Chapter 11 #2
It was not a number that ruined him. He wanted to be honest about that, later, when he thought about it — he was not going to lose the ranch, he was not going to lose the catalogue, mainly because the catalogue was not his anymore.
But it was the biggest number he had ever personally set fire to, and it was going to sit on him for six or seven years, and every man in that business would know it inside a week.
Then he said the other thing, the one nobody in the room was expecting.
"Everybody gets paid through the end of the routing."
His attorney said, "Jesse — "
"Every one of them. Crew, band, catering, the drivers, the merch kids. Full pay through the last date on the calendar like the shows happened."
"That's — "
"I know what it is. Do it."
Because that was the part he could actually get his hands around. Four hundred people whose mortgages ran on him being agreeable, and he had just stopped being agreeable, and it was not going to come out of them.
He hung up.
Then he called his attorney back on her own line, without the promoter on it.
"One more thing and it's not about the tour."
"Go ahead."
"There's people paying for pictures of her."
A pause. "How do you know that?"
"'Cause a man in Bandera called Rusty, and Rusty called his brother-in-law, and it got to me sideways, which is the only way anything gets to me anymore.
" He rubbed his eyes. "There's a number going around for anybody who'll sit on that county road and get a photograph of my wife carrying feed.
It's four figures. That's a lot of money out there. "
"You want me to send letters."
"I want you to send letters to every one of them, and I want you to make it cost something to keep asking, and if there's a way to make it expensive for the outlets, do that too. Spend whatever it takes."
"That's not cheap and it's not fast."
"I don't care."
"All right." He heard her writing. "Do you want me to let her attorney know? It might help the two of them, if she's—"
"No."
"Jesse—"
"No." He said it harder than he meant to and then sat with it. "If she hears I did it, then it's a thing I did. She'll have to decide what to do with it. She'll turn it over in that kitchen for a week and she'll wonder if I meant it, and she's got enough to carry without carrying that too."
"She may find out anyway."
"Then she finds out. But it won't be from me and it won't be from you." He looked out at the lights. "There's about a hundred things I've done in twenty years for the way they'd look. This one doesn't get to be one of them."
"Understood."
"And Kendra — if she ever asks you, straight out, don't lie to her. I'm not asking anybody to lie to her ever again."
"Understood," his attorney said, and rang off.
He sat there with the phone in his hand and felt something he did not have a word for, which was the specific flatness of having done a thing that nobody was ever going to say anything about.
Rusty came to the door at eight.
He stood in the hall with his hat in his hand and looked about a hundred years old.
"That true? About the pay?"
"It's true."
"Through February?"
"Through February."
Rusty looked at the carpet.
"I don't know what to say to that."
"Don't say anything."
"Jesse — "
"Rusty." He leaned on the door frame. "You called her. In March. You picked up the phone and you called my house and you told me she knew, and every man on that bus would've let me walk into it." He put his hand out. "You're the only one of us that did one right thing all year."
Rusty shook his hand. He held on a second too long, the way he had at Georgia's gate in June.
"She all right?" he said.
"I don't know."
"You don't ask?"
"I'm not allowed to ask," Jesse said. "And if I asked you, you'd tell me, and then I'd have gotten around it. So don't tell me anything, Rusty. Even if I ask you at two in the morning some night. Especially then."
Rusty put his hat back on.
"That's the first sensible thing I've heard you say in fifteen years," he said, and went off down the hall.
At half past ten the suite was empty and the phone had stopped.
Jesse Rawls sat in a chair by the window in Oklahoma City with the lights off and the curtains open and a city going about its business ten floors down.
He had, in the space of about seven hours: killed a stadium, fired his oldest friend, ended a five-year deal, canceled twenty-two shows, and put a number on a hotel notepad that would follow him into his fifties.
Nobody knew.
That was the part he had not thought through.
There was no room to walk into. There was no crowd.
Janelle had gone to bed and Curtis was on a plane and Rusty had said the one thing and left, and the only other person alive who would have understood exactly what any of it cost him was four hundred miles south in a house he was not allowed to drive up to.
He picked up his phone and looked at it.
I did a thing today, he thought. That was as far as he got.
He could feel the shape of the sentence he wanted — Georgia, I want you to know I — and he could feel where it wanted to end up, and he could feel, underneath it, the thing that had been underneath every single thing he had done since March, which was: look.
He put the phone face-down on the table.
Then he sat there in the dark for a while and did not have one single person to tell, and he found out what that was like.
It was not noble. He wanted that on the record. Sitting alone in a dark hotel room was not noble and it did not feel like anything, and the man he was would very much have liked somebody to come in and say that was a hell of a thing you did today.
He was going to have to get used to nobody coming in.
Around midnight he got up and got the guitar out of the case and sat back down with it and did not play anything for about twenty minutes. Then he worked at something for a while, badly, and it did not come, and he put it up.
He had not written a good song in four years and he knew exactly what year it had stopped, and he had told one person about it, at two in the morning, on a bus, and it had not been his wife.
He turned the lamp off and went to bed.