Chapter 3 — Volume Two

No parents, no friends, and no hobbies to speak of. Yeonha Carter, who had nothing and lived on a survivor benefit that arrived on the third of every month, rode home from the frontage road with a Telecaster on her back and a practice amp bungeed to her rack. The gig bag was wider than she was. Twice, on the hill, she felt the neck of it catch the wind like a sail.

Her grandparents' house was a brick ranch on Maple Street, three blocks off the highway on the school side of the creek. It had been built in the seventies for a family of five and now held three people who used about half of it. Yeonha's room was the one at the end of the hall, with a window that faced the carport and a closet still full of somebody else's coats.

Her grandfather was in the carport when she rolled up, doing something to the lawnmower. He looked at the amp on the rack, and then at the bag, and said, "Huh," and went back to the mower. Her grandmother, from the kitchen, said dinner was at six. Nobody asked what was in the bag. Yeonha understood that this was their way of being polite, and was grateful for it, and also slightly disappointed, which she had not expected.

In her room she unzipped the bag and took the guitar out and did not know where to put it.

She tried the closet. It disappeared among the coats. She tried the corner behind the door and could not see it from the bed. In the end she leaned it against the wall beneath the window, on top of a folded towel so the finish would not touch the baseboard, at an angle where she could see the whole of it from her pillow. Then she set the amp on the floor beside it and coiled the cable on top of the amp the way Darrell had coiled it, over and under, so it would not kink.

It was already clean. Darrell had spent most of Saturday morning making it clean. She got the rag from the bag anyway and wiped it down, the body and the back of the neck and each of the six new strings from the nut to the bridge, and when she was done the rag was as white as when she had started.

The chord book was in her backpack. She knew what E minor looked like. Two fingers, second fret, the two middle strings. She had known it for three nights.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the guitar across her lap, the way she had sat on the amp in the store, and put her fingers where the diagram said. Then she looked at them. The tips of her first two fingers were on the right strings, more or less. The strings did not go down. She pressed. They went down and the edges of them bit into her fingertips, two thin lines, sharper than she had imagined a piece of wire could be. She strummed once with her thumb across all six strings, unplugged.

Four of the strings made a sound. Two of them made a dead click.

She took her fingers off and looked at them. There were two grooves across the pads, red and bloodless, that stayed for a few seconds and then faded. She put her fingers back and pressed harder and strummed again. Three sounds, three clicks. She could not tell which strings were which.

Her grandmother called her to dinner.

At dinner her grandfather said the Cardinals were losing, and her grandmother said the tomatoes were finished for the year, and Yeonha ate and said the food was good, which was true. Nobody mentioned the guitar. Under the table she rubbed the tips of her fingers with her thumb. They were tender in a way that was not quite pain, the way a bruise is tender the day before it shows.

After dinner she did the reading for Monday, which took twenty minutes, and lay on the bed with the radio on and looked at the guitar under the window.

She had thought about it, on the frontage road, in the store, for three nights with the chord book. She had thought about the sound. She had not thought at all about what her hands would have to do to make it. The bicycle had never needed anything from her hands but to hold on. The Telecaster, it turned out, was not a thing that made a sound. It was a thing that let you make one, if you could, and so far she could not.

She thought about the practice amp. She had not turned it on. Darrell had set the volume to two in the store, and the sound had come out round and low and had hung in the air, and that was the sound she had ridden home with. Her grandparents were in the living room with the television on. The wall between her room and the living room was the kind of wall that let through the television. She did not turn the amp on.

She fell asleep with the radio still playing, earlier than usual, with a tiredness that was not from the hill.

She woke at a little after midnight.

The house was dark and the television was off. The streetlight at the corner of Maple came in through the window at an angle and lay across the floor and up the body of the Telecaster, so that it looked, from the bed, like a thing that was awake. Yeonha lay and looked at it. Nobody had stolen it. It was a strange thing to check, in a bedroom, in a locked house, but she checked.

She could not go back to sleep.

Her fingertips had stopped being tender. She pressed them with her thumb and they were just fingertips again. It was after midnight. Her grandparents slept at the other end of the hall with the door closed and a box fan running, and the box fan was louder than an unplugged guitar. If she was going to be bad at this, it seemed better to be bad at it where nobody could hear.

She got up and did not turn on the light. She sat on the floor with her back against the bed and the guitar across her lap and found the second fret by feel, and put two fingers on it, and pressed until it hurt, and strummed with her thumb.

Six sounds.

They were quiet, and wrong in some way she could not name, but there were six of them and none of them clicked. She held her fingers there and strummed again. Six. She lifted her fingers and put them back and did it a third time, and got five and a click, and adjusted, and got six.

She did this for a while. She did not know how long. The streetlight did not move enough to tell her. At some point she noticed that she had started pressing less hard, because her fingers had found where the strings wanted to be pressed, a little behind the metal bar and not on top of it, and that the sound came out the same whether she crushed the strings or just held them. This was not in the chord book. Her fingers had worked it out without her.

E minor, unplugged, on the floor of a dark room, over and over, was not music. She knew that. But it was a sound she had not been able to make at six o'clock, and it was after midnight and she could make it now, and she had done nothing in between except sleep. She turned that over for a moment. It did not seem like it should work that way. It seemed to.

She wanted to hear it properly.

The amp was beside her. She found the cable by feel, and the jack on the guitar, which took a moment, and the input on the amp, which took longer. She found the volume knob and turned it all the way down and then up to where she thought one would be, less than Darrell's two, and found the power switch and pushed it.

A small red light came on. The amp made a low hum, like a refrigerator, that she had not noticed in the store. She waited for it to be a problem. Down the hall the box fan went on running.

She put her fingers on the second fret and strummed.

What came out of the amp was not the sound from the store. It was a buzz. Every string buzzed, a flat metallic rattle underneath the note, like something loose inside the guitar was shaking against something else. She lifted her fingers and struck the open strings, all six, the way Darrell had, and they buzzed too, worse, a sound like a wasp in a jar. She turned the volume down to nothing. She turned it back up. The buzz was still there.

She sat with the hum of the amp and looked at the guitar.

A hundred dollars. Three dead owners. New strings, a free setup, a man who did not smile. She had noticed in the store that it was too cheap and she had asked why and she had accepted the answer, because the answer had been about ghosts and she did not believe in ghosts enough to walk away from a hundred-dollar guitar. It had not occurred to her that the answer might be about the guitar.

She had bought a used guitar from a man she did not know, without asking anyone, with almost all of the money she had, and it buzzed.

She turned the amp off. The red light went out and the hum stopped and the room was quiet except for the box fan. She unplugged the cable and coiled it, over and under, and set it on top of the amp, and leaned the guitar back against the wall under the window, on the towel, at the angle where she could see it from the bed.

Then she lay down and looked at it, and did not sleep for a long time, doing arithmetic. It was Saturday. Sunday the store was open until six. She did not know if Darrell worked Sundays. She did not know if a hundred dollars was the kind of money a store gave back.

차용 목록 (Borrowed from Super Cub, vol. 1 ch. 3)

사건 비트

인식 층위

본작 고유 (원작 대응 없음)