Drive Like Hell: A Novel Page 7

  Carlton picked up one of Dewey’s cymbals and flung it into the van like a Frisbee.

  “You goddamn sonuvabitch,” Dewey said, “that’s a Classic drum kit you’re fucking with.”

  He handed me his beer and told me to hold it for him while he kicked Carlton’s ass. By that time, Carlton had already scooted to the other side of the van. They played cat-and-mouse like that, hurling threats but making no real moves on each other, until Nick came out of the house and told them to get in the van.

  “I can’t take all this damn yelling,” he said.

  Bev stood on the porch with her arms crossed, seething.

  “This ain’t the creative tension I’ve been talking about.”

  We rattled down I-20, headed for Augusta in the big van. Carlton worked for AAA-Action TV Repair, thus explaining our use of the company vehicle. (Not that Carlton’s boss actually knew anything about the van’s after-hours duties.) I was bouncing along on the floor, wedged between a nineteen-inch Emerson and Nick’s amplifier. Carlton drove, and Nick rode shotgun. Bev and Dewey were in the back with me.

  Between the TVs and music equipment, there was hardly any room to move, but Nick had still managed to find space for a cooler. Dewey was crawling around on his hands and knees passing out cans of Pabst.

  “That’s pretty good service,” Nick said. “Maybe you oughta try to get on with Delta. Shake that tight little ass of yours up and down the aisle.”

  “I got your bag of nuts right here,” Dewey said, grabbing the crotch of his jeans.

  Carlton was steering with one hand and digging through a shoe box full of cassettes with the other. He veered into the emergency lane three times before he found what he wanted: Are You Experienced?

  Once the Hendrix had started up, Dewey asked Carlton if he knew the name of Jimi’s bass player. Carlton failed to produce an answer.

  “It’s Noel Redding,” Dewey hollered. “Of course I wouldn’t have expected you to know that. He’s good, and you suck.”

  Carlton fired back with his middle finger.

  “Hang it in the air, or stick it up your ass,” Dewey said, “but you still can’t play the guitar with that thing.”

  Pretty soon, a hefty joint was being passed around. Nick lowered the music and turned to address those of us sitting in coach. He held up his hands as though an announcement was forthcoming.

  “I hate to be the hard ass,” he said. “It goes against my very nature. But I’m gonna have to ask that my younger sibling abstain from the herbal remedy currently in use. I promised his mother that I’d keep him on a law-abiding track for the next few months.”

  Bev and Dewey eyed me with a fair amount of pity.

  “Well, what about you?” Bev hollered. “You’re not setting a very good example.”

  Nick merely smiled at her. “Bev, honey, I’ve already talked to young Luke about this. It’s a matter of do as I say, not as I do.”

  He turned back to face the windshield and jacked up the music again. But then he seemed to remember something. He killed the Hendrix and looked toward the back again. This time, he pointed right at me. “And by the way, I know you’ve been stealing from my stash, you little shit.”

  Bev and Dewey started laughing. After Nick had turned around again, Dewey passed me the daddy and nodded for me to partake. I didn’t let him down.

  “Look at that,” Dewey said. “Puffin’ like a pro.”

  I passed the joint to Bev. She was sitting on the other side of the Emerson, already wearing her stage outfit: low-riding jeans and a clingy chamois halter top. It would have surprised me to learn that she actually owned a bra.

  Nick was dressed for the stage as well, sticking with the tried-and-true bad-ass look: jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and a faded red BSA Motorcycles T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. His long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  Carlton was the only one who didn’t appear to belong. Between the silk shirt and the fuzzy do, his look wasn’t working on any level. Nevertheless, he and Nick were in deep conversation up front, sharing their own joint and waving their hands animatedly. Dewey was watching them with a disgusted look on his face. Once, while Carlton was talking, Dewey looked at Bev and started flapping his fingers and thumb together like they were a set of lips.

  “What the hell is he yapping about?” Dewey asked.

  Bev pointed to her ears. The music was loud, but not inappropriately so. “You think I can hear?” she shouted.

  Dewey slid over to mine and Bev’s side of the van. He leaned into Bev until their heads were almost touching. “Let’s me and you tell Nick that we want Carlton’s ass gone after tonight.”

  Bev narrowed her eyes like she was irritated with him. “Who are we going to get to take his place, dumbass?”

  “I don’t know. Does it even matter? We could kidnap a monkey from the zoo and teach him to play better.”

  “We already turn his volume way down,” she said. “What else do you want to do to the poor guy? He knows he sucks.”

  “Well, he’s a fucking embarrassment. Look at that shirt. He oughta be working the pirate ride at Six Flags.”

  Bev couldn’t help but laugh.

  “And you fucked up his hair but good,” Dewey said. “He looks like goddamn Curly from the Three Stooges.”

  “Fuck you,” Bev said.

  She jabbed the heel of her boot into Dewey’s gut and doubled him over. Then she glanced my way and smiled. “This is what you call creative differences.”

  I figured it probably was not a great time to correct Dewey; he meant Larry instead of Curly.

  “So what’s the problem with Carlton?” I asked Bev. “Outside of the hair.”

  “There’s no problem,” Bev said. “Dewey’s just being a horse’s ass.”

  Dewey was holding his hand to his stomach like he’d just been gut shot by one of the Cartwrights.

  “He can’t play his instrument is the problem,” Dewey said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t see any bands knocking down your door, Mr. Keith Moonface. Besides, you know what your problem is? You’re a know-it-all jackass.”

  The words were harsh, but she had a point. If someone mentioned a band in Dewey’s presence, he would typically call them sell-outs and then refer to the most obscure cut on their most obscure album. “Now that’s when they were good,” he’d say. He was also given to grand declarations, such as: “Anybody who doesn’t think John Bonham is the greatest drummer alive today can lick my left nut.” Nick was the only person who could pull him down off his high horse. He’d say, “Shut the hell up, Dewey. It’s only rock and roll.”

  Dewey argued that Nick only let Carlton play in the band because of his DJ job at WPND.

  “That’s not why,” Bev said.

  “The hell it’s not. I saw Nick reading one of those Georgia School of Broadcasting brochures. He said if he got a degree, Carlton would hook him up with the station manager. Until then, he’s gotta be assy kissy with Goldilocks up there.”

  Bev took a long, angry drag off her cigarette and glared at the back of Nick’s head. “Broadcasting school?” she asked.

  “That’s what he told me,” Dewey said.

  “Well, he hasn’t said a fucking word to me about it.”

  Dewey bunched up his meaty shoulders like he was expecting another boot to the midsection. “Oh, shit. You didn’t hear that from me.”

  “The hell I didn’t,” she said. “Now spill the beans, fat ass.”

  “That’s all I heard,” Dewey said. “I swear.”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” she said. “You heard it, not me.”

  She looked over at me. “It’s just like that community college shit he was talking to Claudia about. You think I’d heard anything about it before today? Hell, no.”

  I tried to picture Nick walking around a campus with a stack of books under his arms. It was practically inconceivable, though I could have envisioned him sitting behind a DJ’s mike. Nick was like Claudia when it came to
music. He knew his shit.

  I asked Bev if she thought he was serious about going to school.

  “Who the hell knows,” she said. “He doesn’t tell me anything, anymore.”

  She sat there for a long time, sucking the life out of her cigarette, glaring up toward the front of the van. Dewey didn’t say another word.

  A blue, dusky light had settled over Augusta by the time we pulled into the Best Western’s parking lot. The big sign out front said CONGRATS WALTER AND BRITNEY. It might have been a classy touch if the E in Britney had not been a backward 3. Apparently, the hotel needed to buy some more vowels.

  The wedding party was taking place in the hotel’s banquet hall. Not that we were in any hurry to get there. Nick had some business to take care of first. He turned off the radio and pointed to a white Seville parked in the back of the hotel lot.

  “Those are the guys,” he told Carlton. “Pull over beside that Caddy.”

  He spun around and looked at Bev. “You still got the tickets in your backpack?”

  Bev unzipped her dusty red bag and pulled out a short stack of green tickets and badges.

  “Oh, hell,” Dewey said. “Must be Masters time again.”

  Nick smiled. “Starts next week. I figured while we were over here…”

  “Are those the counterfeits?” Dewey asked.

  “Why don’t you buy ‘em and find out,” Nick said.

  Dewey patted his jeans pockets. “Damn, I must have left my wallet back home in my green jacket.”

  Carlton pulled up beside the Caddy. Nick hopped out and walked around to the trunk of the white car. I scooted to the back of the van and watched through the window while he shook hands with two men. They looked to be in their thirties, and I took them for brothers. Both were plump in a well fed sort of way, like they’d downed their share of hot dogs and Snickers through the years before making the turn for the back nine.

  Nick had been into golf ever since his last stay in prison. He’d read a book from the prison library about Lee Trevino and decided he wanted to learn the game. These days he did most of his dealing at the driving range just so he could work on his swing between transactions.

  Nick said something to the brothers and made a swinging motion with an invisible club. Both of the men laughed in a friendly way. They were dressed alike—khaki pants and bright golf shirts: one pink, the other mint green. The brother in the green shirt also wore his pant cuffs a little too high. I could see that he wasn’t wearing any socks with his loafers. The tops of his swollen feet were sunburned.

  Nick handed the tickets to the sockless fellow, and the other one handed Nick a white envelope.

  Dewey slid over beside me and took a peek out the window.

  “Are those tickets real?” I asked him.

  Dewey scratched at his chin. He looked like he was trying to figure his yardage on an approach shot. “It’s highly unlikely,” he said. “At least based on what I saw last year.”

  “You mean he’s done this before?”

  “Yeah, he knows a guy up in Hiawassee who stole some plates from the ticket company. He does the printing, and Nick handles the distribution for him. They made about three grand last year selling these things. That’s a nice spike in the yearly income.”

  “Well, what about the pot? Doesn’t he make enough on that?”

  Dewey groaned and shook his head. “It’s getting harder these days, bud. Between the cops, the cocaine, and the competition, Nick has to work his ass off. I tell you, I worry about him sometimes. I’m afraid he’s spreading himself too thin.”

  This wasn’t the sort of news I’d wanted to hear about the profession I was considering. While I was aware of the incarceration risks, I didn’t know about the competition and the shitty hours. Nick’s “good citizen of the world” speech was looking better all the time.

  Dewey glanced over at Bev to make sure that she wasn’t listening, then he leaned in close to me. “I hear him talking more and more about getting out. Going fucking legit. That’s what this whole broadcasting thing’s about.”

  “Well, what about Bev? She doesn’t sound too high on the prospects.”

  “She could be a problem,” he said. “She likes to pull the damn strings. She ain’t gonna like it if he does.”

  5

  While Puss ‘n Booze might not have been a traditional sort of wedding band, Britney and Walter were not exactly your traditional bride and groom. Like the rest of their wedding party, they were dressed as if they’d just arrived from Sturgis, all denim and leather and Sailor Jerry tattoos. The only thing setting the bride and groom apart from their fellow revelers was headwear. Britney had chosen to don a black veil for the occasion while Walter wore a houndstooth fedora, or as he called it, “my Bear Bryant lid.”

  According to Nick, their marriage might not have even been legal, seeing how the ceremony was performed earlier in the day by another of Nick’s and Walter’s former prison mates. The minister in question was currently wanted in Alabama on charges of mail fraud stemming from a phony evangelical association for which he’d been collecting donations. To make things even stickier, Britney’s divorce from her first husband hadn’t yet been finalized. In fact, Nick wasn’t even sure if any papers had been filed.

  “It is one goddamn tangled web,” Nick said as we lugged his amp in from the van.

  Whatever troubles might lay in their future—and it was hard to imagine their future being without its share of problems—I don’t think Walter and Britney ever regretted hiring Puss ‘n Booze to play their wedding party. Nick and the band performed two sets—really loud ones—and Bev nearly tumbled out of her halter top a half dozen times while she strutted and stomped around the little bandstand that was tucked into a corner of the hotel’s banquet hall.

  The band played pretty much whatever they wanted to play and ignored all requests. That meant plenty of Stones tunes (“before Mick went disco,” as Dewey liked to say) as well as some blues numbers, like “Stormy Monday,” so that Nick could show off his slide skills. They played “Calling Dr. Love” and “Gimme Three Steps” and “Hair of the Dog” just so Bev could change the lyrics from sonuvabitch to motherfucking sonuvabitch. I can honestly say that I have never met anyone who derived such pure pleasure out of profanity as Bev.

  I think that most people kept their eyes on Bev, even when she wasn’t singing in that raspy snarl of hers. She’d be standing there at the mike while Nick played a solo, shucking her shoulders and slithering to Carlton’s unsure groove, making kissy faces to the biker guys down front and basically winning over everyone in the room.

  It turned out Carlton wasn’t half bad with his volume down low. He’d scattered cheat sheets atop his amp to help steer him through certain bridges and solos. Nevertheless, he struggled on a few songs, most notably “Heartbreaker.” After he took a wrong turn during the guitar solo, Dewey flung a drumstick through the air and hit him upside the head. Some of the guys down front laughed, but Carlton looked like he wanted to cry.

  I stood in the back of the banquet hall near the cash bar. Nick had supplied me with a Nikon camera of unknown origin and instructed me to shoot two rolls of the band.

  “You might wanna get me leaping off the stage during ‘Strangle-hold.’ I always do that right before my solo. But wait until I kick my leg in the air.”

  Since the bandstand was only two feet high, I lay on the floor and shot upward as Nick took flight. When we got the pictures back from the photo shop, he looked like he had some serious hop in his boots.

  My other job was to keep everyone backed up in the beverage department. Bev downed four screwdrivers over the course of two sets, and Nick drank five Heinekens, using one of the empties to play slide. Carlton must have realized he had no business drinking and playing bass, seeing how he stuck with Sprite and grenadine. As for Dewey, I quickly lost count of his Jack-and-Coke tally. Finally, during the second set, the bartender sent me to the stage with a fifth of Jack, a six-pack of Cokes, and an ice bucket
. Dewey casually saluted the guy with one of his drumsticks.

  The band closed the evening with a slow song, giving Walter and Brit a chance to nuzzle amid their sea of well-wishers. Nick pulled his acoustic off its stand and started strumming softly. Bev introduced the number in her best whiskey-glass voice.

  “We wanna congratulate you motherfuckers on getting married.”

  A cheer went up. A guy at a back table squealed, “Owwww!” He was bleary-eyed and disheveled, teetering back and forth in his boots, trying his damndest to flick the cigarette lighter held above his head.

  “We just want Walter to promise us one thing,” Bev said.

  A lone voice down front called back to her: “What is it, sugar?”

  “When the time comes to give that first taste of loving,” she said. “When the time is nigh and poor old Brit has to lay there and take one for the team, we want you to remember this, Walter. Because if you don’t, I’m gonna come back down here and put my boot halfway up your sorry ass.”

  The crowd went nuts. The best man even bent over and offered his backside to Bev. And with that, she started singing the opening verse of “Try a Little Tenderness.” It might not have qualified as a touching moment, but it certainly proved that Puss ‘n Booze had some versatility. Walter pulled Britney into his chest and held her tight, standing in place, swaying to the music. Brit was crying, dabbing her eyes with a cocktail napkin while Walter rubbed his hand across her ass and chewed on her shoulder.

  The parking lot was shiny and wet, the van sitting right where we’d left it, draped in a salty, artificial light. I loaded all of the equipment by myself while Nick and the band carried the party up to a hotel room with some of the wedding group. By the time I finished packing the van, my head started to ache again from the concussion.

  I slid the keys into the ignition and turned on the radio. For some reason I left it on a country station. Johnny Cash was singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and it made me think of Claudia cruising down I-95 with Charlie.