Chapter 11
The binder was navy blue and it had his name on the front of it in white, and it weighed about four pounds.
Janelle had brought it up to the suite herself, which meant she was proud of it.
"So this is everything," she said. "The whole build. And I want to say up front, Jesse, this is not a stunt. Nobody in this room is talking about a stunt."
"Okay."
"This is a moment."
Jesse Rawls sat on the end of a hotel bed in Oklahoma City with his hat on his knee and opened it.
Page one was a calendar. Page four was a stadium — the one in Arlington, the big one, with a seating map on it and three of the sections shaded a different color. Page six had a run of show on it with times down the left side, and one of the lines said 8:52 — J. remarks (4–6 min).
There were photographs of the video screens. Somebody had mocked up what the old tailgate picture of the two of them would look like on a screen a hundred and twenty feet wide.
"Where'd you get that picture," he said.
"Curtis had it."
"Where'd Curtis get it."
"I don't know, honey. It's a great picture."
It was a great picture. It was the two of them on the tailgate of her truck outside a dance hall, and she was laughing at something, and he had a black eye from a fight he'd started, and she was twenty-two years old.
He turned the page.
The last section was numbers. The stadium was already held.
There was a hard hold on a Friday in November with a deposit against it, and a production budget with a number at the bottom that would have bought every acre his daddy ever worked, twice, and a note in the margin that said net positive w/ stream.
Net positive. He read that twice.
"So the way it works," Janelle said, "is you don't announce it as anything. You just add the date. And then the night of, you do the remarks, and you do it plain, Jesse, that's the whole thing, no production, just you and a light — "
"And a hundred and twenty foot screen."
"Well, the screen's already there."
"Uh huh."
"And there's not a person in America who doesn't come out of that thinking better of you," Janelle said. "Not one."
There it was.
He sat there on the end of the bed with the binder open on his knees, and he could see it.
That was the trouble with him and it always had been.
He could see it the way other men see a woman across a room — sixty thousand people, the lights going down, the noise coming up off that floor like a wave off a hot road, and him walking out to the middle of it with nothing but a stool and telling the truth.
He knew exactly how he'd stand. He knew where he'd put the pause.
He'd have been so good at it.
And somewhere in the middle of seeing it, he saw the other thing, which was Georgia.
Not on the screen. In her kitchen, four hundred miles south, with the television off, because she'd have the television off. Getting a phone call from her mother at ten thirty at night. Going into town three days later and having a stranger at the feed store put a hand on her arm about it.
Sixty thousand people in Arlington deciding how they felt about his marriage, and her in a house with three bolts on the doors, being the last one to hear again.
He shut the binder.
"No," he said.
"Jesse."
"Kill it."
"You haven't even —"
"Janelle." He handed it back to her. He was surprised at how easy it was to hold his arm out. "How much of this is spent?"
"The hold's got a deposit on it. Some of the production's committed."
"How much do we eat?"
She told him.
"Eat it," he said.
"Can I ask why?"
And here is where he could have said the true thing, and did not, because he did not have it yet — it would be seven months before he had it, and when he did have it he would be sitting across a kitchen table from his wife and it would take him forty minutes and it would nearly kill him.
What he said was: "Because it'd put her on a stage."
Which was true, and which was the good half.
The half he did not say, because he could not yet see it, was that a man who apologizes in front of sixty thousand people has arranged for sixty thousand people to decide he is forgiven, and that Jesse Rawls had never once in his life fixed anything except by getting a room to agree with him.
"That's a real good reason," Janelle said, gently, and she meant it, and she would tell four people that week what a good reason it was, and every one of them would tell somebody else.
He noticed that he liked that.
He noticed himself liking it, which was new, and which he did not enjoy.
Curtis came up at four.
He had a folder of his own, because that was how those two had talked to each other for twenty years — one of them always had a folder.
"All right," Curtis said, dropping into the chair by the window. "Janelle says we're killing Arlington. Fine. Fine. It was a big swing, I get it, we'll find another way to — "
"Sit down."
"I am sitting down."
"I'm gonna say a thing and I need to say all of it before you talk," Jesse said.
Curtis Meeks looked at him.
He was fifty-five and he had gray in his mustache now and he had been the second phone call Jesse ever made, after his mother, the day the first record charted.
He'd slept on a floor in Lubbock. He'd carried a bass cabinet with a hernia.
He had been at the wedding, and he had cried at it, and he had a photograph on his office wall of the two of them at a Whataburger at four in the morning in 2007 with their arms around each other.
"You booked her on the tour," Jesse said.
There was a pause about a second and a half long.
"That's what you're — "
"I'm not done."
"Jesse, that girl was on the Palladin roster and she was on the rise and the offer came in at nothing, we saved forty grand a week and you told me to find — "
"I know what I told you."
"Then what are we doing?"
"You booked her, and then you kept her booked through February when I told you it was getting weird, and then when it went bad you had a plan in a drawer, and then in May you spent six weeks trying to buy tapes off a twenty-seven-year-old and you never one time said to me, Jesse, go home and tell your wife. "
Curtis's jaw moved.
"That's not my job."
"I know," Jesse said. "That's the whole thing. It's not your job. It has never been anybody's job."
"Now hang on."
"There's four hundred people on this operation and every single one of them makes their living off me being agreeable.
" He was looking at his own hands. "Rusty knew in January.
Both drivers knew. Charla knew, and Charla hugged my wife in her own yard in June.
Not one of you called her. And I've been sitting in a room for two months trying to work out how a man gets to be forty-one years old with a hundred people around him and nobody in the world who'll tell him no, and I keep coming back around to the fact that I built that.
I hired every one of you. I paid for it. I liked it."
"So fire yourself," Curtis said.
"I'm firing you."
The air-conditioning cycled on under the window.
"You're what."
"I'm firing you, Curtis. Today. It's already done, my attorney's got it, you'll have the letter tonight."
Curtis Meeks sat very still.
"After twenty years."
"Yes."
"You son of a bitch." His voice did not rise.
It got quieter, and it got worse. "You want to fire somebody, fire the man who was on that bus.
You want to talk about who kept who booked?
You wouldn't get off the second bus. I put her on a routing.
You put her in your mouth on a recording, and now I'm the one — "
"You're right."
"Don't you agree with me."
"I'm not agreeing to make it easier." Jesse made himself look at him.
That was the hardest part of the whole afternoon and it lasted about four seconds.
"I did it. It's mine. It'll be mine when I'm ninety.
And I'm still firing you, because I have spent twenty years handing you every hard thing in my life and you have made every one of them go away, and I have not had to be a man about a single one since I was twenty-two years old. "
"That's the job."
"I know it," Jesse said. "That's why I can't have it anymore."
Curtis stood up. He picked up his folder and stood there holding it, and something went out of his face — the professional part, the poured-concrete part — and what was under it was a middle-aged man who had just lost his living and his best friend inside ninety seconds.
"You'll be back in eighteen months," he said. "You'll have some kid running you and you'll be miserable and you'll call me."
"Maybe so."
"I gave you my whole life."
"I know you did." Jesse's throat had gone. "I'm gonna pay you through the year and past it, and if you want the house in Brentwood I'll cover it, and if you ever need a thing you'll get it, and none of that makes this anything but what it is."
Curtis went to the door.
"Was it worth it?" he said. "Whatever's coming. Is she coming back?"
"No," Jesse said.
"Then what in God's name are you doing?"
He did not have an answer for that. He would think about it for a long time and still not have a good one.
"Get some rest, Curtis," he said, and the door shut.
He killed the deal at five thirty.
It took six minutes on the phone and one of those minutes was a man in Nashville asking him twice if he was sure. Three arena tours, a five-year term, a building of his own in the fall of the year after next. The thing Curtis had been putting together since March and calling the next decade.
Gone.
He killed the back half of the routing at six.
That one took longer, because there were four hundred people attached to it. He did it with the promoter and his attorney on the line and he did not let anybody talk him into a partial. Twenty-two dates. Refunds, penalties, the production sitting in trucks, the crew.
He asked what the number was.
They told him. He wrote it on the hotel notepad and looked at it.