Long Way Gone (5 page)

Big-Big stood, bowed to Daley, and said, “Miss Cross, please come back.” He pointed at me. “He sounds better with you here.”

We pushed Mary down the hall and into her room. Shelly offered to take some pictures of her with Daley, promising to frame them and hang them on the already busy walls. Daley, seizing the moment, climbed onto the bed with Mary, and the two posed like long-lost sisters. Mary was radiant.

As we were walking out, Mary called behind us, “Daley?”

Daley turned.

Mary reached across her bedside table and lifted a CD cover. “Would you sign this?”

The CD was Daley's second album. Now twenty years old, it was the album we'd cut in Nashville just before the fire. Daley signed it and handed it back, lingering next to the bed and studying me. She tapped her fingers on the handrail that kept Mary from falling out and said, “Mary, did Cooper ever tell you about that CD?”

Mary shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“Did he ever tell you he played on that album?”

Mary's eyes grew big. “No!” She looked at me. “He never told me that!”

Daley nodded. “That's what I thought.” She slid the stool next to the bed and sat down, then turned the CD over in her hand. “Did he tell you that he wrote eight of these?”

Mary nearly came off the bed. “What?”

Daley moved her finger as she spoke. “He wrote this one, and this
one, and this one . . .” As she pointed at each one, Mary's eyes grew larger and rounder. “And that guitar you hear is all him.”

Mary looked up at Daley. “That means . . . Coop wrote five number one songs?”

Daley nodded. “Yes.”

Mary turned and threw a pillow at me. “Cooper O'Connor! Twenty-five years I been lying here, melting farther and farther into this bed, and you never uttered a peep. Never even offered to play one of your own songs.” She threw a second pillow. “I can't believe you never told me.”

I shrugged and set both pillows back on the bed—out of reach.

Daley patted her hand. “Just thought maybe you'd want to know.”

Mary crossed her arms and smiled. “And I fully intend to take this up with him when you are not here and I don't look like such a fool for screaming at the top of my lungs.”

As we were leaving—again—Mary called out, “Cooper?”

I poked my head back in the door. “We're even.”

She was laughing at the top of her lungs as I shut the door. “Oh, we're not even close to being ev—”

Daley was quiet until we reached the parking lot. We climbed into the Jeep. I cranked the engine, pulled my Costas down over my eyes, and was about to move the stick into reverse when Daley gently placed her hand on top of mine. She leaned her head back against the headrest and looked at me out of the corners of her eyes. “Thank you.”

“For?”

She nodded toward the building we'd just left. “That.”

“No, thank
you
. You just made a lot of people's day. And you made Mary's year. Decade, even. You're probably going viral on YouTube right now.”

“I didn't give them anything compared to what they gave me.” Daley closed her eyes. “It's been a long time since anyone posted any video of me anywhere.”

When the sun fell behind Mt. Princeton, the cool crept out of the cracks and shadows. Out here the cold never really leaves. Not even in
summer months. It just hides behind the rocks and in the water until the sun goes down. But here on the threshold of October, it crawled out from behind the rocks a little quicker.

Pulling out of the parking lot, I glanced in my rearview. Big-Big was standing on the lawn, watching us drive away.

He was smiling.

T
hough nestled in the bosom of the Collegiate Peaks, Buena Vista is not a winter ski destination like Vail, Aspen, or Steamboat. Winter life here is quiet. Not much outside influence coming in. Summer is a bit different. Given accessibility to the Continental Divide, world-class hiking, four-wheeling, rafting, kayaking, paddleboarding, and mountain biking, the population swells as a couple thousand adventurous college kids bunk here in order to staff raft companies, summer camps, gear shops, and other outdoor adventures. The few thousand locals who call “Bew-nie” home tolerate the ebb and flow of the adventure-seeking tide like snowmelt in the springtime.

Necessary.

The Ptarmigan Theatre was built as a church in the 1860s. Constructed out of granite blocks cut from these very mountains, its walls are four feet thick and rise inside to a vaulted ceiling and balcony that overlook an exquisitely carved stage. Around 1900, given a dwindling congregation, it was deconsecrated, and a local entrepreneur turned it into a theatre with seating for a couple hundred. It continued that way until it closed in 1929, and sat in dark decay and quiet decline for almost fifty years. A shell of its former self.

By 1990, when my dad bought the building off the courthouse steps for pennies on the dollar, the walls had been graffitied, most of the stained glass had been broken or shot out, the roof poured water, and
squatters had dragged in mattresses that soon filled with rats. To keep warm in winter, some of the more determined guests burned a few of the pews and most all of the discarded hymnals and Bibles.

Due to what my father called “a mistake of engineering,” however, the acoustics were divine. He didn't know what he wanted to do with it, or if he did he never said, but he couldn't stand the thought of it getting any worse. I remember him standing on the front steps and shaking his head. “How do you deconsecrate a church?” Dad never understood that.

Whatever his plans for the theatre might have been, they never became a reality.

When I first returned to BV, I scratched my head, took a long look at the Ptarmigan, and decided I'd finish what my father had started. If nothing else, it would give my hands something to do while my mind uncoiled. The Ptarmigan was named after a high-altitude, grouse-like bird nicknamed the “snow chicken,” which works hard to blend into its environment. It prefers barren, snowy, craggy peaks, and its song sounds like a loud croaking.

Perfect for me.

But attempting to return the Ptarmigan to its former glory presented one immediate problem. Money. When I left Nashville, I had carried little with me. Jimmy in one hand and memories in the other—many of which were painful. Add to that our stabbing good-bye and I just assumed that between the conniving producer and bitter Daley, any monies earned on the songs I'd written had been cut off. Then I called my Nashville bank.

Evidently ours was not the first acrimonious split in Music City. When my banker reported my balance, I nearly dropped the phone. “Excuse me?”

In the five years since I'd been gone, my royalties had stacked up and been earning interest. I wasn't going to buy a jet or a mansion in the Hamptons, but I had options.

Within a few years I'd returned the beautiful jewel of the Collegiates
to a quaint theatre with seating for a couple hundred. Further, I had retrofitted the balcony into an apartment where I stayed in winter when the snow and ice kept me out of the cabin. On a whim, I also installed some rather sophisticated recording equipment.

Before long the Ptarmigan became well known as an unplugged acoustic venue for local acts, school Christmas musicals, “Nutcrackers,” and touring choirs.

Having made something of the Ptarmigan, I then turned my attention to the Lariat, aka “the Rope.” The Rope plays live music nightly and has made a name for itself on the acoustic singer-songwriter circuit west of the Rockies. They don't pay much, but crowds are decent and, thanks to the summer influx of those thirsty college kids, the word spread. Wanting to keep my involvement quiet, I created an LLC called Timbrel and Pipe and bought the Rope. Other than my attorney, no one around here knows I own it, and I like it that way.

The Rope fills an old brick building with two large, cavernous rooms. The ceilings are more than fifteen feet high—which explains how Volunteer No. 99 used to fit a ladder truck in here in the fifties and sixties. In one room they serve beer and half-truths, and in the other they play music and tell the other half. The acoustics aren't bad, and the more beer Frank serves, the better they get.

Frank Green is the current general manager. I interviewed and hired him over the phone, and to his knowledge he's never met his boss face-to-face. He's a local, and aside from being a liar, a cheat, and a thief who underpays his performers, he's good at his job. He's bald with bushy eyebrows, is growing wider in the middle, seldom takes his eyes off the floor, drives a twenty-year-old truck that blows white smoke out the left bank, and skims three to five hundred a week out of the cash drawer.

Which he uses to pay for his wife's cancer medication and his daughter's speech therapy.

Frank looked up as Daley and I came in. He nodded at me and wiped down the bar, then picked up a mop and began swabbing the floor. His shoulders sloped.

“How's Betty?” I asked.

He dipped the mop in the bucket and then mashed the rinse lever. The smell of Pine Sol filled the air. “Better today.”

In all the times I'd asked that question, his eyes had never left the floor and he'd never answered differently. And yet over the years Betty had been in and out of the hospital a dozen times. In and out of ICU. Fighting one infection and then another.

Above him on the wall hung a poster of an idyllic island getaway and ocean vacation. Palm trees, island breeze, little drinks with umbrellas. Frank had never left Colorado. Neither had his wife or daughter. The edges of the poster were curled. It was a visible reminder of the vacation he would never take. I used to catch Frank looking into the picture. Now, not so much.

On more than one occasion—as he sipped too far into a bottle of bourbon—he replayed for me the memories of how his dad, as far back as he could remember, had smacked him on the back of the head and told him with spit puddling in the corner of his drunken mouth, “You're useless. Never amount to nothing. Do us all a favor and just die now.”

Frank would stare out the window across the street, swig, swallow, wipe his mouth with the back of his wrist, and slam the shot glass down with a forced smile. “And he was right!” And every time he did that I didn't notice the strength in his Popeye arms or tree-trunk legs, or the bravado in his voice, but the tears in his eyes.

The first few years he worked for me, he was rather fair and honest. That was before his wife got sick.

Frank wears his shame.

I sat in the corner on a stool and plugged Ella into the amplifier. Given the power in Daley's lungs, I needed an instrument with some punch and bellow, and while I'd softened and even muted it in the enclosed room at Riverview, the D-35 had it. Daley stood to my right
and slightly in front of me. Mike in front of her. Faded jeans. Button-down oxford. Hair pulled back and up. Her right sleeve was unbuttoned and came down to her knuckles, covering up most of the Aircast. The bling and bedazzle of a once-rising star were gone. She stood there stripped down. No pretension. No attempt to be some former version of herself. Daley stood there as Daley.

I tuned while she stood waiting on me. She looked back at me over her shoulder. “I'll buy you an electronic tuner for Christmas,” she whispered, and smiled.

I tapped my ear. “Mine's built-in. Like that sharpener in the back of the crayon box.”

A question rested on the tip of her tongue. I could practically see it sitting there, see her trying to swallow it.

So I answered, “The surgeon in Nashville must have done a really good job of reconstructing the ruptured membrane, because I can hear like Steve Austin.”

“Who?”

I plucked the low E-string on my guitar and tuned it down about two octaves, sending it severely out of tune. “Six Million Dollar Man.”

She laughed and the tension rolled off her temples, down onto her shoulders, and out the door where the pain of our past sat smoldering.

Some folks get nervous onstage. Sweat. Stammer. Stumble. Talk too much because the quiet scares them. Others are born to it. One of my favorite things about live music is the joy of playing with someone who, when they step onstage, forgets they're being paid to stand there. Daley's face told me she would have sung for free—in spite of the fact that Frank had quickly apologized and corrected his “mistake,” agreeing to pay her the customary three hundred dollars for new live acts.

What made this all the more intriguing was the fact that there were only two people in the bar besides Daley, Frank, and me. She was looking at the promise of playing for an audience of two—who were halfway through their third and fourth beers, respectively. Which meant that in about twenty minutes, they probably wouldn't even hear her.

It promised to be a fun night.

I was warming up my fingers, rolling through some scales, when she glanced over her shoulder again. “Want me to buy you a beer?”

I popped a Tums into my mouth. “I'm good.”

She raised both eyebrows. “Acid reflux?”

“Something like that.”

She eyed my guitar picking and smirked. “You ready or do you need more time to practice?”

“After you.”

She smirked again. “Oh, and we'll be starting in the key of E. You do know where that is, right?”

My fingers rolled through the E scale, traveling up the frets. “Gimme a minute to find it.”

Without invite, without pomp, without attempting to calm her nerves with a bunch of excessive talking, Daley opened her mouth, and when she did I thought Janis Joplin herself had walked up onstage. After “Me and Bobby McGee,” she jumped straight into “Piece of My Heart.” Once she had us good and lathered and her voice warmed, she took a left turn at normal and three flights up toward impossible with Whitney Houston's version of “I Will Always Love You.”

I stopped playing, the better to listen to her, prompting her to glance back at me and give me a
What are you doing?
look, but as my fingers touched the neck and the notes came up beneath her voice, I was thinking to myself,
Who in their right mind attempts to sing Whitney Houston?

Word spread. Or maybe her voice carried down the sidewalk. Whatever the case, six songs in and we were staring at fifty to sixty people who'd been drawn out of neighboring restaurants or off the sidewalk. Many were wide-eyed. All were mesmerized. None were staring at me—which meant I was doing my job. By the time she closed the set with a sultry serenade, the door had been propped open and folks were sipping beers on the sidewalk, fogging up the window from the outside in. Standing room only.

Somewhere in the history of music-making there arose a romantic
ideal regarding the life of musicians. How they're somehow more authentic and truthful, more insightful into man's existence and the deep mysteries of the universe if they ring out their song while silently fighting destructive urges and inner demons. This unseen inner conflict adds to the drama. In this whirlwind of soul-sucking angst, anger, and torment, the lone voice fights valiantly, ultimately deriving its power and culminating in a song.

Daley had none of this.

Daley sang out of something else. Something pure. Something she'd protected, despite the fact that no one had protected her. She sang out of a reservoir. No war. No angst. No demons. She simply brought her song to the stage, opened her mouth, and offered it. Because that's what it was.

An offering.

Daley's song spilled out of her like water. And those of us listening had been in the desert a long time.

Midway through the second set, one of the guys who'd been there from the start stood up and staggered toward the makeshift stage, his expression a mix of unbelief and puppy dog adoration. I scooted forward onto the edge of my stool, but Daley held a stop-sign hand behind her back. He reached in his pocket, fumbled through a few crumpled bills, then spilled them onto the ground at her feet. She mouthed, “Thank you,” and he returned to his seat—walking backward. Others soon followed. When we closed the second set, Frank brought us an empty gallon pickle jar and placed it at her feet. The bills filled nearly half.

Daley's stage presence was polished like an act two decades on the road. She made eye contact, conversed with her audience.

—Where you from?

—You two been married long? . . . Let's hear it for fifteen years.

—Thanks for the invite. I'd better pass, but can I sing something for you?

—Hi. Do you have a favorite?

—Oh, it's your birthday. Well, happy birthday.