The Devil of Echo Lake (3 page)

When he woke up, the sun was rising behind New York and the pilot was telling them to fasten their seat belts for the descent into JFK.

On the ground, Billy kept the shades on to avoid eye contact and kept walking when anyone called his name or touched his jacket. As a kid, he’d thought rock stars looked cool in sunglasses. As an aspiring musician in his twenties, he’d found them pretentious. Now he knew them for what they really were—privacy. Eye contact was how they trapped you, the leeches who wanted to rub up against your aura of fame and take the residue of glamour back to their mundane lives. It never seemed to cross their minds that you had mundane bullshit to deal with too. Hunger, grief, a moody girlfriend, a dead father, and maybe some of that was on your mind today as you made your way from here to there on your tired feet like everyone else. Didn’t they understand that he had bad days just like they did? If he didn’t want to sign his name every fifty yards on a given day, did it really have to mean that he was actually “an asshole in person?” He fixed his eyes on a far-off point on the concourse ceiling and kept walking.

On the street he flashed a wad of cash at a cab driver and climbed in. By midday he was on the north shore of Long Island winding through tree-canopied suburban streets he hadn’t seen in years. The cab dropped him at number 14 Huckleberry Lane.

The house he had grown up in no longer resembled the one he remembered. His father had been renovating it for as long as Billy could recall. He suspected the man hadn’t even been finished working on it the day he died, but the small transformations it had undergone each year while Billy was away chasing his dream amounted to what looked like a whole new house: a porch where the hedges had been, a bay window where there had been none, new vinyl siding. The old cars had been replaced too and Billy wondered as he walked up the path, if the classic convertible Mustang he had bought the old man when
Eclipse
went platinum was in the garage. The house was still a two-story Cape, but it looked like an impostor sitting among the trees he had climbed before the guitar came into his life.

Then he looked up the cracked cement steps and any feeling he had that this wasn’t home evaporated at the sight of his mother in her nightgown behind the storm door, the reflection of red leaves and cotton clouds overlaid on her ghostly silhouette.

Two

The first leaves were starting to fall when Jake Campbell stepped off the Greyhound bus in Echo Lake, New York. He had started his journey the previous day in Florida with a cup of coffee in one hand and a suitcase in the other. There had been no one to send him off as he boarded the bus in the gunmetal-gray, pre-dawn light. Ally had kissed him good-bye and wished him luck back at their apartment in Winter Park, and she was probably already asleep again by the time he bought his ticket.

As the bus passed through the Carolinas, Jake imagined her cleaning the apartment after the previous night’s party and then maybe going to the library to return the books he’d left with her—the apartment where he no longer lived (unless he fucked this up) and the library where he would no longer be a member. It still felt unreal, things had happened so fast.

By the time the bus reached New York, Jake felt unsettled. He tried to tell himself it was just the fast food and the long hours on the road, but when his sneakers hit the sidewalk of Main Street in Echo Lake and the beauty of the Catskill Mountains spread out before him above the rooftops, he had to admit he was nervous as all hell about his ability to do the job.

Jake pulled his suitcase out of the luggage bay and scanned the street for anyone who looked like studio personnel.
How am I supposed to tell?
He had barely formed the thought when a stocky young man with a shaven head, braided beard, and eyebrow ring nodded at him and extended a hand tattooed with a scorpion on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. Jake shook it, surprised by the gentleness of the grip.

“I’m Brent. Are you Jake?”

“How’d you know?”

Brent shrugged, “You look like a college guy.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t mean anything by it, just nobody else who got off… Come on, car’s this way.”

Brent led him to the rusted remains of a Buick station wagon and scooped a handful of food wrappers, plastic bottles, and dirty socks out of the hatchback to make room for Jake’s suitcase. Another scoop and toss in the front seat cleared a collection of CD jewel cases with fractured covers to make room for Jake’s feet. The car shot out onto Main Street with more speed than Jake expected, the dashboard buzzing to the pulse of System of a Down.

Jake was grateful for the deafening music because it absolved him of the need to make conversation while they passed through town. Hopefully the ride would be long enough to hear some of Brent’s thoughts about the studio, but for now he just wanted to take it all in. He and Ally had looked at the Echo Lake Chamber of Commerce website, but there hadn’t been many photos of the town. Now he had a chance to take quick inventory of what the place had to offer.

It was weird, passing through a small town in a shitbox car doing something just shy of the speed of sound and trying to assess the place as a new home, all to a soundtrack of dark, paranoid heavy metal. There was a Laundromat (essential), supermarket, graveyard, funeral home, Greek restaurant (looked decent), library (big enough for Ally?), never mind—bookstore, head shop, hardware store, ice cream shop, movie theater, and we’re out of town watching the trees and farm stands go by. Jake knew there was more to it than what had just flashed by, but he didn’t know it would be two weeks before he would have another chance to see it by daylight.

In the middle of nowhere, without so much as slowing down, Brent turned the car off the paved road and into a gap in the trees Jake hadn’t even noticed. Clouds of brown dust swirled around the vehicle as it bounced and rocked over potholes, climbing a dirt road through the densely wooded hillside.

“We keep a low profile,” Brent said. “It’s like the fuckin’ Bat Cave.”

Jake glimpsed the occasional barn or cottage through the trees, but when the road became more of a wide, steep trail, he couldn’t help musing that maybe it would end in a desolate backwoods clearing where his driver would rape and murder him. A couple of deer looked up from grazing just long enough to take notice of the lumbering car.

Brent downshifted and forced the tired wagon up a final, steep incline. At the top of the hill, the sky opened up and Jake could see the muted purple peaks of the mountains in the distance again, now forming a regal backdrop for the building in the foreground. Tall and sprawling, it was a marvel of cedar planks that fanned out in spirals from its pyramidal peak down to its multi-tiered deck, a cascading series of high windows reflecting the lush pine forest in fractured segments on all sides. Something about it reminded Jake of a galleon out of a pirate movie.

“Here we are,” Brent said, “Main Building. Eddie’s office, maintenance department and tape library. It’s also Studio A. Studio B is—”

“In the barn, right? And Studio C is in an old church.”

“Yep, you’ve done your homework. C’mon, let’s see if Eddie’s around.”

They found Eddie in Studio A, an enormous concrete room with a vaulted ceiling from which a small fleet of semi-cylindrical wooden sound-reflecting baffles hung on strings, resembling rowboats seen from under water. The walls were draped with tapestries and horse blankets for additional absorption, and the vast wood floor was covered here and there with oriental carpets. Eddie was directing a couple of assistants or runners, who were pushing a grand piano into a corner. He bounced a basketball and shouted directions, the sound of each impact of the ball against the floor telling Jake all about the gorgeous reverberation of the place.

Eddie turned and threw the ball at Jake, who caught it partly with his hands, but mostly with his stomach.

“You Jake?”

“Yeah.”

“Eddie O’Reilley.” He extended a huge hand.

Jake dropped the ball and shook the hand.

“How was your trip?”

“Fine. Took buses all the way from Orlando like Susan said to.”

“We’ll reimburse you for your ticket. Did you get a receipt?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, I’ll show you the control room. You won’t be out here in the tracking room much on this project—it’s a rap session, so it’ll be all about samplers in the control room. There’s a booth over there for vocals, but that’ll probably be the only mic. We’re just clearing the live room so they can use it as a basketball court when they’re not working.”

Jake followed Eddie’s blue flannel shirt and shaggy head of white hair into the control room, where the older man sat down in a mesh-and-leather swivel chair. He sent its twin gliding across the floor to Jake. This time Jake caught with just his hands. He sat down and scanned the room, feeling like the first mate on the
Starship Enterprise
. There was a state-of-the-art SSL mixing console spanning the entire length of the room below a wide double-plate window, through which he could see runners wheeling the basketball hoop into place. The console was flanked on both sides by multi-track tape machines—almost relics in the year 1998, but in the other corner, wearing the blue trunks, was the Pro Tools rig that was about to do a smack-down on the mammoth multi-tracks and send them to the Smithsonian.

Eddie ran his hand through his thick hair and Jake noticed a wedding band. His new boss had bags under his eyes and a friendly, disarming smile.

“So this is the room you’ll be working in for the next… two weeks, I think. You’ll be second engineer to a guy named Rick Delahunt. The producer is Tutenkhamen. Young guy, but he’s hot all of a sudden. The artist is Tokin’ Negro. They get here on Monday, so you have today and tomorrow to get to know the patch bay and set up some of their gear. The only things I’m sure you’ll need a lot of are D.I. boxes and adapter cables. You can borrow some from Studio B, but make sure you check with Brian first. He’s the assistant in there this week. They’re doing some last minute overdubs on a David Bowie project.”

Jake’s eyes must have widened at that.

“Yeah, the Duke. You like his stuff?”

Jake nodded.

“Me too. In fact when I was about your age, I was the assistant on a record he tracked in the city.”

“Cool.”

“We’re going to put you up in one of the cottages we keep for clients here on the grounds. You’ll have a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom while you’re on this project and for a while after it’s done, until you have time to look for an apartment. But no housekeeping, so do your own dishes. If you’re even there long enough to eat. I doubt you’ll see much of the place.”

“That’s fine. How will I get to work? I’m gonna buy a used car, but for now…?”

“A runner will give you rides for now. Any other questions?”

“Not until I look around.”

“Okay, did Susan talk to you about pay?”

“Not yet.”

“Bloody Christ. Why can’t people do their jobs? It starts at seven an hour. We can talk about a raise if it works out.”

Jake nodded. It was what he had expected, but when his father—who had paid for a good chunk of his education—asked about it, he was probably going to present it as an annual figure, pre-tax.

“I know it’s low,” Eddie said, “but if this is what you want to do for a career, it’s about getting experience at this point.”

“I know. That’s pretty much what my teachers said to expect.”

“And you’ll find that the cost of living around here is lower than Orlando. Sure is a
lot
lower than Manhattan. You can get a two bedroom with a fireplace for six-fifty a month.” Eddie smiled and rose from his chair. “Well, I’ll let you get acquainted with the gear.”

*  *  *

Later, on the phone, Ally said, “That’s nice, Jake, a fireplace? That’ll be really useful if you don’t get paid enough to make the heating bill.”

“The heat will never be on because I’ll never be home,” Jake said. “Look, if I started out as a runner, it would take me about a year to even get to this point. They’re kind of taking a chance on me.”

“Who’s your first client?”

“Tokin’ Negro. Just got out of prison.”

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever.”

“And how much are they paying for the studio time?”

“Uh, Studio A is twenty-five hundred per day.”

“Of which you get seven dollars an hour to basically run the room. You’re the cheapest tool they’re renting, sweetie. You deserve more than that.”

“But think of all my classmates who didn’t get a placement, who racked up just as much debt, and now they have to schlep their resumes around L.A.—where I
know
you don’t want to live, and neither do I—just so they can get a chance to make six an hour brewing coffee and emptying the trash.”

“How can studios get away with that? That’s not even minimum wage. Those guys could be making coffee at Starbucks for more than that and they’d be getting tips!”

“Ally, it’s a competitive business. Very competitive.”

“Well, I don’t like it. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe you just don’t like me going away.”

“Yeah.”

“Everybody who succeeds goes through this stage. It’s where you prove that you want it bad enough to pay your dues, and that you’re not going to freak out some rock star who’s in a vulnerable creative state by saying some fan-boy bullshit. It’s where I prove I know what I’m doing and I’m not going to erase the damned tape. Then they’ll pay me more.”

“Okay. I
am
happy for you.”

“I know.”

There was a silence on the line. Jake looked out the back window of the cottage into the dark woods.

“David Bowie’s here for a few days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll
see
him. He’s in Studio B, which is in a barn somewhere. How fucking cool is that?”

“Pretty fucking cool.”

“Will you come up and visit when this project is over? We can go apartment hunting together.”

“Jake, I haven’t decided yet if I’m moving.”