The yellow dog shook his head once, gums flapping noisily, and sent flecks of saliva splashing on to Jack’s leg just below his faded khaki shorts.

         “Take that thing into the studio and eat it, Dan,” he said.

Jack smiled and watched the old dog hobble slowly out of the kitchen. He picked up a ragged dish towel and wiped first his leg, then the floor beneath him where the major portion of drool had landed. He rolled the towel into a ball, turned, leaned back, and arced it high across the kitchen and into the rattan clothes hamper.

         “And the crowd goes wild,” he whispered hoarsely, lifting his arms above his head in the classic three point sign.

He reached into the refrigerator again and without looking, twisted a can of Rolling Rock from its tight plastic wrapper. Damned plastic crap. Never should have done away with returnables. Suddenly he felt old. Returnables. Cash ‘em in and you get a nickel for your trouble. He considered the old dog in the other room. Wonder how much he’ll bring when he cashes in.

         He pulled the pop-top and walked down the narrow hall into a large open studio room typical of the beachfront homes that dotted the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The front wall was a series of windows—large, square plate glass panels—separated by pine timbers Jack had hauled over from the mainland. The room rose two stories to a flat ceiling that supported a crow’s nest on the roof. In the back half of the house two bedrooms on the left overlooked Mississippi Sound. On the right, a bath and kitchen. The loft above was Jack’s bedroom.

        

         His two guitars rested in tubular chrome stands in the westernmost corner of the studio where he liked to sit by the fireplace during the cold months and write. The beat up Guild D-25 was a relic from the old bar days now relegated to open tunings and the rare friend who might make it to Jack’s out of the way backwater for a weekend of kickback and minor rehab.

The Yairi was his main axe, used mostly for summer gigs at Mario’s on the Island or at the small clubs he played in Gulf Shores across Mobile Bay. He’d found the Yairi in a pawn shop in The French Quarter where the salesman, a young dread-locked Rasta, had put the hard sell on him. Jack was skeptical. After all, no true acoustic picker over thirty believed a Japanese luthier could build a real guitar but when he picked it up he was surprised by its delicate balance. And when he played it, heard the even tone from top to bottom, felt the light resonance against his chest and belly…he was hooked.

         Besides, the price was right.

​

         Along the back wall sat a twenty year old Fender Rhodes piano in bad need of repair. Beside it, in a jumble of tape boxes and patch cords, the remains of his recording equipment; a Fostex four track, various sound effects machines and an eight channel mixing board.

         In the middle of the room stood his prized Steinway baby grand, facing the windows and the water. The last remnant of an earlier, more successful time.

         The gray walls were lined with framed black and white photographs Jack had taken over the years. Dark, moody scenes of mountains and sea. Wide expanses of emptiness, marked only by their lack of human content.

         Jack raised the cold beer to his lips and took a long swallow. On the floor,  Dan chewed slowly on the chicken breast. Through the big glass windows, puffy white clouds rode the horizon, reflecting the late April sunset. Mother nature’s daily gift to those fortunate few who chose to live their lives on islands.

        

         He opened the sliding glass door and stepped into the sunset, crossed the rough wooden deck and walked down the steps to the sand. He raised the Rolling Rock to his lips again and drained the can, wondering as he did every night why he enjoyed beer as much as he did. After all the years in all the tank towns, after all the junk he’d put into his body during the sixties and the seventies—the pot, the psychedelics, the pills and all the rest—he’d come back to beer. His drug of choice.

He dropped the empty can on the bottom step and set off up the beach for his nightly walk, waving his hand in front of him in a futile attempt to chase away the bugs that instantly swarmed around his head. He’d been on the island so long he figured he’d become half mosquito himself. It had been two years this past May. Two years of sunsets and evening walks, Rolling Rock and bugs. Instantly, he felt old again.

         “Even Dan’s about to leave me.”

         His brown eyes clouded over and he recalled that cold January night fifteen years earlier in a foul smelling men’s room at a truck stop just off the Indiana Turnpike, chipped plaster walls covered with grafitti and grunge, sink piled high with trash and decaying food. On top of the pile sat a brown paper bag. When Jack poked it, the bag yelped and when he peered inside, two tiny bright eyes peered back. When the eyes crawled out of the bag, they were followed by a little yellow fur ball somebody’d left behind, an orphan of the road.

         The puppy had slept in his guitar case that first night in the van. Jack named him Steely Dan because Steely Dan was his favorite group.

         “Still is,” he said out loud.

         One of his best late night pickup lines at Mario’s was that he’d worked with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker back in the sixties when he was playing rhythm guitar in a less than memorable variety act that opened for Jay and The Americans during Jubilee Weekend at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. But after awhile the girls at the bar got younger and didn’t seem to care if Jack might  have worked with Fagen and Becker until late one night a tipsy cheerleader from Ole Miss laid her head on Jack’s shoulder and cooed,  “Jack, honey, who the hell are Fagen and Becker, anyway?”

         So he’d dropped the story from his bar resume’.

​

         Jack waded slowly into the warm Gulf. “Hey, Nineteen,” he said, dove under a big wave and swam up the beach in long strokes, waiting for the moment when his mind would relax and he’d become one with the water and the sunset. But after fifteen minutes he was still caught in the past, wondering if his dreams had gone sour because Jack Beck didn’t have the talent for the big time or because Jack Beck didn’t have the stomach for the big time.

         After fifteen years in the business, his singular mark had been that one stupid three chord tune he’d written for Donny Pearl, chronicling the end of a nasty breakup with a barmaid he’d met in St. Louis back in sixty-six. Or was it sixty-seven? Gotta’ Move On was a simple tune with an even simpler message…

​

Runnin’ and hidin’. Stayin’ inside myself.

Gotta’ move on over where the grass is greener.

Get outside of your spell…

Gotta' move on. 

  

         Donny recorded it in two takes. The bass player missed the second hook after the chorus on the first take…da’ da’ dat dat da-da’ da-duh’. Bowm, bowm, bum. Only he missed the downbeat—‘bum’. So we did it again and Don nailed it.

Damn thing took off. Sold a million in two weeks. Then it died. So much for the Grammy, the Rolling Stone cover, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

         The royalties made up for the no-Grammy nomination. They’d bought him the beach house. Well, the royalties bought the bar in Asheville and the bar in Asheville brought him the marriage to Eileen and the big house on Town Mountain Road. He’d built this beach house three years ago against Eileen’s better judgment but after the divorce, it was all he had left.

The house and Steely Dan.

         He stepped out of the water and looked back down the beach to where the light on the deck shone pale in the distance.

         “Soon it’ll just be the house.”

 

         When he crossed the deck, Jack saw the dog lying quietly on the rug. When he closed the sliding glass door behind him, he knew by the stillness in the room that Dan had gone. He stepped to the stereo, clicked it on, slid Aja on to the turntable and when the music started, he turned off the light, opened another Rolling Rock and sat on the floor next to his old friend and bade farewell.