Shadows of Austin
Austin, Texas — March 16, 2023
The last of the dusk drained out of the sky over Waterloo Park, and the heat of the afternoon stayed behind. It had not left. It had only lowered itself onto the lawn and settled. Smoke from a food-truck grill rolled across the grass, loaded with charred tortillas, lime, and the sour tang of beer spilled on gravel. Stage lights swept amber, then blue, over the heads below. Two men in sunglasses, long after dark, stood with their arms crossed and studied the stage the way buyers study a used car. One of them raised a phone, photographed the crowd, and typed with both thumbs. Finn watched the thumbs.
Moody Amphitheater had room for five thousand. Tonight perhaps a thousand filled it, clumped in groups with trampled grass between them. Plastic cups sloshed. Phones rose and fell. A thread of marijuana smoke wound through the damp.
Finn Sterling had claimed the corner where the lawn met a concrete retaining wall, a slab still giving back the day’s warmth against his shoulder blades. The leather jacket he wore had gone pale at the elbows. Beneath it his shirt had stuck to his spine an hour ago. He kept his hands in the pockets anyway. Early forties. Studios and green rooms had cut the lines beside his eyes, and he could have named the night behind each one.
Some of his songs had exploded in other mouths, voices with more pull than his own. As a producer he had found talent, shaped it, and handed it its first real success. Then, every time, the same scene: the breakthrough arrived, and a harder man in a better suit arrived behind it.
“Listen to me,” he muttered, and half a smile twitched. “I’m a man. My mileage runs higher. The women get it worse. This business chews them up and goes shopping for something younger, shinier.”
He produced Zane Reed. He managed him, too. This week the kid’s name rode on every tongue in Austin, and Finn had counted the men who looked at Zane the way accountants look at invoices.
“If I lose him, I’m done with management,” he told the dark. “Production pays the bills. It keeps me busy.”
Zane came out of the crowd fast, hair flattened on one side by the wind, knuckles white around a water bottle. He had a stage shirt on already, and a dark patch spread under each arm. Behind him a sound tech counted one, two, one, two into a microphone, over and over, as if the numbers might change.
“Finn. Got a minute?” He pitched his voice low and checked over his shoulder.
His father wanted a new manager, Zane said. The old man claimed Finn couldn’t handle managing both of them, and he had stopped asking and started telling.
Finn laughed once, short. “I was thinking the same thing while I waited. If you came to say you’re done with me, say it.” He kept his tone light. It didn’t quite hold.
Zane rubbed the back of his neck. His father burned fast and had no patience, he said. The man had once told him he had no talent, and he didn’t care in the least who had found him. And when the old man got going, he never stopped. Zane wasn’t sure he could stand the pressure.
“Kid, I’ve been dropped before,” Finn said, and shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first. Maybe the last.”
“What does that mean?”
Finn looked out at the lights. “You go, I go. No more managing. Production, nothing else.”
Zane shook his head hard. “I don’t get why he’s so fixed on this. There’s something behind it. He’s getting something out of it.” He swallowed, and the water bottle crackled in his grip. “Mom warned me. She’s on your side. But she says once he decides, he turns into a plague.”
A stage assistant cut in, earpiece in place, clipboard against her hip. “Zane Reed? You’re up. Five minutes.”
Finn clapped him on the shoulder, felt the muscle jump under his palm, and kept the hand there one beat longer than necessary. “Go. Forget the rest. Kill it.”
“Thanks, Finn. See you after.” Zane jogged toward the stage.
The first bars hit the speakers: electronic pulses stacked under a hook that stuck on first hearing. The bass rattled the plastic cups. Finn backed into his corner and dragged a palm down his face. His fingers came away wet.
It was only a matter of time before that bastard made his move.
Zane did not know that Finn knew. When the boy was small, his father had beaten him. Trash, that man.
The crumpled pack came out of the jacket. Two weeks clean, and one conversation had undone them. The lighter threw sparks twice before it caught.
Drop the habit. Drop the managing, too. Production pays well and the calls keep coming. You can’t hold up the whole world.
A low laugh sounded behind him.
He turned. Cadence Moore stood a step away, dark-eyed, dressed in black from collar to boots. Her hair, short and reddish, left it unclear whether it was hers or a wig, and Finn did not hunt for the seam. The cut came straight out of post-punk, and kohl lay heavy around her eyes. Her name sat low on the festival posters these days, in type that took a squint to read, yet festivals kept booking it. The smile she gave him reached her lips and stopped there.
“Worried about something, Mr. Finn?”
“Where do I know you from?”
“We have a mutual friend. Aura Lux.”
“Who else?” He grinned.
“Aura Lux.” She offered her hand, then tipped her chin at his pack. “Can I bum one?”
“One. It’s poison for someone young and beautiful.” He held out the cigarette.
She lit it and drew the smoke in slowly. “You think I’m beautiful, Mr. Finn?”
“I do. Any doubt?”
“Sometimes beautiful isn’t enough.” Her exhale hung in the heavy air a moment before it thinned.
He frowned. “That’s a lot of acid for someone so young.”
“Young? At this rate I’ll be retired before I’m thirty.”
“You’re nowhere near thirty.”
“Near enough.” She tapped ash off the cigarette and watched it fall. Finn let it go.
“Not possible, either way. I saw your last show. You still move a crowd, you own a stage, and you don’t lip-sync. That voice is rare. It’s real.”
She laughed, short. “You sound like my dad. Same speech. The industry doesn’t value my work, I should find other people, I shouldn’t get discouraged.”
“Who manages you now?”
“Ian Nova.”
Finn’s mouth pulled sideways, as though he had bitten foil.
“That face. You know Ian Nova.” She was teasing.
“My mother used to say that if you’ve got nothing good to say about someone, silence answers best.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He dropped me.”
Her label had not renewed her contract either, she said. Tonight’s set was the last one on her calendar, and she was thinking of quitting. Only the fans held her back. One club in particular never missed a show, and she couldn’t picture telling them to their faces. She ground the end of the cigarette’s ash against the retaining wall as she spoke, small circles, over and over.
“By the way,” she said, “would you manage me? Or do you only take kids at the start?” She aimed for a joke. Hope leaked through anyway.
Finn pointed toward the stage, where Zane’s voice rode the beat. “Hear that?”
“Zane Reed. The sensation of the moment.”
“I manage him. I swore he’d be the last, and it won’t take long. We just talked. Another agent is circling.”
She tilted her head. “What I don’t get is why you’re in it at all. You’re one of the biggest producers in the country. Your songs blow up, people call. Why bleed in management? Leave that to others.”
He studied the ground. “Penance, more than anything. I didn’t want them repeating my mistakes. My first managers cut my career short. Without the songwriting I’d be out of the market, like all those promises that never paid.”
“Aura says you gave her excellent advice. She still follows it. Every time we meet, she brings it up.”
He shook his head. “Aura Lux is a different story. She left the minute she started to blow up.”
Surprise crossed Cadence’s face. “Wow. You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
A sideways smile. “I’ve said too much already. I should get ready. Are you watching? It could be my last. Historic: the early retirement of Cadence Moore, known to her closest friends as Destiny. My dad gave me that name at fourteen, right after my first show. He signed a few forms to get me on that stage. The name was supposed to stick. These days only my friends use it. I could have been a diva. A promise that ended too soon. Enough whining.”
“Who knows? Better days could come,” Finn said.
“Who knows,” she echoed, softly. “Are you going to the after-party?”
“I skip those. People get out of hand. Maybe I’ll stop by.”
“It’s at Hotel Vegas, on East Sixth. I’m off to the dressing room. I have a ritual I never skip. See you later.”
He watched her go, a narrow black shape sliding between the groups on the lawn, until the dark and the crowd closed over her.
What a waste. The industry is full of sharks. She seems grounded, and she’s beautiful. A few changes: current clothes, lighter makeup. The hard part she already does. She sings. Velvet and steel. There I go again. Enough.
He took one last drag and held it. On the stage Zane owned the lawn. The crowd swayed, deaf to every fight that never reached the lights.
