. That was the smart play. That was the play she told herself she was making as she walked down the tunnel toward the motel bar by the entrance, because the dock had no coffee and her thermos was empty and none of those reasons were the real reason.

The bar sat in a carved-out bubble near the mine entrance, all low ceilings and strings of bulb lights and a beer selection that thought very highly of itself. The crowd was soundcheck-lean, crew kids and early campers and a guy in a cape nobody had asked about.

"Vick. Vick! VICKI."

She knew that voice too. Marilyn. Drummer, yeller, old friend. Five years ago they'd both worked dispatch at Kessler Freight, before Marilyn quit to chase drums and Vicki quit to chase a man who played them. They'd stayed friends, mostly by text, entirely by luck.

Marilyn came through the crowd like a barge. Thirty-five, arms like a stevedore, grin already at full width. She grabbed Vicki by both shoulders and shook her once, hard.

"You have got to be kidding me. You drove HERE?"

"I had a delivery."

"You had a delivery." Marilyn said it the way a person says a lie they're fond of. "To the one festival in the country where your ex is playing. What are the odds."

"Astronomical. Cosmic. Shut up."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm saying nothing at all." Marilyn said this while steering Vicki toward the back hall by the shoulder, firm as a tugboat. "Come on. Backstage. You need a wristband."

"I need coffee."

"They have coffee backstage. Bad coffee. Backstage coffee. Same thing."

Vicki could have planted her feet. She was strong for her size and Marilyn knew it and had clearly budgeted for it. She let herself be towed anyway, down a service hall where the salt crust grew on the walls like lichen, past a door with GREEN ROOM taped over some older, ruder sign.

The green room was a salt cave with couches. Low light, a mirror, a table of snacks that some promoter had inflated the word "hospitality" to cover. Two guys from the band were in the corner arguing about a pedal. The rest was empty.

"Everybody," Marilyn announced, "this is Vicki. Vicki hauled our gear for two years and quit because you're all terrible. She is my oldest friend and I love her. Be normal."

"Hi, Vicki," said the pedal guy, not looking up.

Vicki crossed her arms and gave the room a flat stare, the one she used on dock loaders who tried to rush her paperwork.

"Charmed," she said.

Marilyn shoved a coffee at her. It was terrible. Vicki drank it standing up, arms still crossed, and answered maybe six questions in twenty minutes with the minimum viable number of words. Marilyn ran interference like a pro, filling every silence with tour gossip. It was almost working.

Almost. Because the bass kept thudding through the rock, distant and patient, and every fourth thud had Jerry's fingerprint on it. She'd spent two years learning the difference. A bass player's walk, like handwriting. You don't forget handwriting.

Then Marilyn got dragged off by a production guy with a clipboard and a fire in his eye, something about a cymbal order, and the room emptied out on its own, pedal guy first. And Vicki was alone.

For about ninety seconds.

The door opened without a knock. She heard it before she saw him. The bass had stopped, replaced by a drum check, and in the gap the footsteps were very distinct on the salt-dusted floor.

Jerry Mata, thirty years old and unchanged in the ways that mattered and worse in the ways that didn't. Same black hair pushed back like he'd just come offstage even though he hadn't been on yet. Same lean, wound-up look, like a man permanently two seconds from a downbeat.

He stopped. He saw her. Whatever he'd walked in here to get, he forgot it.

"Vicki."

"Jerry."

"You're here."

"I drive things places. It's a job. It involves places."

He took another step in. The drum check rattled the light fixtures overhead, salt dust sifting down fine as flour. He glanced up at them as if to see whether the room was shaking or he was. Fair question.

"Marilyn found you," he said.

"Marilyn found me."

"I saw the manifest this morning. Your company's name on the load sheet. I thought..." He stopped himself. Started again. "I didn't think you'd actually come."

"Neither did I. Then I did. Weird how decisions work."

He laughed. Just a short one, but it was real, and she hated that it was real, and hated more that some traitor part of her chest responded to it as a dog responds to its name.

"Three years," he said.

"Do not do the math at me, Jerry."

"Sorry. Sorry." He put his hands up. Old habit. He'd done it mid-argument a thousand times in that apartment with the bad water pressure, and she'd once told him it made him look like he was being robbed, and he'd kept doing it anyway. "I just. I owe you, I don't know, a few hundred sentences. And I never got through any of them."

"There's nothing owed."

"That's a lie with a flag on it."

Vicki looked at him. The green room was small and the ceiling was low and the rock was everywhere, pressing in patient and old, older than both of them and everything either of them had done. Somewhere far down the tunnels, the drums cut out. The quiet that replaced them was enormous.

"Your set's at nine," she said.

"You checked."

"The board told me. I hit it. We're not close, me and the board."

"Vicki." He said her name carefully, as a man carries something across ice. "Stay for the set. Or don't stay for the set and just have one drink in the bar after, and I'll say the sentences. The few hundred. A representative sample, anyway. And then you can drive off and never think about me again."

She should have said no. She had a clean exit drafted and everything. Rig fueled, route planned, spite fully delivered.

"One drink," she said.

The relief on his face was so obvious it was almost rude.

"One," she said again, to make it law. "And if you say the word 'closure' I'm walking into the mine and living there."

"Deal," Jerry said.

They made it forty minutes into peace. That had to be some kind of record.

The trouble started when Jerry tried to fill the silence. He was bad at silence. Always had been. Two years of dating him had taught Vicki that he treated a quiet room like a hole in the road, something to be driven over fast before anyone noticed.

"So the new record," he said.

"Don't care."

"You haven't heard it."

"Don't care."

"It's about..." He stopped. Regrouped. Tried a different road. "Marilyn says you've got your own rig now. Your name on the door."

"It's a lease. The name's a magnet."

"A magnet with your name on it."

Vicki set the terrible coffee down. "Was there a point, or are you just doing inventory?"

"The point is you're doing great and I'm glad and I'm trying to say something and