Page 91 of Levi

The room goes back to a movie featuring Lee Streeter. He comes up front to run things. I let it happen. I help it happen. He’s safer than I am. He can do the work.

Somebody bangs on the bathroom door. The cars are here.

On the way out I pass the black glass of the window and the jaw checks itself, the famous jawline. Nothing in the eyes, which is the job done right. The dark burner in my pocket. The Martin in its case in my hand, going where I go.

Thousands of people are waiting to scream a name at a man who isn’t there.

The ghost goes to work.

Chapter 34: Dante

Benji texts me constantly between the Roadhouse and Saturday noon. I answer most of them with the word fine.

Benji: Are you good?

Dante: Fine.

Benji: Call me!

Dante: I’m fine. Busy.

Benji: DANTE.

I am fine. Because I have to be. I drove home Friday night and slept. Saturday morning, I went to work same as always. I don’t think about the beach house. Or the man in it.

I’m still telling myself that while I’m sitting at my kitchen table with paperwork, when I hear someone stomping up the stairs. Benji lets himself in without knocking. He’s in my doorway, and I close the packet.

“What the hell are you wearing, Benji? You look like a cross between Elvis and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.”

He’s wearing brand-new white sparkly cowboy boots. White shorts with the square footage of a cocktail napkin. A blue silk shirt. And over the silk, in the wet crush of July, a white leather jacket with a fringe that arrives a half second after he does.

“We’re going to a country music concert and we need to BLEND!” He throws his arms wide, like the outfit is the closing argument. “I researched this for four hours, Dante. The core elements are boots, denim, fringe, and a hat. I’m wearing two of the four. The humidity vetoed the denim, and hats flatten my hair and make my face look wide, so the fringe is doing the work of both. This is what blending looks like when it’s done correctly.”

“You know I love you, but you’ve never blended anything except makeup. You’re not blending in that outfit. We’re not going.”

He doesn’t argue about the blending. He reaches into the jacket and holds up two laminated passes on lanyards.

“They’re VIP. Pit, actually, but VIP-adjacent, I called in a favor. And you’re coming, because you’ve answered me fine eleven times in eighteen hours, which is the most not-fine a human being has ever been. I’m not doing this.” He waves a hand at all of me. “I’m not letting you sit here being a sad, stoic businessman about it.”

“Benji. I have a deal closing—”

“Don’t care. You know what this is.” He stops, and his voice changes, drops the performance off it, and he looks at me dead-on. “You know exactly what this is, because you invented it, Dante. You did this to me when I was feeling low. You refused to let me rot in sorrow. You said the only thing worse than feeling it is feeling it alone.” He hangs one lanyard on the counter’s edge, in front of me. “I learned it from you. Shut up and put it on.”

I can’t argue with him. It’s true. I invented the medicine. I don’t get to refuse the dose.

“I’m not going because I want to see him,” I say. “I want to make that clear.”

“Obviously not. You’re only going because I’m making you.” He’s already past me, into my bedroom, into my closet. Hangers start flying out of the closet and hitting the bed.

“Linen. Linen. Linen. More linen. A cashmere section, Dante. You have a cashmere section, in Florida, in July.” A hanger sails. “Everything in this closet is for closing on real estate. Nothing in this closet has ever been to a concert. I’ve never once been beaten by a closet, and I’m not starting tonight.” He goes quiet for three seconds, which from Benji in a closet is a drumroll. Then he comes out holding a pair of soft jeans I forgot I owned and a plain white shirt. “These. I was with you when you bought them, which was six years ago, which makes them vintage, which is perfect. If you don’t get changed right now, we’re going to Walmart and I’m dressing you in a flag shirt and a cap turned backwards. Move it! We’re wasting time.”

I get changed. He would do it. He’d narrate the aisle.

He rolls my sleeves himself, two turns each, and steps back to appraise the work. “Perfect. You look like the man who sold everyone here their land. It’ll do.”

An hour later Pier Park is a mass of people and airless heat. It is the straightest place I have ever stood in my life. Trucks the size of small homes in the lots. Flags on half of them, the country and the other ones. Boots that have never seen a horse. Sunburn, beer, tank tops, all of it pointed at a stage the size of a strip mall. Benji and I thread through the middle of it, a fringe jacket and the man it’s towing, the two most overdressed men here tonight.

The lot is a quarter mile of grass and packed sand. Benji makes it two hundred feet before the boots give up.