“I’m gonna play you a song—” she had a smile that could light up the darkest of hearts “—that I don’t . . . I’ve never played this for anyone. It’s got a story that goes with it, though. I’ll tell you the story first, then you can let me know if you still want to hear the song.”
He rested the smoke in the ashtray, took a long swallow and set his drink down next to it.
Collette leaned forward on the couch; Emily leaned back. They both stared at him.
What’s the worst thing you can imagine, Tom? The worst punishment someone could wish on you?
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he started, not looking at either of them, staring into the woodgrain of the guitar’s face as the well-practiced patter started to come out of him. “I’ve travelled a lot of miles, sung a lot of songs, met a lot of women.” He smiled, let his eyes connect with Collette’s, then looked away.
“But there’s only one woman I’ve ever loved. Only one woman I’m ever likely to love.”
“Emily Grace,” Collette whispered, and hearing her name in the girl’s voice gave him a chill right to the heart.
“I loved her. Not well. And I lost her.”
“I was there,” Collette said quietly.
“What?” He wasn’t used to being interrupted, not at that part of the story. It threw him.
“I was there. In Spokane. When Emily died. When you . . .” Her voice trailed off. “That was when I was in Spokane, not getting married to my cowboy.”
“Seems you’ve got yourself a ringer,” Emily said, smiling.
“I watched it all on the news. I always wondered—”
“There’s a lot you don’t hear on the news. A lot of half-told stories. This is . . . this is the whole truth—”
“Oh, honey.”
“—the only way I can tell it.”
She nodded, her eyes wide.
“I loved her. And I lost her. And it was all my fault.”
He took a long drink from the tumbler. His hand was shaking again.
“I met Emily Grace when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. I say we met then, but she’d always been around. One of those people you see around, but you never really notice.”
“Thanks.”
“But we met. She was twenty, I guess. We fell in love, got a place together, this shitty little walk-up. I made my music. She waited tables.”
Collette bowed her head.
“We were happy. We had no money, not a pot to piss in, but we had each other. We were happy.”
“We were.”
“But I was a road dog. I was on tour a lot in those days. Not as much as I am now.” He barked out a laugh. “But a lot. Away from home. Away from her. In the path of vice and degradation. Opportunity, I liked to call it.”
“Dogging, I used to call it.”
“See, I love women. I love all women. Always have. I love the way they look, the way they smell, the way they feel.” He looked at Collette, then shook his head, trying to clear off the reverie.
“I was in love with Emily, but . . .” He shrugged.
“You were incorrigible.”
“Incorrigible. That’s a good word.”
“That’s a good word for it. The road’s a hard place if you’re trying to stay true. And I didn’t even try. I slept with a lot of women, but, I don’t know how, in my heart I stayed true.”
“Did she know?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe. It was something we joked about: me and my groupies. But we didn’t ever really talk about it.”
“What happens on the road stays on the road.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
She nodded slowly, like she was trying to figure out her place in all of this.
“I carved up a lot of road in my younger days.”
“A lot of notches in your guitar strap.”
He grinned. “Yeah.”
The bourbon went down just fine, thank you very much.
“When I was first together with Emily, I managed to stop, though.”
“For a while.”
“For a while. But a pretty girl is hard to resist.”
She blushed again, and Tom had to look away.
“We were happy. When I wasn’t on the road, we spent all our time together. We got engaged. Bought a house. Started talking about how it might work to have a family. We were together for more than ten years.”
“And then she died.”
He shook his head. “Don’t get ahead of me now, darling.”
“Sorry.”
“Round about six years ago now—”
“You know exactly how long it’s been.”
“—I was doing some local shows. Road-testing some songs I was working on. I played one night at the Creekside Tavern. That’s where I met her.”
“Jolene.”
“She called herself Jolene.”
“That’s not your real name, is it?” he had asked her, after, his arm around her shoulders, her head nestled on his chest.
“You’ll never know,” she whispered, still playing.
He smoothed the hair away from her face.
“Like the song.”
“Yeah. She came up to me after the show. Waited until she was the last person at the merch table.”
Collette looked down at the floor.
“I asked her if she wanted to stay around for a while. Maybe have a drink. She did.”
“Of course she did,” Emily said.
“Of course she did,” Collette said quietly, staring a hole into the hardwood.
“I had her wait for me at the bar. The other end of the bar from where Emily was sitting.”
“Emily was there?”
“I’m always there.”
He nodded. “She’d been there all night. Listening to the new songs. Standin’ by her man. When she asked if I was all done, if I was ready to go home. I told her—” he took a deep breath “—I told her that I was headed out for Moses Lake with the band. We had a show there the next night. I made it sound like this had always been the plan, that she and I had talked about it, that she’d forgotten. . . .”
“Bastard.”
“And the whole time I was spinnin’ her this line, I could see Jolene at the far end of the bar, looking at me over Emily’s shoulder, this little smile on her face as I was lying to the woman I loved, trying to get rid of her.”
He lit another cigarette, hands shaking something fierce now.
“Emily was confused, I guess. A little drunk. She had no idea what I was talking about, but she ordered us another couple of drinks—”
“One for the road.”
“—and we drank and she gave me a kiss goodbye and told me to behave myself. Told me she loved me. And the moment she was gone, Jolene up and took her place at the bar.
“I expected Emily to go home. It never occurred to me that she’d head out to Moses Lake as well. But she talked to Frank as she was leaving, found out what hotel they were staying at without letting on that she thought I was coming with them. And then she went home, packed a toothbrush and whatnot, and headed out to surprise me.”
“Jesus,” Collette whispered.
“Yeah. I figure it must have been about the same time I was, well, I figure it was about the same time I was back at Jolene’s that she lost control of the car—”
“One more for the road, baby.”
“—and went over that embankment. Police said it looked like maybe she fell asleep. That she probably didn’t feel anything.”
He looked at Emily for some comment, some sign that the police were right, that she hadn’t suffered, but she just stared him cold.
“I killed her,” he said, plain and true. “I killed her as sure as if I put a bullet in her. I killed her because I couldn’t resist a p
retty girl.” He shook his head, waiting for Collette to contradict him. Waited in vain. “If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have been out there on the road that night. If it wasn’t for me—”
“She’d still be alive.”
“Smart girl.”
He took a deep drag off the cigarette then balanced it on the ashtray, folding his arms around his guitar and hugging it to himself.
“But that’s only part of it.”
Collette’s eyes were wide, and Emily leaned forward on the couch, watching him watching her.
“I spent the night with that girl. Let her make me breakfast. And then I went home to pick up some clothes and such for the night in Moses Lake. She was supposed to be at work. The car wasn’t in the driveway. But when I got inside, Emily Grace was waiting for me.”
She was wearing the same thing she had been wearing in the bar, sitting on the couch in a slant of sunshine. She looked at him as he came through the door, but she didn’t make any move to get up. Just looked at him.
“Did you have a good time, lover?” she asked, and his heart dropped between his boots. Busted. “Did you have a good time? I hope she was worth it.”
He started to argue, tried to make excuses, come up with some story, but she just shook her head. Then she asked, “Tom, what’s your worst nightmare? What’s the worst thing you can imagine?”
The question came out of nowhere, and as he tried to answer, there was a knocking at the door.
“You’re gonna wanna get that,” she said.
“It was Highway Patrol, come to tell me that Emily Grace had died. I tried to tell them they were wrong, but when I looked back, she was gone.”
Collette was no longer even trying to meet his eye.
“I thought I was going crazy. I did go crazy. You were there, you remember how hot it was that week: I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t cry. The police, they showed me pictures of the wreck, pictures of her. I couldn’t hold it together. That first day I must have drunk my way through two bottles of bourbon trying to ignore the phone, trying to put her out of my mind. It didn’t work. I was wide awake, sober as a judge, when she walked into our room that night.”
The red numbers on the clock radio read 3:11. He didn’t hear anything, but he could feel her there, knew she was with him.
“Emily?” he said.
She sat down next to him, but there was no weight to shift the balance of the bed. She leaned over him, close to his ear. He was hoping for words of comfort, something to let him sleep.
Instead, she sang in a whisper, words from an old Leadbelly song. “‘My boy, my boy, don’t you lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night?’”
She disappeared before he could answer.
“The next day was the same. More booze. People coming to the house, but I pretended I wasn’t home. That night, though—” He nodded heavily. “That night I cried. I bawled like a baby, for everything I had done, for everything I had lost. I cried like a child, and when she came to me, she took one look, shook her head, and disappeared. The next day . . . Have you ever gone three days without sleep?”
Collette thought for a moment, then shook her head.
“It’s rough at the best of times. Your mind starts to play tricks on you, talking nonsense, but making it sound like wisdom. So it made perfect sense to me to take my daddy’s gun and head back to the Creekside. Scene of the crime. I thought . . . I figured I’d end it all. Put myself out of my misery. People thought I wanted to kill myself so I could be with her. Truth is, I wanted to kill myself so I wouldn’t have to see her, ever again.”
“Funny how things work out,” Emily said.
“It’s funny how things work out. She was there, sitting at the bar like she was the last time I saw her. And I pulled out that gun and I put the barrel in my mouth, I had my finger on the trigger, and she leaned in, she leaned in real close, and she said, ‘You can’t do it, can you? All your big hat, big balls posturing, and you can’t even muster up the guts to take the cowardly way out.’ And then she asked me again, ‘What’s your worst nightmare, Tom?’ but this time, she had the answer.”
He had lowered the gun as she stepped toward him, letting it dangle at his hip.
“I’m gonna tell you what your life is gonna look like, Tom,” she said, in the same reedy voice she had once used to say she loved him. “You’re not gonna sleep. You’ll barely eat. You’ll be so close to snapping all the time, you’ll feel like a rubber band.” The words didn’t sound like a threat or a curse, just a description of the way things were gonna be. “And the only thing that’ll help you, the only way you’ll have to find some peace, to find some rest, is gonna be to tell your story. To find someone, and tell them what you’ve done.”
“‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” Collette whispered.
“She’s brighter than most.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah.”
“So that’s . . . why me? Why’d you pick me?” He could see the distaste forming on her face, the blossoming sense of betrayal. That’s what it looks like when you realize you’ve been used.
Tom had to look away. “Because you wanted to listen. Because it’s been three nights since I last told anyone. Three days since I slept. Because I get so tired. . . .”
“Tell her. You have to tell her.”
“Because you’re Jolene,” he said, and the words felt like they might break him, same as they always did.
The look of horror on her face was the same, too. How many times had he seen that? Too many.
“There’s one in every crowd: the girl who waits ’til the end of the line. The girl with the secret smile. The girl who I can feel right down to my toes.”
He shook his head.
“The sort of girl I’d do it all for again, if the circumstances were the same.”
Collette gasped, and Emily smiled, and Tom just went on talking. “The girl who helped me kill her, and didn’t even know. That’s what she wants—she wants you to know. Emily wants you to know what you’ve done. She wants you to know what it’s in you to do.”
She looked at him for a long moment, tears streaming down her cheeks, betrayal working hard in her eyes, and then she crumpled, her back jumping as she cried. Emily looked at her for a moment, looked at Tom, then vanished, as if she’d never been there at all.
He thought, for a passing moment, that he might go over to Collette, rub her back, try to comfort her. He liked this girl; he didn’t like to see her in pain. In pain that he had caused.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
Instead, he put his guitar back in its case, unplayed and forlorn, his song unheard for another night. His cigarette had burned itself out, leaving a white column of ash.
He didn’t say anything as he left—there was nothing he could say—but he looked back at her, thinking wishes and might-have-beens.
He closed the door behind himself. Heard it lock.
The sound of his boot heels on the sidewalk echoed in the empty night. Behind him, the road stretched on forever, disappearing into the sea and the dark sky beyond. Ahead, just ahead, a hotel. A bed. A night of broken sleep, from which he would wake sadder but no wiser.
And tomorrow . . .
The weight of his guitar case was almost too much to bear. He wondered, as he walked in line with the journeying moon, when, if ever, he might have the guts to put it down, once and for all.
Crossroads Blues
I sold my soul to the devil in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.
I wish it had been at a crossroads, you know? Or in a graveyard. Or, hell, anywhere cooler than a fucking convenience store parking lot. Just for colour, you know?
Because we’ve all heard the story. Hell, everyone who’s ever dreamt of bending that note, or writing that one perfect song, we’ve all thought about it. Go down to the crossroads like Robert J
ohnson did, sell your soul and come back with your touch, your sound, your songs.
Sure, he died young and barking like a dog. But have you ever heard “Love in Vain?” “Crossroads Blues?” “Hellhounds on my Trail?” Hear songs like that, and you realize that how he ended up didn’t matter. The songs are all that matter.
You’d sell your soul to write a song half that good.
At least, that’s what you tell yourself.
Just to be clear—nobody expects it to happen, right? It’s just a story, a fantasy when you’re practicing so hard your fingers are bleeding. It’s not real.
All the same, that afternoon, out front of the 7-Eleven? I knew who he was before he even opened his mouth.
He just—he looked the part, you know? Tall and skinny, dressed in black head to toe, with this long black coat that seemed to billow in the wind even though there was no wind. Short black hair. Good shoes. Expensive shoes. And me looking like shit, sitting on the ground by the door, my guitar case in front of me. I’d seeded it with a few coins, a couple of dollar bills, and that’s all there was in it.
What I remember most, though? He smiled. A lot. And it was this big, open smile. He was like the kind of guy you could see hanging out with, maybe having drinks every couple of weeks. He looked like the sort of guy who would be anybody’s friend.
Which, I suppose, makes sense. Of course the devil’s gonna be friendly. Of course you’re gonna want to be friends with him. It’s all in the marketing.
But I knew from the moment I saw him who he was. What it meant.
I had my head down, looking at my fingering, trying to figure out one of those Bob Dylan songs. They’re bastards—they seem so fucking easy as you listen to them, but when you go to try to figure them out there’s so much going on.
Anyway.
I was looking at my fingering, and when I looked up he was standing right in front of me, just watching me. I have no clue where he came from, he was just there. As soon as I saw that smile, that cat, I knew.
And you could tell that he knew that I knew. He smiled. Well, of course he did—me knowing? That just made it all so much easier.
Seven Crow Stories Page 4