by Lisa Tucker
I wrote to Jimmy. I’d been hearing from him less and less, but still, I expected a quick response given this emergency. No matter how angry he was with Father—and surprisingly, he seemed to get angrier as time went by; his recent letters were full of curses, talk of how our father had fucked him up royal and screwed up his whole life, et cetera to coarse et cetera—I couldn’t imagine that he could ignore my cry for help.
Two weeks later, when I still hadn’t heard anything, I snuck into Father’s study again and tried to track down a phone number for Jimmy, to no avail. A week or so after that I decided there was no choice: I had to go to St. Louis and get my brother.
I called Dr. Humphrey and asked him what to do about caring for my father. Mrs. Rosa, our housekeeper, was still with us, but she barely spoke English and she was only at the house one day a week. Dr. Humphrey sent a nurse who agreed to stay until I returned, as long as I gave her a large sum of money “up front,” which she explained meant before I left. I did so, and an hour later, dressed in what Grandmother had always called my Sunday best clothes, I walked through the door.
Father was still asleep and I couldn’t bring myself to say good-bye. I did leave him a long letter, in which I explained that I would be as careful and cautious as he’d raised me to be and promised to return to the Sanctuary very soon. I also told him I loved him, but I refused to let myself feel how true this was, knowing I would break down at the thought of how worried he would be when he discovered I was gone. But there was no choice. If the only thing he wanted was Jimmy, then I would just have to bring Jimmy home. Surely the two of us could convince Father to get the medical help that his life might depend on.
It was a Wednesday; my plan was to return by Saturday. It was feasible. Jimmy had told me the trip there took about a day and the trip back the same. That left me one day to find my brother, and it shouldn’t take half that, I thought, since I could just give the taxi driver the return address on the most recent envelope.
I had decided not to carry a suitcase or umbrella or even a purse, so a thief couldn’t come after me. I could wear the same clothes for three days; I’d always been a tidy person. My socks were the only things I would have to replace at some point. I had on three pairs of panties; I figured I would remove the inner pair each day and throw them out. I had the stack of money I took from Father’s desk drawer, hundreds of dollars (in case of emergency), curled together and shoved deep in the pocket of my skirt. I had my toothbrush wrapped in plastic and stuck in my sock. I had Dr. Humphrey’s phone number committed to memory, so I could call and check on Father’s condition each day. The last few letters Jimmy had written, with three separate addresses, were tucked under my sweater close to my heart. And folded into the bottom of my shoe was a page from a poem, The Faerie Queene. I’d cut it out carefully, so the binding of the book wasn’t disturbed. In the middle of the page was the line that would be my new motto: Be bold, be bold, and every where Be Bold.
I admit I tried not to think too much about what all this boldness might entail.
Dr. Humphrey offered me a ride in his automobile to the local bus station, and I gladly took him up on it. Jimmy had walked the dirt path all those miles, but I wasn’t as healthy, nor did I have the time to waste. I took the local bus to Raton, and then the Greyhound to Denver, and then the second Greyhound to Missouri, and then I was finally in a taxicab, probably going down the same roads my brother had gone down when he first arrived in St. Louis. And he was right: the noise was the first shock. It was stunning how loud a city was: stunning and absolutely thrilling.
Everyone on the buses had been quietly pleasant. When people smiled at me, I acknowledged their smiles with one of my own, to be polite. After a while though, I was smiling more spontaneously. Nothing outside was bad. This was what Jimmy had been telling me for nearly two years, but I hadn’t believed him. I expected to be afraid. I was waiting to feel the dread of other people that Father felt, that he couldn’t help letting slip out now that he was too sick to keep up a brave front.
Nothing outside was bad, and so much was astonishing. The trip across Colorado, Kansas and Missouri was wonderful, but being in the city—knowing that I was in a real city, a place with thousands and thousands of fellow creatures—was almost more exciting than I could bear. I watched the crowds moving on the sidewalks. Such colorful clothes! The variety of expressions people made! The unusual songs playing on what appeared to be giant portable radios! The black people and brown people and especially all the younger people! People of my own age and Jimmy’s!
I’d been in the taxicab for fifteen minutes and I was feeling very bold—bold enough to speak to a total stranger. The driver had an appealing face; perhaps that was why I decided to let him be the first person in the city I spoke to. I was also proud that I had something to say to him. Some months before, Jimmy had sent me a ticket stub from a concert he’d attended. When it fell out of the envelope, I’d studied it carefully before putting it away. I knew the difference between a ticket and a stub. I knew the tickets the taxi driver had displayed were never used.
My question was so ordinary, or so I thought, and yet the next thing I knew, the driver was not only refusing to answer, he was so angry he turned all the way around at the first stoplight to look at me with what seemed to be unmitigated hatred.
The sudden feeling of fear struck me with the force of a blow, and yet I also felt vindicated. So this was what Father had tried to protect us from. This was why he kept us from any contact with the world outside the Sanctuary: because human beings were every bit as unpredictable as a tire swing, and just as capable of harm.
Of course the fear was stronger than the vindication, and I squeezed my eyes tight and wished to be home harder than I’d ever wished for anything in my life. When I found myself still in the cab, I also found myself headed for the worst kind of nervous attack. My heart was already pounding so hard I felt like it would beat its way right out of my chest, when I began to steady my breathing and calm myself the way my father had taught me, the way I’d been doing since I was a very small child. I opened my mouth and began to sing.
SHOUT DOWN THE MOON
A starkly lyrical novel of page-turning intensity and rare emotional power, about following dreams and overcoming obstacles, about finding your voice and becoming the hero of your own life.
Patty Taylor can handle anything. So what if the guys in her band dismiss her as just a pretty face, hired by their manager to make them more popular? She’s already survived a bad childhood, a destructive teenage relationship, homelessness, and working twelve-hour shifts washing dishes. Traveling with the band gives her a way to provide for Willie, the two-year-old son she adores. But on a hot summer day in Kentucky, when Willie’s father shows up outside her hotel room, newly paroled from prison and intent on having her and his son back, Patty begins a journey that will change her from a girl who can put up with anything to a woman with a voice that can bring the house down.
Read on for a look at Lisa Tucker’s
Shout Down the Moon
Currently available from Pocket Books
One
I know he’s coming. His sentence was seven years, but after less than three, he’s made parole. Mama sends me the news on one of her yellow stickies: FYI, with the date he’s being released—June 3, 1991—circled several times in thick black pen.
On the phone I remind her of the letter I sent him after Willie was born, explaining I wouldn’t be writing anymore, it was over between us. I talk as though I believe the letter convinced him, and change the subject while she’s still feeling relieved.
For weeks I expect him to show up at the club. Sometimes I peer out into the blackness of the audience, wondering if his eyes are on me, if he is listening. Once, I’m sure I hear him laughing right before the first set and I screw up one of the verses of our big opening number: a medley of oldies we call “Yesterday Once More.” Our keyboard player, Jonathan, frowns and later, grumbles to the other guys that I’m an a
ir- head. He doesn’t like me, none of them really do. Before I came along a year ago, they were the Jonathan Brewer Quartet, no chick singer, strictly jazz. They didn’t make any money as Fred Larsen, our manager, likes to point out. Fred likes money and he likes me just fine.
Fred renamed the band, making me the primary attraction, the name on the marquee and the face in the advertisements. At the time I felt flattered; now I realize this means it will be easy for Rick to find me. And he does, but he doesn’t come to the club. We’re doing a two-week stint in Paducah, Kentucky; it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday in July so hot the blacktop feels soft under my sandals. I’ve been down the road at the drugstore, picking up chewable vitamins for Willie, and as I round the corner, I feel my breath catch as I see him, slumping in a lawn chair outside of my motel room with his head against the green concrete wall. Asleep.
He looks paler, a little thinner, but otherwise the same. His hair is still long with a few curls; he still has a gold earring in his left ear, and he still has the stubble on his chin that’s become the style for guys now but he’s had ever since I’ve known him. Even the clothes he’s wearing are familiar: black cap pushed back a little, tight, faded blue jeans, white T-shirt advertising Lewisville Motor Sports, a place he used to work years ago, before he met me. In a way, I’m relieved—I imagined terrible things happening to him in prison, things that would mark him, change him—but I’m also more nervous.
Asleep, he looks younger, almost innocent. And so much like Willie, that’s what hits me the hardest.
He hasn’t heard me coming, I could still back away, but I don’t. Willie is with my friend Irene for the next few hours and this is as good a time as any. I say his name and he wakes up so suddenly that he bangs his head. And then he rubs his eyes and looks at me.
Instinctively, I cross my arms. When he last saw me, I was so skinny I could hide an ounce of weed in the waist of my junior size five jeans. Having Willie made me fill out everywhere. Now I wear a misses size eight.
He stares at me for a minute, and then he’s standing and mumbling, “Patty, Jesus,” as he reaches for me so quickly that I drop my package.
His skin is hot and sweaty but I don’t pull away. He’s trembling and his voice is soft, telling me he’s missed me so much, please don’t make a scene, he’s violating parole to be here, out of state. But he had to see me, just for a little while. He can’t stay long; he has to see his parole officer back in Kansas City first thing Monday morning.
When I finally step back, I’m shaking too because it has occurred to me that I smell like Willie. And because I know we’re standing two feet from the door to my room, and on the other side of the door is the evidence: diapers, Willie’s clothes, stuffed animals, Ninja turtles, and Matchbox cars.
The thought that Irene and Willie may come back early makes me decide what to do. I pick up my drugstore bag and shove it in my purse. “Let’s go to the coffee shop across the street,” I say, already moving in that direction.
I look back and see him still standing by the door. I know he wants to go to my room so we can be alone. “Patty,” he mutters, but when I turn back around and begin walking, I hear him following me.
At the restaurant we order too much food to distract ourselves from the awkwardness. He sips his coffee and says he doesn’t want to talk about prison; then he asks me questions about my job.
I tell him we’re a cover band, playing pop and rock songs, old and new. I tell him about Jonathan’s original pieces, how beautiful they are, no words, just the richest melodies and a deep, complicated interplay between the instruments, and how if the crowd is small, the group gets to play some of those songs in the last set.
I’m still describing one of the songs when Rick interrupts. “I’ve never heard you talk about music like this before.”
He’s leaning back, looking straight at me. I tell him I’ve been with the band for almost a year; I’ve picked up a lot of the language. I don’t say that nearly everything I’ve learned I’ve had to overhear, since none of the guys will talk to me about music. Jonathan resents me even being on stage when he plays the instrumentals, even though he knows it’s not my doing. It’s Fred’s biggest rule: “The Patty Taylor Band has Patty Taylor on all night.” When I’m not singing, he wants me to shake a tambourine and smile, or dance a little in the tight gowns he has me wear. Once Jonathan complained that having a chick gyrating distracted the audience from his art, and Fred snapped, “You better get over your problem with her if you don’t want to find your ass on the street.”
“I can’t wait to hear you,” Rick says, tapping his fingers. “I always knew you’d be a star.”
I don’t bother telling him that the most I ever make—at the top clubs, the ones Fred has to sweat to get us in—is four hundred dollars a week. I’m hardly a star.
I ask him if he has a job yet and he shrugs. “I’ve only been out a few weeks.” He smiles. “I’ve been busy… busy thinking about you.”
Both of us are finished picking at our food when he lowers his voice and tells me he still has it. One of his friends kept it for him while he was in jail. And he can give me some. He can give me as much as I need.
I know he’s talking about all the money he had: thousands of dollars he kept in a blue duffel bag in the bedroom closet, next to the other bag, the one that said Reebok, which he used to carry his guns. I’m surprised; I figured the cops confiscated all the cash when they tore our apartment to pieces the morning after he was arrested. I stare at the wall behind him and think about what that money could mean for Willie. But then I think what Rick might mean for Willie, and I don’t respond.
“Come on,” he says, and smiles a half smile. “What do I have to do? Stick the money in your hand?”
He’s trying to remind me of the day we met. I look away, pretend to be interested in the old couple who’ve just sat down at the next table—but of course I’m thinking about that day now too.
It was late fall, my freshman year. Mama had gone on another of her drinking binges, and I was sitting on the bleachers of the deserted baseball field, trying to decide where to go. I didn’t have any real friends; I couldn’t bring anyone to my house, knowing how Mama was. I was tired of going to the Baptist church shelter, tired of having to tell them the same lie, that I’d run away, and then be forced to listen to the counselor telling me how worried my family had to be.
By the time Rick came along it was nearly dark. I might have been crying a little. I prided myself on my ability not to cry when Mama threw me out, but this time was different. This time she’d pushed me out the door before I could grab my Walkman. I had nothing to listen to but the sound of my own lonely breath.
He parked his car by first base and walked over and stood in front of me.
“I’ve driven by here three times tonight,” he said. “You haven’t moved. Are you all right?”
I mumbled, “Yeah,” and tried not to look at him. I knew who he was, even though I didn’t know his name. He and his friends had fancy cars and bad reputations; of course they stuck out in a town as small as Lewisville, Missouri. One of the girls at my school said they were a gang of big-time drug dealers, but I figured she was making it up. This wasn’t New York or L.A. Our local paper covered Cub Scout food drives and car washes, not gangs and drug busts.
I heard him exhale. “You need a place to stay tonight.” When I didn’t answer, he opened his wallet and started pulling out twenties. “Go to Red Roof Inn. Debbie works there. Tell her Rick sent you.”
I shook my head, but he stuck the money in my palm and told me to do it. Then he said, more quietly, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He left before I could give the money back, and I didn’t see him until the next morning, after I woke up in the beautiful Red Roof. I was never sure the hotel was a good idea, but I got cold. It was a few blocks away. I wanted the clean sheets and the TV.
He was waiting in the lobby. When he asked if I wanted some breakfast, I was floore
d. I hadn’t had anybody offer me breakfast since I was seven years old.
Later, Rick admitted it was partly charity but not just that. He thought my hair was absolutely gorgeous. From the road, when he was driving by, he could see it was blond and very long, way past my waist. And when he saw the rest of me, he thought I was like a girl in a dream he had, a girl he’d always been looking for. To me, he was like the big brother and uncle and boyfriend I’d never had, all rolled into one. Meeting him, I’d finally found my luck.
I wait for the waitress to pour more coffee and take our plates before I change the subject, away from money and our past, back to the band. Rick listens to me talk about the places our band has been. I tell him we’re based in Kansas City, but we’re on the road most of the time, playing hotels and little clubs. I’m in the middle of a story about a wedding we played in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when he tells me he has to know.
I give him a startled glance.
“What did you name him?” He clears his throat. “Or is it her?”
I feel like I’ve just been punched. I was so careful not to be in Lewisville the whole time I was pregnant. I lived in a home for pregnant girls down in Kansas City. I never saw anyone who knew us, or so I thought.
I force a confused look, insist I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Just tell me the baby’s name, Patty,” he says, his voice urgent, his hands flat on the table. “Please.”
“He’s not a baby. He’s almost two and a half.” I pause before whispering, “William.”
“William Malone,” he says, but I correct him. Willie has my last name. Mine.
“Right,” he says. Then softly, amazed, “I have a son… Does he know about me?”
I feel tears in my throat as all at once I’m remembering when Willie was born. I was alone in the county hospital. My counselor from the home didn’t show up and there was no one else to call; Mama hadn’t even spoken to me since I’d thrown away the pamphlets from the clinic and refused to get an abortion. When the pain got bad, I started screaming for him. Rick, help me. Rick, it hurts. Rick, I need you, please come. The nurse gave me a shot of Demerol and I got confused and thought he was on his way. I asked her, “Is he here yet?” over and over. When the doctor came in, he looked at me as though I was pathetic, slightly nuts. I’d already told them the father was dead; I didn’t want to say he was in prison.
