“Uh, Bob,” Binx said. “Jack isn’t with us anymore.”
Smiling comfortably. Jack said, “I’m the enemy now.”
Binx said to Bob, “So we’ll talk later, won’t we?”
“What do I know?” Bob asked. “I’m a simple Aussie.” And he wandered away, into the milling, drinking, thronging scrum.
Looking after him, smiling faintly. Jack said, “You know, the Down Under Trio I almost do miss.”
“You were right, though, to make your move when you did.” Binx licked his lips. “I’ve been thinking—”
Jack shook his head. “Binx,” he said, “we’ve always leveled with one another.”
Alarmed, Binx said, “We have?”
“When necessary.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“So I’m going to level with you now,” Jack threatened.
“Jesus, Jack, I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“It’s for your own good,” Jack assured him, making things worse. Then he said it: “Marcie is your wife. The Galaxy is your job. You’re never gonna get away from either. Once you accept that, you’ll be happy.”
“Oh, Jack,” Binx said, also leveling with his old palsy-walsy, if that’s what we’re doing now, leveling now, “no, I won’t, Jack. No. I won’t.”
14
The song that got to Jack Ingersoll, perched on the Elvis seat for the 8:00 P.M. show in the Ray Jones Country Theater, was called “New York Sure Is a Great Big City,” and it went something like this:
“I kind of took it personally,” Jack told Sara afterward as they ate a late dinner — late for Branson — in the Copper Penny, one of the few joints in town that served stuff recognizable as food. Only a few local hipsters and musicians were scattered around the dimly lit place, so they had their corner booth and its neighborhood completely to themselves.
“It’s that solidarity thing again, you see?” said Sara. “They set up a tribe; they define who’s in and who’s out.”
“I’m out,” Jack said.
“Sure you are. So am I. And they know it.”
Slicing steak. Jack said, “Sara, so what? Where’s the news in all this? Where’s our news in all this?”
“Ray Jones,” Sara said, “and his audience.”
Jack glumly chewed, hating to have to be a teacher again, knowing it brought out the worst and the snottiest in him. Swallowing, knocking back a bit of the not-bad red wine, he said, “Sara, do you really think there’s a point to be made that the great unwashed are bad judges of character, that they’ve got a shitty record when it comes to picking their heroes? Elvis was a drugged-out porker with more sexual hang-ups than a nine hundred number. The televangelists are too despicable to describe, J. Edgar Hoover was a fag-bashing faggot, and Ronald Reagan was brain-dead — they operated him from a Japanese microchip implanted after the fake assassination attempt.” Then he perked up, hearing his own words. “Say, that isn’t bad,” he admitted, and reached for pen and notepad.
Sara grinned at him. “I see. You can take the boy out of the Galaxy, but you can’t take the Galaxy out of the boy.” She watched him jot notes. “The microchip?”
“You bet.”
“That isn’t for Trend, Jack; that’s even less for Trend than Ray Jones’s fan dub.”
“Not for Trend,” Jack agreed, putting pen and paper away. “For later, after Trend fires me.”
Sara stared at him. “They’re going to fire you?”
“Of course. They fire everybody, sooner or later.”
“No, Jack,” she said, “not your usual cynicism. Have you heard something, that you’re gonna be fired?”
“I don’t have to hear anything,” Jack said. “What most people don’t understand is, all jobs are temporary. You get fired, or the company folds, or the technology changes, or the customers move away, or there’s an earthquake and they don’t rebuild.”
“So people who unpack are stupid, is that it?”
“I don’t say that,” Jack objected. “I don’t even believe it. But I do believe I have the jump on them.”
Sara shook her head. She hadn’t finished her food, but she clearly wasn’t eating any more. She sipped wine, sighed, frowned, and said, “Okay, I can see what’s wrong with you, but what’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing,” he said, wanting to make nice. After all, they had to share a bed tonight.
But she wouldn’t accept it. “There must be something,” she said, “or I’d find some normal guy, some regular member of my tribe to hang out with. But here I am with the Cheshire cat. Why?”
“You want an answer?”
“Yes, please.”
She seemed serious, so he was, too. Reaching across the table, taking the fork out of her hand and putting it on her plate, then taking her hand in his, he said, “Then I’ll tell you. I’m sorry, but the diagnosis is not good. After a close look at the X rays and the test results, I’m afraid I have to tell you the reason you’re staying with me is because you love me. Sorry.”
“Hell,” she said, squeezing his hand in hers. “I was afraid it might be something like that.”
15
Ray approved of Cal’s choice; the Trend girl was going to be exactly right.
The whole bunch of them were headed over to Forsyth together in the bus, Ray and his assistant Honey Franzen and his musical director Lennie Elmore and the musicians and Ray’s manager Chuck Wagner and his regular lawyer Jolie Grubbe, who couldn’t understand why he wanted a reporter aboard. “I need a sympathetic press,” Ray explained as they were boarding the bus in front of his house out at Porte Regal, the bus already half full of his people, none of them — happily — seeming to be drunk yet, at seven-thirty in the morning.
Jolie Grubbe, a tough lawyer of forty-something, a great big fat woman with no softness to her at all, said, “Sympathetic press? Are you crazy?”
“Probably. Get aboard the bus, Jolie.”
“There’s no such thing as a sympathetic press, Ray, you know that.”
“Bus.”
“Okay, okay.”
That big thick body heaved itself up the steps into the bus, Ray following. Jolie thudded into the front window seat on the right and Ray sat beside her. Across the aisle, according to his prearranged plan, Lennie Elmore occupied the window seat behind the driver, with Honey Franzen next to him. The rest of the guys were distributed in the seats behind him, taking up two-thirds of the bus’s interior, with the rear third holding a John and a galley kitchen. (This, when they toured, was the band’s bus. Ray would be in the other bus, with the bedroom and the shower and the other kitchen and the closets for costumes: his dressing room on wheels.)