Before He Finds Her Read online

  “Amen,” said Eric.

  “Preach to us, brother Ramsey!” called Paul from behind his drum kit. Eric, sensing sacrilege, shot his younger brother a look.

  Ramsey wiped down the fretboard with a rag and lifted the guitar out of its case.

  “You have no idea,” he said, “how good it is to see you assholes.”

  Ramsey gladly parked his car outside, in the driveway, to make room for the drumset, microphone stands, speakers on tripods, a jumble of patch cords and speaker cables snaking across the ground. The four-channel P.A. sat on a scratched-up coffee table that Ramsey had claimed from someone else’s curb back when he needed to furnish his first apartment on the cheap. Tacked to the drywall were a half dozen rock-star posters and twice as many classic album covers. In the corner of the garage stood a spare refrigerator/freezer, left by the house’s former owner.

  They had a name, Ramsey and Paul and Eric and Wayne. They called themselves Rusted Wheels, but they weren’t a real band. Real bands played out. The point of Rusted Wheels was always exactly this—to jam in Ramsey’s garage. They met up every couple of weeks, depending on Ramsey’s driving schedule, and in all that time, since before Allie was pregnant, there had never been talk of playing in public. There had never been a need. Playing a gig, they all knew—or at least suspected—meant hauling gear and negotiating payment with dickhead bar owners and hustling for people to show up, and that all seemed a lot like work, which was the opposite of why they came together to play.

  How many teenagers jammed in similar garages? Plenty—but teenagers appreciated nothing. You had to be over thirty and overburdened. You needed battle scars to prove you’d earned the right to a few hours of amplified jams and words sung with feeling and reverb.

  “Wayne called me earlier,” Paul said. “He can’t make it tonight.”

  Case in point: Wayne was under thirty. When you’re young and still have all your hair, apparently the rules of band practice don’t apply.

  “He’s not coming at all?” Eric asked.

  Paul gave a Hey, not my problem shrug.

  “What’s he got that’s so important?” Ramsey asked.

  “He’s performing brain surgery.” Paul drank from his beer. “He didn’t say, I didn’t ask. Probably a date.” He belched. “You remember those, don’t you?”

  “I just want to do these songs right on Sunday,” Ramsey said. “I want us to be good.”

  “I got sad news for you, pal.” Eric grinned. “We ain’t good.”

  “Well, it ain’t Sunday yet, either.” But Eric was right. Only Wayne had any real talent. Paul was especially weak on the drums. His tempos defied all logic. But he had problems of his own—handicapped son, wife who’d gone inpatient a couple of times for depression. He worked as an EMT, so it wasn’t as if he could veg out on the job. He was a good man who needed Rusted Wheels at least as much as any of them.

  Ramsey removed several sheets of paper from the back pocket of his jeans. He had composed the set list in his head while driving through New Mexico and written up four copies at a truck stop in Amarillo.

  “This is a lot of music,” Paul said, scanning the list.

  There were eighteen songs, many of them already part of the Rusted Wheels repertoire, plus three or four that they’d tried in the past and found too hard. “Some neighbors might be coming,” Ramsey said. “I want it to be a real show.”

  They’d slogged through a third of the list when, at 7:30, Allie came into the garage carrying pizza boxes. At eight Ramsey made them play quieter, but at nine they were still going strong. At a couple of minutes before ten, they settled on an ending to “Magic Carpet Ride,” called it quits, and made plans to meet up again the following afternoon.

  By then the garage felt superheated, three bodies working hard. Eric was slick with sweat. Paul had stripped down to his undershirt. Ramsey felt the urge to say something before they dispersed. “I can’t thank you men enough. This gig, your dedication. Your friendship.” He forced himself to look at Eric and Paul, rather than down at the concrete floor or across the garage at the ladders hanging on the wall. “It means more to me than you could know.” And with no one knowing what to say next, Ramsey decided to cut them all a break. “Okay, fuckheads, see you tomorrow.”

  Eric snapped open a can of Diet Coke. “So spill it, partner. What’s going on?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Come on—the marathon rehearsal, your rousing speech...”

  Paul had left. Ramsey was changing his guitar strings. The instrument was damn fine, better than he deserved—a Telecaster with a sunburst finish, Allie’s gift to him for his thirtieth birthday. That guitar replaced the piece-of-shit knockoff-of-a-knockoff that followed him from lousy apartment to lousy apartment over the years.

  New strings brought out the Telecaster’s full depth, but Ramsey knew better than to change them right before the gig. They’d go flat every two seconds, and he wasn’t a good enough musician to make corrections on the fly. He wasn’t good enough to tune his new strings while holding a conversation, either, so he laid the guitar back in its case. “I want to tell you a true story,” he said, “about something I did three days ago.”

  Eric’s eyes widened. After all these years, he was still protective of Ramsey. He still felt responsible. “I hope it’s nothing bad.”

  “No, you idiot. I went and saw the Grand Canyon.” Ramsey tossed a few empties into an open trash can. The beer was really for Paul and Wayne. Eric was in A.A., and Ramsey drank exactly one beer each rehearsal to prove to himself that he could stop after one. “Ever seen it?”

  “The Grand Canyon? Of course.”

  “I don’t mean in pictures.”

  “Then no, I haven’t seen it. Been too busy.”

  “Well, I been busy, too. But I was in Phoenix on Tuesday and my load-in got done early, and I said to myself it was time to see something I always wanted to see. Something I always heard you’ve never seen till you see it in person. So I drove through the desert, and when I got there I parked my truck and I saw it.”

  It felt familiar, telling Eric about something he did or someplace he went, though with a crucial difference. Early on in their friendship, Ramsey’s stories were usually confessions: The time he got drunk and beat up some prick outside the Pink Pony. The time he got canned for insubordination. He would confess, and Eric would listen and offer a few words to remind Ramsey that we weren’t simply the sum total of our mean-spirited actions.

  “So how was it?” Eric asked.

  Off and on these past couple of days, heading east, Ramsey considered how he might describe the indescribable. “It was big. And silent.” He frowned. “Damn. I can’t do it. There’s no words, you know?” There was only a feeling born of an expanse so wide that standing on the rim was like leaning over the surface of an empty planet. At the same time, he liked knowing it wasn’t some other planet but just dumb old America. And he liked knowing that he was experiencing the same stunned hush, the same loss for words, that other men had experienced for as long as there had been people to stand there and look. No, he couldn’t describe to Eric what he could barely describe to himself, about feeling small and unimportant, but in the best sense. You don’t matter as much as you think you do, the canyon told him, so lighten up. To get that feeling, to grasp the wisdom written on the immense canyon walls, you had to be there yourself. Otherwise, you sounded like the sort of hitchhiker Ramsey despised, blathering on and saying nothing.

  “I got high that day,” he said. So maybe this was a confession after all, he realized.

  “Weed?” Eric asked.

  “Amazing weed.”

  “Maybe not the best idea,” Eric said.

  “Maybe no, maybe yes,” Ramsey said. “What happened was, I got this idea into my head to climb down into the canyon a ways. There was a trail. It looked sort of steep, but what the hell.”

  “Sure. Worst that happens is you fall a few thousand feet to your death.”

  �
�Exactly. So about a half hour down the trail I can smell it. A minute later, I come across a couple of kids, guy and a girl, on a big flat rock soaking up the sun.”

  “Hanky panky?”

  Eric was thirty-nine, only five years older than Ramsey, but sometimes he sounded like a whole other generation. “No, they weren’t screwing or nothing. They were just sitting there, smoking and talking and looking out at everything. It was already a lot hotter there than up on the rim. It felt like July all of a sudden. They had a jug of water and they offered me some, and then they offered me the joint they were smoking, and I surprised myself by taking both. These kids, they were smart. In college. We talked.” Ramsey tried to recall the conversation. With a good conversation, though, where you’re just having it and connecting with other people, do you ever remember how it got good? “You got to understand the degree of beauty there,” he said. “It was late afternoon, and the sky was this dark shade of blue you don’t ever see in New Jersey. The light kept changing. Every few minutes it was like a whole new landscape. A sight like that makes you open up. I told them things I haven’t even told you, and you’re my best friend.”

  “Shut up,” Eric said, and looked away.

  “Well, you are. It shouldn’t embarrass you to hear it.”

  “I ain’t embarrassed.” But Eric was still looking over at the Jimi Hendrix poster.

  “Yeah, you are. See, there’s your problem. You’re a hell of a guy but you’ll never admit it.”

  Eric looked back at Ramsey. “So what’d you tell them at the Grand Canyon?”

  Ramsey smiled. “I told them the truth.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  It occurred to Ramsey that maybe Allie had confided in Eric. She was the only person he’d ever told about the orbital axis. If she told Eric, it would be a betrayal, but a minor one, done out of her love and concern. She knew that Eric held sway with Ramsey, and for good reason. Were it not for him, Ramsey would still be some angry shitbag drifting from job to job, some legal, some not—-except, now he’d be a thirty-four-year-old shitbag, which was a lot less forgivable than being an eighteen- or a twenty-year-old one.

  “It means,” Ramsey said, “that I told them they better take in all this beauty while they can, cause it won’t be here forever.”

  “You told them the Grand Canyon won’t be here forever?”

  “Nothing will. Not me or you or this garage or the Grand Canyon, neither.”

  “Ramsey Miller, philosopher.”

  “Bust my balls if you want, but those kids taught me something. I offered them a few dollars for the weed I’d smoked, but they wouldn’t take it. The guy, after college he plans to join the Peace Corps. He said the key to life is magnanimity. Can you beat that? His word. It means generous.”

  “I know what it means.”

  Ramsey doubted this but let it go. “He says if you have magnanimity, it comes back to you twofold. Sure enough, we’d just started back up the trail. It was steep and not an easy climb—you know that means something, coming from me—and the girl he’s with, she steps funny on a rock and twists her ankle, bad. I’ll tell you, once the sun goes down it gets real cold in the desert. This time of year, it goes below freezing. So they’d of been in real trouble. They didn’t have provisions or nothing. Just that one jug of water, and we’d already finished most of it off.”

  “But they had you.”

  Ramsey smiled, remembering. “Me and the boy took our time, making sure every step was in the right place. We got his friend up to the rim, safe and sound.”

  “The Lord had a plan for you that day.”

  That wasn’t Ramsey’s point at all, but he stopped himself from correcting his friend. “Afterward, when I was driving, I kept thinking about those two. I shouldn’t call them kids, because they weren’t kids. But I kept thinking about them, and about magnanimity. And that’s when I realized we’re doing this gig all wrong. It shouldn’t be just for us—our families and whatnot. We need to invite everyone.”

  “Who’s ‘everyone’?”

  “Everyone in the neighborhood.”

  “You hate everyone in the neighborhood,” Eric said.

  “That’s my point—we need to come together. Listen, I know there’s people who don’t think much of me, and for a long time I didn’t care. Or I did, but it was easier to pretend I didn’t. But that ain’t how I want it anymore.”

  “And you think a party will fix everything?”

  “Ain’t a matter of fixing things—it’s about doing what’s right. I want people coming to my house, eating my food and drinking my beer and listening to Rusted Wheels. I want their kids trampling my lawn.”

  Eric glanced at the door separating the garage from the rest of the house. “Ramsey, I have to ask. How much does Allie know about this plan of yours?”

  “Haven’t had time to fill her in yet on all the details.”

  “You might want to get around to that. I doubt her ideal Sunday includes hosting all your snooty neighbors.”

  “I’m hosting,” Ramsey said. “She can sit back and drink margaritas. Point is, this is no time for selfishness or hard feelings or any of that bullshit.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no time’?” Eric asked.

  Yeah, Ramsey thought. Allie told him. Definitely.

  On a freezing January afternoon, Ramsey had sat her down and explained the orbital axis to his wife, what it meant, and she made him swear to keep it between them. Frankly, he didn’t care who knew, but he gave her his word and kept it, because he loved her, honored her, and obeyed her, just as he’d promised six years earlier. Anyway, she had a point. There were some things that people would rather stay ignorant about.

  Take those kids in the Grand Canyon. During their truth session, before the shadows got too deep and they all started back up the trail, Ramsey had swept his arms across the magnificent vista and said, You know, God’s going-out-of-business sale is coming sooner than you think. He chose to say it that way for their benefit—clever, a little humorous to lighten the impact—but when the kids started trading glances, he backed off right away, laughing at himself and blaming the weed. He told them about a time when he had been high and decided it would be a good idea to climb the utility pole by his apartment, and then it started to thunder and lightning, and he got so scared that he froze way up there like a cat in a tree, and the power company had to come and rescue him in one of their bucket trucks. It hadn’t been a funny experience at the time, and he’d been drunk, not high, but he told it the way he did because he admired and respected these two kids and wanted them to like him. That was before they all began their ascent and the girl sprained her ankle and Ramsey got to show them what kind of man he could be, what kind of man he was.

  “My friend, there’s no time for bullshit,” Ramsey said to Eric now, “because that’s not how a magnanimous person behaves.”

  In the family room, Allie was facing the TV—a drama, from the serious, argumentative voices. “Eric’s leaving,” Ramsey said as he led his friend to the front door.

  “Good night, Allie,” Eric said to the back of Allie’s head.

  “Mhmm,” she replied without turning around.

  “She feels my judgment,” Eric said once he and Ramsey were alone outside. His voice was just above a whisper. “I shouldn’t be judging anyone. That’s the Lord’s job, not mine.”

  Ramsey always felt uncomfortable when Eric talked as if he were in church or at an A.A. meeting. “Nah,” he said. “She’s just really into her show.”

  Once Eric was gone, Ramsey went inside and sat at the kitchen table, bit into a slice of leftover pizza, and began writing his to-do list. The pizza was cool and hard, but he tasted it. It was that way with everything now: land and sky drenched in color. The band’s music reverberating in his gut with richer resonance. The felt-tip pen dragged across paper and a car whooshed by out front. In the family room, the music on the TV swelled toward a dramatic crescendo. In the laundry room, the dryer thudded rhythmica
lly: b-b-duh, b-b-duh. The dryer caused the recessed kitchen lights to pulse as if transmitting a code he was this close to cracking. He was paying attention, noticing everything. Some people—scientists, maybe, or detectives—must live this way constantly, attuned to every crumb of sensory data. He might have imagined the experience exhausting, but it was the opposite. He felt the world offering up its treasures. The least he could do was receive them.

  He should go to Allie. He would. But first, the list. Thirty-four years old, and he’d never thrown a party before. How much food do you buy? How much beer? Where do you find a pony for pony rides?

  He looked up. Allie came over and stood behind him, a hand on each of his shoulders. She pressed down with her thumbs. She’d been loosening his shoulders this way for seven years, ever since he returned from his first week on the road. My shoulders are killing me, Allie, he’d said, and she came to him and knew exactly what to do. She worked her thumbs now, pressing hard. Ramsey let out a sigh.

  “You schedule a band practice for the minute you come home,” she said. “Now you’re hiding in here.”

  “I’m making a to-do list.”

  “Unless I’m on that list,” she said, still rubbing, “I’m not interested.” Dark outside, but the curtains were open, and in the window’s reflection Ramsey saw the two of them. The tableau looked intimate, yet all the details were in shadow. “It’s a joke, Ramsey. We can still joke, can’t we?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Come on.”

  “What?”

  She let out a breath, almost like a laugh. “You’ve been gone twenty-six of the last thirty days.”

  “I have a job.”

  The rubbing stopped, though her hands continued to rest on his shoulders. “You haven’t had a schedule like that for years. I can only conclude that you can’t stand being here, with us.”