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David Payne
For Will Payne, superhero
sans portfolio and itinerant energy beam…
From the old yellow cat who keeps coming back
Early this mornin’, you knocked upon my do’
Early this mornin’, you knocked upon my do’
I said, “Hello, Satan, I b’lieve it’s time to go.”
—Robert Johnson, “Me and the Devil Blues”
If I die, I will forgive you.
If I recover, we will see.
—Spanish proverb
Contents
Epigraph
Part I
Talking In My Sleep
Part II
A Checkered Sun
Part III
The Hot-Wet Phase
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by David Payne
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
TALKING IN MY SLEEP
ONE
Ransom Hill had fallen hopelessly in love with his own wife. If there was any doubt of it—there wasn’t, but had there been—it ended in Myrtle Beach, as he deplaned and found her waiting with the children at the gate. Tall and thinner than he’d been since high school, Ran had on his good black coat, which still stank of cigarettes, though he’d given them up in anticipation of this trip, the first of many sacrifices he was prepared to make. His slouching jeans were held up by a concho belt in which he’d lately had to punch three extra holes, and his Tony Lamas clapped along with a delaminated sole. His Stetson, though—the new three-hundred-dollar white one he’d seen and really felt he owed himself—was as crisp, serene, and towering as a late-summer cumulus. In its shadow, under memorable blue eyes, two dark crescents stood out against his inveterate New York City pallor, smudged as though by Christmas coal, the lumps that Santa Claus reserves especially for fallen rock stars and other habitual offenders. Ran, as always, was carrying two guitars, the ones Claire called “the Gibson girls” and, again, “the mistress and the wife.” His road-worn but still handsome face seemed clarified by recent suffering for which he had nobody but himself and maybe God to blame. As he came up the ramp, a bit short-winded, with that slapping sole, he looked like someone who had served a stretch in purgatory, and now, there, in paradisal light at the end of the square tunnel, was Claire. And paradise turned out to be South Carolina. Who could have guessed?
Amid the tourists headed for the links and Grand Strand beaches, the rushing bankers on their cells, his wife and children looked like a subversive little carnival unto themselves. Hope, his four-year-old, had on a pink dress-up with blue and silver sequins and boa trim. In dandelion-white hair tinged with the faintest faint blond rinse, her plastic tiara featured sapphires one shade bluer but only half as incandescent as her eyes. Over the summer, her legs had sectioned out like telescopes and suddenly acquired a shape like Claire’s. At their distal ends, her nails were painted chipped hot pink. So, too, Ran saw—with an alarm he rapidly suppressed—were his son’s. Wrapped around his mother’s waist, Charlie, not quite two, had on a Cody Chestnut T-shirt with a grape juice stain and a hard-shell plastic fire hat: FDNY. As he shyly grinned with two new serrated teeth, Ran saw with a pang, for the first time, who his son was going to be, which had carved itself from formless babyhood while Daddy was away.
“Dute! Bi’truck!” he said, and banged his plastic lid.
“Fire truck, dude.” Putting down his cases, Ran took a knee, removed his hat, and raked his fingers through his sandy hair. With a hint of the grin that once upon a time had opened many doors (quite a few of which he would have been wiser to eschew), he held out his arms, not quite in time to catch the kids as they smashed into him like rocket-propelled grenades.
“Dad! Da-dee!” Hope squealed.
“Hey, Sweet Pete!” He keeled over, laughing, on his seat.
“Daddy, how come you’re so skinny?”
“I’m not skinny, am I?”
“Yes, you are. How come?”
“Bi’truck! Bi’truck!” Charlie said, lacking skills, but concerned to have his contribution recognized.
“Man, I really like that hat,” said Ran. “I don’t suppose…”
He commenced a swap, but it was ill-advised. “Mine!” said Charlie, clamping down with two big little hands.
Hope tugged his sleeve. “How come?”
“Well, Pete…”
He lost her on the hesitation.
“Look what I have on!”
“Umm-hmm. Très chic,” he said.
“You bought it for my birthday.” Her tone flirted with severity, as though she suspected he’d forgotten.
“I remember,” Ransom said, and now he did. “It fit you like a sack.”
In New York, cruising the garment district one day in his cab, he’d seen the item on a rolling rack disappearing up a ramp and haggled out the passenger-side window with a nervous Puerto Rican kid in a black do-rag. This was after the label dropped him; after his well-meaning friends rallied round and got him a stint producing a band from the U of Alabama called Broken Teeth (“the next Hootie,” they were touted as). After five days at the Magic Shop in SoHo, he was ready to kill them all or commit suicide, preferably both. In lieu of either, he showed up at home that night behind the wheel of a lurching, shot-shocked cab, making good a long-term threat. Five songs into an album he was hell-bent on self-producing and distributing, he bought studio time by running up huge debts on MasterCard (at one point, he had six he had to rotate every time the promo rate expired). One morning he came back from the garage after a shift and found the closets empty. He sat for a long time at the kitchen table, with Claire’s bran muffin and her coffee—sweet and extra light—in a bag, before he read the note. It was on her
