The End of Music Read online

  “The album again, and the unreleased tracks. Just for the audience that’s there. There’s a buzz in the community.”

  “What community?”

  He launches into his argument, setting it up with the story of Colin’s fall, the money troubles, the van crapping out. How circumstances cheated the band and incited the decline.

  “That’s not what happened,” says Leah, interrupting him. “We were playing great back then. We could always play.”

  “The point is that none of these details or how you remember it or I remember it, none of it matters. Because it’s not our music anyway.”

  “A song about my dead sister and her mental breakdowns? I’m pretty sure that’s mine.”

  “We changed the name.”

  “From Clara to Callie. You think nobody knew? You think she didn’t know? The way you kept leaning on me to finish that song. I said it was a bad idea, and you just leaned on me until we did it.”

  Carter won’t rise to this. “It’s not ours. It belongs to that woman I told you about, who saw me on the plane.” Melissa Ryan’s grip on his bare arm. Her hair and red throat. It prompts a stirring in his crotch, and he marvels at this boyish moment, his dick defiant, rushing ahead against his wishes. “Everyone like her. We have to honour those memories. I mean…”

  “Honour the memories? Like the time you locked me in the house for a week?”

  “We locked both of us up, to finish writing the album.”

  “Right. Except you took my key, and warned me not to go anywhere. Not even for a walk.”

  “We both agreed to it. For the music.”

  “You took my key. You hid it from me.”

  Maybe she’s not so different from Will. Looking to settle scores. The cellophane crackles as Leah pulls a jar from the basket. “Would you mind?” she says. It’s the green one. Carter twists the lid until it pops. When he hands it back, she has produced a spoon from somewhere. He watches her lift a dab of green and lay it on her tongue.

  “You’re not being reasonable, Lee. I mean, this is a lot of strain for you right now—”

  “Oh, fuck off,” she says quietly. “Just…” She holds up a palm and tilts her head back to rest on the pillow. Closes her eyes.

  “There might be a little money in it. You could use the cash. We all could.”

  “Those kids at our shows.” She lifts and shakes her head as if waking, and goes in for another green spoonful. “They had to grow up too, I guess. Or maybe they stay like that their whole life? Weirdos and loners.”

  “Maybe we helped them grow up.”

  “Sad little kids. Lonely and confused and horny. Like us.”

  “We helped them, I think. Gave them a place to be. Maybe we even helped them get laid.”

  “Not likely. But a few of them might have had a really nice wank after the show. I suppose that’s something.”

  //////

  “It’s bad,” says Carter, buckling his seatbelt. “It’s moving along quicker than anyone expected.”

  Isabelle pulls into traffic and turns to look at him, which she almost never does when she’s driving. “That’s a shame.”

  “It’s all about radiation and chemo and tumours. They’re targeting one in her shoulder. Then the bowel thing. A big rush of problems now.”

  He emailed Jordan while waiting for the car. Everything’s changing quick. She’s down to months, possibly weeks. When she’s gone, won’t Carter and Will make a majority, two out of three remaining band members? They’ll be in the clear. He’s pretty sure that’s the case. Jordan’s partner is looking into it.

  Within a few minutes they are cruising west on Eglington with relative ease, escaping Toronto in daylight, before rush hour. Sam falls asleep immediately, his head lolling against the door and wobbling with each bump.

  “We’re going to release the music again,” he says, confidence buoyed and dick still tingling in the wake of its unexpected half-boner.

  “Really?” Isabelle taps one fingernail repeatedly on the steering wheel.

  “Yeah. There’s potential, for sure. Licensing for movies and TV, that sort of thing.”

  “They want to see Sam again in the summer.”

  “What?”

  “Dr. Kim asked us to come back in June.”

  “I thought…” Carter tries to piece it together. “I thought today was routine.”

  “It was.”

  “But June is only…” He twists the rear-view mirror to get a look at Sam. Eyes closed and head dipping. He jerks his chin, fighting the sleep.

  “Dr. Kim is new. So.”

  “Is he young?”

  “She. Yes, she’s young and she’s new and she never saw Sam till today. We should be grateful. Do you know how hard it is to see a specialist?”

  “What did she hear?”

  “A little rush, she said.”

  “That’s not routine.”

  “A little rush in one valve. It’s there on his chart.”

  “Dr. Hurley never mentioned it.”

  “He did, way back. You just forgot.”

  “But he didn’t say ‘rush.’ That wasn’t the word.”

  “Carter! Christ, I don’t know. Rush, swish, whatever it is. I’m trying to listen to her, trying to follow it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to figure out what changed.”

  “Maybe nothing. It’s a new doctor. She can’t just read what the last guy gave her. She has to get in there and hear it for herself. So I don’t know.”

  “Well, we have to get a clear picture from her.”

  “There’s never a totally clear picture. There’s always…Next time you can be there and ask all the questions you want.”

  They drive silently, Isabelle merging left and left again as lanes consolidate and options narrow, pushing them west.

  “I’m just surprised,” says Carter. “Because Hurley used to say, maybe another year and we could stop coming. Maybe a final appointment.”

  “It’s a condition. It’s built into him. There is no final appointment.”

  //////

  The screen opens on the archaeology lab, and there’s music blaring, harsh and jangly over the little speaker. Carter knows the guitar riff, a little pleasure pill of F/D/F sharp/D sharp. Frantic tambourine and boxy drums. A man with a thick, swirling ridge of hair reaches offscreen to stop the music.

  “How’s everything in St. John’s,” shouts Terry.

  “February,” says the man on the screen. “Surviving.”

  “Snow day on Monday, eh?”

  “You can just talk normal,” says the man, his hand looming large as he adjusts his monitor. “I can hear you fine.”

  Terry turns the screen so that it faces Carter. “Say hello to Morris, one of our grad students back on the Rock,” he says. “Morris, this is Herbert.”

  “Hey,” says Carter.

  “Pleasure,” says Morris.

  “Herbert here might be on the dig with us this summer,” says Terry. “He’s from Gander.” He leans in so he and Carter both appear on camera. They’re Skyping from Terry’s office, which is overheated and crammed with books and papers.

  “So I have to tell you this one,” says Terry. “We’re right in the thick of it last summer. Hot as blazes. You never thought Newfoundland would get so hot. And it’s nothing but marsh and bog, and you know we’re all going to end up in it at some point. But it’s poor Morris every time! Four times he went down, and the rest of us dry as bone. A couple of weeks later his wife wakes him in the middle of the night and says, ‘Cripes, Morris, you’ve still got the smell of the bog on you.’ The heat must have baked it right into him.”

  Morris smiles, thin fingers adjusting his glasses. “I went down right up to here,” he says, laying a hand at his chest above a prominent belly.

&nbs
p; “Cataloguing today, Morris?”

  “That’s right.”

  Terry turns to Carter. “Every item from a dig has to be cleaned, photographed, measured, and assigned a catalogue number.”

  Morris lifts a clipboard and reads, “United States Air Force B-24 Liberator. Crashed on approach, 26 kilometres from Gander, February 14, 1945. All ten on board killed.”

  “So this was where we did well last summer,” says Terry.

  Morris pulls the switch to illuminate a floor lamp. He opens a locker and begins expertly identifying the scraps on the shelves. A throttle and gyroscope mount from the cockpit. A segment of fuselage lining patterned like honeycomb. It’s hard to see in the glare of the lamp.

  Terry flips open a second screen on his desk to show the Google Earth image of Gander and its surroundings. “Fourteen wrecks from World War Two. Here’s where we’re at.” He taps a red cross which is labelled B-24. Terry slides his finger around it. “Bog everywhere, as Morris can confirm.”

  Each cross has a label. Canso, Hurricane, A-20, Hudson, Lodestar.

  Morris belches loudly and excuses himself. Carter glimpses a trashcan spilling over with greasy takeout bags. Morris doesn’t look like a field-work guy, whereas Terry is born to it. Every inch the hunter and digger, built for cargo shorts and heavy boots, for hearty meals cooked on a Coleman stove and eaten from a rocky perch. Confined to civilization, Terry’s most vital energies are held in abeyance.

  “Where’s Arrow Air?” asks Carter.

  “Ah,” Terry pushes up his glasses. “That’s around the lake here. We stopped by to see the memorial. But there’s nothing for us to do there. You’re old enough to remember that one, I’d say.”

  “I was in high school,” says Carter. “It was…”He doesn’t want to say. It was thrilling, to be fifteen years old and have epic tragedy so close at hand. “It was crazy. The whole town was in shock, I guess. But we went to school, same as usual.” The boys in grade nine were giddy with news and rumour. Not just a big crash. A super-fucking-humongous DC-8 stuffed to the gills with American GIs. A fire? More like a fucking fireball, man, ripping right down to the lakeshore. Two hundred and fifty burning bodies. Not just burning. Incinerated. Like, even their dog tags melted. At lunchtime the boys streamed into the school parking lot to watch the black smoke rise and spread. It was just off the highway and not even as far as the old cemetery. Close enough to ride their bikes, and several boys declared they would do so after school, and never mind the slick December roads. Forget it, said Todd Philpot. The CIA will have it locked down. That night Carter’s father said the motels were booked up for miles with all the reporters come to town.

  “People there still talk about it, eh?” says Terry. “About conspiracies and cover-ups.”

  “The day it happened people were already saying it’s a bomb, it’s terrorists.” Todd Philpot had spoken of it with grim assurance, narrowing his eyes like Clint Eastwood. “This is heavy shit, boys. The heaviest. Welcome to the real fucking world, boys.”

  “In fairness to them, I think everyone knows the official report doesn’t hold up,” says Terry. “So it invites all kinds of wild speculation. But you have to be wary of that sort of thing in our line of work.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Letting your imagination run away with it. Getting sucked into the idea that you’re chasing a big secret. That only happens in the movies. You’ll find bits and pieces of people’s lives. But you have to resist the urge to fill in the gaps. We know only what we know.”

  People said the ground was still smouldering two days after the Arrow Air crash, hot enough to warm the feet of the men from Search and Rescue. They turned Hangar 21 into a morgue. Nicky Gill’s father did security detail there, and he said the remains they brought back were just the tiniest bags. People said some of the Search and Rescue boys never went back to work after. Some of them lost their marriages.

  Morris opens a small set of drawers and sets the laptop on a table behind him, half sideways. “Smaller items here. More personal.” He brings individual pieces to the screen. A house key, several buttons from U. S. Air Force jackets, and a tarnished lapel pin of silver wings. “Navigator’s wings. We’ve got a set of radio operator’s wings here somewhere too.”

  A large freezer bag holds pieces of parachute, its white nylon stained like a smoker’s fingers.

  “This is the kind of stuff we retrieve,” says Terry.

  Carter examines the Google Earth image again. The town is a grey-white blur, like a patch of overcast sky. He finds the main shopping square, with Alcock Crescent at one end and the patch of wood behind the old post office, where a girl was killed when Carter was a baby. He recalls the frowning, hairy-browed woman who came to see his mother once. There was a great fuss over the visit, with his mother changing in and out of her cardigan. He was shooed from the house as soon as the visitor arrived. It was his father who later revealed that the hairy-browed lady was mother to the boy who did the killing, and she hardly ever left her home anymore.

  “You should come along this summer,” says Terry. “Always a great crowd. Always good fun.”

  Carter has never been easy in the company of men. As a teenager he couldn’t master the knowing grin or internalize the banter, with its scatology and sodomy and sporty belligerence. Couldn’t lie convincingly about girls and lemon gin and the stains on the back seat of Dad’s car. In the end, he settled for being an outsider, slightly disdainful of the manly world. Leah was a good buffer against it during the band years. Carrying himself as a brooding artist helped maintain a distance as well.

  Morris tilts his laptop to show several lumps of iron laid out in plastic tubs, bathing in a bluish liquid.

  “Morris?” calls Terry. “Where are these from?”

  “Langdon crash,” calls Morris from behind his camera.

  “So this is from the same dig, last summer. The sodium hydroxide baths will clean these pieces for us. Takes six months, sometimes a year or more.”

  “Why is it called the Langdon crash?” asks Carter.

  “That was the pilot’s name. He has a grandson who is very interested. Contacted us from Minnesota. Several of the bodies were never found, and his grandfather is one of them. No remains whatsoever.”

  //////

  Joyce wants to Skype, according to Shanna, the nurse at Howley Park.

  I did a demonstration this morning during Coffee Time, she writes. It was a bit confusing for many of them. But Mrs. Carter was quite interested. She asked if we could use it to talk to you.

  Carter is also a bit confused by Skype. But he’s seen Terry do it, and Isabelle. He and Shanna settle on a morning, and after a couple of false starts, a naked pink face fills the screen.

  “Hi, Mr. Carter!” Shanna licks her upper lip with a slithery tongue, and the motion breaks her mouth into fragments. “Are you getting me okay?”

  “Yes. But you’re very close.” He’s never been so close to a face without kissing it. Her hazel eyes are huge, and one front tooth is set at an angle, creating a small black gap.

  “Sorry!” Shanna laughs and backs away. “Is that better?”

  “Yes. That’s good.”

  Even with distance, her gaze is discomfiting. Shanna’s face radiates childlike vigour. Her russet hair is chopped short around the ears, sprouting frosted tips at the crown.

  “I’m in your mother’s room now. Do you want to say hello, Joyce?”

  Carter expects some sort of introductory…something. But Shanna shifts aside, leaving him to look at a rosy blur of a bare wall. There is rustling and mumbling, and the screen darkens with his mother’s green fleecy. A glimpse of her small, leathery hand. Then her head appears, her small, sleepy eyes peering from a bloodless face.

  “Hello, Mom.”

  “Herbert. Well, isn’t this something.” Her eyelids flutter and she squints.
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br />   “Does the screen bother your eyes, Mom?”

  “No,” she says. Her voice is strong but out of sync, trailing behind her lips. Her hair is pulled back the way it should be. The picture brightens—perhaps Shanna has opened a blind—bringing out the red of her nose and the liver spots at her temples. She appears to have cold sores at both corners of her mouth.

  “I’m well,” she adds, before he can ask. “The jewelry box is gone. Someone’s after taking it. But you know, I don’t mind.”

  “I think we’ll find it, Joyce,” says Shanna, off camera. “We’re going to have a good look.”

  A hand rises and waves, making a blurry streak. “Nothing in it worth much anyway. Old cheap stuff.” Joyce smiles. “Is everyone well? Your wife and the little boy?”

  “They’re good. It’s too bad they’re not home to say hello. That’s where I am right now, you know. At home in Ontario. “

  “I know, my dear. That’s why I asked.” She’s chiding him gently. Before he can respond, she resumes talking. Her thoughts ramble in the way one expects of old people, mostly concerning the food, which she doesn’t mind, and the weather, which she does. She peers slightly to one side, as if there’s something over his shoulder. Her questions are ordinary and direct—health, happiness, career, the boy. How old? What’s he like? Where will he go to school? But Carter is unsettled by her clarity. This is not the ill-defined Joyce he saw two months ago. Her face bobs about and crumbles into pixels, but reassembles when she stays still for a few seconds.

  She asks him to fetch a picture of Sam and hold it up so she can get a good look.

  “Can’t you send it somehow? On the computer?”

  “You can email it to me,” says Shanna. “I’ll give you the address.”

  “What do you make of that nonsense some people are getting on with?” said Joyce. “About Canada. Got their head in the clouds.”

  Shanna leans in, showing half of her face. “Her and Mr. Johnson had a bit of a discussion the other day, about Confederation and how the vote went.”

  “That’s great, Mom. I thought you were never interested in all those old arguments.”

  “I’m not interested at all. Only you can’t let people talk nonsense. Someone’s got to set them straight. Do you recall how I poached eggs for you as a boy?”