Forests of the Heart (20 page)

So with the store to himself this morning, he was happily humming along with a limited-edition, six-track EP by Dar Williams that a friend had picked up for him at a concert in New England last fall. It had a solo, live version of “Are You Out There” on it, which was his touchstone for her work. He’d liked her first two albums, but it wasn’t until
End of the Summer
came out last year, with the full-band version of the song on it, that he’d become completely enamored with her music.

The story of how an alternative, late-night radio show had changed the life of the song’s protagonist struck a deep chord with him. He’d grown up in suburbia himself, in Woodforest Gardens north of the city, choking on all of those cookie-cutter houses with their perfect lawns, grotesquely manicured shrubberies, and insipid street names like Shady Lane. Tulip Crescent. Green-lawn Drive.

He used to feel himself getting swallowed up by the sheer banality of it all. The only thing had saved him were nightly broadcasts by a pirate radio station—Radio Fug Cue, they called themselves, and that in itself was a giggle, to hear over the air. No call letters. You simply twisted the dial across the band until you found their current broadcast frequency and out of your radio’s speaker would spill an outrageous mix of hip music, opinionated reviews, and irreverent commentaries, all courtesy of Jack Thompson, aka Scatter Jack, the station’s resident, and only,
DJ.

Thompson was finally put out of business, which proved to be a windfall for the media when it was discovered that he was the son of a city councilor, Ray Thompson, a high-roller already involved in any number of other scandals, none of which actually went up before the courts. But Thompson’s influence wasn’t enough to keep his son out of jail.

Hunter met the younger Thompson years later, when Hunter had finally managed to escape the ‘burbs himself, moving to the city’s core and working in a secondhand record shop. Cool as he was, Hunter had still desperately wanted to find some way to thank Jack Thompson for how he believed Radio Fug Cue had literally saved him from white-collar oblivion, but by that point Thompson had co-opted with the enemy and become the program director for the worst of the local Lite Rock FM stations. Their tag line was “No metal, no rap, no crap.”

Hunter hadn’t even been able to shake Thompson’s hand when they were introduced. He just couldn’t do it, past debt notwithstanding.

But the Dar Williams song let him forget all of that, taking him back instead to those incredible nights when he’d sneak out of the house and lie out in the woods that still edged the housing development, transistor radio balanced on his chest, the world in his earphones taking him away from the ever-shrinking box that was his life. There, Scatter Jack had shown him all the possibilities that lay beyond the closed world of the perfect neighborhood he considered it was his misfortune to be growing up in.

Straightening up from the paperwork scattered across the counter, Hunter winced at the sudden pain in his side. There’d been no blood in his urine this morning, but he knew his kidney was swollen from the way it pressed up against his ribs. The whole area was bruised and sore, his back stiff. Every breath hurt unless it was shallow. He closed his eyes for a moment and the hard man’s features leapt into his mind. The smell of him—tobacco smoke and something feral, a wild dog scent. The cold eyes. The flat voice.

You don’t want to fuck with us, you little shite.

What had
that
been all about anyway?

The Dar Williams EP came to an end and for a long moment he let the silence hang. The store was empty. He’d only had three customers this morning and one had been returning a defective CD. Between the other two, they hadn’t even put thirty dollars in the till. It made him wonder, and not for the first time, why he even bothered opening on Sundays, though of course he had to. Even if the customers weren’t coming in, he had to be as available for business as the big chain stores were.

Hunter didn’t really mind being in the store on a Sunday—especially not now, when his only other option was an empty apartment—but today it just made him feel depressed all over again. One of his staff had to go. There was just no way around it. That salary was just taking too big a chunk of his working capital.

This week he’d been cut off by one of his main distributors because he was late paying his bills. He knew he’d have it covered in a couple of weeks— hell,
they
knew it, too—but in the meantime, they’d cut him off and he could forget carrying any of their back catalog for a while. New releases he could get from Contact Distributors, a rack-jobber who serviced most of the smaller accounts in town, but that meant at least another dollar cost per unit. And since he couldn’t raise his selling price and stay competitive, he’d be losing a dollar on every CD of theirs he sold. Which didn’t help the money crunch he was feeling now.

This was the part of owning your own business that he’d dreaded the most. But someone had to go, and they’d all have to work longer hours, if he was going to keep his doors open. The question was who. It couldn’t be Titus. With his lack of social skills and graces, how would he ever survive? Adam wasn’t much better. Miki had seniority—next to him, she’d been working here the longest.

That left Fiona.

Sighing, he turned to take the EP out of the CD player, moving carefully when pain shot up from his side. A few moments later Dar Williams’s sweet soprano was replaced by the high lonesome sound of Gillian Welch. Though Welch had grown up in California, you’d swear she’d just come down from the Appalachian Mountains by way of the Stanley Brothers to make this recording. He loved the raw, emotional narrative of the songs and her unadorned delivery. By the third cut he was in a bit of a better mood, the store’s poor business and the pain in his side notwithstanding, and returned to finish up the last of his paperwork. It was only when the CD ended and he was back thinking about how he was going to tell Fiona that she was being laid off that his melancholy returned.

He considered his figures again, wondering if he could make it just a temporary thing. A few weeks, no more than a couple of months. Only until business started to pick up again with the warmer weather. He was still worrying at it when Miki came in a little later, wrinkling her nose at the Dan Bern CD he had playing on the store’s sound system.

“Okay,” she said as she offered Hunter one of the coffees she’d brought with her. “I realize that someone up there has decided that every generation needs its Bob Dylan, but really. Doesn’t this guy sound like an
exact
clone to you?”

Hunter shook his head. “It’s just a style of songwriting. You know, talking blues. Anecdotal.”

“And it doesn’t bother you, the way he’s got Dylan down so well it might as well be Dylan? I mean, hello tribute city. Look at me, I’m pathetic.”

“I don’t hear it that way.”

Miki raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Besides,” Hunter went on. “I hear he’s really into Coltrane.”

“Really?”

Hunter nodded, having no idea what Dan Bern’s tastes in music really were. What he did know was Miki’s inclination to forgive a great deal if your taste was what she considered to be good. Classic sax players were right up there at the top of the list.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “ ‘Trane. Bird. Wayne Shorter. Lester Young.”

“You’re making this up.”

“No, I’m sure I read it an interview somewhere.”

Miki cocked her head, giving the CD another listen.

“Well, maybe he’s not so bad,” she said. “There is a kind of improvisational flavor to what he’s doing, isn’t there?”

Hunter managed to keep a straight face until she went to hang up her coat in the back room, only just wiping the grin from his face before she stepped back out into the store. Miki made her way slowly back to the front counter, straightening CD cases in their bins as she came.

“You’re looking rather well,” she said when she was standing on the other side of the counter. “Considering the state you were in last night.”

“The—oh, right.”

She leaned over the counter for a closer look. “You’re not hungover at all, are you?”

“Quick recovery.”

“Umhmm. Very quick. Now I’m wondering if you were even drunk in the first place.”

“Very. Could barely stand up on my own.”

“Which brings us to the question, why would you be pretending to be drunk?”

“Could barely see straight. Sick as a dog. Trust me on this one.”

But Miki wasn’t buying it. “You weren’t just trying to avoid me, were you?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t lie now. That’d hurt my feelings worse than if I thought you didn’t fancy me.”

“I’m not…” Hunter began, but he couldn’t do it. This was Miki, after all. “It’s just that Donal…” He broke off again.

“Oh, Christ. What did he tell you this time?”

“It’s just…”

There didn’t seem to be an out—not and be honest at the same time. So he told her all of it. Miki was quiet for a long moment when he was done. She regarded him thoughtfully from under long lashes.

“You and Ellie, eh?” she said finally. “I could see it.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Not yet.”

Hunter sighed, then gave her a slow nod. “Not yet,” he conceded. “Maybe not at all. Who knows?”

“You’re thinking I’m mad at you,” she said.

Hunter shrugged.

“Don’t be. I won’t deny I was wondering a bit if things could go somewhere with us, but it was only wondering.” She smiled. “Idle conjecture. The fleeting stuff of dreams.”

“You are mad.”

“Only at Donal. What was he thinking? First this business of trying to set us up in the pub the other night, and now this. You know he and Ellie used to be an item?”

Hunter nodded.

“He was quite desperate for her, but she didn’t feel the same, which is why they broke up.”

“So what are you saying? That all of this was planned?”

“Well, not the business at the pub. How could he even know you’d be meeting Ellie last night?”

Hunter laid a hand gingerly against his kidney. “And the hard man—”

Miki cut him off. “Donal’s moody, and a tease, but he’s not that mean. He’d never put someone up to that. But what’s he driving at with this business of not telling Ellie?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“And what would the hard men be wanting with Ellie?”

“He didn’t tell me that either,” Hunter said.

“Well, it can’t be good. That lot aren’t exactly renowned for their charity and goodwill towards others.”

“Someone should tell Ellie.”

Miki nodded. “But first I’ll have a word with Donal. I’ll ask him when I get home tonight and see what he’s got to say for himself.”

“Sure,” Hunter said. “He must have had a good reason to want to keep it from her.”

“He’d better. Or I’ll give him such a rap across the head he won’t see straight for at least a week. Ellie doesn’t need this sort of thing, and neither do you.”

“I forget how fierce you can be,” Hunter said, laughing.

Miki gave him her most innocent look. “Why don’t you come along after we close up tonight and be reminded?”

“Dinner afterwards at the Dear Mouse?”

“Done.”

Miki took a swig of her coffee, then picked up the stack of inventory cards from beside the cash register and swaggered off to restock the items that had been sold yesterday.

“Stop smirking,” she told Hunter who was hard put to stop from laughing at her antics. “I’m trying to be a manly man,”

“It’s not working.”

She rolled up the sleeve of her T-shirt and flexed her muscles. “How can you say that? Just look at these biceps.”

Hunter dutifully admired them. “Donal will be shaking in his boots,” he assured her.

“If he’s involved in any of this, he’ll be doing more than shaking. And that’s a promise.”

They closed the store a half-hour early. Along with freebie promotional copies of new releases—or better yet, pre-releases—making a judgment call about closing early was one of the few perks of actually owning the store. It hadn’t been a hard one to make today. Except for a brief flurry of business in the midafternoon, they’d only had a half-dozen customers for the rest of the afternoon, and none at all for the last half-hour. Miki had wanted to hang a GONE FISHING sign in the door, just in case some diehard showed up at the door before the official closing time, but Hunter—using the power of ownership once again—vetoed that idea.

“Too frivolous,” he explained.

Miki grinned. “As if. You need some frivolity in your life. An extra helping, in fact.”

They took the subway across town to the market, and then walked the ten blocks or so up Lee Street to the Rosses and the apartment that Miki shared with her brother near the Kelly Street Bridge, going at a slow pace because of the steady ache in Hunter’s side. It was still cold, and the temperature was dropping, but after being cooped up inside the store all day and then the crowded subway ride, they enjoyed being outside, never mind the chill.

“You’ve never been here before, have you?” Miki said as she ushered Hunter inside her building.

“Not since you and Judy had your house-warming.”

“That’s right. I forgot you’d come. But you didn’t stay long.”

Hunter nodded. “Ria got bored.”

“I thought you said you were going to a gallery opening.”

Hunter shrugged. “It sounded better than Ria being bored.”

The building didn’t look like much from the outside—just another ratty downtown brownstone—but once Hunter stepped into the foyer he realized that its tenants still took pride in the old war-horse. He’d forgotten how well maintained it was. There were still a few of these places left in the downtown area, buildings where the tenants refused to be intimidated by the steady exodus from the inner-city core and the subsequent arrival of those with less than a personal pride in keeping up the neighborhood. The tile floors of the foyer were clean, the walls freshly painted, all the overhead lights were in working order. The brass bank of mailboxes by the door was polished and gleaming.

“This place is in great shape,” he said as they walked down the hall to Miki’s ground-floor apartment.