https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
"My Name Is Travis Jackson" by Nels Hanson
Continued from part 4
She squeezed my arm, stood on tiptoes and kissed me hard and long on the mouth, then swiveled, squeezing my hand.
The men looked at me, then at Jodie.
Maybe they thought how lucky I was.
Or maybe that we were both crazy.
I had no idea what Jodie had told them.
“And what do I do?”
Jodie started again, making a face.
“I treat him like some kid playing hooky, like some escaped outlaw, sending a posse after him—”
“I wouldn’t call it a posse, Mrs. Cole. Just a little favor among friends.”
Jodie stared at the men, as if they were partly at fault.
“Buck’s like a brother to the President.”
“We know that, Mrs. Cole,” Jake said. “We saw Buck at the White House.”
“Right there with W and Laura.”
“The President’s quite a fan,” Reg said. “So are we.”
“He just needed to be alone, away from all the phonies and barflies, in some place he felt comfortable—”
Jodie dropped my hand, quickly turning.
“What do I care, if he has some imaginary friend?”
I felt a wave of nausea. Neither man spoke or moved nor exchanged a glance.
They looked at Jodie’s back as she crossed the room past the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. The sky was full of thick smoke and now you could hear other sirens.
“Travis Jackson isn’t imaginary,” I said.
I reached in the front pocket of my jeans.
“I found something else you need to look at.”
Jodie had her head down, working at a player on the coffee table. She was done blaming her or me and back to business.
“I’ll show you what kind of music Buck Cole can write,” she was saying.
“Jodie—”
Before I could stop her she’d slipped the tape into the console.
“You ready?” she said to Jake Summer and Reg Phillips.
“Ready, Mrs. Cole?” Reg asked.
“This is your lucky day. It’s not everybody gets to hear an unreleased Buck Cole.”
She stood for a moment, proud and smiling, then hit the button. She dropped back into the big chair, crossing her legs, waiting casually as the tape began to crackle.
Instantly my voice filled the room, talking, upset, shouting and weeping, cursing her up and down, cursing me, then calmer, describing what had gone on in my head the last three years, how I’d slipped around the bend, lost touch with my heart, the place I was from.
How I’d made up a real person to hide the fact I’d lost myself.
“How could I give him up without dying?”
Then suddenly furious again: “And why did you do it? You know, Jodie, it’s a kind of bloody murder.”
It was scary, like some demon talking, except he was telling the truth to save his soul. It was hard to hear, from anybody.
In the background between outbursts as he stopped to catch his breath you could hear the phone ringing in Travis Jackson’s kitchen.
Jodie just sat there looking straight ahead.
“And your mother asked if you’d been good to me?”
I’d forgotten I’d said that, that I knew her mother was still alive. I’d forgotten a lot since the burning heat of the moment. I’d planned to keep Melva’s Nashville visit a secret for a while and now I waited for something about her father just dead from cancer, not killed 20 years ago in a wreck with his body thrown across the oak limb.
But it didn’t come.
“In the name of God, how can you look at yourself in the mirror, much less look at me, or fuck in the Lincoln bedroom where that great man lay? Honest Abe, for Christ’s sake!”
I kept expecting her to turn off the tape, to start to argue, to get up and kick the men out, to kick me out. I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she didn’t.
“If you crawled naked on your knees to Nashville and back it wouldn’t be enough in a hundred years! Tell a man he’s got a make-believe buddy, laugh about it to his so-called friends and then on TV with that prick Donnie Williams, talk heart-to-heart with dear old Saint Laura? Threaten to commit your husband to a mental institution while every second you knew and planned the whole goddamned fucking thing! And how in the world did you think you’d pull it off? Hope I’d stay the right kind of crazy?”
I was out of hand, but the evidence was there for anyone to see and it didn’t make her side look very good.
“You should give me a crown, for the world’s biggest fool! You’ll get one too, if you can steal it from Lady Macbeth!”
A fair jury would have hanged her and I think she knew it, even when I started in on the Bushes.
“That prissy little phony with the jeans and the cowboy boots and the bullshit pickup truck! He wouldn’t know a horse and cow from Barney’s fucking pups!”
The two men stood nervously the first few minutes—I think they sensed I wouldn’t hurt her, that I’d already blown off the steam at the ranch, and when they saw Jodie wasn’t violent they realized their job was done.
They’d searched me, they knew I wouldn’t pull a pistol or knife.
Anyway, that wasn’t their business, marriage counseling or refereeing celebrity domestic quarrels between visiting guests. They were paid to find the wayward Harrah’s headliner and bring him home in one piece, before the curtain went up on the sold-out show—they’d done their work, more or less.
It wasn’t their fault they were chasing two men instead of one.
“And one last thing, while we’re on the subject of your favorite hobby, this political Bible-thumper frame-up you’ve weaseled your way into, this pious Sunday school quit drinking crap over the phone— You think Jesus doesn’t know what you and your Texas friends’ve been up to?”
And they kept quiet about it. They saw all kinds of things.
In their black suits, Reg and Jake, short and tall, waited like a pair of sad priests. The Enquirer would have paid a pretty penny for an exclusive on the Coles’ “hotel blow-up.”
Hell, any paper would have, even The New York Times.
Who knows? Buck and Jodie were pretty big—Maybe it might have thrown up some dust as Bush and Cheney set the stage for Iraq. I never saw a word of it in print.
“Mrs. Cole. Mr. Cole. We have to leave you now.”
They watched Jodie, then turned to me and I walked them to the door.
“Take care, Buck.” Jake smiled.
“Thanks for the ride.”
“Anytime,” said Reg.
He winked and leaned forward
“Just so you know, Jake and I went for Gore.”
“Take care. I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
I closed the door and stepped back into the big room.
On the tape I’d quieted again and now sounded almost normal. I felt divided hearing it, the obvious emotion in my voice. Maybe I was crazy, or just stupid.