stopped and started a few times, on the one song they did, for various twiddlings of knobs, but the guitarist could really play (Chevette got the feeling he wasn’t really letting it out yet, what he could do) and the singer could sing. It was a song about being sad and being tired of being sad, The bar, meanwhile, was starting to fill up, with what looked to be 141 a bunch of locals, regulars, and a hunch who weren’t, who were here to hear the hand. The locals tended to tattoos, facial piercings, and asymmetrical haircuts, while the visitors tended to hats (meshback and cowboy, mostly), jeans, and (on the men, anyway) guts. The guts tended to be the kind that looked as though they had moved in while their owners were unaware and had taken up residence on otherwise fat-free frames. The kind of gut that hangs over the top of a pair of jeans with a reasonably small waistband, swelling the front of a flannel shirt but cinched back in, below, with one of those big buckles.
She’d started on Creedmore’s Redback out of boredom, when she spotted the singer himself headed their way. He had borrowed someone’s meshbacked cap and pulled it on backward, over his weirdly wet-looking bleach-blonde hair. He was wearing an electric-blue cowboy shirt with the store creases still in it, horizontal across the chest, and the white pearlized snaps open halfway down the front, revealing a pale, white, decidedly concave chest that wasn’t at all the color of his face, which she figured was painted on. He had what looked like tomato juice in each hand, in a tall glass with ice. “How do,” he said. “Saw that Maryalice over here. Thought I’d bring the old girl a drink. I’m Buell Creedmore. You ladies enjoyin’ your beer?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Tessa and looked in the opposite direction. Creedmore did a quick, and to Chevette very obvious, piece of mental calculation, Chevette coming up as the one more likely to be profitably hit on. “You hear about us in the city here or over in Oakland?”
“We’re just here for the hot wings,” Chevette said, indicating the plate of chicken bones in front of her.
“They any good?”
“They’re okay,” Chevette said. “But we’re just leaving.”
“Leaving?” Creedmore took a big swig of his tomato juice. “Hell, we’re on in ten. You oughta stay ‘n’hear us.” There was some weird-looking, greenish-sandy stuff, Chevette saw, around the rims of the glasses, and now some of this was stuck on Creedmore’s upper lip.
“Vs/hat you doin’ with those Caesar’s, Buell?” It was the big guitarist. “Now you promised me you wouldn’t drink before the set.”
“For Maryalice,” Creedmore said, gesturing with a glass, “and this 142 here’s for the pretty lady.” He put the one he’d had the swig from down in front of Chevette.
“So how come you got that garlic salt on your mouth?” the big man asked.
Creedmore grinned and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Nerves, Randy. Big night. Gonna be okay..
“It better be, Buell. I don’t see some evidence you can hold your liquor, be the last gig you ever play with me.” The guitarist took the drink out of Creedmore’s hand, took a sip, made a face, and walked off, taking the drink with him. “Sons of bitches,” Creedmore said. And it was at this point that Chevette saw Carson enter the bar. Recognition, on her part, was instantaneous and one-hundred-percent positive. It was not Carson as dressed for lounges that smelled like aromatherapy, but Carson dressed for the knowing exploration of the lower reaches. Chevette had actually been with him when he bought this outfit, so she’d had to hear about how the jacket was Alaskan steerhide (Alaskan steers having thicker hides, due to the cold winters), and a museum-grade reproduction of a 1 940s original. The jeans were nearly as expensive, and more complicated in their sourcing, the denim woven in Japan on ancient, lovingly maintained American looms and then finished in Tunisia to the specifications of a team of Dutch designers and garment historians. This was the kind of stuff that Carson cared deeply about, this absolutely authentic fake stuff, and when Chevette saw him step through that entrance, she had absolutely no doubt that it was him. And also, though she couldn’t have said exactly how, she knew that she was in trouble. Maybe, she’d think later, it had been because he hadn’t known she was looking, so he hadn’t really been bothering to be the guy he had always pretended to be when he was with her, when he’d known she was looking.