She told Titanic all about how lonely she was and about her studio apartment and about how she never dated because the only time she ever met anyone was at work.
Boy, I understood that about this place. Once you knew the regulars, there was no one here to interest her or me, for that matter.
After a half hour, I found myself looking at her and not seeing Mary Jude, the cocktail waitress, but Mary Jude, the person.
An amazing transformation.
It was funny how that big guy could draw information out of people.
He left that night after drinking seventeen dollars of the twenty and leaving me the rest. I realized later that I knew nothing more about him than I had the moment he came in.
TWO
HE DUCKED BACK in the front door two nights later at nine o’clock. Like the first time, everyone stared, but after a second, a few waved hello. He had on a white sweatshirt this time, Levis, and a red baseball cap with the word “Davis” across the top.
Again, he carried the black leather briefcase.
He slid the briefcase up on the bar and took the stool next to old Richard Butler. Richard was one of the regulars who worked down at the docs and drank his supper every night.
Usually Richard was gone by nine with six or seven bourbon-waters under his belt.
For some reason, tonight he had stayed late and was still in his normal spot at the bar.
“A little better music this time,” Titanic said as I slid the bar napkin in front of him and he flipped a twenty at me. Someone had punched up a country song, but not a person in the bar was paying attention to it. I wouldn’t have noticed if Titanic hadn’t said something. I guess I only heard the bad ones.
“You like music, huh?” old Richard said, looking up from the bottom of his last drink.
“Same?” I asked Titanic, picking up the twenty.
Titanic nodded, then turned to Richard. “Don’t you?”
Old Richard shook his head side to side in a drunken exaggerated motion. “Naw. My son liked the stuff and it drove me to drink.” He picked up his empty glass and tried to get something more out of it while chuckling to himself.
I headed down the bar toward the well to make Titanic’s drink and by the time I got back, Titanic had old Richard telling him all about his son and about how he was killed on a music field trip while still in high school. Hell, I’d been serving Richard for three years and not once had he mentioned he’d had a son.
Or that the son had died.
For the rest of that evening, I watched Titanic get people who got near him at the bar to talk about themselves and about their lives and their loves without once mentioning one thing about himself.
I think he knew I was watching him, because every so often he would look up at me and point over at the jukebox and say, “Interesting song. Listen to the words.”
Then he’d go back to whatever conversation he was having at the time.
That instruction from him always brought the song out loud and clear as if it hadn’t been playing the moment before. Usually the words would mean something to me, or get me remembering a part of my life with Rita, or something about my work or my ball-playing days.
Again Titanic stayed for seventeen dollars of his twenty and like he had the first time, left without a word about himself ever being said.
THREE
AFTER THAT HE started coming in twice a week.
Mondays and Thursdays. He always dressed comfortably and always had the black leather briefcase with him. He became another of the regulars, accepted by most of the old-timers as if he’d been around for years instead of weeks.
I loved that about bars like Sandy’s. Once you were in, you were accepted, no matter how strange you looked or what you did or didn’t do outside of Sandy’s.
It was the Thursday night during his third week that I finally got up enough courage to ask him what he did with the briefcase. I did it real casual-like as I slid a drink in front of him and I think I almost caught him off guard.
Almost.
He paused for a long second, looking at me, then he smiled and patted the case lightly with one big hand. “I use it for emergencies.”
“How’s that?”
He pointed a finger up in the air. “Notice the song? Good message in this one.”
The old Kenny Rodgers’ song blared over my consciousness like someone had turned up the volume. Without thinking I found myself following the words as I walked back toward the well.
When I turned around, Titanic had picked up his drink and joined a group over in the corner, leaving his briefcase and his money sitting in their normal spot on the bar.
About a month after Titanic started coming into Sandy’s, Mary Jude started having troubles.
The only reason I noticed it was because Titanic started talking to her a bunch more and I overheard some of her problems. It seemed the loneliness was getting to her and her ex-husband was being a real bastard about letting her see the kids. She just couldn’t afford to fly up to Alaska or help fly them down.
It looked as if she might not even get to see them this summer and that had her awful depressed.
I noticed one Tuesday she came in for work with her eyes red.
I asked her if there was anything I could do, but she just shook her head. That night Titanic came in and talked to her and she seemed to be a lot better by the end of the night.
But she was back depressed again the next night.
The following Monday she didn’t show for work.
Titanic came in at nine and he didn’t look happy. He sat his black briefcase down on the bar and looked over at me. “Mary Jude?”
“Didn’t come in,” I said. “I tried to call her, but didn’t get an answer.”
He nodded. “She is one very sick woman and there doesn’t seem to be much more I can do to help her.” He stood with both huge hands on the case and stared down at it as if it might explode at any moment.
“Help her?” I asked. “You a doctor?”
He looked up at me and smiled that same smile adults give kids when they ask a reasonable question that seems to have an obvious other answer. “No, I’m not,” he said. “I am a musician. And I think it may be time I play my latest song.”
He clicked open the latches on the briefcase and opened the case. The sound of those latches clicking shocked the bar into silence.
Inside, the case was lined in a black velvet and completely empty except for one forty-five record in a paper slip.
He carefully picked up the forty-five and closed the case.
“May I play this on your jukebox?”
I stared at the record for a moment, then looked up at him. “I don’t have a key.”
“I can open it.”
“Then be my guest,” I said.
I didn’t know what to think. One moment we were talking about Mary Jude and how sick she was and the next he tells me the first bit of information I’ve heard about him, then opens up a case he’s brought with him every night and pulls out a stupid record.
He moved over to the jukebox and with a movement of his hand that I couldn’t follow, had the top up. He studied the insides for a moment, then inserted his record carefully. At this point, not only was I watching him, but so was everyone in the place.
He closed the top of the jukebox and turned back to face me.
“I’m sorry for what this will do to you. And to all of you.”
He swept his arm around to include everyone in the bar. At that moment there were about twenty of the regulars scattered around, most of them he had talked to at one point or another.
“It is better people learn their lessons without help,” he said, his big rumbling voice filling the silence of Sandy’s. “But I feel Mary Jude may be in danger and I must try to help her.”
He patted the jukebox. “And this is the only way I know how.”
“Just exactly what are you planning on doing?” I asked.
“I’m just going to play my
latest song,” he said. “Nothing more.”
With that, he turned to the jukebox and punched two buttons. Right at that point you could hear the traffic outside on the distant street that ran in front of the bar.
No one said a word.
The song started low, almost as if it really didn’t have one starting point but had always been there below the level of hearing. I think the instrument was a flute, but someone later said they’d heard a guitar.
All I know is that when it started, I suddenly felt light-headed.
And when the words started with the sound of Titanic’s voice, deep and full and rich, I felt the room spin.
Titanic slowly faded away, as if his massive frame had never been standing there.
Everyone agreed later that he had disappeared.
Or at least everyone thought they saw him disappear.
And everyone agreed that after a few seconds, he was back, dancing with Mary Jude.
I remember half watching them dance, his huge frame agile and light as he led her in and out of the tables. She was smiling and radiant, staring up at his face.
But the other half of me was years away from Sandy’s Bar, drifting over my past decisions and events of my life as smoothly as Titanic and Mary Jude drifted past the tables in Sandy’s Lounge.
I saw clearly what I had done right and where I had been wrong.
I understood for the first time why Rita had pushed me so hard.
By the end of the song, I finally understood what I needed to do to be happy with myself.
How I had been only hiding in Sandy’s.
Everything.
As the last notes of the music died into the walls and the wooden tables and the beer signs, Mary Jude and Titanic faded away as if someone had turned a fan on a cloud of smoke.
And the silence that followed lasted one damn long time.
FOUR
JACOB LOST MORE than half of his regular customers that night, as Titanic’s song changed their lives as it changed mine.
But not a one of us could remember the words to his song.
Or the tune.
We just remember listening to it. And what that listening did to each of us.
Jacob told me that Mary Jude had called him and quit. She had said she was going back to Alaska to fight for her kids like she should have done the first time.
No one ever saw Titanic again, and we couldn’t find his record anywhere in the jukebox.
Two weeks later I quit tending bar at Sandy’s to take a job as a scout for the local semi-pro baseball team. It was a start back, a start to a new life of not hiding.
Titanic’s black briefcase was still sitting behind the bar the day I left, as empty as I had been before he had played his most recent song. I patted it on the way out and said, “Thanks.”
What Came Before…
Nineteen-year-old Boston native Jimmy Gray had been traveling with his parents and older brother, Luke, headed west to find a new home and new riches.
Before even reaching Independence, they were attacked and robbed by Jake Benson and his gang. Jimmy’s parents were killed, his brother wounded.
In one of the wildest towns in all of American history, Jimmy Gray, a sheltered, educated son of a banker from Boston suddenly finds himself very, very much alone.
But then through some luck, he finds other young men about his age and down on their luck who might be able to help him.
Together, the five of them head west after Benson.
They end up hunting buffalo as he always dreamed of doing, but then they are hit with a massive flash flood and Jimmy is left alone, his friends more than likely dead.
Luckily, they all meet up again and are all safe. So they continue west, knowing that Benson is just ahead of them.
Suddenly they come upon Benson and his men killing a farm family. They manage to get one of the men separated from the others, but in a fall he accidently dies.
So they scatter to meet up later at a camp. They managed that but found a survivor of the killings. So one of them had to go back with the kid while the others followed Benson.
The caught him once again terrorizing a small wagon train and managed to scare him and his men off.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BUFFALO JIMMY
PART TWENTY-TWO
HEADED TOWARD DANGER
MORE THAN THREE weeks had passed since Zach and Truitt had rejoined them from taking the young boy back. It had been the longest and hottest three weeks Jimmy could ever remember. They had followed slowly, very slowly, behind the wagon train that Benson and his men were shadowing.
Long reported that one of Benson’s men, the one with the broken arm, seemed to be getting weaker and weaker, which got a cheer from everyone. It had been C.J., with his special sling, that had hit the man in the arm with a rock.
They were all proud of the fact that they had rescued an entire wagon company from Benson and his killers. To Jimmy, after not being in time to save the family at the homestead, saving the fine people of that wagon company had felt wonderful.
The people of the company had been very appreciative as well, wanting the boys to ride along with them the rest of the way to California.
Even though there were some pretty girls Jimmy’s age with the company, all of them had decided to move on, to stay close behind Benson and his men.
The trail across most of Northern Nevada wound in and out of the desert scrub and rocks beside the ever-smaller flow of the Humboldt River. They had had to cross the river seven times, but the flow was so small, the crossings hadn’t ever been a problem.
As C.J. and Josh had told them, ahead was the Humboldt Sink, where what was left of the river just vanished into desert.
And beyond that, the hardest leg of the trip, the Forty Mile Desert.
Every day along the Humboldt, the temperatures were unbearable in the afternoon, so they had adopted a travel method of getting up before dawn and moving in the early light, then by noon finding a shelter of either brush or rocks and resting during the hot hours.
Long kept great care of their horses, making sure they were fed and watered the right amounts, but even with the good care and decent grass, the heat was clearly taking a toll on them. A week earlier, Long had shifted the horse C.J. was riding to a pack horse because it couldn’t carry C. J.’s weight and his gear anymore.
Along the river, Jimmy was stunned at how many broken-down wagons littered the trail. At each wagon without people, Jimmy had them search for water bags and smaller supplies that might come in handy. They had found a few water bags and a canteen.
With what Jimmy understood they were facing, trying to carry extra water might just be what saved their lives.
Years and years of dead stock bones, bleached white, littered the sides of the trail as well. There weren’t that many wagon companies ahead of them yet this summer, since they were traveling by horse, but even so, there were already dozens of fresh dead animals beside the trail, most of them torn apart by packs of wild dogs Josh said were called coyotes.
Jimmy couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like when all the wagons behind them got here, in the heat of August. The entire trail would smell like death almost every step of the way.
They had had to pass at least four solo wagons with families. They had broken down and been left by their companies who had had no choice but to move on.
They had stopped to see if they could help at each family, but there was really nothing they could do. The families all seemed to have water and food. Jimmy figured that with luck, the families would join up with another company coming along, either with their wagon fixed or walking the rest of the way. Otherwise, if at some point they didn’t move forward, those families, children and all, would just die in the extreme heat of the desert.
As each day went by, and the farther they got down the Humboldt, the more graves there were, all with names roughly scratched into wooden crosses.
Josh started to write down all the names and locations,
but after a week on the Humboldt, there were so many, he gave up the task as too depressing.
Two days away from the Humboldt Sink, Josh read them all a passage from his favorite writer, Mark Twain, who had been out west a few years earlier and had written about the Forty Mile Desert.
Twain said, “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step.”
“Okay, no more of that,” Truitt said, shaking his head. “We still have to cross that thing.”
With the intense heat, all the bones and graves along the Humboldt, and forty miles of sand ahead of them, Jimmy could imagine Twain being very, very right about what they were facing.
Jimmy sure wasn’t looking forward to that leg on this adventure.
PART TWENTY-THREE
KNOWING WHAT’S AHEAD
THE WAGON COMPANY that Benson was following camped for three days on the edge of the Sink, so they were forced to camp back down the trail a half-day’s ride to make sure they weren’t seen.
Just sitting, not moving, bothered Jimmy more than anything. But Long said it was a good thing, since they were resting the horses, and gaining all their strength before crossing the Forty Mile Desert.
With the wagon company camped like that, Long was able to get much closer. It seemed, from what Long overheard, that some of the men of the company had died during a river crossing early in the trip, and now there were only five men and three older boys in the seven wagons, with a dozen young children and ten women.
Long said Benson and his men were pretending they were going to help the company across the desert.
“Not likely,” Jimmy had said. “It’s only a matter of time before those people meet a very sad end.”
“Unless we can do something to stop Benson,” Josh said.
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