Running Out of Music

A huge, red-faced man in a Nike sweat suit cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Jailbait on the compound! Jailbait!”

The GIs in the gym laughed, most of the doors down the hallway were flung open, and the faces of several more GIs peered out, Nately’s among them. A chant was beginning: “Jail-bait! Jail-bait! Jail-bait!”

Lucinda was overwhelmed at the immensity of her miscalculation. What had she been thinking? She felt as if the blood in her veins had suddenly begun running in the opposite direction, backing up against her heart like a tidal wave. She waved at Nately, becoming suddenly aware of her white mittens flying above her head like a surrendering flag and seeming so little-girlish. Mittens, for chrissakes.

“Nately! Nately!”

He strode toward her, looking surprised and embarrassed.

“Lucinda Collins?”

“Hi, Nately. I just brought some more blank tapes and was wondering if you could tape some more music for me.”

“Holy shit,” he said, shaking his head. Around them the chant was giving way to whistles and a teasing refrain, “Nately’s got a girlfriend.”

“Fuck off!” Nately bellowed. “Come here, Lucinda.”

She followed him to his room, where he waved her in impatiently. He closed the door and stared at her.

“I just wanted some more music,” she said, “and I had some questions. I guess I didn’t realize what a big deal it would be. I’m sorry.”

Lucinda felt like a character in one of the Pink Panther movies, in one of those scenes where stealth gives way to farce, and people trying to accomplish some simple act of subterfuge wind up swinging from chandeliers and sailing into fountains through plate-glass windows.

Nately grinned at her. “I guess you come by it honestly,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your dad kind of does whatever the hell he wants, too, doesn’t he?”

It was true: Her coming to Nately’s barracks the second time was just as brazen, if not more so, as the way her father had brought her the first time. She didn’t want to be like her father in this way that had caused her so much embarrassment over the years. She resolved to be circumspect forevermore, to paint a circle around herself and never step outside it.

“You gotta get out of here,” Nately said. “Seriously. But let me see your list, since you’re here. What are your questions?”

He sat down on his bed and again slid his record crates out into the middle of the floor.

“At the beginning of the live version of ‘Rhiannon,’” said Lucinda, “Stevie Nicks says, ‘This is a story about a Welsh witch.’ What’s she talking about?”

“No idea. Next?”

“That song they’re playing out in the gym, ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’—that’s a great song!”

“It’s brilliant, but that’s not a question.”

“I can’t hear all the lyrics—what’s he saying after ‘She was the best damn woman that I ever seen’ and before ‘knockin’ me out with those American thighs’?”

“Oh,” Nately said, blushing. He began bobbing his shorn head. “Let’s see. ‘She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman that I ever seen. She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies, knockin’ me out with those American thighs.’”

Although it was clear to Lucinda that the woman in the song was being compared to a car, and that there was something sexual about it, she didn’t really see the point of the comparison. “So, if she doesn’t keep her motor clean, does it slow down?”

Nately fell over sideways on the bed laughing. He grabbed his middle and shook with laughter.

“Usually not,” he said finally, “but it would be better for everyone if it did.”

Just then the door opened, and Snowden walked in. He was in uniform and stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips like a mother who has just caught her son with one leg out the window in the middle of the night.

“I know,” he began, pointing his finger at Nately, “that I am not seeing what I think I’m seeing, and that all this ruckus I’m hearing up and down the hallway is just crazy talk. I know a little white girl is not in my room. I know that I am not seeing that, because that would be flat-out insane.

“And yet,” he said, extending his arms wide to encompass Lucinda standing amid the crates of records, “a little jailbait-white-girl-officer-spawn is in my enlisted-black-man’s room. And that is how I know that my life is over. What the hell are you thinking, Eddie?”

Snowden’s reaction to her presence shocked Lucinda. She felt that she and Snowden had something of a bond from her first visit. Hadn’t they shared a moment when her father corrected Snowden’s grammar? May and can? Now he stood before her, enraged and talking to Nately, whose first name was apparently Eddie, as if she weren’t even there. Her feelings were hurt. The seriousness of her presence in the barracks was being impressed upon her a little too strenuously, she felt. Everyone was a little hysterical. She just wanted some new music.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, Jay. She’s on her way.” Nately stood up and nodded to Lucinda.

“I’ll make your tapes,” he said. “Come on, you need to go before Snowden here starts crying.”

“Crying? Crying?” Snowden reeled back as if he had been shot. “Black people’ve been lynched for less, back in that great country of ours. Now I’m serious, snowflake, you gotta go.”

“How will you get the tapes to me?” Lucinda asked Nately, as Snowden stood outside in the hall, holding the door open impatiently.

“I’ll meet you by the water tower Friday at five o’clock. Can you do that?”

“The Nazi water tower, or the new one?”

“The Nazi one.”

“OK, yeah. Five o’clock. Thanks, Nately.”

Snowden, in a parody of a white newscaster’s voice, delivered his version of the nightly update aired by the American Forces Network: “And so the white people have arranged a delightful rendezvous for Friday afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It’s four o’clock in Central Europe. Do you know where your children are?”

"I feel like we’re spies,” Lucinda said, shivering in the rounded wooden doorway of the old half-timbered Nazi water tower, “trading dangerous information that could end the whole Cold War in one fell swoop.” They were a stone’s throw from the general’s quarters Hitler had used when he visited the training area. A broad sidewalk passed between the structures, providing a shortcut through the wooded area between the residential neighborhood where Lucinda lived and the PX/commissary compound and library.

“Be careful,” Nately said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “my bow tie is really a camera.” His pale pink skin was red from the cold, his green eyes watering. “What’s that from?” he asked.

“Oh,” Lucinda squinted in concentration. “I know those words. Hang on.” The melody began to come to her. “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all gone to look for America,” she sang. “Simon and Garfunkel.”

“Good call. It’s a great song. Great album, Bookends.”

“It’s not one of my favorites,” Lucinda said.

Nately smiled at her. “I was about your age when I first heard it. I found it in my big brother’s collection. I listened to it because of the cover. Those two guys, and all that gray around them. They looked like they knew something they were afraid to tell you. I didn’t much like it then, either. I didn’t really understand it, what it’s about.”

“What’s so hard to understand?” Lucinda asked, thinking she had caught a dig at her age.

Nately’s eyes were still smiling at her. “You’re just not far enough away.”

“Away from what?” She felt herself getting angry. Nately was acting like a big brother. She didn’t like it.

“Home.”

“Home?” She looked up at him. “We’re at the end of the world here, Nately. Don’t tell me I’m not far enough away from home to understand stupid Simon and Garfunkel.”

Nately reached out with his freckled hand to touch her shoulder. Lucinda shook it off.

“Look what you’ve got here, Lucy. You’ve got your mom, your dad, your little brother and sister. Me, I’ve got Simon and Garfunkel.”

“Oh, cry me a river.”

“I’m just saying the lyrics might mean a bit more to somebody who’s away from everything he knows, like the guy in the song. And one of these days it’ll mean more to you, too. That’s all, dear Prudence.”

“Prudence?”

“That’s your new nickname,” he said.

She loved it.

“I brought a few more blanks,” she said. “And a list.”

“You’ve got a bad habit, sister.”

The next Friday, Lucinda waited at the Nazi water tower for Nately to show up with her new tapes. Her parents thought she was at ballet class, so she’d had no trouble getting away, and in any case she didn’t have far to go—she could see her own quarters from where they stood. She knew she would have to stop bothering Nately, but she couldn’t. She didn’t even have time to listen to all the music she requested of him. She just kept asking so she could see him. She hadn’t told her father that she was meeting Nately, and she knew, somehow, that Nately hadn’t mentioned it either. She wasn’t sure why their meetings were a secret, but she knew that they exhilarated her, a secret door in the center of her life.

He was late, and she had almost decided that he had forgotten about her. Just as she was about to leave, feeling sadder than she should have for not being able to pick up her new music, he appeared over the top of a rise, trotting in a long, black leather coat that she had never seen before—a Russian overcoat—and dark shades.

“You look like KGB,” she said.

“I’ve been to Amsterdam,” he said, as if this explained his new look. “Things are happening there, Prudence. The music scene there is wired. One more year and I’m out of the Army, and that’s where I’m going. I’m going to start a band. I had a feeling about the place.”

“One more year,” Lucinda said.

A wave of excitement and longing washed over her. She would need five more years before she could think of moving to Amsterdam, or anywhere else, without her parents. She realized that in five years she could be anywhere. Nately would be a memory.

She had always envied people who stayed put, who had one constant place to tie their memories to. Her memories seemed to her entirely fabricated, because she could never return to their sources to verify them; other people, she imagined, had traces of their own lives everywhere around them, in their neighborhoods and towns. Lately she had begun to feel that she had an advantage over these people: She knew where her self stopped and her environment started, because she was so frequently torn from her environment. But, more often than not, she still envied civilians who were bound to where they lived until the place became a part of their personality. This experience of being grounded was a mystery that she wanted to experience, and she felt its absence as Nately stood before her, poised to fly, not home but to another outpost of his own choosing.

He was breathing hard from his run, his breath crystallizing and falling on the air. Lucinda concentrated on him. She could tell that their meeting was for her one of those moments that shine out from the continuum of moments, a luminous freeze-frame that would later be all she would remember of the entire month—or perhaps the entire year—that the moment belonged to. He reached into his new coat pockets and withdrew the tapes she had asked for. London Calling, Station to Station, Disraeli Gears, Exile on Main St., Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bella Donna. All there.

“Do you spend all your paycheck on music?” she asked.

“Pretty much. Here, I got you something from Amsterdam.” He pulled one more tape out of his pocket, a store-bought tape. Unbehagen, by the Nina Hagen Band.

“Uneasiness,” Lucinda translated. By sheer coincidence she had run across the word in German class that week. “Thank you, Nately. Wow. Thank you for thinking of me.”

She stared down at the cassette in her gloved hand, Nina Hagen’s theatrical face staring back at her, offering the promise of a new sound like a new room, but one she could carry with her, unaltered and unalterable. Music sounded the same wherever you were. You could be startled by the toy cop whistle at the beginning of “Highway 61 Revisited” or hear Mick Jagger’s voice become the texture of ground glass for “Ventilator Blues,” whether you were in any of the 50 states or thousands of feet above the ocean in a plane or sitting in a small room an hour from the Czech border. Music lived in time like she did.

“I’ll bet you’ve got a new list for me, haven’t you?” Nately asked.

“Depends. I don’t know if you’ll have all this,” she said, handing him her list.

“Shoot Out the Lights, how did you hear about that? But have no fear. I’ve got it. I just got it, but I’ve got it. I’m going to Amsterdam again next week, so I don’t know if I can get to everything, but I’ll try hard. Let’s meet here same time two weeks from today, and I’ll give you what I’ve got.”

She watched him trot off in his heavy coat.

“My KGB agent,” she said.

Two weeks later a heavy snow was falling, and Lucinda could hardly make out the figure standing in front of the heavy wooden door of the Nazi water tower as she approached. She felt as if years had passed since she had seen Nately, and she reviewed all her insights about Nina Hagen and Richard and Linda Thompson as she walked. She didn’t want to forget anything. She saw him pacing in front of the door and figured that he must have been freezing, so she began to run. As she drew closer, she realized that the tall, thin figure was not Nately but Snowden. He had stopped pacing and now stood with his hands deep in his front pockets, staring at her. She stopped running and waved. “Nately must have the flu that’s been going around,” she thought. Yet she was pleased to see Snowden—his presence showed that he didn’t hate her, in spite of her white-jailbait status.

“Snowden, hey! You order this weather?” She reached him and ducked under the narrow awning over the door.

“Hey, Prudence,” he said. His face was grim and tight.

“You know my nickname! What’s the matter? What’s got you out today doing Nately’s dirty work for him?”

Snowden puffed out his cheeks and said it: “Nately’s dead. Got killed in a bar fight in Amsterdam last weekend. Wasn’t his fight—he was trying to break it up and he stepped in front of somebody’s knife.”

Lucinda stared and stared at Snowden. She watched his exhaled breaths crystallize then fall. She watched him blink. “Is he … where is he?”

“Shipped home already. He’s going to be buried in Gainesville, where he’s from. I can’t believe it. I’ve already been assigned a new roommate. Every morning I open my eyes and I have to remind myself that Nately’s not the one breathing across the room.”

“No,” she said. She felt her face become a mask of ice as tears fell and froze on her cheeks.

“He had marked his calendar. I thought I ought to show up in case your dad hadn’t told you what happened. Here,” he said, handing her a plastic sack. She could tell it contained the tapes she had given Nately to record with the last time she had seen him. Snowden patted her on the shoulder. “He put so much time into making those tapes for you. You were a bright spot for him.”

Lucinda nodded.

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “You know, he never had any girlfriends.”

Lucinda looked up at him. “Thank you, Snowden.”

She walked home slowly, the cold seeping through her clothes and her boots. Her father hadn’t said anything. Not a word. Of course, her father didn’t know that she and Nately had seen each other more than once. “For a week,” she thought, “Nately has not been in the world, and I didn’t know it.” She reached into the bag and drew out a tape. Still blank. She reached in and pulled out two more, both blank. Then she pulled one out and saw Nately’s handwriting. Shoot Out the Lights, by Richard and Linda Thompson.

She stopped and stared at his handwriting. Black ink, because she had convinced him that his color-coded tripartite system didn’t work. She thought about his hands, the freckles on the backs of them, how they had written these words, and where they were now, his hands. She was colder than she had ever been, the cold going all the way to the center of her. She wondered that her heart didn’t stop.

As she walked past her house, she saw her mother’s shadow moving in the kitchen. She picked up her speed until she had covered the three additional blocks to her father’s office. At 5:10, the building was still bustling. She could see the light on in her father’s second-floor office.

“Hello, little Collins!”

Three NCOs who worked across the hall from her father were coming down the stairs. They separated to let her pass. She climbed the stairs and pushed open the door to her father’s office without knocking. He looked up from whatever it was he was reading, then stood up when he saw her.

“Lucy! What brings you here? I thought you had ballet.”

“Is Nately dead?”

She didn’t know why she phrased the information in the form of a question, except that part of her wouldn’t accept the news as true until she heard it from him.

“Yeah, he sure is. News travels fast on this little base. Got himself killed, the poor dumb bastard. It’s a shame. He was a good boy. That time he made all those tapes for you—that was good of him, didn’t you think?”

Lucinda nodded.

“That reminds me, sweetie, I keep forgetting to tell you. Yeah. When I heard he died, I went over and got these for you.”

He pointed to behind where Lucinda was standing. In the far corner of the room, under the windows, sat Nately’s crates of records, lined up against the wall.

“I didn’t try for the turntable—it looked like an expensive piece of equipment, so I thought his folks might want it. But these would have probably just been thrown away, or all the other GIs would have divided them up. I thought you should have them.”

Her father was standing beside her. She went down on her knees in front of the crates. In the first crate she saw the honey-colored photo on the front of Shoot Out the Lights, along with all the other albums she had most recently asked him to record. As she thumbed her way through the records, she realized that he had separated those he had already taped for her from all the others. He had been keeping track so he could tell, she supposed, how many he had yet to record for her, how close he was to running out of music.

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