John McManus: Fox Tooth Heart

“Gracie visits you.”

“She’s not either, maybe.”

They continued this silly back-and-forth as if I couldn’t hear. Ask me a goddamn question, I thought. When Aisling was alive, I’d kept a list of reasons to break up, topped by “Never asks me about the past.” Even on coke she inquired only about the future. “Always the fucking future,” I shouted back at her once, with a randomness that startled her. That’s because my real fight was with Ike Senior. Ask a question, ask a question, I chanted now in my head. By the bottom of my first glass, he still hadn’t done it. Even when Clara went in for ice, he glanced at me only to see if I laughed at his jokes.

“How do you shoot a red elephant?”

“With a gun,” I guessed.

“With a red gun.”

“All these elephant jokes, as if they’re funny,” Clara said when she returned. “I mean, the elephant falls out of the tree because it’s dead?”

“And the idioms,” my father said.

“It’s awful. Elephants in the room and white elephants and pink elephants and a memory like an elephant.”

“Elephants deserve better,” said Ike Senior, surely playing her. I began dreaming up scenarios to make him feel bad. Claiming I’d been tricked into believing him drowned. Then I recalled replying to his tsunami email.

“Can I use your truck?” I said, only to see if he would ask my destination; it wasn’t safe for me to be seen in public.

He handed the keys over and said, “No title in it.”

“So just don’t get caught? That’s it?”

“No insurance card, either,” he said, with that subtle grin that asked the world to join in his wonder at how droll everything was. I took the keys. He was doing what he believed I needed, and I hated him for it. What’s the trouble, Ike, what have you gone and done? Cry if you need to cry. So vividly did I react to his not saying those things that Gracie, wherever she was, must have heard me in her head.

I hid the Jaguar in the barn behind the house, and taking the truck I accelerated down the highway. Before I knew it I was crossing the Red River. Not the best choice to enter Texas again, but my fans were all sniffly emo boys and stoned vegan girls who lived in cities, not the kind of people you find at a trailer bar above a river. I parked under a neon sign blinking Busch and headed inside. In the dim interior a girl with bluebird shoulder tattoos was perched a few seats down from some big-hatted ranchers. “Double bourbon,” I told the bartender, taking a stool beside the girl. It felt good not to be fleeing the country after all. The bartender poured my drink, passed it over to me. My skin tingled from being so close to the girl, but I didn’t look at her as I mulled over my options. Hide out in Switzerland like Polanski. Live in a Third World capital. I would stand out by my skin color.

Maybe Moscow, I was thinking when the girl said, “You seem fun,” in a pleasant Ozark accent.

Tilting my drink down my throat, I turned to face her. She was cute, with cheekbones that sloped down toward her chin in a svelte triangle. “I’m mentally ill,” I said.

“What kind of music do you play?” This shook me. It’s only my face, I told myself, or my messy hair or my hollow eyes.

“I’m a restaurant chef.”

“Nearest restaurant’s thirty miles.”

“In Venice, California.”

“Are there foods that stop you from feeling emotions?”

“Which emotion is the problem?”

“Sadness, and happiness.”

“Well, I’m just the sous-chef, you know.”

I was starting to enjoy myself. She gestured down toward the ranchers, three of them in overalls and Stetsons, ogling her. “Could you kick their asses?”

“What did they do to you?”

“Stare when I’m flirting with guys.”

Ignorant of music, I told myself. I needed not to like any girls now. Favorite band probably Led Zeppelin; hillbilly twang. I sensed chaos in her when she squeezed my hand.

“So you’ll do it?”

“What’s your name?”

“Haley, you misogynist,” she said, which cracked me up.

“I’m James,” I said, wondering about my last name.

“Feel like a tequila, James?”

“I think I do.” I bought us two shots.

“Welcome to hell,” she toasted.

“Is that a warning?”

“You’ve seen this place.”

I nodded yes, I had.

“Why else am I an alcoholic?”

“I drink a lot too,” I told her, glad to hear that she was one.

“Yeah, where have you been all my life?”

I admit it, the word depraved rose to mind when I heard myself say, “Looking for you.” I swatted it away with another shot of alcohol. I was having too good a time. We got to talking about drunk jags we’d been on. I told her about blacking out in the U-Bahn, and she told about blacking out in Denton, Texas. She said she wanted to die like Amy Winehouse. “Gram Parsons,” I countered, carelessly naming a singer Pitchfork had compared me to. But nothing came of that.

We kissed to catcalls, scooted tables out of the way to dance. “Cheers, mofos,” I called out to the ranchers as we maneuvered around to a country tune.

As I spun Haley, I heard someone say, “Twenty K per tusk.”

I fell out of rhythm. “Pardon?” I said to a red-haired fellow in overalls.

“Pardon who?” he replied, as I steadied myself.

“You said twenty K per tusk.”

“I was discussing my job.”

“What line of work?”

“Know James, in the Shadwell place?”

“He in the ivory trade?”

“I’m only saying yes cause you’ll black it out.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” I said, wishing Aisling would yell at this man on my behalf. I turned to speak to her. Seeing Haley instead overwhelmed my brain in a sort of power surge. One of our LPs, Lumber , treats the subject of blackouts, mainly what you realize during them and then forget. The lyrics are pure fiction, since they chronicle times I’ve forgotten. We must have kept on talking. I caught little glimpses, which I still possess, like Haley whispering in the red-headed man’s ear. Looking for my bandmates, I wandered away. The bar was shaped like one in Portugal, in Porto, where we’d played Primavera Sound. It seemed to me I was back there again. “Eu gostaria de uma cerveja,” I said, and then it faded away and I awoke naked on a carpet rug.

Haley was asleep beside me. “Hey,” I said, poking her.

She awoke, snuggled against me. “Hey, cowboy.”

“I’m scared to move,” I said, referring to my hangover, but it was a deeper dread, one I could have described only by playing music.

“As you should be.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You live in the Shadwell place.”

“I don’t live in Texas.”

“This is Arkansas.”

“Whatever it is,” I said.

“Haley, who are the Shadwells? Well, James, they’re teenage folk singers who murdered their parents and blamed it on slaves’ ghosts.”

So these Shadwells were in prison, I thought, where they fell in with some chick who conned them out of their home, got paroled, then met her match in Ike Senior.

“Maybe an elephant told them to,” I said.

“No, it was years before those elephants.”

I was thinking I might ask Haley if she could hear Gracie talking, but then her phone rang. She sat up and looked at the caller ID.

“My husband will kill you,” she said.

A memory flickered and went dark again. Haley reached for my guitar. Lifting it like a weight, she raised her eyebrows at me.

“Must belong to the Shadwells,” I said.

“Say why you’re lying, and I’ll sing one of my songs.”

“Are you a songwriter?”

“Frank owns this house, is the funny thing.”