by Thomas Cobb
“You know who I like?”
“Who?”
“Glen Campbell. God, he is so damned good-looking.”
“He can play.”
“I felt real bad when he and Tanya broke up. It was in all the papers. I bet she’s sorry now.”
“Most of us are.”
“Drink to that,” she says.
“I spent most of nineteen sixty-one on the road,” he says. “God, it was a great year. I had this Silver Eagle bus. We rigged it out for about ten thousand dollars. A hell of a lot of money then. We’d leave a show about three o’clock in the morning and hit the highway. Everybody in the back of the bus, drinking and playing cards—Will, Tommy, Bob. We’d drive all night and then the next afternoon we’d wake up in some other town, some other state, and it would be showtime again. Jesus, I loved that bus. We did the whole damned country that year.”
“I drove from Atlanta to Barstow, California, one summer. It was so goddamned hot. The car broke down in Arizona. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die.”
“Sometimes I’d just go up to the front of the bus with the driver and let the rest of them sleep. It was so damned quiet. And all around, you’d see the lights of towns, and up ahead, there was a city where they were waiting for Bad Blake.”
“Gila Bend. Goddamned Gila Bend,” Donna says. “We broke down right out of Gila Bend. I was so hot I got a rash on my arms.”
Bad keeps ordering drinks.
“So what do you want to do, Bad Blake? You want to go back on the road?”
“Yeah. I want to go back. I’m booked here for another six months.”
“Let’s go. You and me. Let’s go out on the road. You show me what’s so great. What do you and those cowboy truck drivers like so much about the road? Show me.”
Because it is after nine, they cannot buy a bottle. He drives to the club. Ernie is tending bar. “Wayne here?” Bad asks.
“Took the night off. Just me and Larry.”
“Look,” Bad says, “I’m taking a bottle. Let Wayne know. I’ll make it good.”
“Right,” Ernie says. “You have a good time. See you Wednesday.”
He keeps heading up 59, north, through Cleveland, Livingston, Lufkin, Nacogdoches. The night is cool and he’s not sweating. Donna doesn’t say much. He passes the bottle over and takes it back.
In 1961, driving through Nebraska, he sits up all night with a bottle and his guitar, showing Tommy delicate runs, trying to explain the importance of a hesitation or a pull. Tommy is quick and sure, running the board as fast as Bad can, but missing the intonations. Bad shows him again and takes another pull from the bottle and pushes it over to Tommy. The kid is good, if he can only learn to slow down and listen to what he is doing.
The horizon is lightening when Bad heads back for his bunk. Tommy is on his knees in front of the chemical toilet, heaving. Bad stops, goes in and holds his head. “It’s all right, son. You’re good. But it’s going to be a while before you’re another Bad Blake.”
He awakens to the steady pulse of the red light on the dashboard. “Oil,” it flashes, “Oil.” It is raining and the wipers are going, though he does not remember turning them on. The van is full of the sharp smell of hot oil. As he is wheeling it off the road, he can hear the shrill whine of the bearings.
Donna wakes up. “Where are we?” she asks.
“I don’t know, maybe Arkansas.”
“Where are we going, Bad?”
He tries the key. The starter grinds once before it jams. “Nowhere. The engine’s seized up.”
He gets out of the van. He has no idea where they are, or where the highway is. The road is dirt, softening into deep mud in the rain. The way to go back is the way they came, he figures. He goes back to the van.
She is asleep again. He takes the bottle and a flashlight. He nudges her awake. “I’m going to walk for help. If someone comes along, I’m going that way. You going to remember that?”
“You going for help, Bad?”
He can barely walk. He is drunk, his ankle is tender, and the road is inches deep in mud. Twice he falls and pulls himself, crawling and stumbling, to his feet. To either side are trees, and he can see nothing but the few feet of road ahead of him. His heart is pounding. He can’t gauge how far he has come, but he can still see, faintly, the taillights of the van behind him.
The third time he falls, he can’t get his feet back under him. He crawls to the side of the road, hoping for something dry where his feet can find purchase. His hand slips through a rill of wet mud and the rest of his body follows down the ditchbank. He lands in cold water and rights himself. It is less than knee-deep, but the bank is slick with mud and he can’t pull himself up.
He lies with his back against the ditchbank, resting and trying to get his heart to slow to a quick shuffle. He has lost the flashlight, but he still has the bottle. He lays his head back on the ditchbank and takes a long pull, then lets the rain wash over his face. “Otis,” he says, “goddamn.”
About the Author
THOMAS COBB was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the novel Shavetail and the short story collection Acts of Contrition. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife.
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Praise for Crazy Heart
“A measure of Thomas Cobb’s talent is that he can make Bad Blake’s story amusing even as we watch him fall. Bad is entirely sympathetic, and his crazy heart is vivid; the milieu is as resonant as a steel guitar, and the plot moves along without skipping a beat.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Crazy Heart is a beautiful book…. The characters are cut cleanly out of America—the roadside West, the dance halls and beer joints, the occasional big concert, Houston, Nashville, Southern California, and the endless, eternal hotel rooms that are as close to home as a country singer ever gets…. Bad Blake is a man you will not soon forget.”
—Washington Times
“[Cobb’s] picture of the scraggly underside of Western music is brutally convincing.”
—The New Yorker
“Blake’s dedication to, and integrity towards, his country music is more than matched by Cobb’s moving, respectful evocation of the world of country music, and the life and times of Bad Blake.”
—Boston Herald
“A masterpiece…[Cobb] has created an unforgettable character who engages not only your interest but your emotion…and who proceeds to take you on a roller-coaster ride through his tawdrily tumultuous life.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Thomas Cobb has written a bitter, witty psychological profile of an aging genius that is also a wonderful celebration of country music. Bad Blake lives at the poor end of the rainbow, but you’ll never forget him. Crazy Heart is a splendid achievement.”
—Donald Barthelme
“A piercing, keenly observed chronicle of modern Americana.”
—Los Angeles Times
“This is a heartfelt book: the descriptions of writing songs and playing them, of finding love and ruining it, of sweet, painful memories. There’s nothing startling in the plot or the characters, but they are alive.”
—Houston Chronicle
“You can almost hear the whining twang of a pedal steel guitar and the droning of a mournful singer while reading Crazy Heart.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Copyright
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce song lyrics:
Lyrics for “Satisfied” by Martha Carson. Copyright © 1951 by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Lyrics for “Faded Love” words and music by Bob Wills and Johnnie Lee Wills. Copyright © 1950 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
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br /> A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1987 by HarperCollins Publishers.
CRAZY HEART. Copyright © 1987 by Thomas Cobb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST PERENNIAL LIBRARY EDITION PUBLISHED 1988.
REISSUED IN HARPER PERENNIAL 2010.
Copyeditor: Marjorie Horvitz
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Cobb, Tom.
Crazy heart.
“Perennial Library.”
I. Title
PS3553.0194C7 1988 813.’54 87-395
ISBN 978-0-06-091519-3 (pbk.)
* * *
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062325525
10 11 12 13 14 OFF/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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