Bill Fitzhugh - Fender Benders (43 page)

He stared at the bubbling oil and smelled the froth for the
millionth time.
 
It was a familiar and
relaxing ceremony.
 
It took his mind off
things.
 
Otis wiggled the basket once,
like he always did, and never took his eyes off the oil, its heat held his gaze
as the sounds soothed his jangled nature.

Bing
!
 
The bell in the service window rang
suddenly.
 
Otis jerked his head up in
surprise.
 
Who the hell would be ringing
the bell?
 
Bing
!
 
He turned and looked.
 
It was an older man, a white guy, looking
into the kitchen, ringing the bell.
 
Bing
!
 
Otis looked back at the man, then stepped forward and looked again,
disbelieving.
 
He wiped his flour-covered
hands on his apron.
 
“Chester?”
he said tentatively.
 
“Chester Grubbs, is
that you?”

The old guy smiled and tipped his worn cowboy hat.
 
“What’s left of
me.
”

75.

Otis gave Chester
the first plate of shrimp and made another.
 
They sat in a booth by the back wall with their food and two pints of
bourbon.
 
There were way too damn many
lost years for them to talk about things in any kind of order, so the
conversation ran loose and wild.
 
At
first it was mostly about the old days — the records, the concerts, the girls.
 
They laughed about all the funny stuff and
they tried to be philosophical about all the shit that had gone wrong.

Otis popped a shrimp into his mouth, tail and all.
 
He liked the crunch.
 
“You wanna know what I heard?” he asked.
 
“I heard you
was
dead.”

“Wasn’t far from it,” Chester
replied, leaving it at that.

Otis was still crunching on the shrimp tail as he
spoke.
 
“Heard some bad
things.
 
Everything
from you dying from heroin to hangin’ yourself with a guitar string.”
 
He shook his head.
 
“Peoples’ll say just about anything when they
don’t know the truth.”

Chester was
pulling the tails off his shrimp.
 
“Well,
there’s probably some truth to everything you heard,” he said, tossing the
tails onto Otis’s plate.
 
“Except for the one about me hangin’ myself.
 
After things fell apart here, I just couldn’t
stay, you know, couldn’t stand the humiliation.
 
People didn’t want to work with me all the sudden, whispered that I
never fulfilled my potential or that I never had any potential in the first
place.
 
I got to thinking they were
right, so I run off and spent mosta my time drinkin’ and movin’ around to
places where nobody knew who the hell I was so I didn’t have to explain why I
turned out like I did, you know?”

Otis looked Chester
in the eye, nodding slowly.
 
He
understood.

“Everything good they can throw at a man and every bad
choice a man can make and I made ‘em all.”
 
Chester just shook his head
at the thought.
 
“‘Course, some things I
did was worse than others.”
 
He took off
his hat and rubbed his hand through his dirty gray hair.
 
He pushed back his chair, stood, and gestured
at himself.
 
He looked worn out and his
clothes didn’t help — a pair of slightly grease-stained bargain basement blue
shop pants and a plaid shirt that couldn’t’ve cost more than a buck at the
Goodwill.
 
It was a look frequently seen
on ex-convicts in the
midwest
in the fifties.
 
“Tell me I ain’t the sorriest son of a bitch
you ever saw.”

Otis was shaking his head now.
 
“Things shoudn’ta happened the way it
did.”
 
Otis hesitated as Chester
sat back down and resumed eating.
 
Seeing
Chester like this put Otis
somewhere he hadn’t been in a long time.
 
It made him think about all the shit that happened to them and to a lot
of other people they knew.
 
He almost
didn’t want to say it, but it came out anyway.
 
“That Bill Herron…” he shook his head some more and calmed himself
down.
 
“I was real mad for a while, but I
learned to let it go.”
 
He said the last
part like he was still trying to convince himself.

Chester squinted
wryly.
 
“Yeah, I heard you let it go on
some man in Memphis after I left.”

The slightest smile crossed Otis’s face.
 
“Yeah, I ‘spect that’s part
of why that happened.
 
But that
man was forcin’ hisself on Estella.
 
Man
can’t allow that to happen, you know that.
 
But I did my time.”
 
He said it
like he’d earned the right.
 
“Woulda been
more but Mr. Peavy, he helped me out on that.”

“That’s good,” Chester
said.
 
“But you shouldn’t have to do time
for defending your woman is all I’m sayin’.”

Otis poured a little more bourbon for both of them.
 
They sat there in silence for a while, just
eating and sipping their drinks, looking at each other and thinking about the
water under the bridge.
 
“It’s been
a
awful long time, Chester.”
 
He looked at his old friend.
 
“Why’d you come back?”

Chester put both
elbows on the table and fixed Otis with dead serious eyes.
 
“Everywhere I went, I heard people talkin’
‘bout your shrimp, Otis.
 
I had to come
back and see for myself.”
 
He wrapped a
couple of the shrimp in a piece of white bread then took a big bite and chewed
a few times.
 
“I just wish I’da come back
sooner.”

Otis laughed.
 
“You
shoulda.
 
Used to put
more on a plate than we do now.”

They both laughed,
then
Chester
held up his glass for a toast.
 
“Old friends.”

“Old friends,” Otis said,
clinking
his glass to Chester’s.

They drank.
 
As Otis
poured some more, Chester pulled
something from a sack he’d brought with him.
 
It was a copy of the
Long Shot
CD which he laid on the table.
 
“This is
the reason I came back, Otis.”
 
He took
the cd out of the jewel box and pointed at the writing credits for ‘Potholes
In
My Heart.’
 
“I
think this here’s my son,” he said, pointing to ‘W. Rankin.’
 
“See, we named our boy Whitney.
 
‘Course I lost touch with his mama, but for
all I know she remarried some man last name of Rankin, might’ve adopted the
boy, you know?”
 
Chester
stared at the name on the disc.
 
He
touched it lightly, as close to his son as he’d felt in decades.

Otis didn’t want to dampen Chester’s
enthusiasm, but he also didn’t want his old friend leaning on such a weak
reed.
 
“That’s not much reason to think
it’s your son, Chester.
 
I mean, you been gone too long time to come
back just for that.”

“Yeah, I know,” Chester
said, “it’s more’n that.
 
It’s the
song.
 
The music.
 
I wrote it.
 
A long time ago, for my son.
 
I sang it to him almost every night for I
don’t know how many years before
I.
. . left.”
 
He looked back at the disc with disdain.
 
‘Course the words’ve been changed.
 
I didn’t write
nothing
about no
damn potholes in my heart.
 
I suppose that’s ‘at damn Herron’s doin’.
 
Fact when I first saw his name on the credits
I wanted to kill him.
 
Sumbitch screwed
me over thirty years ago and now come to find out he’s still doin’ it to
me.”
 
He shook his head in
amazement.
 
“But I ain’t here ‘bout Big
Bill.
 
I just want to see my boy.
 
Got some things I’d like to tell him.
 
‘Course I s’pose he might not even live here.
 
But I had to come look,
trail’s
gotta start here.”

“How long you think you’ll be around?”

“Hard to say.
 
Long enough to see if he’s
here,
maybe find enough work to pay my way back outta town.
 
Speakin’ of that, if you
hear of any kind of work, I’d appreciate it if you’d steer it my way.
 
I ain’t exactly livin’ on royalties, if you
know what I mean.
 
I can do just about
anything on a construction site, framin’, roofin’, whatever.
 
I’m not bad with a backhoe either.”

“I’ll keep my ears open,” Otis said.
 
“Estella might be able to use some help
cleanin’ up around here.
 
She gets tired
easy these days.”

“I don’t want you making up a job for me, but if you need
the help, I’m for hire.
 
Pretty cheap too.”
 
Chester
ate a shrimp, then picked up another one and sort of waggled it in front of
him.
 
“Damn, Otis, these’re some fine
little delectibles you cooked up.”
 
He
popped it into his mouth.

Otis smiled.
 
“They
draw a good crowd out here.
 
Matter of fact, old Herron and Peavy come by every now and then.
 
They fall up in here late for a bottle and a
plate.
 
Mr. Peavy comes more than Mr.
Herron, but come to think, they was both in here just—” Otis stopped and
looked at Chester.
 
“Oh Lord,” he said.
 
“I think I seen him.”

“Who?”

“Your boy,” Otis said.

Chester leaned
across his plate.
 
“When’d you see him?”

Otis’s eyes darted left and right like he was searching for
an image in his head.
 
“They
was
all here after they finished that other boy’s
record.”
 
He pointed at Eddie’s
disc.
 
“This boy here.”
 
Then he pointed at Chester
and smiled.
 
“He’s a good looking kid,
your son.
 
I’ll tell you that.”

Chester looked
proud all the sudden.
 
“I’d sure like to
see him.”
 
Otis said he’d call Franklin
and find out where he could get in touch with Whitney.
 
“I’d appreciate that, Otis, I really would,” Chester
said.
 
“And you know I’ll return the
favor any way I can.”

76.

The last stop for the
Long
Shot
tour was the venerable Mississippi Memorial Coliseum in Jackson.
 
Completed in 1963, it had a white roof
pitched up in the center as if supported by a big tent pole.
 
The sides were covered in giant panels,
alternating yellow, white, and orange.
 
The result was a sort of circus tent motif that had tremendous aesthetic
appeal to anyone under the age of eight.
 
In 1995 the facility received a long-overdue face-lift, replacing the
faded carnival look with a new copper façade that had tremendous aesthetic
appeal to
whomever
got the contract to supply the
copper.

For Jimmy, the Coliseum was a repository of odd
memories.
 
As a boy, he’d been dressed in
a silly jester’s outfit and forced to participate in the Junior League’s annual
Carnival Ball fund- raiser there.
 
He was
also there when Cliff Finch gave away free bar-b-qued chicken while running for
governor from the seat of a tractor, or was it a bulldozer?
 
As a teenager, he’d seen a hundred rock and
roll shows under its roof, everyone from the Allman Brothers to Yes (with Rick
Wakeman).
 
And it was there, on the night
of August 16, 1987,
scarcely stoned on some woeful Mexican
weed, that
Jimmy officially got to second base with a girl named Tammy while Bob Seger
played ‘Shakedown.’

Given Eddie’s third single, Jimmy figured the Coliseum was a
fitting place for the
Long Shot
tour
to end because it was also the place where he — and Eddie, for that matter —
had gone to see the Dixie National Rodeo when they were kids.
 
He remembered the inside transformed into
something he imagined was straight out of the Old West.
 
The place was decked wall-to-wall in red,
white, and blue bunting, the floor covered with dirt and sawdust, and the smell
of animals filled every crevice in the building.
 
He watched in awe as real cowboys rode the
backs of wild bulls while others jumped off speeding horses to wrestle steers
to the ground.
 
Jimmy couldn’t remember
the last time he’d been to the rodeo, but every time he stepped into the
Coliseum he remembered the first time.