Moonlight Water Read Online Free Page A

Someday, maybe, he’d want to write music again. And what about the years of sketch pads stacked in his office, fewer filled as time had passed? He took one that had only a few drawings in it and shoved a Rapidograph pen in his pocket, fine point. Black ink.
    Back at the cabin he lounged through the evening, thoughts drifting by, big and small. He decided to quit drinking for a while. The next day he mostly walked the beach. Thoughts came to him like driftwood, the same way his music came. On the second day he discovered that mixing a little jazzy movement in his steps across the sand fertilized his imagination and fed his body. Nothing like the athletic moves he made with the band, but it didn’t matter why dancing helped—you don’t take a cardiogram of the heart and soul of music, art, or dance. A sign above his desk back in the old house quoted Nietzsche, something like, “Those who can’t hear the music think the dancers are crazy.” True.
    So he walked and napped and remembered and dreamed, and every once in a while he pulled out his pen and sketch pad. Didn’t flow like it used to, but it pleased him. Letting his hand do the drawing, he tossed around what had gone right and wrong for twenty years, and the many times he had been sound asleep during his waking life.
    Gianni. How clueless and how wonderful we were.
    Robbie threw himself into a deck chair and ticked back over their friendship—right now it was an anchor. They’d enlisted, met in the army, one city kid and one country kid, working-class young men, gung ho to help their country in the first Gulf War. By the time they finished basic training, the war was over, and the army assigned them to duty on Okinawa. Turned out the Okinawan occupation was the embodiment of the Japanese government’s pretense at complying with the World War II treaty granting America a military presence in Japan—the island was nowhere near the real Japan. They spent their enlistments doing drills, and all they learned, really, was bar fighting.
    Except one other thing—they played a lot of music. Robbie scrounged up a guitar and a harmonica and created nice backups for Gianni’s lyric tenor—he had a fine voice and an encyclopedic memory for lyrics. They got back to the States ravenous to become big-deal musicians.
    They put together several Bay Area bands. They tried everything they thought might sell, and some of the music sounded pretty good. But Robbie wasn’t comfortable. He started writing songs for his own big voice and acoustic guitar. He drove up the coast highway to Tomales and sat with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, wanting to learn folk, but that didn’t work for Robbie, either.
    Then the Elegant Demons came into his life. When the lead guitarist and keyboard player of the Demons got sick before a concert, Robbie sat in for him. The gig was simple—play in Golden Gate Park on a midsummer Sunday afternoon and do old Grateful Dead songs, nothing else, just covers of the Dead.
    They only had two days to rehearse, and what they got into surprised them all. The Dead, known for its long jams, hooked into a current and explored it, exploited it. The crowds rode the wave. A Dead concert was a journey into far-flung musical galaxies.
    Robbie and Kell had that kind of rapport from the first chord. The Dead songs were great, but they wanted to try their own stuff. During rehearsal, their lyrical tunes turned into dervishes. They took phrases from each other, transformed them, and shaped them into new verses and choruses.
    Kell was a special performer, slender and pretty, a gravelly tenor who reminded people of a male Janis Joplin in the rawness and pathos of his expression. Onstage he was pure emotion, and a perfect partner. At the end of the last rehearsal, he said to Robbie, “We’re in the center of it!”
    In person Kell was entirely different. He had almost nothing to say to anyone, just packed up his