Mr. Tall (11 page)

“See?” he said.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

Jesse James reared back on his box and laughed, a scratchy, ill-used sound that made her flinch. His teeth were yellow and dry-looking, and Mrs. Wilson imagined his mouth filled with cobwebs. “Why, kingdom come, Mrs. Wilson,” he said. “Judgment Day. I'm waiting for 'em to roll back the stone.”

Beside the outlaw, Mrs. Wilson saw for the first time, there was a perfectly round hole—the entrance to a tunnel—cut into the wall. She felt not exactly a breeze but a slight stirring of air emanating from the hole, and she inhaled again the fetid copperhead smell she'd noticed as she descended the stairs. It was stronger now. She measured the hole silently with her eyes and decided that it'd be big enough to walk through if she hunched.

Jesse James saw where she was looking and shook his head. “I can't let you go in there,” he said.

“But I need to go.”

“If you go in there, I can't let you come back out.”

“Who's in there?” she asked.

“The stolen girl,” he said.

“Which one?” she heard herself ask.

Jesse James cocked his head and looked at her quizzically, as if she should already know the answer to the question. “Why, all of 'em,” he said.

Mrs. Wilson awoke to find herself clutching her stomach and howling. She climbed out of bed and stormed through the house, doubled over, screaming into a pain that seemed to have no particular locus but flowed from everywhere at once.

“No!” she yelled in the kitchen.

“No!” she cried in the hallway.

In the living room, she collapsed onto her good sofa and wailed, “No! Don't take her. Bring her back!”

She drew her knees up to her chest and sobbed until the pain eased and it was the sobs themselves that had become painful. When she rolled onto her back and stared upward, trying to catch her breath, she was surprised to find that it was morning, that sunlight, indifferent and beautiful, was filling the room, as if all were right in the world. Mrs. Wilson climbed to her feet and staggered to the front door. She took the key from the nail, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled the door open. She gasped when she saw two little girls, no more than seven or eight years old, heading along the sidewalk toward the bus stop, their arms linked, their heads close together, giggling and whispering conspiratorially. School had started again. A cold shot of adrenaline fluttered into Mrs. Wilson's heart. Nobody was watching the girls. Where were their parents? Where were the police? How could everyone have forgotten the stolen girl so soon? Only a few months had passed, after all, since the stolen girl had walked this street for the last time.

Fifteen or twenty yards behind the girls, an overweight teenage boy clumped along, his black baggy jeans drooping down over the tops of his shoes, some sort of sports jersey hanging almost to his knees. He was looking at the ground, nodding his head to whatever music was coming through the headphones clamped over his ears.

Mrs. Wilson crossed her porch. She stepped down onto the top step and pointed an accusing finger at the boy. “I'm watching you,” she called out. “I know who you are. I know where you live. I'll recognize you.”

The boy nodded along, oblivious. But out of the corner of her eye Mrs. Wilson saw one of the girls look back. The girl whispered something to her friend, who also glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. Wilson. Then the second girl said something to the first and together they began to run, their book bags bouncing against their backs in a way that looked painful.

Mrs. Wilson clutched the collar of her housecoat and ran a hand through her hair. “No,” she whispered. “Oh, no.” She took a few hesitant steps down the sidewalk, waving at the girls, as if waving could pull them back, could make them unafraid. “Come back!” she said. “It's not me! I swear. You don't have to be afraid of me!”

S
HE LIVED ALONE NOW,
in a big house in Brentwood bought with the royalties of a bad country music song her husband had sung. When her husband moved out he had taken the furniture with him—out of spite—enough to fill the six large units he had rented at a place on Gallatin Road. She found that she liked the house without furniture—she had acres of parquet floor on which, after a few glasses of wine, she gleefully slid in her sock feet—but one of the toilets downstairs ran constantly, which drove her crazy. She could hear it all over the house, even when she covered her head with a pillow in the master suite upstairs.

The plumber she called was a singer, of all things—“Arlen Jones, the High Lonesome Plumber,” said his ad in the Yellow Pages—and it was the High Lonesome Plumber who now sat backward astride her noisy toilet, working on something inside the tank while she leaned against the doorjamb and watched.

The plumber's pants had not slid down the way one frankly and perhaps unfairly expected a plumber's pants to, but when he leaned over the tank, his golf shirt hiked up his back, and she caught herself staring at the thin column of curly, gray hair that had migrated north of his belt. She looked at her wineglass and set it down on the counter beside the sink. She had no idea why she had called a plumber who wanted to be a singer, instead of a plumber who just wanted to be a plumber, because—for the moment, anyway—she hated all singers and thought that the world would be a better place if somebody invented some kind of bomb to drop on Nashville that would kill all the singers without hurting anybody else. Well, maybe not all the singers. Maybe just the hat acts. That's what Nashville needed—a hat-act bomb. Her soon-to-be ex-husband, the furniture thief, was a hat act.

The plumber put the lid back on the tank, got down on one knee, and twisted the valve open. They listened. When the tank filled, the water stopped running and did not start up again. Her house once again grew cavernous with quiet. He stood and looked at her.

“It was just a seal,” he said.

“A seal?” she said, thinking suddenly of ice, of some man in a fur parka looking through binoculars.

He blinked a couple of times, then grinned. “They're bad this time of year,” he said. “Them seals.”

She covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks were hot. Too much merlot. She wondered if her lips were purple.

The plumber sat down on the toilet and began putting his tools into a canvas bag. He looked up at her and smiled again.

“I'm so stupid,” she said.

His brow dipped once, but he didn't stop smiling. “Don't say that,” he said. “No reason you should know anything about seals.” He jerked his head at the tank. “That kind, anyway.”

She wanted to change the subject and—even though she already knew the answer—asked, “Why do you call yourself ‘the High Lonesome Plumber?'”

He said, “Oh, it's because I sing a little bit every once in a while. Bluegrass mostly. Some karaoke. I'm a high tenor. You know, like Bill Monroe.”

“Oh,” she said.

The plumber zipped the tool bag, but made no move to stand. Here it comes, she thought.

“Cammie Carson,” he said. “Aren't you—”

“Mrs. Keith Carson?”

He nodded.

“That's me. That's me for now, anyway. I mean, it'll still be me, I guess, but we're getting divorced.”

“I read about that.”

She had until recently occasionally appeared in magazine and newspaper gossip columns, as in “Keith and Cammie Call It Quits.” Now she wasn't anybody important. She shrugged, slapped her hands on her thighs, picked up her wineglass.

“That song was quite a hit,” he said. “How long was it number one?”

“Eleven weeks.”

The plumber whistled. “Eleven weeks,” he said.

The house seemed so unnaturally quiet whenever they stopped talking that she found herself wishing he hadn't fixed the toilet.

“But it's a
stupid
song,” she blurted out. “‘I Keep My Hat in My Truck.' I mean, what kind of song is that?”

“I wasn't planning on singing it.”

“Good. When Keith wrote that song, we didn't even
have
a truck.”

They paused for a moment, listening to the song play inside their heads.

“I don't care where he keeps his damn hat,” she said.

“All right then,” said the plumber, standing up. “If you don't care where he keeps his hat, I don't care where he keeps his hat. That's just the way it'll be.”

She turned, walked into the hallway, and motioned for him to follow. “Right this way,” she said. “I keep my bag in the kitchen.”

She grew self-conscious crossing the living room with the plumber in tow and fought off the urge to break into a run. The room had a floor big enough to hold a basketball court, with a cathedral ceiling high enough for, well, a cathedral. She had noticed that, even when the living room had been crammed with furniture and ficus trees, people had tended to talk in whispers and look for a way out. Ahead of them, down the long hallway on top of the kitchen island, sat the squatty statue of Millie and Joe. Roughly carved out of limestone, about the size of a gallon milk jug, it was her most prized possession.

“What's that?” he asked. “Did you get it in Mexico or somewhere?”

“That,” she said, “is Millie and Joe. They're the reason I don't have any furniture.”

“How'd that work?”

“Well, when we split, Keith said we had to sell it, and I told him there was no way in hell. Then one thing led to another, I lost my temper, and he got the furniture. And he didn't even want it, the jerk. He
stored
it.”

The plumber leaned over and stared closely at Millie and Joe. “I believe I would've rather had the furniture.”

“Have you ever heard of William Edmondson?”

The plumber shook his head.

“He was a sculptor, from Nashville, and he was the first black man to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, back in the late thirties. He did this.”

“Well.”

“He was a genius,” she said.

“Okay.”

“What don't you like about it?”

“I didn't say I didn't like it,” the plumber said, “but it looks to me like he could have done some more carving on it. This thing just barely seems carved out at all.”

“That's the whole point,” she said. “I mean, look at those two. You can tell they've been married forever, that they can't imagine waking up without the other one lying right there, but, like you say, they hardly seem carved out at all.” She reached out and touched Millie's face with a finger. “Edmondson could do the grandest things with the smallest gestures. I don't know. I just think that's wonderful.”

The plumber walked around the island and looked at the statue from the back, then returned to where he had started. The old couple sat with their hands on their knees, their shoulders touching, and smiled as if they had just eaten a particularly satisfying meal.

“I don't know nothing about art,” he said, “but they
seem
happy.”

“They are happy. And they make me happy. After that damn song went number one, Keith and I bought a whole bunch of stuff, and spent a whole
lot
of money, but this is the only thing we ever bought that meant anything at all to me. I keep it here because that recessed light up above it is the brightest light in the house.”

The plumber placed both hands on the counter and turned and stared at her. She thought he looked as if he were in the middle of realizing something important. She imagined he was beginning to understand the gorgeous incongruity of William Edmondson's primitive modernism.

“What's it worth?” he asked.

“Mr. Jones. Be ashamed. I know your mama raised you better than that.”

“Well,” said the plumber, “all I can say is, Mama tried.”

“She didn't try hard enough, apparently,” she said, hoping that she had sounded light, but realizing that she hadn't. She almost told him what it cost, by way of apology, but caught herself in time. Millie and Joe had cost $108,000. Telling him would have made her afraid.

The plumber stared into space for a moment, then swallowed. A blush appeared from beneath his shirt collar and rapidly rose up his face. “You know what?” he said. “I know where one of these things is.”

The next morning, in the plumber's truck, she stared at the red bandana tied around her right wrist (it matched the one tied Dale Evans–style around her throat) and just felt like crying. She felt as if she had become, at only age twenty-eight, the kind of silly Brentwood housewife who dressed up for plumbers. She could not believe she had tried on more than one outfit. What was wrong with her? She was, she reminded herself, extremely pretty—she had even been declared “gorgeous” by more than one tabloid—and she was rich. She was married, for the time being at least, to a famous singer who was as pretty as she was.

The plumber made her sad, too. He wore a starched white shirt and jeans with creases pressed down the front. A Windbreaker zipped halfway. Tasseled loafers. Date clothes. His truck, not the work truck he had driven yesterday but what she realized now was his
good
truck, had been freshly vacuumed and smelled like pine trees growing in a field of cigarette butts. God, she thought, we deserve each other.

“I've been thinking about what you said yesterday,” he said. “About how that Edmondson man did big things with small gestures. You know, Hank Williams wrote songs like that.”

She nodded. Keith, like all country singers, paid public fealty to Hank Williams, but privately found his music simplistic and twangy.

“The only thing I know much about, besides plumbing, is music, and I had to put what you said into music terms to understand it. But it makes sense.”

The plumber glanced at her. “I burned you a CD,” he said.

Please, God, she thought, not a CD. Once Keith's single took off, he hadn't been able to go to the men's room in Houston's without bringing back somebody's demo. Now they were coming after her.

He pointed at the disc sticking out of the dash. “Push that in,” he said.

The song was “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The sound was muddy, and the plumber had tuned his guitar sharp, but he had a high, clear, actually lovely voice. She wondered how many times he had sung the song into his computer before he was satisfied with it. When the track got to the part about the silence of a falling star, he tapped waltz time on the steering wheel and softly sang high harmony along with his own melody.

When the song finished, they sat and listened to the CD hiss. The plumber pushed the eject button. She knew this was the part where she was supposed to say, God, that was in
cred
ible, can you send some copies over, I know some people, they're going to want to hear this,
this
is going to blow their minds. But the sad fact was that she didn't really know anybody, except Keith, and the plumber was thirty years too old. She said, “That's a gorgeous song.”

The plumber nodded.

She could tell by the look on his face that she had disappointed him, so she added, “You have a nice voice.”

“Well, thank you,” he said.

“I really don't know anybody,” she said. “And they probably wouldn't talk to me if I did.”

“That's not why I played it for you,” he said. “I know there's not much demand in the industry for fifty-six-year-old bluegrass singers. My ex-wife reminds me of that every time she gets a chance. I just wanted you to hear it.”

“Oh. How long were you married?”

“Twenty-seven years.”

“What happened?”

“Karaoke, I guess, is the short answer. Too much singing. Too much drinking. Too many women. Too much fighting about drinking and women. Singing don't seem to be a good thing for marriage.”

“Singing isn't the problem.”

“You're right about that, I suppose. What about you? If I remember right you and Keith got together in high school?”

“Hardin High in Carthage, Tennessee.”

They had become “Keith and Cammie” for the first time when they started dating sophomore year. All of this was pretty much public record. Keith's publicists had seen to that. Tiny town. High school sweethearts. The perfect origin myth.

“And you're a nurse, right?”

“Nurse-practitioner. I was a midwife.”

She had supported Keith while he bartended and played open mic nights and hung around on Music Row. Then he got his deal at Sony and the song hit. She thought the phrase sounded ominous, like an automobile accident, but decided that was appropriate. She had quit work because of how often she had had to fly to LA with Keith. What a waste of time that seemed now, all that flying to LA.

“So tell me,” the plumber said, “what were you like in high school?”

She didn't like his tone and shook her head. This wasn't going to turn into a date.

“Then what was Keith like?”

“Well, he was a band nerd, he played the trumpet, although now he's got God knows how many people trying to keep that hushed up. It's that whole ‘Garth Brooks was a decathlete' thing. Apparently you can't be a band nerd and keep your hat in the truck.”

“I guess,” the plumber said. “Band nerd. What else?”

“What else,” she said. “Okay, after Keith got his driver's license, he would come over to my house real early on Saturday mornings, and my parents would give him my car keys, and he would drive my car to his house and wash it. And I would stay in bed and pretend to be asleep until he brought it back. Every Saturday morning he did that. And he did it all winter long, no matter how cold it was.”

“That sounds kinda sweet.”

“It was sweet.” She touched the bridge of her nose with an index finger and closed her eyes and stood for a moment in the window of her bedroom in Carthage, peeking from behind the curtains as Keith pulled into the driveway.