can’t see it but it does, and does again, scary but real, and despite his best try at not hollering out, he does. By the time he realizes where he is, Brenda is hugging his head, rocking him side to side like a baby, saying, “Shh, shh, shh,” and kissing the top of his hair.
The first thing he sees through the windshield of the van is an old brick wall painted with ugly words that have been almost whited out, and the rising sunshine on it is so bright he looks at his wristwatch in a panic, afraid they’re late, but it’s only seven o’clock.
“We’re fine,” Brenda tells him. “We’ve got plenty time.”
When he stretches, his back grabs, stiff from the way he’s slept. His mouth tastes like a mule’s taken a dump in it. Brenda, like a mind reader, lays the blue shaving kit in his lap, already unzipped to the little bottle of mouthwash, and gets out to unlock the back. He finds his pocket comb and rakes it through his hair a few times and then goes to wake up Jenny.
She’s curled up in a ball on the far back seat, facing away from him, wrapped in the old bedspread they use for picnics. The only part of her that shows is a mess of red hair, cascading almost to the floorboard. He gauges where her shoulder is and squeezes it.
“Jen?” He squeezes a little harder. “Let’s go, hon. It’s showtime.”
She uncurls slowly and gets a big gasp of air, as if she’s been off in some place without oxygen all this time. Her light green eyes, raccooned by the slept-in mascara, flash at him like he’s an intruder and she blinks several times before she knows him.
She throws back the cover and sits up, looking a little pissed the way she does before she puzzles out the day, and a warm wall of perfume rises up at him from the front of her T-shirt. Outside, Brenda unlocks the big side door and slides it open, a rush of bright cold air. She hooks the hanger of Jenny’s dress in the door handle—the short purple one with the little ring of sequins around the neck—and fluffs at it through the dry-cleaner plastic to get a wrinkle out.
Jenny’s black heels come from the back next, looking strange and lost on the floorboard in the cold sun, then the fishing tackle box with her makeup, and a canvas bag with a curling iron hanging halfway out the zipper.
Travis steps over these to get his guitar case out of the back end, but when his boots hit the pavement Brenda is already coming around with it, knowing the right one, the old acoustic.
He feels moved to kiss her for this but his mouth tastes so foul he has to settle for pushing her bangs aside and pecking her on the forehead.
“You bucking for a raise?” he asks, taking the case from her.
She looks up at him full of meanness, so pretty without a speck of makeup that if it weren’t for the half circles under her eyes and the little patch of white working its way forward from the crown of her dark hair they could be in high school again.
“Double or nothing, cowboy,” she says.
“Shoot,” he says, yawning. “We’re good at doubling nothing. Ain’t we, Jen?”
But Jenny has stumbled up the aisle to the rear-view mirror, where she lets out a groan. “God, I look like a witch! Why do I do this?” Her long hair is bunched in one hand, and she holds it off to the side as if she’s just now found it growing there.
“We’re cool, hon,” Brenda tells her. “We’ve got time to spare. Come get your stuff.”
Jenny walks back and plops down beside her makeup case in total despair, her bluejeaned legs and bare feet dangling not quite to the pavement.
Travis reaches out to tweak her nose. “Well, good morning to you, Travis,” he says in a high fake voice. “I love you, too.” He gets a little grin out of her, but she’s looking around desperately for something underneath the seats. Brenda is one step ahead of her, is already unscrewing the big thermos and pouring them two cups of the black truck-stop coffee she got in Franklin. None for herself, because she gets to sleep on the way home while he and Jenny drive.
Just as they turn up the steaming white mugs, on permanent loan from the Shoney’s in Cullman where Brenda and Jenny work, a dazzling light stabs them full in the face, blinding them.
“Damn . . .” Travis says. He massages his eyes until colors come back, and then peeps between two fingers at the source of the beam. The sun has caught in a pane near the top floor of a glass-faced office building in the next block, and its reflection traps the van like a searchlight.
“Is that it?” he asks, but a sinking feeling tells him it is.
“It’s the right street number,” Brenda says. “I drove by it to see.”
Fifteen years ago—hell, even ten—all the action in Nashville was out on Sixteenth Avenue, studios in remodeled old houses with big oaks around them. From the curb they looked almost like your granny’s place. You could walk in cold and get a real handshake, at least, and if you lucked up and some big wheel was between sessions, or on the way to take a leak, he’d listen to one or two of your songs and take a copy of your tape for later and you left feeling good whether or not it ever amounted to squat, which it usually didn’t.
But when the dollars in the crapshoot kept climbing out of sight, the money men said that The Row made them nervous—too homey and laid-back and time-wasting. So one by one the real players slipped back downtown to places like this, with parking decks and security guards and receptionists with movie-star teeth who ask you if you have an appointment and you’d better.
The joke now was that anybody big enough to do you some good is too busy to fool with you. The only way to cut through the smoke is to know somebody, anybody, the third cousin of a friend of some producer’s butt-wipe, who owes you a favor and can wheedle you fifteen minutes somewhere to pitch your stuff. Okay, ten minutes.
“At least they’ll have nice bathrooms,” Brenda offers, squinting up at the glare, but nobody takes much solace from this.
They gulp down the rest of their coffee in silence and put the mugs away. Travis takes Jenny’s hand to help her down from the running board. “Let’s go blow ’em away,” he says, winking at her. Brenda loads Jenny down with her dress and shoes and gear, and hugs her neck for luck. Travis checks his back pocket for the demo cassette and their business card, hoists the old black guitar case and the shaving kit, and they’re off. Just before they turn the corner the van’s horn honks, and when they look around Brenda blows them one last kiss through the window and then, with the bedspread around her shoulders, does a pantomime of a deep-sea diver going under as she sinks down into sleep.
The security guard in the lobby looks like Captain Kangaroo on Valium. He pushes the clipboard wordlessly toward Travis and Jenny to sign, his sad eyes half shut, not even looking them up and down once, seeming long ago to have quit passing judgment on who comes and goes from the seventeenth floor.
“Are there restrooms on this level?” Jenny asks him. Still without words, he points with two hands at forty-five degree angles to indicate the far corners of the lobby beyond the elevators. While Travis is picking up his case he catches a glimpse of the Captain’s eyes, no longer at half staff, watching reverently as Jenny’s small backside retreats across the marble floor. Travis smiles to himself, feeling better about the state of the old man’s health.
In the men’s room he washes his face and brushes his teeth and gargles the scorched coffee taste out of his throat, and has just finished up lathering to shave when somebody starts banging hard on the door, though it’s not locked.
When he opens the door it’s Jenny, her hair partly curled and one of her eyes made up like a nightclub singer, the unmade eye still belonging to a freckled country girl who could be fifteen or forty in the proper kinds of light.
“Look, you’re right,” she says, her face tight like it hurts her to admit this. She has the short purple dress on, but is still barefoot. An unopened package of gray pantyhose is in her hand.
“Right about what?” Travis asks.
“You