. "I left my wallet in the car," she said. Her voice sounded -Brittle and too loud in her own ears. "Would you get it for me... ? Clark?"
She looked at him, lips smiling, eyes locked on his with complete concentration. She had read, probably in some shit-intensive woman's magazine while waiting to get her hair done, that when you lived with the same man for ten or twenty years, you forged a low-grade telepathic link with your partner. This link, the article went on to suggest, came in mighty handy when your hubby was bringing the boss home to dinner without phoning ahead or when you wanted him to bring a bottle of Amaretto from the liquor store and a carton of whipping cream from the supermarket. Now she tried -- tried with all her might -- to send a far more important message.
Go, Clark. Please go. I'll give you ten seconds, and then come on the run. And if you're not in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition, I have a feeling we could be seriously f**ked here.
And at the same time, a deeper Mary was saying timidly: This is all a dream, isn't it? I mean... it is, isn't it?
Clark was looking at her carefully, his eyes watering from the tweak she had given him... but at least he wasn't complaining about it. His eyes shifted to the redhead and the short-order cook for a moment, saw they were still deep in their own conversation (now she appeared to be the one who was telling a joke), and then shifted back to her.
"It might have slid under the seat," she said in her too-loud, too-brittle voice before he could reply. "It's the red one."
After another moment of silence -- one that seemed to last forever -- Clark nodded slightly. "Okay," he said, and she could have blessed him for his nicely normal tone, "but no fair stealing my pie while I'm gone."
"Just get back before I finish mine and you'll be okay," she said, and tucked a forkful of cherry pie into her mouth. It had absolutely no taste at all to her, but she smiled. God, yes. Smiled like the Miss New York Apple Queen she had once been.
Clark started to get off his stool, and then, from somewhere outside, came a series of amplified guitar chops -- not chords but only open strums. Clark jerked, and Mary shot out one hand to clutch his arm. Her heart, which had been slowing down, broke into that nasty, scary sprint again.
The redhead and the cook -- even the younger waitress, who, thankfully, didn't look like anyone famous -- glanced casually toward the plate-glass windows of the Rock-a-Boogie.
"Don't let it get you, hon," the redhead said. "They're just startin to tune up for the concert tonight."
"That's right," the short-order cook said. He regarded Mary with his drop-dead blue eyes. "We have a concert here in town most every night."
Yes, Mary thought. Of course. Of course you do.
A voice both toneless and godlike rolled across from the town common, a voice almost loud enough to rattle the windows. Mary, who had been to her share of rock shows, was able to place it in a clear context at once -- it called up images of bored, long-haired roadies strolling around the stage before the lights went down, picking their way with easy grace between the forests of amps and mikes, kneeling every now and then to patch two power-cords together.
"Test!" this voice cried. "Test-one, test-one, test-one!"
Another guitar chop, still not a chord but close this time. Then a drum-run. Then a fast trumpet riff lifted from the chorus of "Instant Karma," accompanied by a light rumble of bongos. CONCERT TONIGHT, the Norman Rockwell sign over the Norman Rockwell town common had said, and Mary, who had grown up in Elmira, New York, had been to quite a few free concerts-on-the-green as a child. Those really had been Norman Rockwell concerts, with the band (made up of guys wearing their Volunteer Fire Department kit in lieu of the band uniforms they couldn't afford) tootling their way through slightly off-key Sousa marches and the local Barber Shop Quartet (Plus Two) harmonizing on things like "Shenandoah" and "I've Got a Gal from Kalama-zoo."
She had an idea that the concerts in Rock and Roll Heaven might be quite different from those childhood musicales where she and her friends had run around waving sparklers as twilight drew on for night.
She had an idea that these concerts-on-the-green might be closer to Goya than to Rockwell.
"I'll go get your wallet," he said. "Enjoy your pie."
"Thank you, Clark." She put another tasteless forkful of pie in her mouth and watched him head for the door. He walked in an exaggerated slow-motion saunter that struck her feverish eye as absurd and somehow horrid: / don't have the slightest idea that I'm sharing this room with a couple of famous corpses, Clark's ambling, sauntering stride was saying. What, me worry?
Hurry up! she wanted to scream. Forget about the gunslinger strut and move your ass!
The bell jingled and the door opened as Clark reached for the knob, and two more dead Texans came in. The one wearing the dark glasses was Roy Orbison. The one wearing the hornrims was Buddy Holly.