Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine

You know, to be honest, most of what I remember about that weekend was the crowd. The people. Rush Creek packed. Like we’d rallied the troops, called up an army somehow. Man. They just kept coming. There were so many people I wasn’t sure why I was thinking about Wendell anyway, and later that night, when everybody was good and wasted, he had come out quickly and pulled me aside to say he was sorry for throwing the glass, and he did really look sorry, ashamed. Deanna was trying not to look over from the kitchen doorway, she turned away all awkward and sad. I’d been working on forgiving him already. I knew he wasn’t trying to hurt anybody anyway.

I felt keyed up still, though, so I stayed real late. Almost everybody stuck around, and we played a short third set even, after Wendell left, so the bar was rocking until almost 1:30, and then we mulled around until Deanna finally put her foot down and said she couldn’t keep serving if anybody wanted the bar to be open tomorrow. Or later today at this point, she guessed. The line at the bar to close tabs was insane and I still didn’t want to wander home and get that late-night kind of sad with Gwen asleep and somehow annoyed at me anyway and Jules sprawled out sweating on his bedspread, didn’t want to be that kind of lonesome. Or I wanted to stave it off as long as possible, anyway. I found a booth in the corner a whole group of guys had just left, the table a mess of bottles with the labels scratched off in stripes and leaving wet little wakes on the vinyl. I picked one up, and it was half-full and still relatively cool, so I started to take a swig and almost did before I noticed two butts floating on the surface when I sloshed it around. It reminded me I needed a smoke, but it took me searching every damn pocket I had to find a crushed Marlboro in the chest of my jacket with the filter barely hanging on. I lit it anyway. I had to hold the crack in the paper together with my fingers.

Benny was headed over, eyes popping out his head. He slid in across from me. “Shit,” he said.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “Too little.”

“Sure,” I said. I peeked in a couple of the other bottles and took a warm sip of somebody’s spit out of one. “God,” I said.

“Christ, you’re really that lazy?” Benny asked. I gestured at the line of people trying to close out. But Benny opened up his jean jacket and like magic there were two Heinekens tucked into the inside pockets. He passed me one. “I’m your little angel tonight,” he said.

“Devil, you mean,” I said.

“What I said.” He clinked the neck of his bottle against mine.

“Anybody left around?” I asked.

His eyes glittered, and I wondered if he wasn’t liking Steven just a little bit more now that he’d started to bring coke with him every night. I had no clue where Steven was getting it at first; there was no way he had cash to spare. But I’d sorta mentioned to Hopper the week before that I wasn’t sleeping great—the house didn’t have AC and it had started to get so hot in the bedroom I was sweating deep pools into the mattress every night—and he’d slipped me a pill, told me Steven had given him a baggie of them he’d gotten off his roommate, who had some kind of in. Everybody was grateful, sure, but goddamn if the kid needed another reason to parade around the way he did.

I’d taken a bump or two off the edge of Benny’s pick between sets a couple of times, but I really had tried to ignore it as much as I could. The drinking was enough to get me through even a long night, and it was important to me to draw the line somewhere. But shit,  had I ever seen Benny this warm and glowing? In years, even? Ever? It was so nice. He was smiling big, fingering and tapping the lip of his beer. “Dee says she’ll lock us in.”

“Really?”

“She’s in a kind of mood.”

“What mood?” I asked.

“You know I don’t give a shit what mood. It’s just a mood, I can tell,” he said. “But she’ll lock us in if we want. I mean probably not literally, but you know.”

“She’s gonna stay and serve?”

“My sense is she’s gonna stay and drink. You need to be served? I’ll serve you.”

“Wish somebody would,” I said. I scanned the room so Benny wouldn’t see how happy I’d gotten at the idea of Dee staying.

The tab line was moving now, and T.K. was sopping up old liquor from the rail with a series of rags and tossing them back behind him. I could hear them slap the floor and wondered if Hopper was somewhere around to hear it—I’d been on him about getting his bass stickier on “Moving,” and I hadn’t been able to show him what I meant. The door opened and creaked closed over and over. And suddenly the loneliness was creeping up on me anyway. I spotted the back of Steven’s oily head, and it was only the hope that Dee really would stay and slum it with us that kept me in the bar, but it did.

“OK,” I heard her say as loud as she could. “Y’all all staying?”

“Only if the girl is,” Benny yelled back. I could see Dee look around, clock the dozen people left, look to see who he was talking to. “I’m talking about you, baby,” Benny said, and I could see her face flush clear across the bright room.

“I’ll stay a minute,” she said, “so y’all don’t fuck anything up too bad.”

“I’ve never fucked up anything too bad in all my life, say you’re sorry,” Benny said back. Hopper emerged from near the front and stood up and saluted Dee, all upright. He came across the room toward us. “Lookit, Ringo’s on the move,” some girl said. Hopper stuck up a middle finger. He’d take her home, I was pretty sure.

Everybody kinda settled down around our table and a couple others nearby. Steven was up against the pool table, perched anxious on the edge. Hopper’s girl and her friends looked at each other like they weren’t sure where to sit, what to do with their hands. They seemed so young somehow. But I never know what to do with my hands, not unless they’re on a guitar, and I felt warm toward them. I was trying to harness the warmth, trying to hold it real close and give it to everybody with my eyes. I thought it might make me feel better to treat people especially good. I thought it might help me turn the bad feeling around, I mean. I saw Dee walk toward us with a bottle of whiskey and a handful of shot glasses, drop them off, and then head to the back door to peek outside before she bolted it.

Then Benny was up out of his chair, headed to the stage.

“Benny, y’all can’t play,” she said, walking back over. She did look off to me then, a little sad and a little edgy.

“What you talking about, we can’t play, lady? I, for one, think we play pretty damn good.”

“No, I mean,” she said, “it’s too late.”

“Too late for the sound?” Steven asked, all dreamy and then he giggled.

“Shut the fuck up,” Benny said.

“Be nice,” Hopper said.

“Please shut the fuck up,” Benny said. “Don’t worry, Deanna, we’ll play real soft.”

But I didn’t want to play anymore. I’d been playing all night and I was way past drunk now, and my head was done in and I couldn’t think of a single song I loved all of the sudden. Not one. How was it only Friday night? Benny was back next to me with my Martin and an unplugged Telecaster. Could I just be there? Could I just get it and calm down and not get washed away by the tide, the feeling of sadness just closing in on me? I wasn’t sure. I looked at Deanna, and my vision blurred, and I saw my mother when she was young. And Gwen, when she was younger. And then, oddly, Steven. Steven’s face, still young. Not in a bad way, exactly. Not really. A kaleidoscope.

“Any requests?” Benny asked. I took a shot of whiskey with my left arm over the frets. The acoustic was just dead weight on my legs. “Nevermind,” he said, then looked at Steven even though Steven hadn’t said a word. “I don’t give a shit what you want to hear.” He was playing the Telecaster like a bass, plucking the notes out one-by-one like he was ripping them out of the dirt that sprouted them. It sounded all right, real pokey and dry without a pick-up. A little shuffle. Hopper was beating on the edge of the table with his hands.

Oh, I had it. The D dropped. I had it. This old Lightnin’ Hopkins song I used to play when I was down, real down, back before Gwen and Jules and this crazy-ass bar, back before anything, “Life I Used to Live.” I wasn’t sure what it would do to me now, but I played the riff real high and tentative, as slow as I wanted, and Benny would know it—it had been on his list too, when we met, when we weren’t much more than kids—and I sang the first line in the G, even though I knew it’d get too low for me before long. Who cares what’s coming, I thought. Ain’t nothing but now.

You know the life I used to live. Lord.

I said it over and over, through one measure, two measures, three damn times. Lord. Lord. L– Benny played gentler than I wanted him to, and I could barely hear Hopper’s eighths.

I ain’t gonna live it no more. You know the life I used to live. Lord.

The world stopped then, while we played. Everything stopped. Felt like nobody was breathing, even, all these people around me still and close, Benny and Hopper and the girls with their hips, and that guy T.K. had brought out a couple weekends in a row who thought he could bass as well as Tulsa, and I guess he could, but not by ear, and you know, Hopper’s cousin nodding his big old bald head with a pool stick in his hand, and I felt a weight come down, a pressure from above me. All these people looking at me like I had something to give them, like holding out their hands for it, and the big, deep fear that I didn’t have it to give. There wasn’t a single person I wanted to play for. Not but for maybe Deanna, who didn’t ask me for much at all.

And then you know, right in the second bar of the solo, which I was keeping real easy because there was a part of me that thought I might cry right along with the hammers and bends, I saw her stand up and give me a little half-wave and walk out the door. I had to sing the line about saying goodbye then too, like somebody had planned it out, and I felt all my bones sink down into the chair, which sunk down into the floor, which was set down into the ground, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stand up again. Hopper still beating on the table, and a half-full glass wobbled and tipped over. My hands were numb, but they played anyway.

And afterward, after Benny had taken the girls out to the lot, and while Hopper was packing up the gear we didn’t need to lock in the closet, that’s when Steven came up to me. Sat down, leaned toward me. Cut two long lines on the table, pulled a dollar bill out of his front pocket and rolled it up real tight, handed it to me.

Yes please, I thought, snorted one of them.

“Dougie, can I ask you something?” he said real quiet. I’d handed the bill back and he was twirling it in his fingers.

“What?” I asked. I thought I saw Hopper take a glance over at us and then make himself busy again.

Steven’s jean jacket was half-on, one sleeve in, and the rest of it was hanging off his shoulder like a robe or an old Greek toga or somewhat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

“Do you believe in that stuff?” he asked quickly, looked sidelong at me.

“What stuff?”

“That song, you know. Church. God and stuff.” He bent down and snorted the line left on the black. He gasped, a big inhale like he was pulling in all the world. “You believe in it?”

“No,” I said. My head was a balloon, swollen and drifting. I felt the last couple of weeks—Steven against the stage with his face busted open, the guitar in my lap at the Armadillo, the crowds getting bigger and Wendell quiet—close in on me, lick at my heels. It felt like the world had built up into something new without me realizing it: like I was inside a weird, minor bridge in a song I’d assumed would stay square and easy. I was in the long second before the drums come back in, when all there is to do is wait and sense and be. The best songs—the real, old-school Texas blues or some of the new stomp around town, too, sure, some of it—know exactly how long to make you sit there before launching back into key. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can go on too long. And then it’s too much, way too much, to sit through. It starts to eat you alive, that waiting. You start to beg, pray, for some goddamn closure, for the chorus to come.

“Yeah,” Steven said. “OK.” That cross still around his neck, swinging, swinging when he leaned down. Hopper was gone now.

Who were we again? Me and this kid? Who exactly? I wanted him to tell me, but I didn’t know how to ask. “You sure?” he asked.

“No,” I said again. I looked at his hands.