https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
"My Name Is Travis Jackson" by Nels Hanson
Continued from page 2
“Tough road.”
Reg bent over the wheel when we went along the dry creek past the green cliff of serpentine.
“Ever fill up?”
“Every spring.”
“Right,” he said, glancing at me, “that’s right. Like in your song about Travis Jackson.”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking of Jodie, about what I was going to say. About what she would say.
Then I remembered I’d already said my piece.
I touched the cassette in my pocket.
We hit the gravel at the windmill and Reg asked if he could play the radio.
“You’re probably tired of music.”
“No, go ahead.”
The DJ was promoting the Harrah’s show, announcing he was going to play all our songs one after the other and give away free concert tickets to people who called in with the exact titles.
“This okay?”
I shrugged.
“Out Fever Creek there’s a crazy man,
Wild hair and beard and a crazy look.
He’ll run away if you wave your hand,
Had three wives but nothing took—”
On the gravel road, rock flying up as Jodie gunned the Cadillac through the blowing snow and we headed for Utah, she’d told me Owen had one ironclad demand. We’d cut “Travis Jackson” first thing in Denver.
But we couldn’t sing a song about ourselves. That would ruin a sure hit.
“Travis Jackson was a friend of mine
Cowboy-bred but out of time— ”
From now on we’d go by “Buck and Jodie Cole.”
Then the song surged to fame, Travis Jackson assumed the dimensions of a legend, became a sentimental icon of a disappearing world that maybe never was.
“I was drowning and he threw me a rope.
When I was lost he gave me hope.”
The Travis we sang about wasn’t me. But he was everywhere and he was loved, even by the President and astronauts in space, as only something made up can be loved, because you can’t find it on Earth. I’d become my own Lash Larue.
“See the horses, watch them run
Across the moon, then past the sun,
Travis Jackson’s going strong
Till the West is going, going, gone.”
It seemed only natural that I’d treated Travis as a separate person and then like a couple million other lost and lonely souls fallen in love with Jodie’s myth of my former self. She’d changed the name in the lyrics that first night at the ranch, to begin a romance and a career.
“Travis Jackson was a loving friend,
Taught me not to break but bend—”
I was flattered and had gone right along.
“Like the willow growing by the creek.
He showed me I was strong, not weak.”
After opening night with Johnny Black at the Branding Iron, Travis Jackson didn’t belong to me anymore.
“Sunset, pasture, stand of pines,
Do I hear a dollar, do I hear a dime?”
The moment the song’s Travis Jackson was born, Buck Cole started to stir, and the real Travis, whoever he’d been, became a long-lost friend of himself.
Something like that.
In Jodie’s world, people disappeared before their time, like her mother and father, Johnny Black and Red Stampley.
“If a thing ain’t right then it must be wrong . . . .”
By the time we got to the freeway, we’d heard the DJ play half the Cole repertoire and 20 people call in to win their free tickets. Reg asked if I’d like to get some breakfast in Lovelock, but I said, “No, let’s go see Jodie.”
“Sure,” he said, “she’ll be waiting.”
We didn’t talk after that, except after the radio played “100 Proof Memory” and he said that was the song he liked best. His wife was a big fan of ours. She wanted to come to see us, but her aunt was sick in Ely.
Like Raymond Welch at the service station in Wells, her favorite was “Blind Man’s Bluff.”
We’d heard it just a minute before. How did it go?
“Well, Blind Man’s Bluff
Is a fun game to play
But it’s getting rough
Because day by day“I can’t trust you,
And you can’t trust me,
And our love ain’t new,
Like it used to be—”
After a while Reg reached over and switched off the radio.
“Enough for now?”
“I think so.”
I watched the dry hills and country go by. Things didn’t look so harsh in the morning light, even without the sunglasses.
I realized that like George Walker Bush I wasn’t even thinking of a drink, though the occasion might have served for an ex-drinker’s good alibi.
“Something’s on fire.”
Reg nodded forward at the windshield, at a tower of black smoke in the distance.
“I hope it’s not Harrah’s,” he said.
He lifted his cell phone from the seat.
“Can you hit it?” I asked.
“Mr. Cole, that I can do—”
As he put the phone to his ear he stamped down hard on the pedal so I leaned backed in the seat.
In the side mirror I saw Jodie’s white Caddie hesitate and then run up behind us as we raced the last miles into Reno.
“It’s the Grand,” Reg said. “We’re all right.”