T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Soon, the empty spaces around her have begun to fill, the lights quaver and she’s just turning to look over her shoulder for her mother when here she is, clutching her purse in one hand and a rumpled program in the other. “There was a line at the ladies’,” she murmurs by way of extenuation, then settles into her seat. The audience quiets. A few latecomers shuffle up and down the aisles, squeeze in over laps, purses, rearranged knees. The man in front of them lets out a nervous ratcheting cough. And then there’s an accelerating clatter of applause — apes beating their tight-skinned palms and hard-knuckled phalanges together, she’s thinking, no different from the way it was on the savannas of Africa three million years ago, and she’s one of them, clap-clap-clapping in affirmation — as the emcee struts briskly across the stage to take hold of the microphone and give the audience a long bemused look till the clapping trails off.

He’s a diminutive flesh-challenged man in his forties with limp hair hanging in his eyes and obscuring his ears, and he seizes the moment to deliver an abbreviated pep talk about the series that brings such nationally — and internationally —recognized acts as Micah Stroud (applause all over again) to this historic theater in our own little burg of Santa Barbara on a bi-monthly basis and how everyone should feel free to take a brochure and subscribe, because you’ll not only be supporting the music you love but getting a real bargain too, and did you realize that series subscriptions can save you up to a hundred and twenty dollars per season? He knows to keep it short, but still there are catcalls from down in front, and someone behind Alma begins chanting Micah, Micah, Micah till the crowd picks it up and the man at the mike goes silent. For a long moment he merely stands there giving them an impish look before raising both hands, palms up, until the chant dies down.

“And now,” he cries out in a new voice altogether — stentorian, fruity, the voice of the shill, the barker, the advance man—“the moment you’ve all been waiting for. . ladies and gentlemen, gnomes and little fishes, I bring you the Cajun Wonder, the Lion of the Bayou, the man with the biggest voice and biggest heart in the business. . MICAH. . STROUD!”

Though she’s the sort of person who’s hyper-vigilant, always aware of her surroundings and open in all five senses to what the world brings her, she doesn’t stir or look around her or do anything but tap her foot and nod her head in acknowledgment of the beat till he’s three songs into his set, solo, acoustic, the band waiting in the wings because for now, in a reversal of the usual pattern, it’s just his voice and guitar. Her mother is there beside her, but Alma’s not aware of her, the songs that have become so personal they might have been written for her alone sweeping her up and out of herself to some other place altogether. Which is as it should be. Which is why she’s come. Which is why her focus is exclusively on Micah, bent over his guitar till the tight glistening construct of his pompadour breaks loose and the patch of his soul beard shines with sweat.

He opens with “Loggerhead Blues,” a slow, walking blues that segues into the syncopated upbeat swing of “Dip and Rise,” before bringing it back down to the tragic release of “Minamata,” with its images of deformed infants drawn back into the amniotic sea whence they came till the methyl mercury vanishes from the environment, from their mother’s eggs and their father’s sperm, and they can emerge again, whole and clean and waving their tiny unclenched fingers and toes in a salutation of pure joy. She sways in her seat. She’s not thinking, just feeling, because here’s a man who understands, who fights for the environment, who if he only knew would rise up in all his power and influence to back her and Tim and everything they’re trying to accomplish.

And then she is thinking, even as the band slips out of the wings to join him onstage and he ducks under the strap of his electric guitar and the drummer counts off the beat with his two shining sticks, wondering if he’s ever visited the islands, if he knows the gravity of the situation and what’s at stake. She glances at her mother, who’s enjoying herself, or seems to be. Then she’s focused again on the stage, the opening chords of “Swamp Savior” coming down like an atmospheric phenomenon, but she’s not in the auditorium any longer — no, she’s out on the island, Micah Stroud at her side, assessing the pig damage, bending low to gaze in at the captive foxes in the tranquillity and safety of their cages, asking him if he wouldn’t maybe write a song for them, an anthem to salvation, and he’s leaning in close, hovering over her with the sun caught in his eyes and drawling, Of course, and I’ll go one better and donate the whole proceeds to the cause. How’s that? Good enough for you? No? Well, I’m going to write a check too. . but only if there’s a quid pro quo here, because did anybody ever tell you how irresistible you are? Hey, you ever take time off? I mean, would you want to go on the European leg of the tour with me? Stockholm? You ever been to Stockholm. .?

Four songs with the band, then the stage goes dark but for the spotlight. He turns his back a moment, ducking into the shadows to change guitars — back to acoustic — and then sidles up to the old-fashioned standing mike that’s become his trademark to wonder aloud if anyone out there’s having a good time. Well, they are. All of them. Even Alma’s mother, who lets loose with a war whoop right out of the 1960s as the crowd roars its affirmation. “Hot town,” he murmurs, wiping the sweat from his face with a limp towel. “And I surely do appreciate that on a cool autumn evening out here on the California coast where a poor boy from the bayou can always wrap himself up in the heat you good folks generate”—whistles, applause—“and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

He bows his head a moment in acknowledgment of the applause, his hair fallen loose in a sweated tangle, and when he straightens up and the light catches his face again, she sees that he’s grinning. “But do we have a treat for you tonight, folks, one of your very own”—he raises a hand to shade his eyes and peer out into the audience—“a supremely gifted singer-songwriter who’s going to join me on the next number. Anise? You out there, sweetheart?”

That’s when everything seems to swirl and rush as if she’s caught in a vortex, an open drain sucking her down and taking the whole section of seats with her, her mother an illusion, the sneezing man vanished, hipsters in their trailing coats and scarves and photochromatic lenses all sieving past her as Anise Reed rises from a seat in the front row — how could she have missed her? — in an expanding mushroom cloud of kinked-out hair. But that’s not all. Because Dave LaJoy is there too, in the seat beside the one she’s just vacated, bringing his hands together in praise as the whole auditorium takes it up, Wilson Gutierrez at his elbow, stamping and whistling, while Alicia lifts her pale expressionless face to the light flooding down off the stage and the woman next to her with the big hair shocked with gray. . beams with. . with the pride of a mother. Anise’s mother. Anise Reed’s. And before Alma can even begin to process that revelation, here she is, the supremely gifted singer-songwriter herself, mounting the steps to the stage, her bare feet palpitating, toenails shining, as a lackey darts from the wings with her guitar held aloft in offering.

Nearly sixty years earlier, in September of 1946, when the Lobero was just beginning to fill its seats again after the lean years of the war, Alma’s grandmother brought her baby to term at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica — a healthy girl of seven pounds, seven ounces, who showed no ill effects of her mother’s ordeal on Anacapa Island. Beverly was then living with her own mother, having no way to meet the rent on the apartment she’d shared with Till beyond the end of that first catastrophic month when she missed him through every minute of every day as if he’d gone off to war all over again. So they were two widows in that house she’d grown up in, her father ten years’ dead, her mother on her feet all day long, working the cash register at a grocery on Lincoln Boulevard though she suffered from varicose veins and her ankles sagged till they were like layer cakes collapsed over the edges of the pan.