A Song For the Road

by Rayne Lacko

  The mechanics of the song were inborn. Sandra’s old favorite was a landmark in their lives, grounding their family like a blessing before Sunday dinner. Carter played it through without using a guitar pick, the new strings already at home under his fingers.

  “Son, you’ve got it,” Eddie’s voice came low and solemn. “I always knew you’d be a musician. You picked it up so easy and natural. Shoot, you’re still my boy wonder.”

  Carter stared at his own hands, nearly as big as his daddy’s had been when he taught him to play. There were calluses forming on his fingertips, just like his dad’s. He’d have to give a proper thanks to Mr. Ledbetter for making him work so hard. “Thanks, Dad. But c’mon, you’re on the pop charts and all.” Carter could almost hear his father smiling through the phone. “I just want to play, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” Eddie replied. “What do you mean, ’just play.’ Are you a solo act or frontman to a band?” Carter knew Eddie didn’t trust much in teamwork. As far as he was concerned you were number one, or you didn’t count.

  “I’m on my own,” Carter said. For a moment those words made him feel plenty lonely. But then he remembered Ledbetter, and Mama, and even Lola May, and he knew he had people who believed in him.

  “A solo act. That’s my boy,” Eddie said, recovering his good spirits. “Hey, you know what it takes to make it to the top?”

  Carter’s gaze fell on the instrument. He slid his rough fingertips across its smooth custom stain. “Yeah. It’s right here on the Martin.”

  “Read it.”

  Carter didn’t need to look at it to know the words: “Creativity, Victory, Heart, and Discipline.”

  “See? I had it custom-made when you were born. I hoped you’d fall in love with music as much as your old man.”

  Carter shook his head, not understanding. “Isn’t it just your musical creed or something?” What did a few words of wisdom prove?

  “Look at the first letters, CVHD.”

  Those were Carter’s initials. Across the phone line, electrical signals from New Mexico to California bouncing to some outer space satellite and back to earth, they both spoke his name together: “Carter Vaughan Hendrix Danforth.”

  “I wanted your first name to be Vaughan-Hendrix. Hyphenated, you know? How cool would that be? But your mama didn’t think it’d be fair, like you’d have to live up to Stevie Ray and Jimi, rock’s greatest guitarists. Because what if you turned out to be a dentist or something?”

  Carter broke out in a laugh, surprising himself. His dad was proud of him. And he was more than a little relieved his first name wasn’t Vaughan-Hendrix-with-a-hyphen. He owed his mother a world of gratitude for that save.

  “Hey, what do you say to coming out and helping me record this jingle for Ma Joad’s pancake house? We can produce a father-son thing that’ll crush the internet. The restaurant chain is all about family values. They’ll eat it up.”

  Carter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was ready to pack up his guitar and leave that night.

  Eddie was quiet a moment, and then he added, “I know your mama won’t accept any help from me. But I can get you compensated for performing on the jingle, and you can use the money to help her out, okay, son?”

  “Dad, that would be amazing, thanks. I’d love to.”

  “Cool. I’ll look into flights from Tulsa to LAX. We just gotta clear it with your mama,” he said. A silence fell between them nearly a minute. Carter hadn’t been honest with Eddie about where he was or how he got there. If he went home now, his mother would want him to move into the shelter with her. He was already in trouble for not going to Aunt Syl’s. There was no way she would let him get on a plane to California, not when he still owed her money. He’d been dishonest, and as much as he wished he could fix all his mistakes, he wanted to see his father again more than ever. His mother didn’t know Carter had found his way back to music and that for the first time in his life, he knew music was who he was.

  “Listen,” Eddie said, “maybe it’s best you ask her?”

  Carter wasn’t sure he could. He’d used up the last of his nerve dialing his old man’s number. “I’ll see what I can do,” was all he could offer.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  CARTER COULDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. HE’D given back Mitch’s phone before he remembered he was supposed to ask Mr. and Mrs. Liu for a ride back to Tulsa. He wasn’t even sure they were still in Albuquerque. He wasn’t sure of much, and the worry of it kept his eyes from closing. Mama was moving into the high school gymnasium the next day. He needed to see for himself if she was all right, help her however he could. Good thing Lola May was there. But one image kept popping front and center in his mind: sitting next to his father in a recording studio. Sure, all they’d be playing was a little ditty about pancakes and sausage links. Truth was, he wouldn’t care if they sang about two bullfrogs mating in a river bog. He just wanted to make music with his daddy again.

  His mother wasn’t going to like Eddie’s plan, and she sure wasn’t going to want Ma Joad’s money. All Eddie cared about was “his personal gain,” his mama used to say. Back when Carter was just a kid, his parents used to fight about it all the time. Sandra thought Eddie was only using Carter, “his little trained monkey,” trying to get rich off him. When other children were going to birthday parties and baseball games on the weekends, Eddie was hauling Carter around the countryside to perform at county fairs, bars, and even on street corners, hoping to get discovered.

  Carter grabbed his notebook and Kaia’s pen and tried to sort it all out in a letter to her. Nothing came out right. No matter what he chose, helping Mama or helping his dad, he was letting someone down. Whether he went back east to Oklahoma, or out west to California, he had a bunch of explaining to do. He couldn’t figure where he was needed most. As the morning sun rose over the golden hills, it was the first time he gave up trying to write a letter to Kaia.

  Carter sat in silence in the kitchen. He didn’t have any stomach for breakfast. He’d been at The Little Yucca coming on two weeks, and he knew it was time to move on.

  Mitch’s boots were loud on the linoleum, but Carter didn’t turn around when he heard him come into the kitchen. “Well, good morning to you,” Mitch said, pausing before the boy. Carter was too worn out from trying to figure his next move to offer anything more than a nod. Mitch held out a crisp white envelope to him.

  Carter recognized the oversize, loopy handwriting on the envelope immediately. It belonged to none other than Kaia Liu. He held back a moment before taking it from Mitch. Carter had told her pretty much everything that came to mind every day he’d been away, and he couldn’t help feeling close to her for having shared his heart. But seeing her letter reminded him he didn’t know her well enough to guess what she might have to say in return.

  Carter tucked the letter under his arm and slipped out back to read it in private. Sometimes he wondered if his daily scribblings and sketches ever landed in her grandma’s mailbox or just disappeared in the darkness of the drugstore’s postbox. Getting a letter in reply made him feel like she was listening. Part of him hoped she somehow had answers to the questions he hadn’t had the nerve to ask the night before.

  She’d typed up three whole pages, alternating between font styles and colors. She said she loved hearing about his audition and how he’d tried to draw her image using sound, and gushed about how “cute” he was writing with her sparkly pen. Carter couldn’t help but grin. He kept her pen with him at all times, safe in his pocket. Cute or not, it was special to him.

  Kaia had searched The Little Yucca’s address on her grandmother’s computer. She’d found the tavern in pictures taken by a satellite in outer space, and set about exploring the natural world beyond Mr. Ledbetter’s mobile home, just like him. Carter looked up into the cloudless blue sky and waved. Carter wished she’d offered some reassurance about all the secrets he’d dared to write her. Instead, she dedicated two pages to her thoughts about the edible flowers of t
he Southwest. If she were there, she said she’d try her hand cooking with exotic petals. There were forty-nine species and twenty-four subspecies of yucca, she explained, but the ones you could eat bloomed only once a year. In spring, as it happened. Big talk for a girl who’d sworn she’d never cook without a partner.

  Kaia’s letter read like she wished she were there with him. She didn’t say he was crazy or wasting his time or downright stupid for getting stranded so far from his intended destination. She liked that he was making friends with music again, and she actually wanted to hear him play again one day.

  Ledbetter’s mesquite onion rings were a big seller and gave Carter an idea for cooking with Kaia, even though they were miles apart. When Ledbetter turned in for his afternoon nap, Carter snuck into the kitchen and helped himself to a long, serrated bread knife. He tucked it carefully down one leg of his jeans and headed out to the desert for the afternoon. Once he was out of sight of the tavern, Carter hiked up to a blooming yucca plant. He squinted at the stalk of dense white flowers, nearly as high up as he was tall, stretching upright to heaven. The yucca was a freakish twist of nature, Carter reckoned, like an exploding firework growing square out of the dry dirt. He fingered the sharp tip of one of the long, pointy leaves, spinach green and shaped like a sword. If Carter hoped to collect the flowers, he had no choice but to wade in to the center of the yucca.

  Weaving in between the spikes, Carter reached up along the base of the flower stalk, feeling for the right place to chop it. The pointy spikes held close to his body, thick and springy. No matter how careful he was, the sharp tips poked through his T-shirt, scratching him. The sun shone hot and unforgiving. A sweat broke out on his forehead and dust climbed his legs. He thought of Kaia dreaming of a chance to cook with rare ingredients. What were a few scratches? He was hurting a whole lot worse on the inside. He knew Kaia was too, and he hoped getting the yucca blossoms would help her see she wasn’t alone. Carter wasn’t her brother, the one she wished was still around, but that didn’t mean she had to give up on cooking.

  Carter bent his cheek to his shoulder and wiped the sweat from his brow. He drew back the knife and, with a groan, brought it down hard into the center of the rosette, cutting out the stem. Carter moved from yucca to yucca, collecting bushels of white flowers, his sides, belly, and back streaked red with scratches.

  Firm and slightly crunchy, Carter thought the petals tasted a bit like green beans. Back in the kitchen, he went to work chopping the stems away. Among the smooth, long petals something wiggled and skittered, and then flew up in to Carter’s face, surprising him. He swatted at the tiny critter, blowing air out of his nose and clamping his mouth shut. Dozens of yucca moths wormed loose from the petals, dropping to the countertop and onto the floor around his feet. Carter squealed like a stuck pig, grabbing the whole mess of blooms and hustling them outside, where he pitched them to the dirt. He threw up his hands, shouting at an invisible satellite miles from earth, “Hey, Kaia! You still hankering to cook with these?” For all he knew, she’d tricked him into going on a fool’s errand.

  He thought about dumping the heap, bugs and all, in the rubbish bin. But giving up on the flowers felt a whole lot like giving up on Kaia. Or daring her to give up on him.

  Carter gathered the blooms in a wash bucket with fresh water and took his time cleaning, cutting, and de-mothing the flowers. Back in the kitchen, he stacked the petals three at a time, dipped them in Ledbetter’s mesquite mixture, and dropped them into the deep fryer, determined to make a dish worth all his trouble. Mitch busted in and threatened to dock his pay for wasting Ledbetter’s stock. Mr. Ledbetter wandered in from his nap, woken by the commotion. He took one look at Carter, buried in a snowdrift of white petals, with wheat flour up to his elbows and smudged across his face, and showed the boy some pity. Ledbetter found a bag of rice flour ordered by accident and let him have it.

  Later that night, Carter Danforth’s deep-fried mesquite yucca flowers with hot sauce catapulted to the most popular item on The Little Yucca’s menu. Mitch grumbled and cussed, wishing he’d thought of it himself.

  “You’re welcome,” Carter said, brushing a curl of his hair from his eyes.

  He put the recipe in an envelope and addressed it to Kaia. He placed a stamp on it and set it aside till his next trip to the drugstore. He knew the recipe was nothing fancy, but he never would’ve done it without her. Her letter had made him feel as if he might be managing better than he’d reckoned, and yet he wasn’t sure she was right about him. He’d been excited to get a letter from her, and he was thankful he took her up on her challenge to cook with the petals, but he didn’t want to pretend he was bigger than his britches when he was only trying to make it through each day.

  Mitch found the envelope on the counter. He didn’t take a shine to Carter’s flimsy, one-page offering.

  “Mr. Keller, it’s kind of you to let stay me on at the tavern, and you know I’m ready to help out around here however I can,” Carter dared to argue with him, “but my letters are none of your business.”

  Mitch’s face went from dead serious to plumb angry. “If I ask you to lift a finger around here, I’m asking for ten. Same goes for writing home.”

  It was a pointless fight. Carter wished he could find more words to say, but they weren’t in him. He loved learning music with Mr. Ledbetter, but he couldn’t stay there any longer. His mama needed him, but even if he were a doctor, they still didn’t have a place to live. His dad, for once, wanted to see him, play music with him. That gave Carter the kinds of feelings he couldn’t even admit to Kaia. He sure couldn’t tell her he was scared as a knee baby about where he would go next.

  “I can’t write anymore, sir. Practicing my music is all I have a heart for.”

  Mitch held firm. He insisted something more go out.

  Carter refused, claiming he’d promised Ledbetter he’d get some practice in before it was time for his kitchen chores.

  Playing the Ledbetter card worked. Mitch gave an inch, saying it didn’t have to be a letter; he could record his music. But he had to send it; “The Little Yucca is no hideout.”

  Carter shook his head, but he knew he couldn’t win.

  Mitch shot some videos on his phone of the boy practicing his guitar on the old, dusty stool on stage. Texting the videos to Kaia saved Carter from having to find the words only music could say. She’d said she wanted to hear him, and Carter reckoned Kaia was in the habit of getting her way. Even though it reminded him of his mother, he liked that about her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  LEDBETTER AND CARTER HAD ESTABLISHED AN easy rhythm, rising in the morning to fix breakfast, then picking up the lesson they’d left off just hours before, playing late into the night. Ledbetter was a devout believer in the “sweet spot” offered only in the sanctity of late-night jam sessions, but he wouldn’t abide by late sleeping. “The sun is new each day,” he said, “and anybody who wakes up breathing gets a shot at becoming better than yesterday.” Carter needed to tell Ledbetter his plan, but he was sure going to miss the old bluesman.

  Carter laid out long strips of hickory-smoked bacon on a platter, still hot and greasy from the pan. “I talked to my father,” he began. Carter had come to trust Ledbetter enough to confess the whole mess he’d gotten himself into. “He wants me to come out to California, and record a commercial with him. Trouble is, he thinks I’m in Oklahoma with Mama. But I can’t go back to Tulsa because Mama will never let me go out west. So I’m just going to go,” Carter took a deep breath, “to my dad’s. Without telling anybody. But you, of course.”

  Picking up an egg and cradling it in his hand, Ledbetter’s fingers curled around the delicate shell much the way they framed the neck of his guitar. It seemed to Carter that Ledbetter’s hands were permanently curved that way, like they were ready to jam any time, 24-7. He searched the boy’s face like Carter had left something important out of his confession. “And how do you feel about this plan of yours?”

  “Honestly
sir, it’s the scariest thing I could ever think of doing.” Carter wandered over to a shelf near the storage room and pulled down a jar of shellac. He needed a moment to give it more thought. “Is it weird that the scariest thing also feels like the right thing?”

  Ledbetter shook his head. “A song is just a piece of music if it ain’t got feeling.”

  Carter knew Ledbetter’s ear could be trusted to listen. He didn’t preach about what Carter ought or ought not to do.

  Ledbetter cracked one egg after another right into the blistering bacon fat, a half-inch deep. “You know why musicians write songs about women?” Dredging the raw yolks in the sizzling fat dulled them to brownish beige and gold, the same colors as the hills around The Yucca. “Because nothing else stirs up so many emotions. Desire, jealousy, longing, regret—the kinds of feelings a man can’t easily uproot and be done with.”

  Carter began polishing his Martin with a salve of hand-rubbed shellac, listening. It was coming on the end of three weeks’ worth of lessons and he was used to Ledbetter talking as such.

  “Now, I’m guessing a man your age hasn’t been married and, more to the point, divorced,” Ledbetter continued. “And I’ll wager you never lost your lady to another.” The old man leaned forward and corrected Carter’s polishing technique. “The blues is only a game, some folks say, and it’s true.” The old man worked his jaw in a series of grimaces. “And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.”