Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“Oh, I reckon,” said Drum. “Until you got healed up.”

“Healed up? What are you talking about? I’ m not going to get healed up.”

He didn’t react the way she had expected. He stopped tapping his fingers and slumped back in his seat, staring at the windshield. After a minute he said, “What?”

“I thought you knew.”

“Are you going to have, um—”

“Scars,” said Evie.

A line of girls in gym shorts crossed the playing field, followed by Drum’s darkened eyes. “Jesus,” he said.

“Well, it’s done now. Wouldn’t you like to have me sitting there while you played? People would say, ‘We better go hear Drum Casey, there’s this girl who cut—’ ”

“Are you out of our head?”

“Why? What’s so crazy about that?”

“For you, maybe nothing,” said Drum. “But I ain’t going to sing under those conditions.”

“What conditions?”

“How do you think I would feel?”

“Well, I don’t see—”

“Go on, now,” said Drum. “Get out. I’m real sorry about what happened, but I got my own life to live.”

“Nobody said you didn’t.”

“Will you go?”

“You can live your own life all you want,” said Evie, but she could feel her words fading away from her. Drum had reached across her to open the car door. His arm was covered with fine brown hairs, dotted with the faintest sheen of sweat, and for one motionless second she stared down and mourned it, just that isolated arm which she had only now started to know. Then she said, “All right. If that’s the way you feel.” She stumbled out onto the sidewalk, clutching at slipping books and smoothing the back of her rumpled skirt. Her face felt heavy, as if some weight at her jawline were pulling all her features downward.

Yet when she started up the front steps of the school, two girls in gym shorts were staring past her at the disappearing Dodge. They looked at her, then at the Dodge again. Evie smiled at them and went inside. If two people saw, the whole school would know by noon. They would pass it from desk to desk and down the lunchline: “That girl who slashed the singer’s name in her face, well, now she’s hanging out with him. He drove her to school. Sat a long time in the car with her. What were they doing in the car?”

She smiled at a boy she didn’t know and set her books down in front of her locker. If the boy stared at her forehead, she didn’t notice. The letters stood out clear and proud, framed by damp hair, finer than any plastic rectangle a surgeon could have pasted there.

Drum Casey’s drummer’s name was David Elliott. Some people had tried calling him “Guitar” for a joke, just rounding things off, but David was the kind who slid out from under nicknames. He was not light-minded enough. He played the drums intently, watching his hands, sitting very straight instead of hunkering over the way other drummers did. This made him seem childlike, although he was a good six feet tall. He had white-blond hair that fell in an even line, hiding his eyebrows. His face was fine-boned and his eyes transparent, the color of old blue Mason jars. Yet girls never took to him. They liked his looks but not his seriousness. He spoke too definitely; there was a constant, edgy impatience in the way he moved, and he planned ahead too much. “We’re good. We’re going good,” he told girls. “I want to hit a night club next. We’re getting up there. We’re ready to move.” Drum, beside him, was slow and cool and dark. He made plans too; but while David talked about up, Drum talked about out. “When we get out of this place, I want me a custom car. Going to go so far I’ll lose the way home, forget the name of the town, mislay the map. Also new singing clothes; I want me something shiny.” Girls understood what he meant. They fluttered after him when he drifted off, and David stayed behind to think up more publicity.

David solicited clubs and roadhouses and church organizations. During the day he sold insurance policies door to door, but he never forgot to work the conversation around to music. “Spring is here. Are you going to have a dance? Do you know of any dances? You’ll need a band, records aren’t the same. What about Mrs. Howard, the one in the house on the hill? She gives a dance every May. Won’t she need a band? Ask her. It’s cheaper to hire the two of us; those big groups can get out of hand.” He believed in gimmicks, little eyecatching traps for people to fall into while they were making up their minds. Bright red cards with gilt lettering on them—“Drumstrings with guitar, David with the sticks, 839-3036”—were thumbtacked to every bulletin board. David’s Jeep was painted with psychedelic swirls and a purple telephone number. In December, he had sent Christmas cards picturing an orchestra of angels to every leading businessman in Pulqua, Farinia, and Tar City. He instructed Drum to carry his guitar slung over his shoulder at all times, but Drum didn’t. (“In the pharmacy?” Drum said. “At the liquor store? You’re putting me on.”) And when Evie Decker slashed “Casey” across her forehead, it was David who called the newspaper photographer. “This is why you need a manager,” he told Drum. “Would you have thought of it by yourself? You haven’t got the eye for it.”

“You’re right, I ain’t,” said Drum. “I got to hand it to you.”

Drum got along well with David, better than other people did. He liked riding on the tail of all that energy, letting someone else do the organizing, listening to the rapid, precise flow of talk which he thought came from David’s having spent half a semester at Campbell College. But it was only words that should be so precise, not drums. David’s drums never skipped a beat, and yet somehow the spirit was missing. Other drummers went into frenzies; David remained tight, expressionless, speeding faster and faster without so much as bending forward. “You drag,” said Drum. “Oh, I feel it.”

“I don’t drag. I’m there all the way.”

“Well, but you’re holding me back somehow. Tying me in. I don’t now.”

“Get another drummer, if you feel like that.”

But he never did. Together they went over each new piece, juggling lines and bickering and giving little wheezes of disgust at each other. When it came to music, Drum always won. He had the feel for it. “What’s this talking out in the middle of a piece?” David once asked. “Where does that get you? Most of what you say is not even connected.”

“I ain’t going to argue about that,” said Drum. “I just do it. If you have to ask why, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, all right. I don’t care.”

He had the sense not to go against Drum on things like that. He believed that Drum was a real musician, someone who deserved to climb straight to the top. When an audience talked instead of listening, David muttered curses at them all the while he played. When Drum hit one of his low moods, David followed him around rescuing scraps of songs from wastebaskets. “What call have you got to slump around like this? What you throw away those other cats would give their teeth to write. You’re nearly there. You’ve almost made it.”

“You reckon so? I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,” Drum would say finally.

David paid a visit to Evie Decker on a Saturday afternoon during finals. She was on her front porch studying. She lay in a wooden swing with her head on a flattened, flowered cushion, one foot trailing to the floor to keep her rocking. When she heard the Jeep, she turned and blinked. Swirls of color chased around its body and across the canvas top, where they blurred and softened. And there came Drum Casey’s drummer out of the little tacked-on door, smoothing down his bangs with his fingers. “The Missouri Compromise,” Evie went on out loud, “was supposed to maintain a …” but her eyes were on David. She watched him cross her yard and climb her steps, rifle-straight and full of purpose. Because of the edgeless shimmer of his hair in the sunlight, he seemed only another daydream, nothing to get nervous about. “Afternoon,” he said.