Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (24 page)

Before each song, the players huddled around Eddie in the
main studio.
 
They each had their sheets
with the Nashville Number System notations showing the chord progression for
every song.
 
They discussed solos and
reminded each other of things that they’d come up with in rehearsals,
then
they broke their huddle and moved to the isolation
booths like flankers to the line of scrimage.
 
Eddie would count ‘em down and they’d do the song, usually without any
significant errors.
 
After each take
they’d talk it over.

“Hey, Eddie, let’s switch parts between the first and the
second,” the other guitar player said.
 
“You do it up to the do do do’s, then I’ll take it the second time to
the do do do’s.”

“Good idea,” Eddie said.

“I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s different anyway.”

From his throne in the control room, Big Bill nixed some of
the ideas and promoted others.
 
He did it
all with enough diplomacy to make everyone feel free to toss in their two
cents.
 
The result was usually several
conversations going on at the same time in everyone’s headsets.

“Is that a vocal tag?” Porky Vic asked.

“You want to do that on all three bars?”

“We’re tagging the second ending.”

“No, do it at fifteen, eleven.”

“What key is this in?

“Boy.”

“Good.
 
Boy’s good.”

“Got it.
 
Are we ready?”

And just like that, they’d do another take, creating the
song anew each time, filling out the corners, trimming a bridge or repeating a
chorus with a variation on the lyrics.
 
Eddie tapped out the count on the soundboard of his Gibson.
 
“One…two…uh one…two…wait a
second… wait, wait, wait.”
 
Eddie
waved his hands until everybody stopped playing.
 
“Sorry guys.
 
I don’t know what made me think about this just now, but does anybody
know who said, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture?’”
 
He looked to the control room and saw Megan
smile.

“Yeah,” the bass player said.
 
“I just read that somewhere.”
 
He plucked a few low notes as he thought
about it.
 
“That book by Bruce Feiler, I
forget the title, but I think he quoted Martin Mull saying that.”

The pedal steel player disagreed.
 
“No, it was Tom Waits.”

“I don’t think so,” the piano player said.
 
Tom Waits said, ‘The big print giveth, and the
small print taketh away.’”
 
Everybody
laughed at that.

Eddie shrugged then looked to Megan.
 
“What do you think, Martin Mull or Tom
Waits?”

Sitting next to Big Bill, Megan reached over and pushed the
mic control button.
 
“I still think it
was Zappa,” she said.

Eddie shrugged again.
 
“Just curious.
 
Sorry to interrupt the flow, guys.
 
Are we ready?”
 
He looked around
and got thumbs up from everybody.
 
“Well,
all right then.”
 
Eddie pulled his guitar
up close.
 
“
One.
. . two… uh, one…two…three…”
 
They launched into one of Eddie’s outlaw country tunes which fit
perfectly with the loose, relaxed living room atmosphere of the session.
 
It was an edgy country rocker that could have
passed as something co-written by Robbie Fulks and Kinky Friedman.
 
It was about a guy running from the law who
was lusting for a girl he’d just met in a bar.
 
“
You know what I’m thinking
,”
Eddie sang, “
and you know that it’s true
.”
 
He was looking straight at Megan with a
devilish smile.
 
“
Ain’t no gun in my pocket
…” the music stopped cold, Eddie
paused, then spoke in an exaggerated baritone, “I’m just damn glad to see
you.”
 
The drummer hit a rim shot and the
rest of the band kicked back in and took it home.

By two in the morning they had five good songs in the can
and a camaraderie that was inescapable.
 
The fiddle player tried to organize an excursion to Estella’s for shrimp
plates.
 
Porky Vic and the pedal steel
player signed up, but the others reluctantly begged off citing potentially
irate spouses and lovers.

Megan slinked up next to Eddie as he was putting his guitar
away.
 
She let out a little sigh.

“S’matter?”
 
He
stopped what he was doing and looked at her.

“I’ve got a staff meeting tomorrow morning and I really
don’t want to drive all the way back out to Brentwood, ‘cause I’m just going to
have to turn right around and drive right back into town in a few hours.”

Eddie snapped the latches on his guitar case, trying not to
respond too quickly.
 
“Well it ain’t
exactly the Vanderbilt Plaza,”
he said, “but you’re welcome to stay at my place.
 
We can stop off and grab you a toothbrush and
whatever on the way.”

Megan moved closer.
 
“Oh, we don’t need to do that,” she said.
 
“I packed an overnight bag.”
 
She pressed her lips against his ear and
whispered.
 
“Just in
case.”

34.

The skinny oddball at the Quitman County Clerk’s office
ended up being quite helpful.
 
In
addition to showing Jimmy the National
Crime Information
Center bulletin, he handed over a
list of law enforcement contact names and numbers.
 
The next day, droving back to Jackson, Jimmy
ran up his cell phone bill talking to various people with the Louisiana State
Police as well as investigators in Tuscaloosa.
 
Jimmy learned of a fourth suspicious
poisoning death that had occurred several months earlier in Gulfport.
 
The deaths had two things in
common,
the type of poison used and a certain locally
manufactured headache remedy which appeared to be the poison delivery system.

Jimmy now had ninety minutes to kill as he drove east out of
Jackson.
 
He had a
two
o’clock
appointment with a representative from Okatibbee
Pharmaceuticals which was based just east of Meridian,
near the Alabama border.
 
Oak-pharm, as it was known locally, was the
maker of Dr. Porter’s Headache Powder and was once the biggest employer in Lauderdale
County.
 
But over time the market for headache powders
had shrunk considerably, even in the South.
 
And as their market share dwindled so had the
company’s labor force.
 
Once
boasting over a thousand employees, Oak Pharm was down to about forty now and
looking at more layoffs.

The drive from Jackson to Meridian was a straight shot east
on I-20, a hundred miles of concrete walled on both sides by tall, thin pine
trees.
 
Jimmy would have preferred a
dangerous winding road, some God-awful weather, or a series of road rage
incidents
 
—
anything
to occupy his mind which was otherwise engaged.
 
He was fixated on what it said about him that Megan could dump him so
easily.
 
Was he that uninteresting, that
unattractive, that disposable?
 
Maybe, he
hoped, it wasn’t him so much as it was Jackson.
 
Maybe Megan was right about moving to a
bigger city.
 
Maybe he should move to Nashville
too.
 
He could live anywhere and write;
it was one of the profession’s few benefits.
 
Come to think of it, a fresh setting was probably what their
relationship needed.
 
They were
stagnating in Jackson.
 
They needed new friends, new circles in which
to circulate, a more exciting social milieu.
 

Jimmy didn’t believe that, but it was less humiliating to
blame Jackson than to accept being
dumped.
 
But maybe ‘dumped’ was too
strong a word for what happened.
 
Sure,
Megan had moved to Nashville
without saying goodbye, but maybe she hadn’t had time to call.
 
Maybe she was so busy packing and having her
phone disconnected…
 
Okay, maybe
‘dumped’ was accurate, but couples got back together all the time after one
dumped the other, right?
 
Jimmy thought
of examples to bolster his argument, but every couple he considered had broken
up, one even ended with an attempted manslaughter charge.
 
All right, so those were bad examples.

Then it hit him.
 
Why do I even care?
 
We weren’t together very long and she never
even hinted that she loved me.
 
Why the
hell can’t I stop thinking about her?
 
This is nuts.
 
Shouldn’t I hate
her?
 
Shouldn’t I at least forget about
her?
 
She leaves town without a word,
making me look and feel like a fool but I can’t get her out of my mind!
 
Jimmy knew reason had nothing to do with it;
emotions always trump intellect.
 
Why do I miss her?
 
How can I miss something I never really
had?
 
Am I pathetic or what?
 
Hey, maybe that’s the title of my love song.

By the time he passed the exit for Pelahatchie, Jimmy
realized he was obsessing.
 
He turned on
the radio hoping to get Megan off his mind.
 
It didn’t help that Clay Walker was singing that he didn’t know how
loved started but he sure knew how it ended.
 
Jimmy tuned to a different station only to run into another familiar
song.
 
He couldn’t remember where he’d
heard it before,
then
it hit him like a punch in a
barroom brawl.
 
It was Eddie’s song.
 
Jimmy got honest-to-God goose bumps.
 
He slapped the dashboard and turned up the
volume.
 
This could only be good news for
Eddie.
 
And anything
good for Eddie was good for Jimmy’s book.
 
Eddie’s Internet scheme was obviously
working.
 
Jimmy laughed out loud and
started humming along.
 
Then, halfway
through the refrain, the song stopped cold.

The disc jockey came on immediately.
 
“I know it’s the name of the song,” he said,
“but I just don’t think the
song’s
supposed to end that way either, but it does.
 
Just that like, ever single time.
 
Now,
I been
in the
radio business for twenty-five years, and I’ve heard a lot of good songs.
 
But I’d put that
half
a song up against anything I ever liked.”
 
The announcer talked about the Frances
Neagley website, the MP3 file, and how no one knew who the artist was.
 
He asked listeners to call and let him know
what they thought about the song and to speculate who the mystery
singer-songwriter might be.
 
“And don’t
worry,
we’ll keep playing what we got until we can find the
back half of it.
 
Meanwhile, let’s get
back to songs with beginnings, middles, and ends.
 
Here’s a little something from S-K-O on
Country Mixx 96…”

This was fantastic.
 
Jimmy grabbed his cell phone and dialed the station’s number, but it was
busy.
 
Just as well, he realized.
 
Since the plan was to pique curiosity, Jimmy
shouldn’t be revealing the answer this early.
 
He couldn’t wait to tell Eddie.
 
He punched in the Nashville
number.
 
After a few rings, a familiar
voice came on the line.
 
“I’m sorry,” she
said.
 
“The number you have reached is no
longer in service.”
 
Shit!
 
Not again.
 
“If you feel you have reached this recording
in error—
”
 
Jimmy
disconnected.
 
He tried Nashville
information but was told Eddie Long now had an unpublished number.

Jimmy couldn’t imagine why Eddie would have done that, but
there was nothing he could do about it.
 
“Try Megan Taylor.”
 
He heard the
operator typing into her computer.

“I’m sorry, sir, that’s unpublished too.”

Jimmy sucked at his teeth and tapped his fingers on the
steering wheel.
 
“All right,” he said,
“how about Herron and Peavy Management?”
 
He wanted to talk to these guys anyway, get their perspective on their client
and the Internet marketing plan, that sort of thing.
 
Besides, they could put him in touch with
Eddie.
 
The operator gave him the number
then connected him.

A second later, Jimmy was on the line with Big Bill
Herron.
 
Jimmy explained who he was and
why he was calling.
 
“Listen,” Big Bill
said brusquely.
 
“Eddie told me all about
you and this book you’re supposed to be writing.
 
And I’m going to tell you something, and I’m
only going to tell you once, so you better listen.
 
Stop.
 
Harassing.
 
My.
 
Client.”
 
He said each word as if there was a period
after it.
 
“Eddie wants nothing to do
with you or your book and we will get a restraining order to keep you away from
him if you won’t stay away voluntarily.”

Jimmy was flabbergasted.
 
His
foot inadvertently eased off the gas peddle
.
 
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding, Mr.
Herron.
 
Eddie signed off on this a few
months ago.
 
I’ve been covering his shows
for a couple of years now and the book’s underway.
 
Maybe you—”

“Get this right, Mr. Rogers, there ain’t
no
misunderstanding.”
 
His tone bordered on
menacing.
 
“As Eddie’s manager, I’m
tellin’ you that you’re treading on some damn thin ice.
 
Any publishing rights to Eddie Long’s story
belong jointly to Eddie Long and to Herron and Peavy management and if you
persist with this project, we’ll slap you with a cease and
desist
order.”

“Well, now, hang on—”

“No.
 
You hang on,”
Big Bill said.
 
“Further, if you
represent to any publisher in this country or any other that you have the
rights to this story or if you submit any proposals with such representations,
we will sue you into fiscal year 2020.
 
Do we understand each other?”

“Well, no, I…”
 
Jimmy had no idea what to say.
 
He
had to speak to Eddie.
 
“Could you just
give me Eddie’s number?”