“And where was Steve Young living when he wrote the song?”
“Here.”
“You even knew the man whose backseat Young was riding in when he started writing the song.” He stopped talking, appeared to swallow against a dry throat, then opened and drank from the flask between his legs. “Let me tell you something else.” His voice began to shake now, not out of anger, she knew, but fear, afraid like a child, because that’s what he was, had always been, no matter how many men he’d beaten. She’d need to hear enough of both fear and anger in his voice before the night was over.
He took another drink. “You say you can only sing that song because it’s mythical. That’s bullshit. You live on that road, the real one, the one you can’t leave. Instead of you trying to break up with me at Hank’s gravebecause that’s what you want, that’s what you were telling me with all your shit harmonies, that’s what I been feeling from youwhy don’t we just go to your dead husband’s grave, the one you killed, and you can try breaking up with me there? How ’bout that?”
“Fuck you, Hi. Just take me to where we’re going, and then you can do whatever else you want.”
“Take you where you died up under me?”
“That’s right. Where I died over and over.”
“How often do you die? Every time you think of him?”
“Yes, and every time I think about how he died.”
They were headed downhill now, still on Perry, about to cross Dexter where parades and protesters marched their way to the capitol on Goat Hill, where politicians had once sent boys off to slaughter for reasons they little understood and where the politicians were still no better than the rutting animals that once grazed on its slopes.
“You say how he died. You mean how you killed him, don’t you? Just how drunk were you that night?”
“Not as drunk as you now.”
“Drunk enough, then.”
She had been drunk, enough so that she could not deny it or let go of the fact, but angry too, more angry than drunk. She’d been playing a dive way down Woodley Road, past its miles of Spanish moss and seven bridges. Her husband knew how rough the place was, so he’d gone with her. He sometimes turned jealous, ended the night by accusing her of playing up to the men, wanting more ones and fives thrown into her open guitar case, implying a woman with a guitar in a place like that was no better than a stripper, and some strippers, he told her, would take it outside, burn their knees on the carpet inside a truck. Was jealousy a sin punishable by death? She didn’t think so, but she had punished him, had killed him. A circle of red as bright as her anger hanging over them, her hands raised above ten and two, the impact slamming him against the door, and her husband’s body twisted into an impossible shape, dead on arrival, and the child she hadn’t known about would never arrive. All lost, lost as she was on Woodley Road and on Hank’s lost highway, but she knew the destination she sought, a place a man named Hiram might take her.
They were on Upper Wetumpka Road now, passing the backside of the police station and city court, and just on the other side of the station stood the main entrance to Oakwood, where the bodies of Confederate dead and Union prisoners lay.
After he’d told her about his time in prison, first as a juvenile and later as an adult, he’d finally unburdened himself. A man inside Kilby would not leave him alone. Out in the yard others had crowded around the predator, knew what was coming. Hi joined the gathering, entered it with talk and laughter, and a sharpened piece of plastic, his first shiv, broke it off deep in the man’s stomach, and edged away with the crowd, the body left lying on the ground in their wake. The story had not frightened her, had only drawn her closer to him.
Just past the main entrance lay the graves of lost children, and beyond them the site where Hank’s body had first lain before he’d been moved to another hilltop and French pilots dug up to make room, punished in death for one man’s tortured fame and immortality.
“Say my name,” she said now into the silent cab, needing the reminder of who she was, her identity something older than her age. “Please, say it.”
“Why? You already know your name.”
“Don’t be smart. Just say it.”
“Polly.”
“No. Say it. Say what I want to hear.” He turned onto the narrow asphalt drive that led up to the dead. Then she said, more quietly, “Sing it.” He would have to understand now, at least what she wanted to hear if not yet what she really wanted from him, what she knew he was capable of delivering.
“Polly, pretty Polly,” he sang and then began to hum the harrowed tune. “You want to end things with me the way the man ends things with Polly in the ballad? You want to kill me? That what you do to men? Because your breaking off with me will be my death. And why? Why do it? Aren’t we good together, or have been? Can’t we be again?”
The pleading was back in his voice, which meant the kind of fear a child feels was showing itself again. She half expected him to whimper, and realized if she did hear it, that’s when he would be at his most dangerous. He’d need to whimper.
He stopped the truck at the end of the French graves, where the final pilot had not had to give up his rest in peace, like the others, to the teeth of a backhoe. Hiram lowered his window and cut the engine. The hum of nighttime air filled the now-dark cab, a timeless song of crickets, a soft wind, distant frogs from the bank of the Alabama River, unseen but not far from them, down the far side of this hill they sat atop.
“You’re a child,” she said. “And it’s way too late for you to be a child at your age. Don’t you know that much?”
He surprised her by simply opening his door and stepping out of the truck. Then she heard him pulling his guitar case from the bed and dragging it over the side, as if something heavier than a guitar lay within.
She opened her door, closed it behind her, then walked around and closed his, watched the light inside the truck again dim and disappear. A three-quarter moon lit the white marble of the first of the two large, towering headstones, the grave on the left belonging to the first wife, who’d been determined to join her husband in death if she couldn’t lie beside his wrecked body while it still had lifeand that’s why his grave had been moved, easier to dig up Frenchmen than the dignified locals from wealthy families in order to make room for a headstrong ex-wife. Hank’s stone and marble slab lay to the right, and a low, white marble border wall surrounded the plot’s artificial turf, put down to prevent seekers from digging up pieces of hallowed ground. Beneath the moon the turf was subdued to a more natural, darker color. Hiram walked over to the marble bench, a dark figure but more than a shadow. He carried his guitar case, and then sat down, facing the stones. She slowly walked toward him, said his name, Hiram, quietly to herself, unsure why she now had that name on her tongue, felt as if maybe she were trying to conjure the spirit of something she couldn’t truly give name to. She sat down beside him, close enough so that in the warm night she felt the heat from his body.
He bent over, opened the case before him, and pulled out his guitar, a prewar Martin that had first been played before those pilots, with shouts or with silence, had met their deaths, most probably country or Appalachian songs echoing out of the guitar’s sound hole in some 1930s honky-tonk, or maybe more than one murder ballad. There were so many to choose from, such an ancient and timeless form. He began to play a quiet melody out of single notes, his fingers moving across the fretboard, his palm hard against the neck. He played so slowly it took time before she recognized the bare melody of “Cold, Cold Heart.” He always knew overplaying was senseless, could kill a song’s beauty.