Long Way Gone (22 page)

T
ums, Pepto-Bismol, and Alka-Seltzer had ceased providing any medicinal benefit, and the shock of cold-water submersion remained the only remedy for the ticking inside me. My episodes were becoming more and more frequent, the acrid taste seldom left my mouth, the rushing in my ears was constant, my appetite was pretty much gone, and the amount of time required in the water to stave off the impending rupture had become longer and its effect shorter. In short, my options had dwindled and what few I had didn't do much.

Given this, I stayed close to home. Close to the creek. Given the acidic nature of coffee, I quit drinking Honey Badgers and started sipping some sort of herbal peppermint-ginger concoction with honey. I snacked on Nilla Wafers and bananas, drank milk, and reread my father's letter. I napped a lot, but never more than an hour at a time because I had more control over the outcome if I was awake.

On Friday I drove to town, parked along the tracks, and ran a few errands. I walked into the beauty shop and paid Mary's hairdresser to make a house call Saturday morning and do something special.

Then I visited the town attorney, where I made sure Mary would be taken care of. I left money for Frank to pay his bills, with enough left over to allow him to quit skimming and take his wife and daughter to the islands while there was still time. At my request, my attorney had researched Jubal Tyre. I started a college annuity for him and left his mom enough to buy more than bologna for the rest of her life. It would
never replace an absentee dad, but it would help. Everything else went to Daley.

I picked up my new dark-blue suit at the tailor and some mail-order black Allen Edmonds dress shoes at my PO box, and paid my remaining bills. Then I walked into the barbershop and got my first real haircut in twenty years. When the barber asked me what I wanted, I smiled. “I need to look respectable. Or at least presentable.” When I walked out without hair down to my shoulders, I felt naked.

The town of Buena Vista was buzzing. Posters hung on every pole, national news trucks had parked on Main Street, tall antennae telescoped above the skyline, food trucks had appeared, traveling BBQ pits filled the air with tantalizing smoke, and the hotels were full in every direction for thirty miles. Whatever media marketing campaign Daley's producer had orchestrated had worked. In my thirty-five years of experience with the Falls, I'd never seen the town swell like this. Buena Vista was bursting at the seams. College kids taking an early weekend break, middle-aged bikers with their wives on mirrored Harleys out of Denver and the Springs, four-wheel drives pulling RVs, hitchhikers, and locals—the town looked like parade time on the Fourth of July.

I stood at the gas station, filling up the Jeep, and smiled at the traffic jam and colorful crowds walking the sidewalks on what had become a beautiful though brisk fall day. West of the Collegiates, a few snow clouds crept closer, which could make for an enchanting weekend. Daley could not have chosen a better or more scenic venue or time of year.

I had done my best to slow down everything about me. My movements. My pulse. Even my decisions. “Just one more weekend,” I told myself.

Though I knew better.

The ticking was louder. Niagara closer. The angry storm on the horizon of my life now stretched as far as I could see. Soon the swirling world I'd been able to hold at a safe distance for twenty years would be the sideways-spitting fury in the face, ripping my tent pegs out of purchase. Where the lightning struck without warning and set my world
on fire. Where no bench would hide me and no strong right arm would scoop me out like an excavator. Stopped at the light, I stared in my rearview mirror and heard the thunder rumbling over my shoulder.

The light turned green. I drove through the intersection and felt an odd swelling at the base of my throat. I coughed into my handkerchief and stared down at a puddle of bright crimson. The next wave started in my stomach and traveled upward, where the taste hit my mouth and I coughed again, this time spraying blood across the inside of the windshield.

Life had been reduced to minutes.

Heading west on 306 toward Cottonwood Creek, I shifted into third and redlined the Jeep above 7,000 rpm. Two miles out, I braked at nearly a hundred miles an hour, turned right onto 361 without flipping, sped downhill, spotted the creek, and aimed the nose toward the water as the roar of Niagara deafened my ears. I veered off the highway, avoided a giant cottonwood, jumped the bank, launched the Jeep airborne, and crashed nose-first into the rushing creek. The thirty-six-inch BF Goodriches dug themselves into the smooth river pebble-and-sand bottom, where the water rolled just beneath the front bumper. Steam rose from beneath the hood, but given the snorkel air intake, the engine idled smoothly. The Jeep settled, I unbuckled and fell out into the creek. The shock to my system stopped my ability to breathe. The water grabbed my clothes, pulled me down, and bounced me gently along the bottom. I waited.

When my head broke the surface, the water rolled me upright and I began both breathing and choking. The water here was just above knee-high. I bobbed, turned, flipped, rolled, got sucked under an overhanging tree, and then the water widened and the depth decreased to eight or ten inches. I felt my butt and legs drag the bottom, and my shoulder bumped into a large rock a little bigger around than a basketball. I hooked one arm around it and then wedged my foot between two smaller rocks on the bottom so that my body wouldn't wash downstream and dump me into the Arkansas. If it did, they'd never find me.

The seconds ticked by. The bank was ten feet away, but it might as
well have been a million. My teeth had quit chattering and the needles in my skin had quit stinging.

Over two decades I'd survived dozens of these episodes. Maybe a hundred or more. I quit counting long ago. Depending on the amount of time required in the water to push back the tide, lucidity would come and go. The trick was to remain clearheaded enough to stay in the water as long as required while still being able to crawl out and get someplace warm and dry. Usually the initial shock stopped the hemorrhage before a total rupture occurred. But that was the key. Everything depended on the below-freezing temperature shock stopping the hemorrhage. And all that had to happen before my electrical circuits shut down completely.

It was a waiting game.

Something stung my nose and eyes, which were the only part of me sticking out of the water. When I opened my eyes, I realized it was snowing. I smiled. I liked the thought of that. Dying in the snow. Wrapped in a blanket of white.

The walls began closing in. My last thoughts were of Daley. I would have liked to see that concert.

Wouldn't be long now.

Suddenly my peaceful, silent departure, accented by falling snow and the gentle rippling of subfreezing water, was disturbed by the high-pitched whine of a small engine, the sound of sticks and large limbs breaking, panicky screaming, and finally a big splash and someone thrashing through the water.

I felt hands under my armpits, and someone was dragging me toward the bank. Water washed over my forehead, but between waves Daley's face flashed above me, silhouetted against a gray sky spitting snowflakes. She dragged me onto the pebbled beach and cradled my head, slapping my face and screaming at me. And while I could see her mouth moving and read the frantic expression on her face, I could hear very little and feel even less.

The blood had puddled in my mouth. I coughed, spraying us both in crimson puree, and managed one word. “F-f-f-f-ire.”

Daley's complexion grew even more ghostly. She set down my head, disappeared over my shoulder, and the next sound I heard was the unmistakable hum of the Jeep's engine. Evidently Daley drove the Jeep downstream, climbed the bank, and parked it next to me.

Locals know that conditions in Colorado can change with little notice. Sunshine one moment. Snow and ice the next. Given an inability to predict when that will happen, most of us keep a box in the back of our vehicles with enough necessities to allow us to live in a snowbank for a few days if needed. Daley tore through my emergency box and quickly made a pile of whatever she could find. She pulled the five-gallon gas can off the back of the Jeep, soaked the wood, then loaded the flare gun, stood behind the Jeep, and shot the flare into the pile.

I watched with sedated amazement, thinking she was rather resourceful and quick-thinking. As if she'd done all this before. She then returned to me, dragged me across the hard ground, near enough to feel the warmth of the fire, and started ripping off my wet clothes. When she had me down to my underwear, she unrolled my sleeping bag from the back of the Jeep, stripped off her own wet clothes, and then zipped us both inside the bag where she pressed her chest, stomach, and legs against mine. She was shivering too, but she managed to rub my arms and back with her palms in an attempt to generate warmth, friction, and possibly blood flow.

When someone has been submerged for any period of time in water that feels colder than freezing, the first thing to come back is the perception of cold. And pain. Both return at once. Second are the gross-motor shakes, which are the body's involuntary and violent response to the flow of oxygenated blood and electrical stimuli into the limbs and extremities. The last step is an unstoppable shivering and an inability to get warm.

It's not pleasant.

A
n hour passed. Much of which I slipped through passing from conscious to unconscious and back to conscious. When the color had returned to my face and my head had stopped rocking violently back and forth, Daley extracted herself from the sleeping bag and added more fuel to the fire. Anything she could find. The result produced a roaring and hot bonfire. Further, she grabbed a tarp from the box in my Jeep, strung it like a tent over us to keep the snow off, then slid back into the sleeping bag and placed her chest to my back and wrapped her icy feet around my calves. Somewhere in there I dozed off again. When I woke, our clothes were suspended above us, beneath the tarp, drying. Inside the bag, her arms and legs were wrapped around me, placing me in a cocoon of her making. I took it as a good sign that my legs told me she hadn't shaved her legs in a few days.

For several minutes I lay there drinking in the smell of her. Sweat mixed with Coco Chanel. The touch of soft skin. Letting her body warm me. When I finally opened my eyes, I found her looking at me. The quiet expression on her face told me she was a little scared and a little mad, and I had some explaining to do. As she stared at me, I realized that the peroxide blonde of a month ago had been replaced by her natural amber brunette. Daley today looked like Daley twenty years ago. She spoke softly. “You lied to me.”

I knew she was talking about our conversation at the bus stop. “I never actually lied.”

“You didn't tell me the whole truth.”

“I didn't want to hurt you.”

“Cooper, I been hurting for twenty years. Hurt is a way of life.” She adjusted one arm, wrapping tighter around me. “Either tell me what you're afraid to tell me, or so help me I'm dragging you back into that river and holding your head under until you decide to talk.”

From the moment I'd met her onstage at the Ryman, I'd always loved her strength. And even after two decades, she still had it. I swallowed, knew I wasn't going to die right that second, and so I backed up and started at the beginning.

“In the aftermath of the fire, Sam spun two stories. In the first, he and I discovered a guy robbing his office. The guy shot me, thumped Sam on the head, torched the office, and disappeared like a ghost. Then, at great risk to his own life, Sam mustered the inner strength to drag us both from the raging inferno.”

Daley nodded.

“That was the public version. And, incidentally, that's the version I heard from the doctor when I woke in the hospital.”

She nodded a second time.

“The second story, supposedly the true one, is the one he told you in confidence—in an apparent selfless attempt to keep it quiet and help me. In story number two, Sam discovered me and a second mystery man robbing his office safe and a rather expensive Martin guitar. He confronted us, the conversation went south, my so-called partner shot me, thumped him in the head, and, again at risk of his own life, and despite the fact that I'd just betrayed him, Sam rescued me from the fire while my unnamed partner left us both to bake to a crisp. Gone missing was something like eighty thousand in cash and Bernadette's mother's jewelry, valued somewhere north of two hundred thousand. This ringing a bell?”

“Yes.”

“But what if neither was true?”

She waited.

“After I left, and you walked into the recording studio, how were the songs?”

“Good.”

“And after that?”

“Not so much.”

“And what happened between those two dates? Between you and Sam?”

“Sam made advances. I said no.”

“Did he all of a sudden find new girls to replace you?”

“Yes, but he was always signing new talent.”

“And the songs they sang? Were they any good?”

She nodded. “Very.”

“Where'd he get those songs?”

“Sam's genius was that he always had his finger on the pulse of the city. Sam had writers everywhere.”

“After the fire, a lot of noise was made about his money and his trophy wife's jewelry. But what was the one thing you never heard about after the fire?”

She shook her head. “I don't know, Coop. It was a long time ago. What are you getting at?”

“What was the one thing you never saw me without?”

“A notebook.”

“Even now, have you seen me without it?”

“No.”

“Doesn't it strike you as odd that the most valuable thing lost in that fire was never mentioned by Sam, and yet you knew as well as anyone it was the one thing he kept trying to get his hands on?”

“But . . . the fire took everything. You barely escaped alive.”

“Don't you find that the least bit convenient?”

“But why didn't you speak up?”

I continued, “Let me open door number three. Sam discovered you, cared for you, and ‘made' you. His plan was working out great, until the night you first sang at the Ryman. Then the world heard you sing my
song. Sam's no dummy. Where there's one, there might be more. So he encourages you to get to know me, and then he gets close to us. He sees me constantly writing in my little black book and he sees a gold mine. Dollar signs. Problem is, I'm attached to it and I'm attached to you. What's more, he realizes that the source of the song in you is the pen in me. So now he needs to hatch a plan to get you and the notebook and get rid of me all in one fell swoop.

“Sam was just biding his time until he happened to find me alone in his office, where I just happened to be stealing Jimmy. He couldn't have scripted it any better. He saw the perfect chance, shot me, blew up the evidence, then ‘rescued' me. You know the rest. When the smoke clears and I'm lying in the hospital with my skin peeling off, he's effectively crippled my ability to make any type of music. Further, he's stolen my songs. And yet he knows there's one thing more important to me than those songs. You. Further still, he knows that I know that you have no future without my songs. And you would have no future with me. He was banking on the fact that if I loved you I would concede that he could give you a better future with my songs than I could with a burnt and broken body.”

Her head was shaking slowly side to side. “Why didn't you come to me? Tell me everything?”

“Turn the lens, Daley. Look from the hospital bed. What kind of future could I possibly give you? The best thing for you was for me to keep quiet and let Sam spin you a career with the songs I wrote. Not to mention, I couldn't talk or hear or play or go to the bathroom by myself . . . so how could I have explained any of this?”

She filled in the blanks. Rolled the tape forward. “Then I refused him and he took your songs elsewhere.”

“Right.”

“But that doesn't explain the mysterious third man. You never denied his existence, and you can't tell me that Sam gave himself that cut on his head. That was a huge gash.”

I shook my head. “That's a piece to the puzzle that I may never find.
I believe there was a third man, but I can't prove it any more than I can prove any of this. Sometimes in my dreams I see a man running through the fire wrapped in a blanket. Running toward me. But I can't move. And the flames are reaching up around my neck. I can't breathe and I wake up choking with the sheets wrapped around my face . . .”

The pieces were falling into place in Daley's mind. “So . . . there was never any money? No jewelry? From the beginning, all this was about . . . your songs?” Her eyes searched mine.

“And you.”

“Until I refused him.”

“Yes.”

The truth of the past settled in Daley's heart and pushed out the tears that had been there a long time.

“Let me fill in the rest,” I said. “That particular notebook held seventeen songs. And because I'd become rather good at the Nashville Number System, Sam didn't need me to play them to figure out how they sounded. I'd done all the hard work. Then you turned him down and he moved on, giving my songs to four different artists who turned them into twelve number ones and five platinum records.”

She turned to me. “And you couldn't prove they were yours.”

“Couldn't play. Couldn't sing. Couldn't argue ownership.” I paused. “I thought if I left quietly, Sam would take those songs and spin them into three or four records for you. Maybe five. Solidifying the next ten to fifteen years of your career, if he was smart. Which he was. I lay in that hospital bed and knew the best thing I could do was get out of the way. So I left. Quietly. A year went by. Followed by another. And I began hearing my songs on the radio, but it wasn't your voice singing them. By then it was too late.”

Daley stared out across the street. More of the truth settling in. “You've written seventeen number one songs spanning five artists?”

I said nothing.

“But you never contacted me.”

“Would you have believed me?”

“At the time, probably not.” She stiffened. “But none of this explains why you've stayed silent for twenty years. Twenty years, Cooper. That's a long time to hold my love.”

The time had come. “Dee, when Sam shot me, the bullet entered my liver. The good news is that the liver can heal itself. The bad news is that the bullet acted like a flying razor blade. By the time they got it out, the damage had been done. The resulting scar tissue was severe. In cases like mine, the liver thinks it's been abused and responds with cirrhosis. Even my initial lab results in the hospital confirmed this. As has every one since.”

“Like an alcoholic's?”

“Exactly. But cirrhosis doesn't require alcohol. Just damage. And of that, I have plenty. The scarring and hardening causes what the medical community calls ‘bleeding esophageal varices.' ”

She rose up and rested on an elbow. “What's that in English?”

“All our organs send blood to the liver. When the liver is damaged or scarred, blood can't flow through it like it's designed. That pressure backs up, or reroutes the blood flow. The first place is to the base of the esophagus.” I tapped the top of my sternum where my esophagus meets my stomach. “The problem there is that the veins in that area are thin and not designed to handle the pressure, allowing for the possibility of unpredictable rupture.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I'm a walking time bomb. No one can say when it will go off because they don't know how my liver will react. The doctors once thought I could heal up and live a relatively normal life, but the last twenty years have proven otherwise.”

Her lips tightened. A vein appeared below her right eye. Evidence that the truth was starting to sink in. “And your chances?”

I shook my head. “Slim.” I paused, staring at the river. “To none. Given my experience over the years, and the taste that rises in my mouth, my liver has reacted negatively. That means the varices can erupt suddenly and without warning, and I can find myself coughing up blood without enough time or cognitive ability to dial 911.”

She shook her head. “There's got to be something—”

“There's nothing. If it happens, it happens. But I'll never know it 'cause I'll be dead before my head hits the floor. I either go live my life or curl up in a fetal ball and wait.”

“But why here? Why the creek?”

“The doctor at Vanderbilt told me there was a study, if you can call it that, of a scientist working above the Arctic Circle. He said his research partner had cirrhosis. The medical community had given up on him. This doctor was able to prolong the guy's life by prescribing that he jump daily into freezing water for a certain number of seconds, and eventually minutes. The shock to his system removed blood from his extremities, slowed his heart rate, and, they thought, forced healthy regeneration of his liver. It also gave the veins at the base of his esophagus time to heal and strengthen.”

“And you believed this?”

“I found the study. Called the scientist.”

“What happened to the other guy, the one with cirrhosis?”

“Died of pneumonia.”

All of this was coming to a sudden halt inside her brain, where it was starting to make sense. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She bit her bottom lip. “How long do you have?”

I shrugged. “I had about ten seconds until you showed up.”

She leaned into me, pressing her flushed face to mine. The puzzle pieces were settling inside her mind. “This is why you never spoke up. To save me the pain of knowing this.”

“It seemed rather selfish to ask you to fall in love with someone who might be here tomorrow and might not.”

“You ever stop to think that decision wasn't up to you?”

“I didn't want to hurt you any more than—”

She managed a broken whisper. “I never stopped hoping.”

“I'd like to think that.”

Daley's necklace had spilled onto my chest but I'd paid it little mind. The silver chain hung long enough to place the pendant in the middle of
her chest. Over her heart. She shifted slightly and the pendant sparkled and now lay flat across my own heart.

But it was no pendant.

“I went back to the hospital, but somebody else was lying in your bed. Went to Riggs's, but your apartment was cleaned out. Went home and waited, but you never showed. A few days later, this appeared in my box.” The necklace held the engagement ring I'd given her twenty years ago. She wove her fingers in with mine and placed her hand on my chest. She said it a second time, shaking her head. “Never stopped hoping.”

Daley didn't wait for me to respond. She hooked her legs around me, pressed her chest against mine, and locked her hands behind my neck. “I've lost twenty years. I don't want to lose another twenty minutes.”

“Dee . . . I sip Pepto-Bismol like water. Eat Tums like Skittles. My bedtime cocktail is four tabs of Alka-Seltzer chased with Nilla Wafers. I've tried every tonic known to man. Despite everything, I'm just postponing the inevitable. I can't hold it back and I'm not in control of this.”