A Song For the Road Read online

  He held it so Tommy wouldn’t see the inscription of tiny dark brown serif letters just below the pickguard: “Creativity, Victory, Heart, and Discipline.” Those four words had mattered to his father, enough to have them custom-stained into the guitar. The inscription was as valuable to Carter as the guitar itself, proof his father once had some good in him.

  “It’ll do,” he said, trying to be casual, his back turned to Tommy. “I’ll give you seven fifty for it, no more.”

  “It ain’t for sale, kid.” Tommy laughed a cold laugh. “Already have a buyer.”

  Carter couldn’t be sure if Tommy was bluffing. “How much are they offering for it?”

  “Nine fifty.”

  Carter swallowed hard, thinking about how long he’d hated knowing his dad’s guitar was still in Tulsa, but he wasn’t allowed to play it. He thought about how hard it had been to save. The old coffee can he used as a piggy bank had weighed as much as a sack of hammers, but when he’d counted all the loose coins and random bills from chores and a faraway aunt on birthdays, he’d only cleared three hundred dollars. On weekends, his mother taught him to fix everything from the torque converter to the flywheel on her truck, but she wouldn’t pay him for it. She said if he hoped to drive the old beast one day, he’d best know his way around the engine. He watched where she kept her savings, though. He knew all about where she hid her money. It was cash she wasn’t going to spend on him—and certainly not on his dad’s old guitar. She probably wasn’t even going to spend it on herself. His mom wore the same dusty work clothes day in and day out. Born and raised on a scratch of desert north of Reno, Nevada, she didn’t fuss with getting her hair and nails done. Even when the roof leaked last winter, she’d refused to pay to hire anyone. She went up there and fixed it herself.

  His mother’s savings just sat there, doing nothing and helping no one. Carter wanted to put an end to the guitar that once promised him a future in music. If he was never going to play the Martin again, no one would.

  So he took the money.

  It was just enough, added to the savings in his coffee can, to buy the guitar for seven hundred fifty dollars. And now Tommy wanted an extra two hundred?

  “I can give you seven fifty, right now.” Carter was firm but his voice had lost color. It felt like there was a ball of something scratchy at the back of his mouth. Carter cleared his throat, but the ball grew scratchier.

  His guilty fingers felt clammy around the damp bills, all his mom’s savings, in his pocket. It wasn’t enough to buy the guitar. Stealing it was plainly the dumbest, most selfish thing he’d ever done.

  “Sorry, kid. Nine fifty’s the best I can do.”

  Would destroying the guitar guarantee him sweet payback if he had to steal from his mother to do it? He pictured himself smashing it with a hammer, the way he’d wanted to a thousand times since his dad left. No, he couldn’t go through with it. He’d put back all her money before she found out and—

  He’d let go of his father. Let go of the guitar.

  “I don’t want it,” Carter said, unable to tear his eyes away from the instrument.

  Tommy placed the Martin in an old guitar case and leaned it against the wall. Black and dusty, the case seemed like a coffin to Carter’s only hope. But there was no way of getting any more money. He’d already taken what wasn’t his.

  Rain pummeled the parking lot, the sky swirling with blue-black clouds. The howling wind picked up and thunder broke high above them. Carter cowered, ducking against the cold cement wall. It sounded like the storm was directly overhead. “Most of the time thunder plays a trick,” Tommy assured him, taking a drag of his cigarette. “It sounds close, but it’s miles away.”

  Carter leaned into the wall to steady himself. He figured his mom must be back home by then and wondering why he wasn’t. She was in the habit of pitching a duck fit when he wasn’t back in time for dinner. It’s not like he had many places to be on the best of days, but a tornado was a whole new level of worry. “Hey, Tommy? Would it be okay if I called my mom?” His heart was pounding something awful. “I don’t want her to worry.” He was plenty worried himself.

  “Yeah. Make it quick.” In the small room, the rectangular light of a cell phone’s lit screen appeared before him, shaking in Tommy’s fist. The screech of bending metal cut through the darkness. “Sometimes the bark is worse than the bite.” Tommy tried to make sense of the noise. “You know, reverberation.”

  “Thanks.” Tommy must be coming unhinged, Carter thought, as he dialed his mother’s cell. That storm was just getting started.

  “Hey, Carter.” Tommy kept talking, too unnerved to button his lip. “Everything’s going be okay, you hear?”

  He pressed the phone against his ear, listening. His mother didn’t pick up. Everything was far from okay, he reckoned.

  Debris blew about the parking lot in the screaming wind. Carter held the phone closer to his ear and covered the other with his free hand. In the distance, he could hear the grainy scrape of breaking brick and a loud crunching whine of metal crushed against metal. This wasn’t any seasonal rain shower. It was a full-on tornado. He just wanted to be home. He looked at the black case holding his father’s guitar and cursed ever having held the thing, ever having loved it. It’d brought him nothing but bad luck. He wished he didn’t care about music, wished his father leaving didn’t matter.

  Carter pressed his body against the cinder-block wall. The cool, solid concrete felt safer. And permanent, he hoped.

  A deafening noise cracked overhead. Carter slid down to the floor, burying his head under his long arms. He held his breath and closed his eyes, afraid the ceiling might collapse, crushing him and Tommy like the heap of guitars.

  There was no going out in that mess. Guitar or no guitar, he was stuck. Carter pictured his mother in her basement workshop, her hair tied in a bandanna, sawdust on her forearms above her work gloves. He redialed, entering her number slowly and deliberately. She made it home from her delivery, he repeated to himself. But she wasn’t answering her phone. He dialed again, pressing the phone back to his ear and listened to it ring and ring until it went to voice mail.

  “Mama, it’s me, Cotton. Are you home? You okay?” He wished he could tell her where he was, but she’d freak if she found out he was in Tommy’s pawn shop with all her savings. “Um, I’m fine. Really. I’ll be home as soon as the storm passes. I love y—” The call dropped, cutting him off. “Why isn’t she answering?” he asked, as though Tommy’d have any clue.

  “You got to keep trying,” he said. His voice seemed rougher in the darkness. “She’ll answer, I know it.”

  Outside the window, Carter watched a garbage can in the parking lot stumble a few feet, then fly away. He handed the phone back to Tommy. “Right after you call your family.”

  Chapter Three

  THE STORM BATTERED THE PAWN SHOP ALL NIGHT. With nothing but hope and worry duking it out in their heads, Carter and Tommy didn’t catch a wink of sleep.

  The next morning the sky was dirty and gray, blotting the sun. It was still raining, but the thunder had let up. Carter and Tommy stood on the sidewalk in front of the pawn shop, neither of them speaking. Ambulance and fire engine sirens whined in the distance. Car alarms droned from every direction.

  Through the long hours trapped in the pawn shop, they hadn’t talked much about anything aside from the weather, but the storm gave Tommy the presence of mind to sell the guitar to the closest buyer offering immediate cash, rather than waiting on a better deal. Carter had handed over all his money, stuffing it into Tommy’s meaty palm in the darkness. Gripping his father’s guitar in his arms at last, Carter had hoped the emptiness of losing his dad would be over. Smashing the Martin was supposed to help him move on, become whatever a boy became when “rock star” was no longer an option. Funny thing, though, Carter had wished he could play it that night, hear the strings quiver with life. But he hadn’t dared to take it out of the case, not when the wind wouldn’t let up. Carter knew an
F5 tornado could pick up speeds as fast as three hundred miles per hour. He was afraid the ceiling might peel off and disappear into the eye of a passing funnel. He’d already lost his dad. He didn’t want to lose the guitar. Again.

  CARTER was itching to get home. He was worried about his mom. She hadn’t answered her phone all night. He stuffed the receipt for the guitar in his pocket.

  Tommy stared across the street at a crumpled Toyota hatchback wedged in a tea shop’s window frame as if it had been thrown like a Frisbee. They were lucky to be alive, not a scratch on either of them. Pulling his gaze from the wreck, Tommy shut the pawn shop’s front doors, securing them with an old bike lock wrapped around the door handles, even though the shop had a gaping hole on one corner where the roof fell in the night before. Half of Tommy’s merchandise was trashed.

  “Get on home,” Tommy said with a grunt, sending the boy on his way. “What do you take me for, a babysitter?”

  Carter hesitated a moment, trying to meet Tommy’s eye, but the hatchback had reclaimed his attention the way only a car wreck can. “Thank you, Tommy,” Carter said. “Sorry about your store,” he added, throwing his arms around the big man in a solid hug. Surprised, Tommy thumped Carter awkwardly on the back and released himself, folding his arms across the roll around his middle. “Go on, now. Your ma is probably fixing to wallop you for not getting home last night.”

  Gripping his fingers tightly around the guitar case’s handle, Carter took off running from Tommy’s pawn shop, north on the sidewalk to Ballata Avenue, his street. The guitar weighed him down, wobbling and thrashing like he was dragging it against its will. He tried tucking it under one arm and then the other. Finally, he grabbed the handle with one hand, and hugged it to his chest with the other. Dodging loose roof shingles, fence posts, twigs, and branches, Carter forked right into his neighborhood without slowing to catch his breath. His house was four blocks down.

  Carter stopped short, coming to a hard halt, and stared. The homes he passed every day on his way to school, many a hundred years old or more, were nothing more than piles of rubble. The booming crashes of the night before, the sound he’d imagined was a freight train running off-track, wild and untamed through the middle of Tulsa, must have chosen his neighborhood as a crash pad.

  The truth was plain: his neighborhood was demolished, flattened, wiped out. Carter stared, uncomprehending. Where houses once stood he could only imagine people, the neighbors who occupied them. They all got out, he told himself. Plenty of warning on the news, they had to have gotten out in time. He couldn’t bear the idea he might be standing in a graveyard. But what about his house, he wondered. What about Mama?

  Carter sprinted home, rain pelting his wet hair against his forehead. On some lots, a garage held its ground. As though nature had played some twisted lottery, a short row of four or five homes stood untouched, humbled witnesses to the carnage around them.

  As he neared his house, Carter slowed, blinking away the rain from his eyes. It seemed all right. Only the front door hung open, held in place by just the bottom hinge.

  “Mama!” Carter yelled, taking the front steps in twos. “I’m home.”

  Carter pulled the front door straight, leaning it against the jamb. He stepped inside, trying to make sense of what he saw. Half the house was gone. Rain fell on the living room carpet, soaking it. Rubble lay everywhere, as if a junkyard had exploded. The staircase, a wet, creaking heap, no longer led to the second floor but to the endless gray, crying sky.

  “Mama, where are you?” he yelled again, his eyes scavenging the shards of bent drywall, broken picture frames, and filthy furniture, ripped and soaking wet. The steps to his mother’s basement workshop were buried in rubble, maybe five feet deep or more. Carter squeezed his eyes shut, regret bitter in his mouth. It was a dumb mistake, praying all night that she was down there, he told himself. Now he was sure she got out. She had to be okay. He squeezed the handle of the guitar case in his palm, guilt stabbing him in the gut. He nearly doubled over from the pain. Trying to steady himself, he grabbed on to his mother’s carved wooden headboard, jutting out over soggy cardboard boxes that had been in the attic. Where the dining table once sat, a mattress cowered on top of the neighbor’s motorcycle, a Yamaha V Star, wrapping it like a tent. Carter had taken a handful of lessons on the bike after he’d earned his learner’s permit. It was no good now. The front wheel bulged to one side, the fork tubes bent like broken limbs. Carter brushed away hot tears with his wet arm. The salty, bitter taste of his snot ran down his lip. Getting his bearings, he tore into the mess, calling out, “Mama! Mama!”

  Carter found a strength he didn’t know he had, hauling away rubble covering the stairs to the basement with his bare hands. With the back of his arm, Carter wiped at the sweat beading across his forehead and dug away the filthy remains. When he came across an old box of baby blankets and onesies his mom had kept, he used them to wrap his hands, scratched and bleeding from digging. The song he’d written on his palm the day before, “Hour of Freedom,” was nothing more than a distorted smattering of black ink.

  Half-afraid he would find her dead, half-afraid he wouldn’t find her at all, he begged her to answer him. “Mama, I’m sorry I was late,” he sobbed, grimacing at the gassy stink in the air.

  The rain wouldn’t stop. Carter had to find a place to hide the guitar. The stainless-steel kitchen sink and a good portion of the Formica countertop had survived the storm. Carter cleared out the pots and pans and cleaning supplies beneath and hid the guitar there to keep it dry while he continued his search. An over-sized flashlight, the old kind with a six-volt lantern battery, hung on what remained of the kitchen wall. Carter hoped the battery hadn’t died. Pulling it from its magnet, he tried the switch. A bright light cut through the dust and rainfall.

  When he finally got the basement door open, he nearly flung himself down the stairs, shining the light into the darkness.

  She wasn’t there.

  He bounded back up the stairs. Carter stumbled out of his broken home into the street. With all his strength, he barreled his voice across the deserted plain of rubble and debris. “Mama? Sandra Bermejo! Mama!”

  The wind blew hard across the open field of downed houses. The air felt loud in his ears as he strained to hear his mother’s reply to his calls to her.

  She didn’t answer.

  No one answered. There was no one around, in any direction as far as he could see. That was good, he decided. Everyone had been evacuated. She was somewhere safe, with the others. He just wished he could tell her he was okay, too.

  She would come back, of course, to look for him. He remembered one time when he was just a knee-baby, wandering off at the shopping mall. Eventually, she found him pitching a duck fit, sticky with tears and hungry enough to eat the north end of a south-bound polecat. “Carter Danforth,” she’d scolded him, dropping to her knees to scoop his whole body into her arms, “next time stay where I can find you.”

  Carter returned to his house to wait. He kept his ear tuned to any sound falling between the moans of the wind and the downpour of rain, watching the horizon for the telltale dark funnel of an oncoming tornado.

  It’d been over a day since he last ate. All Carter had left of his kitchen was the sink and a vivid recollection of the meals his mom had fixed there: barbeque pork, biscuits, and corn, and sweet peach pie. At that point, a ninety-nine-cent burrito from a gas station sounded pretty good. Carter thought again about the money he’d stolen. And spent. He didn’t have a dollar in his pocket.

  Carter wondered whether any of the chemicals his mother used in her workshop were flammable. He couldn’t leave the house in case she came looking, but he worried the whole pile might go up in flames. He paused to look to the sky. The rain continued to fall hard, the clouds a battalion of firefighters.

  Maybe she was at a friend’s, in a cellar hidey hole, or had stayed with a client after her delivery. Isn’t that what had happened to him? He’d found a safe place where she couldn’
t even imagine. He had to keep searching.

  Chapter Four

  BY EVENING, THE NEIGHBORHOOD HAD GROWN DARK, darker than he’d ever seen. The streetlights could have blown to the next county over for all Carter knew. There were no porch lights on; there were no porches. No golden lights glowing from quiet houses, where families sat around tables eating dinner. No flicker from TV screens. Just darkness.

  Carter grabbed the guitar from under the kitchen sink and sheltered himself in the basement. He wondered if his dad knew, if somehow he’d gotten word about the Oklahoma tornado from the news. He wondered if he ever thought of him and his mama.

  His dad had a new life some fourteen hundred miles away in Santa Monica. Carter wondered if his new wife’s daughters, Scarlett and Aurora, were better at being his kids than he was. He supposed if they weren’t, his dad would’ve come back by now.

  Rain fell down the hardwood stairs with a sharp splat, pooling under the door into the dank workshop. Bracing the lantern between his shoulder and chin, Carter balanced the guitar case over two sawhorses and slipped out the instrument and hugged it to him. It would have been smarter to leave the guitar in its case to protect it.

  He stroked the length of the guitar’s familiar shape, running his hands around the curved sides, to the heel of the body, then up the neck, bumping over each fret. At the headstock, Carter traced his fingertips over the Martin & Company logo. Established 1833, it read. If the Martin company could weather nearly two centuries, maybe Carter could endure another night not knowing when he’d find his mother.

  When he was little, his dad used to sit him on his knee and hold his hands to the strings. The 000-15M Martin was similar to smaller, 1940s-era mahogany guitars, his dad had told him. It had a balanced sound, and Carter found it comfortable to play, even though it was left-handed and he wasn’t. Eddie believed playing left-handed had been integral to making Jimi Hendrix a star, and Carter’s daddy used every notion, gimmick, and trick to make people sit up and take notice of his “boy wonder.”