Shout Down the Moon (3 page)

Of course Jonathan would never think of talking to me about the book he’s reading. I don’t feel bad until the waitress comes with our food and smiles, asks if I need another soda, if I need anything. Her eyes are full of pity, and I realize she thinks Jonathan is my husband, Willie’s father, and that he’s clearly ignoring both of us. Before I say no thanks, we’re fine, I make a point of smiling and opening my diaper bag, grabbing a magazine. I don’t want her to think I’m pathetic. I’m not pathetic.

I have no interest in the magazine though. Also, it seems rude to read while I’m eating with Willie, even though he isn’t talking; he’s watching Jonathan and looking around at the other people in the truck stop. And eating his hamburger, thank God. He hasn’t even objected to the mayonnaise slathered all over the bun, though he usually calls it “ick” and won’t take a bite until I scrape it off.

I’m halfway through my salad, still thumbing through the magazine, when I realize Jonathan has put down his book and is looking at me. Then he says, “Thinking about cutting your hair?”

The question comes as such a surprise, I give Jonathan a sideways glance, wondering what he’s up to. But he nods at the magazine, open to the hairstyle page, and the look on his face is neutral, like anybody making polite conversation. Maybe even a little interested.

“I might,” I say slowly.

When he asks why, I notice he still has the same mild, polite expression on his face. So I tell him that I’ve had it long since I was fourteen and I think I’m ready for a change. “Plus, it’s so heavy,” I say, pulling it up with my hand. “It’s too hot for summer.”

Willie whines that he’s hot too and I pick up a napkin to wipe him off. He’s been dipping his french fries in ketchup and it’s smeared all over his fingers and running down his mouth to his chin.

“But if you do cut it,” Jonathan says, “you might regret it as soon as it gets cold.”

I say, “True,” and glance out the window but my lips have moved into a smile against my will. It seems like a miracle: Jonathan is being nice to me.

After he takes a bite of his sandwich, he points to the magazine and says, “It’s good to see you studying the problem.” He’s smirking now, barely able to contain his laughter. “I’m sure a decision as important as this requires extensive research.”

I want to kick him, but mainly I want to kick myself. I’m such a fool.

When I don’t reply, he says, “All right, we don’t have to talk about hair,” leaning his head to the side, still smirking. “What would you rather discuss?” He reads from the magazine cover. “Glamour makeup in ten minutes? Or maybe the hot new fashions for fall?”

What I want to say, what I have to bite my top lip to keep from saying, is “No, let’s talk about why you’re an asshole.” But I can’t let myself fight with Jonathan. I tell myself it’s immature, but I know there’s another reason. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone and I try not to dwell on it too much—it messes up my confidence.

The truth is, I only sound good because of Jonathan. With him backing me up, I can cut this gig. But if he quit or, God forbid, if Fred fired him, I’d be exposed as what I really am. Competent, yes, but weak in certain areas. Definitely not the power singer I’m supposed to be.

Fred hired me because he was impressed with my range and depth, my ability to belt out whatever music he put before me. My problem, as I found out when we started playing six nights a week, was that my voice was inconsistent. By the third night, my lungs were hurting and sometimes I got into trouble. I had too much vibrato when the tune was supposed to be clean, or worse, I couldn’t hold the high note without taking a noticeable breath, leaving a nasty silence in the middle of what should have been the climax.

But Jonathan would cover for me. He’d use his keyboards as a distraction, an enhancement, whatever it took. And he made it look like it was supposed to be that way, like I was singing perfectly. After almost a year of playing together, we’re so in sync that sometimes he seems to know what I need before I do. I’m always careful not to look at him then; I’m afraid I’ll get confused, think it means more than it does. He’s just being a professional, doing what’s best for the band.

“We don’t have to talk at all,” I say, after I tell Willie to eat up. My cheeks are burning; I want to get back in the van, on the road.

“I was just joking, Patty,” he says, leaning back, replacing his smirk with a small smile, lowering his eyes so they’re half-open, clearly bored. He’s back to being cool.

I can’t resist blurting, “No, you weren’t. You think my magazine is stupid and so am I. But that’s fine. I don’t care what you think.”

“Of course you don’t,” he says, and he sounds mad suddenly, although I can’t imagine what I’ve done.

“Well, why should I?”

“Exactly. You’ve just started out and you already have your own band. Why should you care what I think?”

I put the magazine back in the diaper bag, out of sight. “It’s not my band. You run the rehearsals, Jonathan, you decide the sets. You decide everything.”

“But you’re the attraction. The product. You’re the one Fred is grooming for bigger things. And in the end, you’ll get the prize.” He stands up and grabs his check off the table, hissing, “Most likely to succeed in an anti-intellectual, art-hating world.”

Even Willie is surprised at how mad Jonathan seems. He points with a french fry at the register where Jonathan is handing money to the waitress, and asks if Jonathan is leaving without us.

I’m wondering the same thing, but I tell Willie no. And I force myself not to worry as he drinks the rest of his milk and we head to the bathroom. I have to pee, that’s all there is to it. Even if we do get left at a truck stop in God-knows-where, Missouri.

As we walk up to the van, Jonathan is sitting motionless in the driver’s seat, staring out the window. When we get in, he doesn’t say a word, he just starts the engine, turns on the radio. Willie is asleep less than five minutes after we hit the highway. I stare out the window, read the billboards, and try not to think about what just happened.

When we finally pass the barn about an hour later, it takes me by surprise; I’d forgotten all about it. It has been painted over, white, and it still looks fresh, like it hasn’t seen one hard winter yet. But as we get closer, I think I see the graffiti peeking through the paint, like a shadow. Maybe it’s real, maybe the barn needs another coat, but I doubt it.

It’s only in my mind, I think, and my eyes start stinging. My stupid mind, which wanted to respond to what Jonathan said about me being a product but couldn’t think of anything to say other than “I am not.”

What I wanted was to defend myself. To scream that I know what he thinks and he’s wrong: I do care about music; I’ve wanted to be a singer my entire life. When I was in the seventh grade, my teacher called Mama and told her I had talent, I should get lessons. Mama never even considered it. “Keep it down in there,” she would yell if I was singing in my bedroom and she had a hangover. When she was drunk, she would laugh at me. “Who do you think you are, Judy Garland?”

Seeing the barn is the last straw; I feel hot and so depressed I can’t imagine making it through the next hour, much less the rest of the drive. The classical piece on the radio isn’t helping: the cello sounds lost, lonely, heartbroken. I tell myself I’m just having a bad day, but it doesn’t change my mood. I force myself to look at Willie, to think, I’m Willie’s mother, that’s important. And I have a job, a good job I worked hard for. We’re making it, the two of us. That’s enough for now. It has to be.

We’re still forty miles from Omaha when Willie wakes up, but I don’t mind amusing him; I need the distraction. I tell him we’re going to a new place. A new hotel. Maybe they’ll have cable so he can watch the Pooh show on the Disney channel.

“I don’t wike the van,” he says, after a while. He reaches around like he’s trying to adjust his diaper. “It makes big needles in my butt.”

He’s picked this up from Harry, who always jokes that his butt is the only part of him that gets any sleep on the road.

I laugh, even Jonathan laughs a little, so Willie says it again. He loves to see everybody around him laughing, happy. And he wants all the guys in the band to like him. Of course he does; they’re the men in his life. My poor baby. They’re the closest thing he has to a father.

W
illie is the only one who keeps his good mood when we get to the club and discover we aren’t getting hotel rooms. Free lodging is part of our contract, but some club owners have found a way to cut costs: they put the band in a house, or worse, a trailer.

Irene is nodding while Willie is telling her how fun it will be to wake up in the morning at the trailer and watch cartoons together. But then she turns to me and says, “A prime location? This dump? What is Fred smoking?”

The three of us are slumped on stools at the bar, watching the guys unload the equipment. The stage is in the corner on the far side of the room, and it’s so small the amplifiers won’t fit. Jonathan says to put them on the floor; we’ll have to run the wires tomorrow. Carl complains there are only two spotlights and one of them is burnt out. Dennis is fussing about the setup for his hi-hat. Harry is shaking his head.

The trailer is a few miles from the club; all we’ve been told is that it has three bedrooms, each with two twin beds. The club owner, Mr. Peterson, said it will easily accommodate a five-person band. But we have seven people; Irene and Harry usually get their own room, so do Willie and I. Even when we get four rooms, we have occasional grumbling from Carl and Dennis, who don’t see why they have to share while Harry gets the extra private room simply because he has a chick. Sometimes Jonathan ignores them, sometimes he offers to give one of them his room, but they never take it. They say he deserves the space because he’s the leader.

“I wish I had enough cash for Harry and I to stay somewhere else,” Irene says, after pouring herself a soda from the bar. Mr. Peterson told us to help ourselves to anything except liquor. For liquor, we have to start a tab. Willie has helped himself to a package of crackers and three glasses of Sprite. He’s not that thirsty, but he likes to watch me pull out the nozzle of the soda sprayer.

By the time we get to the trailer, it’s after ten and all I want is to get Willie to bed. “What room do I take?” I ask Dennis, since he’s right next to me. He doesn’t answer, so I look at Jonathan and say, “I really don’t care. I’ll take the smallest one. Whatever.”

He doesn’t answer either. Fine. I go down the hall, dragging our suitcases and Willie’s toy bag, pick the first room I come to and snap on the light. It’s beyond ugly; it looks both nondescript and glaring, the way things look when you’re fighting off nausea. The twin beds are Early American and the spreads are pale green with nubs; the floor is covered with cheap indoor/outdoor carpet. Two of the drawers on the small chest against the wall are missing their handles. Of course there’s a painting over the bed. Every place we stay has a painting. Ocean scenery is popular, so are tropical forests. But never the sights we can see from our windows: a flat field filled with corn, or a muddy lake, or a truck stop on a slab of concrete plopped down in the middle of nowhere.

When I look at the painting here, I have to laugh. It’s a landscape, cotton fields in the South, and in the background, a stately plantation with pillars like in
Gone with the Wind
.

I go back into the living room to get Willie, and he’s cranky; he says he doesn’t want to miss the party. Jonathan is slumped on the brown plaid couch, staring at nothing; Dennis is on the floor, rolling a joint with Carl, and Irene and Harry are standing out on the front porch, whispering, probably still trying to figure out the room business. I tell Willie he’s not missing anything and drag him away.

He complains while I change his diaper and put his pajamas on, but almost as soon as the light’s off, he falls asleep. Since he was a little baby, he’s always been a good sleeper.

All I want to do is join him, but late or not, I have to go to the kitchen and use the trailer phone to call Mama. She gets mad if I don’t give her the phone number of each new place as soon as we get in. She says Willie could be dead on the side of the road, and how would she know.

I want to keep it short, but unfortunately, I’ve barely said hello when she starts a rant about Rick’s Lincoln “lurking” across the street from her house.

I know this is unlikely. Why would Rick go to her place when he can obviously find me easily enough? And Mama doesn’t even live in Lewisville anymore. It was part of her new start when she got sober: she packed up everything and moved to Evans, a small town east of Kansas City, a quiet, peaceful place, she said. The only house she could afford on her file clerk salary was a rundown shack with peeling paint and a leaky roof and a backyard that barely fit a wading pool, but she felt it was worth it. She wanted me to bring Willie and live with her. And she didn’t want me ever to run into Rick again. She made sure our phone was unlisted; she left no forwarding address.

Even though she started drinking when I was seven—and throwing me out of the house when I was twelve—she has somehow convinced herself that Rick is the source of everything bad that has ever happened. Rick and my father dying, that is. I don’t know how she got through AA, since I’ve never heard her admit that she herself did anything wrong. But she adores Willie, and that’s what matters to me now. He calls her Granny, and she laughs and kisses him and fusses over him, and it’s like we’re a normal family for the first time in years.

I take a breath and ask why she thinks the Lincoln is Rick’s. After all, I remind her, he probably has a new car now. It strikes me as I say this that there was no car outside my hotel room the day Rick showed up. It was as if he appeared out of nowhere and disappeared the same way.

“Well, it sure looked like his.” I hear her take a deep drag from a cigarette. “But okay, maybe it wasn’t. I am a little jumpy since that man got out.”

“Jumpy?” I force a laugh. “You’re a nervous wreck.”

She pauses for a moment. “Patty, tell me the truth. You ain’t tried to get in touch with him, have you?”

“What?”

“I know how you are, that’s all I’m saying. You could never resist them boys who look like two-bit movie stars.”

I let this slide, even though it’s completely ridiculous. Them boys? I’ve never been with anybody but Rick, as Mama knows full well. I tell her of course I haven’t tried to contact Rick, and then I listen as she extracts promises that I will call her and the police if I lay eyes on one hair of his head.

I feel a little bad that I’m not keeping this promise, but the truth is, she doesn’t really want to know that I’ve seen Rick. She just wants to hear that everything will be fine. Ever since she got sober, my job has been to reassure her. When Willie had terrible colic: “Don’t worry, Mama. It’s normal for babies, but it won’t last long.” When he fell and smacked his head on the sidewalk last year: “He’s not bleeding; he didn’t lose consciousness. I’ll just get him checked out at the ER, but you don’t have to come. Don’t worry.”

Whenever I call her from the road, there’s something she’s nervous about. She heard there might be a tornado coming to our area; where will we go for shelter? It’s going to be really hot next week; what if Willie doesn’t drink enough? There’s a man on the loose in Illinois; she heard all about it on
America’s Most Wanted
. Oh Lord, isn’t that close to where we are? What if this man on the loose steals her little grandson?

“Don’t worry, Mama,” I always say. “It will be all right. I can handle it.” Whatever it is.

She hates being nervous. Being nervous makes her chain-smoke. Being nervous makes her want to take a drink—and that’s a lot scarier to me than a tornado or a TV-show bad guy.

I try to change the subject to Willie’s complete lack of interest in the potty chair I’ve been dragging around for the last three months. Another thing she’s worried about. But she doesn’t bite. “You know what bothers me the most, Patty Ann? The idea of that man seeing Willie, putting his hands on him. It turns my blood cold.”

I find myself thinking back about how gentle Rick was with Willie, patting his knee, playing with his hair, kissing his forehead, stroking his little knuckleless fingers. Finally I exhale and tell her not to worry. “I will never let Rick hurt my son.”

She’s still going on about this when I interrupt and tell her I really have to get some rest. I rattle off the trailer number and hang up before she can object.

The whole time I was talking to Mama, I could hear bits and pieces of the band’s continuing argument about the room problem. When I walk into the living room, I decide to ask Irene if she wants to stay with Willie and me. I plan to sleep with him anyway; one side of his bed is against the wall, but the other is exposed and even though I’ve put pillows against him, I’m afraid he’ll fall out. Before I can ask her though, Jonathan says the couch is comfortable enough and he’s sleeping there, end of discussion.

I tell them all good night and head down the hall. It’s so dark in the bedroom that I hit my shin on the frame of the bed, but I’m too exhausted to curse. The air conditioner is on full blast; after I put on my sleep shorts and T-shirt, I lie down in bed, snuggle into Willie.

A few minutes later, Willie rolls over and throws his little arm around my neck. “You are my heart,” I say, but softly so he won’t wake.

For the first few days, Omaha isn’t too bad. The trailer is tough, but at least the club is better than we thought. It’s small, but it’s in an upscale neighborhood, and it does a healthy business from the very first night. Mr. Peterson, the owner, seems pleased with us, although he refuses to let Jonathan do any instrumentals. He tells Jonathan he personally likes jazz, but it won’t go over with his audience. But he offers to let the guys do a special concert a week from Sunday, in the afternoon, and he tells them he’ll put out a newspaper ad and charge a five-dollar admission, split it with them. They’ve made it clear that I’ll have no part in the concert, but still, I’m glad about it. It puts everyone in a good mood.

We don’t have to rehearse much; so far our sets are working with this crowd, mostly people in their thirties and forties, old enough to remember sixties and seventies songs, young enough not to mind a little newer rock. We’ve only had a few requests and they’ve all been the usual ones, slow songs like “Without You” and “Endless Love.” Jonathan has a briefcase full of fake books; he can play almost anything straight through, no practice. As long as the song is slow, it’s not hard to get it together: Dennis brushes the beat on the snare; Harry does a simple bass line, and Carl does a riff in the key. Usually, I know the words already. Fred brags that I know every song ever written and it’s pretty much true. I used to listen to the radio for hours when I was stuck in the car outside some rundown house, waiting for Rick to finish a drug deal.

Weird as it sounds, that time with the radio was one of the happiest parts of my life back then. I would start with rock, my favorite, and then move to Top 40 and country and even mellow old stuff like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. And I sang along with all of it, at the top of my lungs. The windows were closed and it was dark; nobody could see me. I felt like I could sing twenty-four hours a day. I felt like I could sing through anything: a nuclear blast, a car accident, cancer—a drug deal.

Of course now that I’m singing professionally, I can’t sing along with the radio as loud as I want. I always have to protect my voice. I have to be ready for a night like tonight, when a crowd has gathered to hear us at our best.

It’s Friday around ten o’clock, and everyone is a little nervous. The room is full, and Fred is here too. He drove up from Kansas City without his wife, which means he doesn’t want any distraction. Already, after the first set, he has a lot of suggestions. Dennis and Jonathan need to smile more. Harry needs to turn down his amp; the bass is drowning out the sax. I need to make more eye contact with the audience, especially the men, who pay for the drinks. Carl needs to pay attention; Fred says he heard him screw up the melody on “Let’s Stay Together.”

We’re on break, having a little meeting in the back by the bar. I was hoping to call the trailer, ask Irene if Willie is asleep yet. He was complaining of a stomachache when I left, but he had two greasy hot dogs for dinner; I hope it’s just that and he’s not coming down with something.

After a few more minutes of Fred’s lecture, Mr. Peterson comes over and asks if we can start early. The jukebox isn’t cutting it and two tables of customers have just left.

Fred smiles. “Of course.” Then he tells us to get up and make it hot, make it kick. As the guys start to walk away, he grabs my hand. “You sound beautiful, my dear. Better than Darla.”

Darla was Fred’s discovery twenty years ago. She was a local celebrity before she hit it big. She put out three records, all sold well, but then she died in a plane crash while on tour in Japan. Fred told me the whole story. When he says I’m better than her, it’s his ultimate compliment.

I smile at him, though I wish he hadn’t said this right now. Dennis heard it for sure, maybe they all did. And they’re right: it isn’t fair the way Fred always compliments me and not them, but there’s nothing I can do.

Before we can start, we have to wait for Carl. He’s talking to a woman, as usual. All of us get propositioned occasionally, but Carl has groupies everywhere. It’s not just because he has the glamour job as saxophone player. He has white-blond hair and icy blue eyes; Irene says he looks like a young David Bowie. Sometimes he goes home with a woman after the gig but he never brings her around the next day.

We’re halfway through the second set and everything is going fine. It’s a warm August night; Peterson has the front door propped open to let the music draw in people walking by, and it’s working. Every table is full and there’s a crowd standing in the back. Both waitresses are busy all the time, taking orders, bringing refills. No one is drunk yet, or at least they’re not yelling or making catcalls.