by Thomas Cobb
“It was O.K. It was a show. It was nothing special.”
“You and Tommy get along all right?”
“We had some drinks, talked. We’re going to do an album, but I don’t know when.”
“That’s nice.”
“I’ve been thinking about you lately.”
“Lately? It’s only been a couple of days.”
“Yeah, but damned funny thing, it seems long, I mean since I saw you. I’ve been thinking of you since.”
“It was nice.”
“You think any about me?”
“A lot. I’ve been finishing the article.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Yes. I’ve thought about you. I had a good time.”
“Listen. I get off the road in another week. Then I have four days before I go back to Houston. I want to stop off in Santa Fe. I want to see you.”
She pauses for a long time. “You could do that.”
“Hell. You’re not making this easy. You want me to stop by or not? You don’t want me to, I won’t.”
She pauses again. “Yes. Yes, I guess I want you to.”
“I guess I’ll be stopping by in about eight days, then. On the ninth. I think I can be there by early evening.”
“The ninth?”
“That’s a Friday.”
“Friday. That’s good.”
“Maybe we could take Buddy to the zoo or something. Is there a zoo in Santa Fe?”
“I’ll look forward to it. We both will.”
“Me, too. So I’ll see you next Friday.”
“I miss you.”
When she has hung up the phone, he holds on to it for a moment. Say that once more, he whispers.
There are still a couple of hours until he has to get ready. He pulls on his boots and a shirt, and heads across the street to the bar. It is still fairly early in the afternoon, and the bar is quiet.
Bad walks to the back of the bar to check out the action at the pool table. There are three guys, two playing, one watching. They are playing straight eight ball, and they are playing respectably, calling their shots, making enough of them. The man in the plaid shirt is obviously the better of the two. He has a steady hand, and as Bad watches, he sees that he has enough knowledge of the game that he is setting up shots in advance and moving the game quickly. Bad walks over to the table and places a quarter on the rail, then goes through the rack until he finds a twenty-three-ounce cue that is pretty straight, not too worn at the tip. When the game is finished, he picks up his quarter, runs it and racks.
“We can play for drinks if you want,” Plaid Shirt tells him. “Or not, it doesn’t matter. But that’s as high as we go here. It’s a friendly game.”
“That suits me just fine.”
Plaid Shirt breaks and takes down three stripes before he misses. When he does, he doesn’t leave much. Bad takes out his glasses, surveys the table and takes the hardest shot, working for position. “Three ball, off the cushion.” The cue ball comes off the cushion slowly and nudges the three ball into the corner pocket, easing behind the twelve. The shot leaves him a straight shot at the six. He hits it low for backspin so the cue ball stops dead on impact, leaving him a line to the far end of the table. He sinks the four and the seven before he misses the one on a side carom.
Plaid Shirt takes two more before he misses. This time he mishits and leaves Bad a clear table. He runs it.
“Nice shooting,” Plaid Shirt says. “What are you drinking?” Bad looks around at what the others are drinking. “One of those drafts will be just fine.”
He takes the other two players easily. He hasn’t played on the road, but at home he plays for five or six hours a week. When Plaid Shirt brings his beer, he sips at it, playing conservatively but pulling away from the others easily. He begins taking harder shots than necessary, just trying to play against himself since neither of these guys is providing any competition. When Plaid Shirt is up again, he gives Bad a tight smile and puts his quarter into the slot. “Is this going to hurt again?” he asks.
Bad smiles and breaks. He likes the sound of that. “Is this going to hurt again?” He could do something with that.
“Mr. Blake,” Brenda says, “hold for Mr. Greene.”
Suddenly the earpiece of the telephone oozes recorded music. Ten million strings play Dolly Parton. The business has gone to the dogs.
“Bad, how’re you doing?”
“I’m not going to play another date, Jack. I’m off tomorrow night and that’s it. No more, damn it. No more.”
“Bad. Bad. No more. No problem, you’re done after tomorrow night. I’m not going to overbook you. I want you to get some rest.”
“Jack, if you found out your sister was turning five-dollar tricks, you’d overbook her.”
“Cute, Bad. Remind me, next time I’ll put you in a couple of comedy clubs.”
“Might as well, the clown bands you’ve stuck me with.”
“You ever tried to book bands in New Mexico?”
“New Mexico you did O.K. It was all the rest you fucked up.”
“That’s the first time you’ve ever admitted I did anything right. You’re slipping, Bad.”
“No. It’s the first time you did anything right.”
“Hell. That means I’m slipping. Anyway, I’ve got some news from Tommy. Apparently you actually did yourself some good for a change.”
“Yeah, I refused to whip his ass at golf.”
“Whatever you did, you did well. I got a check for twenty-five hundred for the albums you sold.”
“You cocksucker.”
“I know, Brenda told me.”
“Bless her heart.”
“Ditto. And I have a contract here, offering you a five-thousand-dollar advance for an album to be recorded at a future date, to be specified by the end of this calendar year. Plus another two thousand for first refusal rights to all songs written or co-written by you over the next two years.”
“Holy shit.”
“Ditto.”
“I’ll sign for the album but not the songs.”
“It’s the same contract.”
“X out the song part, and I’ll sign.”
“I don’t think we can do that.”
“Hell, you’re a lawyer; of course we can do that.”
“I mean, I think they did it this way to make it a package deal, take it or leave it.”
“I’ll leave it.”
“The hell you’ll leave it.”
“I don’t write songs, Jack.”
“Of course you write songs. Almost half of your income over the last ten years has been off songs you wrote.”
“Wrote, Jack, wrote. I don’t write songs.”
“According to this contract, you don’t have to. All they are asking is first refusal rights.”
“No dice. If I write another song, it’s my song, not Tommy’s.”
“Bad, you don’t have a label anymore. If you write a song, how are you going to record it?”
“I don’t give a good goddamn whether I record it or not. If it’s my song, it’s my song. I’m not going to work for Tommy Sweet.”
“All he’s asking is the right to see everything you write. It doesn’t mean everything you write belongs to him. This is first right of refusal, not indentured servitude.”
“I don’t have dentures. They’re my own teeth, they’re my own songs.”
“This is seventy-five hundred dollars. I believe you could use that kind of money.”
“I’m working on a song, Jack. I want it for myself.”
“So we’ll negotiate it with Tommy. I’m sending the contract to Houston. Sign it.”
“You sign it. You’ve got power of attorney. At least sign the damn thing for me.”
“Right. Think about this, Bad. Tommy has just kicked in nine grand in the last two weeks. Maybe you could ease up on him.”
“He’s a bastard with a nice checkbook.”
“Have it your way
, but this is now your best year in the last seven. Brenda has some messages for you. Get some rest and I’ll talk to you when you’re back home.”
“Right.”
There is a pause, a couple more bars of market music, then Brenda’s voice. “Mr. Blake. You’ve had a few phone calls. Let me give you the numbers.”
“Did you really give Jack my message?”
She laughs, “It was a bad day. I gave it to him word for word.”
“You sweet thing.”
“It was my pleasure. You ready for these numbers? Terry in Houston wants you to call him right away, he says you have his number.”
“Right.”
“Then there is a message from a Mr. Wilks in Dallas; his number is—”
“I don’t know Mr. Wilks. Who is he?”
“I don’t know; he just wants you to call.”
“It’s somebody who wants something, an interview or to listen to his new song. Can it.”
“You’ve got it. You have a good trip home.”
“I believe I will. I do believe I will. Wait, Brenda, hold on a second. What’s a nice perfume?”
“For who?”
“For a woman. What would you want someone to give you?”
“Serious or just fooling around?”
“Maybe serious.”
“I like Opium. It’s expensive, though.”
“That’s O.K. Tell Jack to wire me some money this afternoon.”
The perfume is the easy part. That only takes a good portion of his cash. By his reckoning, it would cost about five hundred to get even the beginnings of a buzz off it. The hard part happens in the toy store. He has not been in a toy store in over twenty years. The last time he was in one, it was small and filled with dolls, cap guns, balls and bats, games and stuffed toys. This one has all of those plus computers, tape recorders and stuff he can’t even recognize. The salesman points out the favorite toys: Gobots, Transformers, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Star Wars or Rambo. What it all comes down to, no matter how many guns, knives, bows and arrows, or muscles, is dolls. He considers a plastic guitar, but toy instruments seem wrong to him. He ends up with a riding fire engine and a foam basketball with a hoop that hangs over a closet door.
When he has finished the final set, shaken hands with the people who have stayed for last call, packed up his equipment and said goodbye to the band, he is tempted to get in the van and head out of Utah. He has about six hundred and fifty miles to drive. If he left now, he would end up in Santa Fe about two o’clock in the afternoon. He has told her early evening. He goes back to the motel and leaves a wake-up call for five o’clock. That will give him a little over three hours of sleep.
By noon he knows he has chosen the worst route. He has driven more vertical miles than horizontal. As soon as he hits a stretch of straight level road, the brush at the roadside grows coarse and dense. The van starts to knock in third, and he is climbing again. He tries to calculate the hours it will take to drive another three hundred miles in second gear.
He is weary of scenery, and his legs are starting to cramp. In the last six weeks he has driven three thousand miles, most of it on three or four hours’ sleep. He drives straight through, stopping only for gas and coffee. Food he buys at drive-ins where he does not have to get out of the van or even stop the engine.
Near the New Mexico border he stops for gas in a small station and gets the mileage to Santa Fe. Inside the station, a mongrel dog, part shepherd, raises his head and wags his tail. “Nice dog,” Bad says to the guy who is charging his gas.
“Damn good dog,” the guy says. “He might not look like much, but he’s a goddamn killer. He likes you. Course, you’re white. Let a goddamn nigger or Indian come in, and you’d better believe it’s a different story.”
The dog wags his tail. The guy comes around the counter and takes a swiping kick at the dog, who jumps back and bares his fangs. “You was a nigger, he’d tear your throat out. That’s a good dog. He hates niggers and Indians.”
The dog is backed into the corner of the wall and counter, his fangs still bared, watching the owner. “I don’t know about that,” Bad says. “Looks like a good judge of character to me.”
“He hates niggers. I got him for my wife. A damn nigger comes around her, that dog’ll kill him.”
“Must be a big disappointment to your wife.”
“Yeah. What? Hell no. My old woman’s a good woman. She hates niggers and Indians.”
“If she is a good woman, I’d get me a pack of those dogs if I was you.”
“Hey, what the hell are you sayin’? You sayin’ my old woman’s got a taste for niggers? That what you’re sayin’? You get back here.”
As he climbs into the van, the dog follows him out. “You poor son-of-a-bitch,” Bad says.
As he drives, images from a dream come back to him, a dream that never got finished but was cut off by the wake-up call. He is in a small bar, not one he has played before but one that might be all the bars he has played before. He cannot quiet the crowd, who keep getting up from their seats, heading for the door and coming back in again. He has this new song, and he is going to sing it for them, but only if they won’t tell anybody what it is. If he can get them to stay in their seats, Tommy won’t find out about it. “You have to be real quiet now,” he tells them. Half of them get up from their seats and head for the door, where Tommy is waiting. He keeps tuning the guitar and trying to hold the song in. Before he can sing it for them, the phone rings.
The song he was about to sing is called “Is This Going to Hurt Again?” As he drives, he works with the one line, trying others with it. That line is a chorus, he figures. He tries it as a first line, putting it to the melody of the fragment he came up with between Colorado and New Mexico: “Is this going to hurt again? / I can’t take any more / Long, lonely nights, walking the floor.” Then he tries: “I can’t take any more / Of saying goodbye, and slamming the door.” And other fragments: “I think about love every now and then / But then I stop and ask myself / Is this going to hurt again?”
What he needs is a guitar. If he could hear the music, test the possibilities on the guitar, he could find his way through this. Once he has a line or two, the phrasing of the music always suggests the rest of the lines. Trying to sing the song and invent the words at the same time is like trying to paint a wall as you’re building it. He has always believed that he never wrote songs anyway, he just copied down songs that already existed somewhere in his mind.
He has the feeling that if he stopped, he could do most of the song in about a half hour. But it is nearly sundown and he’s still a hundred and fifty miles or so from Santa Fe. The light is failing, he is sleepy and his back is beginning to stiffen on him. He keeps shifting position to try to put the pressure on different muscles. If he shifts to his right and pushes forward on the seat, he can stretch the cramping muscles, but he keeps slipping back. Finally, he hooks his left foot under the brace of the seat and lets the angle of his leg hold him in the position he wants.
He keeps working those phrases again, trying to hear the melody, the phrases that move it from verse to chorus in the attempt to work backward into the song. From what he knows, he tries to build an intro. A quick run from E to A to B7 and backward through A to E. He tries tuning the guitar, hearing the notes and running a quick E scale. “You’ll have to be real quiet,” he tells them. “I can’t sing this song unless you’re real quiet, stay in your seats and promise not to tell anyone what I have done.” But they don’t stay quiet and they don’t stay in their seats. He keeps tuning, but they won’t settle down. He keeps looking toward the door.
He hears the crunch of the tires on gravel and then an easy thump. He sees grass and brush and a wire fence coming at him in slow motion. He moves his foot to the brake and turns the wheel, but he is moving in slow motion, too, and the van is bouncing across the scrub brush at the side of the road, rocking slowly from side to side, over the fence. He hears the wire of the fence scraping the side of the van and pu
lling brush with it until the tree is in front of him. He turns the wheel as hard as he can, but the impact sends him across the wheel and into the windshield.
For a minute, he does not know where he is or why he is sitting here. His head is cold and his hand hurts. He sees his hat on the floor next to him in a pile of sheet music and a Styrofoam hamburger box. Around him, everything is wet and sticky. He bends over to pull his hat away from the mess of paper and spilled Coke, and pain blooms in front of his eyes like a Chinese firecracker. Things spin and the world implodes.
When he comes to again, his leg feels like it is strung with hot wires from ankle to hip. He tries to move it, and pain sends hamburger and bile burning up his throat. He eases himself back upright. Now his head is beginning to throb. He checks his face in the rearview mirror. He has a bump and a small cut across the top of his forehead. There is a thin trickle of blood in a winding stream down to his eyebrow.
What worries him is his leg. He can see that his foot is still hooked behind the seat brace. He tenderly runs his hands down the calf of his leg, over the tops of his boot until they reach his ankle. Slowly, gently, he pulls at the ankle to free his foot. A wave of cold splashes up from inside him and the inside of the van darkens to black.
“You O.K.?”
There is a hand on his shoulder, and a face at the window of the van.
“You O.K.?”
Bad leans his head back against the top of the seat and slowly nods his head. “Yeah, I’m O.K. Accident. Fell asleep.”
“Can you get out?” The man opens the door of the van slowly, holding on to Bad’s shoulder with his other hand.
“My leg. I think I broke my leg.”
“Try to get out. Grab on to me.”
The man, Bad is aware, is much smaller than he is, but when the door is open and he has turned around in the seat so he is facing the door, the man’s hands grip him hard under the arms and lift him from the seat. Bad reaches out, and puts his arm around the man’s shoulder. They do a slow, intricate waltz out of the van, lean up against it, and then spin heavily across the grass to where a pickup truck idles, its taillights flashing red.
