Heartland, page 13
Before continuing, those liquid keyboard teardrops falling behind her, and with that same Haggard-style trademark wrinkle of ache in her voice, in her mind wandering back up in the hills and hollows of her childhood, with the Arkansas river flowing close by.
Other times, then, it could seem like she was a completely different person – like the night she ran riot, climbing down off the stage and mingling among the dancers, shredding her throat out, like someone possessed.
As the pile-driving Southern rock, with its heavy riffing, sweeping slide fuzz guitar, continued at a jangling, coruscating lick, and the breathless drummer pounded up a storm, accelerating the rhythm as the volume swelled until the tensions in the ballroom almost reached bursting point.
With the cymbals crashing wildly as she hugged the microphone, speaking wildly in tongues about desert freeways, cavernous skies, the eyes rolling in her head as she seemed almost delirious, intoxicated by the rise of the music.
While the feet of the dancers flew thick and fast as reels, cotillions and waltzes all seemed to be so mingled and blended together that it might well have been described as a dance without a name.
–Let me tell you about the last days! they heard her cry. You want to know about the last days, my friends? Why – don’t you know? These are those days, the ones we’re living through this minute – right now!
After which she’d scaled the steel supports of the balcony and performed a swandive right into the centre of the floor.
Before landing in the middle of Ricky ‘Big-Style’s astonished, awaiting lap.
But, a hoot and a holler though she could be on those occasions, one thing you didn’t do was to think you could take Dawn Kit for granted or do her down, in any shape or form.
Nope, that was something you did not do.
As the unfortunate Teddy ‘Buckfast’ Carson was to discover, one Saturday night in the Heartland bar, after hours.
When he had sidled up to her standing at the counter and spat sourly out of the side of his mouth: Way I hear it, Miss Kit King, you ain’t much more’n a honky tonk whore – a backcountry Jezebel, that’s what you are and all you’ll ever be.
And about which she seems to do nothing at the time – nope, absolutely nothing at all – only to give him this look like he’s hurt her real bad, slipping away as she cradles her round of drinks.
Only the next week, there he is, right in the middle of the crowd again, with the whole place out of their brains as usual, and those buzzsaw chords from the electric slide fuzz guitar threatening to burn the roof off the hall as the heavy percussion continues thundering away.
And what’s Dawn doing only stalking the stage, punctuating the tense, erotically charged air with a series of syncopated, rapid handclaps, prowling like a panther in her black leather rhinestone-studded jacket and low-slung, stonewashed blue denim jeans, wiggling her tongue and shaking her ass, trawling the floor for a sighting of Buckfast.
–You got a mind to offend me, man?
And she’s whirling the cable way over her head, shoving the mic into the faces of the audience as she urges them on in a call-and-response.
–I said yeah!
–I said yeah!
–I said: you got a mind to offend me, man!
–I said: you got a man to offend me, man!
And then starts bouncing from one end of the stage to the other, sneering and chewing her gum, covered in sweat, as the drums keep up their chicka-boom rhythm and the rubbery bass continues on rumbling, rumbling …
–You wanna throw your weight around, shitkicker? You listening to me, Carson? You got a mind to dishonour a lady’s pride and disrespect her dignity? Because if that is the case, and it sure does seem to me like it is, then you can take it from me that you are making one big mistake. Yep, embarked on a course of action that I would have to say is very much erroneous and inadvisable. So maybe you ought to consider switching horses, fucking loser. Before it is way too late, my friend! Because you may not like the consequences, fuck. You attending to Kit, you brainless cunt?
As out went the microphone above the heads of the dancers again.
–I said yeah!
–I said yeah!
–I said: go down old Hannah don’t you rise no mo’!
–I said: go down old Hannah don’t you rise no mo’!
Then she slipped into one of those odd personal trances, with those big brown eyes rolling back in her head and on one knee declaring:
–Low-rate this girl and offend her dignity – offend it yeah!? I said yeah, you low-rated it, offended it, yeah. But that dog won’t hunt and that cock won’t fight. Hullo girl, said my daddy one time, how is my little girl today? I walked miles of motherfucking barbed wire, use a cobra snake for a necktie – yeah! You listening, numbnuts? Carson, are you listening?
As she fanned the guitarist’s instrument with the broad grey brim of her Confederate hat, throating hoarsely:
–Git down, Old Hannah, git you away on down!
Fanning some more, before sinking to one knee as she declared there was a dedication that she would like to make, focusing in on Teddy Buckfast.
And then:
–O, Teddy! she’s squealing, why did you have to go and do it, lie to your pretty baby? Because you told me last week you could fuck like a stallion – and now I’m damned if I can feel a whisper of your little tinkle inside o’ me here at all!
As the place erupted.
Before she moved in to deliver the coup-de-grace:
–But then, she hollered, maybe that ain’t no bad thing, loverboy. Seeing as you got a face that’s ugly as a stumpful o’ spiders!
Putting paid, once and for all, to the foolhardy impertinence of Teddy ‘Buckfast’ Carson – who was never seen back in Heartland again.
But Dawn ‘Kit’ King wasn’t finished or anywhere near it.
–I’d like to see you all out on the floor now for this one. It’s a slow waltz which means a great deal to me, on account of it happens to have been written by my father. Who’s dead now, God rest his soul, but in his time was a wonderful musician – you name any instrument, yep any Goddamn instrument at all and hell, could my Daddy wring a tune out of it. He could of been professional but he turned his back on all that because he wanted a simpler life for his kids and for his wife. Yeah, that was his dream, our own personal Paradise back up in the woods. And so what if it didn’t work out that way, if he turned into just another junked-up hippy. Because that’s what happened, ain’t it father? Once upon a time there was a genius who dreamed. You had too much to dream last night, Zachariah my man – way way too much.
She takes fits, some of them used to say.
You ask me, she’s a couple of bubbles short of plumb.
Then she faltered for a moment and just stood there, saying nothing, twisting the mic cable and staring out at nothing, like she’d forgotten the words or something. Before starting up again only this time with her delivery being trip-hammer fast, like her thoughts were getting way ahead of her.
–Yeah, you might think that’s dumb, like I do – leaving the place of my birth in Serenity, Ohio and going up, into them Ozark hills, with nothing. When he could, just as easily, have headed somewhere else – such as Nashville, maybe, or even the West Coast. He could have made it there, you see, more likely than most. They all used to make the journey out to the Ozarks to see him, the honchos. So many of ’em, when I was a little girl – with all of ’em trying to coax him back. You gotta give it one more shot, I always used to hear them say – but it was always the same, he’d just wave it away. Nope, he would insist, because I got everything that I want right here. And if there was one bad day, then what the heck. What you think, that it’s gonna be perfect all the time in Paradise? I know that’s what they tell you but …
She lowered her head and got all choked up, looking around as if she had, inexplicably, gone and forgotten her name.
Then laughing uproariously and shaking her head as she wiped her eyes.
With the drummer light-heartedly striking the snare as she started up again as if nothing at all had happened.
–As a matter of fact that’s what the actual song is about, you know? That particular day one of the most important people in the record industry at the time – Straight Arrow Montgomery was his name – he had come out to see us in the mountains to give ‘one last shot’ at persuading my father to come back to Nashville and lay down some tracks. Montgomery was short-haired and blocky and thick-necked. He had pinkish, freckled skin and was in white socks and ankle-high work shoes, the leather soft as lanolin, and he seemed to shuffle them along the ground rather than to take actual steps in them. He had thin white wispy hair and there was a ridge of deep tan across his forehead, where the brim of his perforated ball cap stopped. I know you can do this, he said, because you, more than anyone, understand the simplicity that’s at the heart of country music, Zach. And that what it is is just stories told my ordinary people except in an extraordinary way. Thwarted ambition, that abiding sense of failure and being foreclosed. But I know you can give it a certain modern – sophistication is the wrong word – but levels of musical texture and complexity that are often missing, without ever losing the passion that makes it special. Let’s ride them big wheels in the moonlight together – and if it don’t work out then you can come back and everything will be the same, just as before. No harm done. Whaddyou say, Zachariah my friend, will you sing it one last time – that high lonesome sound, for your old buddy Straight?
–I’ll never forget it, she went on, as they listened, rapt, because at first it really had been so pleasant and peaceful. But then my father, he went and took one of them weird and fucked-up turns of his. I could see it coming. For he’d only just finished cold turkey the previous week and was a trembling trip wire for a bomb, I swear to God. He’s out there, he kept on repeating. Who’s out there? Straight Arrow had laughed, under the impression, in his innocence, that it just my father’s idea of a joke. But he sure wasn’t long finding out that it was a damn sight more than that. When Daddy left down the guitar and picked up an axe – I swear to God, I’ll never forget it – started swinging it in these wild arcs then above his head. Before stumbling over to where Montgomery was sitting under the spreading elm, but with his face now the colour of parchment. You wanna know something? my father said – I remember that skullface and those eyes like dead meat – Well then I’ll tell you. You think I live where you do, record man? Is that what you think – because if it is, you’re wrong. Because I don’t live in Mendacity, Ohio, councillor. No, I don’t live there, Lording it behind some felt-covered desk.
She paused for a moment to gather her strength-before eventually continuing.
–No, I don’t happen to live in the shadows with some crested piece o’ big business college bullshit on a frame up there behind me. Because where I fucking live, it happens to be called the truth, you digging me? Yes, that’s where I pitch my tent, motherfucker. Right here with my family, in Truth County, Arkansas. So why don’t you get the fuck off my property and take your offers of big fucking deals with you. You wanna know about these kinda people – that what you wanna know, our little Kit? Well then, I’ll tell you. He don’t understand what it’s like to be alone in the stillness. Because where he belongs is the world of brass-and-glass. Hello, Montgomery, you in there? You reaching out to find and comprehend the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river? Well, that’s good, I’m glad to hear it. Because maybe when you find it you can put all the money that you intend making out of it back into your ugly motherfucking teat bars and casinos. Cos the fact is that me and my family, and especially my little girl Kit here, we don’t want no part of it. Because our quest is pure – you listening to what I’m saying? Pure, you got that? And if we gotta endure a century of isolation out here in the lonesome hollows to snare the ache and the heartbreak of our forebears, here in the land of sultry women, moonshine, hollers, sweet taters, romance and good old boys, corn whiskey, Cajun crazies, snake handlers, coon dogs, bizarre genealogies, outrageous mythologies, and hot rods tearing up circular asphalt tracks, then that is what we are motherfucking more than prepared to do. So get the fuck out of here, Mendacity, Ohio!
–And we never did see that old Montgomery again, she chuckled, he was out of there quicker than a cat can licketty-split!
–But, all the same, it’s something no girl, at any age, ought to see – her father in the night-time trembling like a leaf. With her mother at her wit’s end as she tries her best to make sense of his drug-crazed delusions. I know what they’re saying, Kit, he used to say to me, that boy, somehow his traces they ain’t hooked up right. But it ain’t so – I love you, don’t I? I’m not so lonesome, girl, that I could cry, am I? And if they keep on saying, like I know they’re doing – that what I got going on inside of my mind is some kind of cosmic conspiracy against reality, in favour of romance – then all I got to say is, just wait till I pen my masterpiece, you’ll see. Become aware that it’s you, and not me, who’s got their brain all wrapped kind of loose. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this. I can only hope that maybe you’ll understand. That where we, and my beloved family, we are going to abide in that sweet and Bonny Land, where nothing can ever hope to hurt us again. And there we shall remain – forever!
–Look away, Zachariah! I can remember her hollering, loud and clear and vivid, dropping to her knees at the front of the stage. Zachariah, I implore you, look away!
Dawn said nothing for a long time and then laughed, a little strangely – continuing to be so preoccupied that, at one point, she almost fell right off the stage.
–But we never did get there, we heard Dawn King explain, and never would. He just sat there watching the green water lap at the pilings, and telling me that one day, we would all of us sail to a country of our own, far beyond the stars, and there live forever, up on some golden and empurpled morning.
She remained in what seemed the remains of her self-induced trance before, abruptly, appearing to come back to herself as she shoved down a bottle of beer by the neck.
With the audience remaining close to hypnotised.
–Sorry for rambling, but by now you know what to expect when you buy your ticket to a Dawn King show. Anyhow, this one’s called ‘Sorrow, East Of Arkansas’! And it’s for my father – wherever the fuck you happen to be, my lovely Daddy, and all them delirious dreams that kept you going. With my sincere thanks to Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra …
–Whoever the fuck they might be! hollered Ricky ‘Big Style’, moonshine-whacked again as he stumbled past the stage on rubber legs in pursuit of a half-eaten hamburger, with his face completely covered in ketchup.
There were persistent rumours of a sauna and brothel operating upstairs, and WW’s place had even been investigated by The Sunday World, a new newspaper dedicated to blowing the cobwebs off sleepy old Ireland and kicking it smartly into the middle of the modern world.
With it even carrying a front page photo of WW in his customary bootlace tie and Stetson, flashing that winning shit-eating grin over the top of a picture of a scantily clad model blowing a word balloon inquiring: Are you getting it every Sunday?
Whether they were or not, WW Monroe made it pretty clear that for him, personally, it was of about as much consequence as a popcorn fart in hell.
For he himself had made nothing out of the sauna, he would often be heard to insist, to compare with the return that the Country Club was bringing in.
And which had, with the acknowledged appreciated assistance of his young protégé Jody Kane, always been the jewel in WW Monroe’s crown.
Especially during that blistering summer when the illicit fighting and gambling den they had mischievously nicknamed the Country Club might have been said to be at its height.
Everyone wanted to be seen there waving their money, always well after midnight and, hopefully, in the rain.
Because that was what WW Monroe liked most – you could see it in his eyes, especially if there happened to be lightning.
Then the stakes would be high, and ascending by the second.
As WW upped them by the hundred every minute on his boy.
Like I say, it wasn’t a proper country club at all, nothing more than a nickname for the crudest of canvas rings, with a rude tarpaulin hoisted above and Windy Phelan the trainer hopping from foot to foot in his boy’s corner. With his eyes like fireflies, pummelling the air like a man possessed as he repeated the name of Jody Kane one two three four five times and then the same all over again.
But this particular night, you could tell by the atmosphere of anticipation that it was already destined to be epochal.
High summer, it was, the hottest day of the year so far.
When Jody Kane looked a dead-cert to retain his title.
Yep, the ‘Glasson Bull Calf’, they’d taken to calling him – there just wasn’t gonna be any way you could stop him.
With all of WW’s supporters on hand to cheer him on – Los Locos Pistoleros, as they called themselves.
Whose number included such other near-legends as the formidable, taciturn Long John McNulty.
And who was, in fact, a genuine weapons and explosives expert, unlike a lot of the self-styled swaggering rebel compañeros.
Every one of whom was watching Jody Kane intently now – as indeed they might, for they all stood to lose a helluva lotta moolah on the bout – spitting though his gumshield as he squared his fists and glared from his corner like a chained-up pitbull.
–Once upon a time, announced WW, standing there in the centre of the ring, as the roving spotlight did its best to locate him, sweeping his hat flamboyantly as the shaft of light finally found him. Yeah once upon a time you heard it said that the rich were smart and that the poor man was a fool. And that the rich men congregated under cover of darkness in the privacy of their uptown clubs. Yeah, the country club, gentlemen, that’s where we belong. But what if the poor man suddenly he becomes rich, what then? Yeah, them as value honest labour, loyalty, independence and fairness over the false values of them other vulture-faced opportunists, social climbers, snobs, materialists and the well-to-do whose lives are backed by undeserved wealth and white-collar crime. Then the hell, I say to you, with the private country club of golf and swimming pool. Because tonight, good people, we are here where we belong, in WW’s Heartland. Yep, right here in Glasson County which has always had its own ways and laws – and ain’t at all, like they’ll tell you in other places, some backland that is fitful, stark and way out of whack. A nowhere-place where folks got no choice but to lead barren and meaningless lives. Because what we got here, and always have had, is a separate world with its own seasons, weathers and a daily rhythm in which each hour has always had its own characteristic part, in this place where change, at least before now, has always come slowly but which at no time, ever, was anything but home. Where, unlike the city, everything is home. Where the rhythms of home and heartland can reverberate through the entire town. Yeah, this so-called great city that we hear so much about, which they’ll tell you we spend all our time longing for, pining for success and all its dreams. But that what, of course, we lack when it comes to getting our hands on their dangled prizes is the talent, the shrewdness, the brains and the ruthlessness. With the result that we ain’t never gonna be destined to be anything when compared with them, never gonna be looked-up-to, weighty men like them, whose words are always reckoned to count. With no choice open to us but to roll home roasted, again sick and defeated, hurling defiance at the moon and the roofs of our own little home, and all who have the bitter misfortune to be close to us. But not no more, my friends – no, never again. So come on board the WW Special, for this rig’s riding right into the future. You hearing me, soldier? Come on – hit it, the fuck! Let’s see some sparks spit from these here wheels – whoop!
