Anyway, hope you like this one.

—Brian

(Click on the title below to play the song.)

Return of the Mullet

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

The new crew only asked Mickey Mullet because of his legend. A guy who’d taken more banks than all of them put together, an even dozen. His first one when he was sixteen. All it took was his dad’s pistol and his mom’s pantyhose. He dropped out of school the next year, got himself a little team together. Got a girl. Had a kid. By the sixth or seventh job, he felt like he knew what he was doing. He wasn’t terrified for hours before, just hopped up, prickly with anxiety and adrenalin. No longer felt like getting away was a question of luck. By number nine, you could say he was cocky. Not ambitious—the banks he was hitting weren’t getting any bigger, there was no sense of working up to a job he could retire on. No, just cocky, in an easier kind of way, like a man who owns a big truck and has never driven it in the weather it was designed for. Thinks he’s king of the road, or at least of the suburbs.

On number twelve, he was nabbed, but not because he was cocky, though the newspapers made it out that way. The criminal community said it was dumb luck. He just happened to hit the place when three cops were in the bathroom. The officers heard what was going on outside, had enough time to radio in reinforcements and make a little surprise plan of their own besides. At the trial they managed to pin seven of the previous robberies to him. Why the heck were three cops in the bathroom at once, that’s what I’d like to know, Mickey Mullet said. The judge ignored him, and Mickey Mullet got put away for twenty-three years. He was twenty-two. His daughter just three. He never saw her again.

So the boys in the new crew were expecting more, were not impressed when they saw him. His eyes were still good, and he had all his hair, which he’d taken to combing back nice and straight, like all the men in old movies. But he had a body like a frog and he shook a little, the beginning of Parkinson’s, though he didn’t know that. He hadn’t been to a doctor in a while.

“I thought everyone lifted weights in prison,” one of the boys said.

“Bet you’ve heard a lot of things about prison,” Mickey Mullet said, in a way that shut the other guy up. Nonchalant. Nothing to prove. Though the plan for the holdup, when they laid it out for him, was much more complicated than Mickey Mullet’s plans had ever been. There were computers involved, microphones, video cameras. A van full of equipment. As sophisticated as anything the police had, or at least anything Mickey Mullet thought they had. I’m in over my head, he said to himself, but hadn’t it always been that way? As long as the water didn’t freeze, he was all right.

“Just tell me where to be in the bank, and I’ll be there,” he said. “I’m not shooting anybody, but I know how to make them think I will.”

The boys in the new crew saw how he was balking. Is this the guy we want? one said to the other. He’s a weak link.

No, no, another said. We need him. He’s the only reason we could get Mister Technology over there to come with us. Credibility issue.

But I don’t think he’ll make it out again, the first one said.

So what? the second one said. We don’t know him.

The first one thought about that, was still thinking about it the night before the operation, in a bar three neighborhoods over they all got together in. The boys in the new crew joking among themselves. They had their own generational language, a way of looking at the world. Mickey Mullet sat near the end of the table, bottle in his hand. They were drinking European stuff. He was having a Coors, not saying a word, laughing only now and again. Where you from? the first one almost said. How’d you get away with your fourth bank hit? What’d you do in prison all day? You got any kids? But he didn’t say a word. Thought he could always ask him later.

Then it was fifteen minutes into the bank job, and most of the crew were back in the van. Something had gone wrong. They didn’t know what. Only half the money they expected to get had come out, and two of their people were missing. One of them Mickey Mullet. They watched as two police cars showed up, then five more. An ambulance. Cops strung tape all over the front of the bank. They waited a little longer, thinking at least one of the people they left behind might get out, through cleverness or luck. Dressed as a policeman or a paramedic. Maybe even pretending they were one of the victims. I almost got shot in there. But neither of them came out, not on their own power, and the crew couldn’t check the hospital. It would kill their cover.

They learned what happened the next day, when it was the big news story. Their friend was gone. They’d gone to the same elementary school with her, remembered her as a sharp, bossy kid, impossible to make cry. She could skateboard better than any of them. In high school, she and one of the guys in the crew had made out a few times, in the fall of their sophomore year, when school seemed possessed of an acute hopelessness, a place that promised a future of tan and gray cinderblocks, while the trees along the creek that ran behind the basketball court sparked with yellows and oranges. They’d forgotten they’d ever seen colors so strong. Mickey Mullet was gone, too, though the news didn’t even know about his nickname, used his real one instead. To the authorities, Michael Ralston, juvenile delinquent, ex-con on parole, had just relapsed. To the criminals who knew him, a new streak had ended before it could start. They talked again about how it was bad luck, agreed that if he’d gotten out of that bank, he might have done a dozen more before the law caught him again. Everyone had a story they’d heard about him once. Everyone knew who he was. But no one could say they knew him well. If anyone did, they weren’t talking.

Three months later I sent the recording to Brian. I left an instrumental verse in there so he could record a fiddle solo, because I think every song should have a fiddle solo. Brian sometimes disagrees, and in this case he suggested we ask our friend Brian Wecht to add an organ solo instead. In addition to being an outstanding keyboard player, this other Brian is a postdoc-collecting theoretical physicist and one half of Ninja Sex Party, a fantastic video/music/pan-tainment duo that must be experienced. Thanks, Ninja Brian!

Keep those title suggestions coming, and stay tuned for our next collaboration, “Return of the Mullet.” With baited breath. Get it?

—Drew

(Click on the title below to play the song.)

Elevator, Barcelona

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

That was where it ended, at last, at last. It had been eleven months since she had gone there, from London. She had been eating the salt cod, the cured pork. Tomato on toast for breakfast. Still had not done any of the things that travelers said must be done in Barcelona; had not seen the church or the park. Not even the beach. Had, however, made a few dozen friends—natives, expatriates, exchange students, tourists—none of whom could figure out where she was living or how. How she was eating, keeping herself alive. Even after hundreds of hours of conversation with her, they still did not know anything about her life for the past fourteen months. At all. They knew only that she had been in London, had three invisible months there, and now she was here, at one-thirty in the morning, smoking and talking about movies from the 1950s, which she seemed too young to have seen in the theater. She reached back into her childhood, her adolescence, her early adulthood, for stories. Drew out plenty of them, as people do when they are far from home and feel a connection. They tell you things in a night that they would not tell people at home for years. But of the past fourteen months—beyond the trivial, or things that they all already knew about each other anyway—nothing.

And she was so good at avoiding it, at steering the conversation away from why she had come to Barcelona. She had a stock number of answers she gave when someone asked her, point blank, why are you here? What brings you to Barcelona? Oh, the weather, she would say. Or: I was tired of being employed in London. It’s so much more pleasant to be unemployed here. Or: Well, why did you come here? Why does anyone? About ten such phrases, one friend counted; he heard her use each of them at least three times. Almost every time, the newcomers eager enough to talk about themselves that the dodge worked. And by the time her older acquaintances realized what she was doing, it was far too late, too awkward, to ask.

So they began to project stories onto her. For some, it was criminality. Tax evasion. Theft. Could it have been murder? I know she doesn’t seem the type, one friend said, but they never seem the type, do they? As if anyone he was talking to was qualified to answer that question. Others poured their worst fears into her. A terrible divorce. A violent split with the family. The deaths of her parents. Her partner. Her children. A train accident. A homicide. A horrible illness, or perhaps something longer, consuming, painful. She had lost too much and had to leave, or she would lose herself, too. Perhaps she had been in a mental institution. Perhaps something in her head would go off and she would be in one soon. Yes, I’m sure of it, another of her friends said, there’s something about her. I worry about her so much every time I see her. I want everything to be all right for her, but I have the feeling things will never be all right. A third friend scorned all that, did not conjecture, scolded those who did. Stop trying to reach into her head, she said. It’s disrespectful. She’s telling us everything she wants us to know and nothing more. Isn’t that what we all do? Try to put our best selves forward? So we can be for each other the kind of person we want to be for ourselves?

Ooooh, the first friend said. That’s profound. You should write that down.

Shut up, the third friend said. I’m just saying leave her alone. She’ll tell us when she’s ready.

But she did not. Eleven months into her stay in Barcelona—to the day? They did not know for sure, would argue about it later—she announced that she had realized something in the elevator last night, and it was time for her to go back to London. She had already booked her flight, and was leaving in five days. There was a string of farewell parties, in bars and restaurants, in clubs and squares and hotel lobbies, at which everyone drank far too much, stayed up far too late, waiting for her to say something. But she said nothing, just told each of them what a pleasure it had been getting to know them. And after she left, nobody could stop talking about her.

I Woke Up in Utica

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

Utica is a small city in upstate New York that too many people, including myself, have used as the butt end of a joke, the kind you tell because it’s either that or you cry. Upstate New York’s cities can all seem like lost causes, places that saw their best days already. There’s the wreckage of industry at least a generation gone, and the relics of that past all around, in the gorgeous masonry on churches, public buildings, even small apartment buildings, places that nobody has the money to maintain now. I drove around Binghamton and Johnson City, south of Utica, just a little while ago, and went past miles of empty storefronts, windows of plywood. Nobody on the streets. How can these places ever come back? You visit them and can’t help but think that maybe they should do as Youngstown, Ohio is doing, and remake themselves as much smaller places, to do the very brave thing of giving up what they had and working with what they have.

P.S. Drew here: I want to double up on Brian’s thanks to everyone who pitched in, especially the mighty Joe Bass for his minimalist engineering (“put the mic there”). We know some fantastic musicians, the kind of fantastic where you play them the song once, tell them where to stand, and press record. This is the first take.

P.P.S. from Brian and Drew. For the record: Drew sang lead and played guitar. Christina Crowder played accordion. Ken Bloom played clarinet. Joe Bass and Bryan Thomas both played bass; Bryan used a bow and also hit a tambourine with his foot. Brian played violin, sang in the choir, and clapped his hands. Maggie Neatherlin played violin and sang. Harry Bolick played violin and sang, in his words, “like a tree shredder.” Dan Ruckdeschel, Ben Stowe, Sarah Stowe, Mark Piro, Ian Piro, and Evan Piro all sang and clapped their hands, too, along with Annie, Donald, Steve, Eric, Bill, Breitan, and Kim, whose last names we cannot recall, which we are sorry for, because you all sound beautiful. If you find this, tell us who you are.

—Brian



(Click on the title below to play the song.)

Hyenas Are Born Fighting

By Drew Bunting and Brian Francis Slattery

They’ve just thrown themselves from a train in South Carolina and are almost thirty feet in the air, falling toward the water, when Sal gets the idea that maybe hanging out with Jules is bad for him. She’s right next to him, falling too, arms pinwheeling, hair fanning out around her face. As blissed out as he’s seen her yet. She loves this, he thinks. She loves every second.

It’s five days ago, outside a bar on the rough end of a dilapidated beach town in New Jersey, across a weedy street from an abandoned arcade, and Sal’s just said the wrong thing to the wrong dude. He gets the dude’s knuckles between his teeth before he has time to apologize, is wincing away from the next one when the guy’s put on the sidewalk by a baseball bat across the back of his knees. She’s already primed to swing again. Get up, she yells. Get up so I can knock you down again. The dude does not comply, decides it’s better to lie there. She takes a look at Sal, throws him a towel.

“Cover your mouth,” she says. “I’m Jules.”

Two days later she asks if he wants to get married.

“I have to think about it,” he says.

“But we would have such beautiful children,” she says. They’re lying side by side on a mattress in the attic of a rattling Victorian on the sun-drowned coast near Temperanceville, Virginia that lost its last bit of paint to a big piece of weather four months ago; soon the rain will come for the wood.

“I need a little bit more time,” he says.

“Okay. Until tomorrow then.”

There are forty-seven other people staying in the place. They sleep in piles on the living room floor, in the tall grass of the blowing fields around the house, four hundred yards from the highway. They stay up all night playing music and arguing in the kitchen. A window is broken, fixed with plastic and tape. The shower doesn’t work; someone keeps turtles in the bathtub. But five of the people in this place, Jules says, are going to do something huge.

She’s wrong: It’s six people. Three of them will become investigative reporters who unearth a corruption scandal that puts twenty-two businessmen in jail and topples a head of state in Central Asia. Another three will become oceanographers and deep-sea divers, discover a new species of fish on the ocean floor near a thermal vent. Its unusual regenerative abilities will make them think; four years later, a chemical from its glands, reproduced in a lab, turn out to treat some forms of blindness. Later, biographers will not uncover the connection among all of them and Jules and Sal, that they were all in the same house near the ocean in Temperanceville. But the six of them will all know.

The next day, on the side of the road hitchhiking through North Carolina, Sal learns that Jules should have had a twin, who died in the womb. Jules should have died, too, but didn’t; understood early that it’s all borrowed time, and she owed it to her sister to try to live both their years. In Los Angeles, she learned to play the guitarron, helped build squatters’ settlements in the San Gabriels. They haven’t kicked them out yet, she says. She worked in a television station in Florida, learned to build furniture in Nebraska. Was married once already; it lasted nine weeks. Don’t worry, baby, she says, we’ll last at least twice that long, and kisses him, long and deep, as though she’s pouring all of herself into him, all at once. She has something in her, he thinks, something big. He can feel it. One day it’ll explode and kill them, them and everyone around them. Or show them something they’ve never seen.

Three days later, they’re in South Carolina, running from the state police, skipping along the tops of buildings, tumbling into the back seats of cars waiting at stoplights and scampering out the other side. At last, they’re clinging to the side of the train, howling over a trestle bridge. Four cruisers are waiting on land, the officers with their guns out, one of them shouting into a megaphone, something Jules and Sal can’t hear over the scream of the wheels.

“You’ve been running from the cops for five days?” Sal says.

“Longer,” she says.

“What did you do?”

She shakes her head. There’s no time to explain.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to lose you.” Then she takes his hand off the side of the train, and they jump together.

Twenty-three years from now, they’ll have different names, different accents, different-colored hair. They’ll have made two hundred seventy million dollars for themselves, almost a billion for other people, only to give it all away in one sweeping trip across the dying parts of America in a tiny green convertible, throwing thousands of dollars in cash at everyone they see. Here. Take it. Take as much as you can carry, and give it to your husbands, your wives, your children, your friends who brought you candles when the power went out. Take it and do everything you can. Why are you doing this? the local news anchors will say. Because we should, Jules will say. Because we have to, before it’s too late. Three years after that, she’ll die of an aneurysm in Wisconsin, and he’ll outlive her by another twenty-six years, never regretting a minute he spent with her, until he’s killed in a lightning storm off the coast of Oregon. They never do get to have children.

He doesn’t know any of that is coming, but he looks at her, angling toward the river below them. Feels it again, something in her, and stops thinking. Points his feet toward the water and closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath and holds it.

—Brian