Bound God

Chapter 5: The Rate

The Idol and the Hard Case

"African blackwood," Coin said. "That's what you're holding. Grenadilla, if you want the trade name for it. The cheap ones are plastic, the expensive ones are rosewood, and the ones that cost more than your car are acrylic with a picture of better wood printed on the side. A hundred and eighty years ago a Frenchman rebuilt the keywork so the thing could play in every key instead of three, which is the entire reason you're learning this and not the oboe."

He got four more sentences out of the lecture — mouthpiece, reed, the word embouchure, which he always said like he was apologizing for it — before the kid at the desk started up.

Coin turned his head and did the arithmetic. Four minutes in, Jamie Wade had gone face down on a photocopied stack of scales with one arm off the edge of the desk. It wasn't a light snore. It was a small engine with a bad plug, and it did not care who heard it.

The center sat in a strip mall on the Virginia side, wedged between a dentist and a storefront that had been three different businesses since January. The model was simple: parents who had already paid for the piano and the French tutor and the summer program were not going to quit at clarinet. Jamie's family had paid through August. Coin had taught eleven of these kids. Every one of them had eventually sat up straight.

The listing had gone up June 27 and sat for a week before he called. That should have told him something. Sixty an hour, two afternoons, no qualification past being able to play the instrument — and it had sat there a week, which meant four other people with better sense had read it and kept walking. He'd read it and called. Sixty an hour was three times anything the university had ever paid him for an hour of work, and nobody in his family had ever gotten rich by having better sense.

He stood, put a hand on the back of the rolling chair, and tipped it up off the desk.

"Jamie." He let the chair drop back onto its wheels. "Wake up. Tell me the register characteristics of the instrument I just described."

He hadn't described the registers. That was the trap. He'd spent his four minutes on wood and Frenchmen and one throwaway sentence about the mouthpiece; there was nothing in the lesson to answer with, and that was the point of it. Whatever came out of the kid next was going to be stupid, and the first stupid thing a seventeen-year-old says is usually the only true thing you get all afternoon.

The eyelids came up. Underneath, the whites were somewhere between pink and red, and there was a gray under both eyes that a face that young had no business making.

"Jamie."

"High register's bright, wide open, carries over anything." It came up off the desk flat, with no hesitation anywhere in it. "Middle's the one that sounds like a person. Clean. That's where it sings. Low end's dark and it's fat and it holds up under the whole band. Four octaves if you're not going to be a jerk about it, and it sits close enough to a voice that you can put it wherever you want."

He put his forehead back down on the scales, and the rest of it came up through the paper without the rest of him.

"Perfesser. I did ranked till it got light out, and then I had three hours of Umbridge this morning. I'm dead. Let me sleep, you still get paid."

Coin stood there with the clarinet hanging off his hand and took it in the wrong order. He heard himself do it, and did it anyway.

Who grinds ranked till it gets light out.

He put that one down. How did he know the registers.

He said it a second time inside his own head, because it kept coming out backwards. Coin had said blackwood. Coin had said Frenchmen and keys. He had never once said the word octave, and the kid had just handed the entire instrument back to him flat and exact, as if he were reading it off a label.

Then there was the other word, which had arrived in the first minute and was going to stay, because that is what that kind of word does. Coin could already hear it coming out of his own mouth. Perfesser. This was a kid who paid more per month for the chair he was asleep on than Coin paid in rent. And there was an offer in that, if he wanted one. The kid would sleep, Coin would sit with the clarinet in his lap, and at the end of the hour the woman at the desk would hand him an envelope that did not care how the hour got spent. He got as far as running the week on it before he looked up at the door.

Nobody had knocked. Coin would have heard a knock.

Sebastian Wade was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and the hall light on his shoulders, and Coin could not have said how long he'd been there.

Coin's mouth was already open. "Boss."

"I'm here for him." Wade pointed with one finger, without looking at what he was pointing at.

Coin closed his mouth and opened it again. "Huh?"

It wasn't a face he made often. Wade looked at it a beat longer than the mistake was worth, and then he came off the doorframe and crossed the room and took Jamie up by the collar with one hand and shook him twice, the way you shake a bag to find out whether there's anything in it.

Coin ran the options. There was a version of this where he stood up and pried the man's hand off the kid, and that version was in a movie. He stayed where he was and told himself he'd read the room. He had read the room. Reading a room is not doing anything in one, and he closed that deal with himself in under two seconds, which made it the cleanest trade he'd made all afternoon.

"Who's — hey. Hey!" Arms and legs arrived late. "Who the hell touches a sleeping —"

He got his eyes open properly, and the rest of it left him at once, along with most of the color in his face.

"What are you doing here?"

"The Queen Mother wants you home."

Wade said it evenly, with nothing under it, and dropped him back into the chair. Jamie landed with both hands out and stayed down.

Coin didn't have a file on the Queen Mother yet. He watched the kid's hands come up and started one.

"No, no, no — Perfesser. Perfesser, I'm sorry about before, I'm on a schedule, we're in the middle of a lesson — tell my cousin, tell him, I've got work to do —"

And then Jamie Wade, who had been his student for fourteen minutes, four of them awake, did the one thing that made Coin's afternoon worse: he got both arms around Coin's forearm and held on.

"You taking him home, boss?" Coin said, over the top of the kid's head, in the direction of the man who signed off on his hours.

"Do you have a problem with that."

It wasn't a question. The last word came up at the end of it the way a note bends upward under a finger.

"No. Nope. Nothing." He got his arm loose. "That's — family. Family's family." Wade didn't say anything to that, so Coin filled the space, because that was what he did with this man. "Long one yesterday, though, huh? That's a lot of night for one guy." Nothing. "I'll go sign him out at the desk. You do what you came here to do. I'll be at the desk."

Jamie looked at him like he'd been sold out. Which he had. It took eleven seconds, and Coin kept his face still for every one of them.

Wade's shirt buttons lay in a line, flat, doing what they were told. Nothing else on him moved: no watch, no ring, no phone, nothing in his hands, nothing at all like the row of silver Vance's grandson had been wearing in his ear at lunch. The man spent his days in front of machines and came out of them looking like he'd never touched one. Coin had noticed that his first week and had never once asked him about it, which was its own kind of answer.

Wade was looking at him. Not at the kid, not at the door. At him, for a beat longer than the errand needed, the way a man looks at a tool he's thinking about buying.

Coin filed it under being measured for the next thing. That was the usual reason.

"Are you coming in tonight?"

Behind Coin's arm, Jamie's ears went up like a dog's. Coin tapped him on the head with the clarinet, not hard, and answered.

"Tonight's not great. Paper's due in the morning."

"If you get it done," Wade said, "or you finish whatever else you've got going that you'd rather not describe in front of a kid, come by. Barring something unexpected, I'll be there until four."

Four in the morning.

Coin had three jobs. One of them had a title and a parking lot. One of them was three nights a week behind a bar with a tray in his hand, and he described that one to people in a voice that made it sound like a joke, which it mostly was. The third one didn't have a name he was willing to say out loud.

Whatever else you've got going.

It could have been the bar. It could have been the other thing. It could have been nothing at all — a man saying words in a hallway, because words are free.

He got as far as the edges of that and stopped, which was the only smart thing he'd done all afternoon.

"I'll think about it."

"Great," Jamie said, from the chair, in a voice he'd scraped clean. "You guys done?"

"Jamie." Wade didn't raise his voice. "You're in the car in sixty seconds or the Queen Mother has your head."

"The Queen Mother has been menopausal since before I was born and it hasn't slowed her down once." Jamie got up so fast the chair spun, and went, and was audible the length of the hall.

Wade stood in the door with his hands in his pockets and turned back halfway, the way a man turns when he's already decided the conversation is over and the room hasn't caught up.

"If you decide to stay," he said, "I think we can talk about the rate."

Coin spent the pause in front of that looking at the clock over the desk, because the clock was the only thing in the room that wasn't Wade. Then the doorway was empty.

The rate. He'd put the idea of leaving on the table once, in the vaguest words he could find, and Wade had told him to think about it for a while, and that was the closest thing to an offer anybody had made him in two years.

He was doing the math before he'd decided to. He was doing it while the man's steps went down the hall. He had the clarinet in his hand and the room to himself and no memory of the last thing he'd said out loud, and the number came out the same every way he ran it.

He signed James Wade out at the desk, where the form asked for a time, and wrote down 2:19 and printed his name under it.

He ran it again in the lot. He ran it again at the light. It was still running at eight o'clock, when he was due behind a bar with two phone calls he hadn't made.