Chapter 38 Dante
I’m awake at five-thirty. Through the open hall door I can see him on the floor of the second bedroom, on his side, one arm under my pillow. There’s a Rosemary Beach buyer who wants a third look today and a listing to keep being normal about. I get up and make coffee.
The cafetera’s where it always is. I fill it, pack the basket, tamp it, set it on the burner. The first morning I poured two and set his at the edge of the counter. He looked at it and walked away. I drank both, standing up. You don’t pour out my grandmother’s coffee.
I pour two cups again. I set his at the edge of the counter, same spot. He comes out of the bathroom and he sees it. Then he picks it up, drinks the small dark shot of it, rinses out the cup, and places it in the drainer.
“Thank you,” he says. “That was good. For some reason, these little cups of coffee have been on my mind a lot lately.”
I don’t say anything.
We drive to the house. Fifteen minutes, no talking. His head is back, eyes open, watching the road. I want him behind the gate before the kids wake up in their cars. Before someone takes a shot of him dropped off at his door by a realtor at dawn.
He gets out and stands a second with the door open. Then he shakes his head and goes in. I back out and drive to the Roadhouse.
The lot’s empty. The sign’s off, the kitchen’s dark. Around back there’s a wheelbarrow stacked with firewood sitting by Big Bertha, and Tex is at her open firebox with a rake, dragging out yesterday’s ash.
“There he is,” he says, and points the rake at the wheelbarrow. “Grab that and start handing me splits, Dante. It’s brisket day. She wants feeding early.”
I look at the wheelbarrow, then back at him.
“The wood, Dante.” He jabs the rake at it. “That piece right there. Lord. Don’t they teach you anything down there in Miami?”
I hand him the piece right there. He takes it, turns it over once like he’s grading it, sets it in the box.
Tex doesn’t get to it right away. He builds the fire the way he builds everything, one piece at a time, squared up, no hurry. The slower he moves, the closer he comes to whatever he means to say. I keep handing him wood, one piece at a time, and wait him out.
“Heard your fella sings,” he says.
“He’s not my fella, Tex.”
He knocks the loose bark off a piece against Bertha’s lip, sets it in.
“Heard he’s a big one. Famous and all that.
Sheila recognized his face off that poster and nobody believed her at first. Now look at what happened.
She’s insufferable about it. Telling everyone her and Stormy served a special tasting menu for a country music star.
” Tex grins at me. “Don’t be surprised if it ends up as a regular menu item.
Lee Streeter Special. Sheila says it’s the funniest thing that’s happened in here for a while. ”
“You can be mad at me, Tex,” I say. “You’d have a right to be. I brought him in here. I sat him at your bar. I’m sorry.”
He stops with a piece of wood halfway to the box.
“Why on earth would I be mad, Dante? What are you going on about this early in the morning?”
“He lied to all of you. He sat right there and let everybody be kind to him. He let you claim him. You claimed a man who wasn’t real. And I vouched for him to you.”
Tex sets the wood down on Bertha’s shelf and leans the rake against her.
“You know how Stormy came to me.”
“Tex—”
“He wouldn’t give me his name. Wouldn’t say where he came from, or what he was running from.
Got in my truck and didn’t say six words.
Didn’t say any words. I brought him home and I didn’t ask, because the asking wasn’t mine to do.
He told me the story when he was ready and not an hour before, and that was his to decide.
” He looks at me. “I never once called that lying, Dante. Never.”
“That’s not the same, Tex. He didn’t tell you anything. Levi made you believe a thing that wasn’t true. That’s a lie. Levi lied to me, to everyone.”
Tex crosses his arms and settles in. “Did he now? You sure about that? How exactly did he lie to you? Tell me the lie. The actual words out of his mouth. What’d he say that wasn’t true? Talk to me about that.”
I open my mouth to give it to him. The words aren’t there.
I set the wood back on the pile.
Tex looks sorry, more than satisfied. “From where you’re standing, holding something back and lying feels like the same animal.
Both leave you holding a picture that turns out wrong.
But they don’t come from the same place.
One’s a man getting something over on you.
The other’s a man too scared to say the truth out loud, hoping you’ll like him long enough that it won’t cost him you when it comes out.
” He shuts the firebox door and spins the damper open.
“I’ve known which one your singer is since the first night he walked in and sat down.
So’s Sheila. The only one it’s taking a while with is you.
That’s alright. You got hit harder than we did. ”
He strikes a match on Bertha’s side and drops it in through the vent, and stands there watching until the draw catches and the first smoke comes up thin and white.
“I like Levi,” Tex says. “I claimed him as welcome here. I don’t take it back, and I don’t care what his famous name is.
” He picks the rake back up and tips his chin at the loft windows, where a light’s been on the entire time.
“Benji’s been up there running around all morning.
Mickey told me he’d been at that computer half the night. Go on up.”
Benji and Mickey’s loft is up the back stairs. One long room, bed in the corner, kitchen down the wall, windows over the water. He’s at the table in a robe, reading glasses on, an open laptop. He spins it to face me before I’m through the door.
“Hurry and sit down. I know, you have a showing — you told me twice yesterday, both times in the closing voice, and I let it go because one crisis at a time. Sit down anyway. I couldn’t sleep. You know me, I can’t leave anything alone. I did a little more digging.”
“Benji, I have a—”
“A showing, yes, you’re a very busy and important man, sit the fuck down.
” He pulls the glasses off, points them at me.
“I’m not going over the song numbers again.
Once was plenty. I found more interesting stuff and I’ve been up here since four putting them in order, because a couple of them sting and I wanted the stinging ones to land gently.
Get comfortable. We’re going in order. Mine. ”
I look at the screen.
Benji shows me the women first. A parade of them. Tabloid pages. A young movie star on his arm at an awards show, an actress on a beach, a model. Lee’s New Flame. Country’s Hottest Couple. Is This the One? He clicks through fast, then stops.
“Look at the photos,” he says, “and then tell me what’s missing.”
Beaches. Premieres. A different woman every season. “What?”
“The breakups. There aren’t any. Six women in eight years and not one breakup — no drama, no crying interview, no source close to the couple, nobody throws his records off a balcony.
Every one of them arrives the same way. One outlet, exclusive photos, golden hour on a beach a PR person scouted in advance, and then a season later she’s gone without a sound and the next one arrives on the same schedule.
“Dante, rollouts are my job. Venue, timing, photographer, one outlet gets the exclusive — I could build you that campaign by Thursday. Someone booked those beaches. Someone told her what to wear and when to smile. People falling in love don’t do it on a quarterly calendar.”
Six women in eight years and not one of them real. I understand now what they’re for. A man who reaches across a dark kitchen for another man doesn’t headline stadiums in Nashville. They manufactured him girlfriends so no one would ever think to ask the question.
Last night I stood in that kitchen and demanded to know who he was, as if the answer were free. The answer is the one thing all of this was built to keep him from saying.
“Now the bad-boy file,” Benji says, gentler.
He pulls it up. DUIs. Bar fights. ‘Troubled.’ ‘Sources say he’s spiraling.
’ A lot of it. “Some of it’s manufactured, I’d bet the business on that — outlaw sells, and I know manufactured when I see it.
But the DUIs are court records. Those happened.
And I sat here at five this morning trying to find the angle that makes it funny, because that’s what I do, I find the angle, and there isn’t one.
That’s a man drinking himself off the road in front of the country, more than once, and the people who were paid to look after him wrote it up as image.
I know a little something about building a face so nobody asks questions.
I started at sixteen with drugstore eyeliner, and that was me doing it to myself, on purpose, because my face is mine. He’s got a payroll doing it to him.”
“And then,” Benji says, and the play drops out of his voice, which is an alarm, “the last one. The first one, really. Before all of it. I found it at six this morning and I’ve watched it four times, and I almost decided you didn’t need to see it.
Then I realized that deciding what you get to see is exactly what they do to him. Watch.”
He hits play.
Old footage, a camcorder a long time ago, the color gone warm. A church. Plank walls, a few pews, a window with trees behind it. A choir in robes. The camera finds the one it came for and pushes in.
It’s Levi. Sixteen, maybe. Thin. A guitar still too big for him. He steps to the mic and sings.
I know the voice. Younger here. Cracking on the high notes. Going low and breaking open on a word. No one’s fixed it yet.
There’s raw emotion on his face when he sings. It hurts to watch. The pain is already inside him.
The clip ends on a frozen frame. Levi mid-word, eyes shut.
“He was sixteen there,” Benji says. “A label saw a tape like that. Signed him at seventeen. Took him to Nashville and—” he gestures at the screen, the stadiums, the women “—built all of it on top of him. Seventeen, Dante.”
Last night he told me himself. My dad signed me over to him when I was seventeen. I don’t say it to Benji.
The anger has nowhere left to stand.
Benji watches me. He doesn’t make a joke of it. He knows it hit home. He shuts the laptop.
“Now you know everything I know. I’m not going to tell you what to do with it, and I’d like some credit for that, because I have opinions and I am sitting on every single one of them.
I didn’t stay up all night to hand you a verdict.
I stayed up because you’ve been walking around with the wrong picture of him in your head, and I couldn’t stand it, and this was the only thing I could think of to do with my hands. ”
He stands, ties the robe, goes for the coffee. He’s at the counter, back to me, pouring, when he says, “But I thought he had a real nice voice. Didn’t you think so?”
I could say no. His back’s turned. He wouldn’t see the lie on my face.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”