A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [105]
When he could breathe again, Alex made an effort to consult with his boss. “Bennie, if he doesn’t want to—”
Scotty swung at Alex’s face, but Alex darted aside and the musician’s fist smashed the flimsy door. There was a tannic smell of blood.
Alex tried again: “Bennie, this seems kind of—”
Scotty wrenched free of Bennie and kneed Alex in the balls, which made him crumple to the floor in fetal agony. Scotty kicked him aside and threw open the door.
“Hello,” came a voice from outside. A high, clear voice, distantly familiar. “I’m Lulu.”
Through his roiling pain, Alex managed to turn his head and look at what was happening outside the trailer. Scotty was still in the doorway, looking down. The slanted winter sun ignited Lulu’s hair, making a nimbus around her face. She was blocking Scotty’s path, one arm on each of the flimsy metal railings. Scotty could easily have knocked her over, but he didn’t. And in hesitating, looking down for an extra second at this lovely girl blocking his way, Scotty lost.
“Can I walk with you?” Lulu asked.
Bennie had scrambled to retrieve the guitar, which he handed to Scotty over Alex’s prone form. Scotty took the instrument, held it to his chest, and inhaled a long, shaky breath. “Only if you’ll take my arm, darling,” he replied, and a ghost version of Scotty Hausmann flickered at Alex from the dregs that were left, sexy and rakish.
Lulu twined her arm through Scotty’s, and they moved straight into the crowd: the addled geezer carrying the long, strange instrument, and the young woman who might have been his daughter. Bennie hauled Alex onto his feet, and they followed, Alex’s legs watery and spastic. The oceanic sprawl of people shifted spontaneously, clearing a path to the platform where a stool and twelve enormous microphones had been positioned.
“Lulu,” Alex said to Bennie, and shook his head.
“She’s going to run the world,” Bennie said.
Scotty climbed onto the platform and sat on the stool. Without a glance at the audience or a word of introduction, he began to play “I Am a Little Lamb,” a tune whose childishness was belied by the twanging filigree of his slide guitar, its gushy metallic complexity. He followed that with “Goats Like Oats” and “A Little Tree Is Just Like Me.” The amplification was fine and powerful enough to eclipse the chopper throb and deliver the sound even to the distant reaches of the crowd, where it disappeared between buildings. Alex listened in a sort of cringe, expecting a roar of rejection from these thousands he’d managed secretly to assemble, whose goodwill had already been taxed by the long wait. But it didn’t happen; the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find. And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever the reason, a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out toward its edges, where it crashed against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with redoubled force, lifting him off his stool, onto his feet (the roadies quickly adjusting the microphones), exploding the quavering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before and unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce. Anyone who was there that day will tell you the concert really started when Scotty stood up. That’s when he began singing the songs he’d been writing for years underground, songs no one had ever heard, or anything like them—“Eyes in My Head,” “X’s and O’s,” “Who’s Watching Hardest”—ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped