Heartbreak Town

by Marsha Moyer

  It was surprising how easy the old days were to excavate, once I put my mind to it. I'd sit awhile and close my eyes and the rock wall, the woods, the night would dissolve until I was holding the past in my cupped hands like rainwater, bringing it to my face, drinking it in in long, thirsty gulps. Slowly, painstakingly, I went about reconstructing the past the way archaeologists went after ancient ruins, chipping away on nothing but faith, not knowing what it was yet, this glittery thing I was uncovering, whether it was a single sliver of mica or the gateway to a wonderful secret world below, an entire city paved in gold. Night after night I'd walk and dig, until something—a swallow calling off in the trees, the moon rising fat and as bright as a silver dollar over the pines—would call me back to earth, and I'd turn around, my chest a little looser, retracing my steps with a little more certainty, carrying a little bigger piece of my self in my pocket each night as I headed for home.

  It was the second Monday in July, hot and dry as blazes, but I was in an unexpectedly generous mood and decided to stop by the cafe for a box of doughnuts on my way in to work.

  Carol, the waitress, grinned at me as she slid my white box across the counter and took my money. "Got your ticket yet?" she said.

  "What for?"

  She nodded toward the cash register. Taped to the back was a plain white eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper with block printing, the likes of which customarily begged for loose change for some kinfolk's rare blood disorder or information about wayward pets. This one said,

  ASH FARRELL COMEBACK SPECIAL!

  LIVE & IN PERSON!

  SATURDAY, 8 P.M.

  THE ROUND-UP

  SPECIAL GUEST HARDY KNOX

  I blinked a few times and read it again. Just in case there was any confusion, reproduced beneath the writing was an old publicity still of Ash from his Nashville days, his silver-streaked hair swept back off his forehead, gazing sooty-eyed into the camera.

  The room had gone as quiet as a church; I could hear the rustling of a newspaper, a radio back in the kitchen playing an old Roger Miller song. Carol handed me my change, which I made an effort not to drop on its way to my purse.

  "You didn't forget the lemon cream, did you?" I said in as steady a voice as I could muster. "Peggy'U kill me if you did."

  "Half lemon, half plain glazed," Carol said. "Just like always."

  I tried but failed not to cut my eyes one more time at the flyer on the register. The words swam briefly, Ash's face sliding in and out of focus.

  "See y'all," I said, raising my hand, my voice full of forced cheer as I headed for the door. I wasn't fooling anybody, I knew, as I pushed my way from the chill of the cafe into hot air rising in waves from the sidewalk. Money would be changing hands by the time I was halfway down the block.

  "You knew about this? For how long?"

  "Only since last night!" Audrey said. "Jeez, could you give me some breathing room here?" I opened the bakery box and plucked out a doughnut and sunk my teeth into it, my mouth filling with glazed sweet dough. "I told you a month ago Ash and Hardy were working on songs."

  "There's a big difference between writing songs and getting up on a stage to perform them in front of hundreds of people." It had been five years since Ash had last played the Round-Up. His second record was just out, one tune getting some modest radio airplay, and folks had come from literally hundreds of miles around, camping in the parking lot at daybreak for the 8:00 p.m. show. Dub had had to hire half a dozen boys from the high school football team to handle crowd control.

  Maybe he was too much of a has-been by now, I thought. But if the last few months had proved anything, it was that Mooney never forgot a hometown hero. Ash was the one who'd got out and made good, who'd grabbed and held, even fleetingly, the brass ring. His face still hung in a frame behind the bar at the Round-Up, over the back booth at Burton's cafe. In the town's eyes, Ash would always be slightly above and apart, burnished with the sheen of the wider world.

  "Whose idea was this?" I said. "Not Ash's, surely."

  "Hardy had to twist his arm a little, I think."

  "So how did he do it?"

  "To tell you the truth, I'm not real sure. Hardy has this weird sort of mojo about him, you know? I mean, at first glance he looks harmless enough, but spend two minutes around him and I swear he'll have you eating out of the palm of his hand. I ought to know." She bit into a doughnut, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  "I swear, Audrey, if this is some kind of scam…"

  "Oh no! It's honest-to-God for real. They're putting Ash's old band together and everything. One of the guys, Derrall something, is letting them practice in his garage every night this week till showtime." She said "showtime" like an old-time carnival barker, which, it occurred to me, would've been a good occupation for her.

  "Something about this just doesn't sit right," I said. "Just a few weeks ago, Ash was saying he'd never play music again. Now he's putting up flyers all over town, getting the old band back together? What I really want to know is, what's in it for Hardy?"

  "Can't he just be doing it out of the—you know—the goodness of his heart?"

  "I doubt it, sweetie pie."

  "You know, maybe you ought to try trusting people for a change. Maybe if you gave them a chance every now and then, they'd surprise you."

  I sighed and tucked the flaps shut on the box of doughnuts. "How come we didn't get a flyer? Every window between here and the courthouse has one."

  Audrey disappeared into the back room, and returned with a sheaf of paper. "Hardy says it's no big deal if you won't put one up. He said everybody in town would totally understand."

  I snatched the flyers from her. "Good Lord, how many copies did he make? You could paper the entire county with these."

  "That's pretty much the idea."

  I peeled a sheet from the top of the stack. For a minute I stood with my hip against the counter, taking in the words I still had trouble believing, a face I'd known a lifetime ago. Then I tore two strips of Scotch tape from the roll underneath the counter and, taking extra care to get the edges straight, fixed the flyer to the inside of Faye's front window.

  After work I drove over to Dove's to pick up Jude. The TV was off, for once, and I found Dove sitting at the kitchen table with Lily, who was bent over a Big Chief tablet, scrubbing like her life depended on it with a green crayon. I glanced over her shoulder at what she was coloring: a castle in flames, something or someone being torn and bloodied by a pair of dragon's jaws. "Where's Jude?" I asked Dove.

  "Ash come for him 'bout an hour ago. Said they was goin' to band practice." I dropped my purse on the floor and sank onto a chair. "You look like you could use a drink," Dove said.

  For a moment I had the wild notion that my aunt was about to get up and produce a bottle of Jose Cuervo from the kitchen cupboard, but she just took down a jelly glass and filled it from the tap and handed it to me: lukewarm, as usual, and tasting of whatever the city used to treat its water—nothing like the cool, sweet well water at home.

  "What're you drawing, Lil?" I asked.

  "The boy was mean," she said matter-of-factly, switching to an orange crayon. "Now the dragon's eating him."

  "That must hurt."

  "It does. A lot."

  Dove leaned over and kissed the top of Lily's silky head. "Your aunt Lucy and me is gonna step in the front room a second," she said. "Don't go anywhere."

  I followed her into the living room. She picked up the remote and clicked on the TV, muting the sound of Jeopardy! to a dull roar.

  "You okay?" she said.

  "I don't know."

  "It's good news, ain't it? After all that crazy talk about not playin' music no more, Ash is finally gonna get up there and doit."

  "I guess so. I just—I can't figure out how Hardy Knox tricked him into it."

  "Maybe there wasn't no trick involved. Maybe Ash made up his mind his own self."

  "Maybe."

  "You ever hear of the benefit of the
doubt?"

  "Yeah. I've heard of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too."

  "Well, it wouldn't hurt you none to open your mind a little."

  "It's not my mind I'm worried about." It was my heart, I thought as I walked back out to the car—what was left of it, anyway, tough and stringy, without enough meat or muscle for even Lily's dragon to make a meal of it.

  I drove home, changed out of my skirt and blouse into cutoffs and a T-shirt, and fixed myself a supper of cold meat loaf and leftover macaroni and cheese, which I ate standing up at the kitchen counter, gazing out the window at the trailer behind the house. I washed and dried my dishes and put them away, then slipped on my flip-flops and grabbed my car keys.

  Dark was falling as I set off up the road, the day's heat finally giving way, grudgingly and by inches, to the cool of pine and clay. At the highway I turned right, toward the Corners, a star or two visible in the span overhead, traces of rose and gold still lingering at the horizon. My headlights caught the sign at the intersection of the two highways: beer, gas, groceries. The little store glowed like an oasis in the dusk, and a couple of old men in overalls and feed caps sat on a bench out front under the faded Mrs. Baird's logo, as erect and motionless as cigar-store Indians, watching me go by.

  I'd been to Derrall Beeson's place once before, when Ash and I were first courting. Derrall drove a propane truck, and lived in an old farmhouse down one of the unpaved county roads dotted here and there with rusted-out trailers and abandoned deer blinds in thickets of cypress and scrub pine. I slowed as I approached a little girl in yellow shorts picking something, wildflowers or aluminum cans, out of the bar ditch and putting it in a pillowcase, accompanied by a big spotted dog. I raised my hand to wave, but though she straightened up and regarded me as I passed, she didn't wave back. The dog started to bark. I pressed down on the gas and kept going.

  I was just starting to worry I might not be able to find Derrall's place when I rounded a bend in the road and saw, up ahead, a cluster of lights and, strung out along the road and across the dirt yard, enough cars and trucks for an old-fashioned country burying. The big-bellied propane truck alone would've been hard to miss, but there, too, were Ash's pickup, Audrey's Charger, Hardy's little blue Corolla, a scattering of other vehicles.

  Light spilled across the yard from the house and adjacent work shed, illuminating a hodgepodge of tools and miscellaneous refuse that had evidently been cleared from the shed to make way for microphones and amplifiers. A mixing board had been set up across a couple of spools once used for hauling telephone cable, and the Round-Up's longtime soundman, Jersey Price, sat behind it in a lawn chair with a sweating longneck propped on one knee.

  "Miss Lucy!" he called, hoisting his beer. "Long time no see."

  "Hi, Jersey."

  "Yes, ma'am'—this here's the place to be." He nodded toward the shed, where a bunch of guys milled around under a naked bulb, strapping on guitars and twirling drumsticks, talking and laughing. I heard the familiar static hum of amplifiers, someone saying, "Check, check," into a microphone. Off to one side, sn> ting on a pair of amps, were Audrey and Jude, looking like peas in a pod.

  It was Jude who saw me first. So bedazzled was he by the goings-on around him, he must have forgotten his recent indifference to me. He launched himself forward and came running across the yard, yelling, "Mama, look! Daddy's got a band!"

  I knelt and hugged him quickly, breathing in his sweetly familiar scent, that Jude-like essence that, no matter how old he got or how far he strayed, would always tie me to him.

  He pulled away and studied me, suspicion quickly dawning in his eyes. "You look mad."

  "No, I don't."

  "Yeah. You do."

  I stood and looked into Ash's face, trying to compose an expression appropriate for the occasion: disapproval touched with encouragement, support tinged with wariness. Apparently I wasn't doing a very good job of it; the sight of him wearing his old black Martin guitar over his hip like a gangster's holster momentarily unhinged me.

  "Could I talk to you a minute?" I asked.

  "Run over there to the cooler, buddy, and bring your mama a Coke."

  I didn't want a Coke, but Jude had already taken off.

  "What's up?" Ash asked, fiddling with a tuning key on his guitar.

  "I just—I want to know what this is about."

  "What's it look like? I'm getting ready to play."

  "Just like that? After—what, ten months, a year, all of a sudden you've seen the light?"

  "Something like that." He shifted his weight to his other hip. "Anyway, it wasn't all of a sudden. It's taken me a long goddamned time to get here."

  "Hardy's behind this, isn't he? He's made you some kind of wacky deal—"

  "No deal. Just music. Look, I thought you of all people would be glad about this. I haven't had a drink in two months. I'm writing songs again. Isn't that what you wanted?"

  The question caught me off guard. Was this what I wanted? Was it even what it sounded like—a fresh start, a second chance? Maybe my mistake had been in believing that love was all or nothing: a blush-pink bouquet of roses, fireworks on a blanket next to Flat Creek with whiskey in your veins and a man made of moonlight in your arms, or as black and flat as the highway that ran between Texas and Tennessee. I'd been on that highway a long time; it was the first thing I saw when I got up in the mornings, the thing I dreamed about when I closed my eyes at night. Maybe it was time for a detour, to finally get off the blacktop and find out where the red dirt would take me.

  "Ash!" a voice called from inside the shed.

  "I'm up," he said. "Listen, why don't you stick around? It'll be like old times."

  "No, thanks." To tell the truth, the thought of old times scared me to death; I didn't know what might come welling up in me when I heard Ash strike a chord and put his mouth against the mike and start to sing. "Don't be thinking you can keep Jude out here till all hours of the night," I said.

  "I'll have him home by ten. Okay, mama hen?"

  I wanted to say it wasn't, but what would be the point? It was clear our son had already crossed over to the dark side. "Okay. But you tell him I said just this once. He can hear you Saturday night, at the show."

  "Should I put you on the guest list?" He smiled.

  "If it's no skin off your nose."

  In the shed the drummer commenced to pummeling, and Derrall's guitar jumped in, playing the opening riff to "Suzy Q." I watched Ash's face as he turned toward the music. I hadn't seen that land of wattage since last Christmas, when the citizens of Mooney gathered on the courthouse lawn and, on the count of ten, the mayor threw the switch that turned the whole square into an electric, luminous wonderland. He smiled at me, a smile I thought I'd never see again, and turned and sprinted toward the shed, his guitar bouncing off his hip: back to where he once belonged.

  "How do i look?" I switched on the dome light and examined my lipstick in the vanity mirror of Geneva's Durango. "Like you're on your way to the electric chair."

  "It's the shirt, isn't it? I knew it! The color's all wrong for me. I should never have let you talk me into it." I tugged at the clingy V-cut neck of the knit top Geneva had picked out for me the day before at Ross Dress for Less in Marshall. The shade on the label said "celadon," but to me it looked more like mental-institution green. She'd claimed it set off my fair skin and red hair, but here, under the pale overhead light of the car, I just looked seasick.

  I felt seasick, too. I tried telling myself for the umpteenth time that this evening was no big deal, but it wasn't working. All week long I hadn't been able to stop at the Food Ring for a loaf of bread, or at Orson's Texaco to fill up my tank, without finding myself the object of stares and innuendo-—sometimes behind my back, sometimes straight to my face. "I got two hunnert riding on Ash, Lucy girl!" old Saul Toomey had hollered out Thursday in the cafe in front of God and a whole roomful of hooting diners. I'd never wanted to give anybody the finger so bad in my life, but I kept my arms at my sides an
d a big smile plastered on my face as Carol handed me my takeout bag. She wiggled her pinkie at me, and I leaned over the register. "Just to let you know?" she murmured against my ear. "Not too many folks betting on you this time around."

  "I'm a mess," I told Geneva. "How can you just sit there cool as a cucumber?"

  "Because I'm not about to be made a spectacle of in front of a thousand people. Having Ash Farrell standing up there under the lights begging me to give him a second chance, letting the whole world know what a fool he was to let me go."

  I flipped down the mirror again, bending in to examine my eyeliner. "You know what this reminds me of?" Geneva said, slowing to make the turn onto the FM road that led to the Round-Up. "The very first time you went with Bailey and me to hear Ash sing. That was some night, huh? Remember that poor boy Bailey tried to fix you up with? What was his name?"

  "Rob, I think. Or Ron."

  "He was cute, but he had no idea what he was up against."

  "Neither did I. Anyway, that was the second time, not the first."

  "What?"

  "The blind date. The first time y'all took me to hear Ash play, he had that Misty Potter creature hanging all over him. What an omen that was, huh?" I took my hairbrush out of my purse, then put it back. "I must be crazy. To be doing this, I mean. Maybe I should've just stayed home with a hot bath and a trashy magazine."

  "You're kidding me, right?"

  "I just feel so—so out there, you know? Like everything I'm thinking and feeling is written all over my face."

  She laughed. "Like you could hide it if you tried. Come on, admit it—it's not just you and Ash anymore. The whole town's been waiting for this for a good long time. Anyway, if you'd just relax, you'd look like a million bucks. I'd kill for those boots."