https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
"My Name Is Travis Jackson" by Nels Hanson
Continued from part 5
Finally, Jodie dropped her head. It was pretty strong stuff, as good as any three-handkerchief Sunday matinee.
“I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t think you were ill, that you’re not fully responsible. I’ll help you, not because I’m your husband but as a fellow human being.”
She sat in her chair with her eyes closed, shaking her head, listening to me plead with her to stop, to straighten up, to get some counseling, I’d go with her. I knew she’d had it rough as a kid. She shouldered responsibility for Melva’s two babies. That wasn’t fair.
And her dad a shiftless abusive drunk—
It wasn’t Jodie’s fault or anything to be ashamed of. Lots of people got help and started new lives. That’s what we’d done, when she’d come back to the ranch that Christmas.
She’d saved me and now I’d do the same. This time we’d do it right.
“I don’t know why but I think I still love you and can try to work things out, if you want to. You say the word. Now the ball’s in your court.”
Then there was nothing, just the recording of the unanswered phone, Harrah’s or Jodie or maybe the President and Laura trying to get through.
When the tape finally clicked off, Jodie still didn’t look up.
I went over and stood in front of her chair.
“Where’re your clothes?” she said stiffly.
“I need to change my life—”
I figured it was as much a shock for her as it was for me. It was an awful thing to hear, for both us. Now she was the one seeing a ghost. Without the black I must have looked white as a sheet.
I reached out to touch her shoulder and with a reflex she jerked back.
“Go ahead. Change if you want.”
She didn’t sound angry, just tired.
“Try it for a while. Ruin everything. Then see if it’s as all-fired wonderful as you remember—”
“What about you—”
“I like who I am.”
Now she lifted her hand, ran her fingers through her new hair and put back her chin.
She turned, showing her profile like the face on a coin.
“I like her fine.”
“You really do?”
“Why shouldn’t I? A couple million people don’t have your problem. They don’t have any complaints, not about Jodie Cole.”
She was Gloria Swanson coming down the staircase in “Sunset Boulevard”—Norma Desmond thinks it’s a movie as they arrest her for murder.
“I just got off the phone with Lynn Cheney. She’s asked Buck and Jodie to Jackson Hole, to fish and shoot with Dick.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m afraid I can’t go.”
“Why’s that?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My name’s Travis Jackson.”
She stared at me coldly.
“I know the song but who the hell is he?”
I thought of Barry Nelson in “The Man With My Face,” when he knocks on his door and his wife and her husband ask what he wants. In Nashville I’d turned off the movie before I’d seen the end.
I leaned over and took out the tape and put it in my pocket.
“What’re you going to do with that?”
“Don’t worry. I don’t think this one’s going to make the charts. It wouldn’t sound too good at the next Republican Convention.”
What I had to say Jodie didn’t want to hear.
“You’re talking nonsense. This is nothing, just nothing.”
She didn’t want me, even if she thought she did. I didn’t answer and she asked what I was going to do to hurt us.
“You going to change your name?”
At last everything was straight.
She wanted Buck Cole—the singer-songwriter who was lucky and famous, in love with his beautiful talented partner-wife who loved him more than any woman could ever love a man and had arranged it so he could drive the President’s new pickup and make love one night where Lincoln slept.
Buck was the man at the top and climbing higher, if he didn’t trip drunk and dive into a clinic or worse.
Travis never lived, except in a song.
“Who cares what I call myself?”
“Tell it to the lawyers.”
“I’m good at heart-to-hearts.”
Jodie really was an original, I realized, one of a kind. Nothing, not lightning bolt or mental breakdown, fazed her. Maybe she’d seen it all before, by the time she’d learned to fry an egg.
Again I felt a pang. She was more lost than I’d ever been, as bad as Red Stampley who’d become alternately Roy Rogers and General Patton.
Mad as he was, at least Buck Cole had a strong hunch something was badly wrong. She was talking again like I was a child.
“There’s such a thing as a brand. You say you’re a cowboy. You ought to know that.”
She was willing to take the chance. She was willing to make the sacrifice.
Buck Cole’s sacrifice.
She started to reach for the phone.
“I’m going to call the White House—I want you to talk to George.”
“What for?”
“He knows. Laura says he’s been worse than you and come out of it.”
“Come out of what?”
I wasn’t a saint, but it was still murder, or at least assisted suicide—Jodie’d stood by while I’d opened a vein and drunk Buck Cole near to death.
“Whatever it is.”
It wasn’t any use.
“Here,” I said.
I dropped the ring in her hand.
“Maybe you can sing a song about it. ‘Ring of Gold.’ You can put that on a bumper sticker.”
She glanced at the ring I’d slipped on her hand in Waverly, on Columbus Day, turning it over in her fingers like a missing button. She looked up at me.
“You know, when you called yesterday?”
She had that hard green-eyed gaze, the same stare she’d given me at the ranch when she’d thrown the gold band and driven off, the eyes she’d flashed a week ago in Nashville when she’d left for the airport.
“Yeah,” I said. “For once I do remember.”
It seemed like a year ago, or a hundred. It had happened to another person.
“I wasn’t in the shower,” Jodie said. “I wasn’t alone.”
I didn’t know if it were true or not, if she were trying to make me jealous to get me back, to keep Buck Cole at any cost, one way or another. Now it didn’t matter. I knew the avid man in the room of changing leaves, her shadowed lover in my nightmares wasn’t Slim Frye or Jerry but me, Travis Jackson.
I started to say, “Laura wouldn’t like it,” but she was waiting, eager to tell me, so I let her have her way. She’d sat listening to me.
“Anyone I know?”
“Ask the pool boy. Greg. He’s the one gave Mr. Hollywood my room number.”
I realized I finally didn’t care.
“You know him well, from the Oscars.”
I thought of Richard Burton and then remembered he was dead. I’d been asleep so long anything might have happened. I’d been gone for three years. In my absence a whole world had gone by.
We could have gone to war or landed on Mars and I wouldn’t have known.
“I believe it,” I said, looking Jodie straight in her big green eyes. “You’re a star. You know all the licks.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You could cheat on Nashville with Memphis and Tennessee would never know.”
“Don’t you start in on me, after you screwed the three Wheeler Sisters—”
It was my turn to walk away.
“Buck Cole, you get back here!”
“I’m afraid he’s already gone,” I said over my shoulder. “He passed away, last night at the ranch. He went easy. He hardly knew what hit him, just like Johnny Black when Eddie Rat fired the flintlock.”
I shut the door tight behind me—I thought after all that had happened I at least deserved the last word. Anyway, Jodie firing Johnny had set him on the road as a gofer for Columbia and the contract fight with Rat the rapper.
I heard the ring hit the thick polished walnut.
“Damn you, Buck, I hate you! Hate you! You hear me? You’re nothing!”
She had a strong voice. I could hear her all the way down the hall, past the two men in suits and dark glasses who watched me closely, then grinned. She must have opened the door but I didn’t look back.
I didn’t wait for the elevator.
As I started down the stairs I thought for a second she might come to her senses and shout out my name.
I waited for moment, holding the door open.
But she never did and I went on down the stairwell hearing her call for a man who no longer walked the Earth.
The End