do. You do what you want to do.â
Jim was small and shifty-eyed and his whole face and neck were gray as if theyâd gone that way naturally along with his hair, but I could not ignore him, even though he often discounted himself, saying, âHey, Iâm not the first guy to talk about God while heâs gambling and I wonât be the last.â So I listened and moved to Florida, where Jim had grown up happily, he said, stealing canoes and blowing up cypress knees with homemade gasoline bombs, and where Iâd always imagined myself in cutoffs someday. I was in Florida no more than a week before I went to the Round Bar, where Jim claimed to have seen a girl bare her tattooed breasts one night before the pink light of the jukebox; it was either George Jones or Waylon Jennings playing, he recalled, and she was dancing and crying, and then she just pulled up her T-shirt, and on her left tit it said BORN TO RIDE, RIDE TO DIE and on her right tit it said TIT .
âOf course that was twelve, fifteen years ago,â Jim said. âPlace may not even be open anymore.â But when I got there it was and nothing had changed: elephant ears hid the door, cats slept on the windowsills, antique beer signs blinked on the walls over the splitting leather booths, and the big bar rotated endlessly, imperceptibly, in the center of the room, just as heâd described, as though nothing in the world had changed, as though time and distance meant nothing. âDrop me a line if you ever make itthere,â Jim had said, but the singer was playing the first night I went, and after that I just never got around to it.
⢠⢠â¢
Tonight is the singerâs last night. Tomorrow heâll be back in Nashville trying to sell his songs, back with his wife and his wifeâs cat and his new baby Liza and his four teenage sons from his first marriage. But watching him it is impossible to believe that he wonât be here tomorrow, that he hasnât always been here. Heâs set up on his stool on a wood pallet just large enough for him and his bass pedals and the one Wellington heâs taken off in order to play them, big black Peavey behind his elbow like another person, his head angling with the words like heâs kissing someone, and the music, what he calls his âfatâ sound, pouring out of him, high clean string notes and his fat serious voice together filling the round round room, beautiful.
âAw, heâs not
that
good,â Ron Russell says. He and his brother have joined me in my booth and are trying to convince me to take a ride in their Mr. Small Dent wrecker truck so that Iâll stop paying attention to the singer and pay attention to them.
âHe does got a sweet mouth on him, I will say that much,â Jeff Russell says.
âI can show her something better than that,â Ron says.
âHey, look at yerself,â Jeff says to Ron. â
Look
at yerself. Not a very pretty picture, is it?â
âI think Ron is a good-looking guy,â I say.
âYou hear that?â Jeff shouts.
âAw, sheâs in love,â Ron says. âShe ainât taken her eyes off him for one second. Not
one second
.â
And thatâs true. The singer strums hard, letting loose the strong sad first chords of âSeminole Wind,â sending them flying like wild heavy birds into the room. âWhat heâs got is a
gift
,â Jeff says, his eyes on the singer, and his oil-dirty face appears botholder and younger than it was a moment ago. âGod gave that boy a gift.â
âGift, right,â his brother says. âListen. Picasso? Van Gogh? They was just assholes who
presented
theirselves as important.â
Still, I cannot get close enough to the singer. When we embrace, my arms go over his shoulders, around his head, and his big stomach presses into the area that starts at my belly and goes down to the middle of my thighs. His stomach is hard and
Kim Iverson Headlee Kim Headlee