“I’m not giving you three dollars.”
Inside, the heads of taller concertgoers were silhouetted by stage lights. Seated in a half circle, with dreadnought guitars, behind cantilevered mics, were the Isner brothers and a statuesque girl, Amy Jenner, whose hair was longer than her torso. Clem remembered Amy well. Two years ago, in a Crossroads exercise, she’d given him a note that said You’re sexy. The assertion was so absurd that he’d taken it to be a joke, but seeing Amy now, having learned from Sharon what the world was made of, he understood it differently. The prettiness of Amy’s voice, as she sang of hating to see her lover go, salted the wound he’d inflicted on himself in Sharon’s bedroom.
On the bus to Chicago, he and the baby behind him had finally slept, but it hadn’t been worth the cost of waking up. Returning to his consciousness of the actions he’d taken, to his aloneness with the knowledge of them, was like the reverse of awakening from a bad dream. After a brutal portage to the train station, he’d caught the 7:25 to New Prospect, where a good Samaritan had offered him a ride. He’d dropped his bags at the parsonage and charged back out into the snow, lashing himself forward. He was determined not to sleep until he could wake up knowing he wasn’t alone.
He moved into the crowd, looking for Becky, but the concert was also a reunion. He was immediately pounced upon by a mature edition of Kelly Woehlke, a girl he’d grown up with at First Reformed. They’d never been friends, and on any other night the hug she gave him might have seemed unwarranted. Tonight the touch of a warm body nearly made him cry. His few real Crossroads friends were too anti-sentimental to bother with a reunion, but other alumni were crowding around him, and despite how peripheral he’d felt in the fellowship, how unwowed by the trust-building exercises and the rhetoric of personal growth, he received their hugs gratefully, as if they were the condolences of family. He wondered what Sharon would make of all the hugging. Then he wished he hadn’t wondered, because every specific thought of Sharon, no matter how innocuous, triggered another wave of guilt and hurt.
By the time he’d circled through the crowd, not finding Becky, the Isner brothers and Amy Jenner were rousingly singing of what they would do with a hammer at various times of day. Clem’s energy was spent, and the loudness of the scene had become somewhat hellish. He’d run aground by the stage, stalled out in front of a stack of speakers, when his friend John Goya’s little brother Davy approached him. Not only was Davy no longer little, he looked strangely middle-aged. “Are you looking for Becky?” he shouted.
“Yeah, is she here?”
“I’m worried about her. Did she go home?”
“No,” Clem shouted. “I just came from home.”
Davy frowned.
“Did something happen?” Clem shouted.
The singing mercifully stopped, leaving only a low hum in the speakers.
“I don’t know,” Davy said. “She’s probably just lying down somewhere.”
Into Clem’s ear came the amplified mellifluence of Toby Isner, the elder of the two musical brothers. “Thank you, all. Thank you. I’m afraid we only have time for one more song.”
Toby paused for expressions of disappointment, and someone in the audience politely moaned. Toby had an unctuous sensitive-guy sincerity, a self-pleasuring way of smiling when he sang, that never failed to make Clem’s skin crawl. Now he’d grown a dark beard of biblical dimensions.
“You know,” Toby said, “I love that we’re all gathered here tonight, so many amazing people, so many wonderful friends, so much love, so much laughter. But I want to get serious for a minute. Can we do that? I want us all to remember there’s still a war going on. Right now, right this minute, it’s morning in Vietnam. People are still getting slaughtered, and, man, we gotta put a stop to that. Stop that war. We need America out of Vietnam right now. You dig me?”
Toby was such a preening asshole that Clem almost pitied him. And yet quite a few people were clapping and whooping. Toby, encouraged, shouted, “I want to hear it from you, people! All together now! What do we want?”
He cupped his ear with his hand, and a smattering of voices, mostly female, obliged him. “We want peace!”
“Louder, man! What do we want?”
“We want peace!”
“What do we want?”
“WE WANT PEACE!”
“When do we want it?”
“RIGHT NOW!”
“We want peace!”