up there tomorrow. That’s what happens to people who get the Hellbenders involved without asking and then don’t come through when the pressure’s on. You know what I mean?”
Leroy smiled. He left smiling. The smile was still frozen to his face as he walked down the street.
This whole thing was getting too grim.
Leroy lay on his cot listening to his sister and her boyfriend porking in the next room.
It was late at night. His mind was still working. Sounds beyond those in the bedroom came to him. Somebody staggered down the project hallway, bumping from one wall to another. Probably old man Jones. Chances are he wouldn’t make it to his room all the way at the end of the corridor. His daughter or one of her kids would probably find him asleep in the hall in a pool of barf.
Leroy turned over on the rattly cot, flipped on his seven-transistor radio, and jammed it up to his ear. Faintly came the sounds of another Beatles song.
He thumbed the tuner, and the four creeps blurred into four or five other Englishmen singing some other stupid song about coming to places he would never see.
He went through the stations until he stopped on the third note of the Monotones’ “Book of Love.” He sang along in his mind.
Then the deejay came on, and everything turned sour again. “Another golden oldie, ‘Book of Love,’ by the Monotones. Now here’s the WBKD pick of the week, the fabulous Beatles with ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Leroy pushed the stations around the dial, then started back.
Weekdays were shit. On weekends you could hear good old stuff; but mostly the stations all played Top 40, and that was English invasion stuff, or if you were lucky, some Motown. It was Monday night. He gave up and turned to an all-night blues station, where the music usually meant something. But this was like, you know, the sharecropper hour or something, and all they were playing was whiny cotton-choppin’ work blues from some damn Alabama singer who had died in 1932, for God’s sake.
Disgusted, Leroy turned off the radio.
His sister and her boyfriend had quit for a while, so it was quieter in the place. Leroy lit a cigarette and thought of getting out of here as soon as he could.
I mean, Bobby and the Bombers had a record, a real big-hole forty-five on WhamJam. It wasn’t selling worth shit from all Leroy heard, but that didn’t matter. It was a record, and it was real, it wasn’t just singing under some street lamp. Slim said they’d played it once on WABC, on the Hit-or-Flop show, and it was a flop, but people heard it. Rumor was the Bombers had gotten sixty-five dollars and a contract for the session. They’d had a couple of gigs at dances and such, when the regular band took a break. They sure as hell couldn’t be making any money, or they wouldn’t be singing against the Kool-Tones for free kicks.
But they had a record out, and they were working.
If only the Kool-Tones got work, got a record, went on tour. Leroy was just twelve, but he knew how hard they were working on their music. They’d practice on street corners, on the stoop, just walking, getting the notes down right—the moves, the facial expressions of all the groups they’d seen in movies and on Slim’s mother’s TV.
There were so many places to be out there. There was a real world with people in it who weren’t punching somebody for berries, or stealing the welfare and stuff. Just someplace open, someplace away from everything else.
He flipped on the flashlight beside his cot, pulled it under the covers with him, and opened his favorite book. It was Edward J. Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. His big brother John William, whom he had never seen, sent it to him from his Army post in California as soon as he found Leroy had run away and was living with his sister. John William also sent his sister part of his allotment every month.
Leroy had read the book again and again. He knew it by heart already. He couldn’t get a library card under his own name because the state might trace him that way. (They’d already been around asking his sister about him. She lied. But she too had run away from a foster home as soon as she was old enough, so they hadn’t believed her and would be back.) So he’d had