Less Than Nothing (17 page)

His expression goes dead serious, but he can’t hide the merriment dancing in his eyes. “You want the truth?”

“Never mind. It was rhetorical.”

“You’re still the most beautiful singer sleeping on the grass in St. Louis.”

He definitely knows how to start my day with a bang. “You can’t possibly be sure of that unless you’ve seen all singers sleeping on the grass here. So you’re just blowing smoke,” I say, but I’m beaming ear to ear. I never get tired of Derek telling me I’m beautiful. Which stops me as I rise. I’ve never told him how handsome he is. And this is…this is twice he’s told me I’m beautiful.
Which could be what he says to all his girls
, an ugly little voice in my head taunts, but I shut it down.
Let me have this. Don’t screw it up.

I’m summoning up the courage to give him a morning peck on the cheek, and then realize that without any toothbrushing that might not play so well. Instead, I lift my backpack and slowly roll my head to loosen a kink in my neck.

“I’ll be right back,” I mutter and turn before he can say anything more.

The restroom is exactly what I expect, and I feel like I need to bathe in bleach after using it. I can only imagine what the men’s room is like, and my thoughts flit to Helen, whose life is filled with these little slices of heaven on a daily basis.

I consider my reflection in the chipped mirror. I was expecting worse. I decide Derek’s just trying to be nice with the compliments – whatever beautiful looks like, it isn’t what’s staring back at me.

I do my best to take a sink bath using liquid soap from the grimy dispenser and moist paper towels. After a final glance at myself, I return to where Derek’s waiting.

“Want me to bring you back some coffee?” he asks as he shoulders his rucksack.

“That would be awesome.” My mouth wants to say something more, but my brain’s still groggy and doesn’t comply. I curse silently as he turns and strides to the restrooms – yet another opportunity to dazzle him with my brilliance gone forever.

He’s back in half the time I took, looking all kinds of great, a steaming cup of St. Louis’ finest in his fist. He hands the coffee to me and drops onto the sleeping bag with a loud sigh. “Tell the trucks to be quiet for a while, okay?” he says and then rolls over onto his right side.

I text Melody about our progress and am quickly out of things to do – there’s no way she’s up yet with the time difference, and I don’t know anybody else to bug. As of now, my circle extends to the enigmatic hunk of dudeness sleeping a few feet away and Melody. I don’t know whether to be sad or relieved she’s not awake, because I really don’t want to have to explain why after two days on the road with Derek, nothing’s happened. I can imagine her disgusted expression as she reads it – she’d have closed the deal within a half hour, tops.

The sun’s beginning its slow arc into the morning sky, pulling many of the trucks onto the highway for another relentless day’s drive.

I open Yam’s case and busy myself changing the strings, but I’m restless, whether from the coffee or my inner dialogue and doubts, I’m not sure. I’ve perfected the fine art of driving myself slowly crazy with second guesses and recriminations, and I’m at my worst when I’m alone in my head.

Two hours later it’s getting uncomfortably hot, and Derek stirs before rolling toward me. I peer at him over the top of my book.

“Feeling better?” I ask.

“Yeah. I kind of needed that.” He looks around at the lot, which is now ninety percent empty. “Let’s grab some food and then hit it. Memphis waits for no man.”

Breakfast is interchangeable with the other truck stops we’ve been in, and by the time I’m done, I can feel grease coagulating in my veins. We start walking south along the frontage road and stop by the on-ramp, me with my thumb out. It’s almost an hour before a car stops – an eighties sedan that’s more rust than body. The driver’s a white guy with that weird bald ponytail thing that some old codgers try to pull off. Gray strands are carefully strung across his tanned bald spot like piano wire. He looks me up and down and then switches to Derek, taking a long, appraising glance before he rolls down the passenger window.

“Where you headed?” he asks, as stale nicotine wafts from the car.

“Memphis,” I say.

“Only headed to Sikeston. Get you ’bout halfway there,” he says.

Derek approaches the car and gives the driver the once-over. He nods. “That would be great.”

We toss our stuff onto the back seat, and I climb in. Derek takes the passenger seat. I check the side of the open door to make sure the child lock is turned off before I close it – I want to be able to get out quickly if I have to.

The car smells like an ashtray. There’s a film of brown crud on everything from decades of smoking, and I do my best to ignore it – a ride’s a ride, and if the driver wants to poison himself, it’s not my problem.

Derek strikes up a conversation. The man’s name is Ben, and he’s lived here all his life. He wants to know what we’re up to, so Derek tells him about the show. Unlike Helen and Gus, he seems only marginally interested in our story. Derek offers him twenty bucks toward gas, and ol’ Ben livens up. I can tell he’s happy because he stops chain-smoking long enough to take the money.

When he drops us off near the intersection of the highway that veers off to Sikeston, I smell like I crawled in through a garbage dump and fought my way out through cigarette butts.

“Tell me that wasn’t frigging gross,” I complain, and Derek nods.

“Pretty evil.” He looks around. Not a lot of traffic, which isn’t promising. We’re still well over a hundred miles from Memphis, which will be a long walk if nobody picks us up.

This is farm country, and for as far as we can see, there’s nothing but fields stretching to infinity on the flat plain. The sun’s blistering and it’s muggy. Within a half hour I can feel myself getting sunburned, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. The cars that do come by don’t even slow down, and by noon we’re both questioning the wisdom of our detour.

“Maybe we should try down the road?” I venture, wiping sweat from my brow with the back of my arm.

“We better do something, because we’ve been here almost two hours and we’re dead in the water,” he agrees. “I wonder if there’s anything south of us? I didn’t see anything promising north, did you?”

“Just corn. Lots and lots of corn.”

“Problem is, we can’t walk down the highway. So we’ll have to find something that parallels it and keep our eyes peeled.”

“That sucks,” I say and notice that there’s no more talk about how beautiful I am now. Fortunately I’m a good walker – it’s one of the few pastimes you have as a homeless person that’s both free and good for you.

We head toward Sikeston and stop at a gas station. The attendant tells us that our best bet is a truck stop about seven miles south – the Flying J. He says a lot of travelers stop there for lunch, and that if we’re lucky, we can make it in a couple of hours. I exchange a dark glance with Derek, who’s obviously as happy as I am with our predicament. The guy tells us there’s a country road that runs along the freeway, so we backtrack and begin our forced march, every mile as uncomfortable as any I’ve walked, with the heat and stifling humidity.

A line of plum-colored thunderheads are gathering on the horizon by the time we make it to the Flying J, and we squander another fifteen dollars on crappy food while we debate our options. Derek makes a good case for staying at the truck stop, so after I buy a tube of 70 SPF sunblock and slather it on my face and arms, we settle in for the afternoon, tired, dusty, feet sore, stuck between nowhere and nothing, on the road to Memphis.

We score a ride at two thirty from three church ladies in a Suburban, who seem taken with Derek and chatter with him all the way to Memphis. They’re sweet, but the combination of sunburn and fatigue have sucked my will to live, and I doze while we rumble south, leaving it to Derek to play entertainment committee. He’s naturally good at it, and by the time we arrive in the city center, they’re all best friends, advising us on where to eat, what parts of town to stay clear of, things to see at Graceland.

They drop us off near the Mississippi River, and we make our way to the water, where hopefully there’s a breeze. Memphis is nothing like I pictured, with skyscrapers, a massive glass pyramid, and BMWs racing down wide boulevards, all alongside old-fashioned trolley cars and centuries-old buildings.

A woman handing out religious pamphlets proclaiming that Jesus is a-comin’ any day now tells us that Graceland closes at five o’clock, so our all-day ordeal got us here too late to see it.

“What do you want to do, Derek?” I ask. He’s staring down the street.

“Let’s head over there. It looks like a park. Maybe we can find some shade and hang out.”

The park’s a big square, and there are a decent number of pedestrians out, so we decide to play for a few hours and see if we can earn back some lunch money. We tune up, and I dig out my blanket, and in just under an hour we’ve made six bucks – not great, but better than nothing, and it’s not like we have anywhere to go. I calculate that we can probably make enough to pay for a fleabag motel if we play for eight hours – a depressing thought.

Still, every time Derek smiles during one of our harmonies, my heart sings in time with my voice, and my mind turns to us. It’s all I’ve been thinking about the entire day, but I’m no closer to deciding what to do than I was when I woke up. I’m feeling sorry for myself. It shouldn’t be this hard. He should just grab me, kiss me, and get it over with.

Unless all the talk about how beautiful I am is just that. I can’t figure Derek out – one minute he’s flattering me and sending obvious signals, and then the next it’s like I’m his little sister. I begin to feel frustration turning to anger, and remind myself that, just as I have a running commentary going on in my head, so does he – and I’ve got no idea what his is saying.

We’re finishing up a Doobie Brothers song when an explosion of exhaust roars from the street and a redneck voice shouts at us, “Get a job, shitheads!”

I look up. There’s a moron hanging out the window of a blue Dodge pickup with oversized tires, his face red.
Friendly place, Memphis,
I think as my anger surges, and I flip him off. I’ve heard it all before, and what idiots like him don’t seem to realize is that I
have
a job – I’m a musician, and it’s one of the toughest ways I can think of to make a living.

I’m not a vagrant or a bum. I don’t want charity. There’s effort and skill involved, which is why people toss their money into the case. I entertain them, and if I do it competently enough, they pay me for a job well done. Just because I’m not changing tires or working in a factory doesn’t mean what I do doesn’t have value. I realize I’m getting furious, going from calm to pissed in seconds flat.

“Just ignore them,” Derek warns and locks his eyes on mine. “You okay?”

I nod. “Yeah. Sorry. I shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“You’re only human. It bugs me too.” He grins. “Don’t worry. Pretty soon we’ll be on TV, and then we’ll be trying to figure out how to spend our half million while that doofus is still working at Jiffy Lube.”

I strum a chord and fiddle with the tuning of my high E. Of course he’s right. Derek’s always right, it seems. I wish I had his calm confidence, that assurance that’s so attractive, but I don’t. I can fake it, play tough, but inside I’ve got more contradictions going on than anyone I know.

“Let’s hope so. Don’t worry. I’ll get over it. At least we’ve got proof they make idiots in Tennessee just like they do back home.”

“New, improved idiots. Now with twenty percent more idiot,” he intones.

“I could practically hear him breathing through his mouth,” I agree.

We play for another hour, and things pick up. We’ve made twenty dollars, but it’s getting dark, and flashes of dry lightning are streaking across the sky to the west. The storm we saw earlier has advanced, and we’ll need to find shelter or get soaked. The pedestrian traffic has thinned, and the few people still on the street are hurrying. The air’s heavy with moisture, and as we set our guitars into their cases, a low boom of thunder explodes nearby.

I’m pulling on my backpack when Derek grabs my arm. “Uh-oh.” I look up and see two men beelining for us from across the park. I recognize one of them – the shouter from the truck.

My eyes saucer. “Shit. Let’s get out of here.”

“Too late. Stay here,” he says, and then he’s up, walking toward them as they near, his shoulders square. The shouter’s about the same size as Derek, but the driver’s a monster, probably six three. Fear shoots through me as they approach, and Derek picks up his pace.

The rednecks slow as they get a better look at Derek in his motorcycle jacket, and the driver seems to be having second thoughts when the shouter closes the final ten feet and throws a punch. Derek ducks it, and then everything seems to happen fast. He kicks the shouter in the ribs and follows it with a punch to the face, and before the bigger guy can react, his friend’s howling, holding his nose, blood streaming between his fingers. The driver bellows and rushes Derek, and I stifle a scream as he lands a blow on the side of Derek’s head.

Derek’s knees buckle, but he’s still standing, and he reacts in a blur of motion, raining punches on the big man. I can hear the smack of skin on skin, and then the shouter’s back up and tries to take Derek down, lunging for his waist. Derek sidesteps him and knees him in the solar plexus. He goes down hard, the wind knocked out of him, and his companion swings a wild punch at Derek’s head. He sees it coming and dodges it, and then spins and levels a brutal kick at the big man’s beer gut. When it connects, I can practically hear him deflate, and he sinks to his knees in slow motion, holding his stomach, obviously stunned.