Jimmy.
I stood there staring. My breath fogging up the glass. The glass was locked, so I ran my fingers above the trim boards of the case on both sides and found a small key that fit the lock. I unlocked it and slid the glass open. Jimmy appeared unhurt, relatively unplayed since I last saw him. I lifted him gently off the rack and ran my fingers up and down his neck and headstock like Helen Keller running her hand under the water at the Alabama pump house.
Years ago I’d developed my own way of stringing a guitar. Once I’d fastened the string end securely beneath the bridge pin, I would wrap the string twice around the tuner peg, then separate the strings and run the loose end between those wraps and then through the hole in the tuner, then tighten and tune. That meant that as I turned the tuner, tightening the string, the tension pinched the strings even tighter, allowing the guitar to stay in tune longer. Or so I told myself.
Lots of guys did this. The thing that made my technique a little different was that when finished, I snipped the string ends smooth to the touch so they wouldn’t snag anything. Most guys left a tag.
I ran my fingers across the tuners. The string ends had been cut smooth. Based on the dull color of the strings, the smooth ends, and the fact that the strings sat a little higher off the neck, I came to think that Jimmy had not been played in a long time. Meaning Sam had somehow acquired Jimmy and then hung him up here and forgotten about him. Which meant he had no desire to play him. He just desired that someone else not play him. And that someone else was me.
Jimmy, too, had become a trophy.
I sank my fingers into him, and while the strings had lost their life, Jimmy had not. His deep, boxy, mellow, resonating sound came to life, and a slide show of memories paraded across my eyelids. From watching Dad walk forward from the rear of the tent or weave through the aspens, to all those hours I spent playing that guitar in the backseat of the truck while Dad and Big-Big taught me licks, the pictures flooded back. Some were grainy, black and white. And some were Technicolor and 3-D. All were tied to a tether on my soul. I turned him over, held his headstock up to the dim light, and read the words my mom had engraved when she gave Jimmy to my father on their wedding day.
To me, Jimmy was not simply wood, glue, and string. Many nights I’d slept with one arm draped across his neck. He had been my teddy bear. My mom’s whisper. The arms of my father. The plumb line. Now he was my ticket home.
I felt a seething anger. How did Sam acquire Jimmy? When? How long had he had him? Why? Did Sam thump me in the head himself? He struck me as someone who paid others to do his dirty work. I had so many questions, and yet I knew that if I asked any of them, if I showed any interest at all in what was apparently one of Sam’s most prized trophies, Jimmy would disappear and I’d never see him again.
What to do. I had to either steal Jimmy or find Sam in his office, confront him, and take Jimmy in plain sight. But I had to do all that without interfering with the recording of our album and Daley’s career.
I’d picked a fight with the schoolyard bully before and was all too happy to do it again, but punching Sam in the teeth would not help Daley. I had to outsmart him, not outpunch him. I had to find a replacement for Jimmy and make the switch without being seen. It would be years before Sam would even notice he was gone.
27
I spent early Friday morning rummaging through Riggs’s old Martins. When he asked me what I was doing, I told him I was looking for an older-looking D-28. Something yellowed. He slid one out of a rack, opened the case, and handed it to me. A late sixties or early seventies model. I was shopping not for a particular sound so much as a color. I held it to the light. Close enough.
I paid him four thousand dollars and began thinking about timing. My best bet would be later today, after we’d finished recording and everyone was celebrating on his pool deck. Better yet, later that evening, after Sam had been drinking. Ninety seconds was all I needed.
We wrapped the recording Friday afternoon to champagne, cold beer, hot dogs, and burgers. I manned the grill and kept my eye on Sam.
With one arm around Daley, he lifted his glass and began his toast with a listing of new tour dates. He then toasted Daley, her voice, and her connection with the audience, which was, he said, unlike anything he’d ever seen. The sky was the limit. Then he toasted the band and their hard work. Lastly, he toasted me.
“I’ve been in this business a long time, seen a lot of great ones, but I’ve never seen anyone mix a guitar with words the way Cooper O’Connor does.” He looked at me. “The way you match the guitar with words and her voice . . .” His eyes subconsciously glanced at the small of my back. “It’s uncanny.” He looked from me to Daley and back to me. “There’s no telling how far the two of you can go.” He lifted his glass. “To all the great things to come.”
For a minute there I almost believed him.
By ten o’clock everyone had mellowed. Sam was circulating the pool deck, talking with Bernadette, moving in and out of the house, taking phone calls—proving that he was never not working. When somebody called from out of state, I saw my chance. Sam disappeared inside and I said to Daley, “Be right back.”
I scooted around the side of the house, popped the trunk on Daley’s car, grabbed the new-old Martin, and then walked through the woods toward the office. I let myself in through the back door to the conference room, shot upstairs, and made my way through his office in the dark. I walked around his desk, through the open door behind, found the key, unlocked the glass door, slid it open, exchanged guitars, locked it back up, and hid the key. Then I exited his office and caught a faint whiff of propane gas. Which I’d not smelled upon entering. I hurried back down the stairs and through the conference room toward the back door, where the smell grew stronger.
And where I bumped into Sam.
The single outside light shone down on his silhouette. His steely eyes were focused on me and the guitar case. In his right hand he held a gun. He lifted his arm, pointed the gun at me, and said absolutely nothing.
Then he pulled the trigger.
As his forearm flexed, pulling the trigger on the revolver, I lifted Jimmy across my chest. The blast blinded me as the bullet pierced the case and entered Jimmy’s spruce top, exited his Brazilian rosewood back, and then entered me, where it sliced into my chest cavity.
I have a vague memory of a flash of light, a large explosion, of pain in my ears, searing heat in my throat and eyes, of something falling onto me that was too heavy to move. When I opened my eyes, the world was on fire. My chest felt like someone had shoved a hot poker through it. The smoke was so thick I couldn’t see. I tried to scream. I tried to move.
Jimmy lay next to me. I pulled him to me. Wrapped my left arm around him. Trying to protect him from the heat. I remember clutching him, knowing that we would both die in that room. I felt around behind me, between my back and belt, but my notebook was gone. The thought of it burning somewhere in this room saddened me. More than the hole in my chest.
I thought of Daley, heard her voice, saw her face. I would have liked to spend a lifetime with her. My last thoughts were of my father. How would he hear the news? How would he take it? Would he drive down here and bring my crispy body home? Bury me in the aspens next to Mom? What would he put on my tombstone?
COOPER "PEG” O’CONNOR
DEAD AT TWENTY-FOUR
SUCH PROMISE
SUCH PAIN
SUCH A WASTE
My throat felt like someone was filleting it with a small knife. I couldn’t stand much more. I tried again to get up, but the stuff on top of me was too heavy and my right hand was useless and wouldn’t do what my brain was telling it.
I wanted to die with my eyes open. To see what it looked like when I limped from this world into the next. But the smoke burned my eyes. One ear heard nothing. The other was ringing.
Then I heard a strange sound. Almost familiar. A man’s voice screaming my name. At first it was faint. Then closer. Then a shadow appeared. I didn�
��t know who it was or where he’d come from, but a figure wrapped in a blanket hovered over me. I remember the blanket brushing over me and cooling my face, and I realized that it was soaking wet. When they say people in hell want ice water, they’re not kidding.
The man lifted whatever was holding me down with one hand and picked me up with the other. He threw me over his shoulder, grabbed Jimmy with his other hand, and carried me away through the flames. Stuff was cracking, falling, smoke was billowing. I was coughing and spurting blood out the hole in my chest and I’d never been so hot in my entire life. But the guy was just striding like it was Sunday. Not a care in the world.
The world went black.
My last conscious thought was, Dad, I’m sor—but the words never made it out my mouth.
Not enough air.
28
The sound woke me. An incessant beeping from a machine above my head. I blinked and tried to adjust to the light, but the world was white and bright and fingers-on-chalkboard noisy. Tubes and wires were running into and out of most every part of me. I was draining and dripping everywhere.
A man walked between me and the light overhead. A stethoscope hung around his neck. The beeping stopped. His voice sounded muted. “How you feeling?”
I tried to talk, but my voice was nowhere to be found. I mouthed the word alive, but no sound came.
He patted my leg. “When you got here, you were not.”
I tried to say something else, but it never made it out.
He continued, “You want the good news or bad?”
I figured I already knew the bad. Good.
He smiled. As if that somehow made it better. “You’ll live.”
I found little comfort in that. Given that we were talking, I thought we’d covered that. I pushed hard and almost whispered the word. “Bad?”
His face changed. “You’ll live”—he paused, choosing his words—“differently.” He eyed the whole of me. Wondering where to start. The way a mechanic does after you’ve just taken your fifteen-year-old car in for a diagnostic.
“Something pretty big fell on your hand and broke most every bone.”
I tried to move my fingers, but they felt thick and obstructed.
“Whatever was burning in that building was toxic and extremely hot. Fried your throat and voice box. You’re going to have to learn to talk again. I highly doubt you’ll ever have the same control you once had over your voice.”
That would explain the strange lump in my throat.
“We reconstructed your eardrum, but hearing loss is a certainty. And we stopped the bleeding in your chest and managed to get the bullet out, but it did some considerable damage.” He turned and shined a red laser at an X-ray. I recognized a rib cage and spine, which I assumed were mine. “We’ll talk more about that in the days ahead.”
I was pretty groggy. Coming out of a rather deep haze of medication. His words were echoing off the inside of my mind without landing anywhere. I motioned for a pad of paper, which he handed me. The injury to my right hand forced me to scribble with my left, so the words were barely legible. Where’s that leave me?
He sighed, sat on a rolling stainless steel stool, and scooted up next to the bed. “You’ll never sing again. Might not even talk. Probably never play an instrument that involves your right hand. You may never hear out of your right ear again. And then there’s your liver.” He continued to speak, but my mind was having a tough time making sense of what he said. The words bounced around the inside of my skull like a marble.
I lifted my head and tried to look around, but the room was spinning, so I laid it back down and closed my eyes. “Jimmy?”
He leaned in closer. “Who?”
I mimicked playing a guitar.
He laughed. “The guitar you were latched onto when they brought you in?”
I nodded.
“Never seen that one before. Had to pry the case out of your hands.” He continued, “It probably saved your life. Had it not been there, I doubt we’d be having this conversation. It’s right over there, in the corner.” His eyes took on an inquisitive slant. “You know the guy who pulled you out?”
I shook my head.
“Sam something-or-other. He’s been in here several times with that girl. The singer. He’s her producer. Everybody on the hall wants his autograph. Hers too.”
My whisper was angry. “Never happened.”
He glanced up at the TV. “He saved your life. It’s on all the networks.”
I let it go. The truth would take too long.
Whispering so much had dislodged some mucous in my throat, causing a painful, stitch-stretching, spastic cough. He held a plastic bowl beneath my chin, which I half filled with crimson mucous.
I looked around me and patted the bed with my left hand like an old man searching a coat pocket.
“You looking for something?”
I used hand signals to accentuate my broken whisper. “Small black notebook. Rubber band holding it together.”
He shook his head. “Haven’t seen it. I’ll ask around, but I doubt it survived.” A pause. “That was a hot fire.”
“Heart pine.”
He leaned in closer. “What’s that?”
I whispered, “Two-hundred-year-old kerosene.”
He nodded. “That would do it.”
I stared at the ceiling as the tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. Somewhere in these first foggy moments, I realized several things: my songs were gone and my playing days were over, but it was the last revelation that hurt the most.
Daley was better off without me, and I was going to have to leave her without explanation—which would hurt her the most.
29
The story was all over the news. Sam feigned torment and acted deeply distraught. The ten stitches in his forehead added color to the picture.
In the aftermath, two stories emerged. What Sam told the public. And what Sam told Daley.
The truth, however, was in neither.
In the first story, Sam told authorities and pretty much everyone with a camera that he and I had been working on postproduction when we encountered a man robbing his office safe. He confronted the man, and the man shot me, hit Sam in the head with something heavy, and then evidently lit a propane bomb to cover the evidence.
Sam woke to flame and fire, gathered his senses, and carried me to safety. The thief escaped with eighty thousand in cash and his wife’s jewelry. Through crocodile tears, which the camera did an excellent job of highlighting, Sam lowered his voice and spoke of how he considered me the son he never had. He spoke of my promise. Of all the lost possibilities.
Authorities were still looking for the unidentified man, whom Sam couldn’t see well enough to identify. Just said he was big. Film taken by media crews showed an inconsolable Daley clinging to my smoking clothing as I was being loaded into an ambulance clutching a guitar case.
It made for fantastic news.
They brought me to Vanderbilt Medical. The nurses said Daley had been at my bedside 24/7. She’d helped turn me. Bathe me. Change my wound dressings. The ever-benevolent and affected Sam spearheaded my care. He brought in the best doctors. Burn specialists. Surgeons. A hand specialist. Throat specialist. They stuck me with needles to shoot stuff in and they stuck me with needles to draw stuff out. I began to feel like a raw pincushion.
This care for me did two things: it endeared Sam to Daley and it sold a lot of records.
But as they weaned me from medicine and began slowly waking me from my medically induced coma, Sam suddenly found reasons for Daley to be on every talk show across the country. She became the poster child for how to overcome unspeakable personal tragedy and make it through. Camera angles flashed back and forth between her engagement ring, pictures of us performing onstage, and her present-day watery eyes. Daley was fragile, on the verge of cracking, and Sam took advantage of every tear that fell from her beautiful face.
I sat in bed, watched Daley make the talk show rounds in New Yor
k, and caught snippets between naps. The unknowns were many. Interviewers asked her, would I be able to walk her down the aisle? Could I speak? Sing? Play? How much of me had been burned? Would we be able to have children? Had I suffered oxygen deprivation? Did I have all my faculties?
An empathetic Sam even sent her to and fro on his private jet so she could return quickly to my side. In a brilliant coup d’état, he secured a 60 Minutes exclusive. If he tried over the next million years, he’d never get media exposure this good.
Interestingly, no mention was ever made of my missing notebook.
But if I thought this entire charade showcased his talent, I had another thing coming. The ever-resilient and inventive Sam had two more tricks up his sleeve. The first was to “reluctantly” release the album. Out of respect for me, he stated publicly that he wanted to wait until I could play again so that we could tour, but then a copy was leaked to the media. He vowed to find who did it. “They’ll never work anywhere in this town again.”
It went platinum in two days. And platinum a second time by the weekend.
That didn’t surprise me. But the second trick I never saw coming. Sometimes you bump into a better poker player. And Sam was just better.
Pain had become my constant companion. My skin still felt like it was on fire. Much of me was raw, including my vocal cords. Moving cracked open scabs. Lying still caused thicker scabs. Surgery had reconstructed my eardrum, but the only thing I could hear was a constant muted ringing.
Long Way Gone Page 19
