Mary leaned toward the girl. "How long have you been here, Sissy?"
"I don't know. It's easy to lose track of time. Six years at least. Or maybe it's eight. Or nine."
"... Keith Moon of The Who... Brian Jones of the Stones... that cute li'l Florence Bollard of the Supremes... Mary Wells..."
Articulating her worst fear, Mary asked: "How old were you when you came?"
"Cass Elliot... Janis Joplin..."
"Twenty-three."
"King Curtis... Johnny Bumette..."
"And how old are you now?"
"Slim Harpo... Bob 'Bear' Hite... Stevie Ray Vaughan..."
"Twenty-three," Sissy told her, and on stage Alan Freed went on screaming names at the almost empty town common as the stars came out, first a hundred stars, then a thousand, then too many to count, stars that had come out of the blue and now glittered everywhere in the black; he tolled the names of the drug o.d.'s, the alcohol o.d.'s, the plane crash victims and the shooting victims, the ones who had been found in alleys and the ones who had been found in swimming pools and the ones who had been found in roadside ditches with steering columns poking out of their chests and most of their heads torn off their shoulders; he chanted the names of the young ones and the old ones, but mostly they were the young ones, and as he spoke the names of Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, she heard the words of one of their songs tolling in her mind, the one that went Oooh, that smell, can't you smell that smell, and yes, you bet, she certainly could smell that smell; even out here, in the clear Oregon air, she could smell it, and when she took Clark's hand it was like taking the hand of a corpse.
"Awwwwwwlllll RIIIIIYYYYYGHT!" Alan Freed was screaming. Behind him, in the darkness, scores of shadows were trooping onto the stage, lit upon their way by roadies with Penlites. "Are you ready to PAAAARTY?"
No answer from the scattered spectators on the common, but Freed was waving his hands and laughing as if some vast audience were going crazy with assent. There was just enough light left in the sky for Mary to see the old man reach up and turn off his hearing aid.
"Are you ready to BOOOOOGIE?"
This time he was answered -- by a demonic shriek of saxophones from the shadows behind him.
"Then let's go... BECAUSE ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE!"
As the show-lights came up and the band swung into the first song of that night's long, long concert -- "I'll Be Doggone," with Marvin Gaye doing the vocal -- Mary thought: That's what I'm afraid of. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.