55. Because the semester . .
Because the semester didn’t resume until Monday, I had nothing better to do on Friday morning than work on my paper, “T. S. Eliot, Father of the Blues.” After Brenda Stein mentioned it, I’d checked out a book of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories that included “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote;” though a delight to read, “Pierre Menard” was nothing like what I intended. I needed no further help than Brenda’s suggestion in any case. The essay seemed to sprout from my resentment like a tree growing up overnight from an avocado pit. My main concern was to polish the prose so it wouldn’t read as if written by a hick like me. The logic, or illogic, took care of itself. When I’d finished my morning’s writing, I spent an hour cleaning my apartment. Then I boiled myself a pan of weenies and sat down to consider what was left of my day.
I took my truck downtown, thinking I might drive to the mall later on to shop for a late Christmas present for Grace. As it turned out, though, I hit on what I wanted right away. An executive Scrabble set, bound in leather, was on sale in the window of a downtown office-supply store on O Street. I recalled watching The Goon eat one of Grace’s blanks, after other letters had skidded across the floor at Lederer’s, and happily wrote the check.
My bargain made, I felt thirsty, and drove around the corner toward P Street to get myself a beer. I found a place to park in front of Jerome Weld’s X-Cell Bookstore, and had just shut off the engine when Julia Stein came out of the store in the company of L. D. Langdon and Ted Kemp. The three of them failed to notice me; I followed at a distance as they rounded the corner. Instead of entering Casey’s after them, I crossed the street, passed a pawnshop with a drum set in the window, and went into a shabby bar across from the Trailways depot that was, for a short time, known as the Green Frog.
On the social scale of downtown bars, the Green Frog ranked right along with Bertie’s, where brain-damaged ambulance drivers played drunken games of shuffleboard on a slanted table. Though it sat halfway between Casey’s and Lebsack’s, I could almost always count on seeing not a soul I knew there. That was the attraction of the place. But my thirst for beer evaporated in dismay when the only other customers turned out to be the Tape Joke Brothers, McKinley and Shemansky. It was almost enough to send me back out into the cold. They were sitting with their heads together at a table near the back; they looked up nervously as I approached. “Hey,” Shemansky said feebly. “How’s my old office buddy?”
“Still around,” I said. “No thanks to you.”
“You gave a good report in Leonard’s class,” McKinley said. “At least it wasn’t boring. That’s more than I can say for most of them.”
“Unh hunh,” I said. I unzipped my flight jacket and sat down. “I’ve been thinking about you guys,” I said. “What I think I’m going to do is tie your peckers together and hang you off a bridge. There’s this nice old iron bridge over the trainyards west of town, where the locomotives’ll go under you and blow diesel smoke up your butts. You know the bridge I mean?”
“Neither of us has a car,” McKinley said apologetically, “so we haven’t seen all that much of Lincoln.”
“Neither of us has a car,” Shemansky repeated glumly.
“Not that it matters, since you’re not going to live long,” I said, “but do you drive?”
“We drive,” Shemansky said, “but neither of us has a car.”
“In fact,” McKinley said, “we were wondering if we could borrow yours.”
I was speechless. “You bastards’ve got nerve,” I said finally.
“We’re sorry we stole your tape,” McKinley said. “It was a terrible thing to do.”
“Terrible,” Shemansky said, nodding vigorously.
“Can we buy you a drink?” McKinley asked.
“You can buy me lots of drinks,” I said. “If you buy me drinks every time I see you, maybe I’ll stop thinking I’d like to see you dead. Right now I’d take a beer. What’s this about a car? I don’t drive a car anyway; I drive a pickup truck.”
“We have a gig in Carter Lake, Iowa,” McKinley said, “but we don’t have a way to get there.”
“We could take the bus,” Shemansky added, “but the ticket costs twenty dollars each way. That’s almost as much as we’re getting paid.”
I blinked. “A gig? You two are musicians?”
“It’s a way to make some extra money,” Shemansky said. “We’re tired of starving.”
“We play blues,” McKinley said. “He plays harmonica and keyboards, I play bass.”
“Good God,” I said. “I hope neither of you sings.”
“We’re playing here this weekend,” McKinley said. “Tonight and tomorrow. Tell your friends.”
“How much are they paying you?”
“Tips,” McKinley said.
“Tips,” Shemansky said.
I took McKinley’s money to the bar, since the waitress wasn’t budging. She looked as bad as Vi, the old Swede at Casey’s, only thirty years younger. I got a draft beer—flat, no foam—and sat back down. “Speaking of blues,” I said, “what did you think of the tape?”
“What tape?” Shemansky asked. I stared at him. “Oh,” he said. “That tape.”
“We didn’t listen to it,” McKinley said. “Too much noise on the tape. It was just a bunch of old ladies, right?”
“Idiots,” I said. I cradled my head in my hands. “If you only knew,” I said, “how much dope I had to smoke to get that tape cut—”
“Life is hard,” McKinley said sympathetically.
“That tape is a fucking blues encyclopedia,” I said. “I spent hours making that tape; I recorded ten times as much as I needed, just because the music was so fine. When can I have it back, please?”
“We, uh—” McKinley evaded my gaze.
“We don’t have it any more,” Shemansky said. “We gave it away.”
I blinked. “You gave my tape away? Gave it to whom?”
“We can’t tell you,” McKinley said.
“We gave it to an old bum,” Shemansky said. “Some guy we never saw before. We just gave it to him.”
“An old bum just in off the boxcars,” I said. “Did he have his tape player with him?”
“He said he had one at home,” Shemansky said. “He said he had one at his home in Memphis.”
“An old bum from Memphis, traveling through Lincoln in the middle of winter,” I said. “Taking a trip for his health, right? Come on, guys. Where’s the tape?”
“Gone,” McKinley said.
“Swallowed up,” Shemansky said grandly. “Dispersed like the cooking smoke of Mohenjo-Daro.”
“Don’t even think of getting it back,” McKinley said. “I’ll make you a tape of some sixties blues. Joe Cocker. James Taylor. Janis Joplin.”
“James Taylor!” I said. “Don’t bother. I don’t have a tape player anyway; I gave mine to an old bum from Memphis. He told me he’d gotten hold of a blues tape and didn’t have anything to play it on.” I drank off my flat beer and stood up. “Well, assholes. I’ve got an early date this evening, but maybe I’ll come and hear you later. You’d better get me that tape back, or you can forget about the truck.”
“You said you didn’t have a player,” McKinley complained.
“The wind that blows across that trainyards bridge would freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” I said. “Or two monkeys with their peckers tied together. I want my tape.”
“Can’t,” McKinley said. “It’s gone forever.”
“Lost,” Shemansky added sorrowfully. “Disappeared. Mohenjo-Daro.”
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