Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Back to Wando Passo

  David Payne

  For Will Payne, superhero

  sans portfolio and itinerant energy beam…

  From the old yellow cat who keeps coming back

  Early this mornin’, you knocked upon my do’

  Early this mornin’, you knocked upon my do’

  I said, “Hello, Satan, I b’lieve it’s time to go.”

  —Robert Johnson, “Me and the Devil Blues”

  If I die, I will forgive you.

  If I recover, we will see.

  —Spanish proverb

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Talking In My Sleep

  Part II

  A Checkered Sun

  Part III

  The Hot-Wet Phase

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by David Payne

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  TALKING IN MY SLEEP

  ONE

  Ransom Hill had fallen hopelessly in love with his own wife. If there was any doubt of it—there wasn’t, but had there been—it ended in Myrtle Beach, as he deplaned and found her waiting with the children at the gate. Tall and thinner than he’d been since high school, Ran had on his good black coat, which still stank of cigarettes, though he’d given them up in anticipation of this trip, the first of many sacrifices he was prepared to make. His slouching jeans were held up by a concho belt in which he’d lately had to punch three extra holes, and his Tony Lamas clapped along with a delaminated sole. His Stetson, though—the new three-hundred-dollar white one he’d seen and really felt he owed himself—was as crisp, serene, and towering as a late-summer cumulus. In its shadow, under memorable blue eyes, two dark crescents stood out against his inveterate New York City pallor, smudged as though by Christmas coal, the lumps that Santa Claus reserves especially for fallen rock stars and other habitual offenders. Ran, as always, was carrying two guitars, the ones Claire called “the Gibson girls” and, again, “the mistress and the wife.” His road-worn but still handsome face seemed clarified by recent suffering for which he had nobody but himself and maybe God to blame. As he came up the ramp, a bit short-winded, with that slapping sole, he looked like someone who had served a stretch in purgatory, and now, there, in paradisal light at the end of the square tunnel, was Claire. And paradise turned out to be South Carolina. Who could have guessed?

  Amid the tourists headed for the links and Grand Strand beaches, the rushing bankers on their cells, his wife and children looked like a subversive little carnival unto themselves. Hope, his four-year-old, had on a pink dress-up with blue and silver sequins and boa trim. In dandelion-white hair tinged with the faintest faint blond rinse, her plastic tiara featured sapphires one shade bluer but only half as incandescent as her eyes. Over the summer, her legs had sectioned out like telescopes and suddenly acquired a shape like Claire’s. At their distal ends, her nails were painted chipped hot pink. So, too, Ran saw—with an alarm he rapidly suppressed—were his son’s. Wrapped around his mother’s waist, Charlie, not quite two, had on a Cody Chestnut T-shirt with a grape juice stain and a hard-shell plastic fire hat: FDNY. As he shyly grinned with two new serrated teeth, Ran saw with a pang, for the first time, who his son was going to be, which had carved itself from formless babyhood while Daddy was away.

  “Dute! Bi’truck!” he said, and banged his plastic lid.

  “Fire truck, dude.” Putting down his cases, Ran took a knee, removed his hat, and raked his fingers through his sandy hair. With a hint of the grin that once upon a time had opened many doors (quite a few of which he would have been wiser to eschew), he held out his arms, not quite in time to catch the kids as they smashed into him like rocket-propelled grenades.

  “Dad! Da-dee!” Hope squealed.

  “Hey, Sweet Pete!” He keeled over, laughing, on his seat.

  “Daddy, how come you’re so skinny?”

  “I’m not skinny, am I?”

  “Yes, you are. How come?”

  “Bi’truck! Bi’truck!” Charlie said, lacking skills, but concerned to have his contribution recognized.

  “Man, I really like that hat,” said Ran. “I don’t suppose…”

  He commenced a swap, but it was ill-advised. “Mine!” said Charlie, clamping down with two big little hands.

  Hope tugged his sleeve. “How come?”

  “Well, Pete…”

  He lost her on the hesitation.

  “Look what I have on!”

  “Umm-hmm. Très chic,” he said.

  “You bought it for my birthday.” Her tone flirted with severity, as though she suspected he’d forgotten.

  “I remember,” Ransom said, and now he did. “It fit you like a sack.”

  In New York, cruising the garment district one day in his cab, he’d seen the item on a rolling rack disappearing up a ramp and haggled out the passenger-side window with a nervous Puerto Rican kid in a black do-rag. This was after the label dropped him; after his well-meaning friends rallied round and got him a stint producing a band from the U of Alabama called Broken Teeth (“the next Hootie,” they were touted as). After five days at the Magic Shop in SoHo, he was ready to kill them all or commit suicide, preferably both. In lieu of either, he showed up at home that night behind the wheel of a lurching, shot-shocked cab, making good a long-term threat. Five songs into an album he was hell-bent on self-producing and distributing, he bought studio time by running up huge debts on MasterCard (at one point, he had six he had to rotate every time the promo rate expired). One morning he came back from the garage after a shift and found the closets empty. He sat for a long time at the kitchen table, with Claire’s bran muffin and her coffee—sweet and extra light—in a bag, before he read the note. It was on her good stationery, heavy linen stock with the address blind embossed on the verso of the envelope. Even nineteen years in a rock band couldn’t burn some good habits from the heart of a Charleston girl who’d grown up south of Broad. They left in April, and Ran hit bottom, or what looked like bottom then. By that September morning in the airport, he’d discovered that, beneath the basement, the house we know as life has several unsuspected floors; and, below those, several more.

  “We missed you, Daddy,” Hope said.

  “I missed you, too,” he would have liked to say, but Ransom, briefly, didn’t trust his voice. Sitting on the floor as the traffic veered like a stream around a rock, Ransom squeezed his children hard and smelled them like a stricken animal recovering the scent of its lost cubs, and then he opened his red eyes and looked at Claire.

  Standing barefoot on the Astroturf, in defiance, probably, of several laws, she had on a pair of faded, cutoff OshKosh overalls he recognized far better than Hope’s dress and from much further back, the sort that date from those brief years when you’re as close to physical perfection as you’re ever going to get and later put away in the unlikely hope that you’ll fit into them again. They not only fit her, they were loose, and her tan was almost shocking—a fearless and unapologetic mahogany the likes of which no one who listened to All Things Considered and read the New York Times had dared in recent times, as though in coming here she’d thrown away whole levels of caution and regressed to a wild, natural state. After years of threats and promises, she’d finally cut her hair, the long bolt of heavy chestnut silk she’d both prized and half resented, having had to tend it dutifully like an aging parent or the grave of a lover who’d died young. It barely brushed her shoulders now, the ends chopped in different lengths that looked gamine and unconsidered in a way nobody had to tell him cost a lot of dough. The gray threads he’d begun to notice in Ne
w York had been replaced by red-gold highlights, and all this somehow contributed to, but did not explain, the peculiar, throbbing vividness she had, which Ransom wanted to attribute to her coming home, to starting a new job and being mistress of her own demesne again, any cause, any possibility but one: that his absence had been good for her, had allowed certain parts of her long eclipsed by certain parts of him to reemerge and shine.

  “That’s some hat, Sheriff,” she said as the kids hauled him to his feet.

  Ran held the crown and stared inside. “It’s white.”

  “Duly noted.” She smiled at him from eyes that were the color of the glaze on good crème caramel, with that same burned, limpid sweetness. “You are skinny, bud.”

  “The Tragedy Diet,” he said, making light. “Do I look bad?”

  “Fuck you, Hill,” she whispered as she tiptoed up. “You look twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five?” His tone mingled incredulity and pleasure. Thinking “cheek,” Ran was happily surprised when Claire gave him her lips.

  “Well, thirty-five.” Her eyes had now turned sly. “Forty, tops.”

  “Hey, I’ll take forty,” said Ransom, who was forty-five. Never shy of taking chances, he glanced his fingers through her hair. “It’s great.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and her expression sobered—not rejecting but taking his touch the way you might a friend who says We need to talk, when the matter is a serious one on which you know the two of you may not agree.

  Her kisses were allowable, then; reciprocal privileges, if any, had yet to be determined.

  Pondering the state of play, Ran let his hand drop to her shoulder, wanderingly. On one side of the flap, a replacement button had been sewn. Thumbing the suspender, he drew his hand away. “I remember these.”

  Claire looked down, then up again. “You do? From where?” Her face was innocent and clueless.

  Ransom pressed his lips and shook his head.

  In the baggage area, he chatted with the kids and held their hands, trying not to look at her too much. His lovesickness for his wife of nineteen years was like a tumor in his chest, one he didn’t know if he could live with, but had proved beyond all shadow of a doubt he couldn’t live without.

  And the carousel went round and round and spit out his black bag, and away they went, back to Wando Passo.

  TWO

  You wait here.”

  With an ambiguous smile, Claire put on her Wayfarers and her Yankees cap and disappeared with the kids into the dark maw of the parking deck, leaving Ransom at the curb.

  The heat was something. He took off his coat. Ransom had forgotten heat like this. Even in the second week of September, it hit you like a comforter hauled prematurely from the dryer, scalding and wringing wet.

  Before long, they hove to around the curve. Amid the late-model Tauruses and minivans, they looked more carnival-like than ever in a torch red Thunderbird convertible, the old country-club-style ’56 with the Continental spare that had once belonged to Ransom’s dad, who had sewed seams on the line at the Dixie Bagging mill in Killdeer, North Carolina, Ran’s hometown. Mel had bought the car the one and only way a seamer could afford: from the salvage yard, with the shotgun side stove in and suspicious stains on the white Dial-A-Matic seats. Since his death, it had been parked beneath a tarp in Wando Passo’s crumbling stable. Claire wanted to trade it for something more kid-friendly and familial, but for Ran, the Bird represented something he could neither put his finger on nor quite let go.

  As they drew abreast, loud music thumped the air like a damp rug, and the kids were syncing out a little Motor City dance routine:

  We said, “It’s so tru-oo-ue,”

  We said, “It’s so deep,”

  But all it ever was, baby,

  Was talking in our sleep, that’s all,

  Just talking in my sleep….

  Their little faces screwed up in impassioned winces, they whined the lyrics like world-weary, hardened rockers who’d sweated blood for every word, and it was sweet and funny and, for Ran, like having someone open his belly with a knife and extract his small intestines link by smoking link. “Talking in My Sleep,” you see, was the biggest hit the Ransom Hill Band ever had, but the version booming off the box in the front seat was RAM’s, and the singer wasn’t Ransom, it was Mitchell Pike.

  “Do you like it, Daddy?” Hope asked.

  “Where’d you learn those moves?” he said, struggling to keep glumness from his tone.

  “Mommy teached us them.”

  “Taught them to us,” Claire corrected.

  “Taught them to us.”

  “Yea, Mommy! Yea, Doddy! Yea, me!” Unshy of self-advancement, Charlie hitched his wagon to the chorus as it circled back.

  “Talky nana seep, bay-bay, talky nana seep, aw-haw…”

  “They’ve been practicing all week.” Over her rims, Claire shot him a look of friendly mischief and jangled the keys like forbidden fruit.

  Ignoring them, Ran slipped into the shotgun seat and punched Eject.

  “Don’t tell me. You don’t like what Mitchell did.” Her dark eyes looked preemptively fatigued.

  His blue ones flashed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Come on, Ran, it’s sweet.”

  “Sweet?”

  She stood her ground. “Yes, I think they found a sweetness in it we didn’t see. Why not just give it to them? Did Mitch ever call?”

  “No, Mitch never did.”

  “How about the check?” Her smirk invited him to schuss past hurt feelings and let other people’s money wax the runners on his sled, but Ransom felt resistance, and though this might have been predicted, his forecasts had unilaterally called for clear blue skies. In New York last night packing up to come, as he moved about the apartment on West Jane, he returned over and over to the kitchen table and over and over slid the royalty check out of the music publisher’s envelope. $17,631.27. No fortune, true, but it had been quite some time since Ran had seen a check that large, quite some time since he’d seen any checks at all. Defying doctor’s orders, he uncorked a celebratory red from better times and poured a glass and put on Tosca, music Claire had turned him on to all those years ago, when he was on the cusp of stardom, yet still, at heart, the same hick kid who’d grown up in a company row house in the shadow of the great twin stacks of Dixie Bag with Mel, a fearful, angry drunk whose happiest hour came after the whistle blew on Friday afternoons. Returning from the package store, Mel ritually climbed behind the wheel and punched the buttons on the Town and Country radio of this car, which sat for years on blocks in the backyard awaiting restoration, as the rain and snow and dust and autumn leaves fell into it. At eleven, with money saved from scrubbing down the urinals at Dixie Bag, Ransom bought his first Chet Atkins self-instruction course and taught himself to Travis-pick, pledging himself to rock like a Famine Irish orphan to the church. When he arrived in New York on a Greyhound six years later, he could lay down, note for note, every lick Keith Richards played on Let It Bleed, yet he lived there for eight years and never set foot in the Met. And it wasn’t that he feared the music—actually, he was curious. What Ransom feared was the moment at the ticket window, when some poised, well-turned-out girl with her hair up and a string of pearls would ask him what he wanted, and he wouldn’t know the proper protocol for ordering, and he’d go hot and red like a specimen pinned beneath her clement 10x gaze. Claire—who’d had every chance, every reason, to be that girl, and wasn’t—had changed all that.

  And as Maria Callas sang “Vissi d’arte,” vibrating that silver treble E string in the spine that Ran, in his own way, still reached for every time he picked up his Les Paul, he got a little drunk. More relaxed and closer to himself than he’d felt in months, he turned the check facedown and wrote, “pay to the order of Claire DeLay,” and signed his name. All the way to South Carolina on the plane, he felt it in his wallet, radiating subtle heat, goodness, and he imagined the conversation he and Claire would have, her relief that things, which
hadn’t been okay in quite a while, could begin, from here, to be okay again. And now she asked him, “How about the check?” and the old resistance cropped up and surprised him, though it really shouldn’t have. Somehow, in all his fantasy preenactments of this reunion, the one thing Ran had never counted on was the future being like the past.

  “Can we talk about it later?”

  “Suit yourself.” Claire answered his evasion with no light in her face and put the key in the ignition.

  He touched her arm. “Let’s just wait till we get home, okay?”

  Her expression came back a little ways in his direction, as far as “mature and fair.” But it had started warm and lost some ground.

  “Maybe I will drive….”

  She reached for the chrome handle, but Ransom gripped her waist and slid beneath her, switching seats the way they used to do. As they passed, he felt the difference in her body, slighter but more dense, the bone and sinew closer to the surface, smelled her plain good soap, the perfume at the pulse-point under her left ear and, below that, an emergent hint of her BO, like turned black earth. Briefly, in his lap, there was something radiant and almost hot, and some of it was her, some him, and which was which and what was what was past parsing out. But though there wasn’t any stiffness in Claire’s body, there also wasn’t any give.

  Rebuffed, he pulled them out into the hot wind and took 17 south. As they crossed the double bridges over the Waccamaw and the Black, Ran saw the voluminous billow hovering over Georgetown like a benignant mushroom cloud. It always looked so white and clean emerging from the smokestacks, as if the south side of town concealed a cloud manufactory. Then you caught the sulfur smell of a paper plant.