Moody Food by Ray Robertson

Author:Ray Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2012-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

49.

I’D DONE WHAT Kelorn had told me to. Well, most of it. I’d walked Thomas from the bookstore to our rehearsal space as coolly as possible—slight glitch only when Thomas loudly insisted that we stop in at the Grab Bag and purchase the store’s entire stock of cheap sunglasses and a can of whipped cream—and basically played watchdog until he gradually came down from his trip. I didn’t tell him about the RCMP, though. I decided to wait until he was together enough to understand what I was saying.

It was my first experience with an acid case face to face, and, to be honest, I was a little disappointed. Thomas sat across from me wordlessly plucking away at his guitar like I wasn’t even there and unsuccessfully attempting to get through the same song, a sort of a cross between “Green Sleeves” and “Bo Diddly” (believe it), always tripping up on the same intricate middle section. Aside from trying on and discarding every one of the twelve pairs of black shades before he began playing, I realized that with a song running through his head Thomas zonked wasn’t all that different from Thomas straight and that he probably wasn’t going to start flapping his arms like a chicken and jump out the window any time soon. After a solid hour of this I began pacing the room, occasionally stepping out on the balcony, hoping to see Christine down below tacking up some posters. She never showed.

On the card table I spotted Scotty’s borrowed copy of Robert Burns. I flipped and skimmed until the rhymes on the page and Thomas’s repetitive chord changes worked together to put me under. I dreamed of an undisturbed and endless coal-black river and woke to the sound of a chair scraping across the floor.

Except for the green volume levels of the reel-to-reel, the room was completely dark. I must have slept while the sun set and fell. Thomas flipped a switch on the tape machine, returned to his chair, and played the tune he’d been working on all the way through—flawlessly this time—then stood up and clicked the thing off.

“Sorry about the delay,” he said, as if he’d just popped back from a quick trip next door. “But I had to take care of that before we could get started.”

“No problem.” He seemed like he was all right now, eyes not pinwheeling in their sockets any more and speaking in full sentences. “How do you feel?”

“Fine, fine,” he said. He put a hand in his pocket and pulled out a white tab. “You ready to get going?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about getting down to business, Buckskin. About getting down to work. You’re the Colour Man, no question about that, but everybody can use a little inspiration from time to time.” He jiggled the tab in his palm.

“I think you’ve worked enough for today,” I said. “And if you think I’m going to volunteer for the same deal I just babysat you through, you’re still more spaced out than I thought.

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