The Future Falls Read Free Page B

Charlie appreciated the thought. Slinging her gig bag over one shoulder, she opened the door . . .
    â€œCharlie, are you going into a bar?”
    ...and hung up the phone, allowing the music to draw her into a narrow room; a long wooden bar along one wall, tiny tables along the other. The clientele seemed younger than she often saw in these kind of quasi pubs and the number of sweating bodies already in place defeated the cooler air that entered with her. The fans hanging from the high, pale ceiling merely pushed the warm air around.
    The pass-through at the far end of the bar showed part of a second room. Specifically, a stage and musicians. The music pulled her forward.
    As much dining room as bar, the inner room was twice the width of the outer, the ceiling half as high. The stage had been tucked into the front corner by the bar, the walls were lined with booth seating, and the rest of the room filled with small round tables. This room was significantly less crowded and two of the three tables closest to the stage were empty. Charlie’d seen enough girlfriends, boyfriends, techs, and roadies to know that the occupants of the third table were with the band.
    The bouzouki player was a slender man in his late thirties, early forties, with brown hair that curled around his ears and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed aviator-style glasses. He wore jeans and sneakers topped by a blue flannel shirt over a dark gray T-shirt. A ten-string Irish bouzouki hung from his shoulder by an embroidered strap—it was the wrong angle for Charlie to get a good look at the headstock—and the finish had the kind of small nicks and scratches that told her it was both well loved and well played.
    Most people preferred to sit where the band couldn’t see their reactions,but Charlie wasn’t most people. She tucked her guitar under one of the open tables by the stage, caught the waitress’ eye and ordered a Fat Tire as the song ended and the bouzouki player moved to the front microphone.
    â€œI want to thank you all for coming out tonight, we’re Four Men Down . . .”
    There were five of them. The fifth was a woman with blue streaks in her hair and a smile that could probably be seen from space.
    â€œ. . . and we call Baltimore home.”
    He waited until the crowd’s cheering died down a bit before continuing. “I’d like to take a moment now to introduce the band. On guitar, Dave Anders. On electric bass, Mike Carter. On fiddle, our mistress of the bow, Tara McAllister. On drums, Paul Stephens. And I’m Gary Ehrlich on bouzouki.”
    â€œCan you do that in public?” someone yelled from the back.
    â€œWe can’t get him to stop,” the bass player responded.
    Gary dipped his head and grinned, adjusting his tuning pegs as the room filled with laughter and innuendo. When he drew a fingernail across the strings, Charlie set her beer down and took notice. He’d re-tuned to FCDG, one tone below standard, in a noisy bar, by ear. Not too shabby. Bouzoukis usually played an interwoven accompaniment—a mix of open-string drones, two-note intervals, bass lines and melodic play—but Gary took the lead, fingers flying into “Boys of Blue Hill,” a popular Irish session tune, familiar, given the reaction, to many of the people listening.
    He played a double drop style, two adjacent strings struck simultaneously, one with a flat pick and the other with his first fingernail. More importantly, at least as far as Charlie was concerned, he played like he was exactly where he wanted to be, doing exactly what he wanted to be doing. She drank her beer and drew petty, inconsequential charms in the condensation. Charms that said,
I want what he has
and were wiped away again before they could take
.
    Damn, he was
good.
This music didn’t cleanse, it moved in and made itself at home, leaving little room for anything else and that made it totally worth the crap