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By Root 523 0

the floorboards, the interior reeking of peanut butter and coconut. Buster and Annie had driven to Nashville to help obscure their intentions to Lucas and Linus. If they were involved in his parents’ disappearance, he couldn’t very well leave his parents’ home number for them to call back. He didn’t even want the area code of Coalfield to appear in the phone number, so as not to arouse suspicion. Nashville was Music City USA. Even if the Virgins weren’t Grand Ole Opry material, it was where a freelance music journalist might reside. It was only after they had entered into this complicated ruse that they realized they could have purchased a prepaid cell phone and done all of this at home. To rearrange their plans, to change the pieces of the trap they had set, seemed like a bad idea, a worse idea than waiting for hours for the pay phone to ring, understanding that it might not happen. Buster realized that, regardless of his slight attempts at reconnaissance, he needed some degree of luck for any of this to work. And with each minute that passed, Buster remembered how unlucky he was, how he seemed a beacon for all manner of ridiculous misfortune.

Buster had wanted to put up a sign on the phone, which said OUT OF ORDER, but Annie nixed the idea. “No one uses pay phones anymore,” she said. “I can’t believe they still exist. There’s no point complicating things with fake signs.” On the drive to Nashville, she came up with a set of questions for the Virgins, open-ended questions that would allow the boys to make their own case for stardom. Buried at the bottom of the list, the ninth of ten questions, she finally asked the only question that mattered, the single question whose answer would be recorded for posterity. How did you come to write “K.A.P.”? The tenth question, if it became necessary to ask it, was If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

And then the pay phone began to ring, once, twice, before Buster jumped out of the truck and snatched the receiver from its holder. “Hello?” he said. “Is this the guy from Spin magazine?” the voice replied. “It is,” Buster said, just as he felt someone tapping him on the shoulder. He turned to find Annie by his side, holding the questions for the interview. He took the notebook from her and she stood close to him, almost close enough to hear the conversation unfold.

“Is this Lucas or Linus?” Buster asked.

“Lucas. Linus plays the drums. He likes to stay quiet and make the sounds. I do the talking. Anything I say, he would agree with. Okay?”

“Okay. Perfect. So, the first question is, well, you have such an interesting sound, it seems wholly original, and yet I wonder if you have any influences.”

“Not really. We like speed metal, but we’re not good enough to play like that. We listen to some rap music, I guess, but that has nothing to do with us. Mostly we like movies and books for ideas. We like Mad Max and Dr. Strangelove and Carnival of Souls and Vincent Price movies. We read Dragonlance novels and comic books about zombies and we like books about the end of the world. We like anything about the end of the world. We really like this little book called The Underground. Have you read that book?”

Buster felt dizzy, wished he was in St. Louis so he could see Lucas’s expression as he asked this question. Had he already been discovered, so early in the ruse? “I have read that book,” he answered.

“Fucking great book. The first song on the album, I wrote that song after I read The Underground. Nobody else really knows about it.”

“What kind of guitar do you play?” Buster asked quickly, changing the subject. He resisted the urge to ask Lucas why, exactly, his novel was so amazing, knowing it would lead the interview further away from what he really needed to know.

“I don’t know. I got it from a catalog. We don’t care about instruments. The expensive ones make you feel bad for doing awful things to them. And they don’t make the same kind of sounds that the cheap ones make. We like the way cheap things sound.”

Buster went through the questions, Lucas giving shorter and shorter