Max Collins: Scratch Fever

The answer he got he’d heard before: “1 thought maybe I’d stand out in a cornfield.”

He usually laughed at that, but this time he didn’t. He was thinking about the woman he’d seen — in the white skirt and black sweater. He was thinking about Julie.

“Something on your mind, Jonny?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Cat scratch fever...”

“I thought you looked like something threw you on stage there for a second — couple songs ago. Something to that?”

“Maybe.”

She smiled; she really looked like Debbie Harry when she smiled. “Bet you spotted somebody in the crowd. An old girlfriend. Am I right, Jonny?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, these are your old stomping grounds, aren’t they?”

“Cat scratch fever... Cat scratch fever...”

“Not really. I’m eighty or a hundred miles from home.”

Home was Iowa City. Or it used to be, before he and Toni had met in a music store; she’d been playing with Dagwood, a group that did nothing but Blondie material, formed by the ex-members of Smooch, a band that had imitated Kiss in full makeup and regalia till the Kiss fad faded. It was driving Toni nuts, as they had insisted she dye her hair blonde, with a brunette patch in back, so she’d become a Debbie Harry clone. And even though she knew it was her fate, right now at least, to sing a lot of Blondie songs, enough was enough. Jon had grabbed her, had somehow got together with Les, Roc, and Mick, and had turned Deep Pink into the Nodes and hit the road.

“We got a week to kill,” Toni was saying, “before the tryout in St. Paul. We going to visit your pal? What’s his name?”

“Nolan, you mean.”

“Yeah. Nolan. I’d like to meet that guy. We going to stay with him in Iowa City this week, or what?”

“He doesn’t live there anymore. He moved.”

“Oh, yeah? What about that place of yours, that antique shop your uncle left you?”

“I leased it to an old girlfriend of mine. She sells water beds.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember her. The thirty-year-old hippie.”

“All hippies are thirty years old now. Anyway, Karen’s all right. She’s got a kid I hate, but she’s all right.”

Roc’s guitar screeched out there; guys in the audience hollered.

“Christ, his guitar playing bores me,” Toni said, making a face, swigging some more whiskey. She drank a lot, but Jon never saw it take any noticeable effect.

“I did see somebody out there, you know,” Jon said.

“Oh? If it’s a girlfriend, I’d be jealous, if you and me were still an item.”

“Two weekends ago we were an item. Kind of.”

“Yeah, well, we’re still friends, Jonny. If you don’t have anything lined up, and I don’t have anything lined up, we can still be an item anytime you feel like, far as I’m concerned. But you and I both know there’s nothing serious in it for us.”

He smiled. “You got nice tits, Toni. I’m real serious when it comes to your tits.”

She uncrossed her legs, smiled at him. Gestured at him with the bottle of Cutty Sark. “C’mere, handsome.”

He went to her. Gave her a little kiss. She draped her arms around his neck; the whiskey bottle was against his back.

“Want to be an item tonight?” she asked. “Want to be an item all next week? I got nothing better to do. How about you?”

“I got nothing planned.”

“Unless it has to do with that old girlfriend you spotted.”

He moved away from her.

“Hey,” Toni said. “Something is wrong. What?”

Roc’s guitar was screaming at the audience; the audience was screaming back.

“Nothing. I don’t know. You know what I told you about? About me and Nolan, I mean.”

“You told me a lot about you and Nolan.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“Well, you did.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I think I do. The robberies.”

“The robberies and what went with it.”

She screwed the cap back on the whiskey bottle, then hopped down off the amplifier flight case. “The guns and stuff,” she said.

Jon laughed. “Yeah. The guns and stuff. Right. Well, I saw somebody from one of the things Nolan and I were into. One of the robberies.”

“Somebody you robbed, you mean? Somebody who could recognize you?”

“Somebody that could recognize me, all right. Not somebody we robbed. Not hardly.”

“Scratch fever... Cat scratch...”

“Somebody that was in it with you,” she said. “Right.”

“So?”

“So it was somebody that was supposed to have died in a car crash, a year ago.”

“Jesus. What’s that mean?”

“It means... I don’t know what it means.”

“Maybe your friend would. Nolan.”

“Maybe.”

“You thinking about calling him?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“You better do it on the break. Those assholes are almost finished ‘making pussies purr.’”

Out in the other room, on stage, the trio was doing its big finish, which amounted to lots of sliding up and down on the bass neck for Les, some horrible high squealing lead up on the neck of the Gibson Explorer for Roc, and a frantic series of trips around the drum kit for Mick.

“Let me have a sip of that,” Jon said, nodding at her whiskey bottle.

“You never touch this shit,” Toni said, unscrewing the cap again.

“I know,” Jon said, taking the bottle, swigging it. “But Nolan does.”

Soon they were back on stage doing a song called “Die Young, Stay Pretty.”

IT WAS that kid, it was that goddamn kid!

Dammit!

What the hell was he doing here, playing in a rock band, for Christ’s sake? His curly hair was shorter, but otherwise he hadn’t changed; it was him, all right. Standing behind a portable organ, singing some unintelligible lyrics into a microphone, his voice booming out of the PA system.

The ironic thing was that it was this band — the Nodes — that had brought her here. She had heard the group was breaking up after this engagement, which meant they wouldn’t have anything booked for the following week, which meant hopefully she could convince them to stay together long enough to play Tuesday through Saturday at her club, the Paddlewheel. She’d had a cancellation and needed a band, and this group, the Nodes, while not precisely the sort of group she usually booked in, had a reputation in the Midwest. So she’d come to hear them, and to talk to the leader.

Whose name, it turned out, was Jon.

“Yeah,” Bob Hale said, as they sat at the bar on one side of the dance floor, yelling to be heard above the band, “it’s that kid on the end, playing the organ.”

She had looked at the kid, and he immediately seemed familiar to her.

“Nice enough kid,” Bob was saying. He was a big, florid man in his forties, with reddish-brown hair and a childlike manner that gave him a certain immature charm. “You wouldn’t know it to look at the squirt, but he’s strong. Judas Priest, you should see him carry those amplifiers around, like they was pillows. The girls seem to go for him.”

“Do they.”

“Sure do.” Bob grinned at her; he had big teeth. “Get you a drink, honey?”

“What did you say his name was?”

“Jon. I don’t know what his last name is.”

“Jon.”

“Yeah. They’re booked out of Des Moines. Or they were. Like I said, this is supposed to be their last night. But maybe I could talk to ’em for you and convince ’em that...”

She didn’t hear anything else Bob said after that; she was walking away. Before that kid on stage got a good look at her.

Not that it mattered, at this point; she’d seen the flash of recognition — or something — on his face. He shouldn’t have been able to recognize her, not at that distance; not with the blonde-streaked hair, the glasses, the business-like suit and sweater she’d worn. But the feeling in her stomach said he had recognized her. Goddammit. Goddammit!