Captive Audience. Dave Reidy
and walked a mile and a half in the South Arkansas heat to the music store near the community college, carrying all of his graduation and lawn-mowing money—150 dollars—in the right hip pocket of his shorts.
When Kyle pushed open the store’s front door, rusted bells rang above him and a sweet-and-sour combination of resin and cigarette smoke filled his nose. An older man sat on a stool behind the glass case that served as the store’s counter. He smoked a cigarette. On the pegboard walls to his left and right and behind him, dozens of guitars hung vertically from rubber-coated brackets.
“I’d like to get a guitar,” Kyle said to the older man.
“OK,” the man said. He did not get up from the stool.
“What kind of guitar should I get?” Kyle asked.
“That depends. How much money do you have to spend?”
“A hundred and fifty.”
The man extinguished his cigarette and slid gingerly from the stool. He sidestepped out from behind the glass case and walked toward the wall to his right. Kyle eyed the guitars in the man’s path. Would he pull down the black one with the mother-of-pearl inlays? Or the one with the Mexican drawings on the front? Near the front door, the man reached up for a standard spruce-top model and lifted it gently from its bracket. He held the guitar’s body to his chin, closed one eye, and looked down the neck as if checking a rifle sight. Then he handed the guitar to Kyle, who leaned away a little when he took the instrument, afraid that he might hit himself in the mouth with it somehow.
“What kind is it?” Kyle asked.
“A Dean.”
On the Internet, Kyle had been reading about Gibsons and Martins and Taylors. “Are Deans good?”
“They’re good for the money,” the man said. “This model’s worth two-fifty, but it’s on sale for one-thirty-five. That sale price means no returns, so you’ll have to be sure you want it.”
Kyle looked the instrument over, turning it awkwardly and feeling its weight in his hands. “I want it.”
“You sure?” the man said.
Kyle nodded. He handed the guitar to the man, pulled a wad of bills from his shorts, and set it on the counter.
After giving Kyle his change and a receipt, the man sat down on his stool and tuned the guitar one string at a time. Then he began making shapes on the fingerboard with his left hand and strumming them into sound with his right thumb. Kyle wanted to be able to make one of those shapes, but the man didn’t hold any one of them long enough for Kyle to memorize it.
“You know any chords?” the man asked.
Kyle wasn’t sure what a chord was. He shook his head.
“You want to be a rocker?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll teach you a good rock chord. Once you know this one you can play a half-dozen others.” The man flattened his left index finger against all six strings at the first fret, then placed the callused tip of his middle finger on a string at the second fret and his ring and pinky fingertips on separate strings at the third. Then he ran his thumb down the strings over the sound hole.
“Which chord is that?”
“F,” the man said.
Kyle liked the sound of F.
“You try.” The man stood up and offered the guitar to Kyle. When Kyle had the guitar body secured between his elbow and his side, the man pulled Kyle’s left index finger straight and mashed it against the strings at the first fret. Then he placed three of Kyle’s fingertips on the strings, digging the phosphor bronze into the soft pink skin. Kyle began strumming while the man’s fingers were still on his.
“Hold on a minute, now,” the man said. Then he took two steps back. “Now try.”
Kyle pulled his thumb down over the strings. His F didn’t sound like the man’s. He felt the fourth string vibrating beneath the tip of his pinky and pressed it harder, but the center knuckle buckled and muted several strings, so he stopped.
“There you go,” the man said.
The man threw in a black chipboard case for free, so Kyle walked out of the store with a guitar, a case, ten white plastic picks and four dollars. As he carried home his soon-to-be-thing, Kyle bounced on the balls of his feet just a little and clenched his jaw to keep himself from smiling.
Until that summer, Kyle had thought that Starlee didn’t have any friends. But since July, two guys who looked a little older than her and a lot older than Kyle had been pulling up in front of Starlee’s house every day around lunchtime in an older-model Camaro. Starlee would let them in and almost immediately turn up her music—all fuzz and feedback and whiny singing, not the dance music she’d listened to in junior high. Kyle could hear it clearly through the open double-hung window in his parents’ room, where he whiled away summer days on his father’s computer. The guys were always gone before Starlee’s mother got home from work. When they left, the music would stop, and Kyle could hear the crows cawing in the tall pines down the block.
The day after getting the guitar, Kyle spent the afternoon on the edge of his parents’ bed strumming F chord after F chord. Most sounded better than the one he’d played in the store, though none rang as clearly as the one the man had played. When the fingertips of his left hand began to burn, Kyle would blow on them and examine the dents he’d pressed into them with the strings. Starlee’s music blared out her open windows, but it registered with Kyle as white noise, like a box fan or a dryer running. All he heard was the F chord the man had played at the store. When the burning had subsided, Kyle would lay his index finger over the first fret, fit the strings back into the grooves in his fingertips, and try again to make the sound he heard in his head.
Around four, the rumble of the Camaro accelerating down the block swamped Kyle’s F chords. As the rumble faded, Starlee’s music cut off abruptly. Through his parents’ bedroom window, Kyle saw Starlee step onto her back step and light up a cigarette. An oversized white t-shirt nearly concealed her short red nylon shorts. Both the base and the tips of her ponytail were gathered high on the back of her head with a single rubber band.
Kyle could only play one chord—hardly enough to have made the guitar his thing—but he felt quite a bit different than he had just a few days ago. He wondered if anyone else could see the change in him. He wondered if Starlee could see it.
He laid the guitar down gently on his parents’ bed and scampered down the hall, stopping to gather himself before opening the screen door. Then he stepped out onto the rotting wood porch, hopped down from the top step, and walked with his hands in his pockets to the fence that divided the fifteen feet of gravel, dirt, and patchy crabgrass between his house and Starlee’s. Starlee blew smoke up and away, as if aiming for the tall pines. Her screen door was closed, but the thick white door behind it was open.
“Hey, Starlee.”
She finished exhaling her smoke and glanced at him. “Hey, Kyle.”
The up-and-down lilt that Kyle remembered in Starlee’s voice had flattened out. What remained of it sounded like an accident of muscle memory, or a put-on.
“How you been?” Kyle asked.
“All right,” she said.
“Good.” Kyle tried to keep his eyes off of Starlee’s long legs and was almost grateful that her t-shirt shrouded the rest of her shape. For her part, Starlee seemed to be staring into the thick mess of vines and scrub trees that made the back boundary of her mother’s lot all but impassable. He and Starlee hadn’t had a conversation this long in years, so Kyle didn’t waste any more time on small talk. “What kind of music do you listen to?” he asked.
She shrugged. “All kinds of stuff.”
“What kind of music were you listening to today?”
Starlee glanced at