CHAPTER 63 – In the Pines

Saturday.
Morning.

Eppie sat in Zara’s Prius, drinking Itziar’s coffee, eating a tangerine from Fresno, and cracking off-colour jokes with her Spanish friend as they sat in traffic.

“You know, I’ve been playing the transition in my sleep,” Zara had kept talking. “I still can’t believe Antonio Vargas will be playing with us. That’s insane, Eppie.”

“Is he as good as Paco?” Eppie asked.

“Is he…” Zara coughed. “Don’t let uncle Paco hear this, but in technical terms—and in commercial terms—yeah. He’s better.”

The 405 gave way to the streets, then Culver City’s sound stages, bungalows, and palm trees. Eppie had been here before. The guard at the gate recognised her, and they were let in with big smiles and hat-tips.

“Here?” Zara said after Eppie gave her an impromptu tour.

“Yep. Stage 15. The Julian Johnson.”

They parked and walked.

Mueller was already inside when they entered the rear suites via the side doors. As a German maestro audio technician, he considered punctuality more important than his artists’ lives. He wore his signature spectacles, this time in gold, and he was adjusting the SSL board when they came through the door.

There were two assistants with him. A Dwayne and a Pete. The young men were very much surprised by Eppie’s stature, and after a polite hello, they invited Zara to tour the setup. Clearly, the five-seven, leggy, bright-eyed Señorita with her midriff out mid-winter was the FMC—and not the five-one blonde in the mono-colour cardigan.

Mueller snickered. “Should I tell them you’re the front man?”

“Naw…” Eppie took a seat on the leather couch. “We’ll need to explain everything to Zara anyway. At least this way, she’ll be less nervous.”

The next to arrive was the coolest cat in all of Culver City, a man who Eppie loved because he was only marginally taller than her.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he greeted the room, then herself. “Miss Fontaine. Your bassist has arrived.”

“Tony!” Eppie rose from the seat like a vampire, impressing them all with her body control.

They hugged.

Antonio laid down the infamous guitar case. “Eric Gowler sends his regards. He said he would very much like it if the song could be made with Chad’s guitar.”

“Oh…” Eppie felt a swell of emotions at the thought of that fabled unplugged concert. “I would be honoured.”

“You should be,” Antonio hefted another case for the gofers. “I’ll be on the bass. You’ll be on the Martin D-35…”

While Eppie tuned the legendary guitar with trembling fingers, Antonio and Zara jammed in the recording room, working out the kinks and feeling out one another’s habits.

In the mood lighting, Antonio looked cool as all hell, thanks to his snake leather catching the studio light.

Zara had gone in first, unpacking her guitar with the economy of someone used to cramped rooms. She sat on the stool they had set for her, plucked two open strings, listened, and tuned neither. Antonio came in behind her carrying nothing. His bass was already on its stand. He picked it up the way a rally driver picks up his keys.

From Eppie’s POV, the real musicians were worlds apart from her.
They had not borrowed [Traits] from the “powers that be.” She was an impostor, while Zara and Antonio were true acolytes who drank from the fount of creative passion.

The pair did not speak with words.
She watched as Antonio played a low and slow bassline. It rang out, smooth and unrushed. Mueller had left the audio channels open so that they could still talk if they wanted.

Zara’s head tilted, not toward the player, but toward the notes. Her body seemed to be counting something, then her thumb dragged slow across the strings.

Antonio answered it with a question of his own, lower, further back in the key.

Eppie’s fingers tightened on the Martin’s neck. She wanted to join them, but she didn’t know where to start. The [System] wasn’t that kind. Her [Persona] was… an exquisite tool, much like this Martin D-35.

The guitarists in the studio began to jam in earnest.
No sheets. No plans.
Just pure, unadulterated vibes.

Zara played a run so clean it sounded rehearsed. Antonio locked underneath it without announcement. No count-in, no nod. His fingers danced, and the floor appeared under Zara’s feet as she swung that red dress, her heels tapping across the ballroom floor.

The two were in sync.
Their sync improved.
Ten minutes in, they achieved a union that took Eppie three months.

Her [Sublime] threatened to trigger, but Eppie fought the feeling because she was here to learn, not to enjoy. How could she find that same trust, that same confidence? Or was she asking too much? The cost of such talent must be astronomical.

Tuning the D-35, she acutely felt the vertigo associated with the activation of [El duende].

She thought about Chad Lain. About the fact that this guitar had been in the room when Human Animals was written, that it had been played by hands that would have loved a session this natural, this organic. Chad Lain wrote Human Animals as an act of refusal against depression, alienation, and material glut. He was anti-establishment, and yet the music kept piling fame and money on Lain until he had only one way to protest against the fans who had co-opted his personal pain into a commercial phenomenon.

The D-35 felt warm against Eppie’s thigh. She had chosen a short skirt because she had played with William in one, and she wanted to channel that same feeling.

JESUS CHRIST. Eppie stood up so fast she almost dropped the guitar.

“Nervous?” Mueller said, not looking up from the SSL deck.

Eppie didn’t know what to say. What she did know was that she would very much like to find out what William was doing to reduce her reserves by almost one eighth.

“Yes, I am nervous,” she told the truth by lying. Just in case, she texted Lim and Simone.

The texts came back clean. She relaxed.

Just what the hell had happened?

Antonio listened to the final four bars while nodding.

When the young lady finished, he was quiet for a moment, cataloguing rather than receiving. His hand had not moved from the body of his vintage Fender Precision.

“Soleares,” he said to the girl with the pretty eyes. “I can hear the style. Who taught you?”

“My uncle,” the girl said. She was sweating, but she was happy. “Francisco Arriaga. He goes by Paco. He runs a hotel in Fresno—Hotel Basque.”

Antonio searched his memory and found the likeness of an older musician, one with a face that only a mother could love.

“Paco Arriaga?” he said. “I know this name.”

“You do?” the girl blinked.

“Of him, not in person. A few years ago, I was on a session at the Capitol in Hollywood. My partner was a young guitarist from Bilbao, and he played a soleares run that was very heartfelt and unique. I asked him where he learned it.” He paused. “He said from a Basque man in Fresno, a true artiste. He showed me a picture.”

The girl looked upon him with admiration.

Antonio decided to repay that admiration. “The soleares your uncle plays is from Lebrija originally, the Cádiz lineage. The old masters brought it north through the migration routes, probably two generations back. The Basque Country absorbed many Andalusian workers during the industrial years. The music came with them.”

He smiled at her. “Yes. Soleares has history, Mija.”

Zara’s lips trembled. Antonio laughed to diffuse the tension. He decided to give the girl another musicology lesson—the kind that Eppie would never understand, because the white girl played like a finely tuned automaton, even as she sang like a siren.

He ran his thumb down the cedar guitar’s strings without pressing, just feeling the resistance. “The soleares is the oldest palo. Before everything else was codified. It existed before siguiriyas, before bulerías. At its core, it’s not… codices. It was men trying to find expression.” He pressed a chord. “Where I come from, we did something different with that seriousness.”

“Catalonia,” the girl said.

“Barcelona.” He played something, a single bar, rhythmically nothing like what Zara had played. The thumb hit the bass, and simultaneously his fingers rasgueadoed the treble, resulting in a percussive, bright rhythm with a Caribbean undertow. “Rumba catalana. Its origins came from the ocean. It belonged to the Roma communities in Gràcia. You want to try?”

“Yes!”

His student played Antonio’s tune. The guitarist listened with his head slightly tilted, tracking something beneath the notes.

He adjusted his thumb position.

And then he came in, running underneath her notes, his rumba rhythm as a counterpoint to the soleares’ gravity. The effect was strange and immediately interesting: her descending weight against his horizontal momentum, the two musical grammars of Spanish history parsing each other without resolving.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Zara’s eyes lit up.

She didn’t stop. Neither did he.

They let it run until it found its own stopping place, with Zara settling into a long final chord, Antonio hitting the bass once, then leaving the music to fade.

“Beautiful,” Mueller’s voice came over the intercom. “But practice is over. I am sending in the amateur. Eppie, you ready?”

Their singer dropped her phone on the coffee tray, then cradled the D-35 with reverence. “Alright. Let’s do this.”

The red light came on.
The session room grew dim.

Zara’s tune led them deep into the pines at sunset.
Antonio’s bass set the tone for the heaviness of the rain.
Eppie provided the shivers, then opened her throat with [Causality] on full burn.
[Songstress], [Vocality], [Charisma], [Perfect Pitch], [El duende] fired all at once.

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me.

The booth was sensitive enough that she could hear Zara breathing between chord changes. Antonio’s bass sat so low in the mix that she felt it as a pressure behind her sternum. Without [Perfect Pitch], she would not even notice his participation. Yet, if Antonio was missing, the entire texture of the song, its earth-toned colours, would be completely off-balance.