Chapter Three – Rayna's Story
A/N Thanks to everyone who has clicked through to this chapter and apologies to any Vince fans out there.
She took the guitar from around her neck and went over to the coach. Deacon followed, he was about to sit down, probably too near her when she spoke. "There's cold drinks in the refrigerator if you want one, only root beer, I don't drink anything with a kick to it anymore."
"Root beer's good." He noted the apology for future reference. Weirdly the kitchen was as untidy as it was spotlessly clean, open packets of pasta and cereal on the side, rubber gloves on the drainer and a plastic bag of tinned groceries flopping over the counter.
When he came back with two she was scrunched up at one end of the couch "You ready for the whole nine yards?"
"Shoot."
"Once I've got this done maybe you will stop asking dumb questions and then there is a chance we can write a half decent song together. After that you can get out of my hair and back to New York."
"Ok, Understood."
"Well Chapter one you already know. A loving Momma encourages this here young girl to attend drama classes, and she is picked for a TV ad that goes bigger than anyone ever imagined, the girl can carry a tune, so gets to make a record that sells; then another that doesn't."
It was a pattern Deacon had seen too many times in the record industry, but never with one so young as Rayna must had been. "That's a tough gig," he said softly.
"Actually I think the failure hurt Momma, more than it did me at the time. She'd given up so much to grant me those opportunities, but fame spat me out just as soon as I was no longer flavour of the month. That's didn't stop the popcorn company from re-running those adds of course, which went down really well in High School as you might imagine."
Deacon easily could. Claybourne and school had never fully mixed; so for him singing along to the radio in his bedroom became a private release. To have the one thing that you were good at, that was special to you; turned full circle against you and thrown back as ridicule must have been awful. A girl of that age would really need someone to help pull her through, a strong role model. "What did your Father think?" Deacon asked.
Rayna gave a growly, ironic laugh, "Never knew who my Daddy was, and Momma took that secret to the grave with her." The grave!
"Shit Rayna, I didn't know."
"'Cause you wouldn't, not everyone gets their backstory published in the music press or ghost written as a best seller." She pulled at the butterfly necklace at her throat, "Momma was killed in car smash when I was 15. I went to live with my Grandma to finish my education, Donelson way. Would probably still be there if it hadn't been for Watty."
"Yeah, I was wondering how he fitted in."
"Well Momma knew him from way back. I've always had a sneaky suspicion he was the one who put the TV people onto my drama class in the first place, not that he would ever admit it under pain of death. I've a lot to thank Watty for, not least keeping my under-age drinking from Grandma, God rest her soul."
Deacon, remembering the earlier hint had wondered how that fitted in too. "You sure you wanna talk about this stuff with me?"
Rayna was asking herself the same question. Why the hell was she spilling her life story to a man she had barely met? Then again wasn't that what she did at every AA meeting? Cole would definitely approve she thought, hoped anyway. Because in an uncanny way Deacon Claybourne was not a stranger to her. Over the years the Revel Kings' songs had filtered into her life. Trrue she thought half of them were puerile, but they were still stuck inside her brain along with all the other unattached jigsaw pieces of life junk. Having a major league rock star turn up at your door was certainly surreal, but no more random than sitting in a school gym with whoever dropped by and took the chair next to you at the meeting; or for that matter having a medic pump out your stomach out at 3am in ER.
Before she could find the worlds to continue Deacon offered her a starting point. "I guess drinking became some sort of safety valve, a release?" he said.
Darn, with his shades off he could be mistaken for a regular human being and not a God fresh from the album covers. Her vulnerability was temporarily papered over. "Exactly, drinking was cool. You must understand how easy it was for a teenage girl with long enough pins to get herself service in certain bars, or else rope a boy into getting her one, or three. Drink took the edge off, numbed my mind from thinking about grades, or Momma. But I could never fool Watty though. Whenever it looked like I was pushing it too far, he would take me to one side and lecture me. Never told me to stop outright, just to remember who I really was. I mean how could someone who had hung about with Cash and Jennings back in the day demand sobriety?"
"Good point, and did it work?"
"In the main yes. He made me work on my guitar playing, something else I could lose myself inside, and I'm pretty much certain that it was Watty's reference that got me my first job, as a clerk in HR at Wyatt Industries. That's one of the hot shot companies around here, outside of the music game. If you can smell money in this town, you can bet your last dollar Lamar Wyatt has something to do with it. Just at about the moment he snaffles that last bill from you."
Rayna looked at the clock on her wall, they had not got a single note down yet and Deacon's lyrics were trash. She was falling short of Watty's faith, she shivered and hunched up more. "So fast forward a few years and working for WI had gained me both a half decent man who seemed to care about me, and then a baby daughter. My guitar playing was finding its own style and Watty had me do some open mics. All good and rosy y'all agree?" The question was so loaded that Deacon did not bother to answer. "Only once I was stuck at home with little Daphne, my darlin' husband found excuses to work late, take more clients out for meals, come home with French perfume on his shirt and cigarette smoke in his hair, just a bit way too obvious. But all I did was try to let it roll over me. Life was secure, so instead of confronting him, I picked a fight with the bottle." She stopped her narrative dead in its tracks and suddenly stood up, walked round to face him and placed her palms on each denim clad hip, her long fingers trailing down the seams. Her eyes were still and utterly ruthless. "Now if you are thinking for one second that I would ever, ever, have put my baby-girl in any sort of danger I will physically throw you through that there door and grind you into the dirt where you think I belong. Daphne has always been loved and protected, by her Dad, her child minders, and her sober Mom. When I drank, I did it when I'd made sure she would be safe – you get?"
Deacon raised both his palms in acknowledgement. "Every alcoholic will tell you they believed they could handle it. Well at that point I could. It was only when I couldn't that I actually became the real deal. The date's carved into my heart 23 February 1997."
"What happened?"
"Watty got me an opening slot for a touring band playing in town that Sunday night. Teddy, for all his faults was happy to spend time doting on Daphne, so I went along, did my six numbers and stayed to watch them play. They were good, I mean really good, solid rhythm section, but with enough air in their playing to let the music breath. They were banging out Pogues, covers, 'Moondance', 'Whiskey in the Jar' and some originals that got you right there." She touched her heart. "They had this lead singer-guitarist who was Irish- American. He name was Vince, Vince Jameson, like in the whiskey. He wore tight leather pants, and his light brown hair was combed back slick."
As she told her story Rayna felt herself transported back to that dimly lit, off pitch bar, buzzing with laughter, music and liquor, what Vince called 'the craic.' She had asked him what he meant by that and he told her that if you ever pinned it down, then it would disappear in a puff like smoke in whirlwind. It was more than the voices, the music, drink or humour; it was that feeling in your bones that for one fleeting, glorious moment you were connected with everyone around you, and also everybody you had ever loved, or were going to.
"He had eyes that twinkled like the stars," she continued, "Could pick up just about any girl in the place and by God did he know it. If he had ever joined The Revel Kings you would have had some serious competition." Crap! Did she really say that out loud? "After their set we all eat and drank together; then we drank a little bit more, and then stupidly we got into a drinking competition, which even more stupidly I won."
Deacon blinked twice. The slim lady sitting across from him, out drinking a touring Irish-American musician? Then he thought of Janis.
"The last thing I recall him saying to me," Rayna continued, "was that the only place he had ever seen a sky bigger and more wild than in Tennessee was over in Kentucky and that when he'd made a triple platinum album he meant to buy some land that straddled the State Line, and build a house across it.
I left him in the parking lot, got a cab home. The next morning I took Daphne to Elementary School, and when I came back the cops were at my door. That night Vince had wandered onto the Freeway and been wiped out. I blamed myself naturally."
"But Ray-na, that wasn't your fault. Shoot, life is random, this guy could have had it coming to him at any point."
"Yeah, and when the folks on the program told me that, I nodded obediently back at 'em, but they were wrong then and still are. Vince was special, he deserved much better. I'd had my chance and it slipped through my fingers like sand, he never even got an audition. It should have been me that night."
Something was bugging Deacon's subconscious, he let it brew. "Your daughter would disagree."
She stood up again, violently. "You don't know the first thing about her. Of course it would have been tough, but she was younger then. Kids cope with terrible things, in ways most adults don't understand or have forgotten about." Rayna picked up a framed photo from the shelf, a gawky girl, about 13 Deacon supposed, he was rubbish with these things. Most of her face was hidden by curtains of brown hair and she wore jeans and grey sweatshirt. She was lolloping in front of a barn. "This is the little Madam; once my drinking became too great to disguise or fully shut down, Teddy filed for divorce. She lives with him now, and his new wife in Belle Meade. Teddy went and married the boss's daughter you see, something that impressed the courts no end. The one thing that gives me satisfaction is that Daphne has become a nature loving, horse riding, tom-boy; she has always hated pretty party dresses and dolls. Which pissed off Tandy Wyatt like nobody's business."
"When did your husband leave you?"
"Six months after Vince. Which of course sent me spirally down further; so by the time the papers were finalised and ready for me to sign, I was in rehab. I went from being legless to not having a leg to stand on. My saving grace was that my total crash knocked some sense into me. If my drinking had slowly gotten worse and worse, deeper and deeper in small stages, chances are I would never have caught myself and you would not be having the dubious pleasure of my company today. 'The Programme' stuck. Watty and my sponsor kept very close eyes on me and I used the last of Momma's money and my settlement to get this place. Of course Wyatt Industries 'let me go' at the earliest chance; so when I can't get enough bookings to tide me over I do office temp work. But the only times I feel truly alive are when I'm with Daphne, which is never enough, or have an instrument in my hand. Speaking of which…"
As she went to pick up a guitar, the thing that had been rattling around Deacon's mind hit a home run. Ray – he had nearly called her Ray, before drawling out the second syllable. Where had that come from? She was, he was certain a Ray; a ray of nervous energy and a ray of evening sunlight, the same flame as her hair. The nick-name like her crow's feet felt right. The gentle picking of a tune bought him back into the room.
They jammed after that, country songs, 50s rock and roll; her cracked vase of a voice, years of drink and tobacco he supposed, complemented his own. She even played 'Lights Out', slowing it down dramatically from a valedictory anthem into something brooding and primeval. As Deacon worked on his breathing to make the words fit this gloop of an arrangement, he begun to feel for the first time there maybe was some point to this project. Certainly he had not worried about Cy for hours.
When Bucky returned to collect Deacon, Rayna told him they had nothing original to show for the day but had gotten to know each other that bit better. The three of them agreed Deacon would drive over the next morning. But not too early, as he had 'homework' to complete in the form of some new lyrics first.
