Page 144 of Levi

There’s no air.

I can’t get out.

It’s what my body has always needed. A way out. Somewhere I can see it, air I can reach, the count of steps to the nearest open door.

None of it’s here.

I’m gonna die on this fucking stage. Tonight. Right in front of Dante.

Except they stop the show for lightning. Eight miles in and she pulls everybody. Stage manager said so. She’d pull the Pope.

I make the worst bet of my life, standing in front of thousands with a grin nailed to my face. I start praying to God for the fucking storm. For the lightning. To come down fast and close, put its hand on this stage, and end the show before it ends me.

Because it’s the only way out.

I’ll take the thing that terrifies me over one more verse up here.

Come on. Strike again. Come closer. Strike now. Please.

The boy who used to count the seconds and pray for them to get longer is up here begging them to get shorter.

Another flash. Come on. I can’t breathe.

One Mississippi.

The crack comes before the two. The world goes white at the edges. My hands quit the strings. The grin’s gone, I can feel my face slack and stupid with nobody home behind it.

I’m gone.

A long way off the band stumbles, a guitar hitting a chord I didn’t give it. Closer, the front rows have started to change. I can see it even from inside the white, the lit screens tilting up. The ones who came to watch Lee Streeter are watching something else happening on stage now. Watching it go wrong, live, at the center of their night.

The mic’s right there. I have no idea what to do with it.

The rain’s picking up, drumming on the stage roof behind me or on an aluminum shed, I can’t tell which anymore.

The heat’s got both hands on me, the metal’s against my back. I can’t get a breath past the top of my chest, the count’s down to nothing, the flash and the crack the same instant.

The past is swallowing me now.

Chapter 56: Dante

The VIP pass that closed my deal put me twenty feet from the stage, dead center, close enough to watch the sweat roll down Levi’s face.

I spot Caroline and Allison off to my left. Allison waves at me, and I wave back. They’re happy and no longer mine to worry about. That was the arrangement.

Now I’m standing in a pit full of people who paid to watch Lee Streeter. He works the crowd as the talented professional he is. The grin, the easy patter between songs, the mic tipped to the crowd on the line they all came to sing. The crowd is getting exactly what they paid for.

The storms threatening all day have arrived. The dark wall off the Gulf I spotted this morning is overhead. The first fat drops hit warm on the back of my neck. The crowd doesn’t care yet. A little rain at a country show is a welcome relief from the heat.

Levi is a few songs in when I see it. I spot the exact instant Lee Streeter stops being driven from the inside. The grin stays put with nothing behind it. His hand lifts off the strings between one bar and the next and doesn’t come back. His eyes go somewhere else. The song dies mid-word.

The band runs on ahead of him, the drummer covering, the bass player turning to look. At the center of the stage, he stands silent, staring straight ahead.

I’m already moving.

I don’t know what it is. I only know something bad is happening to him and I need to get there.

Could be the heat. His head. His heart.