Part of it was shock. As a rule, people in Nashville just don’t hold each other hostage. Nashville has more churches per capita than any other city in the country. Despite that, there’s remarkably little religious tension. Everybody behaves and leaves everybody else alone. Until now, that is. Now we were just another Waco, Guyana, or Beirut: a place with innocent people held hostage by other people who were convinced they had a direct line to God.
By that evening, after spending the rest of the afternoon in my office, I was too tired to do much of anything. Unable to resist temptation, I tried calling Marsha one more time. The phone rang once, twice, then about five more times before a computer voice came on and said: “I’m sorry, the cellular mobility customer you are calling is unavailable.”
Click. Dial tone.
I made my umpteenth pass by the still-silent barricades, then crossed the river back into East Nashville and headed for the supermarket. I thought briefly of just grabbing a quick dinner at Mrs. Lee’s, the best Szechuan restaurant in a five-county area, and heading home. There was too much other stuff I needed, though. I even had a toilet-paper emergency, and once you’re in the grip of a full-blown toilet-paper emergency, your options drop fast. You’ve got to go to the store, no matter how much of a bother.
So I restocked the thirty-five-year-old Kelvinator and the bathroom closet, then made a cheeseburger and a pan of home fries while I watched Sixty Minutes. Ed Bradley even alluded to the siege of the Nashville morgue in introducing a segment on a guy who debrainwashed cult victims. Jeez, we were hitting the big time now.
I sat around after dinner, grazing through the cable channels, then halfheartedly reading a paperback history of jazz in America. I was tired but too wired to sleep. Finally I decided Ray and Slim were expecting me at the Bluebird, and if I wasn’t going to sleep, I may as well go have a beer and listen to some music.
The Mazda came to life with a pull of the choke and a twist of the key. A small puff of blue-black smoke appeared in the rearview mirror, then drifted away across the neighbor’s front yard.
Sunday evening is possibly the only time of the entire week when this city isn’t plagued by a swarm of traffic. I cut over to I-65 by way of the Ellington Parkway and took the north loop across the river to the Four-Forty Parkway. In twenty minutes, I was driving down a winding four-lane road toward Green Hills, the upper-middle-class-to-snazzy part of town I used to live in, back when I still had my job at the newspaper and was married to the Executive Vice-President of the advertising agency.
The Bluebird Cafe is located in a strip mall, hidden in among retail stores, past a nursery, down the road from the mall at Green Hills. It looked ordinary from the front, like maybe a small diner. Inside though, it was-as we say down south-ate completely up with atmosphere. Dark, smoky, with framed eight-by-ten glossies of all the famous people who’d played there tacked up all over the place, the Bluebird was a small room with a bar on one side and tables everywhere else. Somewhere back in the corner, a kitchen sat hidden and out of the way. Pipes in the ceiling had been painted and left exposed.
Truth is, the Bluebird Cafe isn’t a hell of a lot to look at. But it is one of the most sought-after venues in the city. If you were an insider in the music business, showcasing at the Bluebird meant you’d arrived. I read in the paper a while back that somebody’d even written a play about it.
I parked three or four stores down and walked across the asphalt parking lot to the line at the front door. All the tables were occupied by people who’d been smart enough to make reservations. I paid my eight bucks cover and wound up in a gallery of folding chairs next to the bar, over in the corner out of everybody’s way. After grabbing a beer, I climbed over three people to get back to my chair. I settled back to wait for the music to start.
In the center of the room, the tables had been pushed back to form a loose circle. Inside the circle, four metal folding chairs sat next to guitars in stands beside several amplifiers. Ray and Slim already occupied two of the chairs and were leaning over their Martins, tuning them up and talking real low. Slim wore a khaki bush shirt, with epaulets on the shoulders, and jeans. Ray wore a pearl-buttoned blue-and-red cowboy shirt and a broad-brimmed ten-gallon hat. I’d never seen Ray decked out like that. He looked kind of goofy, I thought.
Ray’s back was to me, and Slim was to his left. Then another fellow, a tall, skinny guy with prominent cheekbones and sunken eyes, wearing jeans and a checked flannel shirt, made his way through the tables and sat down across from Ray. Ray said something, and all three broke out laughing as the tall one picked up a glossy, jet-black guitar and cradled it in his lap.
I looked down at my watch. They were ten minutes late getting started already. Gigs like this never start on time anyway, but if they didn’t make music soon, I was going to pack it in.
There was an empty chair across from Slim, and it appeared that nothing much was going to happen until that chair was filled. I checked my watch again, then sipped on the beer and did a little people watching. The place was packed, the audience jammed in shoulder to shoulder at tables, waitresses twisting and turning, their trays held high overhead as they delivered drinks. A clamor of chaotic voices filled the room.
I thought of Marsha and wished she were here. Thick crowds in small rooms have never been my style. I’m not sure I like people well enough to be this close to so many of them. I’d come purely as a favor to Slim and Ray. But as long as I had to be here, I’d much rather have had Marsha with me.
Finally, after I’d run out of both beer and mental monologues to replay in my head, I was about to see if I could slip out of the place unnoticed. Just as I rose to leave there was a shift in the tone of the audience murmur and heads started turning toward the front door. I sat back down just as a high voice that bordered on shrill yelled from around the corner: “Oh, good heavens, I’m so sorry, I’m late, oh, good heavens-”
Slim put his head down on his guitar and rolled it from side to side, like he’d been through this routine before. Two women sitting next to me put their heads together, and I heard one of them whisper: “Oh, she always does this. She’s always late. I think it’s just to get attention.”
And then the other one whispered back: “Yeah, either that or she just likes to piss Slim off.”
“What do you expect from an ex-wife?” The first one giggled.
“Oh, I think it’s just an act.…”
Ex-wife? Slim had never mentioned an ex-wife. Why would Slim be sitting in a crowded club on a Sunday night singing songs with his ex-wife? My ex and I avoided each other unless it was absolutely unavoidable.
Music people are strange.
The woman walked into our view from the right, around the corner, her long thin arms waving at the crowd, hands splayed out chaotically, fingers pointing everywhere at once. A fat guy with a long, scraggly beard and thick glasses sat in front of me. I shifted in my seat to look around him and stared.
She was tall; nearly as tall, I figured, as Marsha’s six-one, six-two. Her hair was straight, the color of dark ash, and hung down her back below her waist Crystal Gayle-style. She wore a pair of jeans that must have been painted on and a crocheted white sweater that was nearly see-through. Her face was thin, her features fine: pointed nose, sculpted cheekbones.
She made me ache.
“Becca,” Slim said into the microphone, his voice scolding her.
“Oh, hush,” she said in a voice loud enough and penetrating enough not to need amplification. “Don’t start on me, Slim.”