by Marsha Moyer
People were starting to shove and shout. "Don't stop," I said as we quickened our pace. "Troy!" I called, and as smooth as glass the future Aggie linebacker materialized and blocked our way, easing us through the door like we were on casters.
Once inside, our progress slowed as one fan or old friend after another stopped Ash to greet him, to say "welcome home," to offer praise or wish him well. It was Hardy who came to the rescue, popping forward from his post by the end of the bar, dragging us out of harm's way. "Where the hell you been, man? I've been about to jump outta my skin here! Thought you'd done gone and bailed on me."
Ash slid over and caught Dub's eye, and Dub reached under the bar and opened a cooler and pushed a bottle of springwater at him. Ash unscrewed the top and took a drink. "We set to go?"
"The boys are backstage," Hardy said. "Just waiting on you, Boss."
He took a swig of water, scanned the room. "Well, let's knock this son of a bitch out of the park, then."
Suddenly his faced tensed, his eyes narrowing to slits. I followed his gaze, landing on the guy in the suit coat and gray ponytail at the end of the bar. You'd think, after all that time in Nashville, I'd have been able to smell a rat, but I didn't even catch a whiff until the man leaned forward and stuck out his hand saying, "Rick Musgrove, Ragtop Music. Great to see you again, man. I can't tell you how excited we all are about what you're doing here tonight." The guy just stood there with his hand sticking out, smiling to beat the band. Capped teeth. I should have known. Everybody in Nashville had capped teeth.
Ash turned to Hardy, whose mouth was open, presumably about to dish out some of his famous mojo.
"You little dick," Ash said. "You lying, ass-kissing—"
"Ash!" That was me. Too late. He spun toward me, his eyes like lit coals.
"Are you in on this?" he asked me.
"No! I never—I had no idea."
Ash turned to the bar, where Dub was occupied at the far end, filling two mugs from a tap. He flagged down the second bartender, a slender young man with a blond crew cut who was pouring out a row of whiskey shots for a burly guy in a creased white Stetson. "Hey! You!" Ash called out.
The boy looked up. "Yessir?"
"Gimme one of those."
The boy glanced nervously toward Dub, busy at his end of the bar.
"Hang on now," Hardy said to Ash. "You're off the sauce, remember?"
"Thanks to you, as of about thirty seconds ago, I'm officially back on it."
Hardy looked beseechingly at me. I opened my mouth to speak, but Ash spun toward me with such rage in his face that I snapped it shut again. He turned back to the bartender.
"He's not my caseworker and she's not my goddamned nanny. Here," he said, digging in his back pocket, thrusting a wad of bills across the bar. "That ought to cover the whole bottle. You just keep pouring till I say stop."
"Yessir." The boy took another glass from beneath the bar and filled it with smoke-colored liquor. Ash reached for it and tossed back half the drink in one shot, then polished it off with another gulp and slid the empty across the bar for a refill. I felt like a wax dummy, standing helplessly by, aware of faces nearby swimming in and out of focus, George Jones on the jukebox inviting us to step right up, come on in, as Ash tipped back his second drink and swallowed it whole, then whirled and grabbed Hardy by the collar. Hardy was wearing a black snap-front shirt with roses embroidered on the lapels, and the top snap popped open in Ash's grasp.
"You and me need to settle a score."
"What?" Hardy's voice was squeaky, his eyes behind the smudged lenses huge and terrified.
"We can do it outside or right here, in front of all these good people. It's up to you."
"Now hold on just a second," the record-company guy said. "I think there's been a little misunderstanding."
"You keep out of this!" Ash said, glaring at Rick Musgrove over Hardy's head. "You Nashville suck-asses are all the same. Take a man's life and just, just put it through the goddamned shredder! Make all kinds of fancy-ass promises, then tie him to the fence and leave him out there for the dogs to lick the bones clean! No, thanks. Y'all had your chance with me, and you see what's left?" His eyes gleamed wetly in the blue light. He let go of Hardy's collar. His shoulders slumped, and he turned and rested his hands on the bar.
Several things happened simultaneously. The song on the jukebox ended. A pool cue cracked against a rack of balls. Hardy slid over next to Ash and laid a hand on his shoulder. A woman laughed, high-pitched and drunkenly, on the far side of the room.
Dub appeared on the other side of the bar just as Ash turned toward Hardy, took a step back, cocked his fist and sent it flying forward, catching Hardy square in his belly. The air went out of him in a loud whoomph and he staggered backward, falling against Rick Musgrove, who caught him and set him upright again. Ash's second shot was aimed higher, at Hardy's jaw. Bone met bone in a sickening crunch. Hardy's glasses flew off, into the crowd. The jukebox clicked and whirred and Bob Wills started to play "Cherokee Maiden" as Hardy's eyes rolled back and he slumped to the floor.
Ash turned and waggled his empty glass at Dub. But Dub hadn't been running a country honky-tonk for forty years without learning a thing or two. He came up from under the bar with a wooden baseball bat, a good old-fashioned Louisville Slugger, set it on the bar, and laid his hand over the grip.
"You know I don't allow no monkey business in here, I don't care who you are," he said. "Now get your shit together before I call the law."
Ash lifted the empty glass in his hand, rotating it this way and that, studying the refraction of light in its curves. Then he turned and threw it, straight and hard as a fastball, into the rows of bottles that stood in neat rows against the mirror behind the bar. Glass exploded, liquid flying in all directions. Someone screamed. Dub's wife, Candy, stuck her head out of the office, a portable phone in her hand.
For a man in his sixties, Dub was amazingly nimble. He was over the bar in one leap, the bat extended in front of him in both hands as folks started shouting and stumbling. A mob like this, you never knew if they'd try to save their own hindquarters or if they'd just as soon let their neighbors have a roundhouse punch just for the hell of it, like in some old John Wayne movie or an episode of Gunsmoke.
Ash twisted away from the bar, his fists balled in front of him. I saw nothing but pure animal fear as his eyes found mine. Is this what you wanted? his expression seemed to say. Are you happy now? But before I could react, he was off for the door at a blind run, dodging and weaving through the crowd while Bob Wills's fiddle, as sweet as wild honey, played on.
Dub met my eyes, shook his head. He placed the bat on the bar and squatted, along with Rick Musgrove, over Hardy. Folks were milling everywhere, bumping into each other, trying to see what was going on.
I started to fight my way toward the door. People swarmed one way and another, some trying to get closer to the action, some trying to flee it, as I slowly swam upstream against the crush and sweat of strangers.
Minutes later I reached the parking lot, sucking in gulps of warm, dusty nighttime air. Troy had abandoned his post, along with the couple of dozen of fans who hadn't given up hope of making it into the show. They stood in a loose knot, staring with the same expression of surprise on their faces. I turned, too, in time to see a pair of headlights weaving across the parking lot, headed in our direction. I was dimly conscious of voices shouting behind me as I froze, hypnotized by the bright onrush of glare, glancing off row upon row of glass and chrome.
Time seemed to move on alternate planes, the truck flying toward the crowd and my thoughts slow and liquid and full of the strangest jumble of things: playing with my brothers in Dove's garden while inside our mama wept and wailed over our daddy, Raymond Hatch; walking up the aisle at First Baptist in a white gown toward Mitchell; lying with Ash on the rock at Flat Creek as moonlight fell around us like angel dust; the feel of
Jude's body, solid and fragrant, infant and toddler and little boy all at once,
in my arms. I saw myself wandering through the hereafter searching for Ash like a pilgrim, holding the broken pieces of my heart in my hands, asking people along the way: Have you seen who this belongs to? Always wandering, never finding him.
A meaty hand grabbed the back of my shirt and jerked me off my feet; I sailed backward, landing hard against the size XXXL visage of Shania Twain, just as the pickup's wheels cut hard to the left, glancing off the fender of a battered red Ford pickup, then swerving hard to the right and smashing nose-first into the side of the building. The front end of the truck folded like an accordion into the cab, metal buckling and groaning, glass shattering, the air bag exploding, steam and water rising in a white plume from the crumpled front end.
Astonishingly, the driver's door opened and Ash staggered out. There was a gash over his eye; his nose was bleeding. He stumbled away from the ruined truck, one step, two, then leaned over and threw up, a thin gruel of liquor and bile.
I slipped out of the big man's grip just as Ash straightened and met my eye, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve, dark sockets like empty windows where his eyes had been.
He turned and looked dazedly toward the door of the Round-Up, back at the demolished truck. From far off came the high, thin wail of a siren. He took one unsteady step away from the building, the growing crowd, Troy with Dub now running toward us, shouting. Then he was stumbling away, between the endless rows of trucks and cars, away from the smoke and noise and ruin, the hot August night swallowing him and his crimes and their consequences.
chapter twenty-two
It was almost midnight when Geneva dropped Jude and me at home. Lily insisted on spending the night with us; like a pint-sized bodyguard, she refused to leave Jude's side. Over the past few hours Jude had cried himself into a state of zombie-like exhaustion and dropped off almost instantly, his face mottled with tears and grief-stricken even in sleep. I knelt beside the bed and smoothed his hair off his forehead and kissed him on the nose.
"Aunt Lucy?" Lily's eyes were dark and watchful in the glow of the night-light.
"What, baby?"
"Jude is so sad."
Her eyes dared me to defy her, this old soul in the shell of a little girl. I wondered if she remembered anything of her first two years, if she ever dreamed of walking in a strange green country where everyone else looked like her, whether she understood their soft, musical language, a word resonating here or there: bird, house, girl.
What was I supposed to tell her? That I trusted God less than I ever had, that I felt He had tricked me and was laughing right now behind His hand? That happiness was something parceled out like cards in a game of Texas Hold 'Em, that even though you might hold a straight flush one minute, the next hand could cost you every chip on the table? I was mortified for feeling this way, for not having the words to comfort a six-year-old girl, much less my son when he eventually woke up and started asking what had happened to his daddy.
"Yes, he is. But it helps to have you here. Thank you for staying with us tonight."
"You're welcome."
"Do you think you can sleep?" She nodded. "Close your eyes, then."
I stood at the kitchen window, watching the trailer in the dark, my breath catching every time a leaf scuttled by on the hot, dry wind or a cloud passed over the moon, trying to understand this man I'd married who had grown so very strange and far away to me. The evening ran through my head like a broken movie, forward and back, the frames out of order: Ash disappearing, bloody and sick, into the roughly nine hundred square miles of woods and water that made up Cade County. Hardy being borne out of the Round-Up on a backboard by a pair of EMTs in the revolving red and blue lights of the ambulance as Dub hollered about assault, reckless endangerment, destruction of property, breach of contract. Marjo Malone and Dewey Wentzel showing up with their badges and guns, rounding up witnesses for questioning. A tow truck, then another, arriving to dispose of the mangled vehicles. Jude hysterical, inconsolable. I could close my eyes, shake my head to clear it, but always the loop started up again, and it always ended the same way: headlights speeding toward the crowd, then the last-second swerve and crash, Ash limping out of the wrecked truck, reeling off into the night like a wounded animal, in search of a secret place to either heal himself or die.
My eyes flew open at the sound of a motor pulling into the yard. I ran for the door as headlights cut across the front of the house. It seemed I'd been rehearsing this moment since the day I married Ash, in one form or another: the 2:00 a.m. phone call from the hospital, the squad car at the door. So sorry to inform you, Mrs. Farrell. I was forty years old, too young to have lost two husbands, though I knew it happened all the time. At the very least, I hoped it was Marjo. She was a tough gal, but unlike Dewey, who was about as sensitive as a garden hoe, she was human.
The driver's-side door swung open and the deputy climbed out. As he stood adjusting his gun belt on his pudgy hips, I heard him belch. I unlatched the screen door and stepped out onto the porch.
"Did you find him? Just tell me."
"Not yet. That's how come I'm here. To have a look around your place. Make sure he's not hiding out somewhere. Or somebody's not hiding him."
"Well, you wasted a trip. He's not here."
Dewey laughed a high, nasal laugh. "Like I'd take your word for it."
"I guess you'll have to."
He came around the car to stand at the foot of the steps. I could smell onions and sweat and Aqua Velva, and for a second I thought I would pass out, or throw up.
"We'll get a warrant, you know. Marjo ain't afraid to wake up Judge Poe."
"You're kidding me."
"Oh no, ma'am, I'm not."
"Come in, then," I said, stepping to one side. "But be quick about it. And you'd better not wake the kids or there'll be hell to pay."
I followed while Dewey searched the house. When he came to Jude's room, he flicked on a flashlight, shining it quickly across the bed, then underneath, then crossed to the closet and opened it, closed it again, flicked off the light. A similar check of the guest room and the back porch, including the deep freeze, and he was done.
"What about the trailer?" he asked.
"What about it?"
"You got a key?"
"It's not locked." I knew because I'd checked earlier, moving quickly from room to room, flipping on lights, peeking into the bathroom and the built-in cupboard in the bedroom. I'd paused only long enough to glance at the notebook Ash kept on the milk crate beside the mattress. Mostly nonsense phrases: "Her heaven had cracked open, too."
"Successive approximations to goal." And finally, in blurred ink as red as blood, "Without you, I sure do miss me." I'd picked up the notebook and carried it back to the house with me and buried it at the bottom of a kitchen drawer. I hadn't known why at the time, but I did now as I watched Dewey Wentzel pause to give his ass a good scratching and then head up the cinder blocks through Ash's front door.
I stood in the yard until he came back out.
"Okay. All clear for now. But I'm gonna be staked out up the road the rest of the night, just in case he shows up."
"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard," I said. "If he sees your car, he'll sure as hell stay away."
Dewey shrugged. "I just do what the sheriff says. Dub's hopping mad. And I wouldn't be surprised if that boy Ash beat up decides to bring charges, too."
"The whole thing was his fault. If Dub wants to point fingers, he ought to start with Hardy Rnox."
"I just got once piece of advice for you, Miz Farrell."
"Spit it out, then, and go."
"Harboring a fugitive's a crime, too. If it comes out that you're in on this—"
"Get out of here, before I call your boss and report you for harassment."
"I'll be up the road, like I said," he told me as he hitched up his belt and swaggered off around the corner of the house. "I'll have my eagle eye on you." Dewey started up the Crown Vic's engine and revved it loudly, then circled the yard and set off up the r
oad the way he'd come.
As I went back inside and locked the door, I heard Lily calling me from Jude's room, her voice sharp with fear. I ran toward it, toward the sound of Jude sobbing.
"What's wrong? What happened?"
"I had a dream!" he wailed. "A man came in my room with a light and shined it in my eyes! A scary man with a gun!"
I crawled onto the narrow mattress and wedged myself between their warm, trembling bodies, gathering them into my arms. "It wasn't a dream, baby. It was— That was me. Just checking to make sure everything was okay. I'm sorry I scared you."
"Is Daddy home?"
"Not yet. But maybe if we all close our eyes and think about him real hard, he'll be here when we wake up."
Things were quiet for a moment or two, except for Jude's soft hiccupping.
"Aunt Lucy?"
"What, Lily?"
"When I think about Uncle Ash, it just makes me sadder."
"Me, too," Jude whispered.
"Think about something else, then," I said. "Think about something you like more than anything else in the whole world."
"Dinosaurs," Jude said.
"Chocolate," Lily said.
"Me, too," I said. "And peonies."
"What's peonies?"
"It's a flower. Keep going. Jude?"
"Disneyland," he said, his voice slurred with sleep. "Pirates of the Caribbean''
"Talladega Motor Speedway," murmured Lily, burrowing into my side.
I was quiet as they settled themselves against me, warm and sweet-smelling.
"Your turn, Aunt Lucy."
"Oh. Okay. Um, peonies."
"You said that one already."
"Hush, now. Go to sleep."
I closed my eyes. Peonies. I filled my mind with blossoms, piling them up, bushels and bushels of them, their heavy heads drooping, pink and purple and ivory tinged with blush, until finally they were thick enough that I couldn't see the rush of headlights anymore.