Soldier's Joy by Madison Smartt Bell

Author:Madison Smartt Bell [Bell, Madison Smartt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3546-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

27

ADRIENNE SAT AT A small tippy table in the back corner of what they’d come to call the No Name Bar, wrinkling her nose a little against the criss-cross smells of stale beer and the bathrooms, which were right through the thin wall behind her. Laidlaw was still playing and playing, sitting on a bar stool under the little circle of bluish light, sitting down now probably just because he was too tired to stand up any longer. Martin had gone home at least an hour before, at the end of the third and last official set, but she’d hung in there for a while longer, as she usually did when Laidlaw didn’t want to quit. She’d finally had enough for one night, though, and would have been happy to leave any time.

Laidlaw was hunched down over the banjo like a big old daddy long legs, knees practically in his mouth, head tucked too low for her to see his face. He’d told her how once in this very bar he’d had to drink himself all the way out the bottom of the bottle to get up the nerve to play before strangers, but now he wasn’t self-conscious anymore, and barely aware of the audience either, a good deal of the time. Oh, he knew they were there, in a glazed kind of way. He would talk to them. But she had learned that he preferred to wear through that good-time, half-social part of the evening, collapsing into this kind of total privacy from which the music rose like a trail of smoke from a secret fire—the kind that could gnaw your house down before you had really caught on that anything was burning. It was not the most engaging performance manner imaginable, but it seemed to draw a lot of people in. There were only a few people left in the No Name but all of them looked like they were well hooked. Adrienne took a look at the tip jar shoved up against a leg of Laidlaw’s stool. It was a little better than half full, with a comforting amount of paper money, though the bills would be singles and they tended to wad up and look like a lot more than they really were. It wouldn’t be getting any fatter either, not this late at night.

She lit her thousandth cigarette of the evening and took a sip of beer to chase it. The amount of free beer she’d been drinking lately, she was starting to get the bloat. But she had heard people say you could live on it. And it used to be prescribed for nursing mothers … Laidlaw was playing one of his minor-key melodramas, a long chanting train of melodies building up into a dirge. They were quite good, those things of his, she knew they were, though from the most specialized points of view they could have been called naïve. And a bit on the interminable side too, sometimes. He was not the best musician she’d ever been around, or even close, but he certainly was different.

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