Where the Heart Is (26 page)

She had hired the best she knew, the best of a hundred bands she had formed and re-formed, mixed and blended— good musicians who knew the ropes and the road. She tracked them down, rounded them up and put them with Billy Shadow.

Then, remembering her days as a girl back in Missouri, memories unaccountably jarred loose by the shape of Willy Jack’s lips, and thinking of that Missouri girl and those first delicious nights along the Current River with that first delicious boy, Ruth Meyers called her new singer and her old musicians Night River, feeling somehow that shadow and night might coalesce.

But that hadn’t happened. Not because the drummer couldn’t keep the rhythm. Not because the bass player couldn’t take a solo.

Not because the guitarist didn’t have perfect pitch. It hadn’t happened because they were too tall. Only Davey D. was shorter than Willy Jack—and only Davey D. was still around.

And though the replacements were not as good, not as polished as the originals, Billy Shadow’s star seemed to be rising nevertheless.

Ruth Meyers had done her work well. But it had been a job of work and it had taken a small army to get it done. Willy Jack had needed a lot of cleaning up.

On that day back in Nashville, Doc Frazier, the dentist, had nearly cried when he looked into Willy Jack’s mouth where he found decay, gingivitis and more than twenty years of gunk to scrape through. But a month later, when Doc was finished, Billy Shadow had climbed out of the chair, his teeth capped and bridged and crowned—as clean and white as hospital sheets.

Nina, the beautician who took Willy Jack on, had to first cure him of dandruff, which infected his scalp, his eyebrows and the corners of his nose, a condition she treated for a week with a tar and hot castor oil paste. Next, she cut and reshaped his hair, creating a soft, casual look with curls that tumbled across his forehead. Then she gave him a dark chestnut rinse, a color that made the most of his violet eyes. She toned his skin with mudpacks and treated the puffiness under his eyes with a cucumber and mayonnaise gel. Finally, after she gave him a manicure and pedicure, she took a picture of Billy Shadow, proof that her beauty school training had paid off.

Jack Gooden, the tailor at Preston’s Western Wear, had ushered Willy Jack into the fitting room with instructions to peel off his clothes, the polyester pants and plaid shirt Claire Hudson had given him back in prison. An hour later, Willy Jack was adrape in yards of fine worsted wools and gabardines in rich amber and deep russet, while Gooden pinned and measured and chalked. Two weeks later, Billy Shadow slipped into his new suit that hugged his slender hips and padded his narrow shoulders and swished against his thighs as he walked.

Tooby the bootmaker had looked away that first day, pretended he hadn’t seen the newspaper stuck to the heel of Willy Jack’s sock.

He knew without looking inside the cheap Acme boots that they were crammed full of paper. Willy Jack wasn’t the first short customer he’d ever had. Tooby also knew, several weeks later, when the boy slid his feet into the hand-stitched alligator boots with two-inch heels, that Billy Shadow had never stood straighter and never looked taller than he did that day.

So when Ruth Meyers and her army had finished, Willy Jack Pickens stepped in front of a mirror, smiled at what he saw and watched Billy Shadow smile back.

And Ruth Meyers knew even then how much grief he would cause her. She knew someone’s wife would get caught with him in the back seat of a Lincoln or Cadillac. She knew someone’s daughter would get pregnant and swear he was the father. She knew someone’s kid would get busted supplying him with weed and cocaine. Ruth Meyers knew what was coming.

She knew he’d bend the rules and break the law, sell her short, cut her throat and try to walk away. Ruth Meyers knew who she was dealing with, so she should have known better.

But when Billy Shadow stepped back from that mirror, grabbed Ruth Meyers and kissed her as he danced her around the room, he caused her heart to race and her blood pressure to spike and her throat to tighten at fresh memories of that delicious boy on the Current River.

“Glad you could make it, Johnny.”

“I’m running a little late, but I got tied up. Couldn’t find a graceful way to get up and leave.”

“Well, we get the next set cranked up and—”

“I’m not going to be able to catch the next set, Billy.”

“Hell, you didn’t hear but those last two numbers. I figured you’d—”

“I liked what I heard.”

“Yeah?” Willy Jack took a long pull at his drink. “You like it enough to represent me, Johnny?”

“Whoa! We might be moving a little fast here.”

“I’m ready to move fast. I been on this slow track long enough.”

“You need to understand something, Billy. As long as you’re still tied up with Ruth Meyers . . .”

“Look. I don’t owe Ruth Meyers a damned thing. Not a damned thing.”

“She may think different.”

“I can end that this quick.” Willy Jack snapped his fingers, accidentally spilling the last of his drink. “She don’t have nothin’ to say about it, neither.”

“Billy, Ruth Meyers can be a powerful ally, but she makes a hell of an enemy. You sure you’re ready for that?”

“Now what you figure she can do to me?”

“I’m just telling you. Ruth Meyers has got a mighty long reach.”

“Shit. Ruth Meyers ain’t got that kind of clout.”

Willy Jack punched in Ruth Meyers’ calling card number, then took another hit of the joint before he pinched it out. She answered on the first ring.

“Well, we’re here,” he said. “But it was a bitch. Rained all the way.

And I gotta tell you, Abilene, Texas, looks like the asshole of the world.”

“You’re in the Ramada?”

Willy Jack could hear something in her voice, something to be careful of.

“Yeah. Let me give you this number.” He had to hold the phone close to his eyes because the numbers were swimming. He knew he was fucked up, but he didn’t want Ruth Meyers to know it. “764-4288.”

“I tried to call you before you left Dallas.”

“Is that right?” He knew then, with the silence hanging between them, that something was wrong. But it couldn’t be about Johnny Desoto. She couldn’t know about that. “You call the hotel or the club?”

“Both.”

“Well, we got away a little earlier than we expected. What’s up?”

“I got a call from an attorney in Albuquerque.”

“Oh, hell. If this is about that girl back in—”

“It’s about a woman named Claire Hudson.”

“Who?”

“You know Claire Hudson?”

“No. Never heard of her.”

“She says you didn’t write ‘The Beat of a Heart.’”

“Bullshit!”

“She says her son wrote it.”

“That’s bullshit! Her son’s dead.” Willy Jack knew Ruth Meyers was still on the line. He could hear her breathing. “Okay . . . I knew her, but . . .”

“You lying little son of a bitch.”

“No. Listen, Ruth, listen! I wrote ‘The Beat of a Heart.’ It’s my song and—”

“No, Willy Jack. You’re wrong. It’s Claire Hudson’s song.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Claire Hudson holds the copyright—in her dead son’s name.”

“God-damn, Ruth. I swear to you. Listen, god-dammit. I wouldn’t lie to you. I would never lie to you, Ruth.”

“Really? You really wouldn’t tell me a lie, Willy Jack?”

“No! I need you. I need your help with this.”

“Well, you need some help all right—but not mine. Maybe Johnny Desoto can give you a hand with this.”

“Ruth? Now let’s talk about this. Ruth? Let me tell you about that, Ruth? Ruth Meyers?”

NOVALEE KNEW Forney would be worried. He’d probably called the highway patrol already to check on the roads. And she knew if she didn’t get home before nine, he would more than likely start calling hospitals.

Snow had started falling in the late afternoon, but changed to sleet about dark. By the time Novalee got off work at seven, the windshield of her car was covered with half an inch of ice. She pulled a cardboard box from the trunk, a box Forney had filled with window scrapers, cans of deicer, flares, candles—dozens and dozens of candles. He had read that the heat from one candle kept a stranded motorist alive for two days in a North Dakota blizzard, so he had started buying candles and couldn’t seem to stop.

The Wal-Mart parking lot, a mile of concrete with spaces for five hundred cars, looked almost deserted as Novalee eased the Chevy Where the Heart Is

toward the exit. They had closed down nearly all the registers inside the Super Center as soon as the first snowflake had drifted to ground.

And now they didn’t need any registers at all.

She hoped the sand trucks had beaten her to the highway, but no one was expecting an ice storm in April, so she wasn’t surprised to find the interstate glazed and slick. It was going to be a long drive home.

The commute hadn’t been so rough the first few months she drove it. But the bad weather, which had started early in November, hadn’t let up yet. She had driven through sleet, hail, freezing rain and snow—

nearly twenty inches fell in December alone.

Moses and Forney had weighed the little Chevy down with concrete blocks and Novalee bought a new set of snow tires. Even so, she had slid and skidded all through the winter and had enough close calls on slick roads that she thought several times of giving it up and taking a job close to home.

She wasn’t sure what it was that kept her chewing up five hundred miles of highway each week. She didn’t know why she stayed with it, leaving for work at sunrise and driving home after dark. She sometimes wished she could do what others did and call in sick now and then, just roll up in her quilt on one of those dark icy mornings, say to hell with it and stay in bed.

Lexie tried to talk her into applying for a job at the hospital, a ten-minute drive across town. Dixie Mullins wanted her to go to beauty school so she could work with her in the shop. Mrs. Ortiz urged her to try for a federal job, something with the post office.

But for some reason, Novalee had stayed on with Wal-Mart, one of the few who made the transition to Poteau and the Super Center, and the only one who made the drive back and forth each day. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt a tie to Wal-Mart. Probably because she had lived in one when she was pregnant . . . or because her daughter had been born there.

When the sleet changed to snow, Novalee thought of stopping to call Forney, to tell him she’d be late, but the exit ramps looked slicker than the highway, so she didn’t chance it. Besides, Forney and Americus were in the middle of Puck of Pook’s Hill and that would keep his mind off the weather for a while.

Mrs. Ortiz kept Americus during the day and would have kept her in the evenings, but Forney wouldn’t hear of it. As soon as he closed the library and got dinner for his sister, he came to the house and stayed until Novalee got home. He had to be there, he explained, to try to catch up. He had read Americus so little nineteenth-century history and he had so little time. She would, after all, start kindergarten in the fall.

But Novalee was glad he was there. She liked seeing him when she walked into her house. No matter what kind of day she’d had, regardless of how tired she was or what mood she was in, she always felt better when she saw Forney smiling his crooked smile as she came through the door.

She always knew, when he looked shy and uncertain, that he’d brought her a surprise, a special treat. Like the morel mushrooms,

“genus Morchella, ” he tracked down each spring to cook in his secret batter, or the first strawberries of the season, sugared and arranged on a thin blue china plate. Sometimes he’d bring her something he’d found tucked in a library book—a lock of auburn hair tied in a green silk ribbon . . . a love letter from a man named Alexander.

Forney brought her things for the house, too. A set of glass knobs he’d found at a garage sale, and delicate gold frames for the Polaroids Novalee had taken that first day in the Wal-Mart, the day Willy Jack had left her behind.

All three photographs bore traces of damage from the tornado, but Novalee didn’t see the spots and scratches and dents. She saw only Sister Husband’s miracle smile, Moses Whitecotton’s gentle dark eyes and Benny Goodluck’s thin brown body, stiff and awkward in his camera pose.

Novalee had hung the pictures on the living room wall before the paint was dry, before the windows were covered, before the furniture was even moved in.

Though she’d been in the house for over six months, it still had unfinished spots—kitchen drawers without handles, a strip of molding missing, some trim work yet unpainted. But it was home, a home without wheels, a home fixed to the ground.

She had designed the house herself. Four rooms and a bath, and a deck that circled the buckeye tree. Some thought she’d never be able to build it for twenty-six thousand dollars, the money Sister had left her. She did, though. But she had a lot of help.

Moses did the foundation work, Mr. Ortiz the framing. Benny Goodluck and his father laid brick; Forney and Mr. Sprock did the roofing. Mrs. Ortiz hung the paper and Certain made the curtains.

Novalee did a little bit of everything. She drilled, nailed, caulked, measured and sawed, lifted, climbed, carried and carted. She sweated, cussed, laughed, ached and cried, putting in weeks of eighteen-hour days and six-hour dead-to-the-world nights.

Then one steamy August afternoon it was finished. The house Novalee had only dreamed of was hers.

a home with old quilts and blue china and family pictures in gold frames

Forney was at the window when she pulled into the drive at half past nine. He had already scraped the steps and scattered rock salt on the porch.

“I’ve been so worried about you,” he said as he whisked her inside and took off her coat.

“I would have called, but I couldn’t find a good place to get off the highway.”

“Did you have any trouble?”

“Well, traffic was moving, but just barely. I saw some cars banged up south of the Bokoshe turnoff. Overpasses were like glass.”

“Mr. Sprock said they’d closed down 31.”