“I don’t know, baby. I can’t figure it out. Obviously, they can’t either.”
I pick up the torn fragments of the lame poem, a Keats rip-off. It—the music—swallowed him whole and pulled him under. Like Appalachia, it ate him up. In other words, he ran out on Mom. How is Johnny Allman so popular when he isn’t even original. Or half the man my father was.
“Where did you get this? How do you know it’s from Johnny? There isn’t even a signature.”
“The mix of cursive and print is Johnny’s signature. We wrote so many songs together. I never knew anyone else who wrote like that.”
I know someone who writes like that. I wrote a “song” with him too. Someone who is apparently chummy with Johnny Allman. Why didn’t he tell me! “Where did you get it?”
“From the pocket of the Cooper boy’s coat. The one you wore home that night when Enisi was staying with us. God bless her, she tried. She’s on my amends’ list too.”
So Enisi might not be my grandmother? “Did she see the note? Does she know?” I have grown to love her.
“I found it while I was doing laundry. She didn’t see it. The only way she could know is if Mason told her. But he couldn’t have, or she would’ve rubbed it in my face. Huh!” The burst of inhaled breath locking her mouth open like an “O,” she thinks she’s solved it. “Unless…it was Enisi?”
“Yes, a mother murders her own son when she finds out that the child of his wife whom she loathes is not his after all,” I say as sarcastically as I possibly can.
“You’re right. None of it makes any sense. I thought maybe you had already read the letter. It was in the pocket of the coat you were wearing.”
“Ace’s coat. And if I had found it in the pocket of his coat, I would have assumed he wrote it. Not Johnny Allman.” The writing is that similar.
“Would he? Have wrote it?” my mother asks, as if it is a possibility. “Making you…me…think it was Johnny. But why? Does he know? How could he?”
“He knows Johnny.” How long has he known this about Johnny…about me? And why hasn’t he tried harder to tell me!
“I thought the two of you were friends…or something.” Her brow arches with “something.”
I thought we were too. My fingers stroke pensively the black heart necklace. The diamond represents trust. What trust? It feels how it looks—ominous. And I thought it was romantic!
“You know, his father—Boone—used to buy tincture from your daddy. But he never came to the house to get it, like everyone else. And if I ever answered the phone when he called to order, he would hang up.”
“He hates us.” Why would he buy anything from my father?
“There’s a difference between hating someone and looking down your nose at them, Shelby. He and Wren always had money, stability, things…that’s all.” She tilts her head sideways, thinking. “In fact, he had a thing for me in high school…”
“Maybe that ‘thing’ reignited after Wren left him?”
“And Wren had a thing for Johnny,” she adds.
Johnny. Oh, good God, don’t tell me he’s Ace’s biological father too.
That would make us…
I run for the bathroom, bile creeping from my guts and toward the black heart necklace.
It takes me an hour of speeding through the holler, stopping and running and tracking every trail through the woods before I find him.
In the same tired windbreaker, he’s slumped over beneath a tree. By the hair of his head, I tilt his face up and press the inhaler I carry in a clenched fist to his blue lips.
He fights me, his weary eyes saying just let me die.
“Breathe. Inhale, goddammit!” I pump the inhaler—puffs dispersing into thin air, a few disappearing into his mouth—until it won’t pump anymore.
Mom meets me at the ER in her scrubs.
“I thought you had New Year’s off.”
“I did, but they were short-handed,” she says, pulling me away from the room where a hoard of nurses and technicians tend to Pop.
“Johnny Allman…” Mom and I blurt out, continuing at the same time.
“Did you date him in high school, were you a thing, why didn’t you tell me?” I say so fast, running it all together, just to get it out.
“He’s upstairs in the ICU, their tour bus crashed, he might not make it,” she says, just as rapidly, finally hearing my question. “Did I date him?”
“He might not make it?” I respond with a question, present trumping past.
“He’s fighting for his life, Ace.” She paces back and forth in front of me in the hallway.
But he can’t die. “Shelby.” He hasn’t made good on that promise yet.
“Shelby? Oh. The rumor.”
“It’s not a rumor. There’s a secret note square. I found it in the Bootleg guitar. Not Mason’s, not the one you tracked down for me, but Johnny’s twin guitar. Somehow we got them mixed up the night we were jammin’ on his bus. If the note means what I think it means, he thinks he’s Shelby’s biological father.”
“But he can’t be. The blood types don’t add up,” she says, distracted or deep in thought, her hands whirling about.
“Blood types? Like why I couldn’t donate to Pop but Shelby could.”
“Exactly.” She stops pacing, her pale blue eyes searching mine for familiarity—proof of the inherited mutant gene. “But you could donate to Johnny,” she whisper-cries. “None of it makes sense. What happened that night!”
“What night?” She isn’t making sense.
“He’s all set, Wren,” a nurse calls down the hallway from Pop’s room.
“Thank you,” Mom forces composure. “You, go, look after your father. I’ve gotta go see a woman about a birth.” Fire returns to her hopeless eyes.
“Are you covering for her?” I cut to the chase, my knee bounding beneath the table, sitting across from Grandpa in the stuffy visitation room. “‘She wouldn’t, but the drugs would.’” Did the drugs murder my father? His death drug-related, after all.
Grandpa shakes his head, sorry he gave me ammunition for such a conclusion.
“I saw her this morning in rehab.”
“Oh, ya did. How’s she doin’?”
“Great, way better than expected.” The unexpected truths and amends in her recovery, although disturbing, are promising. “She told me more in the hour we had together than she told me all my life. I know he was going to take me with him. I know she told him I wasn’t his to take.”
“Dontcha believe that, honey. If ever a child belonged to Mason, you did.”
See, that right there—it’s proof that Grandpa wouldn’t take him from me. Who did? And why is he taking the fall. Will any subtle reaction or body language give him away? “So are you…covering for her. Did his ultimatum send her over the edge? Did my mother shoot my father?” I whisper, unable to even utter the specific question at a normal decibel.
Grandpa chuckles to mask it, but the sarcasm rings through his chesty tone. “Yer mama don’t know a barrel from a trigger ’bout a gun. I made shore o’ that. She didn’t even know I owned one.” Apparently he, too, knew that she thought about death, the possibility of taking her own life.
“But my father knew you owned a gun,” I half state, half question.
“I don’t know. I reckon he did, sure.”
“Are you covering for him. Did he shoot himself?” I whisper again.
“Sounds like ya been talkin’ to Poke County’s finest, honey. That’s what they thought…’til ballistics proved ’em wrong.”
“Wouldn’t be the last time they were mistaken, would it, Grandpa.”
He moves not a muscle, his poker face unwilling even to blink. The classic “shutdown.” I read about it in a magazine in the library at school. No shift in movement or eye contact is one sign of being economical with the truth.
“Was it Boone Cooper?” I continue with the last lead my mother and I ended on.
“Boone? Why would I cover fer him, honey. He nev
er liked us, no how. An’ the feelin’s mutual.”
“She said he used to buy tincture from my father. Mullein, maybe.” I recall the voracity with which he self-administered it beneath that red maple in the woods. “He was really weird about it. Secretive.”
Grandpa shrugs. “Maybe he didn’t want anyone knowin’ he was buyin’ from yer daddy. Yer mama’s addiction kinda tainted any ‘medicinal reputation’ yer daddy was tryin’ to establish. Guess people looked at her an’ assumed he was makin’ whatever she was takin’.”
Maybe buying mullein every now and then was Boone’s way of keeping tabs on him. Or her. If that “thing” reignited after Wren left. But how could that thing reignite. My mother wasn’t the same person Boone would have known, had a thing for in high school. Why would he want her and all of the issues associated with having her—an addict.
Wren. Her friendship with my father—if he moved to Lexington, they would be closer than ever. Maybe my father pulling the trigger on the move incited Boone to pull the trigger in a fit of jealous rage. With Grandpa’s gun?
“Was the gun my father carried in the glove box of the Shelby yours?” I stumbled upon it once as a child. Before slamming the glove box shut and pretending I never saw it.
“Well, now, honey…” Grandpa thinks about it too long. The “big pause”—another sign of lying—occurs when the brain first has to suppress the truth before inventing the lie.
It was!
That’s how Boone could have murdered him with Grandpa’s gun. If my father always met Boone somewhere other than the house, somewhere out of the public eye—the remote river, notorious for unscrupulous activity—he would’ve done so in the Shelby.
If the Shelby was there, the gun was there.
In the ER after everyone leaves the room, Pop pulls the oxygen tube from his nose and says, “You should’ve let me die.”
“I thought about it,” I deadpan. “But I need answers.”
“Says the boy who thought he could hide the truth from me.” He rummages through the patient belongings’ bag clutched in his lap and pulls the keepsake VIP tickets to Johnny Allman’s concert from the pocket of his windbreaker. I had them tucked away in the accessory compartment of the guitar case.
So I pull from my own pocket the half-burned spy photo of Mason and Mom. “You never could start a fire for shit, Pop.” I chuckle, attempting to quench the burning tension between us.
He almost laughs but stops himself.
“Where’d you get the mullein? The amber bottles in the medicine cabinet.”
“I don’t owe you any explanations. But since you’re asking, I got ’em from the Lynn girl’s grandmother, same as she did.”
“You got ’em from Enisi, huh. Then why are they all outdated, half-used. Unlike her son…” my finger flicks the spy photo, over Mason’s 3rd Generation Extracts sign “…Enisi’s still around. You could get new bottles, that are actually effective.”
“‘Enisi…’” he quotes, like I am the biggest traitor or disappointment. “Hanging out with that girl’s gone to your head. You wanna be a Lynn. Or an Allman?” His eyes simmer like that fire he tried to start. “‘Enisi.’ Does she know that girl really ain’t her granddaughter?”
“You got them from Mason, didn’t you.” I surprise myself, staying the course rather than biting at his baiting.
“Maybe. If I did, it don’t mean nothing. What are you insinuating, son.”
“Why would you buy anything from Mason? All your warnings to me about the Lynns, do as I say not as I do, huh. Were you spying on him, too, Pop?”
“I bought the shit from him because he was my only option. The dust got in my lungs too early. I couldn’t go to a doctor, risk having it on record. If the mine knew, they would’ve canned my ass before my symptoms got worse, before it could be linked to them. I don’t want worker’s comp, no how. But they don’t know that. I couldn’t lose the mine. That’s what Coopers do. Most of us, anyhow.” He looks away from me, the first to break from the pack.
“If he felt the same about you as you did him, he could’ve ratted you out. Or was he going to?”
“This ain’t a CSI episode, son.” Now he laughs. “Mason couldn’t tell anyone or he would’ve been telling on himself. He had enough trouble with the law. Some of that shit he was making wasn’t legal then. It’s barely legal now. That’s why he was setting up shop in Lexington, a more ‘progressive society,’” Pop pokes fun at the city slickers thumbing their noses at the hillbillies.
“And what, you couldn’t stand seeing him make a better life for himself, moving closer to Mom.”
“Yeah, that’s it. I lured him to the river, broke into old man Walker’s home and stole his gun in the meantime, and then blew him away. Is that what you think of me, son?” His bottom lip starts to quiver.
“Then why the spying?” My voice lowers, sympathetic to his feelings but still needing answers.
He clears his voice, gaining control of his lip. “Hiring a P.I. in divorce cases is more common than you think. It might be underhanded, but it’s not illegal.”
“But you and Mom were beyond divorced in this photo. What could you possibly be trying to prove here?”
He shrugs. “If I thought your mom and Mason were more than friends…maybe van den Berg would, too.”
“Ahhh, Pop.” Hell, it ain’t about murder. It’s about love—in a weirdly warped and stalker-ish way.
He never gave up on her, never gave up on the idea of getting back with her. He gathers pictures of Mom and Mason. They show up on van den Berg’s door. van den Berg misreads them. He breaks things off with Mom. Mom comes back to Pop.
“The plot twisted on me.” He twists the VIP tickets in his hands. “van den Berg was in on Mason’s project, one of the backers. He was as chummy with Mason as your mom was. He even told Mason about the pictures, the P.I. Must’ve gave both of them a good laugh.”
“God, I’m sorry, Pop.” Sorry for being such a jerk of a son. How could I think he was capable of murder. But… “What’s your beef with Johnny Allman? That guitar wasn’t mine to keep.” And I’m feeling less sorry, recalling its broken and charred pieces. “It was handmade. It’s not like I can just replace it.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you hid it from me.” Tears streak down his cheeks, meeting at the corners of his trembling mouth. “You might think he’s something to aspire to, a ‘guitar god.’ You’d rather be him than me.” His Adam’s apple visibly gulps—a hard pill for any father to swallow. “But he’s no man to model, son. He’s a coward who ran out on responsibility. I hope your mom realizes that. I know she got you the tickets. Probably called in some high school sweetheart favor.”
“The pictures of him in the shoe box…”
“She left them behind in the attic. Some school memory box, I reckon. Report cards, clippings, and photos, obviously. Guess it should be a comfort. If they meant anything to her, she would’ve taken them with her.” He snuffs hard, wiping away tears with hospital linens. “I’m surprised she got you the tickets, encouraged you to meet him. She was hung up on him in school. Had to find out the hard way what a louse he is. Drove her right into my arms. And to think, I couldn’t wait to catch her.”
“How long after that was I born?”
“A couple years.”
“So…this has nothing to do with the possibility that Johnny is my ‘biological’ father.”
“Only your wish that he was, son.” He looks away from me, more tears releasing.
“But why would you cover for Boone Cooper?” I squeeze my temples between my thumb and middle finger. It’s all so confusing, not to mention hypothetical. What could be so bad—worse than murdering my father—that Boone could have on Grandpa, or my mother, for Grandpa to take his place in jail.
“Ya jist squashed yer own theory, honey. Boone ain’t got nothin’ on no one. Not even his ex-wife, an’ not fer lack o’ tryin’!” The first Grandpa’s enthusiasm has shone through, he’s not covering
for Boone.
It didn’t faze him when I threw in the theory that my mother thinks my father was not biologically mine. That would be something for which Grandpa might cover for Boone. If Boone even knew.
Johnny! If the secret note square is from Johnny, he obviously knew.
But he ran out on us.
And why would he murder my father and never claim what was his. Why would he leave the Shelby in my possession, the title being in his name. Unless there was more at stake than what the Shelby is worth!
Like his career, his music catalog—maybe some of it was established during Bootleg years. My father and my mother co-writers on songs Johnny used—wouldn’t they be entitled to royalties? Royalties Johnny wasn’t prepared to share.
Bringing me back to the same conundrum, “Are you covering for Johnny Allman?” Shooting in the dark, I have not the conviction to ask the question like I mean it.
“Johnny Allman ain’t been ’round these parts in years. Listen to yerself, honey. This ain’t one o’ them books ya read.” Grandpa’s voice lowers, taking pity on me, before escalating. “I ain’t coverin’ for yer mama, yer daddy, Boone, Johnny. I ain’t coverin’ fer no one.” He thumps his fists down on the table, a rare show of anger—allegiance.
There isn’t even a handful of us that Grandpa would willingly shoulder such a punishment for. Me, my mother, maybe my father, if Grandpa weren’t already locked up for murdering him!
“After all that’s come to pass, I’m su’prised, right thrilled to be sittin’ here with ya. I’d much rather spend this precious time talkin’ ’bout you, runnin’, school, life. ’Side from food, sleep, sparse readin’, an’ even sparser outdoor time, we ain’t got much to look forward to in here. So, please, lay it on me. Tell me ev’rything, honey.” He tries, giving me his best gummy smile.
All that’s come to pass. What they say I did, I done. But he still hasn’t said—specifically admitted—I…shot…your…father.
And how can my mother know, without a doubt, that Johnny Allman is my biological father? She must’ve had sex with him and my father around the same time, for my father to have thought that I could be his. Was there ever a paternity test?
Just Shelby Page 23
