John McManus: Fox Tooth Heart

“Who is Frank? What songs?”

“The songs I write,” she said, beginning to strum. “I finished this one last week. It’s called Three Days Thirty Years Ago.”

In a sultry, rich contralto Haley sang about a boy who’d strolled the lavender rows with her in the South of France. He had woven lavender flowers into her hair, long ago in a place called the Luberon Valley. That was where she yearned to be, not Texas or Arkansas. The song soothed me into a lull, so that it startled me when Haley held out the guitar and said, “Now one of yours.”

I took the instrument, held it awkwardly as if I didn’t know what to do with it. “I’m a chef, remember?”

“My husband met your dad in prison.”

“My dad?”

“Same name?”

“Who’s this husband?” I asked, startled into another memory. It vanished when Haley’s phone rang yet again.

This time she answered. I heard a man’s dull monotone but none of his words.

“Okay,” she said, gesturing toward my guitar.

I shook my head. She signaled again. I said no a third time.

“I won’t be long,” she told the phone then, as if my choice determined hers.

She hung up, got dressed. “Wish I could play,” I said.

“Call me when you’ve learned how.”

I followed her out to where a blue Corvette was parked by my father’s truck. I didn’t remember that car at all. She kissed me bye. As she drove away, I wanted to chase her down and shout the truth, so she would leave her husband and come write songs with me in another country, but I stood there watching her disappear.

I found Ike Senior asleep on a chaise longue. Clara wasn’t around. Absurd to feel lonely after just two minutes. I sat down at a desk, where I came up with some lies that I put down in a letter to my bandmates. Then I burned the letter. By now I was in a sorry state. Bile was swimming in my stomach from the hangover, and I wasn’t cut out for being disliked. Maybe my guitar would cheer me up. I carried it to the porch. Sitting in the bentwood rocker, I played Barnacle , song by song, until Gracie the elephant came shuffling up to the fence.

She didn’t stop there. She waltzed right on into my head to tell me my songs were ugly.

“What?” I replied, although I’d heard her: the songs that comprised Barnacle were chintzy and fake. They were overwrought and shrill and tasteless, she said, using words that once again belonged to no human language. Those are just the ones she’d have used if she’d been human.

Which parts? I asked.

She didn’t answer.

Gracie, say which parts.

All the parts.

Thinking we could understand each other better if I came closer, I carried my guitar downhill and sat on a log in her shade.

“Why are you here?”

I seek peace, Gracie replied in my mind.

With her trunk she lifted some grass into her mouth. “This is peaceful,” I said.

It was until you arrived, she told me. You keep screaming for questions.

The last person I wanted those questions from was a feeble, abused old-woman elephant. “Hey, I’m good now. Let’s talk about you.”

Okay, let’s, she said, still speaking in feelings rather than words.

She began to tell me about a two-bit circus that assembled in Kmart parking lots around the South. The brute Melungeon who ran it, Scoopy Bunn, had beat her daily with a prod. I’d never heard of Melungeons, so I knew Gracie was the one conveying Scoopy to me, but I hadn’t brought a pen. The only way to remember was to put her story to a melody, and convert her nonwords into lyrics.

My anxiety over Aisling subsided as I sat there rhyming about the Florida midway where Gracie had longed for Lake Malawi. She spoke in hints and thoughts that became my lyrics. Playing guitar, I sang about her déjà vu and her dead brothers and the malarial swamp at the water’s edge where she’d fallen in love. No wonder Clara grew maudlin, I thought, shepherding Gracie’s inklings together in paired melodies. Already I could see her as the nucleus of a new song cycle. I wondered how I would record the songs. Elephants held captive in an alien land whose dullards still mourned the Civil War. Elephants who never blacked out drunk, a thought that before I knew it had me reliving the car wreck.

Suddenly the ground was trembling. I broke off from playing guitar to see that Gracie was turning from me.

“Wait, she was dead already,” I said, “I didn’t leave her to die,” but it was too late, she was waddling away.

I climbed the hill to the porch. I felt pretty awful, but after a few shots of whiskey I told myself fuck it, and scribbled what I recalled of the new songs. I heard you thumping for me in another country , went the first line of a mournful number about Gracie’s homeland fifty years ago. Then I thought, Five hundred years ago. Five thousand. What if you lived forever but never forgot?

I gave Gracie a depraved vampire mother who in the year 3000 BC rendered her undead. The heartbreak and terror were overwhelming. Over the millennia, she lost hope that she would ever forget. One day in the Middle Ages, her brain reached capacity. From then on, forming memories caused her pain. I plucked an ugly tune about it, shouting its words until my throat was raw.

Ike Senior came outside. “You’ll shred your vocal cords,” he said, sitting down next to me.

“Least of my worries,” I said, baiting him to inquire about others.

“You were speaking to Gracie.”

“I was sort of meditating.”

“Hear of that family in Siberia, only learned yesterday about World War Two?”

“I guess you’ll study their technique?”

“Well, it’s harder these days. Used to be, you just crossed the state line.”

“I need a new passport,” I said, thinking he would be curious to hear why.

“Under the bed you slept in, there’s a shoebox.”

When I stood up to go fetch it, he laughed. “What’s funny?”

“You are. Think we’re in a spy movie?”

“Screw you,” I said, but went to look anyway. I really did need a passport. And there really was a shoebox, but it held only slide photographs from decades ago.

Holding them up to the light, I saw no Shadwell sisters, no people either, only calico cats. Dozens were sunbathing on the porch of that house where we were hiding. Thirty in one picture. I couldn’t help feeling some calamity had wiped them out, or they’d fled en masse from the same energy feeding my new songs.

I lay down to write. Drinking, I puzzled out a refrain, a sort of theme. It’s good Ike Senior doesn’t care about me, I thought; this way I can focus. I jotted down titles. Elegy, about elephants mourning. Logic Train, about acumen. Hannibal, about vampire elephants still haunted by trauma from the Punic Wars. The lyrics came as fast as I could write them down. I’d tapped a vein, I could feel the songs surging with a voltage I’d never harnessed. The yearning was pitched not toward gauzy maudlin people but toward real people. If I could record and mix these somehow, I thought, and send the CD off in a predated package, I could die in a disaster of my own.

Night had fallen by the time I heard through the wall a familiar rhythm that I couldn’t quite place. There was muffled talk, too, so I laid down my guitar and went to the kitchen. I found my father and Clara playing poker with three strangers.

“You’re in time to buy in,” said Ike Senior.

“James’s kid,” said Clara, as it struck me: they were listening to the trumpet solo of my latest single, “Empty Harbor.”

“Fifty bucks, James’s kid,” said the beefy redhead to my father’s left, who looked familiar.

My pulse at cocaine tempo, I sat down between the other two men and laid down fifty dollars. My father gave me a set of chips. The song’s climax about lying drunk girls crescendoed into my vow to drown in Pacific water, and then damned if “Denouement” didn’t come on, final track of the album.