by Don Keith
The other three tapes were still spinning away on the bank of reel-to-reel machines. Two of them would go into envelopes already addressed to Miguel Garcia and Dominic Musso, to be sent to them at their homes if DeWayne tried to push the point. Another copy would be put in a safe place.
The receiving and recording equipment were not physically in the bank building. Their conversation had been broadcast a long way that morning. Some little old lady with a police scanner in West Nashville could have gotten an earful if she had only been tuned to the right frequency. But it was a risk they had to take. Jimmy wanted the recording done as far away from the Wizard offices and studios as the battery-powered amplifier could fling their voices.
DeWayne stopped his pacing in front of the desk, then bent at the waist like a defensive prizefighter, balled his fists and glared. For a moment Jimmy thought the twin was going to take a swing at him and pop him full in the face. He tensed for the blow, prepared to block it if he could, but knew he would be no match for somebody like DeWayne George who, no doubt, had had his share of punch-outs.
Slowly, he dropped the fist and uncoiled, standing erect again. His face was tight-skinned, like a lizard watching its prey. All color had left his features. Then he turned slowly, walked over and opened the door without saying anything more, his shoulders slumping, the fight seemingly gone from him.
Suddenly, he stopped dead and spun back around. The look on his face sent a chill through Jimmy as the room seemed to immediately grow colder. The twin’s voice was as raspy as scraped frost when he spoke:
"There are some things a real man can't let go by, Brother James. Double crossing is one of them. You are with me all the way or you are my worst enemy. That’s all there is to it. I'll see you again soon, neighbor. I'll see you again real soon. But right now I got a craving to hear me a real pretty country song."
Thirty-eight
Jimmy was relieved that Cleo was lost somewhere out there. Lost from him. Lost from her manager. But also, thank God, lost from the vengeful wrath of DeWayne George. Detroit said the same thing when he bolted through Jimmy’s office door a few minutes after DeWayne stormed out.
Jimmy was still sitting in the chair, still trying to catch his breath, his body caught in some kind of a shivering fit. He had not moved since De Wayne slammed the office door shut.
“It’ll blow over, Jimmy. You were great. Man what a performance. You scared him enough to keep him from doing anything stupid. Shoot, you even scared me a time or two. Once DeWayne cools down, he won’t want to risk everything just to get back at you. We got what we need if he calls our bluff but we won’t ever need it. You’ll see.”
But Jimmy Gill was not so certain. The rabid-animal look Jimmy had seen on DeWayne's face just before he left could not have been relayed to Detroit by the amplified wireless mike.
“I don’t know, Dee. Man, I wish she would call. I’ve got to tell her to stay hidden until he calms down. That’s all. Did you get the tapes okay?”
"We got it all fine. That is, except for a few words when some citizen’s band guy with a linear amplifier almost knocked the headphones off my head," Detroit said. He could see the concern on his friend’s face and knew it wasn’t over a few garbled words. "She'll be okay, Jimmy. It'll all be finished before she pops up again. The timing is right. You’ll see. And then you two can set things right between you, too."
"From your lips to God's ear," was the only response Jimmy managed to come up with.
He swallowed hard and threw himself into the middle of the stacks of paperwork and the reams of computer printouts of ratings reports, working with a fury. Those who called him were amazed that he picked up so quickly and doubtless noticed how his tone changed immediately to one resembling disappointment when he found out who it was calling. Those unlucky enough to receive telephone calls from him that afternoon must have wondered why the boss was so cranky, so short, so stick-to-business. It was not his usual way. He almost always asked about the family or talked some football first. Only then would he bore in. But not that day.
Finally, when there was nothing else on his desk or on his mind to try to hide behind, he stood, stretched, and walked to the office window.
It was already approaching nighttime. He watched the twinkling lights of Nashville's Lower Broadway for a minute but there was no peace for him in their impersonal glow. Instead, they seemed to be winking at him, as if they shared his secrets.
He turned and headed for the door, not certain where he was headed. Just out. Home, maybe. Cleo’s house probably. Anywhere but the office.
However, when he punched the elevator button to select the floor, it was not for the parking garage level. His finger curiously selected one floor down, just below the offices, where the studios for the radio satellite formats were located.
Jimmy had only been through the elaborate maze of small, sound-deadened rooms and past the walls filled with all the shiny, gleaming equipment a few times since everything was finished. Even then, he only gave them half his attention, an approving nod. Detroit had done a beautiful job designing and building it all, bringing it in well under budget. Jimmy realized that he had never gotten around to telling Dee how much he appreciated it.
It occurred to him that in the last few years, the rooms, the equipment, the people working away there had all become no more than liabilities or assets to him. Capital outlay or amortized investment. Income producers or drains on the budget. That was all and nothing more.
After using his master key to open the double-locked door, he stood in a small octagonal-shaped lobby surrounded by huge double-glass windows, each allowing him to peer into studios dominated by immense mixing consoles, lit by soft track lighting and colorful, blinking indicators for this and that technical monitoring equipment. The walls of each room were covered with soft gray acoustic foam and even the ceilings were carpeted. The control boards had dozens of knobs and switches sprouting from their upturned faces, while rows of needles danced with the music that was being shoved through them.
In front of each console, with their backs to him as they worked, stood or sat the disk jockeys, the men and women who were spinning out the programming on each of the networks. A speaker on the receptionist's desk in front of Jimmy was clicked to the country station. He stood there in the darkness and watched the announcer in that studio hunch his shoulders forward, wag his head wildly and wave his arms animatedly in the air as he talked his way out of a hot country song, matching his mood exactly to the happy-go-lucky words and tempo of the music he had just been playing.
From his hiding place in the shadows of the lobby he could almost imagine the smile on the deejay’s face as he happily pre-sold the next song that was coming up on the eighty-six radio stations whose signals he was talking over at that very minute. Then the guy punched a big red button in the middle of the console that sent tape players spinning in each one of those stations, seamlessly spilling out some localized announcement with his same voice. Words that had been scripted by the station and pre-recorded by the deejay days earlier. But they were timely and localized, and delivered in the same pleasant, happy, lilting voice. There was no reason for the listeners in those eighty-six towns to think anything other than that this honey-voiced young man was right there in some studio in the radio station in the middle of their town, talking to each of them individually. That was just one aspect of the illusionary magic he was making in that tiny, cramped chamber, his theater of the mind.
The deejay watched a big stop-watch on the wall until he knew exactly when to begin talking live into his microphone again. He was saying something clever about an event that was happening in the national news that day, tying it in perfectly with the lyrics of the song whose instrumental opening had already begun thumping away under his monologue. Then, just as he had made the point he wanted to make, he popped a big green button in front of him. It would play another tape at each of the stations, one that spoke the call letters or slogans of every one of those stations in
each of the far-flung cities. Again, it would perfectly match the announcer's real-time voice. Then the singer started wailing right on cue, as if he had simply been biding his time, waiting for the deejay to finish all he needed to say before he took over and sang the lyrics.
Jimmy smiled to himself. Made himself a promise. When this DeWayne George mess blew past and a few more things were taken care of, he would once again push the elevator button for this floor, come into one of the studios, and sit in front of one of these microphones for a few on-air breaks. That would let him recover some of that old, familiar, magical feeling again. The feeling of climbing inside someone's head and making himself at home. Of using nothing but carefully inflected spoken words and pre-recorded music to weave a beautiful, entertaining fabric.
Jimmy Gill watched the men and women work for a few minutes longer. He could not help it. He envied them deeply.
Then, quietly, he slipped out of the studios and down to his car before he was noticed. He did not want to intimidate these people with his presence, tongue-tie them if they saw they were under the gaze of the Big Boss. Jimmy knew only too well their paranoia, their insecurity, in this fragile business where on-air talent was only as good as his last rating book, only as strong as his quarter-hour-audience shares.
The night was lonely, cold, and moonless. The sky was so black and dense the stars seemed to have to strain to create any light at all. Jimmy paused at the guard gate on the way out of the garage. He pulled the new Mercedes onto Lower Broadway and headed south, out along Franklin Road, where the mansions of country music stars mingled with those of old money bankers and merchants. He supposed he was headed for Cleo's, but he suddenly realized he did not want to go there this particular night. The loneliness and worry that was eating him from the inside out would only be worse in what amounted to their home together in those rare moments when they had been in the same place at the same time.
He turned around in the lip of her driveway and headed back toward the downtown buildings. Before he got there, though, he turned right onto Demonbreun Street, guiding his car past the glaring souvenir shops and the gaggle of sight-seers marching up and down in front of them. Then he steered down Music Row, where broken dreams haunted the sidewalks like tapped-out tourists. The feeling was so strong it brought him a shiver, like the chill of the night air.
The few visions and dreams that had been gloriously fulfilled were signified by the rich stone-and-glass buildings of the record label offices and music publishing companies. By billboard signs congratulating various writers and singers for their most recent number one songs and the awards they had won. One sign praised Cleo Michaels for her recent Academy of Country Music trophy. She smiled down at him like a captured angel and he gunned the car past before his heart broke.
Somehow, he found himself on the freeway, and eventually ended up amid the ferns and falling water in a bar under the massive glass atrium of the Opryland Hotel. He was surrounded by eager tourists, sitting there sipping their warm beers and craning their necks, valiantly watching through the thick cigarette smoke, waiting impatiently for someone famous to amble past.
A pretty red-haired girl sang and played guitar on a small stage near one of the bubbling fountains. She tapped switches on a drum machine with her feet to change the tempo of the percussion that accompanied her medley of recent country songs the tourists were requesting. She reminded him of Cleo Michaels. He thought of young Cleo, earning her keep the best way she could before she could get her big break, just as this pretty red-haired girl was doing. But Cleo’s dues had been paid in a much seedier place, in clubs at the end of some dark street downtown in Printer's Alley.
She had told him several times about how the apparent hopelessness of it all, the dead-ends and hard work, had helped to steel her. How it made her appreciate more the battles she finally won. How it now made it possible for her to walk away from all the visible trappings of her stardom without looking back.
Baptized in the fire of frustration back then, she believed it was now easier for her to simply turn and leave it all behind. She was satisfied she had proven to everyone, and especially, most importantly, to herself, that she was worthy of all that she had earned.
Cleo had shared those thoughts with Jimmy several times. He had not gotten the message.
At that very moment, as he studied the bottom of his empty beer glass, the smoke swirling around him, Jimmy realized for the first time that her words had been meant for him. That they applied to him as much or more than to her. It was just one more bit of wisdom from the woman he loved that he had chosen not to hear. Another sling-shot aimed directly at him that he had managed to dodge.
“Jesus, Cleo. That’s what you were trying to tell me all along.”
“What you say, pardner?”
On the bar stool next to Jimmy, a massive-sized tourist in a Conway Twitty baseball cap leaned closer to see what this slim blonde-headed guy in the ritzy suit was saying. Jimmy had not even realized he had spoken out loud.
“Oh. I was just saying that she’s pretty good. That gal there.”
“Damn right she is! Better than lots of them that’s making all that damn money squealin’ and squallin’ on the radio nowadays, I’ll tell you. Nobody’ll ever beat Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton and...”
The red-headed singer kicked the drum machine with her toe again, whipped at the guitar strings with a clenched fist, the frets squeaking with the force of her fingers as they chorded, thankfully drowning out the tourist’s tirade Jimmy had accidentally set loose. There was something familiar about the melody. The girl had launched into one of Cleo Michael's signature songs.
It was painfully obvious. There was going to be no way Jimmy Gill could escape from her.
The singer’s music drove him from the bar at a stumble before she had even started singing the lyrics he knew so well. As the fat tourist worked his way back to Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline.
Before the cigarette smoke brought more tears to his eyes.
Before Cleo’s own words could give him another vicious punch in the gut.
Thirty-nine
As much as he wanted her to stay lost for a while, now more than ever, he also wanted to hear her voice and know that she was all right. He wanted to warn her to keep her head down. To tell her he had finally heard what she had been trying to get him to listen to.
He rang her portable telephone number again and got a busy signal. He was not surprised. She had been having trouble with the hang-up sometimes not catching and leaving the damn thing off the hook, unnoticed for hours. She had fussed about the ridiculously huge charges she had racked up because of it. The rundown batteries. Mostly, though, she was only upset because its being off the hook may have kept Jimmy from being able to get in touch with her. He doubted she felt that way now.
Then, hoping that she may have tried to call him, he tried his answering machine at home again. Nothing but some telephone solicitor trying to sell him something. The answering service from the office had half a dozen urgent, crucial, earth-shaking messages. None was from Cleo Michaels. Just more blazing fires he would have to stamp out first thing tomorrow morning. He felt his stomach fill with acid at the prospects.
Maybe it was the crushing tension, broken finally after the confrontation with DeWayne George. Or maybe the horrible loneliness and worry for Cleo that had seized him in its vise-grip. Or maybe it was only the bone-weary tiredness brought on by all the work that had avalanched on top of him the last few months. Suddenly, he was so tired he could hardly step out of his clothes and fall across the unruly, unmade bed at his empty house.
No matter how deep and absolute the sleep was that overtook him, no matter how intense the numb exhaustion, he was visited as usual by a familiar dream that starred his dead mother and one-armed father. Usually, he would awaken, panting, exhausted, and climb from the bed, get himself dressed, and drive toward the office no matter the hour, knowing he was doomed to toss sleeplessly the rest of the night anyway.
But this night, amid the voices of the figures in the dream, there was an insistent, shattering, ringing noise that threatened to tear apart the fabric of the nightmare. Jimmy finally awoke with a start to the pleading ringing of the telephone. He had trouble locating it in the dark, and then realized his eyes were still shut. The phone lay on the floor in a thin sliver of illumination from the nightlight in the bathroom.
"Cleo?"
He prayed it was she. Maybe simply saying her name instead of “hello” would make it so.
"Jimmy? It's me."
Damn! It had worked. It was Cleo!
But her voice was different, heavy, as if filtered and twisted by pain. He could hear a noise that sounded like wind rushing and roaring past her. She was in a moving vehicle for sure, but it was certainly not the quiet rumble of the tour bus he usually heard.
"Cleo! God, I've missed you. Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm okay, Jimmy.” She was quiet for an instant, as if swallowing something she did not really want to. “DeWayne George and I are taking a little ride, Jimmy."
The breath left him in a rush. He thought for a moment that he had stopped breathing altogether. That he might not ever start again.
"Cleo! So help me God, if he..."
"Listen to me, darling." Her words were deliberate, and he could hear a tone in her voice begging him to, for once, listen to what she was telling him.
Whatever you do, listen to me! she seemed to be saying. Dammit, for once, listen to me!
Jimmy struggled to blot out the panic and make some sense of what she was trying to tell him between the lines. The rush of the wind almost shrouded the words, but he listened. God, how he listened!