by Robert Inman
Peachy sang a song she had written about country music stars who want to be in the movies and make videos for the Nashville Network:
Nashville’s going to Hollywood
And country’s going to hell.
Another, to the tune of George Hamilton IV’s “Abilene” that was a spoof on country songs used in TV commercials:
Havoline, Havoline,
Best motor oil I’ve ever seen;
It’ll keep your engine clean,
Havoline, my Havoline.
And an aching, wistful ballad about a woman who looks back on what her life might have been like if she hadn’t run off and gotten married to a no-account man:
And sometimes in the evening
I listen to the wind
And wonder ‘bout the girl I might have been.
The crowd loved her. And so, quite obviously, did Wingfoot Baggett, who hammered away at the drums but rarely took his eyes off Peachy Delchamps, a sly smile playing at the edges of his mouth. I believe, will thought to himself, that Wingfoot Baggett has at long last found peace and grace. Amen and Amen.
Toward the end of the evening, Peachy surprised Will by calling him up onstage. “We’ve got a special guest here tonight. If you’ve spent any time in Raleigh, you know Will Baggett, Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman. Well, he’s taking a break from the weather these days, and he’s here tonight visiting the trashy side of the Baggett family. Tonight, he’s cousin Wilbur. Wilbur honey, come on up here.”
Will hesitated. “Go on,” Billy insisted, grabbing him by the elbow and propelling him out of his chair. He stood, a bit unsteadily, and grasped Peachy’s outstretched hand and let her pull him up onstage. A big cheer went up from the crowd. He turned to them and waved. And then Peachy thrust something into his hand. A tambourine.
“Wilbur’s gonna join us on a few numbers before we call it a night,” she said. “Wilbur honey, whop that thing against the palm of your hand.”
Will gave the tambourine a tentative smack. “Aw come on,” Peachy laughed. “You can do better than that.”
Will tried again, a little more forcefully. The tambourine rang out across the room.
“That’s the way. Now get us a little rhythm going.” She took the tambourine from him, popped it against her hand once and then gave it three shakes -- whang, jingle, jingle, jingle. Will took it back and imitated her motion. “A little faster. Yeah!”
The band ripped all of a sudden into a hard-charging beat, grabbing the the rhythm he was beating out and turning it into a powerful surge of sound that pulsed someplace way inside of him that he hadn’t known was even there. Then Peachy started singing.
I was born to boogie,
I was born to jive;
So if you want some boogie love
Just get yore ass in line.
The crowd went crazy.
“Yeeeeehah!” somebody yelled in Will’s ear. Then he realized it was coming from his own throat. But it wasn’t a voice he had ever heard before.
*****
A phrase came to mind, bubbling up from his distant past. I lay near death… Flashes of memory. An apartment in Chapel Hill, smell of stale beer and cigarettes, weak Sunday morning sunlight at the edges of the windowshade. He tried to turn his head away from the light, but then his head came loose from his body and fell from his bed and bounced along the floor to the bathroom where it disintegrated in spasms of nausea, ridding itself of all it had consumed the night before. God, he thought now, I haven’t been this near death in thirty years.
It took him a bit to figure out where he was -- the fold-out couch in the living room of Wingfoot’s trailer -- and to reconstruct enough of the night before at Baggett’s Place to remember approximately how he had brought himself to such wretchedness. It took a bit because he had to be very careful with this process called thinking. Thoughts, even small and benign ones, were painful in the extreme, richocheting around inside his head like pinballs.
A voice at his ear: “Wilbur…” It was Peachy. He remembered Peachy, that was for sure. How could he forget Peachy? He would have asked her to sing to him, but he wasn’t sure he could stand that much racket. Even Peachy’s singing would amount to racket to someone as near death as he.
“I lay near death,” Will whispered.
“Yes hon, I can see that.”
“I hate to be rude, Peachy, but could you please go away and leave me alone?”
He heard a door close. It sounded like the last door on earth.
Time passed, but he had no idea how much. He was aware at times of the muffled sound of machinery, the murmur of voices, outside. A gaggle of crows roosted at some point in a nearby tree and yammered for awhile, the sound of it almost making him cry. He rose periodically from his bed of nails, staggered to the bathroom at the rear of the trailer, hugged the toilet bowl as if it were made of precious metal, and then crawled back. At some point, his body finally rid itself of poison and he fell into a profound, dreamless, exhausted sleep.
When he awoke again, it was late afternoon. He felt hollow, drained of all that he had ever been. He entertained the brief thought that he had perhaps been kidnapped by aliens who had taken him to a foreign place and sucked the marrow from his bones and the ganglia from his brain and then set him back on earth again, an empty vessel void of personality, knowledge, history. The air inside the trailer was hot and still -- the only sounds, a drip from the kitchen and some Mexican music from the general direction of the nearest greenhouse.
He found his clothes in a pile on the floor, pulled them on gingerly over inflamed skin. Thirst raged in his belly and he rummaged in the refrigerator until he found a carton of orange juice. He drank straight from the carton, just a little at first, testing his stomach. The orange juice stayed put. A good sign. Carton in hand, he walked to the trailer door and stood there for a long while, summoning the courage to open it. When he did, the light was soft and gentle and he gave thanks for that.
The van and Peachy’s Spitfire were parked in the yard, but the only sign of life was Wingfoot, hunkered on a bench under the awning, tinkering with a piece of machinery. He looked up at Will. “Behold, the tomb is empty and the stone has been rolled away. My Lord has risen. Glory, hallelujah.”
Will eased down the steps and took a seat on the bench next to him. “We can talk,” Will said, “but it will have to be very softly.”
Just then, Pedro poked his head around the corner of the trailer. “Senor Wingfoot…” Then he saw Will. “Ayyy, caramba!” He shook his head mournfully and disappeared.
“What’s that you’re working on?” Will managed after a moment.
“Water pump. Needs a new gasket.”
Will watched, sipping on the orange juice, while Wingfoot worked at the pump with wrenches, pliers, a screwdriver. He had a bad moment when Wingfoot opened a can of gasket sealer and the pungent fumes escaped. He rose, walked a few steps away, fought down the nausea, then waited until Wingfoot had re-sealed the can before he sat down again. There was a bit of a breeze now, stirring the still-warm air and sighing softly in the tops of the tall pines at the edge of the clearing. Will communed with his emptiness and began to entertain hope that he might yet live to see another sunrise.
Wingfoot reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pouch of chewing tobacco. Will put a firm hand on his arm. “Please.”
Wingfoot smiled and stuffed the pouch back in his pocket. They sat there for awhile longer before Wingfoot said, “I don’t suppose you want to hear how it all ended.”
“Probably not.”
“One minute you were doing a tambourine solo, and the next minute you were passed out on top of an amplifier. It happened real fast.”
“A tambourine solo.”
“First one I’ve ever heard. You insisted.”
“What was the song?”
“Shit fire.”
Wingfoot sang softly, off-key:
Strike a spark, light a fart
And shit fire.
; Wingfoot nodded. “It’s a crowd favorite. You’ll have to admit, Peachy does have a way with lyrics.”
“I didn’t,” Will said.
“You did.”
Will took another sip of orange juice, then set the carton down on the bench beside him and leaned forward, staring at the ground, thinking of this place (and he included the big house on the Cape Fear) as an island in his life, a time away from time, wholly unconnected to all that stuff back in Raleigh.
“I feel like I’ve been on a long trip to a foreign country,” he said.
“And you’re not just talking about last night.”
“No.”
Will raised up and looked around. “All this, Wingfoot…I had no idea. Does Min?”
“I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth, Cousin Wilbur. She doesn’t ask much about how things are going with me and I’ve learned over the years not to volunteer much.”
“Why?”
“Because I think Min gets along, deals with things, by compartmentalizing. She’s got me in a little cubbyhole that works for her.”
“Do you spend much time over there?”
“I come and go on a regular basis. I try to look after Min as best I can, as best she’ll let me.”
“You’re all she’s got, I guess.”
“Well, there’s Billy,” Wingfoot said. “He goes by several times a week.”
Wingfoot finished with the water pump, wiped it off with a cloth, and set it aside.
“You know we had a fight,” Will said.
“I could tell on the phone that something wasn’t quite right. But she didn’t give me any details. And frankly, Cousin Wilbur, I’m not just dying to know.”
“She still blames me, Wingfoot.”
“Not you.”
“Well, not directly. But I’m the one who got left holding the bag.”
Wingfoot stood. “Well, you and Min will have to work that out.” He disappeared into the trailer for a moment and came back with two bottles of beer. Will held up his hands in protest. “Just sip on it,” Wingfoot said. “It will do you a world of good.”
Will tried a tiny taste. It was ice cold, water droplets beading on the outside of the brown glass. It went down okay. It stayed down. Wingfoot pulled on his bottle and looked out across the yard toward the road.
“Where’s Peachy?” Will asked.
“Gone down to the other place to pick up some plants. She’s taking ’em to Rocky Mount tonight. She’ll drop you off in Raleigh.”
“That’s good. I need to get back.”
“For what?”
For what, indeed. “Well, for one thing, I’ve got a court appearance. And once I get that behind me, I’m going to get my life back.”
Wingfoot gave him a long look as he took a swig of beer. “Do you like being famous, Wilbur?”
“I like my job -- or, what was my job. I guess the famous part just goes with it. But yes, I enjoy it. Maybe more than enjoy it.”
Wingfoot got up, strolled around to the corner of the trailer, peered out toward the greenhouse, and shouted something in Spanish to Pedro and Cisco. Then he came back and sat down and polished off the beer. “Want another one?” he asked Will.
“No sir, I sure don’t. But this one is just fine.”
“Hair of the dog that bit you.”
“I suppose so.”
Wingfoot stared at his empty beer bottle for a moment and then set it down beside the bench. He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Wilbur, you’re a grown man and much too old to be in the market for advice. But I’m gonna tell you something I’ve learned. I’ve learned that if you want a thing so bad that it takes over your life, you better be damn sure you get it.”
“West Point.”
“In my case, yep.” He looked over at Will. “How about yours?”
“I got what I wanted,” Will said flatly.
“And got it taken away from you.”
“And I’m gonna get it back.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Well, I won’t get the exact same thing I had, but something like it.”
Wingfoot smiled. “I sure hope you do, Wilbur. I sure hope you do. But if you don’t, be giving some thought to what you’ll make of yourself. I don’t just mean a job. I mean your other life.”
“What other life?” Will asked.
“Everybody has two lives, whether they know it or not. The one you have and the one you might have. It’s what you would be if you weren’t who you are.”
Will felt an irritated buzzing at the back of his brain, like a bumblebee trying to drill through his skull. He was in no mood for this. “Most people,” he said, “don’t have a secret existence, Wingfoot, some place they disappear to, or flee to, whatever the motivation is in your case.”
“Maybe not as obvious as this, maybe not a physical place, but everybody’s got one. Another life.”
“My God,” Will groaned, “you’ve turned into an existentialist philosopher. I haven’t heard this kind of wooly-brained nonsense since Chapel Hill. And it doesn’t make any more sense now than it did then.” He stood, a bit too abruptly. A stab of pain raced through his head and a meteor shower of black dots stormed in front of his eyes. “Shit,” he said, and sat back down. He was very still for a long time, waiting for the attack to subside.
“Did you have a good time last night?” Wingfoot asked after a moment.
“I made a goddamn fool of myself.”
“But did you have a good time doing it?”
“I don’t remember. Shut up, Wingfoot.”
Wingfoot laughed. “You sure looked like you were having a good time. Especially when you started taking off your clothes.”
“I didn’t!”
“No, but you looked like you might have at any moment.”
“If this gets back to Raleigh…”
“So what.”
“So, I’m trying to get my act back together in Raleigh,” he said. “I’ve got a wife and a kid in medical school and a house and a yard and I did have a job. And intend to have another one.”
“How is Palmer these days?” Wingfoot asked, throwing him entirely off track.
Will realized with a pang that he had not given his son a moment’s thought for some little while, not since they had talked briefly by telephone the day after Will’s firing from Channel Seven. Don’t shit me, Dad, Palmer had said then. It was a strange thing to say, and recalling it now, thinking of Palmer for the first time in awhile, he still didn’t know what to make of it. Or Palmer, for that matter.
“Fine,” Will said. “Palmer’s just fine. Studying hard. First year of med school, you know…”
“That’s good,” Wingfoot nodded. “You and Palmer ever get shit-faced together?”
Get shit-faced with Palmer? It was so thoroughly alien an idea that he couldn’t get his imagination to make even an oblique approach to it. He could imagine Palmer in the bar at the Greensboro Country Club, having a circumspect scotch and soda -- just one -- with the Greensboro Palmers. He would be wearing a neatly-pressed pair of chinos and a Ralph Lauren knit shirt, possibly even a navy blazer. He would sip his drink and make polite conversation with soft edges and pleasant digression. Another? His grandfather might ask when his glass was empty? Oh no, he would say, one’s my limit. That might not be the precise truth. He might have more than one in the company of friends, but not sitting in the walnut-paneled bar of the Greensboro Country Club with Daddy Sidney. And even with friends, not getting shit-faced, falling-down, toilet-hugging, knee-walking drunk. Palmer was a polite boy, deferential to his elders, correct in his manners, neat in his dress. He was not the shit-faced kind. And what would he say if somebody told him that his father had gotten shit-faced last night? He simply wouldn’t believe it, wouldn’t be able to conceive it, any more than Will could conceive of Palmer doing the same thing. The difference was that Will had. He had been royally shit-faced and was still paying the price for it. But what the heck. Once in thirty yea
rs?
“No,” he said to Wingfoot,” Palmer and I have never gotten shit-faced together. I don’t suspect it’s the kind of thing he’d enjoy doing with me.”
“Or you with him,” Wingfoot nodded.
Will shrugged. After a moment he stood, slowly this time, testing his equilibrium. “Wingfoot, I’ve got to go home. “
Wingfoot slapped his knees with both hands. “You’re right, Wilbur. You’ve got to get home. I sure hope you get your life back, as you say. Whatever that means.”
*****
“ How’s your knee?” Peachy asked. She drove, one hand draped over the steering wheel, elbow propped at the open window. She handled the big truck like she did her guitar. They had the windows rolled down and some Waylon Jennings on the CD player.
Will rubbed his knee. He hadn’t given it a thought in the past day or so. “It’s feeling pretty good. I don’t think I’m up to dancing yet.”
Peachy laughed. She had a wonderful, throaty laugh, like something warm cascading over you. “It sure didn’t affect your tambourine playing.”
Will laughed back. “I don’t remember. Wingfoot said I looked like I was about to take off my clothes. Just before I went down. I hope I didn’t mess up the song.”
“We just went right on,” she said.
A large, juicy bug splattered itself on the windshield right in front of Will. His stomach lurched. He was still a little queasy.
Sometimes you’re the windshield, Peachy sang, sometimes you’re the bug.
“Is that one of yours?”
“I wish. Mary Chapin-Carpenter. She and the guy who wrote it have both made a mint off it.”
“I like the your stuff,” Will said. “What I remember of it. That one about not baby-sitting no broken heart.”
Peachy sang it all the way through, keeping time on the steering wheel. She was really good, Will thought, even though he didn’t much care for country music. “Where did you get the idea for that one,” he asked.