Just Shelby

by Brooklyn James

  Johnny Allman—who was he to Maisy? To Mason? To Shelby?

  I should invite her. I told myself I would, now that we are back on speaking terms. Five hours round trip to Knoxville, she could log more miles. Or she could drive right into another bombshell.

  Filing in backstage and waiting in line for my meet and greet after a show that inspired me more in hours than the mine has in months, the thoughts torpedoing my mind are not who are you and what were you to them. How did you do it? How did you make music your living? Those are my burning questions.

  Even with the barrier of the stage, Johnny was accessible, familiar. With every word sung, every lick played, he expresses what the crowd feels. I swear he was singing to me, for me—reaching into my gut and playing its misunderstood melody for all the world.

  Two stacked women, giddy after their meet and greet, pass by me. Ink from a permanent black marker runs across their pushed-up mounds barely covered in tube tops.

  Snap! Snap! Snap! Bony fingers pull my attention from the tube tops and back to the curtain.

  I grab my guitar case and follow the pencil-necked stage manager who speedwalks ahead of me. Just like Shelby did last night on the road. But I have no interest in catching him. So I take my time. I’ve waited for this.

  He talks into his headset, “Last one of the night, folks. Let’s make it a wrap,” leading me down a dark hallway and into an even darker dressing room.

  No stage but barriers nonetheless, Johnny sits on a lavish leather couch curtained by two thick-necked dudes. Handlers. Some chumps bring them to the fights. Johnny is more accessible on stage than off.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna ask you to sign my tits,” I say, reaching for an icebreaker.

  Johnny smiles, barely visible through a full mustache and beard, his hair longer than both. It makes as much of a statement as his music. An homage to those before him who were not only ahead of the cultural curve but shaped it, the hair is a rebellion against convention.

  “You’re not going to ask him to sign your guitar either. No guitars,” the pencil-necked stage manager says, throwing around the only weight he has. Snap! Snap! Snap!

  “Pickguards, are they allowed?” I ask, wanting to snap more than his fingers.

  “One.” His brow raises along with his bony digit, as if I need the visual.

  I set the case in the middle of the floor, almost at Johnny’s feet. He does need a visual. Lifting the hard-shelled lid, I wish it came with a sound effect. Like the one that got me hooked on Legend of Zelda for an entire summer before I discovered fighting. The first time I came across a treasure chest in Zelda, not only did it reward me with a new item but also an unforgettable sound. Da-da-da-Daaaaa! I don’t know whether Johnny ever played Zelda or would recognize the sound, but he certainly recognizes the treasure.

  “Everybody out,” he says, snapping his sizable fingers at the pencil-necked snapper who snaps his fingers at the handlers and follows them out the door.

  “Are you the eBay punk, undermining my brand, selling bootleg copies on the internet?” Johnny stands, the same height and build as me, even the same troubled gray eyes.

  If hair wasn’t swallowing his face, it would be easy to believe I am looking in the mirror, psyching myself up before a fight when I say, “I ain’t no punk. And the guitar isn’t for sale.”

  “Who are you? Where’d you get it? And where’d you get those gray eyes? Jesus Christ, it’s like I’m looking in a mirror, kid.”

  It takes me a minute, but then I laugh, confidently. The tube-top wearing groupies—I bet he gets his fair share of long-lost offspring scares. “I have a daddy. You’re not him. The guitar belongs to a friend of mine.”

  “There ain’t but two of them guitars in existence. Mine. And Mason Lynn’s. You’re a friend of Mason?”

  So he doesn’t know that Mason is dead. “Friend of his daughter.”

  “A girl?” He softens, sinking back down onto the couch. “Shelby…is a girl.”

  “How do you know her name?” I didn’t say it. Did I?

  “Mason and Maisy and me…” he runs a shaky hand over his mustache and beard, thoughts of the trio choking him up a bit “…had a band in high school.”

  “Bootleg.” I pull the CD from the inside pocket of my denim jacket and lob it on the couch beside him.

  “Aw, man.” He glances at it, sniffs, then stares down a spot on the wall. “Put that shit away, huh, kid.”

  I do, safely back into the inside pocket of my jacket. “Her name. How’d you know it?”

  “’69 Shelby Mustang. We rescued it from my uncle’s junkyard. If it was music, we could play it, fast. If it was a car, we could keep it running, fast.” As he talks, he taps his right fist into the open palm of his left hand, forcing meter in front of emotion. “Wasn’t the best choice for a band, but no one could tell us that. We stuck out like sore thumbs in the damn thing. The three banditos and all our gear.” His eyes take him back before they tear up.

  “Y’all were magic. I can’t stop listening to that album.” I fill the sobering silence.

  “We were magic. Mostly, we were young and dumb.” He wipes his nose on his shirt sleeve. “Maisy came up pregnant. Well, we all came up pregnant. All for one and one for all, ya know. Hell, we even voted on it. ‘We’ll go with you. Get it taken care of. Get back to gigging.’”

  “Shelby?” There was a chance she might not survive before she started fighting for life in that NICU?

  “Yep.” He bites down on his bottom lip, remorse and longing in his expression. “But Maisy couldn’t go through with it. I understood. I mean, I didn’t at the time. But I do now.” His fist starts once more, pushing rhythm and pulling emotion. “I set out on my own with nothing but the twin to that guitar. I told ’em I’d come back to see if Shelby was a boy or a… girl. We had a girl.”

  The collective “we.” Or Maisy and him “we.” Pop’s holler gossip—who fathered Shelby?

  “You know her, huh. What’s she like?” He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, an earnest inquiry.

  “Shelby?” I need a minute to formulate, or censor, my description. “She’s smart. Athletic. A track star. She probably makes the papers more than you do.” Yeah, that’s my favorite line. “No doubt she’ll get a full ride to UK between her grades and running.”

  “UK…” He is impressed. “College bound and an athlete. That doesn’t sound like any of us.” His chest reverberates with introverted laughter at the anti-qualities of many a musician.

  “She’s a hard worker. She waits tables, saving up for college, when she’s not studying or running. She’s bullheaded and determined.” With my description, I realize the things about her that are most attractive to me. “She makes a way out of no way. She’s a dark horse, man.”

  “There it is…” His eyes, no longer troubled, beam with pride and the same determination. “That’s Bootleg, bro. We had a girl… What about music. Is it in her?”

  An ironic puff of air bursts from my abdomen and into my throat like a croaking bullfrog. I can’t bear to tell Johnny Allman, especially after watching his seamless performance, that his daughter—if she is his daughter—is just not that into music. He hears it anyway.

  “Well, my old man used to say, ‘You can have anything you want, you just can’t have everything.’” His eyes press into mine. Maybe the only opportunity he’s had to pass along fatherly advice. “She’d be the first college kid in any of our families. It’s crazy, ya know. The only way to live life is forward, but the only way to grasp it is backward.” He throws his arms out to his sides, backstage after a sold-out concert, living his dream. “I wouldn’t change a thing. But probably we’d all be better off if I had. Maisy and Mason…they still holding up?”

  “I don’t really know them that well.” Seeing no way to broach that topic, I tell a form of the truth. I don’t remember much about Mason, only what got around. Maisy’s history speaks for itself, but I don’t know her on a personal level either. “You
’ll have to make good on that promise and go see for yourself.” Even saying that much seems dicey. Would Shelby want him coming around?

  “Yeah,” he says, “I just might do that.” But he doesn’t mean it. Does he? “Music. It’s in you, ain’t it.” He returns to pride and determination, eyeing the Bootleg guitar at his feet. “You play that thing?”

  “It’s beginning to consume me,” I say, addled by the deep-seated desire.

  “Don’t fight it, kid. Them there are the safest fucking strings you’ll ever have around your heart.” He snaps his fingers. The pencil-necked stage manager appears out of nowhere. “Guitar #1, where is it?”

  “Where all the other guitars are, Johnny, packed up on the bus and waiting for you.” The stage manager gives up snapping and takes up tapping his toe. “We’ve got Pigeon Forge tomorrow.”

  “How far away is that?”

  “An hour,” the stage manager mutters.

  “Ah, hell, we got all the time in the world.” Johnny walks to him and pops the collar on his polo shirt. With an elaborate handshake that the stage manager has trouble following, Johnny leaves a wad of money in his skinny hand. “Loosen up. Have some fun. And get some new clothes, will ya. See you on the bus in the morning.” Turning to me, he says, “Grab that guitar and come on.”

  My first real fork in the road—an early morning mine shift or an all-night jam session with Johnny Allman—I do not hesitate.

  Between breakfast and lunch shifts at Hot Brown, I save my legs from standing any longer. Putting my eyes to work with a book, I hunker down in a booth in the corner.

  The only law book I found while rummaging through Grandpa’s books, and a few other possessions, is not very helpful. How am I going to prove his innocence when I haven’t even managed to figure out if I committed an “invasion of privacy.”

  Not only unlawful, the books says it is the “unreasonable” intrusion into private affairs. Grandpa doesn’t have “affairs.” What’s his is mine, he has said on many occasions. It was nothing more than what a snooping parent would be guilty of. And what, exactly, does a “reasonable person” consider “highly offensive”?

  “Just cause,” I believe I have cause to snoop to prove Grandpa’s guiltlessness. But my mucking around produced nothing that screamed of his innocence. Consequently, does my failure to produce a shred of exculpatory evidence “ipso facto” annul my just cause?

  What I found could be incriminating—pills in an unmarked container. Not in any kind of container that I have seen standard prescriptions come in. It was longer than it was round with a bulbous capped end. Maybe its purpose is to hold a syringe. I have seen syringes before in Miss Patterson’s medical bag.

  I nearly missed the pills, the container secluded in a tube sock in the back of Grandpa’s dresser. The only reason it caught my eye is because I hide Hot Brown tips in a similar sock in my own dresser, the hiding spot a tip from Grandpa, an aficionado at hiding money from my mother. Money that he eventually divvies out to her, anyway.

  Does he hide pills from her too? That he eventually divvies out to her, anyway.

  Bells hanging from the leather strap on the entrance door jingle.

  His vesture as conspicuous as his vehicle in these parts, I identified him before the bells announced him.

  I slouch down in the booth, face camouflaged behind a Latin translation book—more manageable than the cumbersome law book that it will help me to comprehend.

  He carries my backpack casually on one tall lean shoulder.

  Testing the viability of telepathy, Drop it at the counter and leave I repeat over and over in my mind.

  His footsteps grow closer.

  Damn telepathy. If that doesn’t work, I am certain making myself invisible is completely off the table.

  His fingers wrap around the top of my book, lowering it until my eyes peek over the edge of the pages.

  “Paenitet me,” Grayson says, his eyes wincing with apology.

  He knows Latin? Of course he does.

  Taking the seat across from me in the booth, he lobs my backpack on top of it.

  I dig through the backpack like a dog in search of a bone. Pushing aside Destiny’s makeup, pushing to the bottom and out of sight the half-eaten food wrapped in napkins, I clutch the note to my chest and breathe a sigh of relief. Practice excused; I can compete!

  “Gratias tibi,” I should say. But I don’t. Reading it is an entirely different feat than pronouncing it…correctly.

  “Thought you might need that.” He smiles.

  The sunlight shining through the window front only enhances his amber eyes, more orange than gold in this light, hypnotizing as flames on a fire. They are rare, rich, brilliant, captivating, regal, perfect—everything that he is.

  He dresses like no boy I know, in an array of colors and layers. A light blue dress shirt held together at the neck by a burgundy tie, only the tops of both are visible beneath a camel V-necked sweater vest, layered again by a navy blue corduroy jacket, and complete with burgundy skinny pants. He pulls it off, everything impeccably tailored and showcasing his model-worthy form.

  Dressed in this fashion, he must be in town on business. The reason he is in Poke County is not to hand-deliver my backpack to me. That would mean not only is he perfect, he is beyond kind, an actual magnanimous man. Because when does one ever get to use that word.

  “To what do we owe your presence? Operation UCAN,” my antagonistic tone releases, mentioning the do-gooder organization for which I am apparently his latest project.

  “Nope. Nice day for a drive,” he says.

  “You drove all the way here to bring this to me?” Does that suffice as a ‘thank you.’

  “It was the least I could do. Look, Shelby, I’m sorry if I made you feel like a charity case,” he uses my words. Actually the blonde’s words that I overheard in the bathroom.

  I close the note back in my pack, my defensive front closing with it. “You didn’t make me feel like a charity case. And I’m sorry I made a scene and stormed off.”

  “No, no, you were right. I should’ve been straight with you that day my parents and I happened into town.” He grimaces, admitting serendipity had nothing to do with it.

  “It was the fairy godmother, wasn’t it.”

  “Cinderella?” he mouths, wondering what she has to do with anything and as if he hasn’t thought of the children’s character in…well, since he was a child.

  “Miss Patterson. She told you that I might be someone who might need a chance.” Now I grimace, admitting that a chance would be pretty awesome.

  “Ohhh, yeahhh.” Not only in resemblance, Miss Patterson does make wishes come true. “Imogen is Operation UCAN’s Poke County liaison.”

  She is Poke County’s everything. “So…you already knew about my mother and my father before I slipped up and told you.” The apples of my cheeks flush. Surely as red as Rudolph’s nose, since we are conjuring up children’s characters.

  He nods, his ears giving my cheeks a run for their money in overheating.

  Oh, good God. He knew all along! And I tried to act so normal, nonchalant, not like the daughter of a pill popper and a bootlegger—one barely alive and the other shot dead, Grandpa imprisoned for it. They once were rock stars, I want to defend. But what does it matter to anyone but me.

  “And I know you’re smart. You try. You apply yourself,” he jumps in, like Captain Brightside. “I know that you work hard. And you run…faster than I ever could.” His expression wavers between admiration and compassion.

  A sound, unidentifiable, escapes my vocal cords. This boy—this perfect, flawless-in-every-way college man—knows how utterly flawed I am.

  “Since we are in full disclosure here, let me tell you something about myself.” He clears his throat, those glimmering golden eyes retreating into fragility. “I. Am. A. Recovering. Addict.” He says each word as if it is its own sentence, as if the pauses allow the proclamation to sink in, not only for me but for him.

  �
�You?” I stagger. But you’re perfect, affluent, privileged.

  “Yes. Me.” Again, each word is its own powerful, surrendering passage. “My non-alcoholic Friday Happy Hour, that wasn’t a coincidence either. I was messed up all through high school, and even into freshman year at university. I was put on probation, almost flunked out. I had to take a year off for rehab.”

  You? At least I keep my stupefaction to myself this time.

  “Addiction does not discriminate.” He shrugs, his posture relaxing and sinking into the padded booth bench. “I used to think it did. I didn’t have a problem,” he says with a sarcastic air of superiority. “My parents had too much money for me to have a problem. They threw all kinds of money at my nonproblem. And it solved nothing.”

  There goes another unidentifiable sound leaching its way through stomach acid, up my esophagus, and out of my mouth. If Grayson’s money did nothing to solve his addiction, I have lost all hope for my mother who continues to reject even free resources available to her.

  “It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom, fell completely apart…until my parents cut off my cash flow, stopped ‘enabling’ me, basically…that I had no choice but to be humbled.”

  That’s what Grandpa was speaking to yesterday. His being in jail is a roundabout way of cutting off my mother, his last stop at “enabling” her. If that is his cover—his reason for copping to a murder he didn’t commit—certainly there are other ways to go about it. Unless he now realizes that he never could cut her off without being forcibly cut off from her, completely unavailable in jail.

  “I had no choice but to admit I had…have…a problem,” Grayson continues. “Admit. Accept. They are similar, easily confused. But the only way to acceptance is through admission. I first had to admit that I was powerless over addiction in order to accept the help I needed.” He pauses, staring right into me with those fiery ambers.

  Is this the part where I am supposed to reciprocate with a light-bulb moment of my own: I must admit that I am powerless over my situation, which has been spawned by my mother’s situation, and accept the help I need. The help he is offering.