Long Way Gone (19 page)

H
aving one thing left to accomplish before we left, I took Daley on a drive. We headed out of town, through the horse farms, hay fields, and rolling hills.

She laid her head back. “Where're we going?”

“You'll see.”

We spent most of the afternoon just driving. Her hand in mine. We laughed. Talked of concerts.

“Remember when . . .”

“What about that guy . . .”

“What were we thinking?”

Band members. Broken guitar strings. The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. The Statue of Liberty. San Francisco Bay.

When she was comfortable in someone else's presence, and I mean like DNA-comfortable, Daley had a habit of singing to herself. Different melodies she'd string together. Some of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard weren't songs at all. I was pretty sure she wasn't aware she was doing it. Most of that afternoon she twirled her hair around one finger and sang. The anxious, fragile girl I'd met in the Ryman had been replaced by the radiant woman beside me. I'd grown used to her presence, her tenderness, her touch. Even her smell. Sometimes, when I was with her, I'd just close my eyes and breathe.

For dinner that night, I took her to my favorite restaurant. The Sudsy
Schnitzel. When we walked up to the counter I said, “Let me order.” She loved an adventure, so she smiled and found a table.

I prepared mine with onions, peppers, and spicy mustard. I prepared hers with cabbage, onions, and that strange cheese that smelled really bad. I arranged both on two plates, set out two napkins, two drinks. Then I found her in a corner next to the glass where we could watch the guys wash and wax Sam's Mercedes.

She took one whiff and said, “Wow! That's special. What on earth did you get me?”

I told her the story of the old man in the green Cadillac. “Every week he came here. Still in love.” I slid my hand beneath hers. “Dee, right now life is pretty good for us. The world is rolled out on a silver platter. But I've known it when it's not. I've known good and bad. I've known loneliness and I've been known . . . What I'm trying to say and not doing a very good job of it is this: I don't know what'll happen in the future. Can't promise you much. Don't know where we'll end. But just like the old man in the Cadillac, I know that I will love you a long, long time from now. Sixty years from now, I want to be sitting here ordering these same horrible dogs and laughing with you. Watching you twirl your hair around your finger and listening to your lullabies.”

I placed the ring in the palm of her hand. “I'm giving you all that I have. All I'm ever gonna have. I'm giving you my song.” I slid the ring on her finger. “Will you sing it back to me?”

The following week was a lot of fun. Sam feigned happiness, even threw us an engagement dinner at his house. I knew better. He'd been at this game a long time. And he'd never lost. That's the message he sent whenever I walked in his front door. I kept my eyes open.

On Monday morning we walked into the recording studio. The entire band. By Thursday evening we'd cut seven of the eight songs. Daley was elated. Sam seemed happy enough. Everyone agreed that
we'd wrap Friday and then spend the weekend listening to takes to decide which we liked.

Thursday evening we finished work and Sam had barbecue brought in, spread across his back porch. Everyone had left the studio except me. I wanted to restring Daley's McPherson, let the strings settle overnight to be ready for tomorrow morning. I'd fallen in love with that guitar.

Problem was I needed strings. I opened the case and found nothing. I knew I could get anything I needed from Riggs, but he was a forty-five-minute drive away, and I figured Sam had to have something lying around. I mean, this was a recording studio. So I started digging. I opened drawers and rummaged through closets.

Along one wall he had custom-built instrument closets. Each instrument had its own sliding drawer or closet, depending on size. Everything from electric violins to Gibson mandolins and banjos to Fender and Gibson electric guitars. He had one whole wall of Martins. Another of McPhersons.

I may not have liked Sam, and trusted him even less, but he and I had one thing in common: an affinity for nice instruments. We'd been so busy during the week that I hadn't had time to play but a few of them. I began sliding the drawers in and out, looking to see if anyone had tucked a set of strings alongside one of the guitars.

Nothing doing.

Last I opened one of the large storage closets where everything that didn't have a place was kept out of the way. Music stands, boxes of electrical stuff, a stuffed deer head, Styrofoam cups, packing blankets. In the back he'd stacked the cases that went along with all the guitars. I wound my way through the stacks and started opening guitar cases. No strings.

I sat down.
You mean to tell me that in one of the most successful recording studios in Nashville, there isn't a set of medium strings?

Sam's office was a separate two-story building fifty feet away, connected to the studio by a winding walkway. Downstairs was the conference room and upstairs was his office. I walked the flagstone path to the door,
found it unlocked, and let myself in. I glanced into the heart-pine-paneled conference room and then went up the open staircase to the office.

If I thought Sam's
house
was a museum, I had another thing coming. His office was his own private Hall of Fame. Warm leather. Recessed lighting. An oak desk half the size of the room. A pecky cypress conference table with twelve chairs on each side lining one wall. A gun safe discreetly tucked away in one corner. The walls had custom-built cutouts, each with its own individual lighting, where he kept his most prized awards. Pictures with presidents. More than a dozen Grammys. Two Oscars for contribution to two different soundtracks.

Interestingly, there were no pictures of wives. Or children. Or grandkids' paintings. Nothing. Everything centered around Sam. I walked around to take a closer look and observed that he was always in the middle of the pictures. The word that came to mind was
narcissistic
.

Behind his desk, a door led into a smaller sitting room. A couple of leather couches. Looked like his personal music room. Or where he kept his most prized stuff. The back of the wall was mostly glass and looked out across the pasture and horse farm. A beautiful view. On either side, facing each other, were a couple of glass cases filled with three guitars. Two electrics on the right, one Gibson, one Fender; and one acoustic on the left. I couldn't see any reason for their significance. No plaque. I eyeballed the electrics with mild interest. What kid-at-heart doesn't love a good electric guitar? But it was the yellowed spruce top and signature Martin headstock of the acoustic that caught my attention. I flipped on the light switch and my knees nearly buckled.

Jimmy.

I stood there staring. My breath fogging up the glass. The glass was locked, so I ran my fingers above the trim boards of the case on both sides and found a small key that fit the lock. I unlocked it and slid the glass open. Jimmy appeared unhurt, relatively unplayed since I last saw him. I lifted him gently off the rack and ran my fingers up and down his neck and headstock like Helen Keller running her hand under the water at the Alabama pump house.

Years ago I'd developed my own way of stringing a guitar. Once I'd fastened the string end securely beneath the bridge pin, I would wrap the string twice around the tuner peg, then separate the strings and run the loose end between those wraps and then through the hole in the tuner, then tighten and tune. That meant that as I turned the tuner, tightening the string, the tension pinched the strings even tighter, allowing the guitar to stay in tune longer. Or so I told myself.

Lots of guys did this. The thing that made my technique a little different was that when finished, I snipped the string ends smooth to the touch so they wouldn't snag anything. Most guys left a tag.

I ran my fingers across the tuners. The string ends had been cut smooth. Based on the dull color of the strings, the smooth ends, and the fact that the strings sat a little higher off the neck, I came to think that Jimmy had not been played in a long time. Meaning Sam had somehow acquired Jimmy and then hung him up here and forgotten about him. Which meant he had no desire to play him. He just desired that someone else not play him. And that someone else was me.

Jimmy, too, had become a trophy.

I sank my fingers into him, and while the strings had lost their life, Jimmy had not. His deep, boxy, mellow, resonating sound came to life, and a slide show of memories paraded across my eyelids. From watching Dad walk forward from the rear of the tent or weave through the aspens, to all those hours I spent playing that guitar in the backseat of the truck while Dad and Big-Big taught me licks, the pictures flooded back. Some were grainy, black and white. And some were Technicolor and 3-D. All were tied to a tether on my soul. I turned him over, held his headstock up to the dim light, and read the words my mom had engraved when she gave Jimmy to my father on their wedding day.

To me, Jimmy was not simply wood, glue, and string. Many nights I'd slept with one arm draped across his neck. He had been my teddy bear. My mom's whisper. The arms of my father. The plumb line. Now he was my ticket home.

I felt a seething anger. How did Sam acquire Jimmy? When? How
long had he had him? Why? Did Sam thump me in the head himself? He struck me as someone who paid others to do his dirty work. I had so many questions, and yet I knew that if I asked any of them, if I showed any interest at all in what was apparently one of Sam's most prized trophies, Jimmy would disappear and I'd never see him again.

What to do. I had to either steal Jimmy or find Sam in his office, confront him, and take Jimmy in plain sight. But I had to do all that without interfering with the recording of our album and Daley's career.

I'd picked a fight with the schoolyard bully before and was all too happy to do it again, but punching Sam in the teeth would not help Daley. I had to outsmart him, not outpunch him. I had to find a replacement for Jimmy and make the switch without being seen. It would be years before Sam would even notice he was gone.

I
spent early Friday morning rummaging through Riggs's old Martins. When he asked me what I was doing, I told him I was looking for an older-looking D-28. Something yellowed. He slid one out of a rack, opened the case, and handed it to me. A late sixties or early seventies model. I was shopping not for a particular sound so much as a color. I held it to the light. Close enough.

I paid him four thousand dollars and began thinking about timing. My best bet would be later today, after we'd finished recording and everyone was celebrating on his pool deck. Better yet, later that evening, after Sam had been drinking. Ninety seconds was all I needed.

We wrapped the recording Friday afternoon to champagne, cold beer, hot dogs, and burgers. I manned the grill and kept my eye on Sam.

With one arm around Daley, he lifted his glass and began his toast with a listing of new tour dates. He then toasted Daley, her voice, and her connection with the audience, which was, he said, unlike anything he'd ever seen. The sky was the limit. Then he toasted the band and their hard work. Lastly, he toasted me.

“I've been in this business a long time, seen a lot of great ones, but I've never seen anyone mix a guitar with words the way Cooper O'Connor does.” He looked at me. “The way you match the guitar with words and her voice . . .” His eyes subconsciously glanced at the small of my back. “It's uncanny.” He looked from me to Daley and back to me. “There's
no telling how far the two of you can go.” He lifted his glass. “To all the great things to come.”

For a minute there I almost believed him.

By ten o'clock everyone had mellowed. Sam was circulating the pool deck, talking with Bernadette, moving in and out of the house, taking phone calls—proving that he was never not working. When somebody called from out of state, I saw my chance. Sam disappeared inside and I said to Daley, “Be right back.”

I scooted around the side of the house, popped the trunk on Daley's car, grabbed the new-old Martin, and then walked through the woods toward the office. I let myself in through the back door to the conference room, shot upstairs, and made my way through his office in the dark. I walked around his desk, through the open door behind, found the key, unlocked the glass door, slid it open, exchanged guitars, locked it back up, and hid the key. Then I exited his office and caught a faint whiff of propane gas. Which I'd not smelled upon entering. I hurried back down the stairs and through the conference room toward the back door, where the smell grew stronger.

And where I bumped into Sam.

The single outside light shone down on his silhouette. His steely eyes were focused on me and the guitar case. In his right hand he held a gun. He lifted his arm, pointed the gun at me, and said absolutely nothing.

Then he pulled the trigger.

As his forearm flexed, pulling the trigger on the revolver, I lifted Jimmy across my chest. The blast blinded me as the bullet pierced the case and entered Jimmy's spruce top, exited his Brazilian rosewood back, and then entered me, where it sliced into my chest cavity.

I have a vague memory of a flash of light, a large explosion, of pain in my ears, searing heat in my throat and eyes, of something falling
onto me that was too heavy to move. When I opened my eyes, the world was on fire. My chest felt like someone had shoved a hot poker through it. The smoke was so thick I couldn't see. I tried to scream. I tried to move.

Jimmy lay next to me. I pulled him to me. Wrapped my left arm around him. Trying to protect him from the heat. I remember clutching him, knowing that we would both die in that room. I felt around behind me, between my back and belt, but my notebook was gone. The thought of it burning somewhere in this room saddened me. More than the hole in my chest.

I thought of Daley, heard her voice, saw her face. I would have liked to spend a lifetime with her. My last thoughts were of my father. How would he hear the news? How would he take it? Would he drive down here and bring my crispy body home? Bury me in the aspens next to Mom? What would he put on my tombstone?

C
OOPER
‟P
EG
” O'C
ONNOR

D
EAD AT
T
WENTY
-F
OUR

S
UCH
P
ROMISE

S
UCH
P
AIN

S
UCH A
W
ASTE

My throat felt like someone was filleting it with a small knife. I couldn't stand much more. I tried again to get up, but the stuff on top of me was too heavy and my right hand was useless and wouldn't do what my brain was telling it.

I wanted to die with my eyes open. To see what it looked like when I limped from this world into the next. But the smoke burned my eyes. One ear heard nothing. The other was ringing.

Then I heard a strange sound. Almost familiar. A man's voice screaming my name. At first it was faint. Then closer. Then a shadow appeared. I didn't know who it was or where he'd come from, but a figure wrapped in a blanket hovered over me. I remember the blanket
brushing over me and cooling my face, and I realized that it was soaking wet. When they say people in hell want ice water, they're not kidding.

The man lifted whatever was holding me down with one hand and picked me up with the other. He threw me over his shoulder, grabbed Jimmy with his other hand, and carried me away through the flames. Stuff was cracking, falling, smoke was billowing. I was coughing and spurting blood out the hole in my chest and I'd never been so hot in my entire life. But the guy was just striding like it was Sunday. Not a care in the world.

The world went black.

My last conscious thought was,
Dad, I'm sor—
but the words never made it out my mouth.

Not enough air.