Sway Page 2

  Charlie emerged from a hallway off to the side. He turned to Bobby with a kind of disgusted shrug, his hands crossed before his waist. Under his arm, pressed to his side, he had what looked like a rolled-up extension cord.

  “Not what you thought,” he said.

  He turned and walked into the living room, his hair covering his face. In the faint light coming in through the picture window, the furniture looked strangely abandoned.

  “What is this?” Bobby said.

  “I told you that already. It’s a friend’s house.”

  “What friend?”

  “Right now it’s just a house. It’s just here. What difference does it make whose house it is?”

  He sat down in a padded armchair, putting the extension cord down on the coffee table before him. The sack was on the floor at his feet, hidden from Bobby’s view, and he reached down into it, rattling the paper. He brought out a can of beer and offered it to Bobby with an upturned, cupped hand.

  “You knew something like this was going to happen, didn’t you?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what this is.”

  “This is kind of like the experiment where you break into someone’s house in broad daylight and decide whether or not you can handle it.”

  Bobby looked back to the kitchen door. It was still partly open, sunlight brightening the little curtain in front of the windowpane, a bleached pattern of inkblots on pink fabric. In the living room, Charlie looked almost like a doll, dwarfed slightly by the overstuffed chair. He was small, only five and half feet tall, and yet the dark room seemed to gather itself around him, as if habituated to his occasional presence.

  “You came all this way, you might as well have a seat for a minute,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you here. Just trust me for a minute.”

  Bobby was still in the kitchen. He looked down at the floor — linoleum with a pattern like Mexican tiles, the shapes fixed and identical, like bored eyes. Charlie pushed the beer to the far edge of the coffee table, toward him. Then he sat back, one of his elbows on the armrest, his fist beneath his chin, and Bobby stepped into the living room, sitting down on the floor, bringing his knees to his chest, looking down at the carpet as if being careful.

  They were friends, Bobby had always thought. They played music together and rode motorcycles and drank beer, slipping off with the girls, and usually after a few days Bobby would leave. Other people came to Charlie as if he were a visionary, some sort of guru, but to Bobby he was another musician, someone with connections. He knew the Beach Boys, Neil Young, a man named Terry Melcher who produced the Byrds. The music they played together was coiling and improvisatory, a current that Bobby helped guide, leaning in toward Charlie to hear his voice, a controlled presence next to Charlie’s endless wandering. They were going to make a record together, that was the plan, but it never seemed to happen. There was another Charlie who didn’t care about plans, cynical and distant, and it was this Charlie, oddly, whom you could most easily imagine becoming a star, swaying the crowd like a revivalist preacher, fully believing in his act until the moment it was over. This was the Charlie who always kept a special eye on Bobby, aroused and suspicious. He seemed to anticipate Bobby’s thoughts, to always find them a little disappointing, evidence of squandered potential, close but never quite there. There was something compelling about dodging Charlie’s moods. It was one of the reasons Bobby kept coming back, one of the main reasons. Sometimes a frightened daze would overcome him in Charlie’s presence, but even the daze had an adrenaline sheen that felt almost like self-confidence.

  They sat there for several minutes, neither of them talking. Bobby looked at the room, the pictures of family members on the walls, or what he assumed were family members. There was a middle-aged woman, her hair pinned back above her head, smiling behind cat-eye glasses with black frames. Her husband was off to the side, almost cut off at the edge, a man with thick creases in his face and a striped tie loosened around his neck. There were pictures of their two grown daughters: in their graduation gowns, separately, and gathered with their mother around a platter of food on the back patio. On the wall opposite the window was a crucifix and a print of an angel. There was an oil painting of a girl in the woods being serenaded by a man with a lute.

  “We shouldn’t leave that car sitting out there much longer,” Charlie said. “We need to get it out of here. You’re going to need to make a choice about that.”

  He sat back in the chair with his hands on the arms, his elbows a little cocked, like someone posing in an old photograph. The brown carpet stretched across the living room toward the opening into the hallway. Its nap had been brushed back in swatches by a vacuum cleaner.

  “I don’t know who lives here,” Charlie said. “It doesn’t matter — we’re not here to hurt them. I don’t know anything about them other than the fact that they live in this house and they wouldn’t want us to be here. That’s why we have to be here.”

  He smiled, a fatherly smile, almost helpless. It was full of a skeptical candor, as if he knew that no matter how hard he tried to communicate what he was about to say he wouldn’t be understood.

  “Those people at the ranch, they all come from places like this,” he said. “I think you know what I’m talking about. It does something to them, I don’t know what. They never stop struggling with it, even after they leave. It’s like they have to hurt somebody or hurt themselves, it doesn’t matter which sometimes.”

  Bobby turned his head and looked at him. “I don’t want anything to do with your little private army back there,” he said. “And if this is about Kitty, then all I can tell you is she’s yours, fine, she’s your fucking zombie.”

  Charlie looked down at the coffee table. “This has nothing to do with Kitty. I already told you that. This has to do with you now. How you’re any different from those people back there, all those boys, those girls, the zombies, if that’s what you want to call them.”

  There was some shift in the room’s shadows that a moment later didn’t seem to be a shift at all, just a deeper stillness. Time and space — these were favorite subjects of Charlie’s, the prison of time and space, the way the mind was always desperate to escape from that prison. He leaned forward in his chair, sizing up Bobby’s face, his thumb moving across his beard, his breath filling the air between them, staring at Bobby like an opponent.

  What did Bobby suppose made him any different from those people out at the ranch, he asked again. How was Bobby any different from those people out there who were just waiting for some sign or some change that never came? Did he want to put himself above them? Did he want to be a star like Elvis maybe, or like Sonny and Cher — or maybe he wanted to be something more serious than that, a rebel, a criminal, Jack the Ripper maybe, or Jesse James. But what did Bobby want really, and did he even know, and why did he just keep drifting around, never asking himself these questions?

  Charlie leaned back into his chair, his face in shadow. “Those people at the ranch are my people,” he said. “You need to remember that from now on. They’re not yours, they’re mine. You can’t just keep treating them the way you treat yourself, like it’s all just a game or a waste of time.”

  He raised one of his hands, as if to pluck something small from the air, then did the same with the other hand. “Moving a piano, making a few bucks like that,” he said. “One moment, the next moment — that’s who you are after a while, all those little moments. They’re not something you can just go back and change. They’re like rooms. They stay there after you leave.”

  Bobby tilted his head back toward the ceiling, his eyes closed. “If you wanted me to leave, all you had to do was say ‘leave.’ ”

  “I don’t want you to leave. I wouldn’t have brought you all the way over here if I wanted you to leave. I want you stay there, if you want to stay there.”

  He steepled his hands beneath his chin. His hair was falling into one of his eyes, but his impatient, put-upon gaze was absolutely still.


  “I’ll do this for you this time, if that’s what you want. I’ve done this plenty of times and it’s very simple. One of us has to go move the car. The other one of us is going to stay here and meet these people, take some money off them, whatever. I don’t have much else in mind, do you? You tell me what you want.”

  Bobby shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you’re just like I used to be. All wrapped up in yourself, not seeing anyone else very clearly.”

  “I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.”

  Charlie reached into his pants pocket and held the car keys out in his hand. He dangled them in front of his face, staring at Bobby, then held them out in his extended palm, just above his knee, the pose somehow biblical, deliberately so.

  “I don’t want to keep you here,” he said. “If you want to leave, then maybe you should leave. You do whatever makes you feel comfortable. This is an easy one. This is almost like practice.”

  “Practice for what?”

  He wanted to be taken seriously. He wanted to be different from those people at the ranch, but he couldn’t even sit there in an empty house without being cowed by his own thoughts. Maybe he was the kind of person who spent his whole life sleepwalking, daydreaming, barely scraping by, never going too far or pushing very hard. Or maybe there was more to him than that. Maybe he could think of just one thing he’d ever done that would show there was more to him than that.

  They were Charlie’s words, not Bobby’s. They were Charlie’s words in Bobby’s ears, Bobby’s mind, shared words. It didn’t matter after a while whose words they were.

  Charlie left the keys on the table. Then he sat back in the chair, slouched a little, one foot up on the table’s edge. The light through the window was a wedge of moving dust, a field of rays that rotated and shone. Outside was the car, parked in front of a neat yard with a low chain-link fence. Everything on the other side of the window was still, brightly colored, like a slide lit up by a projector.

  “None of this is too complicated,” Charlie said. “I’m just telling you some basic things you knew all along.”

  He worked one of his hands into the pocket at the side of his denim jacket and pulled out a balled-up wad of fabric. He shook it out in his hand — it was a black nylon stocking — and laid it out on the table next to the extension cord.

  “Maybe you should go outside for a little while and think about it,” he said. “Take a little walk, get a breath of fresh air. I’ll stay here for a minute.”

  Bobby shook his head. “You’re serious.”

  “Of course I’m serious. These people who live here, I don’t know what they mean to you, why they matter so much. They don’t think, they don’t know anything they haven’t been taught by someone else. You’d just be showing them another side of things for a few minutes. Just like what Kitty did for you yesterday. You and your little gun.”

  It turned out that all along Charlie had had it in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket. It was the same gun from yesterday, the .38 with the wooden grip splintered on one side. He worked it slowly out from beneath his jacket, tugging with his right hand, then set it down on the table beside the extension cord and the stocking.

  Bobby looked down at his hand, his fingers on the carpet, not quite seeing them, lulled for a moment like a child. He looked at the things on the table. When he finally stood up and walked toward the kitchen door, the walking had as little to do with his body as if he were dreaming it. There was the kitchen — the telephone, the notepad, the ceramic cat. There was the door with its inkblot curtain. Outside, in the backyard, was the afternoon sunlight, flashbulb white and then a widening yellow haze.

  There was nowhere left to go. Malibu, Topanga, Mendocino, Big Sur — in the last year, Bobby had crossed these places off one by one as overcrowded, menaced by cops. It was the war in Vietnam — the war had somehow permeated everything, even things that had no relation to the war itself. It made everyone feel like fugitives, wary of the same people they would have looked to as friends just a year before. It was why Bobby had kept moving, sleeping in the bed of his truck or on someone’s floor, fixing up old cars and trying to sell them, bartering, helping out on drug deals. He had been trying to stay out of the war, but the war kept following him in its different forms. It was what made places like the ranch so confusing — dreamy but combative, childlike but also desolate.

  They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn’t do that they wanted to put you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth — it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves at all they’d learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home.

  He stopped walking and looked again at the houses. Sidewalks, fences, lawns. It was a dead world. There was no point in pretending it wasn’t, or that he could go back to it and find anything there but emptiness. What was he afraid of? What was Charlie asking him to do that he didn’t already believe in, even if he’d never had the courage to really imagine it?

  He thought of the pictures on the living room wall — the woman in her cat-eye glasses, the man’s loosened tie. He saw them coming home, turning to find the stranger sitting in their living room. It would all become a paradise then — the living room, the kitchen, the star-shaped clock above the sofa. It would all become something precious he was about to take away, had already taken away, just by being there.

  But what did they mean to him? And what would they think if they’d seen him on the street some afternoon, driving a beat-up pickup truck with a broken piano in the back?

  To live inside Charlie’s skin. To be empowered by fear, to use it like a tool. To go back to the ranch as someone transformed, not the pretty boy you had a crush on in high school, not a musician or another lost soul, but a harder, truer soul he had always known was waiting there inside him.

  He turned and walked up the sidewalk toward the gravel yard. The house was a living thing now, the watchful center of the empty neighborhood. He thought of the man and woman who lived there, and he had a sense that they were all bound by something he had never been aware of and had no name for. It made him sick to feel them inside him now, pulsing like the blood in the veins of his throat.

  ROCK AND ROLL, 1962

  IN THE SMALL ROOM, two guitars surge in and out in chaotic alternation, an amplified noise that seems to revolve. It’s on a dilapidated street in London, called Edith Grove, in the southernmost part of Chelsea. It is the coldest winter there in a hundred years.

  The flat has mold on the walls. Its gray paint is blistered and chipped, the carpet flaked with bread crusts. For now, the singer, Mick, can only sit and watch. The other two, Brian and Keith, are learning their parts from a record player, blankets over their legs. Their hands are cold and they play intermittently, nodding in silence when it starts to work.

  The room feels as cold as it is outside. The radiator is silent, dented, its paint scabbed. To set it pinging they have to feed the gas meter with coins they don’t have and even then the result is only disappointment.

  Brian has shiny blond hair and accusatory eyes. He is the only one who can be called handsome, though his neck is thick and he is short, almost stocky. He is the leader — it is his band, he came up with the name. He stares at Mick and plays seven notes on his guitar with a bent note in the middle. The message is something lik
e You are tolerated for now, but only tolerated. Brian is two years older than the others, twenty-one, and he is already the father of two illegitimate children.

  Mick blows smoke, and his hand travels up to the collar of his bathrobe, affecting disdain. His ugliness is eye-catching; in his movements there is a patient strategy. He is a student at the London School of Economics, still hedging his bets. He can leave here at any time and end up slightly better off than his father, who is a physical education teacher in Dartford. But he is also the only one of the three who has ever performed in public, singing every Tuesday night in Ealing with another band.

  Keith raises his chin, and he and Brian start in on an American song called “Carol.” They trade leads and the two-string vamp of the rhythm part. Keith is gangly, ridiculous. He is still a little in awe of Brian. He makes cutting remarks under his breath, and he sometimes snaps to with a belligerent grin and grabs someone’s nipple and twists. He knows every lick from every Chuck Berry record ever made, an indication of how much time he’s spent alone.

  They have a groove going now. It’s impossible to say who is leading whom. Brian plays with his eyes closed, head bowed, his blond bangs falling almost over his eyebrows. Keith’s style is more aggressive, more rhythmic, his crossed legs moving with the beat. Mick is tapping his knees and bobbing his head with his eyes closed too. His chief talent for now is a lack of embarrassment. He starts singing in a voice that is not his own, a lucky stroke of mimicry. It is part Cockney, part black American, and though neither half is authentic, the mix is somehow a joining of strengths.

  They come from quiet towns and near suburbs, terraced houses thrown up in the aftermath of German bombs. Places you don’t see until you leave them, and why would you want to leave them, the same roses on the same trellises?