Chapter Ten - Cody
From then on, there was no more talk about being just friends. We were officially a couple, and for a little while I think me and Lisa had our fill of happy days. I know I did. I didn’t forget about all the things hanging over us, and I didn’t forget about Brandon’s warning, either, but I did come to think maybe this was our walk through the crystal forest, if you will. Our sweet taste of happiness before the bad times came.
The truck pull was loud and messy and muddy and mean, just like the best ones always are. . . so loud we couldn’t hear a word the whole time. I could tell Lisa had never been to one before, because she obviously hadn’t expected the noise level. She kept putting her hands over her ears during the especially loud parts, but the rest of the time she laughed and cheered with the best of them.
I took her horseback riding on the road that circled the lake the next afternoon, and we talked about it.
“It was really cool, the way you cheered at the truck pull last night,” I told her. We were on a shady part of the road riding side by side beneath the pines and the white oaks, with her on Nikki and me on my trusty Buck. Nikki was Mama’s old gray mare, a nice, sensible horse who didn’t toss up too many surprises.
“What, you thought I was pulling your leg about wanting to go?” she asked.
“Well, you know, sometimes girls have told me a couple things just to impress me,” I said. I was playing with her, of course, but she didn’t take the bait.
“I’m sure they have. You’re a pretty hot commodity, Coby,” she said, and I laughed.
“Coby?’ I asked skeptically, and she smiled a little.
“Sure, why not? Cody boy. Coby. See there, how good at nicknames I am? Buck likes it, I bet,” she said, reaching over to pat the horse’s neck. I rolled my eyes but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t remember anybody ever calling me Coby before, but all it did was amuse me. Mama used to call me Dock when I was little because I used to like Bugs Bunny cartoons, but that’s about it as far as nicknames go. My name’s too short to really need one. But I was still buoyed up by that conversation at Autograph Rock, and Lisa could have gotten by with calling me just about anything right then if she’d wanted to.
Words are not my specialty, but the silly nickname made me feel unexpectedly tender towards her, and when we came to a big mimosa tree beside the wooden bridge over Cadron Creek, I saw my chance to do something.
“Are you ready for lunch, yet?” I asked casually, like it didn’t matter too much.
“I’m fine, but we can go ahead and eat if you want to,” she said.
“Sure. This looks like a good place,” I said, nodding at the tree.
Mimosas are also called Formosa trees sometimes, a name which means simply the beautiful tree, and that they surely are. Not only that, but Cadron Creek is named after the brook of the same name that flows near the Garden of Gethsemane, which they say is one of the most beautiful places in Jerusalem. So you might say I picked a sweet and symbolic kind of spot, if you care for things like that. I sure do. I love the way there’s so much depth and richness to the world beyond what the eye first sees, if you only take the time to learn about it. A man could live his whole life awash in wonders, if he only knew.
So we got down and sat in the shade of the sweet-smelling blossoms, eating our sandwiches and drinking Dr. Pepper, and while we were sitting there I gathered up a double handful of mimosa blooms and started weaving them together. It was more or less like braiding a rope, and I’d had lots of practice with that. I picked a blade of rye grass from the edge of the water and chewed on it absently while I worked, like I usually do when I need to concentrate. Otherwise I tend to stick my tongue out without thinking, and that’s undignified, you know.
“What are you doing?” she asked, watching me.
“Wait and see,” I told her, and with that she had to be content. It took me a few minutes because the stems were so small, and I have to admit it was a bit lopsided, but when I was done I had a pink-and-white crown of fragrant powder puffs. I had her lean over, and I carefully pulled a few strands of her hair through to hold it in place.
“There. Now you look like a princess from back when the world was young,” I said. It was my best stab at poetry, such as it was.
“I feel silly,” she said, but I could tell from her eyes that she really didn’t. She leaned over and kissed me then, one of those happy, innocent kisses with nothing behind it but simple love, and I felt warm from the tips of my toes to the ends of my ears.
I took a drink of Dr. Pepper and kissed her in return, my mouth still full of soda pop, cold and sweet. She always laughs when I do that and calls them monkey kisses, from the way monkeys feed each other with a mouthful of food or water. She tells me Dr. Pepper is fine, but if I ever try it with a mouthful of chewed-up broccoli, she swears she’ll slap me.
She didn’t take off the mimosa crown when we left the bridge, even though it soon wilted from the sun when we came back through open spots.
We passed in front of Marcus’s house and came to the big aluminum gate where the lakeside track emerged onto the main haul road beside the peach orchard, and I had to get down so I could open it for us. Lisa rode through while I led Buck by the bridle so I could fasten the gate behind us again and keep the cows out of the peaches.
Then we headed back toward the barn. The haul road passes over the top of the earth dam that forms the lake, and below it the land drops off to the flats near the bayou; cow pasture down there, mostly. The herd was grazing under the cypress trees that grew near the bayou, too far away to see them very well. I rambled on for a while about how black cows were worth more money than any other color because of the fad for Black Angus meat, but I noticed she wasn’t really paying much attention.
“We’ve got a gig coming up next weekend in Dallas,” I mentioned after a while, changing the subject.
“Really? Where at?” she asked.
“Aw, just another honky-tonk joint, that’s all. But we’ll make better money than we do around here, that’s for sure,” I told her.
“Can I come?” she asked, and I glanced at her skeptically.
“You really want to? It’s not a very nice place, you know,” I reminded her.
“Sure. I think it’ll be fun,” she said.
So we took her with us, and she was good about helping to load up the sound equipment and such, and she didn’t complain when the two of us had to squeeze into the tiny back seat of Cyrus’s truck.
The place turned out to be rougher than I hoped; the kind that has chicken wire in front of the stage. That’s always a bad sign. But nevertheless, the four of us quickly unpacked and set up the equipment, and Lisa found a stool so she could sit at the end of the bar and watch. I was afraid she’d be bored to tears, honestly, but if she was then she did a good job keeping it to herself.
She looked awfully nice, to be in such a place as that. Marcus used to joke around that all it takes to turn a bar fly into a beauty queen is if she’s still got all her teeth, and after some of the women I’ve seen in places like that, I don’t even think he was joking. But Lisa was pretty in a sweet, fresh kind of way; the kind of way that you don’t often see in places like that. It worried me a little, and I hoped the guys left her alone.
Things went pretty well for the first couple of hours, but then sure enough a fight started and pretty soon the whole place was engulfed in it. People were throwing beer bottles and food and even handfuls of sawdust, and chicken wire won’t stop all those things. I barely had time to stash Grandpa Tommy’s Martin behind the drum set before two men came crashing through the chicken wire and knocked me off my stool, and before I knew it all three of us were sucked into the brawl.
I hate bar fights. There’s nothing noble or attractive about them; they’re ugly and senseless and mean, and people get hurt really badly sometimes, especially if somebody pulls a knife or a gun. Not to mention a lot of expensive eq
uipment can get busted to pieces in the blink of an eye.
Normally I would’ve stayed up on stage to defend the equipment, but not with Lisa out there in the very thick of things. I could see her crouched down at the end of the bar, trying her best to stay out of the way. So I bulled my way through the melee and hustled her out the back door as fast as I could. That earned me a busted lip from somebody’s flying fist in the process, but I’ve had worse.
“Are you all right?” I asked her as soon as we were safely out in the alley. My mouth was full of blood and I had nothing to wipe it away with, so I turned my head and spit it out on the pavement.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. She sounded fairly cool about the whole thing, actually.
“We’ll be going home in a few minutes. As soon as the cops get here they’ll shut the place down for the night,” I told her.
“No doubt. I never knew you spent so much time in saloons,” she said, shaking her head.
“I wouldn’t, if I had my druthers. But I guess it grows on you after a while,” I said dryly, and she actually laughed.
“Yeah, I can see how it would,” she agreed.
“That was a joke, Lisa,” I said, wondering if maybe she’d hit her head on something before I was able to get her outside.
“I know. Maybe it’s being out here with you and the others that I like. Even if all we do is go to a bar fight,” she said. I laughed and kissed her for that, forgetting my split lip until too late. A stab of pain reminded me, and I left bright red blood on her mouth, too, like she’d been kissing a vampire. Not a very pretty picture.
“Are you okay?” she asked, trying to see in the dim light.
“Yeah, it’s only a busted lip, that’s all. No big thing,” I said.
“Okay, then,” she said, and kissed me very softly right on my lower lip, not even hard enough to hurt.
Marcus and Cyrus came out the back door right about then, grumbling about how somebody had kicked in a speaker. Marcus had a black eye, but it didn’t look like Cyrus had any obvious injuries. It could’ve been a lot worse.
The four of us loaded up the drums and the amp and I fetched my guitar from behind the stage, and then we collected our money from the owner and went home. Lisa actually seemed like she had a good time, hard as that was for me to believe.
She went with us to several other gigs after that, until we all started thinking of her as our semi-official roadie, and marveled that we were big-league enough to have a roadie in the first place. Marcus and Cyrus thought she was awesome, and never failed to tell me so. Marcus joked around about how if we ever broke up then he wanted first chance to pick up the pieces, and Cyrus asked if she had a sister. It was all good-natured fun, of course, but whenever anybody said something like that she always put her hand on my arm or hugged me or some such thing, just to show the whole world she didn’t give a fig about anybody except me.
I couldn’t help myself. . . I gloried in it. I’d never tasted that kind of love in my whole life even though I’d wished and longed for it ever since I was old enough to know I wanted anything at all. It’s all the sweeter, when you’re suddenly handed something you wanted that much and always thought you could never have. The more time passed, the more certain I was that I loved her and she really was my one and only; incredibly, unbelievably, right there by my side. But I never said so, because in spite of everything I still kept worrying that it was all too good to be true, and sooner or later the other shoe would drop and everything would fall to pieces.
“Why don’t you sing with us sometime, Lisa? We could always use a girl’s part, you know,” I asked her one day, after we’d finished a gig in Tyler. It was one of the more upscale places we’d been to; a trendy little coffee house named Sufficient Grounds, where the manager served us complimentary espresso and strawberry cheesecake when we took our break.
“Oh, I could never do that,” she demurred, although I could tell she was flattered to be asked.
“Sure you could. I bet you could even help me write some song lyrics, if you wanted to. They’re just poetry, after all,” I suggested.
“Well. . . sure, why not?” she said.
So we sat down and tried it, scribbling verses and musical notations for hours on the front porch at Goliad. I played the tune to see what she thought of it every now and then, and I’d try to sing the words she wrote. Cyrus could have done that part a lot better, of course, but at least she didn’t laugh too much.
“So let me hear you sing something, darlin’. I was serious about needing a girl’s part,” I finally told her.
“You promise you won’t laugh?” she asked shyly.
“Cross my heart,” I said, and after hesitating another few seconds she started to sing.
Sleep, my love, and peace attend thee,
All through the night
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night. . .
She started out soft and uncertain, but after a while she seemed to forget about that and became more confident. She grasped my hands, and looked into my eyes, and I couldn’t have torn myself away even if I’d wanted to.
If you’ve never seen love in someone’s eyes, you might be tempted to think it’s only a figure of speech. I’m here to tell you it’s not. I saw it that day, and I knew what it was immediately. I was startled, but not unbelieving. I’ve always heard that the eyes are the windows of the soul, and I guess I never really understood that before. I think now I do.
“That’s beautiful,” I finally managed to say, and she smiled.
“My mother used to sing it for me when I was little. It’s an old Welsh song. Mama’s grandmother was from Caerleon, which they say used to be Camelot, where King Arthur lived,” she murmured.
“See, I knew you had some interesting stories to tell. Maybe you’re secretly a princess after all,” I said, and she laughed.
“Maybe to you, Coby,” she said, amused.
“Yeah, definitely to me,” I said softly.
Many Waters Page 12