Skeletons (21 page)

"Shit, Mama," I say.

And I say it again, because the camera now moves in again close, showing the littered street and then panning right to the face of the reporter, a bonehead holding a microphone.

"So," the boner says, "the battle for the
midwest
rages on. Provisional Governor Warren Harding has called for a cease-fire to take stock of armaments, but vows to fight on until every last human is 'turned,' as it's now called. As we showed you earlier, the entire Chicago Council of Aldermen, including the mayor, was executed outside City Hall this afternoon. The mayor, after being turned, had this to say—"

Bobbie snaps off the television.

"That's just the beginning," he says, leaning back. "Same thing's going on all over the country. All over the globe."

"Even Britain?" I say, instantly wanting to bite my tongue off for saying it.

"Yes, old boy, even Britain," Bobbie says. He leans forward, giving me an even creepier close look at his face. "The point is, you humans are fighting back. There's always an outside chance you could win. And if you do . . ."

He points to me, smiles.

"Uh ..."

"Don't you get it, Roger? If your people win, you protect me! No matter what, people are going to need music, right? And I'll be the one with the music! If we win, I'll keep you around, turn you, as they say. Either way we work together happily ever after!"

"I'm not too wild about the turning part, Bobbie."

He leans forward. His bogus-Brit voice gets just a tad rough. "No choice on that,
Rog
. The only reason you're not dead right now is I need you the way you are."

I calm him down by saying, "Uh, right, Bobbie. Tell me about the music."

"That room downstairs," he says, "is filled with enough talent, new and old, to fill the record stores for years. I've signed every one of them. New contracts, ironclad, for Chin Records. As far as I know, I'm the only producer left in the business."

"Carl Peters?" I ask, knowing that if anybody could survive this nightmare, Peters, the bastard, would be one to do it.

Bobbie replaces his hands back behind his head, rocks back in his chair. "That pile of dust you were standing over in the driveway . . .?"

"Oh," I say, and then I jump out of my chair to lean over the desk and shake Bobbie's hand. "You've got a deal, babe."

"Welcome aboard, old boy," Bobbie says.

So for a while it's party time. Each day Bobbie and I make some phone calls when we can get through, do a little discreet driving in the Lincoln Town Car when it's safe. It's getting increasingly unsafe, at least for humans, at least in the daytime. So we do a lot of our work at night, leaving the party going at Bobbie Land while we travel to
Bel
Air or Malibu to close a deal. We close a lot of boner-musician deals. Some of them won't sign when I'm around unless they're really coked up. Hendrix in particular tries to bean me over the head with his Stratocaster, but Bobbie pulls him away just in time. After that I stay in the car behind the tinted windows while Bobbie deals with Mama Cass, who comes out to try to get at me in the car. I make a note to send her a canned ham and a dozen loaves of bread.

At Bobbie's house I get a little more respect. Everyone's so high you could bring the human pope in and they'd cheer. One of Bobbie's phone calls has netted us into a wonderful coke ring, one of many that seems to have sprung up; seems a lot of old dead drug dealers are back in business.

I spend a lot of time in Bobbie's office when he's not around, watching television. The cable reception's gotten wonky; sometimes it's out for hours at a time, and when it comes back on, there's a human at the controls, showing obviously van-shot footage of humans fighting back. These never last long.

"Go, State!" I usually yell, holding my
Carta
Blanca out in salute, though I don't do this when Bobbie boy is around.

As for boner coverage, I get the feeling I'm only getting their side of the story. But that's nutty enough. The whole world's a mess. The human hunt down has been pushed to the background, and now much of the coverage is about the various boner civil wars going on in every corner of the globe. One particular segment, which I really can't vouch for since I was about as high as I've ever gotten (Bobbie had just reamed me out for making a wrong turn in the Town Car, getting us to Janis Joplin just after she'd been turned into a pile of dust by an angry heroin dealer), showed Simon Bolivar and Ambrose Bierce running away from a pack of wild bone bulls in a Mexico bullring while the place went wild. Just as Bolivar caught it in the back, turning to powder, they went to commercial, and when they came back, Richard Nixon's huge horrible
skullhead
was filling the screen, sweating from his ghostly upper lip, calmly saying that he had come to China to try to bring peace to the region and to the world.

"China will rise from its ashes and rule the earth," Nixon said, and then he declared war on Vietnam, which was about as much weirdness as I could stand before I turned the set off.

There's a lot of craziness like this. In fact, I keep waiting for my radar to go off, telling me to get in the Lincoln and head for the hills, to get away from Bobbie—who I trust about as much as I ever did, which is not at all. But the radar never snaps on. I mean, where is there a better deal for a human right now? Hiding in a storm drain eating dead rats and plotting revenge?

So I stay and, what the fu, with the dope and music and the job, I'm having about as much fun as possible without being turned.

And then . . . things get even better!

Is it possible? You bet, Rhett. Ol' Bobbie, I nearly kiss his
friggin
' bone head when he makes me cover my eyes one day and then brings me to a corner room on the top floor of the house, where they've been banging around for the past two days or so, pushes me in, turns on the lights, and says, "This, old boy, is your office!"

Office! How do you like that, Dad! You know what you had to do to get an office at Roundabout Records, the millennium of waiting, the lineup of asses to be sucked? I wish I had my old man in a headlock now, let him gawk at the racks of vid-stereo equipment identical to Bobbie's, the desk, the plush rug. How's that, Dad? Did I make it now? Am I not garbage anymore?

"Hope you like it, old boy," Bobbie says.

"Like it? Wow—"

"You'll be spending a lot of time in here," he goes on, ignoring my enthusiasm, very businesslike. "Things are getting a bit big at the moment. I'm afraid I'm going to have to turn the whole music end of it over to you. Vice-president, old boy, if you like titles." He gives one of his ghostly Brit grins. "I have another surprise for you, if you'll follow me down to the studio."

So we tramp downstairs and then outside across the lawn past the pool to the huge soundproof studio, and go in, past the ranks of mixing equipment behind glass panels, and when he pushes me into the recording room, it's . . .

The Vomits! Those four lads in all their lovely bone splendor, Brutus Johnson with his Stratocaster slung over his back, Barney Barnes helping Jimmy
Klemp
with a cymbal stand—and Randy Pants, sneering as always, one foot up on a chair, turning to look at me as I stumble in.

"Boys!" I say. Suddenly I love them.

"Hear you wanted us dead, Roger," Randy says in his baritone growl.

"Well, uh, I . . ."

He smiles, taking his foot off the chair to come over and shake hands. "Well, you got your wish, pustule."

He embraces me. I see Brutus grinning at me over his
Strat
, which he's pulled into playing position.

"We've got some nasty tunes to get out," Randy says, letting me go.

I turn to Bobbie
Zick
, who's already leaving. "They're all yours, old boy," he says, "I've already signed them for Chin Records. Lifetime contract.”

“Great!" I say.

And Brutus grunts, hits a chord, and says, "Yeah."

For a time I'm so wrapped up in the Vomits I hardly know what's going on in the rest of the world. There's other Chin Records business, of course; but now I've got a pert little secretary, name of Cheryl, very petite bone structure, and she handles all but the most important calls. There's a lot of bullshit to this business, and most of it comes my way, to the point where I wonder what the heck Bobbie
Zick
is up to. I hardly ever see him anymore; he's either locked in his office or out in his Mercedes, roaming the hills. I think it must be that Beatle reunion thing, but when those calls start coming to me, I know Bobbie really does have other nuts to roast. His own secretary, a porky female monster named Noreen who I'm truly afraid of since I know for a fact she wants to turn me with her own hands, and then possibly eat me, keeps telling me, "He's out, sir," giving me her lascivious scowl. Or, when I work up the balls to press her, she says nothing at all, only opening and closing her jaw with a snap, which makes me leave in a hurry. The Beatle reunion thing, by the way, doesn't come off because they're trying their own record company again, and
Ringo
of all people won't sign.

But the Vomits are doing just
boffo
. Under my hand they've already laid out six new tracks. It's by far the best stuff they've ever done, even if it does have a new morbid streak in it that I don't quite get. Everyone else tells me the
boners'll
love it, though, as in the best one so far, "Dead Right":

(You're) dead right,

'Bout the things that you told me 'bout

Last night,

When you came to me shining in the

Moonlight,

Aooooooooo
!
Aooooooooo
!

We had a bit of a fight over that
Aooooooooo
! business, but in the end, after everyone else in the house loved it, including Buddy Holly, who sat in on a couple of tracks, I relented. I'm also high on "Rattle in the Wind,” “Rise," which isn't about an erection like I thought but about some guy popping up out of the ground in Utah, where the boys were when they got turned, and a real good acoustic ballad, "Puff," which Randy says is about the same guy after he got wasted the second time—hit by the Vomits tour bus, in fact, as he lurched across the road:

And the wind caught you

As you went down

And scattered your
bonedust

All over town

(Chorus): Like a cigarette that's had enough

You went . . . puff .

So everything's idyllic. Until, one day, just after we get "Puff' the way I think it should be, Brutus's plaintive strumming, the sad, haunting wail of Randy's voice, the Roger-radar goes off.

With a vengeance. I've just had a bad day to start anyway, Noreen, the bony porker, telling me she can't authorize the release of any demo-tape blanks because there aren't any more, and then she does that jaw-snap thing and adds, not smarmy like usual but with just a tinge of tremor: "You won't be needing them, anyway." For a moment I think,
This is it
, and I expect her to rise from her desk, climb over it like Godzilla, and devour me whole. But instead I see she's packing things away in boxes—in fact everything in the whole
friggin
' place is out of its place and waiting to be packed in boxes.

"What the—" I say, but when I try to move past her to Bobbie's closed door, she blocks my way.

"You can't see him."

So I tramp down to my own office, thinking to call ol' Bobbie on my phone, but when I get there, the place is cleaned out, the walls stripped, the equipment gone.

"Yah!" I scream, looking for someone to hit, but even Cheryl's not there at her desk, and when I approach Noreen again, she gives me an even sterner look, so I back away, stunned.

I stumble downstairs. The party goes on, but there's not the same intensity. In fact, a lot of the rockers have left, leaving behind mostly hangers-on, beach scum, and drifters. Still plenty of coke and booze, and when one of the drifters named Keg holds out a magazine with cut lines on it, I decide it's never too early in the day to start, and snort two lines, one for each nose hole.

"Gonna need it, I expect," Keg says, grinning from his skull out to his burned-out ghost features. But when I ask him what he means, he just rolls his eyes and puts his own nose to the magazine.

It's the same all over the grounds. Out in the parking lot most of the shiny cars are gone. I finally get someone to tell me that the Stones and Buddy Holly and the rest cleared out the night before, in their own cars or in buses supplied by Bobbie
Zick
. When I press for details, the dweeb, a hanger-on named Joe, shrugs and says, showing a ghost of his gap-toothed grin, "Parts unknown, man."

I think of wringing his neck, but leave him behind, a sudden horrible thought entering my head.

Sure enough, the Vomits are gone. I had left them here not four hours ago, work for the night finished, arguing over minor points and drinking Coors. Randy told me to go to my office: "Get some Zs, we'll sack out here for a couple and start fresh tomorrow."