Kathy Little Bird (17 page)

Next came photographs. Mac had an expensive 35-mm camera. He said you could scrimp on lodgings and transportation, but never cut corners on professional equipment. He bought rolls of high-quality film and we shot poses in every conceivable light. My lips ached from the different smiles I tried. When we finally got a good negative, we had it enlarged and fifty copies made. I wanted copies of the three or four best, but Mac educated me. “Just one. You keep pushing that one, and eventually people will recognize it.”

I scrutinized the photo. It was sexy, in a clean-cut, windblown country way. Mac had pulled my blouse down and
there was plenty of cleavage. My lips curled provocatively, and my black eyes snapped. But you knew deep down I was a decent, small-town gal.

“Is this me?” I asked.

“It’s what we’re selling,” he said.

After making the demo, listing my credits, and printing the photos, Mac discussed what he called “the bottom line.”

“It’s the last line on every financial statement, and sums up the whole operation. It’s the score, the result, the finish, the ball game. Better known as Profit or Loss. You were getting nowhere with Jack. Why? You never looked at the bottom line. You were making it; as a matter of fact you were doing great. But the faster the money came in, the faster it leaked out. If you got holes in the bottom of your boat, it won’t help to rev up the motor. Income is important, but Income
minus
Outgo, that’s what sinks you. The Profit factor is what you got to keep your eye on.”

I nodded sagely, although I could see that this deep financial wisdom wasn’t any different from what Mum dinned into me at age six. Mac took it seriously, though, and purchased a used trailer so we could save on motels. That was okay with me as long as I could lock my door.

The more I got to know Mac, the better I liked him. There weren’t the ups and downs there had been with Jack. Mac was on an even keel. He lacked Jack’s sense of fun and high good humor, but there weren’t the sulks and the despondencies.

We got to be buddies. He was as good as his word. He never came on to me or made a pass, except once when he
was drunk. Best of all, he discussed things with me. We talked over strategies. They were mostly his ideas and his knowledge of the business, but it made me feel I had a say in the matter, and he was quick to praise me when I came up with a good suggestion. He was ambitious but realistic in assessing our chances. All in all, I felt I’d made a move for the better. At first Jack dogged our steps, showing up where I was singing, trying to horn in. But I never considered relenting. Anyone who would sneak behind my back, who thought he could buy and sell me! It made my blood boil to think of it, and I’d start getting mad all over again.

“But we’re married.” It was a refrain he brought up constantly.

Mac made the decision; it was a bottom-line, strictly-business decision. “It will cost something, but you’ve got to make the separation legal.”

When Jack showed up next I told him.

“Divorce?” he said, looking pained.

Giving every word its own emphasis, I said clearly and emphatically, “You and I are history.”

He saw it was true and gave in. “All right. But there’s something you ought to know.”

His air of satisfaction over what he was about to say scared me.

“You’re dead, Kathy.”

I stared back at him, not knowing why but feeling a death chill around my heart.

“That’s right, when I took you from the hospital, that’s what I told the Masons. They think you died in childbirth,
and that’s what they’ll tell Kathy. Your daughter will grow up thinking you’re dead.”

The cold spread through my body. I was dead.

Alarmed, Jack took a step toward me. But something warned him back.

When I spoke it came out a toneless whisper. “The Cree say there’s a death spot in each person. Touch it and the person dies. When you lied to the Masons you touched that spot in me. It’s not a lie anymore. If I’m dead to my daughter I
am
dead. You did this to me, Jack Sullivan, you murdered me.”

“You’re mad,” he muttered, “stark, raving mad.”

He stopped following us after that.

Knowing I was dead to Kathy produced a numbness when I thought of her. I was so upset that I turned to Abram. He would mull it over in typical Abram fashion. He did, and eventually came up with a solution. “You need to talk to someone about it. What about Mac?”

I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know him well enough. I couldn’t take him into my confidence or confess the terrible guilt I felt about my baby. My impulse to go get her was something I fought every day. But there was no way a two-year-old could fit into this rough-and-tumble life. I worked till one, didn’t get to bed until two in the morning, slept till noon, and then most likely we’d hit the road.

There was no help for it; Kathy would grow up thinking I was dead. In a way, that whitewashed me, made a good person of me. I was no longer a mother who deserted her child. I was a good mother
because
I was a dead mother.

This seemed a circular bit of reasoning and I wished I
could explain it to Mum. Thinking of Mum brought my thoughts to Erich von Kerll, my father. Mum had thought he should know about me. And I thought he should know that he had a granddaughter.

On impulse I wrote what would be a crazy sort of letter to receive, and I didn’t know if he would receive it.

I wrote:

I was glad I wrote this new letter. I couldn’t send it, but I saved it to show him someday. I couldn’t send it because he could probably track me down. If you were rich you could do that kind of thing. And right now I didn’t want to be found.

I
WAS
sitting in a Denny’s with Mac, having a sandwich. He was discussing a makeover for me. “Get rid of the bangs,” he was saying. “Makes you look too much a kid.”

“I may look like a kid, but I’m not a kid. I
have
a kid.” I’d kept it bottled up so long that now it came spilling out. “A daughter. Her name is Kathy, and she lives with the Masons on Oakdale Street in St. Paul, Minnesota. They think I’m dead.”

He just looked at me. I hadn’t meant to let it out. But it was said, and nothing I could do about it.

“Is that true,” he asked, “or are you conning me?”

“It’s true. She’s two years old.”

“I’ll be damned.” It was meant as consolation.

“She thinks I’m dead,” I repeated.

“Hey, she isn’t old enough to think.”

“That’s what they’ll tell her when she is old enough. That’s what they believe.”

“Well now, that’s a shame.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a good thing.” Why was I always posturing, posing, making a show of things when inside I felt miserable? Mac wasn’t the right person. I couldn’t really open my heart to him. I could tell him the bare facts, but nothing of the gnawing emptiness.

O
NE
spring day in 1966 as we drove along I heard my own voice coming to me from the country music station.

I grabbed Mac’s arm and he nearly went off the road. “Hey Kathy!” he whooped. “You did it!”

“Shhh,” I said, and settled back to listen. “I could have picked up the tempo a shade, but it was good.”

“It was damn good.” From the minute he bought my contract, Mac concentrated solely on me, putting his other enterprises on hold. He was fond of reminding me of all his expenditures: financing the trailer, food, gas and oil, clothes, photos, demos, fees, the works. So far the club dates brought us even, with a little extra. I had gone a notch higher in the class of clubs we played, although I usually didn’t get top billing. Mac didn’t agree with the old saying that it’s better to be a big frog in a small puddle than a small frog in a big puddle. We both knew I was going to be a big frog in the biggest puddle in the world, and the only way to get there was to dive in and fight it out with the best.

All we had to do was convince a couple hundred million people. Mac intensified his campaign, mailing my demos to deejays and, when possible, stopping to go into a studio and twist arms. He was always plugging me, and it was beginning to pay off.

“Being played on radio is the break we’ve been waiting for. The next thing on the agenda is to get some songs written for you. Most of your numbers are too old and beaten to death. And what’s worse, they’re identified with other voices. We need a hit that’s yours.”

“Oh Mac, there
is
music I want to sing.” And it came out that my Mum was Cree, that I used to spend time on the res and learned the songs of the earth. “I can bring a whole world to an audience. That’s what I want to do. Only people seem offended, they stiffen up, they’re afraid to hear, they don’t want to know there’s a world out there that they know nothing of.”

Right then Mac asked me to sing my Cree repertoire.

I did. I threw myself into it. But stopped short at the reprise. I’d lost him. He too didn’t know what to make of it. “Well, it’s different. Too different, that’s the trouble. Not enough melody. Hard to hum, too much of it off-key, strange.” Seeing the effect this was having on me, he stopped and went on in a more conciliatory tone, but it meant the same thing—he hated it.

“Later,” he said, “when you’re established, that’s the time to introduce something new. Who knows, it might be a novelty. Ethnic might be big by then.”

I nodded, accepting for now.

The problem of material remained. How were we to come by a good songwriter we couldn’t pay?

“We’ll be in Chicago in a couple of weeks,” Mac said. “Plenty of talent there. I have some friends at WGN. And I’ll drop by the Morris office. Of course the real action is New York, but Chicago is a big step. It might be easier to pick up an agent there.”

“You’re my manager. What do I need an agent for?”

Mac roared with laughter. “Kiddo, when you get there, you’re going to have a manager
and
an agent
and
a business manager
and
an investment counselor
and
an advance man
and
a makeup gal
and
a costume designer
and
a voice coach
and
a driver
and
hey, your own private plane plus pilot. You’ll be cut up so many ways, you’ll be lucky to keep ten percent of you. But I’ll tell you something. That ten percent will make you rich. And my twenty percent of your ten percent will put me in offices in Beverly Hills and a condo in Acapulco. Never forget what I’m going to tell you. A hundred percent of nothing is nothing. Ten percent of a fortune is a fortune.”

All this maneuvering was new to me. I hoped it wasn’t new to Mac. I hoped he knew what he was doing. I hoped he could revive his old contacts. I knew he was counting on me as much as I counted on him. I was his ticket back.

We added my radio exposure to my credits, and I pulled down another twenty dollars a night. The latest club was a lot more elegant than any I’d sung in, and Mac persuaded a couple of people in the business to drive up from Chi to hear me.