Chapter 56 Dante
The VIP pass that closed my deal put me twenty feet from the stage, dead center, close enough to watch the sweat roll down Levi’s face.
I spot Caroline and Allison off to my left. Allison waves at me, and I wave back. They’re happy and no longer mine to worry about. That was the arrangement.
Now I’m standing in a pit full of people who paid to watch Lee Streeter. He works the crowd as the talented professional he is. The grin, the easy patter between songs, the mic tipped to the crowd on the line they all came to sing. The crowd is getting exactly what they paid for.
The storms threatening all day have arrived. The dark wall off the Gulf I spotted this morning is overhead. The first fat drops hit warm on the back of my neck. The crowd doesn’t care yet. A little rain at a country show is a welcome relief from the heat.
Levi is a few songs in when I see it. I spot the exact instant Lee Streeter stops being driven from the inside. The grin stays put with nothing behind it. His hand lifts off the strings between one bar and the next and doesn’t come back. His eyes go somewhere else. The song dies mid-word.
The band runs on ahead of him, the drummer covering, the bass player turning to look. At the center of the stage, he stands silent, staring straight ahead.
I’m already moving.
I don’t know what it is. I only know something bad is happening to him and I need to get there.
Could be the heat. His head. His heart.
I run the list while I shove toward the rail. None of it fits. It doesn’t matter. He’s losing it in front of the world, and I’m stuck behind a barricade and a wall of his fans.
Then the sky opens up.
A lightning bolt comes down close enough to whiten the whole field. The thunder is right on top of it, no time between, a crack I feel in the soles of my feet. The PA kills the music dead. A voice trained for this scenario comes over the top.
Ladies and gentlemen, due to weather in the area, we are pausing the show. Please move calmly toward the exits and your vehicles.
The crowd turns at once, and the rain comes down in buckets.
It’s the best thing that could have happened, and the worst.
Best, because now everybody is moving, and a man shoving against the current is no longer the only thing moving in the dark. Worst, because thousands of them stand between me and him.
The rain comes straight down in a sheet that kills the stage lights to a smear. The ground is already turning slippery.
They’ve got Levi now. I can barely see it through the strobing dark. There are hands on him, the crew taking him off the back of the stage toward the trailers.
I turn back around and go toward him. Sideways through a crowd that wants to carry me the other way, shoulder down, both hands up to keep from putting an elbow through someone.
A man falls down in front of me and I haul him up by the jacket without stopping. The rain is in my eyes. The VIP rope at the stage has gone slack from being trampled. A security kid in a soaked polo is trying to hold a line that no longer exists.
“Sir, sir, you need to evacuate, go that way—”
“I’m with the production.” I flash him the laminate on the lanyard. I don’t slow down enough for him to read any of it. “Artist services. They need me at the trailer.”
He’s nineteen, there’s lightning, and he’s got bigger problems than me.
He lets me past the barricade. I stop running to keep from drawing suspicion.
I walk fast past a golf cart loaded with cases.
Two cops in ponchos. A group of guys on the crew wrestling a road box out of the wet.
None of them is looking at me. All of them have a storm to manage.
The trailers are lined up behind a chain-link run somebody propped open to get equipment through. There’s a group gathered at the third one. Handlers, a medic, a young woman with her phone in one hand and her hair plastered flat, doing crisis at the top of her lungs.
“—no, Lee’s not talking to anyone, get me the bus, where is the bus—” She sees me and stops talking to whoever is on the phone. “You. You’re the— the realtor, the video guy—”
“Where is he?”
“He won’t— he’s not—” She’s young, and out of her depth. She goes back to the phone conversation. “We can’t get him in the bus, he won’t move, he’s—”
“Let me. I can help.” I’ve already moved past her.
Levi’s right inside the trailer door, on the floor. Back to the wall, knees up, the hat gone, the pearl snaps dark with rain or sweat.
His eyes are open, fixed on nothing in the room. His breath comes in little sips at the top of his chest, none of it getting down to where breath goes. His hands are flat against the floor like he’s holding the world down by sheer will.
A handler reaches for his arm, and Levi flinches off the wall hard enough to crack his shoulder against it. The handler backs off. I kneel down on the floor beside him where he can see me.
“Hey.” I don’t dare touch him yet. “It’s Dante.”
Nothing.
Only little sips of air, his eyes wide.
“Levi.” The word I’m allowed to use that no one else here can. “Levi. It’s me. I’m right here. You don’t have to do anything. Just look at me. Look in my eyes.”
The name catches. He isn’t back yet, not fully, but his eyes drag off the middle distance and find my face. They hold. For one second there’s a person behind them again, reaching. His mouth opens. What comes out is barely words.
“Can’t— the air— there’s no—”
“I know.” I don’t. I have no idea how terrible it must feel. But I know the next thing to do. “Air. We’re going to go get you some. Right now. Can you stand if I’m under you? I need to get you out of here. You can get more air outside.”
He can’t answer. He gets a fistful of my soaked shirt, and that’s answer enough.
He can’t carry his own weight and won’t let anyone else touch him, so I grab him up close. An arm around his back, my shoulder under his.
We look like two friends caught in the rain, and in a storm full of evacuees that’s the most invisible thing there is. I half-drag him out of the trailer and down the three steps.
“Where are you taking him?” the young woman asks me when we move past her. “The protocol is to get him to the bus. I can’t let you leave.”
“He’s leaving.” I cut her off. “He needs out of the crowd and the noise, away from the lightning. I’m a private vehicle, no press, gone in ninety seconds. You can tell that to whoever’s on that phone.” I don’t wait for her to agree. “Tell them artist services handled it.”
She lets us go. The truth is the storm already decided it. The crew’s attention is on the disaster caused by the thunderstorm. The equipment, crowd control, soaked customers. One man walking the headliner out into the rain is the least of their worries.
The white SUV is where I left it in the VIP parking lot.
I pour him into the passenger seat, pull the strap across him, ease his head back.
I drop both front windows six inches before I even start the engine.
He asked me for air, and air is the one term I can deliver on tonight.
The rain comes in. He doesn’t flinch from it.
He turns his face toward the gap, into the wet.
I drive him out of there. Along the back service road, past the cops waving the lot empty, onto the highway. The wipers are losing the fight, the lightning going behind us. He’s dead silent beside me.
“Levi, are you still with me?” I reach over and squeeze his hand. “Hang on, baby. I’ll get you out of here.”
He nods once. His breath comes down by degrees from the top of his chest to somewhere nearer normal. His hand stays pressed flat to the door, same as the trailer floor, holding still whatever only he can feel moving.
I keep my voice calm. “We’re almost there. I’ll keep the windows down.”
I don’t ask him a single question. There are so many I want to ask.
What was that? What happened to you? Where did you go?
Not one of them is mine to ask yet. Asking would be for me, not for him.
I’m scared. I finally admit it to myself. I’m terrified for him.
I’ve seen Levi in a bad way more than once. I’ve never seen him absent from his own body.
The apartment is unlit when we get there. I get him up the metal stairs, inside, onto the couch. Once he’s settled, I open the balcony door all the way, then go through the apartment, pressing every door flat against the walls.
The storm is moving off north, the thunder stretching longer between the flashes. The count is getting longer.
He’s slowly coming back to me. I can see it. His breath reaches bottom again, the eyes are mine again, the hands let go of whatever they were bracing.
Then, before anything else, I get the wet clothes off of him. I stand him up in the bathroom and work the soaked pearl snaps loose one at a time, peel the ruined stage clothes off him and hang them over the shower rod to drip.
He stands for it like a worn-out kid, swaying a little, letting me move his arms where I need them.
I put him in my own t-shirt and sweats, tie the drawstring myself because his hands are done for the night, and change out of my own soaked things.
He doesn’t say one word through any of it. Neither do I.
I put him back on the couch.
He looks up at me and I understand without a word that he’s about to tell me the answer I was afraid to ask for.
I sit down beside him, and pull him over where his head is in my lap.
I thread my fingers through his hair, squeeze my eyes tight, and wait for whatever’s coming.