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The latest motel in a never-ending parade of them looked less like a place intended for human habitation and more like an abandoned shack that some optimistic business owner (or a deeply malicious prankster) had nailed a 'motel' sign onto in the hopes of gathering a few extra bucks before the building finished its slow collapse into a pile of dust.
Its vacancy sign buzzed in the dawn haze with the persistence of a dying insect, the lights flickering as the sign swayed in the morning breeze. The asphalt parking lot shimmered beneath a layer of old oil stains and desert dust. A Coke machine filled with Pepsi products leaned crooked against the emptied ice dispenser like a drunk propped up outside a closed bar. Somewhere nearby, a dog was barking.
Inside room twelve, nine Leningrad Cowboys, one band manager, and one corpse slept in various states of collapse throughout the room.
Mauri Sumén woke first.
This was not unusual. Accordion players lived harder lives than other musicians, so of course they always had to wake up first. Guitarists got all the attention on stage. Singers got women. Drummers got to sit down for the entirety of every performance and were applauded for it. Accordionists got chronic back pain and the responsibility of carrying around an instrument roughly the size and weight of a radiator.
Not to mention the fact that women, bizarrely, didn't find accordions very attractive.
Mauri sat up slowly on the edge of the coffee table he had been using as a bed, wincing as his spine crackled like frying grease in a hot pan. The room smelled like beer, cigarettes, leather shoes, staler-than-stale socks, and the lingering spiritual presence of the poor decisions they had made after their show last night.
Pekka lay in his coffin propped up near the wall beside the television, still dead. His ice looked like it could use a refill, judging by the slow spread of a water puddle across the motel carpet.
As he yawned, Mauri nodded at Pekka politely.
Then he froze.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
His hand went instinctively to his hair.
Flat.
His hair was not fully flat, but flat enough that immediate, medically urgent corrective action was required before he was seen by anyone whose opinion he valued, or simply by anyone at all. He couldn't let anyone see him like this! What would Jatimatic Ohlstrom say?! In a blind panic, Mauri reached toward the pocket where his comb should have been.
Nothing.
Well, maybe it fell out during the night. He checked beneath a cigarette pack. Under a motel bible (no bills tucked away, which said a lot about the clientele). Behind an empty beer bottle. Behind a second empty beer bottle. Behind a third, fourth, and fifth empty beer bottle.
Nothing.
A cold dread settled into Mauri's chest.
He turned toward his bag, suddenly frantic now, rummaging through clothes, sheet music, loose socks, and a mostly empty bottle of cheap aftershave.
No comb.
To make matters worse, as he picked up the bottle to check beneath it he realized his can of hairspray was empty, not even enough left for a single emergency stabilization of a shaky pompadour.
He pressed the nozzle. A faint wheeze. A ghost of hairspray that he could smell in the air.
He pressed it again.
Nothing at all.
Mauri stared into the empty can for several long seconds, as though the sense of betrayal itself might magically refill it. Then, as he looked at the floor beside his bag, came the third horror.
His shoes were gone.
The spot beside the table where his long winklepicker shoes had rested overnight sat empty except for a crushed cigarette and something that might once, maybe, have been a pickle.
Mauri looked around the room wildly.
Everyone else still slept, oblivious to the horrors Mauri was enduring.
Sakke sprawled half-off the mattress nearest the window. Mato snored loudly into his coat sleeve beside him, somehow having ended up sideways across the bed. Sakari had somehow ended up sleeping in the bathtub again. One of the others was using an unopened pack of hot dogs as a pillow. Vladimir, of course, was sleeping like a baby in the bed he had claimed entirely for himself on the other side of the room.
Igor was nowhere to be seen, but Mauri simply assumed he was still asleep out in the trunk of the car. Since they brought Pekka in at night, there was always plenty of space for Igor to lay down and sleep out in the car.
Mauri stood slowly, carefully stepping over Heikki, who was sprawled out on the carpet, halfway under the bed that Sakke and Mato were sleeping on.
Without the shoes, his pant legs pooled awkwardly around his ankles. Without the pompadour, the silhouette the rising sun cast on the wall looked wrong. Incomplete.
Mauri hated it immediately.
He crossed the room and shook Sakke's shoulder. "Sakke, wake up," Mauri whispered. "Where are my shoes?"
Sakke opened one eye halfway, squinting up at Mauri. "What?"
"My shoes. The ones I leave by the table."
"Which table?"
"The coffee table. Where I sleep."
Sakke's eye moved to the coffee table, then back to Mauri. "...who are you?"
Mauri blinked. "What?"
"Do I know you? Why would I have your shoes?"
"I am Mauri."
"...no," Sakke shook his head, "you aren't."
"Yes I am."
Sakke closed the eye. For a moment Mauri thought he had gone back to sleep. But then, after a moment, Sakke opened his eyes and peered up at Mauri curiously. "Mauri? The accordion guy?"
"Yes."
"The accordion guy has nice hair."
The silence that followed was long.
"I... I have nice hair."
"...no...Mauri's hair looks much better." Sakke yawned, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
Mauri stood motionless for a moment. Then he tried Mato. Mato squinted at him through the dim light filtering between the curtains.
"I didn't think housekeeping was allowed in the rooms before checkout."
"I am not a housekeeper."
"Then who are you? Why are you in our room?"
"I'm Mauri."
Mato frowned, raising a hand to rub at his eyes. "No... Mauri is taller."
"I'm not wearing my shoes because somebody moved mine."
"You don't have any shoes?"
"Yes. That is the problem."
Mato blinked groggily over at Sakke, who was now lighting a cigarette, and then back to Mauri. "I think you should leave."
"But I sleep here," Mauri protested.
"No you don't. I don't know who you are."
"Yes, I do sleep here," Mauri pointed at the coffee table. "That was my bed last night."
Sakke exhaled smoke thoughtfully. "He could be police." he whispered as he bumped Mato's shoulder. "Undercover, or something. Maybe the government here knows we're trying to get into Mexico."
"I play the accordion," Mauri offered. "You know the accordion player who plays the accordion in the band I play that accordion. ...because it's my accordion. And because I'm Mauri."
"No... you aren't," Sakke and Mato both said, squinting suspiciously at Mauri.
By the time Mauri had attempted explanations with the remaining conscious members, he realized that it wasn't just Shakke and Mato. Nobody recognized him.
Not a single one of them.
Without the towering pompadour shellacked into place by industrial - and probably toxic - quantities of hairspray or the sharp winklepicker shoes extending his silhouette by at least another foot and a half, Mauri apparently ceased to exist as a member of the band.
He looked, according to Silu, "far too ordinary to be a Leningrad Cowboy."
"You look Swedish," Puka had said accusingly. "Mauri doesn't look Swedish. Finnish, maybe."
Mauri stared at them all in disbelief. He had opened his mouth, closed it, and spent several seconds genuinely uncertain whether being called Swedish by his cousin who had known him since childhood was the most offensive thing that had happened to him today. It was, he decided, a close race with being called a housekeeper and being accused of robbing a dead man.
"You have toured with me for years," Mauri insisted. "We grew up together."
"Prove it," Sakke said, folding his arms across his chest.
"I know all the songs."
"Fans know songs." Mato crossed his arms, matching Sakke. "That proves nothing."
They didn't really have fans, but Mauri decided not to go down that road.
"I know that we bought the first car for seven hundred bucks back in New York."
Silence. That gave several of them pause. Then, Mato narrowed his eyes. "You could've seen that. Are you stalking us?"
Mauri, briefly, considered if violence would be the answer. But instead, he retreated toward the bathroom while the others argued amongst themselves in low, suspicious mutters. Sakari was still in the bathtub, but he was asleep, snoring quietly.
The motel bathroom light buzzed weakly overhead. Somebody had left cigarette butts along the sink. The mirror was cracked directly through the center, splitting Mauri's reflection into two equally exhausted men. He stared at himself.
God. They were right.
Without the hair and shoes he barely looked like a Leningrad Cowboy at all. Just some tired man standing in his worn socks in a crumbling Texas motel.
For not the first time since they had arrived in America, Mauri found himself wishing that their sisters were with them. Their sisters would have recognized him, even without the pompadour or shoes. And they certainly would've knocked some sense into the rest of the band.
Shaking his head, Mauri's gaze drifted away from the mirror and slowly toward the coffin visible through the half-open bathroom door.
Pekka still had his own shoes, his own hairspray, his own comb, tucked neatly into his jacket pocket.
Mauri stared at the coffin for a long moment. It felt morally questionable. But then again, Pekka was dead. And more importantly - Pekka was impeccably styled.
Mauri stepped quietly back into the room. Nobody paid attention. Sakke and Mato had started arguing about whether or not to wake up Vladimir to beg for breakfast. Everyone else was still in various states of waking up, or still asleep entirely. And so, slowly, carefully, Mauri crouched beside the coffin.
"Sorry," he muttered to Pekka under his breath. "I'm just borrowing, I promise."
He reached toward the comb-
-and the coffin lid suddenly creaked loudly beneath his elbow.
The room went silent.
Everybody turned to look at Mauri and the coffin.
Pimme squinted. "What's he doing?"
Mauri froze. "...Nothing."
"Why is he touching Pekka?" Heikki asked. "Do we know this guy?"
"He's robbing Pekka!" Puka cried, pointing an accusing finger.
Mauri stood quickly, throwing his hands up. "I was not robbing him!"
"You were opening his coffin!"
"I was borrowing from him."
"From a dead man?"
"Well..." Mauri shrugged, "it's not like he's using it."
That comment seemed to only made things worse.
Mato stood up out of bed abruptly enough to nearly fall over. "Get away from Pekka!" he shouted, and threw a beer can at Mauri's head.
"I just need his comb!" Mauri cried as he ducked, the beer can neatly landing in the ice settled at the bottom of Pekka's coffin. "...and his hairspray and shoes."
"You admit it!" Then Silu gasped, his eyes narrowing as he looked at Mauri. "Wait," He pointed dramatically. "And he's got Mauri's accordion! Thief!"
The room fell silent again.
Mauri looked down at the accordion hanging from his shoulder.
Right.
At some point he had instinctively picked it up when Heikki nearly kicked it as he rolled over on the ground.
Unfortunately, this only made him appear guiltier.
"...this is my accordion," Mauri said tiredly.
"No it isn't," Sakke replied. "It belongs to Mauri."
"Yes...and I am Mauri."
"You keep saying that." Sakke shook his head. "You liar!"
Another empty beer can flew past his head.
Then a shoe. Ironically, and disappointingly, it was not one of his own.
Mauri staggered backward clutching the accordion protectively against his chest as the band surged toward him in drunken outrage.
"You don't even have the right hair to be Mauri!" Someone cried.
"You don't understand," Mauri shouted desperately. "I just ran out of hairspray!"
The words hung in the air like toxic gas.
Ran out.
Mato cursed himself. Leningrad Cowboys never ran out of hairspray. That was like forgetting to breathe.
Sakari, who had been awoken by the commotion, stepped out of the bathroom and pointed shakily toward the front door. "Get out."
"No way, you can't-" Mauri protested, but Sakari shook his head.
"A man who runs out of hairspray," Sakari said, with the gravity of someone delivering a sentence in court, "is not a Leningrad Cowboy. And I don't want him in this room."
Mauri stared at them all. "...you're serious?"
Another beer can bounced off the wall beside him, and Mauri finally gave up. He left with the accordion strapped over his shoulder and the motel door slamming behind him hard enough to rattle the windows in their cracked and dusty frames.
Inside, the remaining Cowboys stood in uneasy silence.
After several moments, Puka spoke.
"So... has anyone seen Mauri..?"
Nobody answered.
Mauri stood outside in the parking lot for a moment in his socks, in the already-building heat.
Without the shoes, his pant legs pooled incorrectly around his ankles. Without the pompadour, the silhouette the low sun cast on the cracked asphalt beside him was the silhouette of nobody in particular. An anonymous man with poor posture and an accordion.
He found he could not look at it for long.
Mauri started walking.
The town they had found themselves in barely deserved a name. It had one diner. One gas station. One church with peeling white paint and a sign outside bearing an inspirational message that had weathered until only "LORD" and "SUFFERING" remained legible. One grocery store with security bars on the windows despite the fact that there appeared to be nothing inside worth stealing. A few other miscellaneous stores and restaurants, nothing special at all.
Mauri wandered through it all miserably.
Without the shoes, walking felt wrong.
His hair sagged further with every passing hour beneath the Texas heat, already fierce despite the early hour.
As he passed, people looked at him.
Not in the way people usually looked at the Leningrad Cowboys - the long, incredulous double-take, the widened eyes, the instinctive reaching for a companion's arm to verify that the other person was also seeing this. That look, over time, had become something Mauri relied on. It was almost a point of pride, to draw so much attention. But these people looked at him normally.
This disturbed Mauri greatly.
At one point, a waitress opening the doors of the diner said, "Morning, sir!" without hesitation.
Mauri nearly walked into traffic.
He was not a sir. None of them were sirs. The word assumed a basic quantity of respectability that the Cowboys had collectively never possessed and were, as a group, philosophically opposed to. Being called sir was worse than being unrecognized.
Around noon he found himself sitting beside a laundromat eating stale crackers from a vending machine.
A small child approached him cautiously. "Hey, mister. You in a polka band or something?"
"No," Mauri sighed. Not anymore.
"You look sad."
"I am," Mauri admitted.
The child considered this, biting into a candy bar that he had selected from the vending machine.
"Okay. My dad always looks sad too," the child offered, in a tone that suggested this was intended as comfort. Then the child left.
Mauri ate another dry, stale cracker.
He had heard what happened to men who left the band. Or were pushed out of it. Some of them went to the camp. A few of them, Mauri had heard it said, actually liked it there more than being in the band. He thought about the camp seriously for a moment. And then Mauri ate another cracker, and desperately wished that he had some money to go to the bar.
Somewhere across town (which wasn't very far) Mauri could faintly hear the band rehearsing without accordion or keyboard accompaniment. It sounded terrible.
Good.
By late afternoon the heat had become unbearable, and Mauri had ended up in the town park - although calling it a park was generous. It was really just a patch of dying grass surrounding a fountain that no longer functioned, and a few trees that had somehow not withered away into dust. He sat on a bench beneath the least-dead tree, his accordion resting beside him like a loyal dog.
He was more tired now than angry. Mostly he felt insulted.
Years on the tundra. Months together on the American road. Endless bars and deserts and jail and terrible, terrible gigs. Shared cigarettes. Shared motel rooms. Shared onions.
And apparently all of it outweighed by a missing pompadour and pair of shoes.
As evening settled over the town, he curled sideways against the bench, his arm cast over his eyes to block out the light.
The air, thankfully, finally began to cool.
Traffic hummed faintly from the highway in the distance, and Mauri must have drifted half asleep because the tap on his shoulder startled him badly enough that he nearly jumped up and swung the accordion like a weapon. But instead Mauri looked up, exhausted and prepared for another confrontation.
But instead of one of his bandmates, he saw...
...Igor?
Igor stood silently beneath the streetlight that had come on while Mauri slept. In one hand he held a bag with the logo of a corner store Mauri vaguely remembered passing printed across it. In the other hand he held Mauri's shoes. Shoes that were... freshly polished?
Mauri stared at him, and Igor smiled, small and a little shy, the way he smiled when he had done something he hoped was right but wasn't certain.
Then he lifted the bag slightly, letting it fall open so Mauri could see the contents. Inside sat a new can of hairspray. A comb still in its packaging. And food. Bread. Sausage. Beer.
For a long moment Mauri said nothing.
Then he looked at the shoes again. "Where did you find my shoes?"
Igor pointed vaguely toward the motel.
Mauri sighed, and looked at the shoes for a long time. Then he reached out and took them, set them beside him on the bench, and accepted the bag with both hands.
Igor sat beside him on the bench.
Mauri opened the hairspray with something approaching religious reverence. Then he pulled the comb free of its packaging. Carefully, methodically, he rebuilt the signature family pompadour. As he worked, Igor watched with fascination. And when Mauri finally finished, the towering hair once again defied both gravity and common stylistic sense.
It was perfect.
Hair settled, Mauri bent down and slipped his shoes back on. And then the transformation was immediate. Balance was restored.
Igor grinned broadly, and Mauri studied him for a moment. Then slowly, he pointed at Igor's head.
Igor blinked, his expression one of confusion.
Mauri shook the can lightly, motioning to Igor's head with the comb. Igor's eyes widened, and a moment later he was sitting perfectly still while Mauri attempted to construct something vaguely resembling a pompadour from Igor's extremely limited amount of hair.
It did not work.
But after enough hairspray, almost anything became possible, and Igor looked delighted, raising a hand to touch his hair, as though checking it was real.
Then they split the food between them in silence beneath the flickering park light.
After a while, Mauri spoke. "You know, they didn't recognize me."
Igor nodded sympathetically, taking a bite of the sandwich he had assembled for himself.
"They thought I stole my own accordion. Which is stupid. Who would steal an accordion?"
Another nod.
"They also thought I was the government stalking them," Mauri added. "At one point, they thought I looked Swedish."
Igor made a face.
"Yeah." Mauri took a drink of beer. "Exactly."
After a moment, Igor motioned towards the hotel, his expression questioning.
"Well, they are idiots," Mauri said. He said it without heat. "But, no, I wouldn't leave the band over something like this. I guess I can't really blame them, I can't remember the last time I saw any of them without their pompadour or shoes. I probably wouldn't be able to pick any of them out of a crowd."
Igor smiled.
Mauri paused. Then, slowly, he smiled too.
"You know," he said, reaching over to clink his beer bottle against Igor's, "you're really not so bad."