Nine Volt Heart

by Annie Pearson

  JessesBoy: The new songs show how much happier my brother Jason is now that he’s free of the Dragon Woman. When Jason is doing well, I’m happy too. We were pretty miserable for a while. But when you hear the new boots, you will hear how much better we are doing.

  This time, I did what I shouldn’t have done. I replied while logged on under my lurker alias.

  Sebastian: I was in Bergen, too, and this song isn’t one of Jason Taylor’s better efforts. It’s not in the set list for other shows for good reason.

  Right then I vowed to myself that I’d revise the song, change the words, and take a different tack on the music, just to prove my stalker wrong.

  In my own email box—which only a handful of people use, together with my special spam friends who want to help me get out of credit card debt and also get a bigger penis—was a short note from one of my Americana friends. I refer to the kind of Americana that needs disambiguation on Wikipedia. I started a forum under my lurker alias on No Depression years ago. Then I moved it to a blog, where the discussion threads have been a haven since life went sour. My lurker-alias blog is obscure enough that it attracts only the most serious about exploration of roots music, like people writing graduate theses. Nothing gets posted without the site manager’s approval, which I know makes me a censor of sorts, but I always post everything received that isn’t spam or ads. The etiquette of the blog is that we just freeze out obnoxious posters by not responding. Through the blog I met a few old musicology codgers who had been batting around issues since John Lomax first published and who liked preserving their arguments on the Internet. A few of them have become personal friends of mine. This morning, it was Chas1933@jugum.com, whom I consider a good friend, though we’ve never met in person. I learn something interesting whenever he writes to me.

  Chas1933: Your help with more recent influences has been invaluable. I’ve about chased that Gram Parsons thread to its end. Call me an old fart, but it seems most of his influence centered on who he spent time drinking with.

  Sebastian: That’s too cynical. The real influence was his insistence on going back to roots and being true to that, instead of listening to the derivative sound that got radio play in those days.

  Chas1933: I can hear that in his music. I confess I just wanted to yank your chain since you always insist on going back to roots. Want to help me with the next thread I’m following? Got time to waste on an old man?

  Sebastian: It’s never a waste. I owe you far more from what you’ve sent my way in the last couple of years. What’s your next project?

  Chas1933: The Lost Sons. No one has done much research into the work those boys did. I see it called Hillbilly Bebop, and one guy calls Jesse Rufus the son of Charlie Mingus and Hank Williams. But I don’t think old Hank was AC/DC.

  Sebastian: The traditional list of influences starts with the Delmore Brothers, because of the close harmony. Though I believe for Jesse it was the Sons of the Pioneers. The Bakersfield country-western work from the Fifties and Sixties. Gram Parson and Neil Young. And the Beatles.

  Chas1933: I can hear all that. You have an opinion on everything. What do you hear in Jesse Rufus? You must have given his work a listen.

  I had listened to every line and every note Jesse Rufus recorded, over and over, hoping for hidden messages, the way kids in the Sixties listened to Sergeant Pepper and Sympathy for the Devil. I spent the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades trying to learn every chord, imitating how Jesse Rufus bent notes with his voice, transcribing chords and words, looking for acrostics or coded clues, any indication that he knew I existed. I have never longed for a lover the way I longed to find out that he knew I was in lower Wallingford, wishing he would come be my real father.

  Sebastian: Too much tequila, coke, and speed. I can’t hear anything else in the music. It’s a crying shame.

  12 ~ “Wild Card”

  JASON

  WHILE I WAS IN mid-conversation with Chas, Susi returned, dressed in running shorts and a long-sleeved athletic shirt. Though she had cooled down enough that she wasn’t breathing hard, her legs were blotched red from exertion in the cold morning air, and her skin glistened with perspiration. In a damp t-shirt, more than just her erect posture showed through. She had the build of a swimmer, strong shoulders and great lung capacity. Fortunately, she didn’t have breasts to speak of, and she was small, which has never been a type I’m attracted to. Otherwise, the pure physicality of her strong body and that pert—impertinent—way she had of staring deep into a person’s eyes almost had me crawling on the floor and begging.

  I crumpled up the note that said thanks for the laundry, see you around and jammed it into my pocket.

  “Oh good, you found everything I left for you.” She smiled. Dammit. I can’t take much of that. “I’ll make breakfast after I shower. Then I want to show you the notes and we can talk.”

  The woman had an agenda, with an assumption that I shared it.

  OK, I should have split the moment she went to shower. That made two lost chances to just grab my bag and scoot. I did make the effort. I unplugged my laptop and wrapped up the cord, then I finished making the last set of notes from the CD and DVD labels, and I stuck it all in my pack. Except there was a sheet of handwritten music on the piano, and it distracted me for several heartbeats. I couldn’t stop myself from playing it several times, struck by both the melody and the golden tone of the piano. She was by my side, taking away the music, hiding it, and saying, “I’m embarrassed that you saw this.” Her voice had the same timbre as the piano.

  “It was rude to leave you here alone, but I needed exercise,” she said. “After meetings all day yesterday, I needed to take a run before everything we have to do today.”

  Dressed for business, she wore a suit jacket that accented her erect posture and the tidy, efficient movement of her hands, showing off a sophisticated, Katharine Hepburn-beating-up-Spencer Tracey charm. That stiffness where she covered up the injury to her face reinforced the impression that she was a serious woman, not to be trifled with.

  “Susi, I don’t know if I can help you.”

  She looked up from where she was manufacturing a breakfast sandwich in a tidy flurry, her brow raised in faint consternation. “You know about the plans for the Troubadours Institute, right? You received the advance draft of the proposal?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about it.”

  She sighed as she slipped the sandwich into a pan on the stove. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted email, but she insisted. I just want you to look at the money. Our fundraiser Randolph keeps assuring me, but I don’t trust him to tend to business correctly. I will relax when you tell me the pro forma looks like what you’d expect to see if you were giving us money.”

  The sun went behind an April cloud. It was disappointing to hear, I do admit. She didn’t want my body, she wanted my money.

  I said, “I’d like to help, but like Bruce said, ‘I left my wallet back home in my working pants.’”

  She laughed as if I were joking, and then asked, “Who’s Bruce?”

  “How about later?”

  “She said you would keep putting it off. You have to help us.” She was busy scrubbing pots while shaking me down. “We are looking for a great deal more money than either of us knows how to manage. We need you to prove that we have a team member who knows this business.”

  “Susi, I don’t think I’m your man.” However, I was still seeking to explore the territory and see what I could say yes to, before I had to say no.

  “You committed, Jason. When we called, your partner or your attorney friend, whatever he is, promised he’d get the information to you and get it on your schedule.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Damn if I could remember what Karl said the day before. Something about a foundation? I remember saying yes, but thought then that I still had a chance to dodge it.

  “I’m asking for a half a day today and tomorrow, Jason. It’s only a few hours of your time, but it’s my whole life.”

 
; “That is a bit dramatic. I’m not used to being the rescuing hero.”

  Susi said, “She warned me that you’d be like this—putting it off, as if you were lazy and got where you are through family privilege. Which we both know isn’t true.”

  She put a folder in my hands, and I began leafing through it.

  “I got where I am through my own hard work, thank you.” I tried not to sound too tetchy, but failed.

  “So did I. Now I want to get further. This isn’t just for summer fun—play with some kids, put on a show, and then forget it. This summer is my chance to prove we can do it. I want to turn this into a permanent project. I know I’m good at teaching, but I don’t want to stay at that school where I’m working now. I can’t find work in the public schools, because there’s no money left for performance arts. If we can do this, then we’ll create a place to nourish kids who love music but aren’t wealthy enough to go to a school like Prescott. I know how to work with those kids, and I think I can get others to contribute.”

  “You did your research well, Susi.”

  “You haven’t finished reading the proposal yet.”

  “I mean your research into my background. This is a perfect concept if you are trying to make me fall in love with you.”

  She flushed and came close to stammering, but then she focused on the sandwich she was toasting and didn’t look at me. Spencer Tracey 1, Katharine Hepburn 0.

  “I’m teasing, Susi.”

  “The numbers start on page thirty.”

  “Let me finish reading the curriculum part.”

  “All right. We wanted you to tell us whether the numbers look right, from a funder’s perspective. She said to make you look at it closely, because otherwise you will avoid it just to tease.”

  Since Susi insisted, I stared at the lists of numbers, which I more-or-less understood, but I suspect that Karl wouldn’t trust me to have an actual “funder’s perspective.” She set the grilled sandwich before me. As I read, I ate tomato, cheese, and avocado on what looked like homemade bread, dipped in egg like French toast and then grilled.

  “It looks great.” I can check the math fine, but I don’t know pro forma from Prokofiev.

  “You approve?”

  “Yes.” I shrugged. I approve the fax of the credit-card bills that Karl’s admin forwards every month and that is about as deep as my financial wisdom extends. Bought five CDs in Soho, stayed ten nights in a hotel near Chelsea, tickets to three shows at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, one hundred pounds from an ATM near Charing Cross Station, sixty-five pounds worth of books at the Tate Britain gift shop. Approved for payment.

  She sighed, which I would have liked to have provoked in a different way. “What a relief. I worry that Randolph is sleazing on something.”

  “The part I don’t understand is why you are fundraising in Seattle for a roots music project. Why aren’t you hitting people in Nashville and Memphis? Or the Carolinas and Texas. Or even Chicago. Places where they care more about roots music.”

  “The program will be here, and we don’t know people there,” she said.

  “I should introduce you. That’s how I could best contribute.”

  “Great, then let’s go.”

  “Today? Right now?”

  “I need to get these people to commit today. The trustees of the school are looking forward to meeting you. The grant has to be submitted by April 15, or we are out of the running for this year’s money. If we don’t get our funding this year—”

  “Then you will have to spend the summer at the beach instead of teaching boys with zits how to play twelve-bar blues.”

  “No, it’s—look, you admired my father’s collection last night. Dad hasn’t many years left. He’s still eager to keep teaching. I want to create the opportunity for him to have at least one more season of lectures. I know he is not a genius. He spent his life teaching music in little schools, too, but he has something to offer.”

  I was just about to open her curriculum vitae when she took the folder away from me.

  “Look at the schools you went to, Susi. All your training is in classical music. What are you doing down in the dirt with the hillbillies?”

  “My father is a fan of roots music and he made me listen too, starting with the first wax cylinder recordings of the early twentieth century, up through the great bluesmen in Memphis and Mississippi. I came to be intrigued with American mountain music and the folk traditions of the British Isles.”

  “Then you were magically transported from 1955 to this brave new world, where you adopted a disguise as a gentle school teacher with the business style of a killer shark.”

  “So you will help us?” She smiled.

  I was doomed.

  “Let me call my friends and tell them I won’t be around this afternoon.”

  I couldn’t calculate yet how much I was willing to have this adventure cost me, or how I would explain it to Karl when he saw the size of the check I’d be asking him to cut. I sat at the counter to eat the sandwich (oh god, it was indeed homemade bread from an alternate universe), hungriest of all to hear her speak, but not looking at her because I was afraid she would smile.

  “You can use my phone,” she said. “It’s in the bedroom.”

  “I’ll use my cell,” I said, and ducked onto the deck to call Ian while I finished the sandwich. I retained access to enough of my native intelligence to know that this woman’s bedroom was the last place on earth I should dare to enter.

  ~

  “Speak.”

  “That drummer won’t work, Ian. We need a rhythm master, and he doesn’t have it.”

  “Jason, buddy, where are you? Your bags showed up here last night without you. Had to tip the driver big time for wrangling all four guitars. What is in the box that weighs a ton?”

  “Books. I went to the museums after you and Cynthia left.”

  “So where are you? You didn’t stay at a hotel, did you? You get introspective and weird when you hole up alone. You need to be home with family. I’m stuck here by myself, since Cynthia is out of town.”

  “I met this woman.”

  “Oh crap. Where are you? I’ll be right there.”

  “No, I don’t mean like that.”

  “What other way is there when you don’t come home at night?”

  “We’re just talking. I met her at Neumo’s last night.”

  “Just what are you two talking about?”

  “I don’t know exactly. She has this unusual voice—”

  “Shit, man. Shit. Shit. Step out on the street. What neighborhood are you in? I can be there in a minute.”

  “Madrona, I think. Or maybe Leschi. You don’t need to get me. She’ll drop me off later. We have business to take care of.”

  “Oh shit, man. She doesn’t want to sing with you, does she? I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “I don’t know if she sings at all. She didn’t say. It’s just how she talks that gets me.”

  “Are you jetlagged, man? You don’t sound right.”

  “I’m fine. You can read about it on my blog. It’s no big deal. I’ll talk to you at dinner.”

  I hung up, realizing as I did that I hadn’t put Susi in my blog.

  13 ~ “Mama’s Opry”

  SUSI

  I SHALL NOW CREATE a separate record of my sins of both omission and commission and of the embarrassing moments from the first full day of my acquaintance with Jason.

  To begin with the first sin, I did his laundry.

  It was a considerate, humane action that I would have done for any houseguest stranded without luggage. It takes only a minute to iron a shirt. There shouldn’t be social stigma attached to friendly actions between people, just because one is a man and the other is a woman, and the subject is the man’s laundry. It is true that I used to do Logan’s laundry, but only because he’d let it sit longer than I could stand. So I washed Logan’s for my own sake, and I stopped when we could afford household help. This later occurrence was a one-
time event for a guest.

  (The belt buckle is silver-plated nickel with the figure of an old-fashioned motorcycle. He doesn’t keep anything in his pockets other than his wallet, and I did not look in it.)

  Next, I tried hard to show that I have a sense of humor. I wanted Jason to think that helping us would be fun. This attempt was not a sin on my part. It’s merely embarrassing, because I’m so bad at it. I’m far better at giving him the opportunity to laugh at me than I am at rendering true humor. As we got into my car to go to the meeting, he started teasing. Now, after a few mistakes, I can tell when he is teasing from the first two notes of his voice as he speaks.

  He said, “I intend to force a confession from you. All the evidence indicates that you are a time traveler from—what? 1955? Or farther back? 1935? What do you like best in your collection, Susi? Hank Williams and his friends on the Lost Highway, or Leadbelly and his field-holler friends?”

  “I would prefer whatever Hank Williams’ mother sang to him. I can appreciate the significance of the works of Huddie Ledbetter and the others that the Lomaxes recorded. Only a few of them strike an emotional response in me—that’s why others appreciate the blues, right? Because of the emotions aroused?”

  “Yes. It’s also why lots of other people do not like it. What strikes a note for you, Susi?”

  “Skip James. Every note he sings makes me want to weep. Little Milton. The others are too masculine for my tastes.”