The Wishbones Read Free Page B

Grampa.”
    From the corner of his eye, Dave caught a brilliant flash of red. Before he understood what he was looking at, Alan Zelack had rushed across the stage, shoved Joey out of the way, and begun CPR. The whole sequence came back to Dave as he watched—the head tilt, the sweep of the mouth with one finger, the pinching offof the nostrils. The multiple chest compressions for every breath of air.
    Zelack performed these actions with ostentatious competence, his blond hair flying, his red tuxedo shooting off tiny urgent flares. Dave's first, ungenerous impulse was to resent him for hogging the spotlight even in a tragedy, but that quickly passed, replaced by a grudging sense of respect. Like everyone else gathered around the stage, Zelack must have known that Phil was already dead. And yet he kept trying fiercely to bring him back, pumping his chest and filling his lungs, minute after interminable minute, until the ambulance finally arrived, and Phil's body became the property of professionals.
    The Wishbones played their set anyway. They thought about canceling, but a couple had traveled all the way from Belvidere with their wedding consultant to check them out, and didn't want to have make the trek again. As a courtesy to them, Artie decided that the show must go on.
    Dave felt a little weird about it, but as soon as he strummed the first chord of “Jailhouse Rock,” his reservations vanished. The music jolted him like an electric shock. It seemed to pass through his body on its way from the guitar to the amp, cleansing him, reminding him of how good it felt to be alive.
    And it wasn't just Dave, either. Buzzy, who usually stood stone-faced and motionless while he played, was grinning with amazement, rocking from side to side as he plucked out the pulse of the song. Ian had abandoned his usual two-bit Elvis impersonation and was singing like he meant it, while Stan pounded the drums as though exorcising the demons from his life. Even Artie caught the wave. The solo jumped out of his horn, every note of it a fresh squawk of pleasure. It seemed to Dave that the song had never existed before, that they'd invented it on the spot.
    Somehow they kept the momentum for ten more tunes, finding something real in even the tiredest old standards. When they had run the gamut of their repertoire, from disco to pop, from polka to R&B, Ian surprised them all by breaking into one last song on his piano, something the Wishbones had never done before.
    “This is for Phil,” he said. “Rest in peace, brother.”
    The chords were simple, and Dave recognized them right away. He hadn't played “Knockin’ on Heaven's Door” since high school, back when he was lead guitarist in a band called Exit 36. Listening to the words now, colored as they were by death, Dave wondered what they could have meant to a bunch of teenagers in a suburban garage in 1979, kids whose idea of heaven was half an ounce of Colombian Gold and a girl with big tits to smoke it with.
    But then he stopped wondering and gave himself up to the song. He closed his eyes and sang the chorus with every ounce of strength in his body. It was a blessing.
Rest in peace, brother.
    Julie answered the door in gray sweatpants and a baggy orange T-shirt. In her hand was a fat paperback with a tortilla chip marking the page.
    “You lucked out,” she whispered, jerking her thumb in the direction of upstairs. “They went to bed.”
    As he had on countless nights before this one, Dave followed her down the carpeted stairs to the rec room. As always, Julie left the door open, a somewhat discredited token of good faith to her parents. He pulled off his tuxedo jacket and draped it over the armrest of the brown-and-beige-plaid couch.
    “Sorry I'm late. Things got messed up at the showcase.”
    She shrugged. “It's probably better this way. They still haven't really forgiven you. Or me, for that matter.”
    “You can't really blame them.”
    Julie didn't respond one way or the other.