Heartbreak Town

by Marsha Moyer

  "They're great, aren't they?" I was wearing my Rocketbusters, the ones Ash had picked out for me on a trip to El Paso back when he was still feeling flush. They were caramel-colored, with pink butterflies and flowers on a burgundy background scrolling up the sides, a lone pink blossom on a bed of dark green leaves unfurling across the toes. "You don't think Ash will get the wrong idea, do you? Maybe I'm being too obvious."

  "You're wearing your wedding ring, aren't you?"

  "What if it's a trick? What if he's planning on announcing in front of, of however many people that he's fixing to run off with—■" I still couldn't bring myself to say her name or even picture her face; a brown station wagon full of buckets and brooms was as far as I'd let myself go. "With somebody else."

  Geneva reached over and closed the mirror. "Get over it, already. You're the luckiest girl in Cade County tonight, and you know it."

  I turned and looked into the backseat. "How's everybody doing back there?"

  Lily gave me a scowl. She was dressed in a short denim skirt, a flowered western shirt, and miniature red Ropers. "I look like a dork," she said. "I don't see why we can't just wear normal clothes, like normal people."

  "Because tonight is special," Geneva said. "We're going to hear your uncle Ash sing."

  "I can hear him anytime I want on the stereo."

  "But this is different. This is live and in person, in front of hundreds of people."

  "I don't care," Lily said. "I still look dumb."

  "Well, your cousin might have something to say about that," Geneva said. "Jude?"

  "Don't talk to me," he answered tersely. His hair was slicked back with gel, and he was decked out in a pearl-snap shirt and creased Wranglers and shiny black Tony Lamas. Ash had promised to bring him onstage and let him sing a number.

  I turned to face front again. "He's nervous," I whispered to Geneva.

  "I'm not nervous!" he said loudly. "I'm just trying to focus."

  Geneva and I looked at each other, trying not to laugh. "So, is there anybody in the family who isn't getting a piece of this action?" she asked. Kit and Connie were coming with their kids, and Bailey had gone by earlier to pick up Dove.

  "Just Mama. I called her up the other night and asked her if she wanted to come. You can imagine what she had to say to that—five minutes of Bible verses, a big lecture about consorting in the devil's playground."

  "I think your mama's lonely."

  "Loony, maybe."

  "I'm serious. All she does is sit in that house night and day, listening to preachers on the TV."

  "Well, whose fault is that?"

  "She told Dove she thinks you and Bailey and Kit aren't grateful to her."

  "Grateful? For what? Carrying us in her womb so that Dove could raise us? Running around tipsy in her nightgown after our daddy left, so that all the kids at school could make fun of us?"

  "She's getting old, Lucy. Her hip's really bad."

  "I know that! Dove's been trying to get her to the doctor for months, but she'd rather sit home and ask the PTL Club to take care of it."

  "You Hatches are stubborn as mules, every last one of you. I should've known better than to bring it up, tonight especially. Good Lord," she said, as the Durango came up on a line of tail-lights. We inched forward as a kid in an orange safety vest directed us with a swinging flashlight to a spot in a field at least a quarter mile from the Round-Up. I was sure I'd never seen so many pickups and cars and SUVs in one place in Cade County in my life.

  "Whatever happened to the idea of VIP parking?" Geneva muttered, squeezing in between two pickups.

  "This isn't Miami Beach," I reminded her as we got out and started to hike up the highway as part of a mass migration, passing beneath the Round-Up's sign—a cowboy with a lasso circling endlessly in flashing orange neon. "Just be glad Ash is putting us on the guest list. I'm betting half these people don't even get in."

  Sure enough, there was a long line outside the entrance, and the words "sold out" traveled through the crowd in an ominous buzz. Geneva grabbed my hand with one of hers and Lily's arm by the other; I managed to get hold of Jude's belt loop and drag him behind me as we muscled our way into the throng.

  "Coming through, coming through!" Geneva shouted. "VIPs, coming through!" Miraculously, the waves parted, I found myself wondering what we were going to do if and when we finally got to the entrance, where for years Dub had employed an elderly, half-blind man named Arless Cooper to collect the cover charge; I doubted Arless would recognize his own wife without laying his hands on various parts of her, a form of ID I didn't relish submitting to. I was relieved to see Dub's nephew Troy, a handsome, square-shouldered boy who was going off to Texas A&M on a football scholarship a few weeks later, manning the door.

  "What the hell you mean, 'sold out'?" a gigantic, red-faced man in a Shania Twain T-shirt was shouting, his nose about two inches from Troy's. "My buddy and me done drove all the way from Blanco County for this, and now you try and tell me we can't get in?"

  "I'm sorry, sir," Troy answered with such sincerity that it seemed to me he was more deserving of a scholarship in drama than football. "The maximum capacity of the Round-Up is 480. It's illegal to allow one more— Hey, Geneva. Hey, Lucy."

  "Hi, handsome," Geneva said. "How's it going?"

  "Hey, lads," he said to Jude and Lily. "Y'all scoot on in. Show starts in half an hour."

  "Hey!" the big man hollered as Troy stepped aside to usher us by. "What the hell's this? Women and children first?"

  "You got it, sweet cheeks!" Geneva called back over her shoulder. "We're with the band!"

  Walking into the Round-Up was like stepping into a time warp, a place that seemed to exist inside a glass case in a museum display, where the songs on the jukebox and the initials carved into the wooden tabletops were the same no matter what was happening in the world outside. The entrance was paneled with planks of cedar weathered to silver and papered with old posters of Roy Acuff and Bob Wills, the air perpetually blue with smoke and neon and smelling of sawdust and whiskey and drugstore perfume. There was something sweetly illicit about the place, an anticipation that set my pulse thrumming. The walls reverberated with Carl Perkins's guitar, laughter, the clack of cues against pool balls.

  "You couldn't fit another body in here with a shoehorn!" Geneva shouted in my ear as we edged into the crowd, trying to keep an eye on our kids. "How are we gonna find Bailey and Dove?"

  "We're supposed to have a table," I shouted back. "Ash said he'd take care of it."

  It took several minutes, but we finally located the rest of our clan at what used to be our regular table, back when Ash's band played here every Wednesday and Saturday night. The cover charge in those days had been three dollars, and a good night was when two hundred people showed up. Now Dub was charging twenty bucks a head, and in spite of the fire code, there had to be six hundred souls squeezed in along the wooden benches, packed shoulder-to-shoulder on the dance floor.

  Bailey and Kit had already emptied half a pitcher, and Dove and Connie were sipping bottles of Lone Star. Geneva wedged herself in between the boys and poured herself a cup of beer.

  Bailey plucked up Lily and planted her in his lap; she picked up his plastic cup, gave it a sniff, wrinkled her nose, and set it down again.

  Jude was tugging at my arm. "Where's Daddy? I need to find Daddy!"

  I looked toward the stage, where the instruments sat glistening and upright in their stands, Ash's black Martin acoustic as shiny as a prize stallion under the rose-colored lights. "I don't know, baby," I said. "You sit here with Aunt Dove a minute, and I'll go see if I can find him." I steeled myself and waded off in the direction of the bar.

  It took about five minutes to get to the front of the line, another two to catch Dub's eye. "Hey, Lucy!" he called. "How you doin', girl?"

  "Good, Dub," I yelled back. "Have you seen Ash?"

  He shook his head, jerking his thumb toward the end of the bar, mouthing something I couldn't decipher. I steppe
d back and looked in the direction he'd pointed, and saw Hardy Knox in conversation with a potbellied fellow in a suit coat and string tie, gray hair combed back in a sparse but tidy ponytail.

  "Lucy!" Hardy cried when he saw me. He grabbed my sleeve with a clammy hand. "Where's Ash?" Behind his glasses he was bug-eyed.

  "What do you mean? I was thinking you could tell me."

  "I haven't seen him since we finished the sound check, and that was"—he checked the Pabst Blue Ribbon clock over the bar—"almost two hours ago. We're supposed to go on in twenty, and, and…" He flung up his hands and flailed them in the air; with his flopping hair and narrow shoulders, he looked like some kind of weird bird trying to take flight.

  "Look, don't freak out," I said. "He's got to be around here someplace, right?"

  "I don't know what to think!" Hardy said. "He seemed fine at sound check, but then he started acting sort of strange. I was trying to keep an eye on him, but what with one thing and another, somehow he just—"

  "Strange, how? Was he drinking?"

  "Oh, hell, no. He just got real quiet and then his eyes got that, that look ..."

  "Yeah." I knew that look.

  "So, do you think you can find him?"

  "Me? This whole thing was your idea, Hardy. I'm just part of the audience."

  Hardy stood there white-faced, his jaw hanging from its hinges. He barely looked capable of holding himself upright, much less heading up a search party.

  "Wait here," I said. "I'll see what I can do. Meantime, you be thinking about how you're going to thank me for bailing out your ass."

  A boy I recognized as one of Troy's compatriots from the Mooney High football team sat guarding the dressing room door with a glazed expression.

  "Hi," I said. "I'm Lucy Farrell." The boy stared at me without flexing a muscle, facial or otherwise. I held up my hand, displaying my wedding ring. "Mrs. Ash Farrell?"

  "G'hed," he said, jerking his chin over his shoulder. So much for security, I thought as I walked past him and pushed open the door; any woman in the place with the brains or the nerve to flash a gold band could have waltzed right in.

  The Round-Up had hardly any backstage area to speak of, just a room about the size of a walk-in closet, with a card table, a few folding chairs, a moldy old icebox. Derrall and the rest of the band, a couple of whom I remembered from the old days, were sitting around drinking Bud Light—the only thing Dub stocked in the icebox besides RC Cola—and gazing at a small TV screen where a miniature wagon train pounded across the desert, pursued by a band of tiny Indians on horseback and accompanied by muffled screams and hoofbeats. A few girls perched in the guys' laps, small-town girls with too much makeup and unfashionably big hair. I could see them scoping me out, ready to pounce if anybody tried to hone in on their action—or possibly hoping to improve it, depending upon who walked in through that door.

  "Hi, guys," I said. "Y'all seen Ash?"

  "Not since sound check." Derrall grinned at me, the big, easy, no-sweat grin of a guy who drove a propane truck Monday through Friday and got to play Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash covers for the locals on Saturday nights. "Want a beer?"

  "No, thanks."

  I muscled open the back door. The sky was black behind the dance hall, and reeked of Dumpster. It took me a second or two to get my bearings, another to make out the tip of a cigarette glowing in the dark a few feet away.

  "Who's that?" a voice said, thin and shaky and rough as gravel.

  "Lucy Hatch," I said. "I mean Farrell. Mr. Cooper?"

  It was Arless, all right. Leave it to Dub to give a blind ninety-year-old the job of guarding the back door, keeping potential stalkers and groupies at bay.

  "You looking for Ash, he went thataway." The cigarette traced a red arc in the direction of the parking lot. "He's a good boy, Ash," Arless said. "I 'member back when he used to play here reg'lar, he always used to sneak off right before showtime. Then danged if he didn't always turn up two minutes before Dub was about to send the dogs after him."

  A long-forgotten image suddenly popped into my head. "Yes, sir," I said. "See you, Mr. Cooper."

  "You take care, little girl," he said. "Say howdy to your mama forme."

  I hurried down the alley and across the parking lot. There was still a mob around the front door, and cars and pickups not only filled the lot but lined the bar ditches up and down the highway, even though the boy with the safety vest and flashlight was telling folks not to bother stopping, that the show was sold out and then some.

  I waited for a break in the slow-cruising traffic and then sprinted across the blacktop and into the field, weaving my way among vehicles parked scattershot across the trampled grass, like a tornado had struck a used-car lot. At the far edge of the field was a row of loblolly pine leading into a thicket of taller trees and thick underbrush.

  The path to Flat Creek was right where it used to be, marked by a lightning-struck scrub oak, split and barren, spectral against the night sky. It was seven and a half years since Ash had brought me here for the first time, had led me through the brushy growth to an open spot above the creekbed, where he'd laid me down on a rough wool blanket and made love to me while the creek, swollen with spring rain, rushed below and the moon bleached our skin the color of old bones.

  If memory served, it was only a couple of hundred feet from the edge of the field to the creek, but it felt like miles as I tramped through vines and brambles and over roots. A hot wind had come up, tossing the tops of the pines, sending clouds like ghost fingers scrabbling across the firmament. I stumbled once and got turned around, found myself looking back at the distant lights of the Round-Up through the trees. "Shit," I said out loud. If this wasn't just so typical of Ash, requiring a search party tricked out in two-thousand-dollar boots.

  A shrill whistle came from somewhere deep in the brush. It didn't sound quite human, but it didn't sound like any bird I'd ever heard, either. I paused, holding my breath. For the first time it occurred to me that I didn't have any business being here, that no telling what was afoot in these woods at night—snakes, wild pigs, maybe even the legendary but seldom-seen East Texas Big-foot, to say nothing of beasts of the human persuasion.

  I burst out into the clearing. A pale swath of August moon fell on the creekbed, the flat rock where a figure stood, dark against the darker woods behind it.

  "Lucy Hatch, girl guide." Ash held out his hand and helped me up onto the rock, where I raked leaves out of my hair and brushed my hands on the front of my Levi's.

  "Goddamn you," I said. "I just about broke my leg out here. And my boots! I bet they're ruined." I extended one foot and turned it this way and that.

  "Such fine-looking boots, too."

  "Some no-account cowboy singer gave them to me."

  "Well, maybe he'll buy you a new pair."

  "I don't want a new pair. I just want the old ones, the way they used to be."

  "Well, now, it's funny you'd bring that up," Ash said. "I've just been out here counting the stars and thinking about the way things used to be."

  I put back my head and studied the sky. It never failed to surprise me, the way the earth's course was marked by the movement of the constellations, proof of how even if you stood rooted to one spot, the world went on turning.

  "I was thinking about the summer before we went to Nashville," Ash said. "We were sitting out on the back steps one night, and you said you wondered if there were stars like this in Tennessee."

  "I remember."

  "Well, there weren't. And it was never quiet, either—not like this. Like—listen a second. Hear that?" I shook my head. "My point exactly. Nothing. Just crickets and the wind in the trees. In

  Nashville, I always felt like there was this big machine down inside the earth, wheels and gears just churning and churning. It drove me crazy. That, and no stars."

  It was true, what Ash said, about the absence of noise, but I could feel a kind of murmur in the earth here that I'd never felt in Nashville, a pulse like a beati
ng heart. It was the absence of that pulse that had brought me back; feeling it now, it was how I knew I was home. I wondered if Ash felt it, too, or if he'd left that part of him forever in Tennessee, or at the bottom of a bottle.

  "What time is it?" he asked.

  "Just about showtime. There's a whole mess of folks over there across the road all pumped up, ready to hear you sing."

  "And only one who knew where to find me."

  I took a step closer to him, reaching for his hand. He took it and pulled me to him, lacing his free hand in my hair. I stood on my toes and lifted my face and kissed him gently on the mouth.

  "What was that for?"

  "I don't know. Luck. Because I felt like it."

  "Well, come here, you." He lifted my face in both hands and kissed me for real this time, sweet and slow, our lips parting, tongues exploring the familiar depths of each other's mouths.

  "What was that fort" I asked, pulling back to catch my breath.

  "Luck. Because I felt like it." He smiled, his face half in shadow. "If we're really lucky, maybe you and I can sneak out here later, after the show."

  "You never know." With my fingertips I traced the curve of his jaw under the thatch of neatly trimmed beard. "You ready to sing, Cowboy?"

  He kissed me again, once, at the peak of my hairline, the way he'd done the first night he came home to East Texas, back in the spring. "Now or never, I guess."

  Hand in hand we made our way out of the woods and across the road. At the edge of the parking lot, he stopped short at the sight of the crowd still loitering around the front door.

  "Holy shit," he said.

  "We can go around back, if it's easier."

  "Nope," he said, tightening his grip on my hand. "Remember what I taught you? Hold your head up and act like you made the rules."

  We parted the crowd easily, folks falling aside as we made our way through. It's the beard, I thought as a rumble began to build and follow us toward the entrance. They don't recognize him with the beard. "Hey!" a man's voice hollered out; it sounded like the same fellow who'd been arguing with Troy earlier. "Hey, it's him! Hey, Ash! We done drove all the way from Blanco County to hear you sing, and instead we're standing in a goddamned parking lot!"