Читать книгу Turbo's Very Life and Other Stories - Carroll Dale Short - Страница 8

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, anybody, the third cousin of a friend of some producer’s butt-wipe, who owes you a favor and can wheedle you fifteen minutes somewhere to pitch your stuff. Okay, ten minutes.

“At least they’ll have nice bathrooms,” Brenda offers, squinting up at the glare, but nobody takes much solace from this.

They gulp down the rest of their coffee in silence and put the mugs away. Travis takes Jenny’s hand to help her down from the running board. “Let’s go blow ’em away,” he says, winking at her. Brenda loads Jenny down with her dress and shoes and gear, and hugs her neck for luck. Travis checks his back pocket for the demo cassette and their business card, hoists the old black guitar case and the shaving kit, and they’re off. Just before they turn the corner the van’s horn honks, and when they look around Brenda blows them one last kiss through the window and then, with the bedspread around her shoulders, does a pantomime of a deep-sea diver going under as she sinks down into sleep.

The security guard in the lobby looks like Captain Kangaroo on Valium. He pushes the clipboard wordlessly toward Travis and Jenny to sign, his sad eyes half shut, not even looking them up and down once, seeming long ago to have quit passing judgment on who comes and goes from the seventeenth floor.

“Are there restrooms on this level?” Jenny asks him. Still without words, he points with two hands at forty-five degree angles to indicate the far corners of the lobby beyond the elevators. While Travis is picking up his case he catches a glimpse of the Captain’s eyes, no longer at half staff, watching reverently as Jenny’s small backside retreats across the marble floor. Travis smiles to himself, feeling better about the state of the old man’s health.

In the men’s room he washes his face and brushes his teeth and gargles the scorched coffee taste out of his throat, and has just finished up lathering to shave when somebody starts banging hard on the door, though it’s not locked.

When he opens the door it’s Jenny, her hair partly curled and one of her eyes made up like a nightclub singer, the unmade eye still belonging to a freckled country girl who could be fifteen or forty in the proper kinds of light.

“Look, you’re right,” she says, her face tight like it hurts her to admit this. She has the short purple dress on, but is still barefoot. An unopened package of gray pantyhose is in her hand.

“Right about what?” Travis asks.

“You know. On the bridge of ‘Trusting’? Where you said for me to come in two beats early an octave high and slide down into the note and I said it sounded stupid? Well, it don’t. It kind of grows on me.”

As long as Travis has known her, he never hears her say this many things in a row without thinking of the crazy disparity between her talking voice and her singing one—the former like a little girl in a cartoon show, people stifling a grin and nudging each other the first time they hear it; and the other, the singing, as rough and low as the last sip of whiskey in a glass. Echoes of Patsy and Kitty and Lacy J. and Maybelle and Lord knows who-all else, a woman who has loved and hurt for a thousand years and can make you feel every scar.

“So, do you want to do it that way?” Travis asks, the lather drying on his cheeks.

She nods with both halves of her face and then runs back toward the ladies’ room in her tight dress, opening her pantyhose as she goes. The sight stabs Travis under his right breastbone with a feeling that a faceful of cold water can only partly quench, and as he shaves he makes himself think of the Agreement.

The one they reached two years ago, maybe three now, the night the band played a Shriners’ convention in Indianapolis and the crowd flat ate them up, standing ovations and rebel-yelling and refusing to let them go until they’d done three—no, four—encores. Then to top it off, paying them the five hundred in cold hard cash and standing them to free drinks at the bar. It was better than Christmas.

Travis going easy on the drinks because it was his turn to drive and also because he was so high already from doing the show. So that Jenny and the drummer—Carl—both ended up drinking his share too, and by the time they were ready to head home Carl climbed in the back and immediately conked out and Jenny in the front drowsed on Travis’s shoulder down the interstate until he found WSM on the radio and it was playing Bill Monroe doing “Uncle Pen” and Jenny sang the high tenor harmony with it and he joined in on the baritone part and wondered if life ever got any better than this.

They were both so damned giddy that afterward he could never remember for sure whose lips had found whose in the dark, but he did remember that when it dawned on them what they were doing they separated at the same instant, like getting an electric shock.

Jenny panting to get her breath back regular and him saying to the taillights of the cars up ahead, “We can’t do this, can we?”

She shook her head violently. “Unh-uh. It’d be . . . it’d be like insects, or something.”

He thought on that a minute. “Like what?”

“Like . . . incest. What did I say?”

He got to laughing so hard he cried and couldn’t see to drive, and when he pulled off onto the shoulder to wipe his eyes her arms were suddenly around him with more strength than he thought she had. They sat holding each other that way for a long time.

“I love you, Travis.”

“I love you, Jen.”

The Agreement was fairly straightforward. He wouldn’t start anything if she wouldn’t, and in that way she would go on being like one of the family to them, Brenda’s best friend and the sister he had never had, and even when he was dead certain that a guy she was going out with was a shithead Travis would not volunteer his opinion to that effect unless she asked for it.

With a wet comb and the least touch of spray he gets his hair mostly presentable in the bathroom mirror and wishes he could so something about his face. Is it just the lighting in these places, or are there really such dark canyons under his eyes? True, between his day job and their five-night gig at The Trap this week he hasn’t been getting a lot of sleep, but damn. It’s all right to have a face like Haggard or Jones or Willie once you’ve made it. But when you’re just breaking in, it behooves you to look a little less hard-ridden than that. He heard one of the girls in the shop office talking about a new tinted cream they had out especially for that, the bags, but he hasn’t got up his nerve to go looking for it. Too late for now, anyhow. Showtime. Crack them knuckles, boy. Whistle a happy tune.

Jenny is standing by the elevators on her high black heels, her head down like a girl waiting to be asked to dance. He presses the button for Up.

“Do I look all right?” she asks. That little-bitty voice.

Does she look all right. The stab under his breastbone again.

He pokes her gently in the stomach with his index finger. “Buzzz,” he says.

She swings her travel bag, trying to hit his butt, but he jumps away. “Ain’t you never gonna let me forget that ‘insect’ shit?”

“You look like a million bucks,” he says, as the elevator doors bong open.

On Seventeen, the number they’re looking for is at the far end of the long hall. Maroon carpet and gray wallcloth and soft lights recessed inside the wood trim near the floor. At the distant dead end a polished door of dark wood says WinSong on it in gold letters, and because there’s not a knocker or a buzzer they go on in.

There’s no receptionist at the big curved desk, so they have a seat and wait for her to come back. Gold and platinum records line the dark walls, set into cases of glass to keep people from handling them, Travis supposes. When nobody has come after ten minutes and it’s five minutes past their appointed time, Jenny talks him into going back to look for somebody.

They go back through the suite of offices tapping on doors, but nobody answers. The doors of several offices are open, but the rooms are dark and quiet. No windows.

At the end of a hallway is a set of double doors. Travis thinks he hears voices inside, so he taps lightly with his knuckle. No response. He tries the knob and it opens.

The four men sitting around the end of a conference table snap their heads toward the interruption with looks of contempt, which are heightened when they notice his guitar case. One of the men—boys, really, none of them looks over thirty—says “Jesus” under his breath and rolls his eyes toward the ceiling, and another one says loudly to Travis, “You need to make an appointment. Come back on a weekday.” He spaces the words a little apart, the way you’d talk to a child.

“I did,” Travis says. “I mean, we do. Have one. With a Mr. Crews.”

At that, one of the boys slaps himself in the top of the head and whispers “Shit.” He turns to the others and says, “I’m sorry, guys. It slipped my mind. This won’t take long, okay?” All of them are wearing bright pastel clothes, the kind you’d play golf in. The table is strewn with long computer printouts. Columns of numbers.

The one who apologized gets up and comes to shake Travis’s hand. He has a tan you can’t get in winter without money, and a little black widow’s peak of hair. “Manfred Crews,” he says. “Y’all come on in. What you got?”

With Jenny’s entrance, their overall interest level rises a notch or two but not much. “Well,” Travis says, taking his guitar out of the case, “I’m Travis Matthews. And this is Jennifer Hammond. Like to play you just a couple of songs I wrote, and leave you a tape to listen to later. We know you’re busy.”

He strums a quick G-chord to check the tuning. The top string is a touch flat, the way it gets in dry weather, and he keeps flicking it with his thumbnail while he twists the peg to bring it in tune. One of the boys coughs, and another glances at his watch. Crews hasn’t set back down, but stands in the corner of the room with his arms crossed.

“This one here’s called ‘Trusting,’” Travis says. As he’s strumming the intro, he turns toward Jenny and winks. She nods and smiles at him, her mouth the tight little line it makes when she’s nervous.

Like a waltz, he reminds himself. Keep it like a waltz. And one, two, three, four-and-Jenny-starts . . .

Sometimes we all say

Things we don’t mean

But with you it’s a full-time affair

One, two, three, C-chord . . .

You say that we’re lovers

And you call this a life

And you’re always telling me

How much you care

One, two, F-chord, and he comes in on the harmony . . .

But I hear you talk when you’re sleeping

And I’m never the one on your mind

And on like that to the instrumental bridge, then he’s holding his breath waiting for her to come in early and start the note and slide it down and he’s kicking himself that they’ve never practiced it this way, they should have stopped and run through it a couple of times at least, but it’s too late. And then it comes, not the way he heard it in his mind when he asked her to try it but a hundred times better, her whole heart in it, hell yes, and his insides are so excited he almost forgets which place he’s supposed to come back in on harmony, which is . . .

And faithful don’t mean just trying

And trusting you

Has got to mean more

Than another way to lose

Oh-h-h, trusting you

Has got to mean more

Than another way to lo-o-o-ose . . .

Hot damn, that was it. They just about nailed it, that time. Never sounded better.

Silence from the group of boys. A couple of nods.

“Nice. Very nice,” says Crews. “So tell me. What are you selling, here?”

Travis glances at Jenny, but she looks back blankly. “Beg pardon?” he asks.

“Your song? The act? Your vocal, her vocal? What? I need you to give me a little direction here.”

“Oh. Uh, we’ve got a band . . .”

Crews looks puzzled. “A van?”

“A band. Our, uh, drummer had to work today. He couldn’t come. And, uh . . . well, we’ve got a van we’ll sell you, too, come to think of it.” He laughs at his own joke to break the ice a little. Four stone faces look back.

“Do you pick, hon?” Crews asks Jenny.

“Some. Yessir,” she nods.

“Actually, it’s more than ‘some,’” Travis butts in. “She can play bass, dobro, mandolin, banjo. Hell of a fiddle.” The reason they never push this in auditions, unless somebody asks, is that Jenny can play and sing but not both at once. Strangest damned thing. Try as she might, it just won’t work. And the best answer she can ever give as to why she can’t play while she’s singing makes her blush a little. It’s like trying to type while you’re . . . you know. No, I don’t know; what? You know. Making love.

“So you’re not pitching songs,” Crews says to Travis.

“Well . . . sure. Yeah. That too.”

“I mean, you’re not against selling one to somebody who can si— . . . uh, a singer that’s more established in the business, is what I’m saying. Sort of a known quantity.”

Travis forces a smile. “I’d sell ’em a song in a heartbeat, yessir. You bet.”

In the silence that follows, one of the golf boys drums his fingers softly on the table, and another uses the stub end of his ink pen to slide one of the green computer pages toward himself without being too noticeable about it.

“Tell you what,” Crews says brightly, “I’ll walk out with you.” He puts one arm around Travis and the other around Jenny, steering them toward the door.

It’s not until Crews has told them good-bye and gone back inside, and they’re waiting for the elevator, that Travis realizes how expertly he’s given them the old blow-off . . . Where y’all from? Really? I’ve got some good friends near there . . . so smoothly that Travis just now remembers he failed to leave a demo tape and a business card.

When they go back, the dark wooden door is locked. Travis kicks it once with the toe of his boot, then realizes this is unprofessional behavior and heads back toward the elevator.

“Trav?” Jenny says. She’s still at the office door. “Shouldn’t we . . . ?” When he looks back, he sees what she’s nodding toward, looking a little ashamed. Beside the door is a wooden crate, the kind fruit is shipped in, with a sign on it in curlicue lettering: demos 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 . . . damn,” he says, almost in a whisper, “don’t you know that was a night?” And not until he hears his voice go high and quivery on the last few words does he realize how near the tears were. He swallows hard and keeps blinking until the confusion of wet colors in his eyes divides out into separate stained glass windows again, and by then he feels Jenny’s arm, the lightest touch, around his waist.

“What am I doing wrong, Jen?” he asks, not looking around at her. “I’ve give it my whole life, and I’m forty fuckin’ years old, for Christ sake, and . . .”

“Liar,” she says.

“And I still hadn’t got a pot to piss in, and . . .”

“Liar.”

“Well, forty in a few months.”

“Seven months.”

“Well, I . . .”

“Listen, Trav. And I’m saying this with love, but don’t start any self-pity shit, okay? You’ve above that.”

“I’m just saying . . .”

“I said, you’re above that.” The arm around his waist gives him a hard squeeze. “We’re good. It’s gonna happen. We’re right on the edge of something breaking through. I can feel it.”

But the bitterness in Travis hasn’t run its course yet.

“Yeah,” he snorts, half pulling away from her. “Name me one person who’s broke through and made it at forty.”

“K. T. Oslin,” she says, without having to think. “Record of the Year, New Artist of the Year, her first album goes gold after just three . . .”

“Yeah, well name me a man that has,” Travis says. “A damn arc-welder, somebody looks like hell. Somebody I can identify with.”

Her arm on his waist falls away as if he’s burned it. When he looks up she’s right where he’s looking, straight in his face.

“You think it don’t hurt me?” she says. Her shoulders are shaking, and her cheeks are red even where there’s no blusher. “You think it don’t hurt me, when they do that shit like they just done? Huh? You think I don’t have feelings too?”

There’s nothing he can say to this, except to reach up and touch her shoulder, her arm, get the connection back again. But she won’t have it. She twists away.

“I wish I had a little door right here,” she says, slapping hard with her hand the place on the dress where her heart is. She’s shaking worse, and gritting her teeth to keep from shouting. “A little door, and I could open it up and show you how much it hur–” The sobs choke her voice off. “How much it . . .” When the tears start she covers her face with both hands. She hates the way she looks when she’s crying.

“Jen? Come here, Jen . . .” This time she doesn’t pull away, lets him hold her.

“I’m sorry,” Travis says. “I’m real sorry I started that.”

Her sobs start to even out, and she wipes at her eyes with her hands.

“I’ve just been real down in the dumps,” he says. “Stuff accumulates, and it gets to me.”

He feels her nod into his shoulder.

“I’ve been down, too,” she says. “It’s kind of rough at home right now.”

Home translating as the current shithead she’s going out with, Travis knows. The guy answers the phone a lot, and Travis is pretty sure he’s moved in.

“We don’t need to bring each other down,” she says, still talking into his shoulder. “We need to build each other up.”

“I know that. I just forget sometimes.”

Outside, in the cool sunshine, a line of tourists is starting to form at the front doors when they take the key to TeeBo.

Back at the van, Brenda rouses up a little from her nap when they get in. “How’d it go?” she asks them.

“They seemed to like us pretty good,” Travis says. Looking at the windshield, not at Jenny.

“Great,” Brenda says, turning over and straightening the spread across herself. “I knew you’d do good.”

“We left them a tape,” Jenny tells her, as Travis backs out of the parking lot and heads for the ramp to the interstate.