Steam and Static

I woke up at six something in the morning in a bed that wasn't mine, in a room that smelled like cedar and sulfur, and for about four seconds I had no idea where I was. Then Gerard rolled over next to me and the whole previous evening came back in one piece, like a delivery manifest I'd signed without reading.

He was forty-six now, fourteen years since the last time I'd seen him asleep, and he still slept on his stomach with one arm dead off the side of the mattress like a man reaching for something he'd already decided not to reach for. I lay there and did the arithmetic I do when I'm avoiding getting up, which is most mornings. I'm forty-four. I drive auto parts between mountain towns in a van that has 190,000 miles on it and a radio that only gets one station. I had dated this man for two years, starting when I was twenty-eight and we were both playing in the same bar band and he was the only person in it who could read music. Then he took a city job at thirty-two and I stayed, and I told everyone, including myself, that it was a clean split. It had not been a clean split. It had been a split with a lot of crying in a parking lot behind a brewpub, which is a different genre entirely.

The resort, as far as I could tell from the window, was a long low building of dark timber perched on a hill above a rail town, and it was empty. Off-season empty. The parking lot had three cars in it and a lot of melted snow refreezing into little shelves. Somewhere below us a train horn went off, one long note, and Gerard stirred.

"Time is it," he said into the pillow.

"Six something. Train just went through."

"Morning train." He rolled onto his back and looked at the ceiling, and then at me, and there was a pause where we both ran through the same catalog of last night's decisions. "Okay," he said finally. "So that happened."

"That happened," I agreed.

"Coffee's downstairs somewhere. Alex, the caretaker, leaves a pot on." He sat up, unhurried, like someone who had done this morning once before with me and remembered how it went. "I'm not doing the awkward thing, Scott. I'm too old and you were never worth it."

"That's the spirit."

He laughed, which was the thing I'd forgotten about him, that the laugh came easy even when the words didn't. We sat on the edge of the bed in the gray light like two guys waiting for a parts order to come in, and he told me, in the flat way you tell somebody your news when you're not sure why you're telling them, that he was here recording an album. There was a little recording room in the bathhouse annex, of all places, built into the old stone part where the springs used to be piped through. An engineer named Dylan ran it, and Gerard had been coming up here for two winters, tracking songs whenever the resort had no guests to annoy.

"An album," I said. "At a hot spring."

"The rooms sound incredible. Stone everywhere, the reverb is unbelievable. Dylan figured it out years ago and talked the owner into wiring the annex." He was pulling on his jeans as he talked, and I made myself look at the window instead, because I'm forty-four, not twelve. "You'd know this if you ever listened to anything I sent you."

"I listened to the first one."

"You listened to forty seconds of the first one, you told me so yourself."

"Forty good seconds, though."

He threw a sock at me. It was, all things considered, a better morning than most of my mornings, which was exactly the kind of thought I should have been more worried about.

* * *

The resort's front desk was a counter the size of a kitchen island with one man behind it, early forties, reading a paperback and eating an egg sandwich with the focus of a person who had been promised a quiet week. A little brass placard said ALEX TANAKA, and he nodded at us the way you nod at people you already know the story on.

"Coffee's fresh," he said. "Bathhouse opens at eight. Gerard, Dylan's asking if you're doing vocals today or if he has to mix all afternoon instead."

"Vocals today," Gerard said. "I'm showering first. Scott, there's coffee and there's nothing else, take your pick."

The coffee was terrible and I drank two cups of it standing at the counter while Alex went back to his book. I told him, because he asked and because I like talking to people who don't care, that I'd driven a crate of brake calipers up from the valley the evening before, delivery for the resort's kitchen truck, and the booking had put me here at closing time and then I'd run into Gerard in the parking lot, and one thing had led to another in the boring traditional way. He said, "Huh," and turned a page, and that constituted the entire review.

The plan, which I stated out loud to make it real, was simple. My run was done, the van was fueled and due back at the depot by the station, and the afternoon train came through the town at the bottom of the hill at two fifteen, and I would be on it, going home to my apartment and my sensible life, and this would be a story I told nobody. Gerard came down showered with wet hair and didn't argue with the plan, which annoyed me more than an argument would have.

Then a door at the back of the lobby opened and a big man in a flannel shirt came through it talking before he was all the way in the room. "Gerard, tell me you can sing today, because I have the vocal chain set up and if I touch it again I'll ruin it." He saw me and stopped. "Who's this?"

"Dylan, this is Scott. Scott, Dylan. Scott drove brake calipers for your kitchen truck and then stayed for unrelated reasons."

"Reasons I'm leaving on the two fifteen," I said.

Dylan looked at Gerard, then at me, then did the math with an expression I didn't love. Then his face changed entirely, because a different problem had occurred to him. "Wait. You're driving back down to the rail town anyway?"

"Before two, yeah."

"Okay. Okay, listen." He held up both hands like he was framing a shot. "My harmonica is dead. Not broken, dead, the reed's gone flat on the low note and it's the one on half the album. There's a music shop two doors from the train station, the guy there holds one for me, a Special Twenty in C, he knows the deal. I'll pay you cash, fifty, to pick it up on your way to the platform and bring it back up. Alex has a spare key to the gate so you can drive in."

"Fifty dollars," I said, "to make a stop!"

"Cash, today, no paperwork. You'd be saving my mix." He said it fast, the way people talk when the bookkeeping is already settled in their head and they just want the errand agreed to.

"It's a real errand," Alex said from behind his book, without looking up. "He pays. He's good for it."

I looked at Gerard, who was buttering a piece of toast with enormous concentration, and he shrugged in a way that managed to say both nothing and everything. Fifty dollars was fifty dollars, and a dead reed was a real problem, and the stop was two doors from the platform. It was business. It settled clean, cash on delivery, and I have never once in my life turned down a paid errand, that's the actual job.

"Fine," I said. "Special Twenty in C, two doors from the station, back up the hill before two."

"Great," Dylan said, already peeling bills off a fold. "You're a lifesaver and I don't even know you."

"You don't want to," Gerard said, around toast.

I took the money, counted it, and put it in my jacket pocket, which is what you do when a deal is a deal. Then I went out to the van, which was crusted in road salt and sitting there looking sensible, and I sat behind the wheel for a minute with the engine off, telling myself the drive down and the drive back up were just a delivery, same as any other, and that the two fifteen train was still the plan, and that I believed me. I put the key in the ignition.

The drive down took forty minutes and the radio only got the one station, same as always, and I let it play whatever it played because arguing with it was a habit I'd given up years ago. The town at the bottom of the hill has four blocks to it and a station platform that always looks surprised to have a train. The music shop was where Dylan said, two doors from the platform, a narrow place with guitars on the wall and a guy behind the counter who was reading a parts catalog and didn't look up until I said the words Special Twenty in C.

"You're the runner," he said, which apparently was how Dylan had described me to him, and I decided that was accurate enough not to argue with. He went to a drawer, took out a harmonica in a green plastic box, and rang it up against a tab he kept in a spiral notebook, which told me Dylan had done this before. Sixty-three dollars in the register's world, fifty in mine, and the difference was somebody else's problem. I pocketed the box, bought a coffee I didn't want out of guilt, and walked back out to the van.

It was one o'clock. The two fifteen came through at two fifteen, that was its whole personality, and I sat in the parking lot across from the platform with the engine off and the harmonica on the passenger seat and I thought about how comfortable my own bed was and how nothing at the resort was my problem. Then I thought about Gerard's face this morning, which had been careful in a way that annoyed me, and I thought about how the drive back up was forty minutes out of my life. Then I started the van, which tells you how the vote went.

* * *

The gate key worked the way Alex said it would, and the parking lot still had its three cars plus my salt-crusted van, and I went into the main building looking for Dylan and instead heard a harmonica coming from the bathhouse annex. It was a low, wavering note at first, testing itself, and then it opened up into something slow and blue that I recognized from a lifetime ago, because it was one of ours, a song we used to close sets with back when I was twenty-eight and thought three sets a night was a career.

I went down the stone corridor toward the sound. The annex is the old part, where the springs used to be piped through before somebody decided guests wanted tile instead of rock, and the recording room sits in there with its window and its foam, and Gerard was standing alone in the