by Marsha Moyer
"What's your take on him? He said I should ask you."
"Hardy's okay. He acts kind of like a lost puppy, doesn't he? But don't let him fool you. The boy's got an agenda like you wouldn't believe."
"What kind of agenda?"
"To be the next Harlan Howard. From what I hear, he might even have the goods to back it up. He's always got three or four A&R guys dragging around after him, but nobody's signed him yet."
"How come, do you think?"
"I don't really know. Hardy marches to a different drummer, I guess you could say."
"I already pretty much figured that out. But what's he want with Ash? That's the part I can't make any sense of. I mean, if he's everything you say he is, then why hitch his wagon to a falling star?"
"With Hardy, who knows? Maybe he's got some angle nobody else can see. Then again, maybe he's just doing his Christian duty."
"He told me he's sort of a Buddhist."
Denny snorted. "That boy was raised full-out backwoods Pentecostal. Snake-handling and talking in tongues, know what I'm saying?"
"So, what should I do? Do I need to watch my back, or what?"
"Well, I wouldn't go inviting him to sleep in the guest room. But I don't think you need to call out the sheriff on him, either. If I was you, I'd let Daddy handle him—this is between the two of them, right? It doesn't have anything to do with you."
Except that now it did. How had Hardy Knox understood the quickest way to get under my skin, that by giving me his tape— knowing I'd listen, that I'd be helpless to resist—-he'd be sucking me in, creating in me a stepping-stone to Ash?
I went in to check on Jude, to see if he'd managed to get himself into his pajamas like I'd told him, to make sure he said his prayers and to read him a story. I found him splayed sideways across his bed, still in his dirty clothes, sound asleep in a puddle of lamplight with a hodgepodge of toy dinosaurs and army men scattered across the comforter. The thrill of graduating from kindergarten and being outdoors all afternoon with his daddy had done him in. I tried maneuvering him under the covers without waking him, but he wouldn't be budged, and I had to settle for leaving him there, spread-eagled among the little plastic beasts and men.
I flipped through the TV channels for a while, lighting for a few seconds at a time on legal and forensic-investigation series, hip-hop videos, a show where guys in suits and ties were yelling at each other about the economy, a documentary on civil rights. For several minutes I watched Fred Astaire dance on the floor, the walls, the ceiling, as light and easy as a puff of air in his patent-leather shoes. Everybody but me, it seemed, had something extraordinary they could do that set them apart from the masses. Why, if you could write and play music the way Ash could, wouldn't you do it until your voice gave out and your fingers bled? Why wouldn't you, if you had the ability, spend the rest of your life till the day you died dancing on the ceiling?
I shut off the television and wandered out to the front porch to watch the night come on. The sky was deep purple streaked pink with a silvery sheen behind the woods across the road. Heat lightning flickered in the distance and the air smelled of rain, but I knew it was only a tease, a false alarm. It hadn't rained since the night Ash showed up, the night before Good Friday. Everywhere you went you heard folks complaining about gardens needing twice-daily watering, crops and stock tanks drying up in the pastures. I thought about what Ash had said about my fondness for metaphors; the weather, lately, seemed like a pretty good match for what had become my life: parched and listless, withering from lack of sustenance.
I was roused by a nearby rumble of thunder, a sudden shift in the wind. There was a sizzle of lightning, a sharp, metallic smell in the air, and then fat drops began to fall, kicking up puffs of dust in the yard.
I jumped to my feet and opened the screen door, grabbing my keys from the hook inside, and ran to the Blazer, where I'd left the windows down. Inserting the ignition key, I flicked the switch to power up the windows. At the same time, in a flash of lightning, I saw Hardy Knox's tape glowing white in the dash. Without really considering what I was doing, I pushed it into the slot and it began to play, picking up in the middle of the song about the boy whose life was split between his love for a girl and his music.
My throat closed up. I wanted to find Hardy and grab him by the shoulders and shake him. "Go back to her!" I wanted to yell in his face. "Go find her and don't let go!" It wasn't a matter of telling him he couldn't have it both ways; the man who'd written this song understood that. It was the fact that Hardy had chosen, and that the choice would cost him, and he would never get a chance to do it over again.
So caught up was I in the music, I wasn't aware till the last second of headlights slashing through the rain, across my windshield. I slid low in the seat as Ash's truck rolled slowly past, then backed up and pulled to a stop alongside the Blazer. Next thing I knew he was standing outside, beating his fist against the passenger-side window. I contemplated letting him stay out there getting soaked to the skin, possibly being struck by lightning and fried to a crisp, briefly torn between believing things would be easier all around that way and having to explain to our half-orphaned son what I'd done. Finally I hit the button, unlatching the doors. Ash scrambled into the passenger seat, shaking himself like a wet dog.
"What the hell?" he said. "I could've gotten electrocuted out there! What are you doing, anyway?"
I reached for the volume knob and turned it up. "Listen."
Ash sat back in the seat, head cocked. "Son of a bitch," he said after a second. "I can't believe he— That little fucker."
Lightning flashed, and rain blew sideways in sheets across the windshield. He reached across me for the stereo controls, but I grasped his wrist and pushed it away.
"Remember when you asked me to go down to Jefferson and talk to Father Laughlin?" I said. "Well, I'm asking you to keep your mouth shut and listen for five minutes. If you won't do it for you, then do it for me."
Ash sighed and leaned his head against the seat back and closed his eyes. I pushed the Rewind button and held it for a minute, then released it and turned up the volume.
He sat without moving as the tape played and the storm blew and pounded around us. In the dashboard light, the creases in his face looked like the jagged terrain of a strange and hostile country, a place I didn't have a guidebook for, where I didn't speak the language.
When the music ended, I pressed the Eject button, and the cab filled with silence. Slowly Ash raised his head and opened his eyes.
"I don't believe it," he said finally.
"Believe what?"
"I don't believe that's Hardy Knox. It sounds like—I don't know. It reminds me too much of somebody else."
"It's you, you idiot," I said. "Who it reminds you of is you."
Helplessly, I felt tears start to roll down my cheeks, and I covered my face with my hands. Ash's fingers brushed my wrist, but I shook him off.
"Why are you doing this, Lucy?"
"I can't believe you'd ask me that. I can't believe you're really that dense."
"Are you getting your period? Is that it?"
"Oh Lord." I rummaged in the console till I found a handful of DQ napkins and blew my nose into one.
"Well, you can't blame me for asking. Practically the only times
I've ever seen you cry, you always claimed it was hormones. I remember when you— Holy shit. You're not pregnant, are you?"
"Why don't you just go?"
"Now? Out in the rain?"
"I mean away. Back to Nashville. Or someplace else. Anyplace else. It's just too hard, watching you do this."
"Do what?"
"Not being who you are. Who you were meant to be."
"Look, I went to Nashville, and I couldn't cut it. Do we have to keep thrashing it over and over again?"
"I'm not talking about Nashville. It never was about Nashville. You just let yourself get caught up in that, that head trip, that crazy circus. So you couldn't be what some dipshit record comp
any guy expected. So you didn't wind up on the top of the Billboard charts or the cover of Country Weekly. So what? That doesn't make what you are any less. Don't you get it, Ash? I get it, even Hardy Knox gets it. Why can't you?"
The thunder had moved off, a distant grumble in the east, and the rain had stopped. I took the key out of the ignition, opened the car door, and stepped out onto the damp ground. The air smelled of wet peat and pine, and the temperature had cooled a good ten degrees. Overhead, the sky broke apart into shards of silver and blue, a crescent of moon like a cosmic wink shining through. As I walked toward the house, Ash was still sitting in the passenger seat of my car.
The next morning the air was thick and steamy, the sky a hazy blue. Ash stopped by around noon to collect Jude. Neither of us mentioned the thunderstorm, Hardy Knox's tape, my tears, our conversation. But when I went out to the Blazer to make a run into town for groceries, the tape deck was empty. I looked in the glove box, the console, felt around under and between the seats, but there was no mistaking it; Hardy's cassette was gone.
chapter eighteen
Late the following Tuesday morning, Audrey and I were getting ready for a delivery run when through the front window I saw Ash's truck pull up to the curb.
"If I've told him once, I've told him a thousand times," I said, "he can't park at the curb. It's a fire lane, for heaven's sake. What does he think the red paint is for?"
But when the shop door opened to the usual clamor of bells, it wasn't Ash who walked in, but Hardy Knox. At least I was pretty sure it was Hardy, underneath the dirty jeans and sweat-soaked T-shirt and the sunburn that made him look like an oversize, fresh-peeled shrimp. The only parts of him that were familiar were his thick black-rimmed glasses and his Bugs Bunny grin; I'd have recognized those anywhere.
As Audrey and I looked on, he walked over and opened the cooler door, where he selected one fresh pink rose and placed it on the counter in front of me.
"I hear these are your favorites." He glanced from me to Audrey, his eyes dropping to the front of her T-shirt: too hot to handle. She smiled crookedly, tugging at the hem of the shirt, which didn't quite hide the strip of flesh between it and her jeans, the little silver ring in her navel.
I pushed the rose back toward him. "I don't need your bribes, Hardy," I said. "And I'm not playing your games anymore."
"It's not a bribe," he said. "It's a thank-you gift."
"For what?"
"For liking my tape," he said. "Don't try to tell me you didn't. I heard all about it. It made you cry." I felt myself flush. "Anyway," he said, "there's something else I owe you for."
"What would that be?"
"My new job."
"Your job?"
"Yep. Ash is letting me help out with the house."
I did my best to hide my surprise. "I didn't know you were a carpenter."
"Oh, I'm not. I mean, it's not like I'm out there hammering and sawing and shit—that's his and Isaac's gig. I'm more like a, a gofer. I fetch tools, and run into town to the hardware store, or to grab them some lunch at the DQ…"
"You mean Ash is actually paying you for this?"
"Well, no, not exactly. But he's letting me stay in the handyman's cottage, for free! Awesome, huh? Hey, listen, I'd better git. I told 'em I'd be back in twenty minutes with burgers and fries. I didn't say anything about stopping off here." He inched the rose once more in my direction. "How much for the flower?"
"Run along, Hardy. The DQ can get pretty busy this time of day."
"I think he really digs my music," Hardy said excitedly as he backed toward the door. "I think maybe we can make something happen."
"Hardy?"
He paused with his hand on the knob. "Yeah?"
I started to say his source was giving out old information, that pink roses weren't my favorite anymore. Give me peonies any day, heavy and blowsy-headed. We almost never got them—only a few weeks every spring when they arrived by FedEx from North Carolina—but when we did, I took them home with me by the armload, stuck them in every available container in big, wild bunches: deep magenta, ivory shading to seashell pink around the edges, and every shade in between. On second thought, Hardy Knox didn't need to know that. Neither did Ash, for that matter.
"You might want to stop by the Sav-Mor and grab some sunscreen," I said.
Audrey and I watched Hardy scale the running board of the truck and ease it away from the curb, looking like an overgrown child behind the wheel.
"Who was that?" Audrey asked as I circled the counter and replaced the rose in the cooler.
"Just some nut," I said. "A victim of Ash's latest pie-in-the-sky scheme."
"He's a musician? Is that what he was talking about, about him and Ash making something happen?"
"Let's go load the van."
"He's sort of cute," Audrey mused as we carried the arrangements out the back door: a mixed spring bouquet for somebody with a new baby in the hospital, a wreath for the funeral home. "In a, you know, geeky kind of way."
"You already have a boyfriend."
"Yeah, but all he does is drink beer and play cards with his buddies and pass out in front of the TV."
I laughed. "Honey, you just described ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the male population. In this part of the world, at least."
"I always thought it would be cool to date somebody in a band."
"Hardy's not in a band," I said. "He's just some guy with a demo tape. Believe me, the bushes are crawling with them."
"Not around here, they're not. Anyway, you liked his tape. It made you cry."
I adjusted the wreath and heaved shut the van's door. "If you tell anybody about that, I'll tie a string to that thing in your belly button and hang you up by it till your guts fall out."
"Jeez," she said, "you are so uptight sometimes! What's wrong with crying over music? Isn't that what it's there for? To sort of, you know, keep us plugged in? To God and the universe and each other and shit?"
"Have you got the keys?"
"What are you so scared of, is what I'd like to know," she said. "That somebody might accidentally find out you're human?"
Before I could think up an answer for that, she'd climbed into the driver's seat and slammed the door. A plume of exhaust exploded from the tailpipe as Audrey started up the ignition and wrangled the balky transmission into reverse. I watched the old van buck and shimmy its way out of the parking lot and around the corner. I stood with the midday sun beating down on my head, breathing in gas fumes and hot asphalt and honeysuckle until things started to spin. Then I went inside and turned down the air conditioner a notch and rested my head on the counter until my heart slowed its banging. It didn't pay to loiter in the noonday sun. You couldn't be too careful, exposing yourself to the elements.
A few days later I bumped into Isaac King at the Miracle Mart, where I'd stopped on the way home from work to buy Jude a Milky Way to tide him over till suppertime. Ordinarily I
didn't fall for that kind of blackmail, but lately the stakes were getting higher; it was hard to compete with a daddy who had his own full-scale, real-life construction set, complete with bulldozers and cement trucks and a bunch of honest-to-God Lincoln Logs. I hadn't been out yet to see for myself, but the way Jude described it, it sounded like one of those TV shows where the crew builds a house from the ground up in five days. I fully expected to hear in a week or so that Ash was getting ready to throw himself a housewarming party, complete with hot-tubbing and grilling on the deck.
"Well, if it ain't Miss Lucy," a voice said behind me in the checkout line, and I turned to see Isaac's friendly face, as dark as cocoa, his pink-gummed, gap-toothed grin. I laid my candy bar on the counter and gave him a hug, breathing in the ripe outdoor smell of him, sweat and sawdust and hard, honest work. I was ashamed to admit how long it had been since I'd seen him face to face. Before we went to Nashville, Ash and Isaac had been best friends, and we'd spent time with him and his wife, Rose, and their ever-growing brood of kids; but I hadn't sought
them out when I came back alone with Jude, hadn't seen a way to work the two of us into their life without Ash, our axis, our common core. "Where you been keepin' yourself, girl?" he said, holding me at arm's length. "You look like the world's treatin' you right."
"You look pretty good yourself," I said, taking his arm to pull him aside so that a scowling fat man could pay for his six-pack of Coors Light and a handful of scratch-off tickets. "How are Rose and the kids?"
"Same as ever. Kids growin' like weeds, and Rose, well, I thank Jesus every day for that woman. I married a saint."
"You got yourself a new baby, I hear."
"Yes, ma'am. Ten months old. DeShawn, his name is, but we call him Dumplin', 'cause of how fat he is. I don't believe the boy ever will learn to walk. His mama and the girls, they don't never put him down, just tote him around stickin' goodies in his mouth mornin', noon, and night."
"So are you on your way home now?" I asked, eyeing the two-liter bottles of Dr Pepper and Big Red and Mountain Dew he cradled in both arms.
"Ha! I wish. Ash don't want to quit workin' so long as there's a speck of light left in the sky. Lucky we don't live up in Alaska, he'd be crackin' the whip twenty-four hours a day. No, we're just takin' a break, havin' ourselves a little happy hour."
"That looks like pretty tame stuff, for happy hour."
"Boss man's orders."
"What?"
"Oh yes, ma'am. Ash runs hisself a tight ship these days. I got to say, at first I missed me a beer at the end of the day, but I'm gettin' used to it. And Rose, she sure is happy to have me home sober, come the end of an evenin'. Only one puttin' up a squeak is Hardy Rnox. Not much he can do about it, though, 'cept go back to Tennessee, and I b'lieve he'd tolerate pret' near anything not to have to do that."
"What's Hardy doing out there, anyway?"
"I wish I knew. Makin' a nuisance of hisself, mostly. Boy don't hardly know a nail gun from a Skilsaw. Spends mosta his time yakkin' and strummin' his guitar. I can't for the life a me understand why Ash puts up with it, but he won't say. Me, I just try and do my job and keep myself clear of the rest of it."