or somebody. Could you say how that’s one of the finest things?”
The man is taken ashamed suddenly, afraid that he has asked too much, and he rubs his hair down nervously into a gray ducktail behind. He apologizes with his eyes.
But Emmett smiles and takes up a second sheet of paper. He writes it full and then begins another. The traveler gets up to leave, folding the pages to fit in the pocket of his pants.
Emmett watches as he walks out of sight toward the road, as he stops once to turn back and wave at him. The man waves with the humility due a gift of shoes, or bread.
Deep in the dream, he guns the old pickup’s gas pedal and almost takes to the air when he tops the hill at Thompson Bend, his stomach hanging weightless and ticklish for an instant before the tires fully hit dirt. In the mirror he can see the humongous white ostrich plumes of dust he’s raising, big enough probably to see from outer space with one of the spy cameras they have up there now.
He must be seventeen again. It feels like that. He can’t remember for the life of him where he’s headed but he knows in his heart it’s somewhere good. Fishing, or to Brenda’s, or into town to buy the new Gibson hollow-body he’s saved up for all summer.
But that’s when the road ahead of him starts looking like no road he knows of, plunging deep down into craggy rocks and shadows like the place in the cowboy movies where they ambush you, but he has up such a head of steam he can’t just stop on a dime, and besides he doesn’t see anywhere to turn around.
Suddenly an invisible hand from nowhere pokes him in the side, he can’t see it but it does, and does again, scary but real, and despite his best try at not hollering out, he does. By the time he realizes where he is, Brenda is hugging his head, rocking him side to side like a baby, saying, “Shh, shh, shh,” and kissing the top of his hair.
The first thing he sees through the windshield of the van is an old brick wall painted with ugly words that have been almost whited out, and the rising sunshine on it is so bright he looks at his wristwatch in a panic, afraid they’re late, but it’s only seven o’clock.
“We’re fine,” Brenda tells him. “We’ve got plenty time.”
When he stretches, his back grabs, stiff from the way he’s slept. His mouth tastes like a mule’s taken a dump in it. Brenda, like a mind reader, lays the blue shaving kit in his lap, already unzipped to the little bottle of mouthwash, and gets out to unlock the back. He finds his pocket comb and rakes it through his hair a few times and then goes to wake up Jenny.
She’s curled up in a ball on the far back seat, facing away from him, wrapped in the old bedspread they use for picnics. The only part of her that shows is a mess of red hair, cascading almost to the floorboard. He gauges where her shoulder is and squeezes it.
“Jen?” He squeezes a little harder. “Let’s go, hon. It’s showtime.”
She uncurls slowly and gets a big gasp of air, as if she’s been off in some place without oxygen all this time. Her light green eyes, raccooned by the slept-in mascara, flash at him like he’s an intruder and she blinks several times before she knows him.
She throws back the cover and sits up, looking a little pissed the way she does before she puzzles out the day, and a warm wall of perfume rises up at him from the front of her T-shirt. Outside, Brenda unlocks the big side door and slides it open, a rush of bright cold air. She hooks the hanger of Jenny’s dress in the door handle—the short purple one with the little ring of sequins around the neck—and fluffs at it through the dry-cleaner plastic to get a wrinkle out.
Jenny’s black heels come from the back next, looking strange and lost on the floorboard in the cold sun, then the fishing tackle box with her makeup, and a canvas bag with a curling iron hanging halfway out the zipper.
Travis steps over these to get his guitar case out of the back end, but when his boots hit the pavement Brenda is already coming around with it, knowing the right one, the old acoustic.
He feels moved to kiss her for this but his mouth tastes so foul he has to settle for pushing her bangs aside and pecking her on the forehead.
“You bucking for a raise?” he asks, taking the case from her.
She looks up at him full of meanness, so pretty without a speck of makeup that if it weren’t for the half circles under her eyes and the little patch of white working its way forward from the crown of her dark hair they could be in high school again.
“Double or nothing, cowboy,” she says.
“Shoot,” he says, yawning. “We’re good at doubling nothing. Ain’t we, Jen?”
But Jenny has stumbled up the aisle to the rear-view mirror, where she lets out a groan. “God, I look like a witch! Why do I do this?” Her long hair is bunched in one hand, and she holds it off to the side as if she’s just now found it growing there.
“We’re cool, hon,” Brenda tells her. “We’ve got time to spare. Come get your stuff.”
Jenny walks back and plops down beside her makeup case in total despair, her bluejeaned legs and bare feet dangling not quite to the pavement.
Travis reaches out to tweak her nose. “Well, good morning to you, Travis,” he says in a high fake voice. “I love you, too.” He gets a little grin out of her, but she’s looking around desperately for something underneath the seats. Brenda is one step ahead of her, is already unscrewing the big thermos and pouring them two cups of the black truck-stop coffee she got in Franklin. None for herself, because she gets to sleep on the way home while he and Jenny drive.
Just as they turn up the steaming white mugs, on permanent loan from the Shoney’s in Cullman where Brenda and Jenny work, a dazzling light stabs them full in the face, blinding them.
“Damn . . .” Travis says. He massages his eyes until colors come back, and then peeps between two fingers at the source of the beam. The sun has caught in a pane near the top floor of a glass-faced office building in the next block, and its reflection traps the van like a searchlight.
“Is that it?” he asks, but a sinking feeling tells him it is.
“It’s the right street number,” Brenda says. “I drove by it to see.”
Fifteen years ago—hell, even ten—all the action in Nashville was out on Sixteenth Avenue, studios in remodeled old houses with big oaks around them. From the curb they looked almost like your granny’s place. You could walk in cold and get a real handshake, at least, and if you lucked up and some big wheel was between sessions, or on the way to take a leak, he’d listen to one or two of your songs and take a copy of your tape for later and you left feeling good whether or not it ever amounted to squat, which it usually didn’t.
But when the dollars in the crapshoot kept climbing out of sight, the money men said that The Row made them nervous—too homey and laid-back and time-wasting. So one by one the real players slipped back downtown to places like this, with parking decks and security guards and receptionists with movie-star teeth who ask you if you have an appointment and you’d better.
The joke now was that anybody big enough to do you some good is too busy to fool with you. The only way to cut through the smoke is to know somebody,
