Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

joke lost something in translation across two hundred years of slavery and another hundred of Jim Crow.”

“If so, let the Hugers and DeLays pay reparations. I don’t know who my grandparents were on my mother’s side much less anybody further back, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that no Hills owned any slaves. While you and Marcel were at prep school, I was mopping floors in a black church. But I was someone in New York when you were just another pair of pretty wannabes at music school. I took Cell in the band because of you, and he toured with us two years making better money than he’s probably making now. Then when we were on the cusp of breaking out, right when I needed him the most, he quit. Why, I never understood. I didn’t want him to. How much more am I supposed to owe the guy?”

“And while you were being such a saint and altruist, you screwed him over ‘Talking in My Sleep.’”

Ransom’s whole expression dropped. “So that’s it!” He slapped his forehead with his palm. “Stupid me—of course! He wants a piece of the RAM action—is that what he said?”

“We’ve never talked about it.”

“Never? Come on, Claire.”

“Read my lips, Ran, never, not one word.”

“That’s what it is, though. It has to be. He’s pissed.”

“You could hardly blame him if he were.”

“How many times do we have to do this, Claire? I wrote that song, all six verses, every line and every word in every line. I came up with the concept, the music….”

“It also has a chorus, as I recall. Yours was ‘But all it ever was was talk / And talk is cheap.’ Cell and I changed it to ‘But all it ever was / Was talking in our sleep.’ We made that up from scratch. Whole cloth. It changed the song. You know it did. We wrote it on the F train coming back from Coney Island one day while you were in the city doing…whoever you were doing then.”

“Hey,” he said. “I was at a business meeting, Claire.”

She gave him a hard look not wholly lacking in compassion. “Don’t try to kid a kidder, sweetie. I know where you were.”

Ransom took a beat. “Okay, I made mistakes, Claire. I admit I wasn’t perfect. I never said I was. But that was a long time ago, and I’m here to try to rectify. In the end, it was one line. One. And anything I ever made off my music and my book was share and share alike with you, wasn’t it? I think Cell got more from RHB than RHB got back—but if I screwed him, bottom line: so did you.”

“Or maybe you screwed both of us.”

Ransom blinked and shook his head. “Jesus. Jesus Christ. So that’s what all this is about.”

“Actually, Ransom, what this is about is the fact that you called Marcel ‘nigga,’ and embarrassed him—and me.”

“You know I’m not a racist, though,” he said. “At least look me in the face and say you know that in my heart I’m not.”

She looked him in the face and said, “I don’t know what’s in your heart. What I know is that if it has long ears and goes hee-haw most people will feel justified calling it an ass. They won’t look any further or really give a shit what’s in your heart.”

“But you aren’t most people. You’re my wife. You have to care. Don’t you know what’s in my heart?”

“Truth?”

He hesitated only slightly. “Truth.”

“Once upon a time, I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure.”

His expression turned forlorn. “Then who knows, if not you? I thought we were supposed to know that for each other, Claire. I thought that’s what this whole thing was about, for you to know what’s in my heart like I know what’s in yours.”

“I’m not sure you know what’s in my heart either, Ran,” Claire said, speaking what she’d only thought before. “And as for ‘supposed to,’ we passed that on the fly ten years ago. And not just us. Everybody does. We weren’t singled out. You’re just late catching on.”

A certain look came into Ransom’s eyes, the sad and soulful one that always made Claire think of Mel, the time she went to Killdeer right before the wedding. She’d heard so much about him, yet when they finally met, the big bad monster turned out to be a lonely, sick old man with a lost look in his fierce, watery blue eyes, the look of someone whose drunks and rages were just ineffective protests against a sense of beatenness he’d accepted somewhere so far back that he’d forgotten there was any other way to be. And even if Mel glimpsed it sometimes, before he got too deep into that first glass of 20/20 in the front seat of the Thunderbird, he no longer had the energy, and probably not the wish, to change. Ran—whatever else you said of him—had always had that energy and wish, and if he had some Mel in him, he’d fought against it, too. Claire saw him fighting now, and she did not know what she felt, except she didn’t want to see him lose.

“Okay,” Ran said. “I’m sorry. I apologized to Marcel. I apologize to you. Just don’t give up on me, okay?”

The sudden plaintiveness of this, and its sincerity, wrenched her. “I never have.”

Seeing her fighting sudden tears, Ran took encouragement like a cornerback who intercepts the ball and heads for the opponent’s goal. “Okay, I haven’t done too hot so far, but at least I’m trying,” he said. “We’ve still got the evening, and tomorrow is a brand-new day. If I can cut back on my percentage of errors and add to my percentage of success, before long you’ll have yourself a model husband, DeLay. Before you know it, I’ll be Jesus fucking walk-on-water-roll-back-the-stone-and-find-the-Bad-Boy-risen Christ!” His grin was the victory dance in the wrong end zone.

Claire’s expression was the silent field. “Ransom, did you