As I approached the clearing in the park with my guitar, fear bubbled inside my gut. I was still struggling to come to terms with the bombshell Sarah had dropped on me that morning. Not that I didn’t deserve to suffer.
Would Harrison even be in the clearing? Now that he knew I knew, he would probably be furious. Our conversations had been tense already, and now I understood why. With things out in the open, I wasn’t sure he would want anything to do with me at all.
Every fiber of my body screamed to run back to my car. Drive away. Avoid. My fight-or-flight response had always chosen flight. I’d run from every bad situation in my life.
I took a deep breath. Not this time. I’d promised Sarah I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye to Harrison. If he never wanted to see me again, I would honor that. I would at least, though, look him in the eye before I left. I owed him that much.
The closer I got to the end of the trail, the more convinced I became that the meadow would be empty. I even half hoped it. No music floated up the path. No guitar strummed. No voice sang a chorus. I heard only birds chirping in the trees.
But when I rounded the bend, I saw him leaning against the trunk of the tree with his guitar lying on the ground beside him. He waited until I was nearly to him before he spoke. “I wasn’t sure you would show.”
I stood, holding my guitar. “I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”
“Neither am I.” He studied me for a moment. “Well, are you going to sit or not?”
On my walk down the trail, I had debated what to say when I saw him. How do you start a conversation with a son you never knew you had? I wasn’t good at conversation without pressure. And I avoided it totally when the pressure was there. I started out clumsily after I settled into a sitting position. “I’m trying to wrap my head around this dad thing.”
He held up a hand to stop me. “I have a dad. A great one.”
“Fair enough. You’re lucky. Russ is far better at that than I ever would be.” I ran my hand along my guitar strings. “Maybe I’m just a guy you can talk to about music.”
He shrugged, clearly unimpressed with my answer. “I’ve got music friends too.”
I knew what he was doing because it was exactly what I had done a thousand times before. When things got uncomfortable between me and someone else, I pushed them away. Shut them off.
What he wanted was for me to leave. Except I wasn’t going to. Not this time. I’d been walking away my whole life. From Millerton. From bands. From friends. From my own family. All it ever got me was away, living in a dump of an apartment that I could get evicted from if I didn’t find a way to make some money. And that was tough because no band wanted to hire me—they thought I would just quit on them too.
He could get up and leave. I wouldn’t chase him if he did. But I would not turn first. Let him test me. He deserved that much. “So, what do you want from me?”
He leaned back against the tree, his face scrunched in thought. “I’ve listened to Mom and Dad’s stories about you. Seen you on videos online. But it feels like I’ve got nothing. It’s like you’re not real. Tell me something, anything, about you. Something no one knows. Give me something to figure out if you’re worth the time.”
That was a tough one, so I told him the only thing that came to mind.
The band I was playing with that night in Mississippi really was bad. The lead singer liked women too much, the drummer chased men, and the bass player snorted too much cocaine. All of that was true. Not much else was.
The crowd was sparse. Maybe thirty or forty people. Mostly falling-down drunk dudes out for a night on the town with their girlfriends. They didn’t know who we were, and they didn’t care.
Snake was eyeing this lady drinking alone, and he started chatting her up during breaks. She was ten to fifteen years older than him and at least fifty pounds heavier. But Snake, being Snake, didn’t care. Our cut of the door would not be much, barely enough to cover gas to the next town on our schedule, but he could use his free drinks to get her drunk. Somebody dropped a dime on him, though. Called her old man and told him what was going on.
We were playing our last set. That woman was on stage, stumbling around drunk and warbling into the mic. Next thing we knew, some guy was shouting at us.
He was big. Not muscular, but fat. Huge. Three hundred fifty pounds at least. And stumbling drunk. Weaving from table to table. Knocking over chairs. Pushing people out of the way. The whole time, he’s yelling, “That’s my wife!”
Snake was eyeing the woman, trying to decide if she was worth the trouble. The bassist was already easing his way off the stage. The big guy grabbed a full pitcher of beer and slung it at Snake, but he was too drunk to throw straight. It came flying directly at me, soaked my clothes and guitar, and dripped on my amp.
I could barely afford to eat, let alone buy a new amp. All I wanted to do was dry my equipment before it shorted out. So I moved forward. The big dude climbed onto the stage and hit a microphone stand. The stand came down right in my path, and I fell over it. So there I was, all of one hundred fifty pounds, soaking wet—which I was, in beer—and I collided into a wall of blubber more than twice my weight. The only thing going for me was that he was drunk, so he fell backward. In his panic, he reached out for anything to grab, which turned out to be the guitar strapped around my neck.
I tried to stay upright, but it was impossible. No way I could resist all that weight. The strap or my back was going to break, or I was going to fall.
I fell. We crashed off the stage and slammed into the floor. He landed on his back. That knocked the wind out of him. I landed on top of him. He probably didn’t even notice scrawny little me as I bounced off him like he was a trampoline. My poor guitar, unfortunately, was between us. I crushed it in the fall.
When we slammed to the floor, a gun he had tucked into his waistband came loose and clattered across the floor. In about the only lucky thing that happened that night, I bounced off his gut and landed on top of the gun.
I didn’t wrestle it from him. I didn’t even think about what it meant. I just stood up with it in my hand. And that was when panic set in. He was on the ground. The gun was in my hand. My guitar was shattered. I could barely catch my breath. I couldn’t even think straight enough to figure out if I’d shot him and didn’t remember it. I almost pissed my pants in fright.
A bunch of good old boys grabbed me and took the gun away. Another group held him down. Next thing I knew, cops were coming through the door, and everyone was saying I pulled a gun on this guy. Nobody had seen which one of us had it at the beginning. Even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have been on the side of some skinny, long-haired musician from out of town.
I tried to explain what had happened, but they hauled me down to the jail because they didn’t believe me. The next morning, though, they let me know the guy was telling them it was his gun, not mine. He wasn’t doing it to protect me. He just wanted his gun back.
Anyway, the serial numbers proved it was his.
He, of course, said he’d never pulled it out or anything, which was true, so I must’ve taken it from him during the fight. Now, there wasn’t a fight, but all I wanted was out of town. The guy said he didn’t want to press charges, and I sure didn’t, so everything got settled without any fuss. The cops wrote it up just like he told them. They warned me never to come back to town, like I had any plans to do that.
I caught back up with the band, and we skedaddled. The whole drive to the next town, Snake complained he’d never gotten laid.
Next thing I knew, someone in the band told the story to a newspaper. Probably Snake, though I never found out for sure. He must’ve thought it would make the band sound tougher.
A reporter pulled the police report, which said I had taken the guy’s gun from him during the fight, and shared the story. The band started calling me Mad Maverick McDougal.
I was going to tell the truth, clear up the whole mess, and stop the stupid lie, but I got a call from another band who had heard the story and offered me a job. I wanted out of that awful band I was in, so I took it. Then I couldn’t tell them the truth because it was the whole reason I’d gotten the gig.
So that’s the whole sordid story.
Harrison leaned against the tree while I waited for his reaction. “So you let everyone believe a lie for a job?”
I thought about that for a moment. I’d never told anyone the truth about what happened that night. “Not for the job. Yeah, at first, maybe, but also because it was easier than admitting the truth.” I paused for a minute and realized there was more to it. “But it was the way people looked at me too. For the first time in my life, they didn’t see some scared punk who let people run over him. They saw a guy who stood his ground against a man twice his size. An armed man.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” I admitted. “I haven’t done it much in my whole life. But it felt good that people thought I could.”
He chewed on his lip as he thought that over. Finally, he nodded. “That makes sense.”
It did because it was the truth, not something I told myself much. But saying it aloud made me realize something more. “You know what I really want?”
“What?”
“To know for myself that I can stand my ground. I don’t want it to be a lie. I want it to be real.”
Harrison stroked his guitar in thought for a few minutes. Finally, he looked up at me and cocked his head. “Mom says you used to busk the streets in Asheville.”
I nodded.
“That took guts, didn’t it? Playing your guitar in front of strangers. No stage. No separation. Just you and them.”
“Yeah, I guess it did, but I think music made it easier.”
He picked up his guitar and strummed a few chords, tuning as he went. “Maybe. But it still takes guts.”
I’d forgotten about my nervousness that first time Anna and Charlie got me to play in Asheville. I never would have done that without them conspiring to make it happen. I’d wanted to run away so badly. But I’d stood there. And played. Conquered my fear. And that had felt good.
I looked Harrison in the eye. “I’ll do whatever you want. Leave if you ask, but I’ll be blunt. I’d prefer to stick around. Get to know you some.” I paused, waiting for a reaction. When I didn’t get one, I said, “If that’s cool.”
He fingered his guitar as he thought. He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no either. “Let’s play a few songs.”
We played more than a few as the afternoon passed.