Дональд Уэстлейк - Baby, Would I Lie?

The audience laughed and called out with surprise, and with the spotlight tracking him, Elvis went tearing down the aisle and up onstage, still hollering gibberish, until the male guitarist, who doubled as MC, calmed him down, and then they did the joke, which was that Elvis wanted to announce he’d just seen Glenn Miller alive in a nearby supermarket.

Glenn Miller? Did these people know who Glenn Miller was?

Apparently. They laughed and applauded this small joke and then the MC asked Elvis to sing a song as long as he was there, but Elvis said he had to rush back to the supermarket to see if Glenn Miller was still there. He ran offstage and the audience laughed and applauded some more. Yosemite Sam gestured that Sara could resume her seat, which she did, and the show went on.

A little later, the warm-up act finished, the curtain closed, and a loudspeaker voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen — Ray Jones!”

A somewhat bulky fiftyish man in a dark blue tux, under what might be his own mussy black hair but was probably a really good rug, and carrying an acoustic guitar so adorned with bright colors and wild designs that it looked like somebody’s favorite motorcycle, came out through the center split in the red curtain and stepped over to the microphone left there by the MC. A spotlight shone on him, and the applause was long and loud and truly enthusiastic. When it died down, the man sang, in his gravelly, well-traveled voice, a sappy air called “It’s Time to Write Another Love Song (This Time, the Song’s for You).”

More applause at the end of this song and then the curtain reopened, and there were the musicians again, with more instruments than before. Ray Jones said a few words of welcome to the audience, thanking them for coming, asking them if they didn’t think this was a really terrific bunch of musicians up here (they did), making a couple of small jokes about Branson traffic and the well-known desire of all fathers everywhere to go fishing instead of to the theater, and generally making himself accommodating to the crowd. He said nothing about murder trials or tax problems or anything troublesome.

Then he strummed a chord on his guitar and said, “Now, folks, I’d like some help on this one, if you feel up to it. I think you know the words I mean, where I want you to come right in and join me. If you could do that, we could really get something going here, I’m pretty sure. And— ”

The musicians started a lively, fast-paced introduction, which the audience clearly recognized; there was laughter and applause and a stirring in the seats. Then Ray Jones leaned in to the microphone and sang:

Ray Jones lifted his head and shouted over the music, “That’s your cue!”

And, on the beat, the audience en masse gave him the line:

Astounded, Sara turned to look at Yosemite Sam, who was grinning inside his beard as though remembering with pleasure every greasy meal he’d ever faced. And all through the theater, happiness was loud and palpable as Ray Jones went on:

The audience didn’t need any priming from Ray Jones this time as they roared him the line:

It’s an affirmation, Sara thought; it’s a declaration of class solidarity; it’s a tribal anthem; it’s a credo; it’s a social statement at the bedrock of self-image and belonging, and I have to remember this for the piece for Trend . This is who we are; that’s what these people are singing, and we’re all here together, and there’s no strangers to laugh at us or look down their noses. This is who we are.

Meantime, Ray Jones had gone on into the bridge, and Sara’s foot was tapping along with the beat:

Half the audience was clapping along with the song now, and Sara had to resist the impulse to do the same. Ray Jones, grinning, nodding, pounding his own left foot on the stage floor, drove them all into the peroration:

Everybody bellowed it out:

Grinning, winking, Ray Jones side-talked the mike:

Everybody:

Ray Jones:

There ain’t nothin else to do—

Everybody, including (to her utter astonishment) Sara:

Cheering, rousing, standing ovation. Openmouthed, amazed, Sara turned to stare at Yosemite Sam, and he grinned at her and winked.

Dear Jack,

Herewith, a preliminary report and a suggested approach:

The exhilaration of finding oneself in the very heart of the American ethos is hard to describe. Despite the complications and sophistication of 200 years of history, Americans are still essentially the same rugged, simple people who first braved the unknown to carve a civilization from this new continent’s wilderness. The process of taming that wild and beautiful land continues, here in Branson, Missouri, among these rugged rocks and sandy scrubs, where the eternal verities of family, honesty, and valor now unexpectedly find themselves confronted by many of our postmodern ills: murder, rape, dark passions, and a complex, cynical, uncaring legal system.

Branson is country-western star Ray Jones’s spiritual home, as exciting as Atlantic City, as clean as Disneyland, as fresh and new as wet paint. And these people are Ray Jones’s people, honest, simple, slow to anger or judgment. In this confrontation between Ray Jones and the citizens of his soul, the presence of the world’s press, eager for a kind of meaning they can understand, seems almost irrelevant.

Jack Ingersoll showed the fax to his boss, Hiram Farley. “I think I’d better go down there,” he said.

“Go now,” Farley said.

Upon sending her initial fax to New York, the morning after attending the Ray Jones show — she’d actually written it last night but still thought it a good, evocative first draft this morning, and so sent it — Sara decided to do some legwork, which actually meant carwork, which meant that awful traffic outside. But there was no way to avoid it; Sara joined the hordes searching for the world’s cheapest pancakes, struggled through them at last, and pointed the nose of the trusty rental east.

Forsyth seemed weird at first, until Sara realized that what made it so odd, after Branson, was its normality. This is what small towns actually look like — sleepy, quiet, a bit dusty. Low buildings flanking wide empty streets. Lots of cars and pickup trucks parked at the curbs, but little traffic moving.