A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [104]
Rebecca clutched his hand, her slim fingers moist. “I love you, Alex,” she said.
“Don’t say it like that. Like something bad is about to happen.”
“I’m nervous,” she said. “Now I’m nervous, too.”
“It’s the choppers,” Alex said.
“Excellent,” Bennie murmured. “Wait right there, Alex, if you wouldn’t mind. Right by that door.”
Alex had left Rebecca and Cara-Ann and their friends in a multitude that had swelled into the many thousands, everyone waiting patiently—then less patiently—as the starting time of the concert came and went, watching four jumpy roadies guard the raised platform where Scotty Hausmann was supposed to play. After a T from Lulu that Bennie needed help, Alex had snaked his way through a gauntlet of security checks to Scotty Hausmann’s trailer.
Inside, Bennie and an old roadie were slumped on black folding chairs. There was no sign of Scotty Hausmann. Alex’s throat felt very dry. Im invsbl, he thought.
“Bennie, listen to me,” said the roadie. His hands shook beneath the cuffs of his plaid flannel shirt.
“You can do this,” Bennie said. “I’m telling you.”
“Listen to me, Bennie.”
“Stay by the door, Alex,” Bennie said again, and he was right—Alex had been about to move closer, to ask what the fuck Bennie thought he was trying to do: put this decrepit roadie on in Scotty Hausmann’s place? To impersonate him? A guy with gutted cheeks and hands so red and gnarled he looked like he’d have trouble playing a hand of poker, much less the strange, sensuous instrument clutched between his knees? But when Alex’s eyes fell on the instrument, he suddenly knew, with an awful spasm in his gut: the decrepit roadie was Scotty Hausmann.
“The people are here,” Bennie said. “The thing is in motion. I can’t stop it.”
“It’s too late. I’m too old. I just—I can’t.”
Scotty Hausmann sounded like he’d recently wept or was on the verge of weeping—possibly both. He had shoulder-length hair slicked away from his face and empty, blasted eyes, all of it amounting to a derelict impression despite his clean shave. All Alex recognized were his teeth: white and sparkling—embarrassed-looking, as if they knew there was only so much you could do with this wreck of a face. And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
“You can, Scotty—you have to,” Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown. “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?”
Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”
Benny took a long breath, a flick of eyes at his watch the only sign of his impatience. “You came to me, Scotty, remember that?” he said. “Twenty-some-odd years ago—you believe it was that long? You brought me a fish.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were going to kill me.”
“I should’ve,” Scotty said. A single hack of laughter. “I wanted to.”
“And when I hit bottom—when Steph threw me out and I got fired from Sow’s Ear—I tracked you down. And what did I say? You remember, when I found you fishing in the East River? Out of the blue? What did I say?”
Scotty mumbled something.
“I said, ‘It’s time you became a star.’ And what did you say to me?” Bennie leaned close to Scotty, took the man’s trembling wrists in his own, rather elegant hands, and peered into his face. “You said, ‘I dare you.’”
There was a long pause. Then, without warning, Scotty leaped to his feet, upending his chair as he lunged for the trailer door. Alex was fully prepared to step aside and let him pass, but Scotty got there first and began trying to muscle him out of the way, at which point Alex realized that his job—the sole reason Bennie had placed him there—was to block the door and keep the singer from escaping. They grappled in huffing silence, Scotty’s desiccated face so close to Alex’s that he was inhaling the guy’s breath, which smelled of beer, or the aftermath of beer. Then he refined his opinion: Jägermeister.
Bennie seized Scotty from behind, but it wasn’t much of a hold—Alex made this discovery when Scotty