Savy paused, confirming his suspicion. “Listen, my band is—”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry”—trying to smile his way out of heartbreak—“it’ll give me something to work toward. Maybe I can open for you guys one day.”
Savy broke eye contact and noticed the bottle in his hand. “That’s an interesting way to keep hydrated.”
“I’m going to bury it. It’s kind of a… secret that needs to be laid to rest.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.”
“Well, don’t go yet.”
“I’m not,” she said. “Just need to pee like a banshee.” She shuffled off into the privacy of the shadows and scrub to do her deed, and Clay stepped into the ghost of the house to do his.
The square footage was limited, claustrophobic even without the walls. His instructions had been to deliver the bottle to the base of the chimney, and that was what he did now. The Ganeks had left a bunch of tools in the gardener’s shed, so Clay had pocketed a trowel, which he used now to stab at the thickly packed grit where a chunk of foundation was missing.
To use both hands, he set the bottle on the broken hearth, and in the moonlight its glass was frostier than ever (Clay only hoped Savy hadn’t noticed that particular detail).
Now that Deidre wasn’t yelling at him or throwing guitars, Clay could admit his sympathy for her. She’d lost her life, and her love, too soon and would never get them back. What she had done to him as a ghost had been out of an instinct to protect her home. And she had been terribly afraid. Of what, Clay didn’t fully understand.
“Rest in peace,” he whispered, sincerely, when the shallow grave was dug. He grabbed the bottle by its cold neck and lowered it sideways into the earth. Then he shoved at the mound of dirt with both hands, pushing it over top.
Savy was waiting for him on the far end of the ruins, lost in her own thoughts. Clay dropped onto the concrete slab that had once been a front stoop and they watched the city lights, side by side, without speaking.
The silence got to Savy first: “Before ten o’clock,” she said, “you can watch the jets taking off from Bob Hope. That’s actually what they call the Burbank Airport—Bob Hope!”
“He hosted The Tonight Show?”
“No, that was Johnny Carson. Bob Hope, I don’t know—he made faces and people cracked up. On the comedian timeline, he’s before Eddie Murphy, after Abbott and Costello.”
“Oh-kay.”
“Anyway, I like watching the planes take off. Makes it look so easy to leave, to just go off to a different life. Like you did.”
“There wasn’t much holding me in Philly,” Clay admitted.
Savy nodded. She gestured as she spoke and her bracelets clacked as she gestured. “I was just thinking how, right now, my band is more like a lead balloon than a jet. No upward trajectory, no going anywhere. We had a full lineup for maybe eight months, then Bass, our singer, wanted all our songs to sound like Rage Against the Machine. And I love Tom Morello, he’s one of my heroes, but his style is so distinct, I wasn’t going to spend hours on stage ripping him off. So Bass left to do his Great American Rap Record and we’ve been auditioning his replacement longer than he was in the band. One of us always has an excuse to shoot the candidates down. Then we’re all a year older, with nothing happening—and I’m really done with that. I want to go somewhere.” She looked at Clay then, stared him straight in the eye. “So I was thinking we give you a chance.”
Clay blinked back. “A chance to, what?” He waited on the punchline. Or to snap awake in bed and realize that all of this—Savy, Boyle, Deidre, the band, the caterpillar stitches—had all been an elaborate dream.
“Our next rehearsal’s Wednesday,” she said, dead-serious. “Can you make it?”
“But before, I thought you said—”
“I don’t recall saying anything before. But yes, I’m making an executive band decision here. Spider will be overjoyed to have a singer again.”
“And Fiasco Joe?”
“Oh, he’ll bark and bitch and cry,” Savy told him, “but he’ll come around.” She leaned in. “He’s kind of afraid of me.”
Despite everything that had happened tonight, the notion that three other musicians (or at least one of them) were willing to give him a chance, to see if he could step up and deliver them to the life they wanted so badly, floored him the most. “Let me just make sure I’m on the same page right now,” he told Savy. “I’m in the Terrible Genuises?”
“You are,” she laughed. “Except now Fiasco is calling us either The Queefs or Hot for Horsie. So basically he’s off band-naming duty forever, and we’re open to suggestions.”
Clay watched the city lights twinkle and shimmer on distant airwaves, and he couldn’t help his big, dopey grin. “I think I might have one,” he said.
PART II:
WATCH IT BURN!
10
WE LAUGH AT DANGER
(AND BREAK ALL THE RULES)
As summer passed into fall, the L.A. weather only grew hotter. Clay marveled at this phenomenon, so contrary to the alignment of seasons back east, and he marveled at the new reality he had stepped into. His anxiety about jamming with Savy, Fiasco, and Spider lasted only as long as their first practice. Savy had a way of making you feel like you belonged, and Spider was cool and easygoing, and Fiasco Joe, for all his initial hostility, at least accepted that Clay would be in
