“Ladies and gentlemen of the chamber of commerce, please feel free to stick around for open mic night. I know many of you know how talented our own Glory Greenleaf is, and some of you are about to find out. Give it up for Glooooory Greenleaf!”
The applause sounded sincere, and surprisingly polite. Glory peered out into the dark. There were about fifty people all told still present, which constituted a downright remarkable crowd for an open mic night. No one drunkenly shouted “Show us your tits!” which was a refreshing change of pace.
Glory re-adjusted the mic, mulling on the fly what her set might be. And then she knew just how she was going to do it.
“Now, I know my little friend Annelise Harwood has to get home to bed, so these first two are for her.”
“That’s me! They’re for me!”
Annelise hopped up and down in excitement next to her grandma Sherrie.
And then Glory plucked out and bent those first funky, bluesy notes of “Son of a Preacher Man.” She gave the strum a little extra chop, a little more funk, shaping the song into something with a little more edge. She moved her hips and shoulders with the rhythm, and it was infectious: it got heads bobbing and shoulders moving. The audience knew they were about to get rocked.
That moment when the mic picked up the first note she sang and filled the room with it, immersing her in her own sinuous, smoky-edged voice: it never lost its thrill. She’d heard comparisons to Dusty Springfield, but her tone was grittier and bigger; she could do Janis Joplin justice, but her voice was more velvet than gravel. Above all, it was absolutely her plaything. She could caress notes, flirt with them, send them wailing into the stratosphere, and pull them right back down again.
The applause was protracted and sincere and loud, maybe a little surprised, when she brought the song to an end. And then she segued effortlessly into another classic, “Me and Bobby McGee,” and delivered it with soul and yearning. There were quite a fewWoooooswhen she’d finished it. Not all of them drunken.
So far, two songs about men. About ache, nostalgia, loss. She was building a mood, and she could feel the audience surrendering to it without realizing it.
She was going to take them deeper still.
Down, down to a hush with those first deceptively simple, softly plucked, notes of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe.” Just like she’d told Franco Francone earlier today.
The audience was almost entirely motionless. Like children being told a spooky bedtime story.
When she’d first heard that song as a little girl, it had almost frightened her; its offhand mystery seemed very adult and oblique, but beautiful and transfixing in its simplicity. It was the kind of song that got under your skin.
And now she sang that haunted little Southern Gothic story like she’d lived it, the supple, husked velvet of her voice delivering those potent lines almost matter-of-factly. She saw the audience leaning forward, into her voice, into the song. Listening to every word as if for the first time, because she made it sound and feel new. She hoped it was new for some of them.
It ended. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
And the applause was even louder now, and someone whistled. Feet were stomping.
And now she was going to take them deeper still.
Because tonight’s theme, she’d decided, was going to be love and pain, in all their infinitely subtle gradations, because frankly she needed it. The audience might not be big but she wanted to break each and every one of their hearts and make most of them cry. She could do it, too.
So she picked out the first notes of Fleetwood Mac’s “Songbird.”
There was no freaking way a warm-blooded human could hear that song sung competently and not get a little wet-eyed. Or at least battle a throat lump.
But Glory’s voice slid into it, caressed each separate note as if they were treasures she’d collected, and turned it into a sensual, aching hymn, a sort of thanksgiving born of sorrow.
And she knew by the absolute lush stillness in the room that she was killing all of them. They were all sincerely suffering in the best possible way.
It was artful sadism.
It was bliss.
She was, for this half hour at least, in her milieu, and it was freedom.
She’d played that song the night they’d taken Eli’s dad’s ashes down to Whiskey Creek. He’d wanted to be cast there at sunset, to join the Hellcat River and be taken out to the Pacific Ocean, so that’s what they did. Then they’d built a bonfire. And then she’d played that song and sung.
Eli had sat on the opposite side of the fire, arms wrapped around his legs, his cheek resting on his knees, flickering in and out of her vision. His girlfriend’s arms wrapped around him from behind.
Tonight she was conscious of Franco Francone out there listening to her in his dark corner.
And Eli out there in his cruiser, catching the bad guys, laying his life on the line, a job that could be dull as hell or whimsical and then, ten minutes later, him dead on the verge of the highway, like his dad.
