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Jamie Sue had never understood why Leslie had hired Lyle. It seemed to have something to do with their common experience in Vegas or Reno, or other marginal enterprises the Wellstones dabbled in as part of the price they paid for doing business in what they considered a corrupt culture.
She had taken little Dale into the barn with her and unrolled a plastic tarp on the floor for him to play on. But the two of them were trapped, with no means of escape, and she had no idea where Jimmy Dale was or the fate that might be awaiting him if he had been abducted by Ridley and Leslie’s goons. She felt a terrible sense of urgency, as though she were drowning in full view of others and no one on the bank could hear her voice. Or was that just her melodramatic daytime-television mentality kicking into gear?
No, time was running out, and not simply on this situation on this particular Saturday in the summer of 2007, she thought.
The choices she had made over the years all had a consequence and a cost, and the bills were coming due. She should have toughed it out by herself when Jimmy Dale went to jail, staying loyal to him and accepting privation as her lot, just as her blind mother and disabled father had. What would have been the worst thing to happen if she had gone it on her own? Second-class-celebrity status as an aging honky-tonk performer? Living in a trailer? Putting up with over-the-hill, drunk truck drivers who wanted her to sing “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)”?
The list of things she should not have done was long. She shouldn’t have married her community-college English professor and used his alcoholism to sue him in divorce court for almost everything he owned. She shouldn’t have posed as a religious woman and deceived the crowds who flocked to Sonny Click’s revivals. She shouldn’t have used her sexuality to manipulate uneducated family men who trusted her. She shouldn’t have used Leslie, and she shouldn’t have pretended she had married him in order to care for Dale.
It was the last thought that bothered her most. Everything she’d done had been a justification for her own agenda. She had even used her little boy as an excuse, when in reality, she had loved all the benefits of marriage to a man like Leslie Wellstone — the limos and luxury cars and private planes, the palatial estates, the servants who attended her every need, the awe and respect and diffidence she created with her presence wherever she went. In the meantime, she had lost her music, the one element in her life she had treated as a votive gift and had not compromised for the sake of either celebrity or commercial success. In her earlier career, she had continued to sing in the traditions of Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells while everybody else in Nashville was going uptown, then somewhere along the way, she had forgotten who she was and what she was and had taken the gift for granted and used it to manipulate people into voting against their own interests.
She remembered a statement that Keith Richards once made regarding a famous R&B musician whose hostility to his own audience hid just beneath his skin: “Chuck’s tragedy is he doesn’t realize how much joy he brings to other people.”
Her head was dizzy, her hands dry and hard to close.
She began brushing a mahogany-black gelding in his stall, raking burrs out of his mane and forelock, rubbing him under the jaw, touching the graceful line and smoothness of his neck, talking in a reassuring voice in his ear. The gelding was four now but still hot-wired and subject to spooking and rearing in dry mustard weed, and neither Ridley nor Leslie would ride him. But Jamie Sue could and did, sometimes without a saddle, using only a hackamore to rein him.
Ownership of a fine horse came with ability, not legal title, Jimmy Dale always said. He said no one owned the sunrise or the rain, or mesas and mountains, or the bluebonnets of South Texas. Your claim to ownership of the earth was based on the six feet of dirt that went into your face. The rest of it was a grand playground that God had given to all His children. At least that was what Jimmy Dale and his peyote-soaked friends said.
She wondered if her thoughts amounted to what a theologian would call contrition. She decided they probably did not. But perhaps they were a start.
She picked up Dale from the tarp and set him like a clothespin on the gelding’s back, keeping her arm around his waist to steady him. “I’m going to get you your own pony one day,” she said. “Maybe back in Texas, where your grandma and granddaddy used to live and your mama grew up.”
“Just when do you plan on doing that, Jamie Sue?” a voice said behind her.
She turned an
d looked into her husband’s face. “What have you done with Jimmy Dale?” she asked.
“I haven’t done anything with him. I’ve never even had the pleasure of meeting him. But tell me, why is it you think I might have harmed him? You weren’t planning on going somewhere with him today, were you? You haven’t been screwing him in the bushes, have you?”
She had stepped into his trap. “I’ve never understood your mean-spiritedness, Leslie. Your brother orders things done to his enemies, but only when he’s forced to. You enjoy offending and hurting people just for the sake of hurting them. Maybe the war did that to you. Maybe it’s because you married someone who doesn’t love you. But you’re a sad man and an object of pity. Not because of your deformity, either. You’re pitied by others because of what you are, and that’s what you’ve never understood about yourself.”
She lifted Dale off the horse and set his weight on her hip, momentarily shifting her attention away from Leslie. When she looked at him again, his head was tilted sideways, the shriveled skin alongside one cheek and his neck stretched free of wrinkles, like a large piece of smooth rubber.
“I have the sense you’re at a point of decision in your life,” he said. “Standing at the crossroads, wading across the Jordan, that kind of thing. You know, Scarlett O’Hara gazing out upon the wastes?”
“What decision? How can I make decisions? You’ve fixed it so I can’t go anywhere.”
“Would you like to go for a late dinner tonight? I’ll have Harold drive us in the limo to Bigfork or Yellow Bay.”
“Who lives inside you, Leslie? Who are you?”
“Not interested in dinner tonight? The lake is lovely when the rain is falling on it. Last chance, Jamie Sue. I wouldn’t ignore the importance of the choice you’re about to make. There are maybe three or four choices we make in our lives that determine our fate. A random turn off a freeway into the wrong neighborhood, buying a burnt-out sweet-potato patch that sits on top of an oil pool, taking off the night chain because we trust the Fuller Brush man. You took a chance and married a man who is physically repellent to you. Want to back out? I don’t mind. Want to roll the dice and see what happens? Tell me. Tell me now.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice dropping in register, a cold hand squeezing at her heart.
“It’s all a matter of choice. You want to believe you can walk away with half of our wealth. You also want to believe you can walk away with all your knowledge about how things really work, how we jerk around others, how our enterprises are nothing like they seem. Pick up the dice and drop them in the cup. Everyone should have a second chance. It’s easy enough. You’re a brave girl. Shake the cup and rattle them out on the felt.”
She looked into the moral vacuity of his eyes and for the first time felt genuine mortal fear of the man she had married. She started to speak, but her words caught in her throat.
“A country-and-western band should be entertaining the folk at Yellow Bay,” Leslie said. “We can watch the folk at work and play in the fields of the Lord. It’s Saturday night for the folk, and their messianic songstress will be there to brighten their lives.”
“I think you’re going to hell,” she said.
“We already live there, my dear. You just haven’t realized it.”
He reached out with his mutilated hand and touched little Dale’s cheek.
