here, please.
He’s heard that this is done nowadays, but has never seen it till now. With morbid curiosity he looks inside and sees cassettes scattered on the bottom a couple of layers deep. Three or four dozen of them, easy. He looks Jenny solid in the eye. She looks down at her feet. “Just a thought,” she says.
He takes the cassette out of his pocket, a business card rubber-banded to it, and draws back his arm high and hard as if he means to throw the tape clear through the bottom of the crate. Then he catches himself and looks over at Jenny, but she’s staring away from him, down the hall. He leans forward and lays the tape carefully on the middle of the pile, its distinctive yellow plastic shell and light blue business card immediately lost in all the colors of cassettes and cards underneath it, like an oversized Easter basket.
Out on the street he walks fast, not saying anything, and Jenny has trouble keeping up.
“Travis? Where are you going? I thought the van was back this . . .” He doesn’t answer, keeps walking.
“Oh,” she says.
The city is coming slowly to Saturday-morning life. Vagrants change sides of the street to catch the warmth of the sun, and too-early tourists, with cameras around their necks, rub their eyes and plod in search of breakfast.
Three blocks on the right, at the end of a row of pawn shops and X-rated theaters, Travis turns in under the sign for Momma Lee’s Place and Jenny follows him. It’s a beer and short-order joint, little lighted signs everywhere for Heineken and Miller and Michelob still turned on from the night before. There’s only five or six people in the booths, but the air is blue with cigarette smoke and the smell of frying sausage.
Travis goes all the way to the back and slides into a booth opposite an old black man with little gold-wire glasses who’s reading the morning paper. Jenny slides in beside Travis, but it’s still several seconds before the man looks up and sees them.
“TeeBo!” Travis says. “What it is, man?”
TeeBo shows big white teeth and raises his arm for Travis’s high-five. He tips an imaginary hat toward Jenny. “How you, darlin’?”
He folds up his newspaper and drains the rest of his coffee cup, making a face at the taste. “So what brings y’all to Gomorrah this fine day?”
“More of the same, bud,” Travis says sadly. “Listen . . .” He glances side to side to see who’s overhearing, and then lowers his voice. “My rear end’s dragging. You, uh, know what I’m saying? I need a little pick-me-up. Little boost.”
The transaction is an old one, but TeeBo is obliged to act troubled by it, a little unsure, scratching at his chin and considering. “They was ever to catch me,” he says to Jenny, as if she’s the jury, “I’d be one gone black child.”
“Hey, man, we’re discreet,” Travis says. “We’ve never made you look bad before, have we?”
But TeeBo already has out what he needs, extending it across the table in a closed fist like candy, dropping it into Travis’s hand: an ancient door key, tarnished almost black by time and use.
“Fitteen minutes,” TeeBo says sternly. “The touris’ starts lining up at about nine.”
“You got it,” Travis says, the two of them sliding out of the booth to go. As Travis gets up he says, “You wouldn’t play me an E-flat for luck, would you?”
The man looks offended. This, a part of the transaction too.
“TeeBo don’t play flats,” he scowls. “Just sharps.”
He whips a tiny silver harmonica from the shirt pocket of his janitor uniform and, shutting his eyes, plays a note as long and lonesome as a train whistle, warbling a little at the end as it passes from hearing.
“Much obliged, man,” Travis says, when the note fades away. “See you in a few.” They take a shortcut across the corners of two parking lots, empty at this hour of the morning except for a few RVs, their tags from Virginia and Ohio and Canada, travelers in town to do a weekend around the Opry.
Travis walks fast with his head down past an insurance office and the old boxing gym, the sun through its upstairs windows outlining punching bags that hang from the ceiling like sides of meat.
A quick left turn through the alley and they’re at the back doors of Ryman Auditorium, a weather-beaten brick building with narrow cathedral windows that used to be a church, a hundred years ago. The white paint on the wooden doors is peeling, and once the key is in the lock Travis has to lean his weight against the handle and give it a hard nudge upward before it opens.
The long dark hallway smells like dust, and still holds the chill from the night. But as the hall curves upward past the dressing rooms and the high glassed-in booth where the radio control room used to be, the air gets gradually warmer and fills with light. When they reach the plank floor of backstage, Jenny’s sharp heels make such an echo in the perfect quiet that she takes them off and carries them.
Travis sidesteps a network of ropes and weights and pulleys and holds the worn red curtain aside so Jenny can step through, and he follows her.
At the front edge of the stage an old-timey microphone sits in a brilliant slash of light from the stained glass windows at the rear of the auditorium, panes of red and green and gold so full of the morning sunshine that they look to be vibrating from it. A million specks of dust float in and out of the light in slow motion, rising and falling on currents of air as the big room warms.
The times Travis came to the Ryman when he was a boy, back when they still had shows here, what impressed him most as he watched the place fill up with people was the perfect geometry of the hundreds of curved wooden church pews, encircling the point where the center microphone stood, as exactly as if a good carpenter like his Uncle Donnie had tied a long piece of twine to the microphone stand and looped a pencil in the other end and drawn arc after arc, main floor and balcony too, and every curve he drew became the perfect, smooth back of a pew.
They stand there for the longest, taking in the quiet, before Travis says, “The first night old Hank was on the Opry, they clapped him back six times. They just went crazy. Six times, kept making him do the same damned song.” He laughs, and shakes his head in wonder at this.
“‘Lovesick Blues,’” Jenny says, and he realizes he’s told her this before, more than once. And that he’s probably told her the next he’ll say, too, but he needs to say it anyway, needs to hear it said.
“And Uncle Donnie was right over there,” he says, pointing to a seat near one of the big poles that support the balcony. “He’d just got back from Korea, and he was coming through the bus station here, and somebody give him their ticket because they couldn’t go. And he got to see Hank that night.”
“I’ll be,” Jenny says.
“He said everybody just went wild. Old folks and all. He thought they was going to tear the place apart. Never had seen anything like it. Said it took ol’ Judge Hay ten minutes, after Hank went off, just to settle everybody down so they could go on with the show.”
Jenny shakes her head at the memory.
Travis steps to the microphone stand and runs his finger along the vertical strips of board that spell out WSM-Grand-Old-Opry down all four sides.
“God
