All Tomorrow's Parties

24. TWO LIGHTS ON BEHIND

THEY found a dark place that felt as though it hung out beyond where the bridge's handrails would've been. Not a very deep space, but long, the bar along the bridge side and the opposite all mismatched windows, looking south, past the piers, to China Basin. The panes were filthy, patched into their mullions with yellowing translucent gobs of silicone.

Creedmore in the meantime had become startlingly lucid, really positively cordial, introducing his companion, the fleshy man, as Randall James Branch Cabell Shoats, from Mobile, Alabama. Shoats was a session guitarist, Creedmore said, in Nashville and elsewhere.

'Pleased to meet you, said Rydell. Shoats' grip was cool and dry arid very soft but studded with concise, rock-hard calluses, so that his hand felt to Rydell like a kid glove set with rough garnets.

'Any friend of Buell's, Shoats said, with no apparent irony.

Rydell looked at Creedmore and wondered what trough or plateau of brain chemistry the man was currently traversing and how long it would be until he decided to alter it.

'I have to thank you for what you did back there, Buell, Rydell said, because it was true. It was also true that Rydell wasn't sure you could say Creedmore had done it so much as been it, but the way things had worked out, it looked as though Creedmore and Shoats had happened along at exactly the right time, although Rydell's own Lucky Dragon experience suggested to him that it was far from over.

'Sons of bitches, Creedmore said, as if commenting generally on the texture of things.

Rydell ordered a round of beer. 'Listen, Buell, Rydell said, 'it's possible they'll come looking for us, 'cause of what happened.

'Why the fuck? We're here, them sons of bitches back there.

'Well, Buell, Rydell said, pretending to himself he was having to explain this to a stubborn and willfully obtuse six-year-old, 'I'd just picked up this package here, before we had us our little argument, and then you poked the security man in the gut. He won't be too happy about it, and chances are he'll recall that I was carrying this package. Big GlobEx logo here see? So he can look in the GlobEx records and get video of me, voiceprint, whatever, and give it to the police.

'The police? Sunbitch wants to make trouble we give it to 'im, right?

'No, said Rydell, 'that won't help.

'Well, then, said Creedmore, resting his hand on Rydell's shoulder, 'we'll come see you till you're out.

'Well, no, Buell, Rydell said, shrugging off the hand. 'I don't think he'll bother much about the police. More he'll want to find out who we work for and if he could sue us and win.

'Sue you?

'Us.

'Huh, said Creedmore, absorbing this. 'You in an ugly place.

'Maybe not, said Rydell. 'Matter of witnesses.

'I hear you, said Randy Shoats, 'but I'd have to talk to my label, see what the lawyers say.

'Your label, said Rydell.

'That's right.

Their beer arrived, brown long necks. Rydell took a sip of his. 'Is Creedmore on your label?

'No, said Randy Shoats.

Creedmore looked from Shoats to Rydell, back to Shoats. 'All I did was poke him one, Randy. I didn't know it had anything to do with our deal.

'It doesn't, said Shoats, 'long as you're able to go into the studio and record.

'Goddamn, Rydell, said Creedmore, 'I don't need you comin' in here and fucking things up this way.

Rydell, who was fumbling under the table with his duffel, getting the fanny pack out and opening it, looked at Creedmore but didn't say anything. He felt the Kraton grips of the ceramic switchblade. 'You boys excuse me, Rydell said, 'I've gotta find the can. He stood up, with the GlobEx box under his arm and the knife in his pocket and went to ask the waitress where the Men's was.

For the second time that day, he found himself seated in but not using a toilet stall, this one considerably more odorous than the last. The plumbing out here was as makeshift as any he'd seen, with bundles of scummy-looking transparent tubing snaking everywhere, and NoCal NOT POTABLE stickers peeling off above the sink taps.

He took the knife out of his pocket and pressed the button, watching the black blade swing out and lock. Then he pressed it again, unlocking the blade, closed it, and opened it again. What was it about switchblades, he wondered, that made you do that? He figured that that was a big part of what made people want them in the first place, something psychological but dumb, monkey-brained. Actually they were kind of pointless, he thought, except in terms of simple convenience. Kids liked them because they looked dramatic, but if somebody saw you open one, then they knew you had a knife, and they'd either run or kick your ass or shoot you, depending on how they felt about it and how they happened to be armed. He supposed there could be very specific situations in which you could just click one open and stick somebody with it, but he didn't think they'd be too frequent.

He had the GlobEx box across his lap. Gingerly, remembering how he'd cut himself back in LA, he used the tip of the blade to slit the gray tape. It went through the stuff like a wire through butter. When he got it to the point where he thought he'd be able to open it, he cautiously folded the knife and put it away. Then he lifted the lid.

At first he thought he was looking at a thermos bottle, one of those expensive brushed-stainless numbers, but as he lifted it out, the heft of it and the general fineness of manufacture told him it was something else.

He turned the thing over, finding an inset rectangular section with a cluster of micro-sockets, but nothing else except a slightly scuffed blue sticker that said FAMOUS ASPECT. He shook it. It neither sloshed nor rattled. Felt solid, and there was no visible lid or other way to open it. He wondered about something like that going through customs, how the GlobEx brokers could explain what it was, whatever that was, and not something full of some kind of contraband. He could think of a dozen kinds of contraband you could stick in something this size and do pretty well if you got it here from Tokyo.

Maybe it did contain drugs, he thought, or something else, and he was being set up. Maybe they'd kick the stall's door in any second and handcuff him for trafficking in proscribed fetal tissue or something

He sat there. Nothing happened.

He lay the thing across his lap and searched through the fitted foam packing for any message, any clue, something that might explain what this was. But there was nothing, so he put the thing back in its box, exited the stall, washed his hands in non-potable bridge water, and left, intending to leave the bar, and Creedmore and Shoats in it, when he'd picked up his bag, which he'd left them minding.

Now he saw that the woman, that Maryalice, the one from breakfast, had joined them, and that Shoats had found a guitar somewhere, a scuffed old thing with what looked like masking tape patching a long crack down the front. Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.

Creedmore was hunched forward, watching, his wet-look streaked-blonde hair gleaming in the bar gloom, and Rydell saw a look there, an exposed hunger, that made him feel funny, like he was seeing Creedmore want something through the wall of shit he kept up around himself. It made Creedmore seem suddenly very human, and that somehow made him even less attractive.

Now Shoats, absently, produced what looked like the top of an old-fashioned tube of lipstick from his shirt pocket and began to play, using the gold metal tube as a slide. The sounds he coaxed from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as surely as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sounded the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Rydell think of tricks with glass rods and the skins of cats. Somewhere inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something gorgeously, nastily tight was being figured out.

The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had gone absolutely silent under the scraping, looping expressions of Shoats' guitar, and then Creedmore began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like.

And Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his baby.

How the red light was his mind.