Chapter 10
The new E string was half fed through the peg when the phone went off on the counter.
Savannah finished threading it and set the guitar down on the couch before she picked up. Tuesday morning, and Corinne Ledbetter was already talking.
"Your fourth one," she said. "The phone demo with the dog barking in it."
"'Rust on the Latch.'"
"That's the one. My artist played it twice in a car and then made her producer listen to it in a parking lot, which is how I know it's real, because she's twenty-six and she does not do anything twice.
" Papers. "They've got eleven songs and one hole and they cut it the second week of June. I want to put it in the hole."
"All right."
"There's a second thing." Corinne's voice got careful in a way that Savannah had learned to hear across three phone calls. "They also want 'Hard Water.'"
Savannah stood in a rented kitchen with a mug with a fish on it and looked at the window over the sink.
"No," she said.
"I'm obligated to tell you that if she cuts 'Hard Water' it's a single, and a single on that record is a house."
"I know what it is."
"You want to tell me why, or do you want me to make something up for them?"
"Make something up."
"Savannah."
"It took me six years and I finished it in forty minutes by taking a man out of the bridge," she said. "The first voice on it is going to be mine. That's the whole reason. It isn't a good business reason and I'm not going to dress it up as one."
Corinne Ledbetter laughed, one syllable, like a door closing.
"That's the best answer I've had all year," she said. "I'll tell them it's on hold. Send me the papers on the fourth one and I'll have a draft to your lawyer Thursday."
Deacon had not called in eight days.
She noticed it the way you notice a sound stopping.
The Tempo piece had gone up on the Wednesday and gotten picked over for two days and then the town had moved on to a lawsuit about a bus company, and in all of it there had been nothing from him.
No call. No text. Not one of those four-word messages with no name on the end.
She checked, once, that she had not blocked him by accident, and then felt stupid about checking, and then decided she was allowed to feel stupid in her own kitchen.
Holt had said negotiating posture in a trade with his client's name on it, and the client had gone silent.
She wrote it down on the back of an envelope because writing things down was how she found the thing that was wrong.
He read it. He said nothing. Eight days.
Then she put the pen down, because she had spent five weeks building a life that did not run on what a man in another house was or was not doing, and she was not about to hand it back over an envelope.
She called Silas Rourke at four in the afternoon.
He answered on the fourth ring with a guitar going behind him and did not stop playing.
"It's Savannah."
"It says so."
"Yes."
The playing stopped.
"Say the whole word," Silas said.
"Yes. I'll write the ten with you."
"All right, then."
"I'm going to say your terms back to you." She had the receipt on the counter in front of her, thirty cents, soft at the folds now from being carried around. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I want to hear myself say them out loud one time in my own kitchen."
"Go ahead."
"Fifty-fifty on everything we write, words and music, no hair-splitting about who had it first." She went down the list with her finger, the way she'd read a set.
"Both names on the front of the record, same size type.
Not with. Not featuring. Not in the little print on the back with the engineers. "
"That's two."
"Equal say on takes, on players, and on what stays off the record."
"That's the one that matters."
"And your publisher papers it as a co-writer deal before we write one line. Not a handshake. In Odette Callahan's hands, on her terms, and if she doesn't like it we do it her way."
Silas was quiet for a second on the other end. She could hear a refrigerator kick on in a garage in Eastland.
"You got it word for word," he said.
"I've had it word for word since the gravel lot."
"Then what took you three weeks?"
"I was making sure it wasn't a move," Savannah said.
"Huh." A stool creaked. "And?"
"It isn't. I checked twice."
"Well, that's more checking than most people do." He picked the guitar back up. "Thursday, then. Ten o'clock, and eat something first, because I don't feed anybody."
"Silas."
"What."
"Thank you."
"Don't," he said. "I need ten songs and you can hear a turnaround in nine seconds. This is the least generous thing I've done all year." He hung up first, which she had gotten used to and had started to like.
The draft came from his publisher on Thursday morning and Odette had it marked up by two.
Savannah sat in the chair in Berry Hill with the window unit rattling and read all nine pages of it herself, out loud in her head, every line, which took forty minutes and which she was never going to not do again as long as she lived.
"It's clean," Odette said. "I've read eight hundred of these and this one's clean. Their publisher's a grown-up. The splits are flat, the credit language is specific down to the point size, and there's a real approval right on masters — not consultation, approval, which nobody gives anybody."
"What's wrong with it."
"Nothing's wrong with it."
"Odette."
"Nothing is wrong with it, and I'll put that in writing." She took her glasses off. "I don't like it either. It makes me feel like there's a shoe somewhere."
Savannah turned back to page six.
"I want something added," she said.
"Tell me."
"An exhibit. Definitions." She put her finger on the blank half of the page.
"I want it to say that no matter whose name gets typed first in any registration, at any society, at any agent, on any release — the money is fifty-fifty.
That the order of the names in the box has no meaning of any kind.
That there's no such thing in this deal as a primary writer. "
Odette did not say anything for a moment. Then she got a legal pad.
"Two sentences," she said. "Maybe three. I'll make it so plain a claims clerk can't get around it with a running start."
"Put it in its own exhibit. Not buried in the body."
"Why?"
"Because nine years ago a man buried one in an exhibit and I stopped reading at page four." Savannah looked at the folder on the desk, the chalky rubber band still around it. "This one goes where somebody who stops reading at page four will still see it."
Odette wrote for four minutes without talking. Then she read it back, and it was ugly on paper, and it was not ugly out loud.
"They'll want a week to think about it," she said.
They did not want a week. The signed page came back at ten past five, initialed in handwriting like a ransom note, with one line written across the top of the cover sheet in the same hand.
Should have been in there to start with. My fault. — S.R.
Savannah sat in her truck in the lot behind the coffee shop and read that four times.
Then she drove home, and she did not put the radio on, but for a different reason than the last time.
The sack was inside the screen door.
She saw it from the carport with the groceries on her hip — a paper grocery sack, folded over twice at the top, standing up on the concrete of the step. No tape on it. Nothing written on the outside.
Savannah set the groceries down on the hood of the truck and stood there a minute.
Then she picked it up.
It was light. It smelled like a shed. Not like a store, not like a house — like a metal building that had been shut all winter, dust and old grass seed and hot tin. When she unfolded the top there was a dead wasp caught in the crease.
She carried it inside and put it on the counter and took the things out one at a time and set them in a row.
A yellow Walkman, the cheap kind, scuffed white at the corners, with the foam gone off one side of the headphones.
Two AA batteries, still in the little cardboard-and-plastic tab off the end of a four-pack.
A cassette in a hard clear case, white label, nothing written on it at all.
And another cassette, in a case with a crack across the front, and on the label, in blue ballpoint, in a nineteen-year-old girl's handwriting:
S.W. — 4 SONGS — CULLEOKA — SEPT
The loop on the S was wrong. She had not gotten it right until she was about twenty-two.
There was no note. There was nothing else in the sack.
She stood there with both hands flat on the counter, which is a thing she did in a dressing room in March and had not done since, and made herself go through it in order, the way you troubleshoot a buzz.
Bud Vestal had a four-track in the back room of a hardware store in Culleoka and never charged her one dollar for it.
She was nineteen. She cut four songs in an afternoon in September with a borrowed guitar because hers had a crack in the neck, and Bud's air compressor came on twice and he wouldn't let her stop.
He had been dead a while now. The store was a tanning place, she'd heard.
She had lost the tape somewhere between two apartments and a van.
She had told exactly one person about it, one time, in the Econoline outside a Sonic in Muskogee, Oklahoma, sitting on the bumper eating a hamburger at midnight.
It was a narrow bumper. His leg had been against hers the whole time and neither one of them had moved it, and she had not thought about that one time in nine years, and she thought about it now.
She had said there was a middle section on the second song she could never get right again, and that she had it on a tape once and the tape was gone.
And Deacon had said play it for me sometime, and she had said the tape's gone, and he had said huh, and that was every word either of them had ever said about it.
Nine years ago. Before the deal, before Holt, before any of it.
Somebody had gone through boxes in a hot shed.