5
Seattle pet shelters, it turns out, are harder to get into than the hippest velvet-rope night clubs. The first two are full, and no amount of begging works. The third one has space, but it requires an application and a copy of the cats’ vet records. I tell the pierced girl with her hipster no-leather shoes that I’m leaving town, that I have the cats in the car, and she gives me the most snide look in the world and tells me that I should’ve thought of this before I went and adopted a pet. I almost smack her.
“Wanna smoke that bowl now?” Stoner Richard asks after strike three. It’s eight o’clock and the shelters are all closed for the night.
“No.”
“You wanna go to a club or something? Blow off steam? Since we’re in Seattle?”
I’m exhausted from the night before and I don’t want to be here with Stoner Richard and I’m trying to figure out how I’ll get vet records when tomorrow is Sunday. I start to beg off but then Richard says: “We can go to one of those hole-in-the-walls that Meg liked to go to. Once in a while she’d deign to let us tag along.” He pauses. “She had a whole klatch of friends up here.”
I’m momentarily stunned by Richard’s use of both deign and klatch. But the truth is, I do actually want to see these places. I think of the club we were meant to have gone to the weekend I came to visit. All the clubs we were meant to have gone to all the weekends I didn’t come to visit. I know how excited Meg was to be amid the music scene, though after the time I visited her, the breathless emails about it all started to taper off and then stopped.
“What about the kittens?” I ask Richard.
“They’ll be fine in the car,” Richard says. “It’s, like, fifty-five degrees tonight. They have food and water.” He points to Pete and Repeat, who, having squealed and yowled the entire drive up, are now quietly nestled together in their carrier.
We drive to a club in Fremont by the canal. Before we go in, Richard lights up a small pipe and smokes out the window. “Don’t want to give the kitties a contact high,” he jokes.
As we pay our covers, he tells me that Meg went here a lot. I nod as if I know this. The place is empty. It smells of stale beer, bleach, and desperation. I leave Richard at the bar and go play pinball by myself. By ten o’clock the room starts filling up, and by eleven the first of the night’s bands comes on, a very feedback-heavy outfit whose lead singer growls more than he sings.
After a few okay songs, Stoner Richard finds me. “That’s Ben McCallister,” he says, pointing to the guitar player/growler.
“Uh-huh,” I say. I’ve never heard of him. It takes a while for the Seattle scene to filter all the way down to Shitburg.
“Did Meg mention him to you?”
“No” is all I say. Though I want to scream at people to stop asking me that. Because I don’t know what Meg told me and I ignored, and what Meg didn’t tell me. Although one thing I know for damn certain is that she didn’t tell me that she was in such intense pain that the only way to take it away was to order a batch of industrial poison and drink it down.
Stoner Richard is going on about Meg being obsessed with the guy, and it’s all sort of white noise, because Meg was obsessed with a lot of guitar players in her day and in her way. But then this particular guitar player, this Ben McCallister, he stops to take a pull from his beer, holding the long neck of the bottle between two fingers, his guitar hanging off his lanky hip like it’s a limb. And then he turns out toward the crowd and the lights are on him, bright, and I see that his eyes are impossibly blue and he does this thing, like he’s shielding his eyes from the sun and looking out into the crowd for someone, but the way he does it, it makes something click.
“Oh, that must be Tragic Guitar Hero,” I say.
“Nothing heroic about that guy,” Stoner Richard says.
Tragic Guitar Hero. I do remember her writing about him once or twice, which was notable because she hadn’t written about any guys. At first it seemed she was into his band and she crushed on him the way that she always crushed on the guys—and the girls—she met in bands.
Tragic Guitar Hero. She’d told me about his band, retro Sonic Youth–Velvet Underground sound, infused with some modern sensibilities. Typical Meg stuff. But she’d also written about his eyes, so blue, she’d thought he wore contacts. I look at them now. They are weirdly blue.
And then I remember a line from one of her emails. Meg had asked, “Do you remember the advice that Tricia gave us back when she started working at the bar?”
Tricia loved to dispense advice, especially when she had an audience as attentive as Meg. But somehow I’d known right away which pointer Meg was talking about. Never sleep with the bartender, girls, Tricia had warned us.
“Why? Because everyone does?” Meg had asked. She loved the way Tricia talked to us, as if we were her friends from the bar, as if either of us was sleeping with anyone.
“There’s that,” Tricia had replied. “But mostly because you stop getting free drinks.”
Meg had written that it held true for Tragic Guitar Heroes, too. And I’d been confused because Meg hadn’t mentioned being into this guy or going out with him, let alone sleeping with him, something she had never done, except for that one time that we had both decided didn’t really count. And surely if Meg had done something as momentous as sleeping with a guy, she’d have told me. I was going to ask her about it when she came home. And then she didn’t.
So that’s him. That’s Tragic Guitar Hero. He seemed so mythic, and usually attaching a name to a mythical creature tames it. But knowing his name, Ben McCallister, doesn’t do that.
I watch the band intently now. He does that thing that rockers do, swiping away at his guitar, leaning into it and into the mic and then stopping playing, grasping the mic like he would a lover’s neck. It’s all an act. But it’s a good one. I can imagine his line of groupies. I just can’t believe Meg would be one of them.
“We’re the Scarps. Silverfish is up next,” Ben McCallister says at the end of their short set.
“You about ready to go?” Stoner Richard asks me.
But I’m not ready. I’m wide-awake and furious at Ben McCallister, who, I now understand, screwed my friend, in more ways than one. Did he treat her like some throwaway groupie? Didn’t he realize that this was Meg Garcia he was dealing with? You don’t throw Meg away.
“Not yet,” I tell Richard, and then I’m up out of my seat and over at the bar where Ben McCallister is standing, drinking another beer and talking to a group of people who are telling him what a great set it was. I march up to him, but once I’m standing right behind him, so close I can see the vertebrae in his neck and the tattoo atop his shoulder blade, I have no idea what to say.
But Ben McCallister seems to know what to say to me. Because after a few seconds’ chitchat with the other girls, he turns around and looks at me: “I saw you out there.”
Up close, Ben McCallister is much prettier than any boy has a right to be. He has what I can only assume are Irish good looks: black hair, skin that on a girl would be called alabaster but on a rocker is just perfectly pasty. Full, red lips. And the eyes. Meg was right. They look like contacts.
“You saw me out where?” I ask.
“Out there.” He points to the tables in the club. “I was looking for a friend of mine; he said he’d come, but it’s impossible to see anything with the lights.” He mimics shielding his eyes against the glare, just as I’d seen him do from the stage. “But then I saw you”—he pauses for a beat—“like maybe you were who I was looking for.”
Is this what he does? Use this line? Is it so rehearsed that he even plants the little eye shield squint-into-the-crowd thing during the show? I mean, it’s a great line. Because if I was in the crowd, then it’s like, Wow, you were looking for me. And if I wasn’t, well, then you said that nice thing and what a sensitive rocker you must be to believe in something like fate.
Is this the line he used on Meg? Did this work on Meg? I shudder to think of my friend falling for this crap, but then with Meg far away from home, with glitter dust in her eyes and guitar fumes up her nose, who knows?
He takes my silence for coyness. “What’s your name?”
Will my name ring a bell? Did she mention me to him? “Cody,” I say.
“Cody, Cody, Cody.” He gives my name a test drive. “It’s a cowgirl name,” he drawls on. “Where you from, Cowgirl Cody?”
“Cowgirl country.”
His smile is slow, like he’s intentionally rationing it. “I’d like to visit Cowgirl country. Maybe I can come and you can take me for a ride.” He gives me a meaningful look, in case I haven’t caught the double entendre.
“You’d probably get bucked right off.”
Oh, he likes that. He thinks we’re flirting, the dickwad. “Would I, now?”
“Yeah. Horses can smell fear.”
Something on his face falters for a second. Then: “What makes you think I’m scared?”
“City dicks always are.”
“How do you know I’m a city dick?”
“Well, we’re in a city. And you’re a dick, aren’t you?”
A flurry of confusion passes over his face. I can see he’s not sure if I’m just a violent flirter, the kind of girl who’d be hot, if a little angry, in bed, or if this has actually passed over into something else. But he arranges his face into the lazy wannabe rock-star slackery smile. “Who exactly have you been talking to, Cowgirl Cody?” His tone is light, but underneath it’s laced with something less pleasant.
I make my voice go all breathy, the way Tricia does so well. “Who have I been talking to, Ben McCallister?” I lean in close.
He leans in close too. Like he thinks we might kiss. Like most of the time, it really is this easy for him. “You know who I haven’t been talking to much?” My voice is pure breath.
“Who?” he says. He’s close enough that I can smell the beer.
“Meg Garcia. I haven’t talked to Meg Garcia in more than a month. How about you?”
I’ve heard the term recoiling before, but when I see Ben McCallister snap away from me, I understand what it means. Because he jumps back like a snake—recoiling—before it strikes.
“What the fuck?” he asks. The flirting portion of our evening has ended, and Ben’s voice is now truly a growl, a wholly different sound from the bullshit thing he sang with.
“Meg Garcia,” I repeat. It’s hard to look into his eyes now, but in the last month, I’ve become an expert at hard things. “Know her?”
“Who are you?” His eyes are burning with something, a kind of fury, and they make the irises icy. They don’t seem like contacts anymore.
“Or did you just screw her, and screw her over?”
There’s a tap on my shoulder. Stoner Richard is behind me. “I’ve got to be up in the morning,” he tells me.
“I’m done here.”
It’s getting on for midnight and I’ve had three hours’ sleep and have forgotten to eat another meal, and I’m shaky. I manage to walk to the front of the club before I stumble. Richard grabs my arm, and it’s then that I make the mistake of turning around to throw one last death-ray at the cocksure, shallow, pretty-boy poser, Ben McCallister.
I wish I hadn’t. Because when I look at Ben McCallister one last time, he has this expression on his face—it’s the particular contortion when fury meets guilt. And I know that look. I see it every day in the mirror.