Red House Blues Read online

  Charles was pretty sure he’d screwed up and shouldn’t have come up those stairs. But if there was even a small chance Palmer would let him play that Strat - let him hold it even - he wasn’t going to back out. This opportunity dropped out of the sky right in front of him and he couldn’t let it go - wouldn’t go running home like a scared little nigga in the wrong part of town. Palmer would understand. He was a guitar man.

  So Charles pretended he fit right in, made a place for himself on the couch next to Walt. Palmer was spinning groups Charles hadn’t heard before, playing along with the records, embellishing here and there. Some of it he liked, some not. His friends in the neighborhood didn’t play much top forty. That was mostly white kids’ radio. He preferred the R and B sounds he heard around the house. But that Strat sure sounded fine whatever kind of music it was playing.

  Walt had his feet up on the coffee table and looked like he was sleeping except for his hand beating time on the arm of the couch. Ferlin just kept on smoking and passing the joint around to Palmer and then on to Charles, who hadn’t smoked hash before but wasn’t about to admit it. Hash was a white man’s pleasure. Kids he knew didn’t have that kind of money anyway. They popped pills or drank booze they filched from their folks. He watched the other men and did what they did. All the while aching to play that guitar.

  Palmer was toying with the kid. There was no mistaking the kid’s lust. It was a lust Palmer well understood. That kid could hardly contain himself. He was ready to piss his pants, that was plain to see. Palmer expected that at any moment he would get up and grab the Strat right out of his hands. But the kid was polite, he was contained. What gave the kid away was he couldn’t keep his fingers still. He was playing air guitar sitting right there on the couch, his fingers describing every chord as if he already cradled the Strat in his arms. It was love, pure and simple.

  He thought it might be time to put the poor kid out of his misery. One more toke and Palmer took the strap off over his head and held the Fender at arm’s length.

  “Okay, kid. Let’s hear what you got,” he said.

  Charles got up from the couch like a man bewitched and clasped the neck of the guitar with a slightly shaking hand. His own instrument, even when it had a full compliment of strings, was cheap trash. His second-hand amp sounded like an overturned bucket. The Strat was a real guitar, something he’d only seen on album covers and in his dreams.

  He positioned his fingers and strummed a few chords.

  “What the hell are you doing, man?” said Palmer. “You’re holding it all wrong. Let me show you.” He reached for the guitar. Walt let out a low chuckle from the couch. This might be fun after all.

  Charles backed up, holding the guitar close. “Hey, be cool,” he said. “I taught myself. Might not be the right way but I figured it out.”

  Charles launched into Duane Eddy’s “Forty Miles of Bad Road” just to show him. Palmer sat down hard next to Walt. “Holy shit,” he said under his breath. The kid could play, no doubt about that at all.

  That first night Charles played until Palmer had to practically pry the Strat out of his fingers. Then they all smoked a little more weed and listened to a garage tape Ferlin had of a guy called Dylan who sang in a kind of folk style. He couldn’t sing, thought Charles, but the lyrics were right on.

  They didn’t hear Clay come in the front door and go upstairs. Sometime around three, Walt opened he eyes to find Ferlin had already gone off to his own room off the kitchen and the kid was asleep, his head on the arm of the couch. Too late to send him home now. Palmer stirred in the chair. “That’s it for me,” he said, and turned off the stereo. Walt turned out the lamp beside the couch and he and Palmer went upstairs to their rooms, leaving Charles dreaming music on the fat couch.

  Hours before dawn another sort of music spiraled through the molecules of Red House on Fir Street, an off-key melody worming through tattered paper and faded paint, echoing from the memory of an anguished cry, of aching loss, of privation. It was an old tune like a honky-tonk piano out of tune. It clung like cobwebs to the corners of a deserted room, vibrated through the residual acrid smoke of the drug, all snarls and claws, caught in tangles of misery with nowhere to go beyond the encapsulating walls. Those sleeping within its walls slept restlessly but unaware what was growing in the acrid air surrounding them.

  The Negro kid was back the next evening and the next, quietly coming to the front door, drawn out of his painful shyness by the prospect that Palmer would once again let him play the Strat. Donna decided she might as well invite him to the dinner she planned for Friday night. He’d probably show up at the house anyway. From the look of him the kid didn’t get many meals.

  Donna planned the dinner to be the occasion where Clay would announce his college plans to the whole household. It was sad, she thought, that the housemates almost never ate together. She hoped that tonight they would sit down like civilized people and share a meal. They’d have some wine, even if it weren’t within the budget. She’d make a huge pot of spaghetti with meatballs. The guys like pasta. Serve a plate of garlic bread with it. And she’d mix up a punch bowl of sangria. She’d seen a recipe in Sunset Magazine. That would go with spaghetti and be festive. Donna wanted it to be a night they would all remember.

  One problem. The dining room was Walt’s studio. The housemates either ate at the kitchen table or took their food into the living room. Donna’s first hurdle was to clear at least enough of Walt’s art supplies to seat the five housemates, and now Charles.

  “It’s just for one night,” she told Walt. “You can stack everything in the breakfast nook if you want. I wouldn’t ask but this is important.”

  “What’s going on Donna? Clay finally decided to marry you? Pitter patter of little feet?” he said.

  “You’ll find out with everyone else tonight.”

  Walt had to catch a master class with Mark Tobey at Cornish, so moving the art supplies was left to Donna. Tubes of oil paint, rags, palettes, and brushes covered every inch of the gigantic oak table. Two easels held working canvases. Completed canvases rested against all the walls. They were out of the way so she left them there. Walt had two oak chairs piled with sketches and smelly rags. The rest of the chairs, Donna thought, were probably stored in the basement. In a pinch she could use the old white kitchen chairs if she couldn’t get one of the men to go down into the basement. She swore she wasn’t going into that horrible hole.

  Only once since she moved into the house had she gone down there, and once was enough. It was a dark, stinky, moldy cave with a dirt floor and spiders, bringing to mind all the horror flicks she and her brother used to see on Saturday matinees in San Jose. “Don’t go down there!” they’d scream at the screen with all the rest of the audience as some stupid girl in a wispy nightie started down the cellar steps. And even though Donna didn’t believe in monsters anymore, her one trip down to the basement had left her unaccountably shivering and shockey.

  She hated the house. Once she and Clay were married they could get their own place. It didn’t have to be much. Maybe a little apartment north of town. Somewhere clean and new that didn’t groan with every night wind, that didn’t smell of mildew and rot.

  Predictably none of the housemates showed up before Donna had the table set with a large white cloth and the household’s mismatched dishes. She was keeping an eye on the bubbling pasta when Ferlin came in from the back yard, wearing his usual layer of motor oil. No doubt he’d been working on Walt’s beat up motorcycle. That piece of junk never worked right and never would no matter how long Ferlin worked on it.

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Have you seen any of the others?”

  “Yeah, out back catching some cigs. I gotta get cleaned up.”

  Got to avoid helping with the dinner, more like, she thought.

  “Ferlin, before you wash up could you tell the guys they need to get in here before the spaghetti’s ruined? I’m draining the noodles right now.”

  “I dig,�
� he said, and went back outside.

  Donna emptied the spaghetti noodles into a colander, then lit candles she had stuck into the mouths of empty Chablis bottles. By the time the group was assembled in the dining room the only thing left to do was mix up the sangria punch. Ferlin volunteered for that. If there was one thing he knew better than motors it was booze.

  Ferlin never did tell anyone what he added to the punch that night along with the wine and citrus. It was going to be a far out trip. Mind expanding. Wouldn’t hurt to loosen up serious Clay and uptight Donna. Even if he had told them, they might not have heard of the stuff back in 1960. A little weed was the extant of their highs. Not their scene. Ferlin had his sources up in the University District, where mostly he’d trade a tune-up or repair job for party chemicals. It was Charles who figured out what happened, but that was several years after that night, when he was using the stuff pretty regularly himself. And by that time it didn’t matter anymore.

  The dinner was everything Donna hoped it would be and more. The guys devoured the food with gusto. Great mounds of spaghetti and meat balls disappeared, washed down with glasses of punch. Little Charles had a second helping of everything. The talk got more brilliant as the evening wore on. They discussed philosophy and art theory, Palmer and Clay contributing their musician’s perspective, Walt speaking to the visual artist’s point of view. Even Charles had some observations on composition. Ferlin smiled from his side of the table. Donna sipped her sangria, a feeling of contentment and love washing over her.

  The candles burned low and the food was gone. Donna left the dishes right were they were. Caught in the magic of the moment she realized she didn’t care about the mess. Tomorrow was soon enough for dish washing.

  The group was ready to move the conversation to the living room but before they did Clay announced he would be starting at the University of Washington the next quarter. Everyone toasted his plans and congratulated him. It was such a beautiful moment Donna wasn’t surprised to realize she had tears running down her cheeks. Ferlin went to the kitchen, coming back with two six packs of Rainier beer. The party moved to the living room, leaving the candles to gutter out one by one.

  It was a gold colored room, or rather permutations of saffron, mustard aflame, dirty sunsets, and contagion. A few years before, Walt and Palmer painted the walls with dab-ends they found solidifying in numerous rusty paint cans in a shed out back. None of the colors in the cans was in evidence in the house so the paint was probably what was left from one of Ferlin’s neighborhood projects but he couldn’t remember for sure. They mixed every drop they could scrape into a galvanized pail, swirling it around with an old wooden spoon. The resulting color spread across the rough plaster in hectic streaks and splotches. They left the woodwork unpainted, the native fir blackened by a hundred years of smoke and bacon grease. Over the windows a long-forgotten previous tenant had hung red and blue paisley Indian bedspreads. Even on bright days they drowned the room in muted smears like bruises. At night the porch light seeped through the tattered patterns tattooing the room with twisting vines.

  The room contained a couch, a red plush monstrosity Ferlin found in the alley. Overstuffed chairs with sprung cushions clustered around the dead fireplace. An iron chandelier festooned with spider webs dangled from the center of the ceiling. It had never worked. Ferlin suspected the wiring, which was always shorting out. The housemates lit the room with undependable floor lamps or candles. Candles worked best, since every time the stereo and the lamps were on at the same time the fuses blew. The carpets were threadbare Orientals that had probably not been beaten or vacuumed in fifty years. They may have been bright red at one time but had transmuted into the color of dried blood. Walt’s paintings layered every wall with a crazy quilt of dizzying hues. Opposite the fireplace the staircase ascended into darkness. This was the living room. It encapsulated the housemates like a cyst.

  Tonight Palmer picks up his guitar while Walt lights the candles and a few sticks of sandalwood incense. Ferlin hands the beer around, the house trembling under his feet, first sign of an excellent high, he thinks. Clay and Donna curl into each other on the couch. He kisses her hair. She clutches his fingers. At her shoulder a candle flares to life on the green end table. Palmer fingers a chord - pain of strings cutting deep into flesh - treasured pain - pain like food, nourishing as a memory he returns to over again even though it cuts like razors. Charles thumbs through a stack of albums looking for something to put on. Walt sits on the floor, leaning back against the couch, against Donna’s warm legs. He rolls a joint, sucking it alight and passes it up to Clay; a snake of smoke worms through purple shadows snarled with the dusty scents of sandalwood and beer, low chords strumming orange. Charles slides the black disk from its sleeve. Ferlin slumps in the blue chair, closes his eyes and draws in a slow breath, climbing into the smoke wrapping itself into the iron curl of the chandelier.

  Palmer is suddenly tired. He passes the Strat off to Charles and pops the top off a beer. The kid’s impossibly long fingers like spider legs wrap around the neck, fingers so fast Palmer can’t follow them. The kid never once looking at the instrument, the fingers moving independently of mind, music slashing through the haze suspended in the air, sweaty and searing.

  A mistake. Palmer realizes he has made a mistake. He realizes he’s been tricked somehow into giving over the guitar - how did that happen? Did the guitar trick him? He will never get it back. It isn’t the kid’s fault. Charles is captured in the steel jaws of the music that sweeps out from strings and body, swallowing, eating, devouring. The room is a stomach, churning, vomiting music. Palmer tries to close his eyes - vacuum of his eyes - where did the words come from? He knows them but has forgotten their origin. Vacuum eyes - drawing him into the guitar, the guts are - guts were. Stair. Stare. He watches Charles sway with notes that fly faster and faster, wings beating, bones and feathers flying at the cage of walls and light - the house taking flight into the night. And he knows it will destroy them all, destroy Charles - this thing that has possessed the guitar - he sees it clearly, its teeth chewing them up, absorbing them all into the belly of the house. Why don’t they feel it? None of the others see it. Struck blind. They don’t feel the house watching with its famished eyes - don’t know the danger engulfing them, drawing them into its hungry maw - only one can stop it, only one way to stop it.

  “What the hell you doing, Palmer?” cried the kid.

  Before any of the rest noticed anything beyond their own thoughts Palmer ripped the guitar out of Charles’ hands and bounded up the stairs toward his attic room.

  “What happened?” said Clay, disengaging his hand from Donna’s.

  “Damned if I know. He just grabbed the Strat and ran like he was crazy,” said Charles.

  “Somebody go after him. Clay, go see if he’s all right,” said Donna.

  “Yeah, okay.” As much as he thought it was probably just Donna getting worked up again over nothing, he took the stairs two at a time.

  Then the group in the living room heard the screams. Charles and Ferlin ran for the stairs, Walt reaching Donna just in time to stop her from following them.

  Ferlin was the first one to Palmer’s open door. By then the bed was on fire, the guitar at the center. Time constricted to a crawl in which each detail of the room was illuminated by licking flames - Clay beating at the fire with a pillow - ashen-faced Palmer screaming at him to let it burn as he squirted lighter fluid at the core of the conflagration.

  With a roar, flames exploded over Clay’s hands at the same second Ferlin pulled the blankets off the bed. Clay staggered backward into the wall and sat down hard on the bare plank floor.

  “We gotta get this shit out to the street before the whole place goes up,” shouted Ferlin.

  Together he and Charles wadded the bed linen up over the guitar to smother the flames, a black and silver pall of smoke filling the room. Clay lay stunned and forgotten in the heat and smoke.

  “I’ll get this end, man,” said Charle
s. “Help me drag it down the stairs”.

  They pulled the mass of smoking bedclothes to the landing and pushed it down the stairs to the entry hall, then went back for the mattress. The house was spinning, the stairs spiraling away from them, the front door continually shifting position so that they dropped the mattress several times before they got it to the sidewalk.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” shouted Ferlin, doubling over in a fit of coughing. “God, what the hell was that all about?”

  A smudge of burnt wool filled the night air, ember stars glittering from black blanket folds.

  Charles didn’t reply. He didn’t know what to say, and at any rate at that instant Palmer burst from the front door and pounded down the stairs like someone was chasing him. He flung himself on Walt’s motorcycle parked at the curb, kick started it and bugged out down the street leaving Charles and Ferlin in a cloud of blue exhaust.

  “Come on, kid. We got to stop him before he kills himself,” said Ferlin.

  “How do we do that without a car?”

  “We’ll have a car. No car in this town I can’t jump.”

  With that he ran across the street to a red and white Chevy Impala, did something to the door, slid under the dash, and had the car started before Charles realized what he was doing.

  “You crazy, man? You can’t steal a car!”

  “Just did. Get your black ass in this car and help me find Palmer before the police do.”

  They found him fifteen minutes later where he had skidded into a light pole. The police were just arriving. Palmer was banged up but alive. Ferlin identified him for the cops before the ambulance transported him to Harborview Hospital. Walt’s bike was a pile of twisted scrap metal.

  But the police knew Ferlin from the neighborhood, and they also knew he didn’t own a car. He and Charles were taken in on suspicion of car theft. The social climate being what it was then, they let Ferlin off with a warning but they booked the Negro for being in a stolen car. Because he had no priors they gave him a choice - enlist in the army or face five years in jail. He enlisted.