by Dave Connis
He wears a baseball cap declaring his obsession/affiliation with the Tennessee Titans, and I’m pretty sure I see a Tennessee Titans “T” inked onto his arm when he takes his jacket off.
“So, what do you kids want to know?”
“Well, uh,” Trey says, “we want to just ask you a few questions about the Elias Harper murder.”
His face stiffens. He’s probably never wanted to talk about this, especially to a bunch of kids.
“You said you were doing a report on police racism.”
I look at Addy. She makes an “oh boy” face: gritted teeth, wide eyes.
“Well, it’s kind of based around the Harper murder,” Trey says. Something tells me Mr. Crowell would stand up and leave if we weren’t in his house.
Dez notices Mr. Crowell’s distrust and explains everything from the beginning. She talks about how being murdered because you’re a different shade of human is like killing a celebrity because they’re a different kind of human. It’s a clever analogy that grabs Mr. Crowell, and instead of listening because he has no choice, he listens because he wants to. A few minutes later, she gets him to relax enough and she explains what we’re looking for, and why we’re looking for it. She gives the information we’ve already gathered in such detail it’s like she has it stored away on an Excel spreadsheet in her brain.
After she’s finished, he walks over to his counter and pours leftover coffee into a blender with a scoop of protein powder, milk, and ice and then blends it for a few seconds. “I’ve never discussed the details of this murder with anyone,” he says, pouring the smoothie into a pint glass.
We cast each other some disappointed looks, but Addy just nods like she’s sure something good is coming.
“Mostly because there were never any details to discuss. Racism was obvious during that time. There were probably hundreds of people targeting Elias, Colin, and Gabby. Just like there were hundreds of people targeting me for being Nashville’s first black police chief.” He sits at the table and, though the guy is jacked, he sits like he’s weak. It’s like he’s Samson, and this conversation is his Delilah.
“The precinct kept none of the evidence, I’m sorry. Do you have any other questions?”
My head is filled with overlapping curses. When I run out of swear words, I start combining them.
“Do you think Colin Cratcher killed Elias?” Elliot asks.
“No. No, I don’t. I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“The same reason the jury was sure.” Mr. Crowell takes a giant sip of his caffeinated muscle juice.
“What reason?” Dez asks.
“The song played in the courtroom. He called it evidence. It was called ‘What Are You, Elias?’ It was Colin’s response to the people threatening Elias and Gabby. The three of them had sung on the track together. Colin broke down as soon as the song came on.”
“A song cleared him?” I ask, incredulous.
“No. Technically, the song wasn’t evidence at all. Colin was the evidence. He couldn’t make it a minute without looking back at Gabby for assurance. The man was a wreck.”
“But he was high, right?” Dez asks. “He didn’t remember that night.”
Mr. Crowell shakes his head. “Yes, but it wasn’t Colin. Everyone in that courtroom knew that at the end.”
I don’t feel like making eye contact with anyone. To make eye contact would mean taking on more disappointment.
“You know,” Mr. Crowell says. “I may have a copy of that song. I’ve done my best to forget that day, but I have a blurry memory of Colin giving me a demo after the trial.”
“Isn’t that something you should remember?” Dez snaps.
He casts her a cold look, and her sharpness wilts. “No, that day reminded me that, though I was a professional agent against injustice, I couldn’t end it. I may have been the one with jurisdiction and a gun, but it takes a world to win a battle against anything worth fighting. That was the toughest case of my life. Through my entire career, my day was good if I didn’t have to deal with another case like that.” He sighs, rolls his neck, and then glances at the clock hanging above the kitchen sink. “I need to go. If you give me a few days to deal with my feelings on this matter, I’ll look around to see if I have a copy of Colin’s song.”
—
“That meeting wasn’t nothing, guys,” Trey says as we pull into our cul-de-sac. “He may have a song for us. We can’t just be disappointed. We did this for adventure, remember? To be together. To fight our addictions with those moments. Wallowing is dangerous for us.”
Addy pulls onto the highway and nods. “Yeah, Abuela is right. If you guys can’t enjoy this trip for other reasons, we better leave. Having four depressed addicts in one house will be a disaster I won’t be able to contain.”
They’re right. The decline of Adam Hawthorne is happening, and I don’t know how to stop it. If I can’t figure it out soon, I might go all the way back to the beginning when I was okay with not caring and not asking questions. It sounds so … normal.
That night, we play more of Elliot’s bottle cap game, which we’re now calling Capola, while pretending to be happy. When it’s time to go to bed, I don’t get into my mattress. I stay with Dez in the Hamana. We don’t talk at all, which is when I know we both feel the rumble of our expiration date barreling toward us. Instead of trying to figure out a way to break out of the rope holding us onto the tracks, we hold hands and sleep.
Maybe if we’re asleep, we won’t feel the train as much.
FINE
Two days later, I’m the biggest unnatural disaster I’ve ever been. I stay with Dez at night so I don’t watch porn, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it all day, or from feeling the itch every single damn second of every damn hour. Porn’s suddenly a phoenix rising out of the ashes. It keeps telling me I won’t be fine until I consume it, and it does its best to remind me of that every minute, and it’s exhausting.
All I want to do is be someone else. I don’t want to consume but, right now, it seems like that’s all I can ever do. Knowing Dez will be in my disaster.
What have I done?
Suddenly the Anti-Adam Order feels more right than ever. I deserve the Order. I deserve retaliation, because that guy …
That’s guy is me. It’s not past Adam. It’s not someone I used to know.
It’s.
Me.
That night, after watching Trey and Addy successfully like each other—sit next to each other, have normal discussion, be normal people in a normal relationship—I grab Dez and take another walk around the cul-de-sac. I want to attempt normal with her, and the act of walking makes her forget about some of her walls.
“I’ve always dreamed of being a psychology professor,” she says with a shy smile. “I’d totally do addictions counseling on the side, too.”
“You’d be awesome at that,” I say. “With some experience first.”
“Maybe I’m just fascinated with my own brain, but I’m amazed people can help others dig to the roots of addiction. People literally get how God fits into synapses and neurons. Call me a nerd, but studying nervous ticks sounds like an amazing job.”
As she talks about all of this, a Trey-like gusto fills in her words and motions. Her voice is hopeful, and her free hand waves back and forth, emphasizing random words. This is her. This is Dez. Underneath her layers of fear, she’s innocent, a dreamer, hopeful, and all of those adjectives are sexy on her.
She rambles on about religion and the brain for a few more minutes, but as if passion crept past her without her permission, she pauses mid-sentence. The brief glimpse of a free Dez disappears, and she makes sure to throw herself under the addict bus to make up for feeling something other than dismalness.
“But I’m never going to change, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I want.”
She sighs and gives me a half smile like what she said was funny, but I can only look at her and wish that she were free of herself. Is that version of Dez possible
? Is the current Dez, Dez? Is it possible that the real you is the person you make fun of and belittle when they come around?
We get to the end of the thermometer-shaped road and start making our way back. We’re halfway to our house when someone yells out behind us. “Hey, there!”
We turn around to see the old woman we saw watching the sunset a few nights ago walking toward us. “Are you the kids staying in the house at the end of the cul-de-sac?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say flatly, even though I don’t feel like talking or being polite. “I’m Adam Hawthorne, this is Dez Coulter. There are three more with us, but they’re at the house.”
“Go grab them!” she says.
I finally see her face. I know I’ve seen her before, but I don’t know where.
“I’m going to have all of you all over for coffee and dessert. I won’t take no for an answer.”
Dez laughs. “We won’t give no for answer then.”
—
The woman’s house looks exactly like ours. Exactly.
Addy realizes this before I do and asks, “Do you own the house we’re staying in?”
“Yes,” she says. “I had both houses built in the mid-eighties. My mother used to live there, but she passed on, bless her heart. Come, please sit.” She taps her palm on the kitchen island where six black bar stools wait underneath the lip of a speckled black marble counter top.
“So, whose mother was the one who made the arrangements?” she asks.
“Mine, ma’am,” Dez says.
“Please call me Miss Hunt.”
Miss Hunt. That face.
I look at Addy to make sure I’m not imagining this. Her eyes tell me everything.
The woman in front of us is Amelia Hunt.
Memory after memory of The Woman crash on me, but that last game of Word Hunt taints all of them. Unsatisfied. Temptation. Me knowing. Doing nothing. I feel like getting up and running out of the house, but I don’t.
“Thanks for having us over, Miss Hunt,” Trey says. “Your home’s beautiful.”
Addy leans into his ear and whispers something. Trey looks over Miss Hunt over and then grabs Addy’s hand.
Normal.
Why can’t Dez and I be normal?
“Oh, thank you,” she says, “but it’s nearly the same as yours. The only difference is that there’s a railing in each of my bathrooms because my joints are miserable things. Would anyone like coffee?”
Dez mouths “I love her” to me.
Miss Hunt shuffles around in the kitchen in furry white slippers. She’s opening cupboards as though this is the first time in years she’s had people in her house. She pulls a red canister of coffee into arms as well as a small bowl filled with sugar. “Are y’all related? What brings such young people all the way from Seattle by themselves?”
“We’re not related. Well, these two are,” Trey points to Addy and me. “We’re all friends and part of an addiction group, and this is like our trip of rebirth.”
I wince. I’m not sure if telling the woman who’s renting you her house that you’re part of an addiction group is a good idea.
Miss Hunt tips her glasses down and flicks her eyes back and forth between the girls. “Are any of these boys giving you problems?”
“They are all outstanding gentlemen,” Addy says, smiling.
Dez chuckles and takes a different, less encouraging path. “Well, for me, one of them is, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
That’s a lie, but whatever.
“Which one of them is the boyfriend?” Miss Hunt asks. Dez points to me.
“You respect her, young man. Over there in a house with no parents around. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll respect her, you hear?”
Trey and Elliot have a chuckle at my expense, but when Miss Hunt catches them laughing, she stares them down.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and Dez elbows me in the ribs as a joke. I look at her with what I thought was a smile, but when she sees me, she tilts her head in confusion.
“So, why are you here?” Miss Hunt asks. “How is your ‘rebirth’ going?”
We have nothing to lose by telling her what we’re doing, or at least trying to do. We needed something from everyone else. Miss Hunt? She’s just a person, and, despite how much I don’t want to be here, a nice one at that. I nod to Trey, and he explains everything to her: Mr. Cratcher. His cancer. Coming here to find the album so we can finish his remake for him. He gives her an overview of the Knights of Vice, and how we’re trying, but definitely failing, to support each other to be better people. Miss Hunt stops her busybody fidgeting and listens to him with deep eyes. Her look’s one that makes me wonder if she knew all of this before Trey explained it.
While I eat the most delicious tiramisu I’ve ever had, Trey explains the stalled state of our album search. After he’s finished, she takes a deep breath.
“Colin is still alive?”
“Yes, as far as we know,” I say. “We haven’t gotten any calls yet.”
She takes a sip of her coffee and holds the tiny white china mug in front of her face so it hides her mouth.
“Wait here,” she says. “I’ll be right back.” She starts walking but turns. “Did he ever have a songwriting company?” she asks.
“The Chaos Writer,” Dez says.
Miss Hunt seems like a person who’d be ashamed if she knew we heard her call Mr. Cratcher a “sly bastard” under her breath while walking away. That’s why none of us say anything about it when she comes back with a white three-ring binder.
“I was a friend of Colin’s,” she says. I glance at Addy and see she’s biting her lip. It’s killing her not to fangirl.
“I met him in ’66. Right when I signed with Columbia records. We wrote songs together for three years.” She slides the binder toward us. “He was a genius with words. He made them honest and beautiful, light and dark. He had a way of taking two opposites and bringing them together. I even sang a few tracks on the album you’ve come here for.
“Right before Elias was murdered, Colin came over my house and told me a bunch of people were threatening to kill him for dating Gabby. A few days after the trial, Colin sent me a letter thanking me for my friendship and that was the last I’d heard of him. Then, in 1984, a songwriter named Leonard Cohen released a song called ‘Hallelujah.’ There was a line in it that sounded too familiar to be a coincidence, and it was because I’d already sung it on Colin’s album. Goodness, if only I could remember what the album was called.”
“Hounds of Eden?” Elliot asks.
“Oh, yes.” She smiles. “Such a good title. I sang for three songs on it. If I remember right, the first one was called ‘Heart like a Wasteland.’ Oh, and the second was ‘Beast of Nashville.’” Her face grows somber. “The third, ‘What Are You, Elias?’”
Dez and I stare at each other at the mention of the last song. For some reason, when Mr. Crowell mentioned it, I didn’t think twice about the title. Suddenly, I want to find the album more than I did before, but not because I need to conquer something. I want to find out the answer to his stupid question.
I want to know what I am.
“It’s a pity he never finished that album,” Miss Hunt continues. “He would have made it. He could have played with the biggest of them. Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Colin Cratcher.”
Dez flips through the binder filled with hand-penned lyrics. Each page has two signatures in the top left corner: Amelia Hunt and Colin Cratcher.
Miss Hunt leans against the counter with an air of nostalgia in her eyes and wishful smiles. “When I heard the line ‘there’s a blaze of light in every word’ in Mr. Cohen’s song, I had suspicions that Colin was at it again. I contacted The Chaos Writer, but he never responded. Rightfully so.” She laughs. “If he’d have taken me as a client, I would have known instantly who he was and he wanted to be invisible.”
We’re all on the edge of our seats, and no one wants to ask the question that’s sitting on the tips of o
ur tongues. We’re all afraid of the answer. Dez decides to be the strong one, which is more ironic proof that she can be strong when she wants to be.
“Do you have a copy of the album?” she asks, almost whispering. She grabs my hand. I hold it tight, like I’m waiting to catch her when she trips.
“Colin’s? No, no, he didn’t let those tracks out of his sight. Back then, everything was analog, you know. It was all records and 8-tracks. Data was clunky and took up space.”
“Do you know if anyone else has the album?” Trey asks, the optimist to the rescue.
“If Colin doesn’t have it, no one has it. He took back all of the trial evidence before he moved. He didn’t leave anything behind. Colin Cratcher wanted to completely disappear. He wanted a new life with Gabby. I’m sure it’s in his possession somewhere. He never got rid of anything.”
To say I’m frustrated is an understatement. We came all this way—Seattle to Nashville—just to figure out Mr. Cratcher was lying. I start to blame his lie for the state of Dez and me. Maybe if we hadn’t come out here, we would’ve survived each other. Even though I know that’s not true—whatever’s happening with us would’ve happened eventually, but it feels better to blame someone else other than myself for once.
“He told me he didn’t have it,” I say. “He said it was gone. Why would he lie?”
“I imagine he didn’t want to bring up that old hurt. That time in his life was extremely painful. When you are a collector of years and aches, there are some old bones you just want to keep buried.” Miss Hunt says.
“Can you remember the names of the other songs?” Dez pleads.
She’s grasping at anything now. I can tell she wants to cry. She keeps swallowing. Her blinks are like, three seconds long.
“Can you please remember the rest of the album?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Miss Hunt says. “But please call me when you start working on it again. I’d love to sing on it.”
Dez stands and walks toward the door. “Fine.”
JUST A CONSUMER
It’s been a day since Miss Hunt told us Mr. Cratcher “probably” has the album. Two since Mr. Crowell told us he’d look for the song. Christmas is in three days, and we’re supposed to be going home in two. That was the deal.