High Strung Page 5

  Cafton waited patiently, wanting Bynum’s full attention.

  Even though Bynum and his wife, Mattie, usually rode on the tour bus with the rest of the group when they toured, once off the bus, they parted ways with the others. It’s not that they were snobbish, but rather, they had agreed when they wed they would find ways to normalize their lives and relationship in an exceedingly abnormal business.

  Bynum was a man of his word, and Mattie was a woman who had no problem helping him stay true to it. So far, so good. By being a couple, not part of the tour herd, Bynum and Mattie had pulled off an unheard-of feat in the music industry: a happy marriage. Mattie wasn’t his first love, but she was his best, and would be his last.

  “Okay. I’m with you now. Shoot.” Bynum was ready to absorb whatever prompted Cafton to call him.

  “Somebody tried to toss some Molotov cocktails through the front windows of the café.” Cafton sounded detached, like a newscaster.

  “Honey, it’s Caf. The café was firebombed,” Bynum lowered the receiver and whispered to Mattie as she handed him a snack and refilled his juice glass.

  “Good grief, Caf. Are you okay?” Bynum was fully awake, up to speed, and snacking on the blueberry bagel with cinnamon cream cheese Mattie had just made for him.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I was out and Dagwood was upstairs in his hiding spot, so no one was hurt. Luckily I was out getting some sodas.” Cafton made the sign of the cross on his chest even though he wasn’t Catholic. “I went back in and got him. He’s safe, too.”

  “Sodas? At night? You were driving at night? Where are you now? Surely you’re not at home. In a hotel? Y’all can use our place, you know. You have a key. We won’t be home until after the tour, for three months, so you’re welcome to just move right in.”

  “I know, thanks, but Dag and I are at the Music City Emerald. The damage to the house is mostly cosmetic, plus the porch furniture. I’ll get everything cleaned up today. We’ll probably be back home tonight or tomorrow night. But I’m more concerned about safety than inconvenience right now. Thinking about getting those metal burglar bars put over all the windows.” Cafton liked to bounce things off Bynum before making major changes to the café. “They might help prevent that bozo from tossing a bomb through the window in case his aim improves next time. What do ya think?” Cafton’s stomach growled, causing Dag to raise his head and look quizzical, as if he had growled at him.

  “Well, just remember, if you’re keeping him out, you’re keeping you in. It’s a trade-off. I’d rather lose the club than lose you and Dag.” Bynum painfully remembered a little widow lady in his home town not being able to make it out of a fire because she was trapped in a room that had bars on the windows. The firefighters couldn’t get to her in time to save her because of the bars. “Ya know I always like to have a way out of a house no matter what room I’m in. But then again, I’m not living there anymore, so it’s your call.”

  Cafton quickly considered Bynum’s counsel. Yeah, he’s right. And the bad guy probably won’t pull this trick again, since Moses has his boys patrolling. Plus, it would signal fear to the jerk. It would look like he rattled me. That won’t do. Never show fear to bullies. It only encourages them. Okay, no bars.

  “I’m at a loss for a motive or suspect. Any idea who might have done this or why?” Cafton asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing. No, I can’t imagine who would do this, but whoever it is, they sound like a whack job. You need to carry your little pistol with you, because this guy wasn’t just looking to invite you to a bonfire to roast marshmallows. He wanted you to be the bonfire.”

  “Yeah, I’m already carrying my pistol. I don’t know who wants me dead, but I’m going to be suspicious of everyone around me until we find out who he is,” Cafton said.

  “Yep, me, too. Just makes no sense. Whoever did this ain’t right in the head.” Bynum was very concerned. More concerned than he let Cafton know.

  “Changing gears, you psyched for your first show tonight? You’re gonna kill ’em!” Cafton said, trying to brighten the mood. He could not have been more proud of Bynum’s success if he had been his blood brother. It wasn’t about money with them, it was about family. Cafton’s mom died when he was fifteen. Immediately afterward, he drove to Nashville to keep a promise he’d made to her. Bynum was the first person in Nashville who he trusted and who had the character he looked for in a friend. Bynum was trustworthy. His integrity wasn’t situational. He was always good. He always tried to do the right thing. He believed in and lived his life with loyalty, compassion, kindness, humility, and grace.

  “I don’t know about us killing them, but another gol-darn tour might kill me. Being on the road gets old quick, Caf. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to putting the wrap on this and heading back home.” Bynum looked over at Mattie, who nodded in agreement.

  “By the way, have you heard anything about Dangcat?” Bynum continued. “He never just up and goes missing like this. I’m really worried about him. I’ve got a sick feeling about it. And now this with you. Wonder if they are connected.”

  Bynum was like that. He was a worrier. He worried about everyone around him. He worried about poor families and the homeless. He worried about stray animals. He worried about Mattie. He worried about Cafton. What he didn’t worry about: himself. He said he had himself covered in prayer, so he was going to be fine, no matter what the Good Lord wanted for him. His nightly prayer list for others was long and diverse.

  Bynum and Cafton were both perplexed and worried about Dangcat. He had always been as dependable as a sundial.

  “I hadn’t thought about these all being connected, but it’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?” Cafton agreed, thinking about the threatening phone calls adding to the equation.

  The last time Cafton saw Willie Dangcat, Merriepennie Music’s award-winning engineer, he was wrapping up the final mixes on Jump Steady’s debut record. Cafton remembered Dangcat was wrestling with something on the record that had him frustrated. Then it was like the Rapture just took him. One night he was at his board, and then he hadn’t been seen since.

  Bynum and Cafton had signed the bar band, Jump Steady, to their label in the fall. Jump Steady was comprised of four dangerously handsome brothers from Kentucky who blended bluegrass and rockabilly into a foot-stomping, rebel-yelling, boot-scootin’, line-dancing musical phenomenon. Their music was like blended Kentucky bourbon and Appalachian moonshine, delivered in a Mason jar. The boys were chomping at the bit to grab this fame beast by the tail and ride it all the way to stardom.

  Cafton and Bynum had seen the band play several times at local dives while scouting talent. Jump Steady had earned their music cred in the crucible of competition played out all summer long in the honky-tonks, and on the sidewalks on Lower Broadway, busking for small change. Guitar case open to catch the coins and the occasional folding money, the band had played for hours on end for the bar-hopping tourists.

  They had worked their way up as a window band in several renowned honky-tonks. Bunched up together on the tiny stage in front of the plate glass window, they faced the crowd in the bar, with their backs to the street-side window. Their live music was broadcast outside to lure in tourists who would buy a drink or two during the set. The band was paid a pittance gig fee and kept everything collected in their tip jar. They also sold homemade cassettes of their original songs for a couple of bucks.

  But it had been a desperate and tenuous existence. A local window painter would come by weekly to change the name of the bands and to highlight bar specials on the windows. Fame was fleeting. Your limelight could be erased with the swipe of a soapy rag.

  Before signing Jump Steady, Cafton and Bynum put on a showcase for them at New Song and gauged the reaction from people they invited to the event. The A&R guys handed out free tickets to the show at a baseball game so they would be pretty sure they got locals in the audience instead of tourists.

  Tourists like what they hear on t
he radio. That’s pretty much all they want to hear, which means they are not a reliable audience to critique new music or new artists. But Nashville locals knew good music. It was everywhere. There was as much contract-worthy talent waiting tables and washing dishes in Nashville honky-tonks as there was on its stages. So, passing muster in front of a hometown Nashville audience was a good litmus test. If you could make it there, you were marketable.

  Merriepennie Music hoped for a full house, and they got it. The reaction was excellent. They signed Jump Steady shortly after the last guest left. Unlike some labels that drag out an album two or three years from concept to drop, Merriepennie fast-tracked everything. If an artist wasn’t ready to hit the ground running and do the hard work, they weren’t ready for the bare-knuckle music industry, at least not on this label. “We give a lot, and we expect a lot in return from our artists,” Bynum told the band as a disclaimer prior to signing them.

  The public sees the glitz and glamour and the best of the industry. They see fancy cars, big mansions, and sparkly clothes. They see the entertainment. Behind the magic sparkly curtain, what they don’t see are seventy-two-hours-straight songwriting sessions. Rehearsing around the clock for days on end. Playing guitar until fingers bleed and there are specks of blood flicked onto the floor. Being holed up, working night and day in the studio, doing nothing else while an album is in progress.

  Jump Steady laid down the tracks for their first album in just two months, under the wizardry of Dangcat. For the most part, it went smoothly, according to Dangcat. Most of the band was eager to accept Dangcat’s knowledgeable direction and to do whatever he asked to produce the best album.

  Most of the band. But not Chad.

  Chad Overstreet was the stereotypical, know-it-all, pain-in-the-ass kid. The youngest of the Overstreet family in the band, he had always had an outrageous ego, according to his brothers. Blood being thicker than water, plus experience in ignoring him, allowed his brothers to work around Chad in the band, rather than ditching him. However, unlike his brothers, he constantly questioned Dangcat’s ideas and adamantly argued for what he thought were his better ones.

  His taste of notoriety and his wild fantasies of future superstardom had turned him into an insufferable jerk to everyone around him. His fanatical ambition and extremely exaggerated self-importance had already made him a lonely young man long before he had a chance to be lonely at the top.

  Cafton had just chalked it up to immaturity and either avoided him or said, “Okay, Chad. I’ll look into it,” or some other noncommittal response to Chad’s constant selfish demands. Cafton then asked Dangcat to find a way to minimize Chad’s disruptions without compromising the album. “No problem. I have a two-year-old. I know how to manage irrational kids and their temper tantrums. I’ll just nod and smile to keep him cool. After I get what I want from everyone else,” Dangcat replied, “I’ll just cut out all his crap before doing the master.” Problem solved, or at least delayed, so the album would be able to drop to coincide with the tour.

  Cafton and Dangcat included, most people’s strategy to deal with Chad was passive avoidance. When he showed up in a cluster of individuals, or in a room, or anywhere people had an escape route, it looked like rats scurrying off a sinking ship. He could clear a room quicker than teargas. People found polite but urgent reasons to excuse themselves from his presence.

  Southern folk usually try to sidestep overt conflict, preferring to avoid distasteful subjects or people rather than confront them and make a scene. Unless pushed. If you push a Southerner past his manners, get ready to be laid low.

  The irony in all his disruption and ego while making the album was that Chad was the least talented, least deserving band member. His ego far surpassed his talent. The baby of the family, he grew up tagging along with his older brothers as they played music. Even as pre-teens, the older boys had worked diligently, taking music lessons and relentlessly practicing. Innate talent and indefatigable practice made them young pros. They were stage-ready.

  Chad, on the other hand, was a mediocre talent, at best. His mandolin playing and vocals were more tolerated than appreciated or needed. He probably could have been as good as his brothers, but he was so enchanted with himself, and so lazy, he had not felt the need to practice or enhance his skills. “Ya can’t improve on perfection, now can ya?” he’d boast in all seriousness. It was that “perfection” that was frustrating Dangcat.

  “No, I haven’t heard anything from Dangcat,” Cafton responded to Bynum. “It’s so unlike him to do this. I will check in with Heckle in a couple of days and set up a reward if Dangcat doesn’t show back up.” Cafton looked in the small fridge under the television set and pulled out one of his sodas. He wiped the top with a tissue and popped the top to get a sip, but he couldn’t reach the cups and ice while tethered to the phone. He never drank directly from the can. It was a long-standing habit, after seeing rats and mice crawl all over and poop and pee on cans in the storage room of the honky-tonk he managed when he first came to Nashville.

  “I’ll have to talk with Heckle again soon anyway, when I give him a statement about the bombing. I know him, though. His first theory will be that Dangcat relapsed and is holed up in some crack house.” The thought of one of his friends being in a crack house, and not to drag someone out to rehab, made Cafton cringe.

  He got a familiar, uneasy feeling about the recent odd happenings in his world. Were they disconnected, isolated coincidences, or did they somehow fit together in a worrisome puzzle? Cafton had a highly honed sense of impending peril, not that it took a psychic to sense something dodgy about death threats being left on your unpublished home phone answering machine.

  “If Heckle puts forth that theory, tell him it’s bullshit before he even gets started!” Bynum was incensed at the thought. Cafton was shocked. He had never known Bynum to curse. “There’s no way Willie is geeking in some crack house. No way. There is another explanation, and they have to figure it out.”

  Chapter 5—Devotions

  Dagwood and Cafton were gratefully back in their own home after three full, stressful days of swarms of cleaning and repair people restoring the café. Dagwood hid upstairs most of the time in his safe place during the day, until Cafton tucked him into the gym bag to go back to the hotel. Cafton would have liked to hide, too, but he needed to oversee the work being done.

  On the third day, as soon as everyone completed their jobs and cleaned up the mess, Cafton made supper for himself and Dagwood, and unwound for a while, reading. Then Cafton made a beeline for his bed to catch up on his sleep deficit. He hadn’t slept well in the hotel. His brain wouldn’t stop trying to figure everything out. What happened to Dangcat? Who was making threatening phone calls? Who firebombed his home? Was all this connected, and if so, how? These questions swirled around his mind like debris in a tornado.

  Back home, he didn’t have any answers to his questions, but sleeping in his own bed again would give him the peace and rest he so desperately needed to re-group and find the answers.

  Ten hours later, Dagwood had already returned to his routine. He had slept most of the night with his paws tucked up underneath him like a hen on Cafton’s chest, timing his breathing with his daddy’s. Meanwhile, Cafton dreamed of being chased through Seattle’s fish market and being out of breath. He had never been to Seattle’s fish market, but he had seen fishmongers throwing around huge fish there on a travel documentary. Now, he was feeling fishy and breathless. Fourteen pounds of black and white, buzzing feline on your chest, nose to nose, waiting on breakfast, will do that for you, or to you, depending upon your perspective.

  It was 5:35 am, five minutes past breakfast time. Dawn was just emerging. In preparation for one of his favorite times of day, breakfast, Dag had changed positions, now sitting closer to the door, staring intently at Cafton from the top of the bureau, to wake him. Cafton was still deep in dreamland. Less subtle measures were obviously in order. Dagwood leapt from the bureau to the foot of the bed, walked up C
afton’s leg, and stepped lightly onto his chest. Four minutes later, Cafton was still deep in fishy slumber. Dagwood felt five minutes’ worth of patience was not only sufficient but downright generous, especially considering breakfast was at stake. He decided it was time to take even more drastic action lest he starve to death.

  Smack!

  Cafton awoke. He was, in fact, wide awake. “Dag, you’ve GOT to stop doing that. You’re gonna give me a heart attack. My nose is not the wake-up button. Sheesh. Some people have alarm clocks. I have a spoiled rotten cat who can tell time.” He tenderly lowered Dag’s head, gave him a snuffle and kiss between his ears, and moved him to the other pillow. “Love you, buddy. You hungry? Yeah, me, too.”

  Cafton cherished this time of day. He took advantage of the quiet and solitude to contemplate the possibilities of good things happening and problems being solved. He also relished the tranquil simplicity and routine of early morning before the day’s activities intruded on his peace and quiet. This was the time that Cafton planned what he wanted to accomplish each day. Today, he wanted to accomplish headway into figuring out Dangcat’s mysterious disappearance.

  But first, each day, he talked with the Lord. It was more than a habit; it was a ritual. For as long as he could remember, he had performed this ritual. It had meaning, and it grounded him. The foundation of his prayers had been set by his mother asking him one question when he first started kneeling by his bed every night and praying as a very young boy. “What if the Lord only let you have what you truly appreciate?” she prompted. That insightful question became the guiding principle not only for his prayers but for his way of life, as well.

  Cafton’s mom knew Cafton was a thoughtful, critically thinking kid. She knew he would take her question to heart and it would shape his life. She instilled appreciation and gratitude in his spiritual DNA. Growing up, he had known both abundance and scarcity. He knew peace and violence. Infinite love and selfish greed. Fear and courage. Health and illness. Kindness and cruelty. Family and the loss of family. He was keenly aware of and understood the challenges of life and sincerely appreciated his blessings. But he didn’t stop there. During his prayers, he always asked the Lord to bless others, as well.