Cavedweller Read Online Free Page B

into one of the limos sent around by record companies hoping to sign her to sing on her own. She didn’t like the parties anymore, and she’d never enjoyed talking business. Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.
    Once they moved to Venice Beach, Delia tried to behave as if it were just another small town too, a place like Cayro. It did not matter that behind her house loomed thousands of others, postage-stamp boxes layered across Los Angeles County up from Santa Monica or south to Long Beach and all the little suburbs that trailed down to San Diego. Delia rarely went outside her neighborhood, and as long as she stayed off the highways, she could pretend they were cut off from the world. When she took Cissy over to Randall’s place in West Hollywood or went to the studio annex in Santa Monica, the sight of greater Los Angeles stunned her. The glass structures along Wilshire, the grotesque mansions in Beverly Hills, the interlaced freeways that Randall prowled, none of that was Delia’s world. Her world was the cottage and its tiny garden, the convenience store a few blocks west, and Cissy’s school two blocks past that, with the occasional trip down to Rosemary’s in Marina Del Rey.
    “It’s strange. Every time I take a drink, I go back in time,” Delia told Rosemary not long after she left Randall. “I imagine I am back on the bus, going nowhere in particular, just cruising with the band.”
    “Uh-huh.” Rosemary blew smoke out her nose. “Cruising back to the toilet to puke your guts out and curse Randall with every heave of your stomach? I remember you pregnant and sick as a dog. I remember those bus trips.”
    Delia pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and shrugged. “In my imagination,” she said, “it’s always 1971 and we are all young and happy. It’s like a dream, a good dream.”
    Rosemary shook her head. “Nothing like the dream life, huh?”
    Delia was the only member of Mud Dog who had loved the road. While everyone else grew pale and exhausted, she blossomed, catching naps during the day and sleeping easily backstage. She drank a lot but ate little, mostly fruit and rice, and avoided the pills and powders that kept half the band wired and sleepless and sick as dogs. In the midst of the tour chaos, Delia was serene. She would drift up the middle of the overloaded bus with a smile and a bottle in her hand, trailing her long fingers over the greasy Formica storage cabinets as if they were flowers and sweet-smelling vines. Sometimes she just stood there, steadying herself with one hand, eyes almost closed. To her it seemed like dancing, balancing there while the bus swayed and rolled along. She would laugh at the thought of herself almost motionless yet hurtling forward.
    What Delia did not love were the motels and the parties, the obsequious roadies dealing drugs behind the luggage vans, the hysterical fans who pounced on her before she could get away. There were always people coming up on her from behind, wanting to talk or to touch her, following her every move so closely she would start to shy away even from Randall or Rosemary or Booger, or Little Jimmy the drummer with his shy nudge. Her skin seemed to wear thin, to the point where she hesitated sometimes before following the band out onstage. After a while the road wore you down until you lost the satisfaction of the music everyone came to hear, and Delia knew that the only thing she loved without reservation was the music’ in her head.. The road itself, the two-lane blacktop and the six-lane freeways, the truck stops where the only things you could be sure of were the eggs and the bottled beer, that was not something you loved. The road was something that took you over unawares—the unexpected poetry of road signs and the reassuring glint of reflective markers counting off miles, the backbeat of the wheels whooshing along the asphalt and the song it