Way Past Dead

by Steven Womack

  Of course, I could always go back to repoing cars with Lonnie, although even that had lost its appeal. He mostly needed me in the middle of the night, and usually to run to someplace like northern Alabama or somewhere up in Kentucky. Lots of driving, tedium, lack of sleep, punctuated by moments of extreme terror.

  The gig with the insurance company represented my best prospect. I’d been hustling them for a couple of months now, hoping to pick up just about anything. Their in-house investigators had given up after a couple of months of watching the bricklayer. He’d had all kinds of tests run: MRIs, CAT scans, the whole program. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but there was the incontrovertible evidence of the wheelchair. The guy never got out of it. He never slipped. He played his part perfectly. But so had I.

  I’d taken the job on a contingency basis, which a half-dozen people had told me never to do. I only got paid if I came up with proof that the guy was defrauding them. If I hadn’t gotten the videotape, it would have been wasted time. It was a gamble, and it had paid off. With a little luck, I’d be an insider now with the insurance company.

  I reread the paper, with its sidebars on the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians and Brother Woodrow Tyberious Hogg. Brother Hogg, it seemed, had done a little time down in Texas for credit-card fraud and paper hanging back in the mid-Seventies. He’d undergone a jailhouse conversion and had come out a Bible-thumping sidewalk preacher in a polyester leisure suit with a head full of Scripture and Brylcreem. In the mid-Eighties he came to Nashville and took his shot at becoming a country/gospel crossover star, a shot that thankfully missed the target by a Texas mile. He brought Sister Evangeline and a few other people, mostly runaway kids, with him, and they rented one of those decaying, once-grand houses on Belmont Avenue. They passed out religious tracts, leaflets, and pamphlets blasting the communist and/or Catholic conspiracy to pollute our spiritual purity, or some such crap. Standard paranoid religious deviant stuff. They had a thing for the Masons, too. They were passing out anti-Masonry tracts long before the Southern Baptists got their panties in a wad over them. Ahead of their time, I guess.

  Somewhere along the line, the group-slash-cult started making clothes. At first, they’d buy stuff from Goodwill and the Salvation Army, then spray-paint pictures of Jesus and outline them in rhinestones. People, especially music types, started paying money for these faded denim jackets and torn blue jeans that had undergone the Enochian metamorphosis. After a while the group didn’t have to buy used clothing anymore. They rented an old building over on Charlotte Avenue. Then they bought the building. Then they took in more and more runaways, who worked cheap and hard and loved Jesus and didn’t ask a lot of questions. Pretty soon the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians didn’t have to survive on handouts anymore. Now they owned several buildings, including a three-million-dollar, ten-acre estate on Hillsboro Road near the county line. Three million may not be much in New York or L.A., but down here it’ll still buy you something that’ll make reporters use the word estate. A high brick-and-stucco wall surrounded the ten acres, and the place was as secure as a fortress.

  The main newspaper story outlined how it had all hit the fan Friday when somebody from inside the compound dialed 911 and reported Sister Evangeline Hogg had been found unconscious in her bedroom. Several bottles of pills and an empty quart bottle of Smirnoff were found by the bed. The paramedics arrived with a Metro squad car in tow, which was standard operating procedure.

  The Enochians went ballistic. They didn’t want any part of the Metro Nashville Police Department on their property. The cops didn’t have a search warrant or anything, and there wasn’t enough probable cause for them to think a crime had been committed, so they very politely waited outside the compound. They followed the orange-and-white ambulance to General Hospital. When Sister Evangeline was pronounced DOA and a probable suicide, the officers simply escorted the ambulance next door to the morgue before Brother Woodrow had a chance to claim the body, which he wouldn’t have been allowed to do anyway. In this state, the law requires an investigation into possible suicides—including an autopsy.

  As I sat in my office overlooking Seventh Avenue near Broadway, I could hear in the distance more whopping of helicopter blades and the occasional bursts of siren. The whole drama was unfolding, as the television news reporters would say, scarcely ten or twelve blocks away. I felt a curious detachment from it all, as if this was all happening in a different place or time than the one Marsha and I occupied. Maybe it was just that there was nothing I could do about it.

  Part of it was shock. As a rule, people in Nashville just don’t hold each other hostage. Nashville has more churches per capita than any other city in the country. Despite that, there’s remarkably little religious tension. Everybody behaves and leaves everybody else alone. Until now, that is. Now we were just another Waco, Guyana, or Beirut: a place with innocent people held hostage by other people who were convinced they had a direct line to God.

  By that evening, after spending the rest of the afternoon in my office, I was too tired to do much of anything. Unable to resist temptation, I tried calling Marsha one more time. The phone rang once, twice, then about five more times before a computer voice came on and said: “I’m sorry, the cellular mobility customer you are calling is unavailable.”

  Click. Dial tone.

  I made my umpteenth pass by the still-silent barricades, then crossed the river back into East Nashville and headed for the supermarket. I thought briefly of just grabbing a quick dinner at Mrs. Lee’s, the best Szechuan restaurant in a five-county area, and heading home. There was too much other stuff I needed, though. I even had a toilet-paper emergency, and once you’re in the grip of a full-blown toilet-paper emergency, your options drop fast. You’ve got to go to the store, no matter how much of a bother.

  So I restocked the thirty-five-year-old Kelvinator and the bathroom closet, then made a cheeseburger and a pan of home fries while I watched Sixty Minutes. Ed Bradley even alluded to the siege of the Nashville morgue in introducing a segment on a guy who debrainwashed cult victims. Jeez, we were hitting the big time now.

  I sat around after dinner, grazing through the cable channels, then halfheartedly reading a paperback history of jazz in America. I was tired but too wired to sleep. Finally I decided Ray and Slim were expecting me at the Bluebird, and if I wasn’t going to sleep, I may as well go have a beer and listen to some music.

  The Mazda came to life with a pull of the choke and a twist of the key. A small puff of blue-black smoke appeared in the rearview mirror, then drifted away across the neighbor’s front yard.

  Sunday evening is possibly the only time of the entire week when this city isn’t plagued by a swarm of traffic. I cut over to I-65 by way of the Ellington Parkway and took the north loop across the river to the Four-Forty Parkway. In twenty minutes, I was driving down a winding four-lane road toward Green Hills, the upper-middle-class-to-snazzy part of town I used to live in, back when I still had my job at the newspaper and was married to the Executive Vice-President of the advertising agency.

  The Bluebird Café is located in a strip mall, hidden in among retail stores, past a nursery, down the road from the mall at Green Hills. It looked ordinary from the front, like maybe a small diner. Inside though, it was—as we say down south—ate completely up with atmosphere. Dark, smoky, with framed eight-by-ten glossies of all the famous people who’d played there tacked up all over the place, the Bluebird was a small room with a bar on one side and tables everywhere else. Somewhere back in the corner, a kitchen sat hidden and out of the way. Pipes in the ceiling had been painted and left exposed.

  Truth is, the Bluebird Café isn’t a hell of a lot to look at. But it is one of the most sought-after venues in the city. If you were an insider in the music business, showcasing at the Bluebird meant you’d arrived. I read in the paper a while back that somebody’d even written a play about it.

  I parked three or four stores down and walked across the asphalt parking lot
to the line at the front door. All the tables were occupied by people who’d been smart enough to make reservations. I paid my eight bucks cover and wound up in a gallery of folding chairs next to the bar, over in the corner out of everybody’s way. After grabbing a beer, I climbed over three people to get back to my chair. I settled back to wait for the music to start.

  In the center of the room, the tables had been pushed back to form a loose circle. Inside the circle, four metal folding chairs sat next to guitars in stands beside several amplifiers. Ray and Slim already occupied two of the chairs and were leaning over their Martins, tuning them up and talking real low. Slim wore a khaki bush shirt, with epaulets on the shoulders, and jeans. Ray wore a pearl-buttoned blue-and-red cowboy shirt and a broad-brimmed ten-gallon hat. I’d never seen Ray decked out like that. He looked kind of goofy, I thought.

  Ray’s back was to me, and Slim was to his left. Then another fellow, a tall, skinny guy with prominent cheekbones and sunken eyes, wearing jeans and a checked flannel shirt, made his way through the tables and sat down across from Ray. Ray said something, and all three broke out laughing as the tall one picked up a glossy, jet-black guitar and cradled it in his lap.

  I looked down at my watch. They were ten minutes late getting started already. Gigs like this never start on time anyway, but if they didn’t make music soon, I was going to pack it in.

  There was an empty chair across from Slim, and it appeared that nothing much was going to happen until that chair was filled. I checked my watch again, then sipped on the beer and did a little people watching. The place was packed, the audience jammed in shoulder to shoulder at tables, waitresses twisting and turning, their trays held high overhead as they delivered drinks. A clamor of chaotic voices filled the room.

  I thought of Marsha and wished she were here. Thick crowds in small rooms have never been my style. I’m not sure I like people well enough to be this close to so many of them. I’d come purely as a favor to Slim and Ray. But as long as I had to be here, I’d much rather have had Marsha with me.

  Finally, after I’d run out of both beer and mental monologues to replay in my head, I was about to see if I could slip out of the place unnoticed. Just as I rose to leave there was a shift in the tone of the audience murmur and heads started turning toward the front door. I sat back down just as a high voice that bordered on shrill yelled from around the corner: “Oh, good heavens, I’m so sorry, I’m late, oh, good heavens—”

  Slim put his head down on his guitar and rolled it from side to side, like he’d been through this routine before. Two women sitting next to me put their heads together, and I heard one of them whisper: “Oh, she always does this. She’s always late. I think it’s just to get attention.”

  And then the other one whispered back: “Yeah, either that or she just likes to piss Slim off.”

  “What do you expect from an ex-wife?” The first one giggled.

  “Oh, I think it’s just an act.…”

  Ex-wife? Slim had never mentioned an ex-wife. Why would Slim be sitting in a crowded club on a Sunday night singing songs with his ex-wife? My ex and I avoided each other unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

  Music people are strange.

  The woman walked into our view from the right, around the corner, her long thin arms waving at the crowd, hands splayed out chaotically, fingers pointing everywhere at once. A fat guy with a long, scraggly beard and thick glasses sat in front of me. I shifted in my seat to look around him and stared.

  She was tall; nearly as tall, I figured, as Marsha’s six-one, six-two. Her hair was straight, the color of dark ash, and hung down her back below her waist Crystal Gayle-style. She wore a pair of jeans that must have been painted on and a crocheted white sweater that was nearly see-through. Her face was thin, her features fine: pointed nose, sculpted cheekbones.

  She made me ache.

  “Becca,” Slim said into the microphone, his voice scolding her.

  “Oh, hush,” she said in a voice loud enough and penetrating enough not to need amplification. “Don’t start on me, Slim.”

  The audience howled. The two women next to me shook with laughter, as if they’d seen this before and were expecting it. The fourth singer, the one across from Ray, hit a loud E chord on his guitar.

  “I’m Slim Gibson,” Slim announced to the audience, his voice its usual low and slow. “And this ravishing beauty here is the late Rebecca Gibson, my lovely ex-wife and talented ex-songwriting partner.”

  The audience laughter swelled. Evidently, I was the only one who hadn’t seen this dog-and-pony show before. I found it hard to laugh; there was a sharper edge to all this than I liked.

  Rebecca Gibson slid her long body between the tables, through the crowd, and onto the empty chair across from Slim. She sat down, crossed her legs, and pulled the microphone on its horizontal stand to her lips.

  “I may not be on time,” she said brashly, “but there’s no call for you to refer to me as the late Rebecca Gibson.”

  The audience roared.

  “The romance may be gone, but the royalties remain, right, baby?” she said.

  More roaring. She was animated, cheeky, seemingly in constant motion. In a different time, she might have been labeled brazen. She was as extroverted as Slim was introverted. The difference in the two must have made for an interesting marriage, which as far as I’m concerned is only a slight variation on the ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

  I sort of knew what to expect next. At a songwriters’ roundtable, four singer-songwriters sit in a circle and take turns, each singing one of his or her own songs. The other three could jump in and provide a little background or harmony, but basically each one had the stage to himself. I also knew from the couple of other times I’d been to the Bluebird that Slim was in the starting position. In just a second or two, as Rebecca adjusted her mike and settled in, Slim ran his pick down the six-string one last time to get everybody’s attention.

  “This is one that Becca and I wrote a long time ago,” he said. “Hope you like it.”

  Then Slim played a three-chord progression that was elegant in its simplicity. Ray and the other songwriter, whose name I never did get, slid into accompaniment, the strings of their guitars filling the spaces in Slim’s lead. Then Slim began singing, his voice plaintive and sweet, right on key, exactly where it needed to be. I recognized the song, “All My Empty Heart Wants Is You,” as one that had been recorded a few years back by some minor up-and-comer who rapidly came and went.

  Like most country songs, it hit somewhere real deep, on a fundamental, almost profound human level. Most country’s like that—songs about loneliness and despair and struggling to find love in a cold world. Sometimes it could go over the top; “crying in your beer” jokes about country music had become clichés. I wasn’t much of a country fan, but only because I hadn’t taken the time to learn it, study it. Maybe, I thought, I ought to give it a chance.

  When Slim finished the first verse and transitioned into the chorus, Rebecca’s voice melded with his in a harmony that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I realized at that moment why people who love this stuff get so damned crazy about it. When she talked, her voice was almost a yell. But singing there with Slim, their voices filling the room, the audience quiet enough to hear heartbeats … there was something about it that ran deep and strong and powerful.

  After a few moments I got lost in it, my conscious mind on hold and something inside me just following their voices, not even aware of the words as words. The words and the music floated and bore me and everyone else in the room along. There was magic there, mystery and focus and intensity. Slim, who rarely said more than ten words to anybody, was liberated by the act of singing and playing. Something inside him soared. And Rebecca, who was loud and irritating and hyperactive outside the song, became calm and pure and sweet when lost inside the music. Each was yin to the other’s yang; their opposites matched perfectly, their sameness blending into one. The
marriage of these two gifted people had to be both fiercely passionate and powerfully doomed.

  Nobody can sing all the time.

  Slim hit the last word in the song and let his own voice fade away as he completed the last run on the chord progression. Ray and the other picker pulled back just at the end, leaving Slim’s final notes echoing in the room to dead silence.

  Then I was on my feet, clapping until my hands burned and my arms ached. My voice grew hoarse from cheering along with the rest of the room. They’d made the audience wait and fidget and grow impatient, and then just at the right instant, they’d knocked us flat on our butts.

  “Whew,” Rebecca spewed, fanning herself with her right hand, “if we’d been able to do that all the time, we’d still be married. Right, baby?”

  Slim stared at her silently, his brown eyes boring a hole through her, almost oblivious to the crowd around them. It seemed as if the temperature in the room had gone up about fifty degrees. My chigger bites from Louisville—and I’ll let you guess where most of them were started itching again like crazy.

  Ray hit a chord, then pulled his microphone closer.

  “That’s gonna be a tough one to follow. Why don’t we shift gears jest a little?”

  Ray exaggerated his Southern drawl to the point of nausea. I wondered how many people in the audience knew he was born just a block from the last stop on the double-L train in Canarsie, and still rode the subway to his job in Brooklyn up until maybe twelve years ago.

  “Y’all sing along with me on this one, you’ve got a mind to.…” And then Ray went into this hilarious song about a revival preacher caught with his pants down in the Widow Walker’s living room.

  Then it was Rebecca’s turn. She adjusted the microphone and fidgeted in her chair, as if it were physically impossible for her to sit in one position for longer than a moment or two.

  “Well, as most of y’all know,” she began, “I’ve just finished recording what I hope is going to be my breakout album.”