to do a weekend around the Opry.
Travis walks fast with his head down past an insurance office and the old boxing gym, the sun through its upstairs windows outlining punching bags that hang from the ceiling like sides of meat.
A quick left turn through the alley and they’re at the back doors of Ryman Auditorium, a weather-beaten brick building with narrow cathedral windows that used to be a church, a hundred years ago. The white paint on the wooden doors is peeling, and once the key is in the lock Travis has to lean his weight against the handle and give it a hard nudge upward before it opens.
The long dark hallway smells like dust, and still holds the chill from the night. But as the hall curves upward past the dressing rooms and the high glassed-in booth where the radio control room used to be, the air gets gradually warmer and fills with light. When they reach the plank floor of backstage, Jenny’s sharp heels make such an echo in the perfect quiet that she takes them off and carries them.
Travis sidesteps a network of ropes and weights and pulleys and holds the worn red curtain aside so Jenny can step through, and he follows her.
At the front edge of the stage an old-timey microphone sits in a brilliant slash of light from the stained glass windows at the rear of the auditorium, panes of red and green and gold so full of the morning sunshine that they look to be vibrating from it. A million specks of dust float in and out of the light in slow motion, rising and falling on currents of air as the big room warms.
The times Travis came to the Ryman when he was a boy, back when they still had shows here, what impressed him most as he watched the place fill up with people was the perfect geometry of the hundreds of curved wooden church pews, encircling the point where the center microphone stood, as exactly as if a good carpenter like his Uncle Donnie had tied a long piece of twine to the microphone stand and looped a pencil in the other end and drawn arc after arc, main floor and balcony too, and every curve he drew became the perfect, smooth back of a pew.
They stand there for the longest, taking in the quiet, before Travis says, “The first night old Hank was on the Opry, they clapped him back six times. They just went crazy. Six times, kept making him do the same damned song.” He laughs, and shakes his head in wonder at this.
“‘Lovesick Blues,’” Jenny says, and he realizes he’s told her this before, more than once. And that he’s probably told her the next he’ll say, too, but he needs to say it anyway, needs to hear it said.
“And Uncle Donnie was right over there,” he says, pointing to a seat near one of the big poles that support the balcony. “He’d just got back from Korea, and he was coming through the bus station here, and somebody give him their ticket because they couldn’t go. And he got to see Hank that night.”
“I’ll be,” Jenny says.
“He said everybody just went wild. Old folks and all. He thought they was going to tear the place apart. Never had seen anything like it. Said it took ol’ Judge Hay ten minutes, after Hank went off, just to settle everybody down so they could go on with the show.”
Jenny shakes her head at the memory.
Travis steps to the microphone stand and runs his finger along the vertical strips of board that spell out WSM-Grand-Old-Opry down all four sides.
“God . . . damn,” he says, almost in a whisper, “don’t you know that was a night?” And not until he hears his voice go high and quivery on the last few words does he realize how near the tears were. He swallows hard and keeps blinking until the confusion of wet colors in his eyes divides out into separate stained glass windows again, and by then he feels Jenny’s arm, the lightest touch, around his waist.
“What am I doing wrong, Jen?” he asks, not looking around at her. “I’ve give it my whole life, and I’m forty fuckin’ years old, for Christ sake, and . . .”
“Liar,” she says.
“And I still hadn’t got a pot to piss in, and . . .”
“Liar.”
“Well, forty in a few months.”
“Seven months.”
“Well, I . . .”
“Listen, Trav. And I’m saying this with love, but don’t start any self-pity shit, okay? You’ve above that.”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“I said, you’re above that.” The arm around his waist gives him a hard squeeze. “We’re good. It’s gonna happen. We’re right on the edge of something breaking through. I can feel it.”
But the bitterness in Travis hasn’t run its course yet.
“Yeah,” he snorts, half pulling away from her. “Name me one person who’s broke through and made it at forty.”
“K. T. Oslin,” she says, without having to think. “Record of the Year, New Artist of the Year, her first album goes gold after just three . . .”
“Yeah, well name me a man that has,” Travis says. “A damn arc-welder, somebody looks like hell. Somebody I can identify with.”
Her arm on his waist falls away as if he’s burned it. When he looks up she’s right where he’s looking, straight in his face.
“You think it don’t hurt me?” she says. Her shoulders are shaking, and her cheeks are red even where there’s no blusher. “You think it don’t hurt me, when they do that shit like they just done? Huh? You think I don’t have feelings too?”
There’s nothing he can say to this, except to reach up and touch her shoulder, her arm, get the connection back again. But she won’t have it. She twists away.
“I wish I had a little door right here,” she says, slapping hard with her hand the place on the dress where her heart is. She’s shaking worse, and gritting her teeth to keep from shouting. “A little door, and I could open it up and show you how much it hur–” The sobs choke her voice off. “How much it . . .” When the tears start she covers her face with both hands. She hates the way she looks when she’s crying.
“Jen? Come here, Jen . . .” This time she doesn’t pull away, lets him hold her.
“I’m sorry,” Travis says. “I’m real sorry I started that.”
Her sobs start to even out, and she wipes at her eyes with her hands.
“I’ve just been real down in the dumps,” he says. “Stuff accumulates, and it gets to me.”
He feels her nod into his shoulder.
“I’ve been down, too,” she says. “It’s kind of rough at home right now.”
Home translating as the current shithead she’s going out with, Travis knows. The guy answers the phone a lot, and Travis is pretty sure he’s moved in.
“We don’t need to bring each other down,” she says, still talking into his shoulder. “We need to build each other up.”
“I know that. I just forget sometimes.”
Outside, in the cool sunshine, a line of tourists is starting to form at the front doors when they take the key to TeeBo.
Back at the van, Brenda rouses up a little from her nap when they get in. “How’d it go?” she asks them.
“They seemed to like us pretty good,” Travis says. Looking at the windshield, not at Jenny.
“Great,” Brenda says, turning over and straightening the spread across herself. “I knew you’d do good.”
“We left them a tape,” Jenny tells her, as Travis backs out of the parking lot and heads for the ramp to the interstate.
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