Chapter 15
VIRGIL KILGORE: You asked me what I'm afraid of. I'll give you the honest one and you can cut it.
(pause)
Somebody's going to add it up one day. Everything I've got, where it came from, what it cost, who paid. Somebody's going to do the arithmetic out loud in front of me and I'm going to have to stand there for it.
It was the cassette that made her go back.
She had it in a sandwich bag on the shelf in a rented house for six weeks, and she took it down about every third day and turned it over and read her mother's handwriting on the masking tape and put it back.
AMBER — CHURCH — 4 SONGS.
You cannot play a thirty-year-old cassette on a machine you bought at a drugstore.
You can, once, and then you own a bag of tape.
There are maybe four decks in Middle Tennessee she'd trust with it and she has known where all four are for fifteen years, and the nearest one is bolted to a bench in a barn in Cheatham County.
She could have driven it to Ridgeway. She thought about that for a long time — she got as far as putting their number in — and then she did not do it, and she has decided since to be honest about the fact that she does not entirely know why.
She texted him on a Tuesday in the middle of March.
I need the Nakamichi. There's a cassette I want off tape and I'm not trusting it to a shop.
Then, before he could answer, because she knew him:
I'd like to come Thursday at one. I'll be done by four. I don't want lunch and I don't want to sit in the house.
The three dots came up and went away four times.
What finally came back was: Key's in the lock.
She got there at five past one.
The gravel was soft the way it gets in March. The field had that first thin green coming up through the brown, and there were three round bales down by the fence line that had not been there in December, which meant he had let somebody cut and bale in the fall and had not mentioned it.
The barn had a new padlock on it. Bright, heavy, good — better than the one she'd had on it — and the key was sitting in the bottom of it, hanging there in the open, where it had apparently been since February.
Anybody could have walked in.
She stood there holding it and understood that this was a sentence he had written for her to read, and that he had written it in the only language he has ever been fluent in, and that he had then said nothing about it for a month and a half.
She turned the key and pushed the door.
The barn was cold and dry and completely undisturbed. Six reels on the bench with a card that said TO LOG and a December date. The heater where she left it. Her coffee cup, unwashed, growing something.
The GALLOWAY box was on its shelf at the end, on its own, exactly straight — and she looked at it for a second, because she keeps that box tight against the upright, and it was sitting about two inches out.
She stood in the middle of the floor with her coat on and looked at those two inches for longer than she is going to admit.
Then she went down and took it off the shelf and opened it.
Nothing was wrong with it. The reels were in order, the sleeves were the right way up, the card on top was hers with her date on it.
Whoever had been in it had put it back the way they found it, near enough, and had gotten it back on the shelf two inches proud, which is what happens when you are being careful and you do not know the shelf.
There was one thing.
The tape on the second reel was wound tail-out. She winds heads-out. She has wound heads-out since the day she built the system and there is not one reel in that building she has left tail-out in fifteen years, because a tape that has been played and not rewound is a tape somebody listened to.
Amber stood there holding a two-inch reel of a record she made when she was twenty-four.
Then she put it back the way it was — tail-out, exactly as she found it — and put the lid on, and slid the box back onto the shelf, two inches proud, and left it like that.
She could not have said why. She has thought about it since and the nearest she can get is that it was evidence, and she did not want to disturb the scene.
He came down at twenty past.
She heard him on the gravel and did not turn around, and he stopped in the doorway and did not come in.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"You want the heater on the extension or the wall?"
"Wall's fine."
He came in then, three steps, and plugged it in and went back to the door.
She looked at him properly for the first time since Russellville.
He had lost weight. Not the good kind — the kind that takes it out of the face first and makes a big man look like a coat on a chair.
He'd had his hair cut by somebody who didn't know him.
And he stood in the door of that barn with his hands in his coat pockets, which is a thing he has never done in his life, because Virgil Kilgore's hands are always out and always on something.
"You can sit on the crate," she said.
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself."
"I'm going to stand," he said, "because if I sit on the crate I'll be here till dark, and you said four."
Amber turned back to the bench.
"That was for me," she said. "Not for you."
"I know it was."
"I'm saying it out loud so it stays true."
"Amber," he said, "I heard you the first time."
They worked.
That is the strange, ordinary, unbearable fact of the afternoon: they worked, the way they have worked in that building a hundred times, and it was easy, and neither of them mentioned that it was easy.
She got the deck warmed up and ran a test tape first, which took forty minutes she did not have to spend and spent anyway.
He held things. He is very good at holding things.
He read box numbers off shelves and passed them down and put them back and did not once put anything back in the wrong place, because he has watched her do this for fifteen years and it turns out he was paying attention the entire time.
Around two he said, "Can I ask you a work question?"
"What kind."
"An actual one. Not a — " He gestured with a box lid. "I'm not doing anything. It's a question about the job."
"Go ahead."
"How do you decide what's worth keeping?"
Amber stopped with her hand on the deck.
"Because there's — " He was looking at the shelves. "There's a hundred and some board tapes of me being terrible in a bar. I've been standing here two hours thinking about it. Who's that for? What's the use of it?"
Nobody had ever asked her that. Not a journalist, not the university people who called in 2018, not Julia Novak, not him.
"You don't decide," she said.
"You've got to decide something, there's a finite amount of —"
"No. Listen." She turned around and leaned back against the bench.
"You don't decide, because you can't. You're not the one who knows.
In 1997 you couldn't have told me which of those nights was going to matter, and I can't tell you now, and whoever's doing this in forty years is going to want the one we both think is garbage.
" She shrugged. "So you keep it. You keep it and you card it and you put the date on it and you don't have an opinion.
Having an opinion is somebody else's job and they haven't been born yet. "
Virgil stood in the middle of that barn with a box lid in his hand.
"Huh," he said.
"What."
"No, that's — " He shook his head. "That's a hell of a thing to have believed for fifteen years by yourself in a cold building."
Amber turned back to the bench so she would not have to have a face.
"Ask me another one," she said.
"Can I?"
"You've got till four."
So he asked her another one, and then a third, and one of them was stupid and she told him it was stupid and he laughed, and she answered all three all the way to the end and he let her.
Around two thirty they got into the pre-1998 boxes, because they were open and because she is constitutionally incapable of leaving a job half done.
There was a reel with no card. A quarter-inch, no box, in a plastic bag, with a strip of tape on it that said TANDY'S — 2ND NIGHT in a hand that was neither of theirs.
"That's Cofield's writing," Virgil said.
"When?"
"I don't know. Ninety-four?"
"It can't be ninety-four. Tandy's didn't open till the spring of ninety-five."
"Then ninety-five."
"You weren't playing two nights anywhere in ninety-five."
He came and stood beside her and looked at it.
"Hang on," he said. "Two nights. Two nights, that's — " And then he started to laugh.
"What?"
"That's the boots."
And Amber said, "Oh — " and then she was laughing too, before she had any say in it at all.
Because it is the story of the boots, which she has heard a thousand times, which nobody else on earth would find funny: two nights at Tandy's in the fall of 1995, when a man named Cofield had let him have the Friday and the Saturday, and Virgil had bought a pair of boots on the Friday afternoon with money he did not have, and they had been wet, and he had played the whole Saturday standing in a puddle of his own dye with his feet running blue.
He had told her that story in a motel in Owensboro when she was twenty-five years old.
They stood in the barn and laughed at it. Both of them. All the way, the real thing, until he had to lean on the bench.
And then it stopped.
It stopped the way a machine stops, both of them at once, and the barn was very quiet and there was a reel in her hand.
"Ninety-five," Amber said. Her voice had gone strange. "It's the fall of ninety-five."
"Yeah."
"I'll card it."
She wrote the card. Her hand was not entirely steady and she wrote it anyway, and put the reel in a sleeve and the sleeve in the box and the box back on the shelf, and neither of them said one word for about four minutes.
She has thought about it a great deal since. Everybody prepares you for the fights. Nobody tells you that the dangerous part is the two of you being funny at the same time about a dead man's handwriting.
At three they were both reaching into box twenty-two.