Heartland, page 3
Like the old songs, maybe, that we all used to listen to before it all turned into an early-morning vision of hell. You know the kinda tunes I’m talking about, Ray – Merle Haggard, maybe – but that ol’ Hank most of all, at least as far as I’m concerned. Because, the way I see it, there ain’t nobody who’s come as close to mapping out that territory of pain and desperation. Showing you to a place where it’s OK to say: I’m broke, and I don’t mean money. A place of emotional release is what I mean, a spiritual pilgrimage. Where you can just let it go and give it permission to pour right out of you – in a torrent, know what I mean?
I knew what he meant, all right – and still do.
Anyhow, Ray, the letter continued, I hope when you get this that all is coming together in your life and that you don’t mind me saying this couple of things. It’s just that we’ve a lot to talk about, you and me – and I don’t, like a lot of people, want to do the fool thing and leave it too late.
So long then, partner – I’ll be in touch with you again real soon.
I hope you don’t mind me writing to you out of the blue.
But it’s been a long time, Ray, ol’ pardner.
So that was it. That was what that old Jody had to say. That was the first of his many welcome letters. I got them all tied up together, for safe keeping.
And, like I was telling you, no matter where I went or in what dire circumstances I might happen to find myself, I always made sure to have those envelopes close to my heart.
If that sounds strange, like something you’d expect from lovers or something, then that’s OK – but that’s not how it was between me and Jody.
And if you happened to see me weeping when I was reading them, then the reason for that is because I was ashamed – of failing him.
Not just him, in fact, but everyone.
Which is what I’ve been feeling for most of my life, at least until recently.
When things started improving dramatically, I somehow found the courage to look directly into my soul and get it all down among these pages – like Fr Conway says, warts and all.
Talking about my drinking, it’s like staring down the lens of a telescope and viewing this wild, unkempt creature – coming stumbling past, waving his arms like some deranged Willie Nelson in a long duster coat, talking to himself, just like I used to, slugging from a bottle, stumbling onward, day to day, in an inebriated haze of abdicated responsibility.
All of which, thank God, has changed.
But I couldn’t have done it on my own.
No way – not a chance.
Without the assistance and support of a couple of very special people, I’d never have had a chance of making it through.
And it’s thanks to them, I think it’s fair to say, that I’m capable of saying these things at all – and am not in some long-stay institution or other.
Or worse.
Because, for the best part of the late nineties and early noughties, it really and truly was very bad.
I did have a sort-of relationship with a woman. But no matter how we tried, me and that old Angie Brody, we just couldn’t make it work.
You’re not thinking about me, I remember her saying, out of the blue, one night.
And again – many times.
You’re thinking about her, aren’t you Ray, you’re thinking about the singer. She’s still there inside your head.
You don’t have to lie.
I heard you calling her name in your sleep. Dawn, you said.
Even though she played you, just like she did everyone in that dumb fucking valley that you come from – even in spite of all that, I swear to God you’re still thinking about her. I can’t believe it. After all this fucking time, it’s still true.
No, I protested.
After all this time, and everything we’ve been through, she’s still there inside you – working your mind. Playing you, Ray. Because she was good at that, wasn’t she? she said bitterly.
No, I insisted, you’ve got it way wrong. Because that just isn’t the way it is, Angie.
She hadn’t even bothered to answer.
She’d also begun warning me too – about my drinking, I mean.
But as soon as she found out about the affair I’d been having – just a brief fling with someone whose name I can scarcely remember – after that, there could be no going back.
She announced I had given her no choice and showed me the door.
I’ve still got her picture – convinced that one day, out of nowhere, she’ll arrive back.
Ray, she’ll say.
And I’ll say: Angie.
But that’s not actually going to happen, is it?
And deep down I know it.
For nothing, as we know, cuts deeper than betrayal.
I’ve never met anyone with such an open and generous nature – the exact opposite of me, more or less.
The problem with you, Ray, is that you got a good face but a bad heart, she always used to say.
And I got to admit that she used to look so lovely, my Angie, in her red bandeau and figure-hugging denims.
But not anymore.
Not since I’d given myself away in my sleep.
Into that velvet dawn we’ll ride, I’d moaned, apparently.
Speak her name, Angie had bitterly demanded the following day, go on – say it to me here, right here and now. In the cold light of day, declare her name like you did last night. Say: Dawn.
But of course I couldn’t.
And just stood there, looking dumb and hangdog-stupid.
It’s just a pity it wasn’t me you were talking about, were her last words to me before I left. Because for a while I did sincerely think we had something that just might be worth salvaging, Ray.
But not now, she said.
Not now, Ray Wade. So go – and don’t look back. Don’t even fucking think about it, looking back.
And it wasn’t so very long after that that my life slipped completely off the rails and I found myself surrendering to the hooch, full time.
Straying through the bars and anonymous dives of every distant small town, lying sprawled across the counter as I raved and rambled to myself, hurling it down as fast as I could.
But it doesn’t work, does it?
Because it just sits there, waiting, doesn’t it – your heartbreak.
Knowing that, inevitably, you’ll always come stumbling home.
One of the first things I wrote in the pages of this ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ – which, as I say, is how I prefer to describe it – somehow it turned into the strangest kind of … I don’t know, odd dark fairy tale or something.
And which, whenever I showed its contents to my faithful supporter Fr Conway he observed that – incoherent though it might be in places – in its own crude way it exposed certain things. And which was why I ought to keep on going.
A kind of ‘emotional espionage’ is how he likes to describe it.
Anyway, this weird kind of fairy tale I was telling you about – it was kind of based on the memory I had of everyone who was there that night in Mervyn’s Bar.
Only it was a long time before any of that had happened, when they were gathered together for an occasion of great celebration – way back when the very first ballroom opened in Glasson County. Heartland, it was called.
Where they were all awaiting the arrival of its owner, the legendary William Walter Monroe.
The one and only WW.
With them all as excited as kids, and now again keeping their eyes on the door. Only this time, as I say, in anticipation of an evening of tremendous pride and happiness. For they, more than most, had reason to be grateful to WW for all he’d done. Having given them all employment when the meat factory eventually had closed. Red Campbell’s job was tending bar, Wee Hughie was now the full-time booking agent for Monroeville Promotions, with Sonny and Big Barney his proud appointed ‘chucker-outers’.
He sure did figure on himself having a good team, WW had always been fond of saying.
–Hometown boys, just the same as myself! he would declare, fingers drumming exuberantly on his lapels.
And it was true.
For, he too, in his youth, had hustled pool and shot the breeze and, indeed, raced cars whenever he got the chance.
Yep, a whoopin’ and hollerin’ upcountry feller like themselves – someone no one could ever have credited with meeting his end, like he did many years later, in a shocking and unexpected manner, at the end of a rope under a sourapple tree.
Not in their wildest fevers could any of them have imagined that ever happening.
But there it was – with the corpse of WW Monroe attired, as always in his Stetson and bootlace tie, only now with eyes bulging and his tongue protruding vilely, with his hand-tooled boots suspended six inches from the ground.
To make matters worse, it was his wife Connie who had made the appalling discovery.
It was also rumoured that his right-hand man Tony Begley had been next on the scene, having by chance been visiting at the time – standing enjoying a smoke as he gazed out across the splendour of Kentuckyland, when he heard the scream.
No one could have foreseen such an unwarranted and lamentable end.
Because it just wasn’t the sort of thing a person the like of WW ever did, irrespective of any downturn there might have been in his fortunes.
As a matter of fact, it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone did – not when they’d only just left their wife sitting there contentedly in the drawing room approximately one half-hour before.
No matter what they might try to say, me and Jody knocking over his precious treasury bonds, dumb though it had been, it had nothing to do with WW’s financial and emotional collapse – or very little.
But someone had to take the blame.
So the brutal, savage drinking had begun almost immediately after WW’s funeral.
As they all sat, stunned, underneath the motionless, unlit glitterball, facing each other and staring dazedly at the mural of Old Glory, with Elvis in his leathers jacknifing on the wall opposite.
Sonny Hackett was staggering around like a blind dog in a meathouse, just about managing to speak and no more.
–I know there’s them that didn’t like WW, he thundered, and that they resented his swagger and the habit he had of lording it some. That’s because some folks they just can’t handle how well the man has done ever since leaving these watery hills and hollers. But he’s come back to live amongst us, ain’t he – and I got to say that, to me, he ain’t ever been nothing only courteous and attentive. You hear?
–Polite, that’d be him, Wee Hughie Munley agreed, that’d be Mr Monroe OK, and there ain’t a soul around here can disagree.
Sonny Hackett, simmering, leaned against the bar counter and snarled:
–Anyone hereabouts as ever says a word against him, I’ll drop them. Drop the bitches right where they stand. You think I wouldn’t? For Heartland and the upcountry code … yeah.
Once upon a time there was a tumbledown shack just lying there by the roadside – until a certain WW had transformed it into what could only be called some kind of magnificent temple. But not remaining content with that – he had been possessed of the impertinence to mount an enormous confectionery-pink fibreglass heart, hoisted on metal supports on top of the roof, with magnificent effrontery shedding its romantic glow all across the wooded slopes and shallow lakes and little mountains of Glasson County.
Because lighting was important, WW had always insisted, especially for half-blind bitches such as us as has spent way too long, maybe centuries, in the dark.
From now on, he announced one night, us’n’s ladies is a-gonna be in the pink.
An idea which, he’d gone on to explain, derived from the entertainment world of the nineteen-thirties, when pink lighting had been used in clubs and glamour spots to give skin tones a healthy and attractive glow.
Who would ever have believed it possible?
In a ‘nowhere place’ the likes of Glasson County?
As the elaborately animated sign surmounting the entrance – The Heartland Ballroom – seductively flicked its lights on and off.
With the giant rooftop heart revolving in its radiant blush-pink glory.
Just as it had been doing that same night long ago, in the early seventies, when they had all been sitting there waiting in the back bar of Heartland, excited by the prospect of their new boss’s appearance, for the purpose of congratulating them for having made the first night of Heartland such a success.
Big Barney Grue – eyes blazing, whiskers flaring – saw no option but right there and then to stand out on the floor and, rotating his fists, threaten there and then to take on all comers.
–Any man-fucking-jack, that is, who is dumb enough to have the nerve to run down any of us what comes from Glasson County.
As they cheered him on, and he stomped the floorboards, fists still flying.
–Because we all know what them city boys they say about us. A gang of thieves and outlaws defying the laws of their country – that’s all they ever had to say about us. That was before Mr Monroe come home. Yes, that was before the first block of Heartland ever was laid. But now things are different. Me and you, we gonna show ’em, Big Barney, Mr Monroe says. And we will. We – goddamn it! – we sure as hell will!
But all of that now was history – all of twenty years ago, and more.
And now Mr Monroe, that old WW, he was dead.
Well, of course he was. For they’d all just watched his coffin being lowered, right up there on the hillside in that garden of stone lying in the shadow of Glasson Mountain.
And which was why it was proving so hard for any of them to be there, there in that same back bar, the site of so many possibilities long ago.
Having arrived there immediately after the ceremony – like all of them had been drawn there in some inexplicable trance, just sitting there in a kind of daze.
Red Campbell had looked up as though he were ashamed.
As Wee Hughie came over and generously replenished his glass.
–Someone has got to pay for this, said Sonny, for I’m not sure I can bear this pain.
–Someone, vowed Red, has got to make this cruel day right …
Big Barney Grue’s lips were moving all right, but he couldn’t have told you what they were saying.
Or even if they’d said anything.
–Someone, repeated Sonny, you believe me, someone is gonna have to pay this check.
And, just at that moment, he lifted a bottle and drained its entire contents by the neck, momentarily experiencing a dramatic vision of the recently deceased WW Monroe – having, astonishingly, without any form of warning at all, suddenly appeared there in the ballroom’s back bar.
Quite alive, oh yes. More alive than ever, in fact.
No mistake about that.
Striding, or so it seemed, right through those swinging double doors, laughing and hollering in the company of his loyal and trusted lieutenant, Tony Begley.
Before swinging right across to ‘talk turkey’ to his ‘favourite barman’, the one and only Red Campbell, as he gave Wee Hughie his great big broad twinkling smile.
–Hell, Hughie, whooped the businessman, if you don’t look like that old bluebird of happiness has this very second arrived at your front door.
Before standing in front of them, with his fingers drumming on his lapels as usual, and suddenly appearing almost twenty foot in height. Or, at least, that was how it had seemed to Sonny Hackett – with a kind of peace and contentment about him.
Of achievement, maybe.
Or satisfaction, Sonny thought to himself.
Now that his life’s dream of Heartland had been realised, with many more equally magnificent ballrooms to come, he had assured them.
–With a spectacular restaurant service, three or four weddings on weekends, and live music several nights a week. So, hold your head up here, sweet little Glasson County, for you just fell in the shithole and come right up with the gold watch and chain – right Tony?
Tony Begley stepped forward into the light, smartly dressed for the opening in country-club casual, dark-coloured slacks with an untucked sports shirt smoothed out over a ballooning stomach, and high-sided elasticated brown boots.
–They’re done laughing at the country boys, he continued with some insouciance, they’ve done their share of patronising us fellers.
–Damn right, agreed Sonny, you sure have got that one right, Tony Begley. Good on ya, buddy!
–They think they can tell us mountainers what to do, Begley continued, but that, you see, is where they are wrong. Because that only works when folks are poor. Or crushed, maybe – when they get to figurin’ themselves boxed in by rules all got up to suit someone else – lawyers, bankers and corporate hustlers. Yeah, the dirt-poor’s soul feels trapped and smothered and what’s it gonna do only seek freedom in sweetness and wildness. So when you see someone like, say, Teddy ‘Buckfast’ Carson on a spree – or even that old rascal Red Campbell over there – when you see them getting a little drunk and cutting loose on the world, what you got to understand that what is happening is that their souls is trying to fight free. And that there ain’t all that much bitterness, nor attitude neither, when you get to looking deep into what they will tell you is the country hill boy’s cold cold heart. And which is why – now that the first of WW’s mighty arenas have been built – there are gonna be some serious changes around here. Because now that we have found our voices, we are gonna sing them high and strong right from the roof of this here Heartland Bar. For, sure as a goose he ain’t got no shoes, we have got them big wheels rolling – and right from here on in, Glasson County gonna be smokin’ with the hammer down thanks to a feller name o’ Monroe who made it all happen. Right, fellers? So if he wanna ride the high horse around Glasson County, then let him, I say! Because I, for one, got no objection.
As WW himself nodded in approval, and then swept, flamboyantly, without further ado, in behind the counter and announced, with a flourish that it would be his privilege to stand all of his tried and trusted ‘loyal hombres’ a drink.
