"That would be on my heart for the rest of my life," Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I'll not kill. Not that. Never that.
They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe's torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel 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