After he’d parked and slung their bags across his shoulder; after he’d put Charlie’s socks and shoes back on and tied them; after he’d crossed the parking lot with Charlie slipping from one arm while holding Hope’s hand and reminding her to look both ways; after he’d surrendered them to their teachers and come back out with two dark moons of sweat in his armpits and a tremor in his picking hand; after having longed for them and missed them so, Ransom slipped into the driver’s seat and breathed a sigh of profound and profoundly culpable relief. In the desperate hope that he might find a pack of two-year-old cigarettes from his last trip, he reached for the glove box, but no such luck.
Mother duck said quack, quack, quack,
But only one little duck came back….
As he punched out the kiddy tape, the radio came on, and what else could it be?
We said, “It’s so tru-oo-ue,”
We said, “It’s so deep”…
Ransom laughed and reached reflexively to turn it off, the way he had a dozen times before, then didn’t. Pulling into traffic, he gave up and listened, really listened, for the first time. Mitch Pike had taken the driving backbeat of the original, steeped in old-time Stax/Volt Afro-funk, and slowed it to a ballad tempo. It was this that had Ran contemplating suicide the first eleven times he tried to listen and could not. Now, though, as he crawled along the strip, he realized Claire was right, Pike had found a sweetness in the song. Not that sweetness had been missing in his version, but it was just one of many things he’d put into his recipe. Ran had written “Talking in My Sleep” about the devastating end of a great love—his for Shanté Mills. The grief and fury he’d put into it, the despair, the deep question he’d posed about relationships, his challenge to the gods—all gone. Mitch had simplified—that was his masterstroke. Ransom suddenly understood that this was why Pike’s version had gone number 1, where RHB’s topped out at number 23, and the ghost of his old agent, Ponzi Gruber, floated up, telling Ran, the way he had way back at the start of everything, The cream alwaysrises, Ransom. Always. And Ran suddenly realized that RAM’s version was a better song.
He’d reached the light now, and he turned. Out there on a two-lane between high walls of trees, it hit him with a clang of rare finality that the success he’d dreamed about and worked for was never going to come. Deep into the country now, it came home to Ransom that his work, the work into which he’d poured the best part of himself for thirty years, was going to disappear without a trace.
But all it ever was
Was talking in our sleep, baby,
Just talking in my sleep….
The tires went tump-tump, and Ran was home.
Only as he pulled into the spelled green of the allée did it occur to him he’d driven past the CVS without a thought of turning in. Ransom knew he really ought to turn around. After all, he wanted to be good…even if he’d slipped a tiny bit. He’d promised Claire. On the other hand, he was dog-tired and wanted to check his song on the off chance that it might prove him wrong.
Like Buridan’s ass, suspended between a bale of righteousness and a bale of sloth, he hesitated, then chose sloth. He had to drive back for the cocktail party later anyway.
“Can’t wait for that,” he told himself aloud, as good intentions slipped a further notch. And maybe the old unimproved, unmedicated Ran wasn’t too dangerous to unleash, for a few more hours, on the friendly world that had convinced him of his error.
Inside at the partners desk, he reread his song and laughed. Words that not five hours before had fallen with the heavy chink of gold doubloons now seemed like charred and pitted scoriae brought back by chimpanzee astronauts from the dark side of the moon. Apart from strangeness, they held no interest whatsoever, and even if they’d shimmered with immortal genius, Ran had no idea where he’d meant to go from here. The song, in short, was gone.
Rifling the drawer, he took out Clive’s old box. “Hell, yeah,” he told himself, “let’s get happy and go shoot some freaking guns!”
Outside, he loaded both barrels per instruction, then fired the first, surprised when the recoil knocked him back two steps. The muzzle belched a thick black cloud of acrid smoke. Fanning his way through, he found the Costco can of black-eyed peas thirty yards from its original position, reduced to smoking shreds of unidentifiable shrapnel, not much larger than a pile of fingernails.
“Damn,” he said, sobered. “This thing could saw a man in half, couldn’t it?”
Woman, too.
“Woman, too,” he said, agreeing with himself. Having satisfied the urge and even spooked himself a bit, he stared toward the back porch, noting how the yard sloped slightly downhill from the river toward the house. Kneeling like a golfer on the green, Ran assessed the lie.
“Two hundred years of runoff. Yep, that could do it.”
Gassing his whacker in the old slave cabin Claire had turned into her gardening shed, he waded into the periwinkle, clearing the area where he thought the new swale should go. It would cost some bucks, but a few hours’ dozer work could send the water toward the road. That solved, they could see about the ants.
As Ran revved the engine, the doubled hanks of nylon blurred into an orange-tinted cutting wheel. He kept a weather eye out for the
