Long Way Gone

by Charles Martin

  “I’m okay to leave?”

  He looped the stethoscope around his neck and eyed the empty bag of fluids hanging above her. “Give me a few minutes to process your papers and we’ll get you out of here. But you need to lay low. No travel for a few days. No excitement. No bright lights. No computers. No texting. Rest is your friend.”

  He walked out and I asked, “You hungry?”

  Her shoulders tipped farther and the weight fell. Outward. “I could eat a little something.”

  After the nurse removed the IV and helped Daley dress, we walked down the hall toward the exit, where the sun was burning a hole right through my retinas. I handed Daley my Costas. “These’ll help.”

  She put them on, and when the doors slid open we bumped into the bubba with the stitches in his head. He puffed up and growled in a loud voice, “There’s that bi—”

  If I thought she’d have trouble taking up for herself, I had another thing coming. He barely got the bi out of his mouth when Daley’s boot caught him square in the groin. He probably dressed out near three hundred, but her foot lifted him off his heels and set him on his knees, where he began heaving. As he knelt there emptying his breakfast on the floor, she dumped her Honey Badger on his head. “That’s for my Hummingbird, you fat, greasy, foulmouthed, bucktoothed jackwagon.”

  She wobbled a bit, and I caught her where she locked her arm in mine as we walked toward the parking lot. I cracked a smile. “I thought the doc said no excitement.”

  “I’m not excited.”

  I helped her up into the Jeep. “I’d hate to see you when you are.”

  4

  We sat in a booth at the Roastery, where Daley sipped her second Honey Badger and nibbled on a piece of quiche. She hovered over her cup. “You’re right, this is really good.”

  “You kind of wasted that last one.”

  “Sorry.” She eyed the menu board above us. “If I’d have known how much it cost—”

  “It’s no trouble.” The circles beneath her eyes told me she hadn’t slept in a couple years. “What happened?”

  “Well, he was kneeling there on the floor and I thought—”

  “No, last night. The green Ford.”

  She softened. “Just a couple of yahoos being yahoos.”

  “Where were you coming from?”

  “I had a gig last night at this saloon in Leadville. Actually, it started late afternoon. Singing covers for bikers. But”—her face soured—“I got upstaged by two guys on the street. They emptied the bar. One of them was really good. Left me alone with the bartender. So I packed up and hitched a ride here.”

  I didn’t bother to tell her my role in that. “How’d your guitar get mixed up in it?”

  “The yahoos wanted more than conversation.” She sat back and shrugged. Her eyelids were heavy. “Decided they’d take it.” She turned the table. “Have you lived here all this time?”

  “I traveled around the first few years. Eventually circled back around. It’s home.”

  She pushed the quiche around her plate. “Cooper—”

  I held up a hand. “You don’t have to. Long time ago. A lot of water under that bridge. Say, have you thought past the next couple of hours?”

  Her top lip was covered with steamed milk froth again. She held up her cup, staring at the contents. “I’m thinking about moving here and applying for a job. They can pay me in these things.” She laughed and extended her arm, showing the Band-Aid that covered the hole from her IV. “Let them drip into the same vein.” Her laugh was easy and, like her voice, deep with resonation. She looked up and down the street. “What’s the name of this town again? Dolce Vita? La Vita Loca?”

  I laughed. “Buena Vista.”

  “Close enough.”

  “You got a place to stay?”

  She shook her head.

  “I keep an apartment here in town if you need a place.”

  “You have a home someplace else?”

  “I split time between my mountain home up there beyond the clouds”—I pointed west toward the salt cliffs and the pass that led beyond St. Elmo—“and my apartment down here. Where I lay my head is often a function of the weather.”

  “Tell me about it.” She leaned her head on one hand. “Sleep sounds good. If you don’t mind.”

  The drive west down Main Street took us past the Lariat Bar and Grill. It’s a town staple, rooted in the lore that actual cowboys used to belly up and down the dust. Town legend holds that at least one recorded gunfight spilled out into the street. Locals reenact it every year. Some say you can still see bloodstains on the wood floor; others say that dark spot is an oil stain from the time the room served as the garage for the volunteer fire department. Whatever the case, the stains are part of the romance of what is now the town bar and watering hole. And based on the traffic, this is a thirsty town. The bar smells of stale beer, wet cigarettes, and greasy French fries. The waitresses—who were once rodeo darlings and homecoming queens warmed by their boyfriends’ letter jackets—sell cold draft beer and will bend an attentive ear, provided your tips are generous. But people with sensible taste will tell you that any use of the word grill in connection with the Lariat is a rather liberal definition. There is a griddle, and they do serve food, but that’s about all you can say. The one thing they do really well is live music.

  Daley read the sign and asked, “Is that place also known as ‘The Rope’?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  She stared out the Jeep window. Lost in foggy moments that happened years before this one. She chewed on a fingernail. “The manager’ll let you play for tips.” She was still a second, then suddenly sat up straight and checked her wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. “Oh snap! What’s today?”

  “Saturday.”

  She palmed her face with her left hand, closed her eyes, and let out a heavy breath. I pulled over to the curb and pushed in the clutch. The Jeep sat idling. I waited.

  After a minute she said, “I’m playing there tonight. Or I was. But—” She held up her hand and spoke without looking at me. “I could really use that hundred dollars.”

  “Frank got you for a hundred?”

  “You know him?”

  I thought before I answered. “We’ve met.” We were parked on the side of the road next to the railroad tracks. I glanced in the rearview and asked, “How’s your voice?”

  She shrugged. “Not what it once was.”

  “No, I mean from yesterday.”

  “I can sing.”

  I made a U-turn, drove three blocks east toward the river and Sleeping Indian Mountain, and parked next to the Ptarmigan Theatre. “Wait here a few minutes?”

  She nodded. As I hopped up on the sidewalk, she called after me, “Cooper?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you’re not . . . I mean . . . I don’t know that I have the strength to sit here and . . .” She shook her head ever so slightly.

  Sometimes it’s not what people say but what they don’t say that shows how beat down their soul really is. Somebody, or something, had hurt her. A lot. I set the keys on the seat. “Well, if I don’t come back, you can keep the Jeep.”

  She set her feet on the dash and laid her head back, and the wrinkle between her eyes faded.

  I keep an apartment in the loft of the Ptarmigan. I use it in the winter when the snow and ice drive me down out of the mountains.

  I ran in and grabbed an old Martin D-35 that had become a favorite of mine. Her name was Ella, and she was born in Pennsylvania to German and Brazilian parents sometime in the seventies. She and I met fifteen years ago at a pawnshop in Taos where the chemistry was quick and electric—in an acoustic sort of way. She’s throaty, tender, will bark if you dig into her, and yet she’ll lift you off your seat if you loosen up on the reins and let her voice speak. I’d named her after a character in a book. This guitar reminded me of Miss Ella and her rich, pure, multilayered, resonating voice. Whenever she opened her mouth to speak you’d do well to listen,
because what she said would soon find its way to your heart, where it would peel back the layers and either pierce you or heal you.

  I walked back to find Daley sitting at a picnic table beneath an umbrella that spun in the breeze. I unlocked the case, set Ella on my knee, and sat there tuning her.

  Daley watched me with amusement. “You know they now have these little electronic thingies that work pretty well.”

  I smiled without looking up. “You don’t say.” When I finished, I strummed a few chords and then placed my hand flat across the strings, muting it. Abruptly I turned toward her. “Sing something.”

  She spoke slowly, raising one eyebrow. “Just. Sing. Something?”

  “Anything you want.”

  Without warming up or making some show of apology, she opened her mouth and poured out a sultry, silky Dusty Springfield tune about Billy Ray being a preacher’s son. I nearly melted on the bench.

  I’ve always had a soft spot for the preacher’s kid. She knew that. I knew she knew that. And she knew I knew she knew. Which made it that much more fun.

  In two seconds I was twenty years younger. The pitch was so perfect and tone so true I almost didn’t touch the strings for fear of blurring her beautiful sound. The words rolled off her tongue with a rhythm and cadence pushed by a voice that held a sense of longing. While powerful, it contained a disarming vulnerability. When we were talking, Daley’s walls were jagged and Jericho high. Impenetrable. But the moment she opened her mouth and the first note rang out, the gates flung wide. Proving that the music in her was DNA-deep. As much a part of her as her sea-blue eyes. And the only clear window through which she viewed, and understood, the world.

  She paused at the end of a line and smiled. “You gonna play or just sit there looking dumb and wonder-struck?” When she sang the part about Billy Ray being the only one to ever reach her, she glanced at me.

  Causing me to wonder if she was just singing a song, or talking about us.

  5

  Describing music is tricky. I’m not convinced that you can describe it like, say, a painting or a novel. While those are both experiences that produce feelings, they do so through the window of the eyes. The image we see—either images or words on a page—enters our eyes, travels through our intellect, where we make some sort of sense of it, and then routes through our emotions. The process is one of intellect and understanding first, emotions and feelings second.

  In my experience, music doesn’t work that way. Music enters us through the ears, where it makes a beeline to the grid of our emotions. Then it routes through to our intellect where we might “make some sense” of it. Music is felt on one level, and understood or processed on another. This doesn’t mean you can’t use your intellect to describe it . . . but I question whether the words we use can really do the job. It’s like describing the smell of the number 9.

  Music is meant to be experienced, not described.

  Music has its own language, shared by musicians, and it is just as real a language as Greek or Latin and, if you’re new to it, just as complicated. The key to deciphering the language of music is do-re-mi. And yes, it really is Rodgers-and-Hammerstein simple.

  For you nonmusical people, this do-re-mi stuff is called “scales.”

  Scales are the building blocks. The inherent order in music. They are as real as gravity and are hardwired into our DNA. Like preloaded topographical maps. Proof of that hardwiring is seen in our ability to know where a song is going musically the first time we hear it. For a singer or musician, the challenge comes in getting their fingers and hands and voice to make the corresponding sounds. So here is point number two. To really play music, or speak the language, one thing is required. And for it there is no substitute.

  Practice.

  People can cheat their way to the top in a lot of areas of life. They can steal, bribe, kill the competition, or take steroids to make them stronger and faster. But with music there’s no shortcut.

  Period.

  Fake it and people will throw tomatoes. Listeners can spot a fraud a mile away. That’s why standing on a stage or singing on a sidewalk can be such a gutsy proposition. It’s why lip-syncers are stripped of their awards and then drawn and quartered on the city gates. Despite this age of tolerance, we will not tolerate a fraud onstage. We value music and we value performance and we expect those who play or sing to do the same.

  My ear had always been pretty good. I was one of those folks born with a propensity. My dad used to say that I sang before I talked. So when Daley opened her mouth, the question for me was simple. It wasn’t “What song is she singing?” but rather “What key is she singing in?” Said another way, “Where is she in do-re-mi?”

  My job was not to compete, not to show her what I knew, not to show her how good I was or had become. My job was to create a shelf, a platform. Scaffolding. To fill the air around her with a structure. Something safe.

  Daley smiled. Leaving Dusty Springfield behind, she slapped her right thigh with both hands, creating a chain-gang rhythm, and dropped into a Johnny Cash tune called “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” Lower. Deeper. Gravel mixed with soda water.

  I smiled and modulated to a new key right along with her. Anytime you start singing Johnny Cash, you’re walking on hallowed ground. The thought was not lost on me that the Man in Black most often played a Martin D-35.

  She seemed amused. A kid on a playground. Having evidently thought of someplace else she wanted to go, she raised her chin and slipped sideways musically. I softened my touch and listened, wanting to hear where she was going. So started a rather interesting game of musical cat and mouse.

  Her voice became softer, less gravel, more gold. My second-favorite Elvis tune, “In the Ghetto.” Anyone who tackles Elvis has got some chutzpah. But not nearly as much as someone who attempts Michael Jackson. I had just caught up with her when she crossed the stratosphere again and lifted out the dross. This time there were no impurities. Mere mortals don’t sing “I’ll Be There.” That’s like stepping into the ring with Godzilla. You’re about to have your lunch handed to you.

  Apparently no one had ever informed Daley of this. With all the care and weight of someone filing their nails with an emery board, she opened her mouth and, so help me, I thought the King of Pop himself had hopped up on the hood of the Jeep. No sooner had she sung the chorus than she reached way back, maybe 1930-something, and belted out Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago.” By the time I had caught up with her, she’d tired of that and jumped trains midtrack to Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” And while she sounded lonesome, I doubted whether a whip-poor-will ever sounded that hauntingly pure.

  People passing on the sidewalk stopped to listen as we traveled through the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s southern anthem, and Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” By the time she broke into Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” a loose crowd had gathered. No bother. If I thought she was enjoying singing for me, the addition of an audience added another dimension. From John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” to Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind,” she finally let loose with CCR’s “Fortunate Son.”

  To say she still had vocal range would be an understatement of biblical proportions. The melody and the medley were magical. The only thing more magical was how she so effortlessly made each song her own. You know you’re in the company of someone pretty gifted when the cover they’re singing can compete with the original. When she finished, she simply closed her mouth and folded her good hand across the Aircast. She wasn’t even breathing hard—and Buena Vista sits at almost eight thousand feet.

  In twenty minutes of “play that tune,” the trick for me was to be good while not too good. I wanted her to think I could play alongside her in a bar. Nothing more. I throttled back, bringing little attention to myself. Never leading.

  She paused a minute, tapping her top lip with her index finger and squinting one eye. I knew she was searching for the next
song, and I thought to myself, This ought to be good.

  A sly smile spread across her face as she sat back, crossed her arms, and launched into Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” with the same ease as a kid singing “I Dig Dirt.”

  At this point a man in a cowboy hat walked over and dropped twenty dollars in my guitar case. Daley stood and hugged him—to which he tipped his hat—and never missed a note or a single inflection.

  And while she stood there commanding the attention of most on Main Street, I had two thoughts: her voice, while not what it once was, was still really good. Her vocal control and bravado were probably better. But the thing I just couldn’t wrap my head around had nothing to do with her talent and everything to do with her choice of songs. Every song she sang had been made famous by someone now dead. There was not a living artist among them. Also of glaring importance was the fact that she didn’t sing a single one of her own songs.

  Not one.

  As this thought was filtering its way down through me, she turned to me. “Is there anyplace I can go that you can’t follow?”

  “Probably. But it might take us awhile to get there.”

  She looked at my hand, then back at me. “When did you start playing again?”

  “Few years after I got back.”

  “But I thought your hand was . . .”

  “It was.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Nine or ten thousand reps of five or six different hand exercises.”

  “You’re better now than you were back when.” She had her back to the street now, and folks decided the show was over and started to drift away.

  “I don’t know.” I studied my hand, straightening my fingers, then making a fist. “I felt like I played pretty well back in the day.”

  A nod. “You did.”

  “Speaking of guitars,” I said, “whatever happened to that McPherson?”

  Her chin dropped. Eyes darted. The confident troubadour had been instantly replaced by the almost-made-it or, worse, the has-been. A shrug. “Rent money.”