The Stand

lonely and all the colder—that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.

“Do you play?”

He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was—coming from a house like that, it was probably a good un. He hadn’t played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.

“Yeah, I do,” he said, and discovered that he wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.

“Let’s see what we got here,” he said, and unsnapped the catches.

He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn’t enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It sure is.”

He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel- string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords—zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Grieg’s contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them “dollar slicks.” Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.

“What are you smiling about?” Nadine asked.

“Old times,” he said, and felt a little sad.

He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.

Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open.

Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: “Music hath charms…”

Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang… his singing was always going to be better than his playing.

Well you see me comin baby from a long ways away

I will turn the night mamma right into day

Cause I’m here

A long ways from my home

But you can hear me comin baby

By the slappin on my black cat bone.

The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry thought he looked like someone who had been suffering from an unreachable itch between his shoulderblades for a long, long time and had finally found someone who knew exactly where to scratch. He scruffed through long- unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.

I can do some things mamma that other men can’t do

They can’t find the numbers baby, can’t work the

Conqueror root

But I can, cause I’m a long way from my home

And you know you’ll hear me comin

By the whackin on my black cat bone.

The boy’s open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl’s thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to a good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn’t remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit.

When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn’t believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: “He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better.”

So he played Geoff Muldaur’s “Goin Downtown” and his own “Sally’s Fresno Blues”; he played “The Springhill Mine Disaster” and Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mamma.” He switched to primitive rock and roll—“Milk Cow Blues,” “Jim Dandy,” “Twenty Flight Rock” (doing the boogie-woogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, “Endless Sleep,” originally done by Jody Reynolds.

“I can’t play anymore,” he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. “My fingers.” He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails.

The boy held out his own hands.

Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. “It takes a lot of practice,” he said.

But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up “Jim Dandy” almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn’t bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was muted and ghostly—as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cotton—but otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune.

When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves.

Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: “You’re not bearing down hard enough, that’s all. You have to build up calluses—hard spots—on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too.”

Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn’t know if the boy really understood or not. He turned to Nadine. “Did you know he could do that?”

“No. I’m as surprised as you are. It’s as if he is a prodigy or something, isn’t it?”

Larry nodded. The boy ran through “That’s All Right, Mamma,” again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe’s fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true.

“Let me show you,” Larry said, and held out his hands for the guitar. Joe’s eyes immediately slanted down with distrust. Larry thought he was remembering the knife going down into the sea. He backed away, holding the guitar tightly. “All right,” Larry said. “All yours. When you want a lesson, come see me.”

The boy made a hooting sound and ran off along the beach, holding the guitar high over his head like a sacrificial offering.

“He’s going to smash it to hell,” Larry said.

“No,” Nadine answered, “I don’t think he is.”