Firehouse on the road at last. Emma learns that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll has three elements — not all of them are always fun.

Wild Horses

A novel, based on a true story

by Rebecca A.

Chapter Thirteen.

We got into Memphis at 2.00pm and found the motel where we were
staying. Then we went to do a sound check over at the bar we were
playing that evening. We'd finished by 4.30, and as we weren't due
to go on until 10.00 we had some free time. Everyone went to do
their own thing. The guys all had people they wanted to see and
Steve -- who seemed to be in one of his moods -- said he wanted to
go off by himself. I was secretly glad since I, too, wanted to pursue
some private business. I took the number Cee had given me for his
friends in Memphis and dialed it. A man's voice answered and I asked
for Vanessa. She came to the phone and I introduced myself as a
friend of Cary's, and said he had told me to look her up if ever I
was in Memphis.

"Do you have some time to meet for coffee?" I asked.

"The heck with coffee, honey, let's find some place we can get a drink."

Vanessa suggested we meet in the bar of the Peabody Hotel. It was a
very grand looking place. When I entered the hotel in the early
evening it appeared there was a ball or function of some kind taking
place elsewhere in the hotel, as the lobby was full of men in
tuxedos and women in elaborate evening gowns. The lobby itself was a
grand two-story affair with a fountain and large overstuffed
furniture. I was dressed in a simple dark green dress and my black
sling-backs and as I walked through to the bar I felt plain and
strangely unfeminine amongst such finery. Then I noticed a bunch of
ducks in the fountain, and I was reassured. They were real, live
ducks, quacking and splashing. I smiled. It was hard to feel like
you were weird when there were ducks living in the hotel. The
Peabody seemed like it had character.

At the bar I ordered a lime and soda and waited for Vanessa. I had
told her on the phone how to recognize me, but she had given me no
clues about herself, and I eyed all the women in the place to see
whether she might have missed me come in. I was the only
unaccompanied woman in the bar, and definitely the only one under
thirty, so there seemed little chance of that. I took the copy of
'The Dice Man' that Rick had lent me from the mesh shoulder bag I
was carrying and began reading it. I had just read the first line
and realized it began with a story about rape when I saw Vanessa in
the margins of my vision.

I knew it was her before I saw her clearly. She swept in and made a
beeline for me. Wow. She was *huge*. At least six feet tall, maybe
more. At least as tall as Pris. And big with it. When she spoke her
drawl was pronounced, even for Memphis. "Emmmm-ahhh!" she oozed. She
had blonde hair -- make that platinum blonde -- piled high on her
head and a black wrap-over dress that barely contained her
extraordinary breasts. Her face was round and fleshy, and she had
the beginnings of crows feet beginning to mark her otherwise creamy
skin. It was hard to guess her age. Her voice was quite deep, and on
the phone had suggested she was older, but she seemed no more than
35 to me in the flesh. She was smiling, and she had her arms open as
though she expected me to stand up and be swallowed up in them. "I'm
sooo sorry to have kept you waiting!"

I said hello and she sat and ordered a vodka and tonic. "None of
that Scandinavian crap daaahling" she insisted to the Bartender
before turning to appraise me. "Emma, you look just diviiiiine."

For some reason I blushed. "Thank you for meeting me."

"I could hardly wait," Vanessa breathed. "Dear, Cary Philips is like
my own child. I was so, so heartbroken to lose him when they... when
he was involved in that unfortunate business."

"Have you heard from him?"

"I had a postcard --"

"-- From San Francisco? Is he okay?"

"-- And a letter. Yes, they were, and yes, he is."

"That's good to hear."

"He's a sweet boy."

"Do you have an address where I can write to him?"

"I'm afraid not." Her vodka arrived and she drank a large mouthful
right off.

"Oh."

My face must have fallen, because Vanessa immediately tried to
reassure me. "But I'm sure he'll write again. Emma, if I understand
it he's not really at liberty to tell anyone where he is. Do you
know anything about that?"

I briefly considered how much I would have to tell Vanessa. Since
she couldn't help me locate Cee I wasn't sure I needed to tell her
anything.

"Tell me, Emma, how is it you came to meet him?" She continued.

I knew we would get to this at some point if I pressed her for
information, but now I was on the spot. Cee had said she was a good
friend, so...

"We met when he was at Brand."

"Inside?"

I nodded. I suddenly found it difficult to meet her eyes.

"Were you doing volunteer work or such?"

I was still staring at my hands in my lap. "No ma'am. I was an inmate."

Vanessa didn't say anything for a long, long time. I figured she was
either puzzled, or shocked, and eventually I looked up at her to
find out which. She didn't seem to be either. Instead she had a
small smile on her face. "I knew that, Emma," she said gently.

Now it was my turn to be puzzled.

"Cary mentioned in his letter that you might contact me if you
needed help. Pardon me for intruding on your life, but I had to know
if you were going to be honest with me."

"I uh... I don't need help. I was just trying to find a way to reach
Cee -- Cary."

"Cary thought there would be things you would need."

"No. No, I can't think of anything."

"Would you like... would you be willing to tell me how you came to
be at that place?"

I sat awkwardly for a moment. Vanessa gestured to attract the
barman's attention. "Sugar, we could do with two more Vodka's. We'll
take them over there." She indicated a table at the far end of the
bar, away from other people. I could see the bartender was thinking
of protesting to Vanessa about serving liquor to someone my age, but
she gave him a look that evidently made him rethink.

We went over to the table. I felt more like a freak than ever as I
walked. I hated it when people knew about my odd situation. I felt
so self-conscious. I made sure I smoothed my dress under me as I sat
and I crossed my legs and offered her a weak smile.

"Start at the beginning, sugar," Vanessa said as the bartender set
our vodkas down on the table and left. So I did. I abbreviated all
the stuff about my innocence. Something I couldn't put my finger on
about Vanessa suggested to me that she had seen more of the world
than I had, and I figured she would draw her own conclusions about
whether I was or wasn't a good person based on more than any story I
could tell. During the course of the telling I became slightly
emotional once or twice, which might have been due to my memories or
the two additional vodkas Vanessa ordered, or perhaps a little bit
of both.

I finished the story at the point at which I'd last seen Cary, in
the back seat of the Malibu bumping down the track from the cabin
where Travis was now buried. I didn't feel the need to tell Vanessa
anything beyond that.

"Are you happy, Emma?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Please, call me Vanessa. Good. I'm surprised. Not many boys would
have dealt well with what you've been through. There must have been
something in you?"

I shrugged. I wasn't defensive about my masculinity any longer. I
didn't even think of myself as having any masculinity any more, and
I said as much to Vanessa.

"Pardon me for asking, sugar, but is that all you?" She waved a hand
at me to indicate my body, and I blushed for some reason -- it was
strange to be embarrassed about that after everything I'd just told her.

"Yes ma'am."

"Vanessa, please. The gods have been kind to you, haven't they?
You're a beautiful woman, Emma." I blushed again. "I really can't
pick anything about you that would give you away at all. So tell me,
sugar, what are your plans for the future?"

"I don't know, ma -- Vanessa. I guess I'm just happy ..."

"Do you want more?"

"More?"

"Do you want... do you want to become a woman?"

"How?" I genuinely didn't understand.

"Surgery, sugar."

"They can do that?"

"You really haven't been out in the world much, have you? What have
you been doing for hormones?"

I confessed that I hadn't had any at all since the last shot Blaha
had given me nearly six months earlier. Vanessa seemed concerned,
and grilled me about my feelings, and suddenly some of my unease in
the previous weeks seemed to make some sense to me. My old male self
was starting to come back as the hormones Blaha had given me faded.
I wondered what would happen if it continued. Would I become more
like a guy, and less like a girl? Would I wind up looking like a
girl, or like a guy with tits? What would happen to Steve and me if
I started looking less like a girl?

I had just started getting used to being a girl, and I was happy. I
didn't know whether I could be anything else, now. Being a guy just
seemed so... it seemed so completely different to who I felt
comfortable being. So... other.

Vanessa seemed to read my mind, and she told me she shared my concerns.

"Thanks, I think," I said.

"Emma, do you trust me?" Vanessa asked.

"Pardon?"

"Do you trust me?"

I paused for thought. "You're a friend of Cary's, so..." I shrugged.

"Do you have any money with you?"

"Some," I said. "I think sixty dollars." In fact I had almost a
hundred that Julia had thrust at me before we had come to Memphis,
but I didn't want to reveal that.

"Good." She downed the rest of her drink and motioned for me to do
the same. "Come with me, then, dear."

We took a cab, down south on Second Street, past Beale Street which
seemed like it was being torn apart building by building, and on a
couple of blocks into a neighborhood that looked the worse for wear
for different reasons. Most of the people on the streets were
colored, and the houses were different, but I had a feeling that in
lots of other ways it wasn't too different from the neighborhood I
had grown up in. People here were doing it hard, and always would.

We stopped at a two-storey place with an old ornate porch. The
flaking paint on the building was so old that its weathered gray
color was indistinguishable from the bare timber patches. "I'll need
forty dollars, Emma," Vanessa said.

I was going to ask her what it was for but something in her face
told me that just by being in the cab outside this place I had
already forfeited a large amount of whatever rights to control I
had. I was pretty buzzed from the vodka anyway. I reached into my
purse and gave Vanessa forty dollars, and she indicated that I
should pay the cab as well. I sighed and dug into my purse again as
Vanessa consigned the forty dollars to an envelope she extracted
from her own purse.

A group of black men were slouched around the door to the building.
They reluctantly shifted their hips as we approached so we could
squeeze past them into the hallway beyond. Vanessa knocked on a door
and after a few seconds we were admitted. Inside it was so dark I
couldn't see anything for a few moments, but I was aware of others
in the room and I could almost feel their eyes sizing me up.
Eventually some dark faces took shape in the gloom, and in the light
from a television set at the far end of the room I saw a pale
skinned figure observing us.

"You a pretty one, girl," the figure said. I recognized the voice as
the man who had answered the phone when I first rang Vanessa, but
something about that voice didn't quite ring true with the mass of
the figure it was coming from.

"Hush now," said Vanessa. "Girls, this is Emma. She's a friend of
Cary's, and y'all know how I feel about Cary, so I want you to make
Emma feel real welcome." She turned to me and indicated a chair
beside a dark skinned girl next to me. "Sit down, honey, and I'll be
right back." She disappeared into a room beyond the television set
and I heard her begin to say something to someone inside before she
closed the door.

I sat awkwardly, still nervous at being the center of attention.
Everyone in the room was staring at me, and at first I averted my
eyes and looked at the floor in front of me. When I flicked my eyes
back up at the girl sitting opposite me she was still looking at me,
and I blushed and studied my hands for a moment. In the quick
glimpse I had got I had noticed her heavily made-up eyes and short
red dress, and my impression was that she was very possibly a
working girl. Another quick glance up and a nervous smile at her
confirmed my opinion. She gave only the most imperceptible smile in
return, and met my gaze confidently. The woman next to her was
older, but similarly attired and made up. Was this some kind of
brothel? I wondered.

The male voice from the end of the room said something I didn't
catch, and the women laughed. I instinctively felt it was a comment
about me, and I blushed. There was something odd about the laughter
of the girl next to me, and I turned to look at her. Although the
only light in the room was the television I found I could make out
her features much better now, and to my shock I noticed that even
with her coffee-colored skin she seemed to have noticeable beard
shadow. She was a guy. Maybe. I didn't want to stare so I looked
away, back at the girl opposite me. She seemed normal enough.

"Where you from, girl?" the man at the end of the room asked. I
realized now what had seemed incongruous -- the voice belonged to
someone who looked extremely androgynous.

"She lives in Mississippi, Delia," Vanessa said as she opened the
door. "Not that it means anything to you. Emma, would you like to
come in?"

I stood up and followed Vanessa into the next room. It was slightly
brighter than the one I'd just come from, but only just, lighted by
a single desk lamp that shone directly downward. There was a figure
on the other side of a large wooden desk, visible only in the light
that reflected off the dark, worn leather inlay on the desk top,
which is to say hardly visible at all. Vanessa guided me to one of
two chairs in front of the desk and we both sat down.

"Lester, this is Emma Boyle. Emma, Dr. Lester Savage," Vanessa said.

"Charmed, m'dear," the barely visible Dr. Savage said. I could see
that he was white, and that he was fat. A pint bottle of whiskey,
three-quarters empty, sat on the edge of the desk not far from the
Doctor's right hand. "I understand you are having some women's
problems."

That was one way to explain it, I thought. Dr. Savage asked me a
couple of questions about my health. I felt awkward about even being
in the office with him, especially since I had quickly guessed the
nature of part of his practice from the women in the room outside,
but his inquiries were brief and pointed, and a few moments later he
had scrawled a prescription and passed it across the desk. Then he
asked me to undress and lie on the examination table that was barely
visible in the gloom over at the side of the office. I looked at
Vanessa and she nodded.

I undressed down to my bra and panties and lay on the table as the
Doctor lumbered to his feet and went to the other side of the office
and unlocked a small cabinet. He took out some packages and
unwrapped them as I looked to the ceiling and tried not to be
fearful. My mind was full of the possible consequences of being
examined in what was clearly an unhygienic environment. He lumbered
towards me and I stiffened. "Lie on your side," he commanded, and I
complied and waited for his sweaty fleshy touch. Instead I felt a
quick swab on my thigh and then the jab of a hypodermic, followed by
some pain as a thick substance was injected into my muscle. He
finished the injection, swabbed me again and then told me to get
dressed. As soon as I was decent, before I had the chance to sit
down, he told me he would provide the prescription by mail every two
months, and that under no circumstances was I to relate the details
of what had just transpired to anyone so long as he was alive.
Vanessa slid the envelope across the desk to the Doctor and then
stood and led me out of the office.

Out on the street we had to walk to the end of the street to a
busier road to hail a cab. I kept rubbing my thigh where Doctor
Savage had jabbed it. It had been a while since I had received a
shot like that, and Blaha had always given them to me in the butt,
which didn't hurt quite so much. Vanessa noticed me rubbing and
smiled. "At least it will keep you looking pretty, sugar."

We took a cab to another house in a slightly more upscale
neighborhood. By more upscale I mean the windows in the houses all
had glass in them -- otherwise there wasn't a whole heap of
difference. We walked up a flight of stairs to a large apartment in
a run-down building. The place looked totally different inside,
clean and bright and well-maintained, although I noticed an
electrical outlet was taped to the wall in the small kitchen off the
hallway. "Welcome to my place," Vanessa said cheerfully. "Make
yourself at home, sugar." She pulled some papers from the top of the
refrigerator and passed them to me. "You might be interested in
these while I make us a drink."

I begged off the drink, explaining that I had to go on at ten.

"You're a little short to be doing the clubs, aren't you sugar?"
Vanessa asked.

"What's height got to do with it?" I asked, puzzled.

"Most of the owners hereabouts, they like their girls a little taller."

I honestly didn't understand what she was getting at for a moment,
and then I wondered whether I should be insulted. "Vanessa," I said
gently, "I *sing*. I'm not a dancer or anything."

"You sing?" I could tell by the inflection in her voice that she
still thought my singing was part of a sex act or a strip show.

"Rock and Roll, R&B," I said. "I'm in a band." I reached into my
purse and extracted a flyer for the trip that Ray had given me at
the sound check. "Firehouse."

"Oh, my lord!" she said as she finally understood, and then she
laughed. "What must you think of me, child!"

"It's okay, really. But I'll stick to water if that's okay with you.
The vodka has already been a bit much."

"Heavens, sugar," she said, looking at the flyer and handing me a
glass of water. "You do this for a *living*?"

"It's not much of one," I admitted. "But we're just starting out,
really. If you want to come tonight I'll put your name on the door."

We went into the living room and I looked at the papers she had
handed me. There was a postcard from Cee, and a letter which ran to
almost four pages. Reading it didn't add much to the details that
Vanessa had told me, but it was nice to see Cary's thoughts on San
Francisco and his feelings about being away from Brand. Both were
overwhelmingly positive, which was hardly surprising. As Vanessa had
said, there was a brief mention of me in the postcard, and then a
much longer description of my situation in the letter. 'I believe Em
will need help soon,' Cee had written, 'and I hope you'll do
everything for her as you would for me. She was my best -- my only
-- friend in that horrible place and she deserves only good things.'

I sat in the living room missing Cee more than ever. I was glad he
was enjoying California, but I wished I was with him.

I probed Vanessa about Doctor Savage's, and the 'girls' in the room
outside his office. "How did you know about a place like that,
Vanessa?" I asked. I idly wondered whether she was a real girl.
After all, she was so tall, and her voice was quite deep. But her
breasts were so large, and her mannerisms seemed very feminine.

"It's okay, sugar, I'm all girl, if that's what you're wondering.
Born and raised that way. I'm a kind of aunt to most of them I
suppose, and a few of the gay boys working the bars. Most of them
don't have anyone else, so I take care of them."

"Take care of them?"

"A little money when times are tough; a lot of love because times
are always tough." She drained her glass again. I hadn't seen her
pour them and I suspected that hers contained vodka.

"But why?" I asked. "You don't... please pardon me if I'm being
rude, but you don't seem to have a lot of money to go around."

"Oh, I have money, sugar. I'm very careful with it, is all." I
remembered that I had paid for the cabs -- but then I had told
Vanessa I had money.

"As to why," she continued, "I don't rightly know. I suppose I have
a kind of natural resistance to the forces that make everyone walk
the narrow path, Emma. There's a lot of love in the people society
casts out, but very few get to see it."

Vanessa had a soul as big as her body. Maybe bigger.

I asked about the room at Doctor Savage's again. Why were all the
girls sitting there? Were they waiting for appointments? Had I
jumped a queue? Vanessa explained that they lived there, in the
other rooms aside from Savage's office. "He's a harmless old fool
who's obsessed by boys in dresses but incapable of doing anything
about it since he made friends with the bottle," Vanessa said. "He
doesn't have any other practice these days, and the girls take care
of him in return for medical services rendered. So long as he treats
them well he gets a place to live and he gets to keep his license."

We sat and discussed the Memphis 'scene', which involved a
substantial number of drag queens and transsexuals. Vanessa
explained the difference to me, and then we got into more personal
discussions as she asked me again about my future and then told me
about the various surgical options open to me if I decided I wanted
to go "all the way". She was a treasure trove of information.

When I left at 9.15pm I felt refreshed. Although surgery had never
been on my mind before, the other issues were the sorts of things I
had sometimes discussed with Cary, and even though Vanessa was very
different to Cary I felt better about having talked about my
specific problems with her. They weren't the sorts of things that I
could mention to Julia and I was always afraid to raise them with
Steve for fear of how he might begin to think of me.

The gig went well, *really well*, and the crowd cried for more. The
only difficult moments were before the show, when Steve seemed
uncharacteristically subdued and pallid and I worried that he might
be getting sick, and after the show when Vanessa and the person
named Delia came backstage and Delia's appearance made the rest of
the band nervous. Embarrassed, I hustled the two of them off for a
drink out front before the bar closed. They had loved the show, and
loved my singing, and I found Delia a most intriguing androgyne,
with features neither entirely female nor male which drew very odd
glances from some of the other patrons of the bar, and disturbed me
more than I admitted. Her appearance settled one thing in my mind,
though: Steve definitely didn't like being reminded of my in-between
state. He'd been as disturbed as the other guys in the band when
Delia was introduced.

***

We'd been playing to packed houses for months now in Tupelo, and Ray
had found us more gigs in Jackson, Knoxville and Nashville that had
gone over well. He organized some time for us in a small studio back
in Memphis. We went up there on the weekend and laid down ten songs
in the two days. Being in the studio was interesting, but it was
really pretty hard work. You lay down the tracks separately and
combine them in the mix, and it's hard to sound spontaneous and
fresh after you've sung the same verse four or five times. I wanted
to take a look around the town but there really wasn't any time
because we worked so hard all day and were all exhausted by the time
we finished.

The engineer who worked on our songs was a cheerful Greek guy named
Con who was very patient with us and our naivete about the recording
process. He had done some work with Alex Chilton, which blew Brett
away because we all thought Alex's records with his band Big Star
were fantastic. We stayed late on the Saturday night to record
'September Gurls' in a rough single take as a kind of homage.

Everyone tried their best and Con was a lot of fun to work with, but
in the end neither Brett nor Steve was totally happy with the way
the songs sounded. It wasn't really very surprising that they
sounded rough considering how much stuff we'd tried to record in one
weekend! Steve was unhappy with a couple of his solos and Brett
thought the overall sound was too muddy. He wanted my vocals to
stand out more in he mix. I was flattered, and I was impressed, too.
As a singer himself I expected him to want more of his own
performances in our recordings, but he was genuinely interested in
us succeeding as a band.

During the following week we met up with Ray in Oxford, and he
listened to our complaints and then arranged for Steve and I to redo
our parts on a couple of tracks the next Saturday, with another
engineer doing the mixing. Steve and Brett thought the mix was much
better and we ironed out one or two things in my performance that
had worried me too. Of course going back into the studio cost us a
lot of money, but Ray was supportive and told us we'd get it back
eventually in record sales and increased crowds.

Ray rush-pressed an EP of four of the songs from our studio
sessions. It contained a song that Steve and Brett had written
together, one that Brett had written alone, one that Steve had
written alone, and one that Steve had written with me while we were
at Brand together, 'No Questions'. Ray said he needed the EP for
distribution to radio stations where we were touring. He also got
Pete the anarchist to take some photographs of us performing at
Elroy's that he could use for publicity.

It cost more than seven hundred dollars for the studio time and the
record and the distribution, but everyone kicked in money. I think
Julia put up Steve's share. Elroy said he'd put in mine. I tried to
protest but I really didn't have any other way of paying. Elroy was
a sweetheart. I promised him I would pay him back. I don't think he
believed it, but I meant what I said.

When Ray gave us the record we all went over to Lisa and Brett's
house and played it about thirty times until nobody could bear to
hear it again. Except Bo, who kept playing it over and over again
until people begged for mercy. A few weeks later he was *still*
playing it.

Our shows featured only original material now, except for encores
which were always covers. Our choice of songs to cover was eclectic,
to say the least. Brett was well and truly into a Britpop 'punk'
phase, while Steve was much more into R&B and my own tastes were
slightly more folky. Rick liked any song that gave him a chance to
show off on keyboards, Bo liked flat out Rock and Roll and Jim was
leaning into a kind of Jazz Fusion, of all things. We usually did at
least two songs for an encore, and sometimes more if it was a really
good night.

Four months had gone by since our deal with Ray had begun, and it
was time for us to go on the road. Our first stop was probably the
toughest town we were going to play the whole tour -- a huge gig, to
more than 3,000 people, back in Memphis. Ray told us it was going to
be okay, but I paid more attention to Elroy's comments. "If they
like you in Memphis you'll find acceptance everywhere, but if they
hate you..." he said. Seeing that I was worried he tried to reassure
me. "'S alright, Emma, they're gonna love you, you know that."

***

Although most of the guys in Firehouse had been in other bands
before none of them had ever played a really big house, and none of
us really had any idea of what to expect. We loaded everything we
had into two vehicles, a van Rick had borrowed from a friend, and
Wendy's pickup which held most of the gear. I never really figured
out what Wendy did for a living besides hang out with us, but
whatever it was he could afford a nice truck and he was able to just
up and leave to come with us.

We all gathered at Brett and Lisa's to pack everything into the van
and the truck. Everyone was acting like we were going to be gone for
months instead of two weeks. Elroy showed up and gave us a couple of
six packs for the journey, and I gave him a big thank-you hug and
told him we'd send postcards. I think he was almost as excited for
me as I was. Julia and Pris said farewell and Pris reminded me with
a smile that going on the road trip did not mean I was moving out.

***

>From Memphis we went to Jonesboro, and then down to Little Rock. At
first being on the road was fun. When the Memphis show went over
well we felt good, and they liked us in Jonesboro, too, even though
it was a small gig by comparison. In the weeks before we went on the
road we had been practicing a lot, and some of the new songs Steve
and Brett had written were really fantastic. Everyone felt great.
What's better than playing good music and making people feel good
with it?

By the third day we were all getting irritable with one another. We
had all stayed up late after playing in Jonesboro, drinking and
joking around. We had never performed more than two nights in a row
before, and driving between cities was really pretty boring,
although we had the constant schizophrenic accompaniment of Iggy Pop
and Townes Van Zandt alternating on the cassette player so there was
always something to listen to. It wasn't difficult work -- each day
we didn't get up until at least 9.00am, and that was usually only
because we had to be out of the motel rooms. We were staying in the
cheapest places we could find, places where the walls were thin and
the mattresses were rotten and the plumbing was shot. We tried to be
in our rooms as little as possible. Steve and I had a room to
ourselves, but Rick and Bo and Brett and Jim doubled up to save
money. Three hotel rooms were eating into our earnings anyway, and
when gas and food and booze were included we didn't make much out of
most of the shows.

In Little Rock, our third stop, we were part of a double bill with a
band called Sons of the Railroad, who were more hard rocking than we
were and came from some town I'd never heard of in East Texas. We
played first, and then hung around while they played. I got carded,
of all things, and asked to leave the bar area, even though the
barman had seen me on stage only an hour earlier. It was only 10.30pm
and we didn't want to leave. We had all planned to go back to the
motel together at the end of the night and Rick and Brett were
nowhere to be seen and Jim was dancing with a girl, so Steve and me
and Bo and a blonde girl he had met went backstage to the band room
to wait for them. We all sat around the room and the girl passed
around a flask of whiskey she had.

"This is Maggie," Bo said to us. "Maggie, this here's Emma and Steve."

The girl nodded. "You guys were great tonight. Really."

There didn't seem to be a whole lot to say to that. It was nice to
get the praise, but kind of awkward. "Thanks," said Steve, affecting
an oh-so-cool air. I couldn't believe the expression on his face and
laughed.

"Here, man, you look like you need to relax and deflate your ego,"
Bo said jokingly. He had some grass and he rolled a joint and passed
it over to Steve, and we all laughed kind of nervously. Steve took a
hit from it and passed it on to me. I looked at him uncertainly. I'd
never tried it before, and I didn't smoke tobacco. He looked at me
like I was a child, and so I took it and inhaled and then
immediately coughed and spluttered and dropped the joint.

"Sorry!" I said.

The girl, Maggie, picked it up from the floor and took a hit from it
like she'd been doing it for years. I felt like such an idiot. She
passed it on to Bo with an approving nod, and then it came around
again. This time I waved it off. "I don't think I'm made for it," I
said. I didn't care if Steve thought I was uncool for not wanting to
get stoned.

Maggie was alright. She was not an especially beautiful girl; her
skin was pockmarked from a difficult adolescence and her thighs were
quite large, but she had a good heart, an open face and a ready
laugh, and that seemed to make her more attractive than most of the
other women Bo brought backstage after our gigs. I thought at first
that Bo had just hit on her out of the blue after our set, because
the guys in the band were always making jokes about Bo being such a
ladies man. I remembered an old off-color joke Steve had told me
about drummers when we first joined the band. But it turned out
Maggie was an old friend of Bo's. They went to high school together
in Texarkana. She hadn't known he was playing tonight, but had been
in the bar and had recognized him. They were both glad to get
somewhere quieter to talk, and I thought they deserved some privacy,
but Maggie was a real live wire who crackled with jokes and talk and
liked to have an audience. She had lost her job clerking at a local
business the week before when the old accountant who ran it upped
and died, and she was looking to move on out of the area, she said.

After the joint was finished Bo rolled another, and then another,
and I think the three of them were pretty stoned by the end of the
third one. I felt kind of out of things. Later that night when we
all went back to the motel -- Maggie accompanied Bo, I noticed --
Steve was very distant again, and he barely acknowledged me before
he hit the bed and slept.

Next morning he was much more cheerful, and we made love after we
woke. We lay together afterward and I stroked the hairs on Steve's
arm as I lay my head on his chest. I liked Steve's hairiness. I
don't know whether I liked it just on its own, or because it
reminded me of how different the two of us were and that made me
feel just a little more feminine. Maybe it was a bit of both. I was
stroking his arm, and he was running his fingers over my neck, when
I noticed there was a lot of bruising around the inside of his elbow.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Hmmm? What?" Steve said.

"Your arm. What did you do to it?"

"Huh? Oh, I don't know."

I let the subject go at the time, but I should have known what it
meant. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom instead. When we
checked out Bo announced we needed to swing by Maggie's place to
pick up some stuff -- she was going to come on the road with us. I
thought it was interesting that someone would make such a snap
decision and just up and leave pretty much everything she had for a
week or more, but I was also glad to have another girl riding along
with us, even if it did get kind of cramped in Rick's borrowed van.
Even though we had been away from Oxford for only a few days, I
found I missed having women around. The guys were nice enough, but
somehow I just didn't fit in with guys anymore. If I ever had, I
thought.

Our tour called for us to swing across through Texas, and into New
Mexico, then back into Southern Texas and then into Louisiana. After
that it was along the coast and up toward Atlanta taking in most of
the major cities along the way. After Atlanta we had Gadsden and
Birmingham and then we were back in Oxford. I had never even seen
the ocean, so I was looking forward to the coast part of the trip.

I had discovered that washing clothes on the road was impracticable
most of the time, and so I'd had to wear a variety of things
on stage, from my green dress, in a place that looked better than
most in Austin, to just plain t-shirt and jeans in a rough looking
place in Alexandria. Mostly it didn't seem to matter much. As Julia
had predicted, people liked to look at me and the first part of our
shows always went better when I dressed up than when I wore
t-shirts, but once we got to the part of our second set everyone
called 'the quiet songs', the ones that Steve had written for me
specially, the atmosphere in every room we played changed and got
really intense. As we performed in front of different audiences I
got more comfortable with myself on stage and Brett and Steve and I
even worked out some on stage banter between songs that the crowd
seemed to like. Everywhere we went people thought we were great, and
we actually sold a lot of the EP's that Ray had given us. After we
did the show in Baton Rouge a guy from one of the local radio
stations came up and asked us to do an interview with him, and he
made us a feature of his next show. Ray was ecstatic, and ordered
more records.

I was beginning to warm to Ray. At first I had dismissed all his
talk about big success and records and all that, but I had to hand
it to him: he worked hard. Every gig he had ever set up for us had
been in a good, well-run place that could pull a crowd, and on the
road trip every place we went he had already sent records on ahead
to the local radio stations and followed up with phone calls to make
sure they would play them. He had a network of people in most of the
towns we went to who put up posters promoting our shows and got
articles placed in the local paper. Whenever we got into town Ray
would visit the local record store to see whether they would stock
the record. We weren't the only band he managed, but it seemed like
he gave us all his attention.

Our first single broke in Dallas -- Ray had taken the song from the
EP that Steve had written with me, 'No Questions', and done a
separate pressing of it backed with our cover of 'September Gurls',
and some DJ there just wigged out on it and convinced the program
director to put it on high rotation. Within a week it seemed like it
had rippled out from there. By the time we got to Louisiana it was
getting nation-wide airplay, our gigs were selling out, and scungy
journalists started calling our motel rooms. Ray flew down to Baton
Rouge to be with us, and begin to plan putting an album together.

I noticed that all the guys smoked dope, and there was a lot handed
around. I was kind of curious about it -- I don't want you to think
I was some kind of ultra-straight kid who was morally opposed to it
or anything, and I sure didn't want the guys to think that. But I
had never smoked tobacco, and after that time with Maggie and Bo I
thought I couldn't smoke anything. Steve tried to teach me, but it
didn't work. I just coughed and spluttered and everyone laughed at
me. So I was the only one who didn't get stoned most nights.

We were in the van just outside Mobile, joking about the amount Bo
had drunk the night before, when a cop pulled the van over. Rick was
driving and Ray was in the front seat beside him, and Steve, Bo,
Brett and I were in back. Wendy and Jim were in the pickup and kept
on going after we got pulled over. I didn't know what was happening
at first -- Rick said "Shit" and began to pull over and I thought
something was wrong with the van.

"It's cool," Ray said. "Bo, make sure your stash is hidden away
somewhere safe."

"What's up, man?" Bo said.

"Cop," Rick said dejectedly.

I felt, more than saw, Steve stiffen in the seat beside me. I took
his hand and squeezed it. "It's okay," I said. "Everything will be
okay." I don't know why I said that but it was probably to reassure
myself as much as Steve.

Rick stopped the van and turned off the engine. A few moments later
the cop walked along the side of the van and appeared at Rick's
window. He was tall and thin and hard looking. "See your license?"
the cop said. Rick handed it over. "Registration?" the cop said.

Rick got it from the glove compartment. "It's not my van. It belongs
to a friend." I looked over at Steve. He looked like a caged animal.
I could see his muscles flexing as he considered leaping from the
van and running.

"Good friend, lettin' you drive it this far," the cop said. "Know
why I stopped you, son?"

"No, sir." Rick said.

"You got some wire" -- he said it 'wayuh' --"hangin' from the back
of your van. It's draggin' behind you."

"Oh. Thanks," Rick said. "Mind if I get out and look?"

The cop nodded his assent. Ray and Rick both got out and went around
the back of the van. The cop peered in past Rick to try to get a
look inside as they opened the back door. He was looking straight at
Steve. I could sense Steve's body go rigid.

"Damn," Ray said. Sure enough a lead had flopped out of one of the
boxes in back of the van, and whoever had packed it had shut the van
door without noticing it hanging out. The plug on the end of the
lead was ruined. "Well, thanks for letting us know, officer."

The cop looked away from Steve and I could feel the tension ease
slightly.

"Musicians, huh?" the cop said, peering at some of the gear in the back.

Ray couldn't resist handing him a handbill for the trip with the
dates for the tour.

"Firehouse. That's easy to remember." He folded the handbill and put
it in his pocket. "Well, y'all enjoy your stay. And pack your load
better next time."

Ray closed up the back and he and Rick got back in the van as the
cop drove on. "Jesus," said Bo as Rick started the van, "*Now* I
could use a drink."

I noticed Maggie was staring at Steve strangely as we drove off. Had
she noticed anything unusual about his behavior?

We got into Mobile early in the afternoon and did our sound check
quickly. Wendy was getting practiced at our setups and was able to
do everything much quicker these days. Then we went to the motel to
check in. Afterward the guys and Maggie wanted to get out and look
around, but I was feeling tired, and thought I'd lie down for a
while before dinner. I fell asleep for an hour and woke up around dusk.

I suppose I shouldn't have pried. I should have left well enough
alone. Steve's guitar case was lying in the corner of the room, and
I was bored, and I went over to pick up the Gibson to try to play a
few of the songs we had been working on. I picked it up from the
case and carried it over to the bed, where I sat on the end and
strummed a couple of chords, thinking about the opening to 'Nowhere
I Could Go', a song Steve and Jim had written together that Steve
had been trying to teach me to play. The guitar didn't sound right,
but it wasn't the tuning. I held it up and heard something moving
inside it, and when I turned it over a small plastic bag with a tiny
amount of white powder in it fell out.

Ohhhh, Steve... My heart fell to the floor along with the bag.

It was almost 7.30pm when Steve returned to the motel. We were due
to go on at 8.00pm. I had found the syringes he used in his shower
bag with his razor, and I was waiting for him, sitting on the end of
the bed with the guitar lying beside me and a syringe and the bag of
heroin in my lap. As soon as Steve opened the door to the motel room
he saw me, and his face fell. Neither of us said anything for a few
moments. I guess my face was saying "Well?" and I didn't have to.

"Em... " He didn't know what to say, and he threw his hands up. He
walked over to his duffel bag and extracted a shirt from it, then
peeled off the t-shirt he was wearing to change. When I saw his
naked torso I started to notice the signs I should have picked up on
earlier. There were bruises on both his arms, and his once muscular
chest had lost some definition. He didn't look too bad, but if I had
been paying more attention I should have noticed him getting run
down. Well, I had noticed him looking pale and stuff, but I hadn't
thought about heroin.

"You're not going to say anything?" I said finally.

"What do you want me to say?" He said as he pulled on the shirt and
began to button it up. "Sorry? I don't think that's really it, do you?"

"Steve... Why?"

"Why not?" He shrugged again. "I wouldn't expect you to understand, Em."

That hurt. That he couldn't talk to me. That he thought I wouldn't
understand. That really hurt. I tried to hold it back but a tear ran
down my face.

"I *don't* understand, but maybe if you talked to me more..."

"That's the problem, Emma, alright? I don't want to talk to anyone.
Okay?"

"Steve..." I got up and walked over to him. I wanted to hug him, but
he turned away.

"Not now, Em. We're gonna be late for the gig."

"Fuck the gig!" I said, really crying now.

"Oh, shit," he said wearily. "Look, can we not do this now? Please?"

"Steve, I --

"I mean it, Emma. You know why I didn't tell you? Because I didn't
want any of your 'we can work it out' stuff, alright? That's not
what it's about. Just let's forget about it now and we'll talk about
it later." He brushed past me and scooped up the smack from where
I'd left it on the bed, then went into the bathroom and closed the door.

He was right. I didn't want to do this now. I went outside and got
into Wendy's pickup to go with him to the bar. A few moments later
most of the other guys came out and got into the van, and then
Maggie joined me in the pickup.

"What's the matter, honey?" She said when she saw my tear-stained face.

"Steve," was all I could say. She put her arm around me and I sobbed
for a few moments.

"He was acting kind of strange this afternoon when that cop stopped
us," Maggie said. "Is he in any trouble, Emma?"

I lifted my head from her shoulder. "What do you mean?"

She looked embarrassed. "Sorry, it's none of my business, right? It
was just... he looked like he was hiding something. Has he been
hurting you?"

"No," I said, wiping my nose. "No. He's just... I don't know what to
think, Maggie. I just wish he'd talk to me about stuff, you know?"

"He's a guy, Emma. Haven't you worked all that out yet? Guys never
talk about stuff that's important. Not unless they're about to die
or somethin'."

"Maybe."

"Don't push him, just let him talk to you in his own time," she
said. Then she laughed. "Hah! Here's me givin' you advice. I'm
practically the winner of the Elizabeth Taylor award for stable
relationships! Emma, ignore everything I say, okay? I want you to
promise me you'll ignore any advice I offer you."

"I promise," I said, and smiled. Maggie was a good tonic. I was
still hurting inside but it was hard to stay upset around her for
very long. Wendy came out and got in the driver's seat and we headed
off to the gig, and Maggie did her best to put my mind on other things.

***

At the bar Steve and I didn't speak to one another. The guys were
all looking at us like they were afraid to say anything. I think
that was sensible.

We played like shit that night. I was all messed up emotionally and
my sinuses were all blocked up from crying. I think Steve had shot
up before we left the motel now that he didn't need to hide it from
me. His guitar changes were sloppy and although I managed to sing on
key I couldn't put any feeling into the songs.

During the break between our sets Steve and I couldn't even bring
ourselves to look at one another. "For god's sake!" Brett said. "I
don't know what it is, but can't you two make up?"

"I don't know, Brett. Why don't you ask Steve?" I said. I felt lost
and alone, caught up in swirling waters that were taking me in
directions I didn't understand.

After we finished the show Steve left on his own. The others looked
at me like there was an explanation I should give, but I burst into
tears and crumpled into a little ball on the floor. Bo and Maggie
pulled me up and hugged me, and Ray told them to take me back to the
motel. I was really upset. The stress of the day was getting to me.
Ray tried to get me to take a pill he had, but I hissed "No drugs!"
at him and he recoiled like I'd bitten him.

When I woke up next morning Steve was lying on the bed next to me,
still in his clothes. I looked at his face while he was sleeping.
God, I loved him more than I could say, but I was so worried for
him, and I was still hurt from last night. I couldn't believe he
felt he couldn't talk to me. I felt so much for Steve there was
nothing I wouldn't tell him. Why didn't he feel the same way?

When I reflected on this later I saw that what I thought wasn't
really truthful. There were many things I hid from Steve or tried
not to remind him of, like the male parts of me, the way I worried
about our future and the way I felt about not being enough of a
woman for him. I hid those things from him because I didn't want to
worry him. Maybe he thought he was protecting me, too.

I got up and took a shower and washed my hair. My hair was halfway
down the middle of my back and in need of another trim, and it
needed a lot of shampoo and conditioner each time I washed it. I
felt better after the shower, but I still felt numb inside. I combed
my hair out carefully and blotted the excess water from it and
thought of how happy Steve had been in those first weeks after I had
revealed my secret to him at Brand and we had made love several
times a night. With a tear in my eye I reflected that since we had
been out of Brand things hadn't been quite so good, what with Travis
and then Steve's moods and now the drugs. I thought on it and
realized that Steve's moods were probably related to the drugs
rather than anything I had done, unless he was taking drugs because
of something to do with me. I shook my head as though to clear the
thoughts from it. How the hell did I know what Steve thought or felt
when he wouldn't talk to me?

When I came back out into the motel room Steve was awake and sitting
on the edge of the bed., and he watched me as I walked across to my
bag and selected some clothes for the day. When I dropped my towel I
faced away from him, as I always did when I dressed, and I pulled up
my panties and tucked myself back in them and then reached for my bra.

"Em, I'm sorry," Steve said. I turned to face him. "About last
night, I mean."

I thought that was all I needed to hear and I turned to look at him.
In the subdued light through the crack between the curtains I could
see his blue eyes, shadowed with dark rings beneath them from lack
of sleep and who knows what else. I knew he meant the apology
sincerely, and I crossed the floor to him and sat on his lap. He
cupped my left breast in his hand. I lay my head against his. We sat
with our arms around each other for a few minutes, not saying
anything, just feeling closeness with each other.

Eventually there was the issue of Steve's drug use to consider. I
didn't quite know how to bring it up, and Steve seemed to sense that
I wanted to say something but couldn't. "It will all be okay, Em, I
promise," he said. "I can keep it under control."

I didn't really believe that but I didn't want to fight with him.
Instead I lay down on the bed and he lay next to me and touched me,
so gently, on the face and neck and breasts. I felt those familiar
butterflies running through my insides in a soft fluttering as my
body responded to his touch.

We touched each other slowly and softly and sweetly as though we
were discovering each other for the first time, both afraid but
entranced by one another. He was hard, and I ran my fingers lightly
up and down the length of his cock as he stroked his fingers up my
belly and over my breasts and neck to my mouth. Then he bent over me
and started kissing my neck, and my breasts, and my stomach, and
then the insides of my thighs. I tried to give his cock more
attention but he pushed me back on the bed and continued to stroke
me and kiss me, and then nibble on my nipples until I thought my
insides were going to melt. Whenever he did those things to my
breasts I felt the sensations somewhere deep inside me, in a way
that went right to my core, and it was beautiful and scary all at
the same time -- scary because it felt like if I gave in to the
blissful sensations my body would melt away, dissolve away, and
never come back. I felt warm and soft and pliable, and gradually I
became aware that I was moving my hips, needing him, wanting him in
me to respond to those movements. After who knows how long he paused
in his kissing and nibbling and stroking and rolled me onto my front
and pulled my panties down. He took a pillow from the top of the bed
and thrust it under my hips, and then I felt him apply some
lubricant to me and then position his cock at my opening while he
put his hands under me to touch my breasts. In a moment he was
inside me, in a quick thrust that made me cry out because it hurt,
but then the hurt turned into something different, an overwhelming
satisfaction, and he was moving in me and I was moving my hips in
return and he felt so good and I felt warm all over and tingling
sensations in my nipples and crotch and then it was even more
intense and I thought I wouldn't be able to bear his fingers on my
nipples a moment longer and his cock felt like it would break me in
two and then he found a spot inside me that sent me into spasms of
pain and ecstasy and confusion and then again, more ecstasy, I
needed him so badly, I wanted it never to end, never, and he thrust
into me harder and stronger and we had never ever fucked like this,
slow but strong and I kept spasming until I was weak and moaning and
I thought I was going to lose myself forever. And then I did, there
was no me, there was just us, just Steve and me as one and I had no
thoughts, just sensations over and over and stronger and wider
through my whole body radiating out from my belly but up through my
arms and legs and then back again, my *whole* body, my fingertips,
and I was hot and confused because there wasn't only me, there was
us, and then his breathing changed and we were fucking more quickly,
urgently and there was a grunting noise coming from one of us and
some moaning from the other and then Steve came inside me with a
gasp, and it was him and me again and he thrust six, eight, twelve
times into me and collapsed on top of me. I could hear his breathing
next to my ear and he whispered my name, "Emma, Emma... Emma."

***

Chapter Fourteen

During the next few days Steve and I maintained a different kind of
relationship than we had before I discovered the heroin. In some
ways we were even closer, but in others... I think I had lost some
of the respect I had for him. Before, he was invincible.
Afterward... I couldn't understand why he felt that way; why he felt
so bad about himself that he needed it.

I was sure Steve was still shooting up. Whenever we got into town he
would disappear for a few hours, and he always looked distant and
dull when he showed up to play. After that bad night in Mobile his
performance improved, though -- in fact in Columbus, two nights
later, he put in one of the best sets I'd ever heard him play. After
the show he left alone, without talking to anyone. I went back to
the motel with Wendy, Bo and Maggie. "Great show," Bo said, "but
this ain't what I signed up for, y'know?" I nodded sadly.

The next morning I woke to find Steve laying on the bed next to me
again, and he apologized once more.

I looked deep into his eyes.

"Steve, what is it you want?"

"I don't know, Em," he whispered. "I don't know."

"Is there something I can do to help?"

He didn't say anything. We both lay together for about five minutes
without saying anything at all. Then he turned his head back to look
at me and said quietly "You don't know what it's like. You should
try it."

I didn't see how both of us developing a drug problem was going to
help us. "I don't think so, Steve."

"Just once, Em. Then you'll know why."

I didn't want to lecture him. I knew that wasn't the way to bring us
back together. Steve wasn't going to give it up just because I said
so, and I knew from watching him in the preceding few days that if I
made him choose between me and the drugs I'd lose. Not at first -- I
hoped that initially he would choose me --but one day I'd find
another needle. I ran my hand over the stubble on his cheek. His
skin was dry and dull-looking.

"When did you start?" I asked.

"Uh... the first time was about a week after we arrived in Oxford.
Leon and me were out at a place over to the west, listening to some
wild music, and we hung out with the guys playing it later on, and
they offered it and, you know... it was alright."

"Leon was doing it too?"

"He decided he didn't want to keep on doing it. I think he thought
he liked it too much."

"Was he right?" I wished Leon had stayed. He had been good for Steve.

Steve shrugged.

"Who do you get it from?" I asked.

"All over. It's not hard, Em."

"You've been buying it in places we've toured?"

He nodded. "I scored some in Memphis, and Austin, and Mobile."

That gave me something else to worry about. I would always wonder
whether he was going to get arrested for heroin when he went out. It
wasn't enough that he was a wanted escapee, now he was a drug addict
too. There had been very little in the plastic bag when I had found
it in Mobile, and I guessed that he would need to get more soon.

"You said you could keep it under control, but that's not true, is
it, Steve?"

"Emma, you know you mean everything to me. I wish... I wish you
could understand this."

We hit the road to Atlanta. Although our shows had been great since
the debacle at Mobile, the atmosphere in the van was bad. No-one
felt much like talking, except Maggie who kept trying to cheer
everyone up without much success. When 'No Questions' came on the
radio as we were driving into Atlanta nobody smiled, and Brett
turned the volume down on the pretext of asking for directions and
not being able to hear Bo's reply. At the venue Steve bailed on us
as soon as the sound check was over, as usual, and I went back with
Maggie to the cheap motel we'd checked into earlier.

I called the apartment in Oxford. Pris answered, sounding cheerful.
It was great to hear her voice. She was on her own because Julia and
Pete had gone to Jackson for the weekend with some friends. "It's
kind of quiet without you," she said. I didn't want to tell her
about Steve and the drugs over the phone, so I talked about the
shows we'd done and she told me about the events of her week. I was
suddenly lonely and wishing I was back in Oxford. After I finished
talking to Pris I rang Elroy and felt even more homesick. He told me
he was missing me, too. We talked for about ten minutes until my
supply of dimes was used up.

I was still musing over what to do about Steve, and so Maggie tried
to divert me by steering me into a co-operative beauty session. We
spent the late afternoon in my motel room painting each other's
nails and fooling with our hair. I touched up the roots of Maggie's
hair -- which wasn't naturally blonde at all -- using a bleaching
kit we picked up at a drugstore around the corner, and she helped me
put mine in rollers and then style it with lots more body.

Steve still wasn't back at the motel at 7.00pm, when we were due to
head off to the gig, so we all waited, and waited next to the van in
the parking lot. Brett was really pissed at him for being late.

At 7.45 Steve finally showed up, completely stoned. Whatever Brett
was planning to say to him never came out, since it was obvious that
arguing with Steve while he was in that state would be fruitless. We
got to the venue at 8.30 and went on for our first set at 9.00. The
place was cavernous, maybe the biggest bar I'd ever seen, but it was
packed with college kids who gave us a huge welcome when we took the
stage.

I never really understood how Steve could play so well while he was
so out of it, but he could. If anything he played even better when
he was stoned. Perhaps he wasn't great in a technical sense, but
when he was stoned the feeling that he put into the music was
extraordinary. It was like he was feeling the music as much as
playing it.

The rest of us were just as good that night. Whether we all fed off
Steve or just finally learned to put our differences aside and
really play as a band, everyone came together for three really
powerful sets of music. We did an encore, and then we were out of
original material and so for the second encore we did a high-octane
frenetic version of one of Brett's recent discoveries, Pete
Shelley's 'Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)' with
him out front and me backing and then closed with me doing a rather
melancholy version of an obscure song we'd practiced at the sound
check the past three days, 'Junk Man'. It was a song I'd liked a lot
since I'd heard Pris playing it in the apartment a few weeks
earlier, but now there was an ironic tinge to the words.

"Southside girls they told me

That you were hot as fire

And I remember every word you said

When you told me I'd get burned

I said don't worry baby

I'll just live and learn

I should have listened to the junk man"

When you're on stage under lights it's hard to see past the first row
or two of people in front of you unless the bar is very well lit
too. Most of them aren't. You can see thirty or so faces, and
between songs you can occasionally hear louder people further back,
but mostly you're only aware of the people on stage with you. You get
almost all of your feedback from the crowd at the end of each song.
With the exception of the Mobile show, the applause had been getting
better and better every night we'd been on the road, and in Atlanta
that night the crowd stomped and hooted for more for a full three
minutes after our third encore.

Because we couldn't see, or hear above the ruckus, we didn't know
when we finished the encore that the police had entered the bar, and
so we all went backstage unaware of any problem. Once we got into
the room set aside for us I could see as soon as Steve laid his
guitar down that he was about to head out into the night again, and
I went over to him and put my arms around him. "Stay with me
tonight," I said softly.

He looked at me and I could see he was momentarily torn, but I knew
I'd lose and was a fool for trying. "I'll only be a little while,
Em, I won't be late." He pulled away from my arms and walked out of
the room and out the back door. Bo looked at me and shrugged, then
passed me a beer.

About 30 seconds after Steve had left the cops showed up at the door
to the room. I was busy helping Rick with some cables and didn't
notice them at first. It was only when I became aware that everyone
else in the room had stopped moving that I looked up. There were two
of them, a man and a woman, both in plain clothes, both holding
badges up for us to see. The guy was probably in charge, because he
spoke first.

"Looking for Steve Hammond," he said to Brett, who was closest to him.

Brett looked over at me and then at the rest of us before he looked
back at the cops. None of us knew what to do. Finally I spoke up.
"You just missed him." I nodded toward the corridor that led to the
back door.

At that moment we heard a loud cracking sound outside through the
small barred window in the room that opened onto the parking lot. My
heart went into my throat. I recognized the sound, even though it
was further away than the last time I had heard it. It was a
gunshot. The male cop ran toward the back door and the policewoman
drew her gun and pointed it at us one by one.

I felt the beginnings of panic.

None of us moved. It wasn't just because of the gun pointed at us;
we were all hanging on the next sounds. From the bar there was the
dull thump of some canned music that management had put on after we
finished playing, but we were waiting to hear what was going on
outside. In a few seconds we heard shouting, it sounded like the
cop, and then we heard a siren, briefly. It seemed like it was right
below the window. Then some more, indistinct shouting, and then just
the dull thump thump of the bass from the music in the bar.

The policewoman broke us from our freeze. "You all in the band?"

Brett spoke up this time. "Yes ma'am."

"'Cept Maggie and Wendy," Bo said, indicating them with a nod of his
head. "They work behind the scenes." That wasn't quite true in
Maggie's case, but it was the shortest way to explain their involvement.

"Would you mind not pointing that thing at me?" Jim asked the
policewoman. She showed no sign of lowering the gun. She didn't look
much older than any of us, I reflected. She was nervous, and her
nervousness while armed was making us all nervous. We all looked at
one another uncertainly.

In a few moments the male cop came back to the door, looking flushed
and sweaty, accompanied by two uniformed cops. "Okay, everyone, up
against the wall,' he yelled. "Arms on the wall, legs apart!"

There was shouted chorus of complaint from everyone except me. I
knew how this worked from my time at Brand.

"I said up against the wall, people!" One of the uniformed cops
grabbed Brett's shoulder and muscled him toward the wall, then
forced his hands upward. The rest of us reluctantly followed suit.
The policewoman came over to Maggie and began to frisk her roughly.
I figured she'd probably get to me next. I could hear the other cops
patting the guys down. My panic was increasing as I was wondering
what the shot meant, worrying about where Steve was, and feeling sick.

Bo gave voice to all our thoughts. "What happened outside?"

"Your friend just shot a cop," the male plainclothes policeman said
with venom. At that point all my senses failed me and I hit the floor.

***

I came to with four people standing over me: the two plainclothes
police, Bo and Maggie. It took me a little while to focus enough to
make out their faces, and a little longer to realize where I was and
what had happened.

"Are you alright?" The policewoman asked me.

Steve shot a cop? It didn't make any sense. Steve never carried a
gun. The only time I'd ever seen him anywhere near one was in the
cabin when he shot Travis, and those were exceptional circumstances.
I couldn't imagine what he'd want a gun for.

"Emma?" It was Maggie asking this time.

I blinked a couple of times and tried to sit up. Whoa. Slowly, I
thought to myself as my head spun again for a moment.

"Are you okay?" Maggie asked again.

"Yes. Yeah... Yes, I think so. What happened?" My head hurt. I must
have hit it on a nearby chair when I went down.

"You passed out, Em," Bo said. In the background I could hear the
other cops taking names and addresses from Jim, Rick and Brett.

"No... no, I mean what happened to Steve?"

"Munsey, call for another ambulance," the female cop said. "We need
to get her checked out."

"No ambulance," I said. "I'll be okay. What happened to Steve?"

"I don't know yet," she admitted. She mouthed 'do it' to one of the
uniformed cops. "I was in here with you. The report back was that
your friend shot a cop in the parking lot."

"Steve would never do that," I said. I looked around for the male
plainclothes cop but he had left the room. "Please can you find out --"

"-- What's your name?" she interrupted.

"Emma Donaldson," I said. I was sharp enough to remember that the
license Pete had given me said 'Donaldson' instead of Boyle. I
noticed Bo look at me strangely, though. He only knew my surname as
Boyle.

"What's your relationship to Steve Hammond?" she gave me her hand
and helped pull me up to rest in one of the room's few chairs.

"He's my boyfriend," I said. "Can you find out what's happened to
him?" I wondered whether he really had shot a cop. It didn't make
any sense. Had the cop busted him for heroin possession? Or was it
something to do with Brand?

My head hurt.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Nineteen."

"You don't look it."

"Yeah, that's what everyone says."

"Lean over," the Policewoman continued. "It'll help keep the blood
to your brain."

I put my head down. The uniformed cops had finished taking names and
addresses, and there was relative quiet in the room. Outside I could
hear car doors slamming and many voices, all too low to be
understood above the bass from the music next door. Even with my
head down I felt dizzy, and sick. I thought of Steve on stage just
twenty minutes ago, and I raised my head again to argue with the
policewoman and find out what had happened. As soon as my head came
above my shoulders I knew I wasn't in a fit state to argue with
anyone. My head swam and I felt sick. I felt a dull ache inside me,
in that part of my belly that Steve had made feel so good so many
times. There was a sharper pain on the back of my head, but it
didn't hurt in the same deep way that my insides did.

"We'd like you all to come down to the station to make statements,"
I heard the policewoman say to the others before she turned back to
me and said "I'm still going to have a doctor look at you."

"I'll go with her," I heard Maggie say. "If that's all right. You
can ask me questions there, right?"

"What about our stuff?" Brett asked. I could tell he was still
pissed from being frisked. I realized they hadn't frisked me yet,
unless it was when I was unconscious. Maybe they had, and that was
why the policewoman wanted me to see a doctor. I wondered what she
thought if she knew my secret. I wondered whether the others knew
now too. Bo and Maggie had seemed concerned when they were leaning
over me, so it seemed unlikely, but... None of this was making a lot
of sense to me. What had happened to Steve? I needed to know before
I could think properly about anything else. I began to weep,
noiselessly.

"Your stuff will be locked up, here. We may need to search this room
anyway," the policewoman said as though she was only just thinking
of the possibility.

"We don't have to go to the station, do we?" Rick said. His voice
also indicated he was hostile after being frisked. "I mean, if
you're not charging us with anything."

"Is there something we should be charging you with?" One of the
uniformed cops said darkly.

The police began hustling the guys out of the room. "I'm gonna stay
with Emma," Maggie said to Bo. To the policewoman, she said "Where
will you send her?"

The policewoman shrugged. "Probably Northside."

"Can you go there after the police station?" Maggie asked Bo. "I
think we'll be there a while." I felt her hand on my shoulder. I
idly wondered why she thought we'd be a while.

The guys left with the uniformed cops and about five minutes later
two paramedics arrived to take me to hospital. Before we left I was
able to raise my head, and I saw the policewoman talking to the male
plainclothes cop in the corridor. I tried to hear what they were
saying but it was difficult

"Are you in any pain?" one of the paramedics asked me as he took my
pulse. I was puzzled at all the attention. All I really wanted to
know was what had happened to Steve. Was he alright? I still felt
sick, and my head hurt, but none of that meant anything until I knew
whether or not Steve was okay. He injected something into my arm.

"It's not her fault if she has lousy taste in men," I overheard the
policewoman say in a brief break in the music from the bar. The
guy's reply was lost as the next song began.

Whatever the paramedic gave me began to kick in, and the rest of the
night became a bit of a blur. I remember the back of the ambulance
was crowded. I was lying down on one side of the compartment. The
paramedic was next to my head on the other side, and next to him
near my arm was Maggie who was holding my hand. At the rear near my
feet was the policewoman. She kept trying to ask me questions. I
don't remember what I answered. I remember Maggie was great.

The policewoman told me Steve was uninjured but had been arrested.
More than that she either didn't know or didn't want to say.

We arrived at the hospital I was put on a gurney and wheeled into a
little cubicle with a bed in it, and various doctors and nurses
asked me questions. Maggie answered a lot of them. I had to answer
the dumb ones, like where was I and what day was it and who was the
President, and then they did stuff like stroke the bottom of my foot
with something sharp, apparently to test my reflexes. Eventually a
doctor started poking around at the back of my head. From his
questions and comments I realized that I had a large gash at the
back of my head where I had hit it on a metal chair as I fainted.
That explained why my head hurt so much. I hadn't bled too badly,
but they wanted to make sure I was okay. The doctor was finding it
hard to see the wound through all my hair.

"You're not going to cut my hair, are you?" All of a sudden I was
overcome with paranoia about that. I thought that if my hair was cut
I might look more like a boy, even though I knew that was unlikely
from my own experiments tying it back.

"I don't think we'll need to do that," the doctor reassured me. "I
can see it now." He wiped the wound with something and made some 'Uh
huh' noises, and then told me I could sit back against the pillow again.

"I don't think it's as bad as it looks," he said. ."But we'll do
some x-rays to be sure. Are you pregnant?" He asked. When I didn't
say anything, he said "What's wrong?". I looked past him at the
Policewoman and Maggie, and he took the hint and asked them to leave
the cubicle for a few minutes. Then he asked me the same kinds of
questions Dr. Bagley had asked me back in Mississippi. I wondered if
he was going to want to do a pelvic exam. I figured the answer was
no, so I pretended everything was normal, and didn't tell him the
truth about my body. He seemed to accept my answers. I guess he had
no reason to doubt them.

Then the Doctor had me shunted off to x-ray while the policewoman
asked Maggie a lot of questions about Steve. By the time I got back
Bo was there, along with Brett and Wendy.

"You okay, kiddo?" Brett asked.

"Yeah, I guess. Do you know how Steve is?"

"He's in a shitload of trouble, Emma." Brett looked. "I can't
believe that he did it, but..." he glanced at the policewoman, who
was still sitting at the other side of the cubicle. I think he
realized we couldn't really talk about Steve with her present.

"You guys are all okay, though?"

"Yeah," Bo said. "They just asked us a bunch of questions, like how
long had we known Steve, that sort of thing."

"That's good," I said. "I was worried about Steve, but I was worried
about you guys, too."

"Em, do you have the number for his sister? We should, you know, get
him a lawyer and stuff," Brett said.

I gave Brett the number. "I don't know if Julia... Um, Julia has
money, but not a lot of her own. And Steve didn't exactly see eye to
eye with his Dad, you know?" I looked at the policewoman, unsure of
whether I should say anything more. "Give her a call. No, no, wait."
Maybe it was the drugs and all, but I had forgotten about my phone
conversation with Pris momentarily. "She's away for the weekend. Um,
can you, can you phone Pris instead? She might know how to get
Julia. Tell her I'll call her as soon as I can, okay?"

Maggie and the guys left, and it was just the policewoman and me in
the cubicle. "Now that you're more lucid," she said, "perhaps we can
go over a few more things."

"Are you going to arrest me?" I asked.

"I don't think so. Have you done anything wrong?"

"No," I answered truthfully. If she had asked me if I'd done
anything illegal, I might have thought about a different response.
But I had done nothing wrong.

"How long have you known Steve"

So much for being truthful. From her comments and questions I was
beginning to think she didn't know about my time at Brand. Maybe she
didn't know about Steve's time there either. Of course, it would
only be a matter of time until they found out about Steve's record.
I wondered if he would say anything about me.

"About six months," I lied.

"Has he ever been in trouble before?"

I didn't know if I should continue to answer her questions, because
I knew that if my story was in any way different to Steve's they
would use my deception against him. "I don't think --"

"Emma, I'm just trying to help," she said.

She had been pretty nice so far. That was pretty remarkable since
Steve was accused of shooting a cop. I'd heard that when people do
that the cops usually go crazy in revenge, Maybe it was because she
was kind of young for a cop.

On the other hand I didn't think for a moment that me speaking up
would help Steve. Fortunately at that moment the Doctor returned.

"I don't think I should say anything until I talk to a lawyer, you
know? I don't want to get Steve into trouble," I said to the
policewoman.

Her eyes narrowed and I wondered whether my stance would make her
look more closely into my own background. But after trying one more
time to get my cooperation she gave up. She turned to the Doctor
"Are you going to keep her all night?"

"I think so," he said. "Just for observation."

She left, and then the Doctor left. An orderly came and wheeled my
gurney up to a ward with three other women in it, and then a nurse
came and gave me a pill. I lay there worrying about Steve and
wondering what was going to happen until the pill kicked in and I slept.

***

The next morning a nurse woke me at about 7.00am. I guess people get
woken up early in hospitals. She looked at my chart, and then at my
head, and told me the doctor would come to see me later in the
morning. At 8.30am she came to give me a message. "A guy who says
he's your boyfriend's lawyer called. That make sense to you?" I
nodded. She gave me a slip of paper with a name and number on it.

I got up and showered and tried to fix my hair as best I could. My
scalp was very tender and it hurt to brush my hair much, so I tried
to untangle it but I left it loose and a little untidy. Pris would
have called the look I wound up with 'bedroom hair,' I thought. I
wondered if she had managed to talk to Julia yet. My mascara had run
in all the trauma of the night before and I had slept without
cleaning my makeup off, so I looked a fright. I cleaned off my face
as best I could and then dressed and sat on the bed to await the
doctor. The woman in the bed next to me struck up a conversation
with me and offered to let me use some of the cleanser and
moisturizer she had in her cosmetic case, and that made me feel a
lot better.

At about 10.00am a couple of doctors I hadn't seen before came by
and inspected my head and announced I could be discharged, and by
11.00am I was outside, under the covered entry to the hospital,
wondering what to do next. As I stood by the door a drunk wandered
up to me. He looked like he hadn't washed in years. "Aaarrrrr," he
slurred. He didn't look very old, perhaps only thirty-five, although
it was hard to see his face under his wild mane of dirty hair. I
wondered what had happened to him to reduce him to this. A security
guard and someone in a white medical-type coat moved toward us and
took one of his arms each.

"Stupid cops," the drunk muttered.

"Can I help you?" the medical guy said.

"Need to see a Doctor." As he said this he raised his face, and
looked straight into my eyes. For a drunk, his gaze was quite
disturbing. His eyes, I realized with a start, looked just like
Steve's when he was high.

"What's the problem."

"Need to see a Doctor," the bum repeated. He was still staring at
me. I turned away.

Yeah, buddy, everybody wants to see the Doctor," the security guard
said.

"Your name is?" the medical guy asked.

"Jesus Christ," the bum said coolly.

"Ah, yes, we've been expecting you." The Security guard turned to me
and smiled. "Sorry about that, Miss." As they led him away he called
out something about salvation to me but I could only make out that word.

I was shaken by the way the bum had stared at me, and I went back
into the lobby of the hospital and sat down for a moment. After a
few moments I got up and tried calling the motel to talk with Brett,
but the guy at reception told me that everyone in our group had
checked out already. I was stunned. We were supposed to be staying
in Atlanta for two nights. Why would they check out early when we
still had another show to do tonight? I guessed the show was off
because of Steve. But I was surprised that they had left without
letting me know. I understood that they might have been upset about
Steve, but I wondered what I had said or done to make them so angry
with me that they'd leave me behind.

I asked if they had paid for our room and the guy on the phone
seemed surprised and said no. I figured that made sense, since Steve
and I had always paid for our own room and the guy in the motel
probably thought we were still in bed. He seemed alarmed that I was
phoning and asking these questions -- he probably thought I was
going to skip off without paying. I reassured him that I would come
back. "My stuff's still there, and my boyfriend's still here," I said.

Then I phoned the number on the message the nurse had given me. A
kid answered the phone. I guessed it was the lawyer's home number.
"May I speak with David Breslin?" I asked. I could hear footsteps
thudding on a wooden floor as the kid ran off to get him, and a few
moments later David Breslin came to the phone.

"I'm Emma Donaldson," I said. "I got a message you called."

"Thanks for calling back, Emma," he said. "I need to talk to you
about Steve."

"Is he alright? Where is he? What's going to happen to him?"

"Can we meet?"

"This morning? Sure," I said. I had nowhere else to go except back
to the motel. "Is Steve okay?"

"Steve is fine. Are you still at the hospital?"

I said yes, and he asked me to meet him at a coffee shop a few
blocks down the road in 30 minutes. "I think I'll recognize you from
Steve's description of you," he said.

I hung up the phone and walked down the road to the coffee shop. It
was developing into another warm day, and I had to take my jacket
off. I felt kind of conspicuous walking along the street, because I
still had on the clothes from the show the night before, and going
braless in the black halter top wasn't something I had ever done
during the day before. A couple of guys in a passing car yelled
something at me and I knew it was a comment on my breasts, or maybe
my ass in the tight jeans I was wearing, and I noticed that the men
I passed as I was walking all looked at my chest instead of my face,
but there wasn't anything I could do about the way I looked until I
got back to the motel.

The coffee shop had a dozen or so tables and was fairly busy for a
Saturday morning. I ordered some juice and a danish and sat to wait
for the lawyer. A guy at the neighboring table was reading the
'Journal-Constitution'. There was a paper stand outside and I went
and bought one and returned to the table. On page 5 there was an
article about the shooting, and it named the cop, Anthony Figueroa,
and Steve Hammond "musician and heroin addict". It made me
depressed. Here it was in black and white. The article was short on
details, but it said that the police had visited the bar looking for
Steve. "Hammond had recently escaped from a juvenile detention
center, but was recognized by a sharp-eyed highway patrolman who
stopped a vehicle he was in some days earlier... " The article said.
"As Hammond fled the bar there was a scuffle with Officer Figueroa,
and Hammond allegedly shot Figueroa with the officer's own gun."

The radio that was playing in the cafe had just begun the opening
bars of 'No Questions' when I heard a voice. "You're Emma Donaldson,
right?"

I looked up. A sandy-haired guy in his early thirties wearing jeans
and a plaid shirt was standing at the other side of the table. He
didn't look much like a lawyer, I thought. More the kind of guy
who'd mow lawns. He had a friendly look on his face, and a charm in
his voice that was different to Steve's but still kind of disarming.

I nodded agreement.

"I'm David Breslin, Emma."

"Uh huh. Hi. How is Steve?"

"He's fine. The cops were pretty rough on him, but he's okay now. I
got to see him late last night. He asked me to meet with you."

"He's not hurt or anything?"

"No, he's fine. Not exactly happy, but that's understandable. He's
in a cell by himself."

"What's going to happen to him, Mr.. ah... Breslin?"

"Call me David, please Emma. I can't really say until I know some
more about what's going on. I've talked to Steve. He's told me a
great deal. Now I need to talk to some of the other people who were
with him in recent weeks. You are his girlfriend, right?"

I nodded again. Stay calm, be nice, I thought.

"Well, we need somewhere private to talk," he said. "I would have
suggested that we meet at my office but I live close by and I
thought it was silly for both of us to travel downtown. Do you have
somewhere you need to be after this? Maybe I could drive you there
and we could talk in the car."

"Uh, I'd *really* like to go back to the hotel and get changed," I
said. "If that's okay."

I felt awkward about getting into a car with a strange man, but he
was Steve's lawyer and I figured I could trust him. We walked out
onto the street and he guided me to his battered old Mercedes. I
think I had been expecting him to have a newer car since he was a
lawyer, but Public Defenders don't make a lot of money. He was a
gentleman, though, and he opened the door for me and closed it after
I was seated. I discovered I liked it. I liked it that he had done
that, even though it was such a trivial thing. I leant over to the
driver's side and popped up the lock so he could get in easier. He
smiled.

I gave him the address of the motel. I realized that I had no real
idea how to get there, and that I had put myself completely at this
guy's mercy, and would have to trust that he was taking me to the
motel instead of someplace private where he could do terrible things
to me... I looked over at his face. He didn't look like the serial
killer type. As though I knew what serial killers looked like.

"Well, Emma, I'd like you to start from the beginning. Where did you
meet Steve?"

I looked at him uncertainly. Where should I begin? I still hadn't
worked out why nobody had come after me. And I was still shaken up
from the events of the previous night.

I wondered what Steve had told him, and whether he knew the *truth*
about me.

I supposed he noticed my hesitation, because he continued. "Emma,
you don't have to worry about Steve. I'm his lawyer; I'm here to
defend him. I won't be trying to trick you into anything." He turned
away from the road for a moment and smiled again. "Now the police,
and the district attorney, they'll be trying to trick you."

"I figured that already."

"Yeah." He returned his attention to the road. "They're usually not
that subtle."

"What about me?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what if what I say gets me in trouble?"

He seemed genuinely puzzled. "There aren't any charges against you,
Emma."

"Might there be?"

"Are you worried about something?"

"I don't know whether I should say anything."

"Emma, I'm only trying to help Steve."

"If you're my lawyer, then anything I say to you can't be passed on
to anyone else, can it?"

"That's true Emma. But only if I'm your lawyer."

I considered this for a moment. "Will you be my lawyer?"

"I don't think so, Emma. I'm a public defender. I get assigned to
cases. Even if I could, well... I don't know what your concerns are,
but whoever represents you should be independent. If you think
there's any chance they might come after you... I don't know why
they would, but if they do, for some reason, then you need to get
someone independent."

I suppose I looked depressed. I looked down at my knees.

"I can't afford a lawyer, anyway," I said glumly.

"Will you tell me your version of last night's events anyway?
Anything you say to me is probably going to be useless in court
anyway. Even if I wanted to repeat it, it would only count as
hearsay unless you said it again in court."

He seemed trustworthy, but I decided to err on the side of caution,
and not give away anything that the guys wouldn't have already told
the cops. I recounted what I'd heard outside in the parking lot --
the sirens, the shouting, the shots. There really wasn't a whole lot
to tell. I hadn't seen anything -- none of us had.

"How did you and Steve meet?"

Here was the time to see whether Steve had told him everything. I
decided to lie. "Music stuff, you know..."

"Uh huh. And this was, ah...?"

"About three months ago, when he got out of Brand."

"So you know about that."

"We don't have many secrets, really."

Breslin was a nice guy, but I didn't think Steve was going to do too
well with him. He seemed dedicated -- here he was turning up to meet
me on a Saturday morning -- but the case seemed pretty difficult. At
least he knew that. "I won't kid you, Emma, being charged with
shooting a cop is about as serious as it gets," he said. "Plus he
has a record already, and..." He let the sentence trail off. He
didn't need to emphasize the problems.

We drove for about 35 minutes until we arrived back at the motel. As
the day was wearing on I was feeling worse and worse. My mind
already knew that Steve's situation was hopeless, but my heart
wasn't ready to take on that burden yet. We sat in the car outside
the motel room as David asked me a few more questions. We discussed
Steve's drug use, and his behavior in the weeks leading up to the
shooting. "Can you put me in touch with the other band members?"

"I would, but I don't know where they are," I admitted. I was still
hurt that they had checked out of the motel without calling me, and
it probably showed in my voice. "I think they've probably gone back
to Mississippi."

"They left without you?" he asked.

"Yes... I honestly don't know..." I was close to tears. I tried to
pull myself together and show some control. "I'm sorry I can't be
more helpful," I said formally. "Can I see Steve?"

"He's not allowed any visitors right now, Emma," David said gently.
"Just me."

"Can you at least give him a message for me?"

"Sure," he said.

I thought for a moment. There were so many things I want to say to
Steve. I remembered the conversations we had conducted using Carlos
Gonzales as our intermediary. Breslin was unlikely to remember much
at all with everything else that was on his mind. Keep it simple, I
told myself. "Tell him 'Wild Horses'," I said.

"Wild Horses?" He seemed puzzled.

"Couldn't drag me away," I finished. "He'll know what it means."

"Okay." He looked doubtful. "Anything else?"

"Can you get something to him?"

"He can't really have any possessions until they move him to prison
to await trial. That will happen later on today. I can get something
to him then. What did you have in mind"

"A guitar," I said. "Music keeps him going."

I gave David the number of the motel and scribbled Julia's number
back in Oxford down as well. "I don't know when I'll be back there.
In the meantime I'll probably be here. Can you let me know when
Steve will be allowed visitors?"

"I'll see what I can find out, Emma." He paused. "Are you going to
be okay here?"

"I think so," I said. I really had no idea what I was going to do,
but I didn't want to burden him with anything more than Steve's
problems.

He gave me his business card and scrawled his home number on the
reverse. "If you think of anything else you want to say, or if you
need anything, give me a call, okay?"

"Thanks," I said as I got out of the car. I watched him drive off
with a heavy heart. He was Steve's best hope, and while he was a
nice guy I didn't think nice was going to cut it in the courts.

***

I went into the motel reception area, depressed as hell. I called
Pris, but the phone just rang off. I stood in the reception area and
held the handset in my hands, trying to work out what to do. Most of
what I owned was in the room two hundred feet away, but that wasn't
so important, really. I stood there, confused. I had no place to go,
except maybe back to Oxford. I wasn't sure I could afford to pay for
the motel room if I stayed, but I couldn't think of anything else to
do. I wanted to see Steve, and I couldn't do that in Oxford.

Eventually I rang Elroy.

"How you doin' honey?" he said as soon as he heard my voice. "Brett
called, told me what happened. Is Steve okay? Is there anyone you
want me to call?"

I wanted to stay calm, but hearing Elroy's voice made me suddenly
emotional. Damned hormones or something. I broke down in tears and
it took him a few minutes to get anything coherent out of me.
"Elroy, it's just terrible, they're going to throw the book at Steve
and the cops were really horrible to him the guys have just left me
and I need a lawyer and I can't afford it and --"

"Slow down, honey. Now, why do *you* need a lawyer?"

Silence.

"Where are you?"

"I'm at the motel."

"The one y'all were in yesterday?"

"Yes. I didn't know where else to go, and my stuff was still here
and I had to get it anyway and..."

"Have any money?"

"Uh, no, not really," I said sheepishly.

"What do you mean, the guys just left you?"

"They checked out of the motel and... well, I don't know where
they've gone, Elroy."

"They were supposed to collect you from the hospital," Elroy said.
"I spoke to Brett this morning and he said they were going over to
get you and bring you home."

"Well, I didn't see them."

"I expect they'll be looking for you over there. Okay. Back to this
business of the lawyer. What's Steve's lawyer like?'

"He's the public defender or whatever they're called. He seems okay,
so far."

"What did he tell you?"

"He can't tell how it's going to turn out yet, but it doesn't look
really good."

"What about you? Why do you need a lawyer? Did you do anything last
night? Are you doin' drugs, girl?"

"No! No, it's... Elroy, I can't tell you. I'm sorry. I just needed
someone to talk to. But you're right, I can't burden you with this --"

"-- What do you mean, 'you're right' and 'burden'? Emma, my dear, I
care about you, y'know. I know I come over all gruff sometimes, but
that's just an act. Whatever it is that's wrong, you know it won't
change the way I think about you. You're just about the sweetest
girl I know, and --"

I hung up.

I felt really guilty doing it, but I couldn't even begin to explain
to Elroy what my fear about my own situation was. I wished Julia or
Pris would answer the phone. I tried their number one more time,
without success.

I stumbled back to the room, and lay down on the bed. Around seven I
tried Julia and Pris again. No luck. I didn't feel at all like
eating, so I popped a Valium and lay down. My head was full of
images of Steve, and the cops, and the bum that morning and his
terrifying eyes. Jesus Christ, salvation. I remembered Steve's eyes
the last time I saw them when we came offstage the night before, all
dull and scary. Eventually the Valium kicked in and I went to sleep,
a dull uneasy sleep filled with hospitals, the guards at Brand, Bo
and Maggie, unseen gunshots and a wild eyed man who claimed he was
Jesus Christ.

(continued)

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