Ray’s leaving school and hitching to Florida in search of a music career did have some truth in it, though not much. He and Cal actually did make the tape he talked about, on a tape recorder Cal had stolen — while Ray stood watch from a safe distance — from the high school music department, a section of the school devoted exclusively to the marching band. (Ray wasn’t a member of the marching band, they having no use for a guitar and he having no use for them.)
But music wasn’t the main reason Ray left town all of a sudden in the middle of his sixteenth year, dragging Cal along for protection. The main reason was a girl, the first great love of his life. He doesn’t mention her now, partly because it ended badly but also because he can no longer remember her name; not that he tries hard.
This girl had a regular boyfriend, one of the few rich kids in town, son of the drugstore owner. He it was who took her to the movies, bought her sodas, necked with her in his father’s car. But it was Ray who got her pregnant.
Whoops. It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t lied to him, another lesson he carried with him from his high school years. She’d lied because she wanted to get away from her home, and the only way she could think of to do that was get married. She wanted to marry Ray because she thought he’d be more fun than the drugstore boy, so she lied, and then she pretended she was surprised and scared and helpless.
At that time, Ray’d had the letter from the record company for about four months but hadn’t done anything about it because he found their manner tepid, not even offering him bus fare for the audition. But now he pulled out this letter, showed it to the girl while holding his thumb over the date, and said, “I’m not gonna marry you. See this letter? These music people want me. I’m goin to Florida and I’m not comin back. My advice is, get into the backseat of that drugstore car and get yourself knocked up all over again.”
Which is what she did, being smarter than he’d thought. And that’s why Ray went off to Florida to find the life that was waiting for him, originally as a sideman on extremely minor-league session dates, playing other people’s music in other people’s groups, but learning, every single day.
The following year — they were in Nashville by then — somebody told Cal the baby’d been born, so Ray’s got a kid out there someplace, grown up now — boy or girl, he never did ask. Be funny if the kid was in the audience some night, neither of them knowing. A song in that? Nah.
Actually, the birth of the baby had led to Ray’s first set of original lyrics. Some impulse had driven him to buy one of those comic Nashville postcards and send it to the girl c/o the drugstore, writing on it: “I’ll remember you, always, and think of you real often with a smile. I hope you’ll be forever happy and learn to live without me after a while.”
13
Binx Radwell sat hunched on the folding chair in the rental house, elbows on the folding rental table, frightened eyes blinking at the maps taped and stapled and nailed to the paneled wall, and tried to ignore the cold sweat pouring from his body like condensation on a porcelain toilet, tried to ignore the volcano-like rumblings in his intestine, and listened to the words buzzing up along the phone lines from Galaxy headquarters in Florida. This was the voice of one of Binx’s many lords and masters, new lords and masters since the change of ownership of the newspaper had bared Binx’s vulnerable flesh to colder winds than even he had heretofore known possible.
It was at field headquarters that Binx was undergoing this latest episode in the perpetual slow flaying that was the story of his life. Whenever the Weekly Galaxy went out into the world on a major story — celebrity scandal, child in well, celebrity death, religious fruitcake sex or religious fruitcake violence scandal — the first thing it did was rent a house in the local area, rent a lot of office furniture and office machinery to fill that house, bung in a bunch of phone lines, staff the place with reporters and photographers and editors from the main headquarters down in Florida, plus whatever local stringers they might have available, and start boppin. In long-con terms — and the Weekly Galaxy is nothing if it’s not a long con — this is the store, and its purpose is the same as it was for Yellow Kid Weil and the other long-con experts of yore: to pretend to be what it isn’t.
For instance: Let us say you are Cherry Chisolm of the Weekly Galaxy and you wish to interview Ray Jones’s ex-wife, who is being paid handsomely by Ray Jones to keep her flappin trap shut. If you call Ray Jones’ ex-wife — also named Cherry, interestingly — and say, “Hi, I’m Cherry Chisolm of the Weekly Galaxy and I’d—” that’s as far as you’ll get before she hangs up. But if you call and say, “Good afternoon, I am Laura Carrington, calling on behalf of the Countess Sylvia Bonofrio. Mademoiselle has asked the countess if she will chat with you for publication. Now, as you know, Countess Sylvia rarely gives interviews herself, but feeling the empathy toward you that she does, and I’m sure you remember the absolute hell the countess went through seven years ago when Alfredo — Well, I’m sure she’d rather I didn’t go over all that again.” And so on.
At some point in this flap-doodle, the ex-wife will ask to call back, won’t she? She listened this long, but she’s doubtful; she wants to talk it over with her lawyer and her boyfriend and her best girlfriend, so she’ll ask if she can call back. Now, you don’t want to give her a hotel telephone number, do you? You don’t want your calls to go through a hotel operator who might very well have already been suborned by some other scurrilous paper, do you? You don’t want a hotel maid to wander into the room during the next call, do you, while you’re talking with an Italian accent and being Countess Sylvia?
Of course not. If you wish to use a phone, if you wish to set up a darkroom (in the bathroom), if you wish to interview a witness, a relative, a venal police officer, if you want a private conversation with anybody at all in which both information and money may change hands, you don’t want that happening in a hotel, do you? Or anywhere out in the world, right? What you want is your own house. Every time there occurs in the world what the Galaxy thinks of as a major story, therefore, the Galaxy begins by renting a house.
This particular story’s house, at 1023 Cherokee, was in the old original part of Branson, the part that existed when the only strangers who’d ever heard of the place were bass fishermen. (Of course, once the Army Corps of Engineers put in those flood-control and hydroelectric dams, converting the flood-prone White River into a lot of weird-shaped lakes, there wasn’t any bass fishing anymore because of the severe temperature change of the water, but not to worry. They put in the fish hatchery, near which Belle Hardwick would eventually expire, and stocked their fake lakes with trout. From a real river with real bass to imitation lakes with interjected trout, the fishing equivalent of a carnival game. But, hey, fish are fish, right?)
Anyway, 1023 Cherokee was owned by a nice widow lady who lived mostly in a nearby nursing home these days. Her house was so thoroughly low-maintenance, it, too, could have been put together by the Army Corps of Engineers; beige paneled walls, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, Formica and Scotchgarded beige furniture. (All the furniture was now out in the carport, under tarps.)