Rock On (41 page)

Which he was, more or less.

No one stared at him in Gatwick Airport. He didn’t care to try his luck in the streets of London, a city he’d last seen in 1975, the psychedelic sparkle of Carnaby Street morphing into the black-lipped punk snarl of King’s Road. Though he’d had his hair cut short and neat, though a Gabonese diet had left him far thinner than he’d ever been in his performing days, someone in London would surely recognize him. Possibly even someone he’d slept with. Cobb couldn’t imagine anything much worse than that, so he bought a copy of
Rolling Stone
with Matty’s face on the cover and sat down to wait for the plane to America.

He had to fly into Atlanta, go through Customs again (they searched his bag this time, cursorily, but there was nothing to find), then endure a two-hour layover before the flight to Asheville, North Carolina. Cobb didn’t think he’d ever been in North Carolina before, and by this time he didn’t care. He planned to find a hotel room, sleep for at least a couple of days, then rent a car and check out Matty’s alleged secret hideaway, which looked on the map to be a couple hours’ drive from Asheville.

When he saw the heavyset man at the Asheville airport holding the sign that said
William Van Duyk,
he should have just kept walking. Instead the old Terry Cobb took over, the Rockstar Asshole, and he looked down his nose and snapped, “Who the fuck sent you?”

The man held up one hand in a placating gesture. He had a thick moustache and a widow’s peak, and his suit was the opposite of Cobb’s, cheap but well-pressed. “Sir, I work for a driving service, I was hired to meet your flight—”

“How’d you know when I was coming in?”

The driver grinned. “Not that many planes coming into Asheville. We’ve had a standing order to meet any flight with a William Van Duyk on the roster.”

He’s just a stupid hick, Cobb thought. So Matty had hired a limo. That shouldn’t surprise him. Matty hadn’t minded spending money when he was alive; why should he mind now?

When Matty was officially alive, Cobb corrected himself. He knew quite a lot about the difference, and it was this knowledge that made him deeply suspicious of the circumstances at hand.

It had happened in 1985, after the Kydds’ acrimonious breakup and the flop of his own solo career. The solo failure had bothered him for a long time, because he thought they were good records—but he’d gone back to his roots, old rock and blues, and that had been a mistake. Cobb blamed it on the endlessly layered, flowery, overproduced sound that was so popular in the seventies, a sound that the Kydds in their later days had helped create, a sound that dominated Matty’s successful solo efforts. Nobody wanted to hear Terry Cobb cover “Crawling Kingsnake.” It was the timing, that was all. Only when he was very drunk or very depressed did he consider the possibility that his edge wasn’t as sharp without Matty’s melodic genius to back it up.

So he fucked around in New York for a while, just doing drugs and being famous. By that time, cocaine had arrived in a big way, and his flirtations with it made him paranoid. He converted more and more of his assets into cash, gold, and even diamonds without quite knowing why.

On the ninth of December, 1985, Cobb had a reservation on a flight from New York to Amsterdam. Possibly due to the aftereffects of the speedball he had snorted the night before, he overslept and missed his plane. It wasn’t a big problem; he’d only been going for the good hash. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

Hours later, the clock radio woke him. A Kydds tune, one of his. Cobb almost reached over to turn it off, couldn’t muster the energy, and lay in his darkened bedroom listening. The news came on. Three hundred miles out of New York, the plane he’d missed had fallen into the Atlantic. And apparently everyone thought he had been on it.

A search was launched, of course. But the plane had exploded in midair, then plunged into some of the deepest water between the U.S. and Europe. The ocean was black, frigid, and shark-infested, and the diving crew only found about half of the bodies. Terry Cobb’s was not among them despite the crew’s extra efforts (they were all Kydds fans, they told the press, causing a minor uproar among the families of the other victims).

Which is it better to be?
Cobb asked himself that night, over and over.
A washed-up rock star, or a dead one?

The answer was always the same.

When the phone began to ring, he unplugged it.

He didn’t make his escape right away. There were important things to be procured, documents that would allow him to travel as somebody else, anonymously, very far away. He took everything he needed to a hotel in Times Square and hid there by day, slipped out by night and gradually, expensively, got what he needed. He opened a vast New York bank account in his new name, acquired credit cards, and said fuck the apartment, the investments, the royalties; let them go to Matty and the other two and whoever else was still making a profit off the Kydds.

Near the end of January 1986, a man with a U.S. passport in the name of William Van Duyk boarded a flight to Bangkok. Cobb spent the next several years wandering through Thailand, Bali, India, Turkey, and Morocco before fetching up in Gabon. There inertia took him, and he stayed.

But he’d been bored for quite a while now. And the night he’d seen the TV report of Matty’s death, he realized that he missed Matty more than he’d ever let on to himself. They had been essentially married to each other for a decade, after all, without the sex but with all the joys and sorrows, the shared jokes and secrets, like it or not. If Matty was really dead, Cobb wanted to see what his partner had left him, and why.

If Matty wasn’t dead . . . well, Cobb didn’t know what would happen then. Matty had known he was alive all these years, had even known where he was, and hadn’t made a single overture.

Cobb pressed his forehead against the window of the limo. He could imagine Matty speaking to him, could hear the words clearly. I came back to you plenty of times, it said.
Too many times. If you wanted to be dead, I wasn’t going to argue . . . and you always knew where I was, too.

That was true. He’d never forgotten the address or phone number of Matty’s New York apartment, had contemplated sending a cryptic postcard or making a transatlantic phone call on any number of lonely, drunken nights. But he hadn’t known of any secret hideaway in North Carolina.

He opened his eyes and looked out the window. They were driving through mountains, great green humpbacks shrouded with mist. He glimpsed wildflower meadows, waterfalls, mysterious little overgrown paths. The area was beautiful, he supposed. Unlike Cobb, who always wanted to see the squalor of a place, Matty appreciated natural beauty.

Cobb frowned. The
Rolling Stone
tribute said Matty had shot himself in the head—in the mouth. He’d had to be identified by fingerprints. Matty appreciated all natural beauty, yes, but none more than his own. He’d been vain enough to get manicures, and even in their earthiest hippie days, he’d always kept his hair squeaky-clean and short enough not to hide his pretty face. Most of all, he’d known he had a pretty face—God knows the press had told him so often enough. Would he have destroyed that face?

Somebody
had died; Cobb was sure enough of that. There had been an autopsy, though of course that was subject to conspiracy. Certainly, though, he had let someone’s ashes trickle through his fingers onto the floor of his house in Gabon. (He’d kept the ashes for a few days, still in the Federal Express box, then carried them to a deserted beach near the town and thrown them handful by handful into the sea. It took nearly an hour, and by the end of that time he was so thoroughly drenched in sweat that he never noticed the tears spilling down his face.)

It took several seconds before he noticed that the car had stopped.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said when he saw what was outside the window.

“Mr. Van Duyk, I was given very specific instructions.”

“Drive me to the nearest town.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

Cobb stared at the driver. The man’s eyes were steely. It occurred to Cobb that he was miles from anywhere and this guy probably didn’t like him very much. “Right,” he said, “fuck off, then.”

The limo pulled out and sped away down the winding mountain road, and Cobb turned despairingly to face Matty’s house.

He didn’t know what to call the architectural style—wedding-cake Victorian, maybe. If so, someone had left this cake out in the rain for way too long. It seemed to have at least sixteen sides, and each side had two tall skinny windows, all their panes broken. The structure was built of once-white clapboard, great sections of which were splintered into sticks or missing altogether. There were two stories and, Cobb thought, an attic as well. Complete with bats, no doubt.

The rest of the view was no more encouraging. To get to the house, he would have to walk past an ancient graveyard whose stone monuments looked as if they had frozen in the act of melting. In the distance, thinly forested hills arched their backs against a darkening sky.

Cobb could see no other houses, no utility wires, no sign of human habitation at all except the empty road, which was really only a dirt track.

He dimly remembered the limo pulling up at a chain stretched across the road several miles back, a sign that read
Private Road,
the driver getting out to unlock the chain and then again to fasten it behind them. This was all Matty’s property, then, for God knows how many miles around.
His
property, now.

What a fucking treat.

He remembered Matty’s map and took the creamy envelope out of his bag. Here was the map, here was the house, here was the graveyard represented by a scatter of crosses. And here, tucked inside the sheaf of papers, was the key.

Cobb hoisted his bag and walked past the graveyard, across the yard, up the four front steps to an absurd little porch that looked as if it had been pasted onto the front of the house as an afterthought. He paused at the French doors—the glass in these was still intact, at any rate—and looked in. He couldn’t see anything, so he inserted the key into the lock and pushed the doors open.

The ruin inside was as great as he might have expected. A grand staircase swept upward just inside the doors, its elaborately carved newel post listing, its banister scarred, several of its risers gone. A tapestry of dust and cobwebs swathed the walls and ceiling. The floor looked solid enough, but he was damned if he was going to test it.

I’ve found the most private place in the world,
Matty had written.
It wasn’t enough to save me, but I think it might be just the thing for you.

“Fuck you,” he muttered, and took the sheaf of papers out again, perhaps meaning to crumple or shred them, he wasn’t sure. But something made him turn over the estate map, and there was a rough sketch of the inside of the house. He’d seen it before and it had meant nothing to him, but now he recognized the French doors, the sweeping staircase. There in Matty’s handwriting, very small, was an arrow pointing to the staircase and the notation
Press the newel post, Terry.

He did.

A gleaming steel elevator rose silently out of the floor. The door slid open. The interior of the elevator was streamlined and immaculate. Cobb looked at it for a moment, then sighed, shrugged, and stepped in.

Four hours later, he lay sprawled in a sybaritic stupor. The place was fucking palatial, and it was all underground. Hewn right into the rock. He had no idea if anyone else was here, didn’t think he’d explored even half of it. The epicenter of the place was clearly designed just for him: a huge bed (he had always loved to stay in bed), a great stereo system with his favorite music, a television with over a hundred channels (and where the hell was the satellite dish?), a lacquered rolling tray full of fragrant sinsemilla. His guitars were here, the ones he’d last seen in his New York apartment the night of the plane crash. The kitchen was stocked with beer, vodka, tonic, and Cobb’s favorite foods, including a whole box of Cadbury Flake, an English chocolate bar unavailable in the States. He’d always bought them at the candy store in Manchester where he and Matty used to go after school. One of the clerks would sell them cigarettes, too, even though they were only fourteen . . .

If Matty was dead, there was no one in the world who knew him.
The thought shocked Cobb out of his satiated doze, and he sat up in bed. He’d been close with the other two, of course, and with a number of women. But the intimacy of total
collaboration,
the sense of minds melding, had never been there with anyone else.

He went into the kitchen and got the bottle of vodka out of the freezer.

Many shots later, he slept.

In his dream, he was standing atop one of the distant hills. He could see the house and the little graveyard behind him, but they did not look fearsome now.

With the smooth suddenness of dreams, Matty was beside him, resting one elbow on Cobb’s shoulder as he’d had a habit of doing since they were school friends. A breeze ruffled Matty’s dark hair, lifted it from his face. There were streaks of gray in that hair, but Matty’s face in profile was as serenely handsome as ever, if a shade more careworn. Afraid to speak first, Cobb watched Matty out of the corner of his eye, and Matty smiled.

“I really am dead, you know.”

“Well . . . ” Cobb’s voice was rusty, but he would not let it crack,
would
not. “You look damn good for a man who’s taken a shot in the mouth.”

“Oh,
that.
” Matty turned to face Cobb. “I don’t have to look like
that
to convince you, do I?”

“No,” Cobb said hastily. “Look, do we have to stand out here?”

“Of course not, nature boy,” said Matty, and at once they were back in the house, lying in bed. Cobb wasn’t embarrassed, though he was naked and Matty appeared to be also; they had shared plenty of beds and bathrooms out of necessity.

Matty propped himself up on one elbow and lit a half-joint Cobb had left in the tray. Before Cobb had time to wonder whether the joint would be smoked when he woke up, Matty said, “I didn’t die in New York, though. I died here, in this bed.”