A Guitar and a Pen

  Dad opened the tailgate and took out the cooler. He took out two Miller Lites and used the cooler for his seat. He handed me one of them.“All right, son, calm down. You don’t have to promise shit. I don’t want you to tell Mark, and I’ll just have to hope you have the good sense not to. Here’s what happened. What really happened.” An even longer drink of alcohol followed a long drag of nicotine.

  “I was rifle hunting by myself up on the Umpqua, and it was a nasty rainy-ass day. I wasn’t even going to go but your mom and I were fighting and I had to get out of the house. I was on unit 16-F looking at the timberline when I spotted a five-point bull—a beauty. He was only standing about 150 yards away. He turned broadside on me and I let him have it right behind the front shoulders with my 30-06. He went ass over teakettle down the ridge and rolled up against a fir stump. I knew he was dead—I watched him for ten to fifteen minutes and he didn’t move a muscle. Well, I knew getting that big SOB out was going to be hard, but I got my cable ready and drug it out as far as I could. I was going to quarter the elk and carry him to the end of the cable and get it out that way. It wasn’t gonna be fun, but I had plenty of daylight and I would have been home before supper. I had already field-dressed the bull and was taking a break under a tree when I heard shots—oh I don’t know, maybe three or four. Then I heard some guy whooping it up. I took out my binoculars and I spotted him on a lower landing from where I was. I figured he took out another satellite bull, and I was thinking what lucky bastards we were, and how rare it was to get two bulls out of the same canyon on the same day. That’s where I figured wrong. I saw him coming up the ridge towards my bull, and thought he must need my help or something, but the truth is, he never saw me till thirty minutes later when he walked up on my bull and me. I never had a chance to say hey how are you or nothing when he said ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I told him I was trying to get my elk out when he said, ‘Your elk?’ Well, he was convinced he’d killed this elk, and even when I showed him the blood on the ground and on the little elms where the elk had rolled down the hill, and the place where I shot the bull on its right side, he either didn’t believe me or he just plain didn’t want to. I felt sorry for him, at first. I could see things were getting out of control, and even though I didn’t want to, I offered to split the elk with him. I even offered to use my tag. He could have hunted the rest of the season with half an elk in his freezer. He had a crazy look on his face, and suddenly I found myself looking down the barrel of his gun. I believe it was a 30-30. I admit I was scared. I guess I wasn’t hiding my fear too good, ’cause I saw this smile come over his face. I thought he was gonna kill me right then and there. I dropped to my knees and I started begging for my life.”

  I sipped my beer and listened to my dad’s story intently. I was in shock from the admission of murder, but I think I was more flabbergasted by the sheer amount of detail and sentences strung together by a man known for one-word explanations. He was looking at his cork boots while he was recounting the events of that day. His expression never changed until he continued on with the story.

  “I thought about my boys and my two girls and your mom. I wondered how you’d get along without me. I’d never see grandkids or go to Alaska. I shit myself, and this made him laugh even harder. I was really groveling then. He said he wouldn’t kill me if I took a bite out of the guts of that elk. So I did. I had blood and elk shit all over my face. Then I threw up and this made him laugh like a madman. This stuff went on for what felt like forever. He was playing mind games with me. Torturing me. Finally, he made me cut off and stick the elk’s privates in my mouth. He said he wished he had a camera, so he could take a picture to show my boys what a good cocksucker I was. And then right when I thought I was done for, he told me to go get in my truck and get out of here. I thanked him like I’ve never thanked anyone. I was just so grateful to be able to live another day. It was weird. It was almost as if not only was it his elk, but my life was also his to do with what he wanted. I would have helped him get the elk out, but he never thought of that, I guess. By the time I climbed that ridge and got to my truck, I was so tired, and so—oh I don’t know—sad.”

  He took out another Pall Mall, and I could tell the story was taking its toll. He popped a nitro pill. Dad, you can stop now. I get it, I said in my head but not to him. I needed him to finish the story. I had to know. This was my only chance at getting my father back.

  “My gun was still in the rack where I left it. It’s strange, but I thought about using it on myself for a minute there. But then I was filled with a rage I didn’t know I had. I think I must have screamed a bloodcurdling scream, and that guy—I think his name was Mike or something—heard it. I guess he realized that I killed that elk with something and maybe I might use it on him. He was right about that. I saw him making his way down the ridge with the elk head. He was about 250 yards or maybe farther. I had the crosshairs on his back and I fired a shot. I missed him. I wasn’t too surprised because I was shaking like a leaf. Then he did a funny thing. He stopped by a tree and put the elk’s head where his head should be. I guess he was tired of running, or forgot that a moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one. Well, I just fired one more shot at the head of that elk, and that son of a bitch went down. I watched for about ten or fifteen minutes and he didn’t move, so I went down there to see. I saw the hole in his head—it was just above the left eye—and when I picked up that elk’s head, it had a hole in it too. I guess that’s why the bullet didn’t go all the way through. I drug his body up near the elk’s. There was a flat place in the ground just below the bull. I dug a little hole with a rock that I’d found and put him in it. That took a while. Then I rolled that elk over him, thinking no one would look for him there in a million years. Also, no one would think the buzzards were eating anything but rotten elk meat. I felt bad about that elk meat. I drove his truck three miles to the main road down in the bottom, and walked that three miles back up. I didn’t want anyone to know he was in that area, just in case. I was lucky it was such a miserable rainy day. You know, I did not see one other car or truck besides his or mine.”

  “Did you really have to kill him?” I asked.

  He looked at me and half smiled.“I didn’t really weigh out the consequences or anything. I think I would have killed him even if the whole world was watching.” He sighed deeply.“My only regret is that you know. If you want to turn me in, well, you do what you gotta do. You know the truth. What I did that day was right.”

  I just shook my head. I couldn’t think about it. The news was too new. I couldn’t get any perspective. Mark came walking down the road and Dad looked at me and shrugged. I shrugged back, not sure what either of us meant. Mark was oblivious about everything but the hunt.“Let’s go get some meat, girls!” he yelled.

  The rest of those ten days went by fast. We saw a lot of elk, and I actually got a shot off, but I missed. So that year we struck out during my hunt. Mark got a spike elk at the end of the season and a cooler of frozen elk showed up in Nashville a month or so later, a nice and unexpected surprise. Dad and I never spoke again about the murder of Michael J. Whiting, forty-five, of Junction City, Oregon.

  The next year I took a day off from hunting and tracked down Michael J. Whiting, Jr., who was working in a Home Depot in Eugene. I told him I was working on a story about unsolved murder cases in the area. He had been eleven when his father turned up missing.

  “So, what was your father like?” I asked innocently.

  “I don’t remember that much,” he said, and then his voice began to crack, and I knew that wasn’t true.“Oh, I promised my mother I’d respect her privacy, but honestly, mister, whoever killed my dad probably saved her.” He wiped away a tear with the back of his hand.“Dad would have eventually killed her, or me. He was not a good person. I really don’t want to go into it.”

  I assured him he didn’t have to.

  “If they ever find out who did it, I will personally thank them. You can print that.”

/>   After my “interview” with the son, I did indeed feel better. I don’t know what that says about me. My dad did not kill in self-defense, and maybe the murder was premeditated. Maybe it was temporary insanity. I have to admit there is a part of me that lies awake and wonders if the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  Tim Johnson

  Tim Small Johnson grew up in a small logging community in western Oregon, and it’s evident that his rural roots run deep in his words and his approach to music. His musical tastes and interests vary widely, but country music was—and always will be—his first love. Tim’s early influences include artists such as Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings.

  Tim’s first cut was “The Struggling Years,” recorded by the late, great Chris LeDoux. More than a decade later, Tim has scored over one hundred major label cuts, including such hits as “I Let Her Lie,” “Thank God for Believers,” “Things That Never Cross a Man’s Mind” by Kellie Pickler, and Diamond Rio’s moving single “God Only Cries.” Tim’s song “To Do What I Do” was recorded by Alan Jackson and inspired the title of his 2004 release What I Do. Tim also wrote the song “When I Think About Leavin’ ” on Kenny Chesney’s quadruple platinum album When the Sun Goes Down.

  Tim coproduced Blaine Larsen’s first two albums, Off to Join the World and Rockin’ You Tonight, on Giantslayer/BNA Records.

  Will It Ever Happen Again?

  Michael Kosser

  Every week I make appointments to write songs with my friends. We get together at ASCAP or BMI or Joe’s farm or my house over in Mt. Juliet. It’s not always easy to do that. You see, my last hit came in 1992, and my last major album cut happened in 1994. Last week we celebrated my tenth consecutive year without a cut. Gallows humor is no humor—not when you take your life seriously.

  I feel so sorry for my wife. We were married in 1982 and we struggled for years. Oh, we had dreams. I’d get big hits and she could stop working and we’d have a family and live like real people. I went seven years without making a dollar on my songs. Then when things happened, they happened suddenly. I wrote a couple of things with Duke Devery. Duke wrote for Hitlannd Music, and Hitlannd had a very hot plugger named Dwarf Duval.

  One memorable week Dwarf got both of the songs I wrote with Duke recorded, one with Randy Travis and one with Alabama. For three months we waited, and sweated, and then within two weeks of each other, both Randy and Alabama had our songs out and on the radio. We watched the two records race each other up the charts. My wife and I went to the bank and borrowed money for a very nice little house. I began to listen to the radio every day, and most of the time I heard at least one of the songs.

  Suddenly country music sounded so much better on the radio than it had when everyone else was getting all the hits. In October, when the BMI Awards came along, it seemed like that whole dinner was for us—me and Duke and my wife, and Dwarf, and the company owner, Mr. Crawford. They went up to the stage with us to collect the plaques, grinned at us, slapped us on the shoulders and called us “their boys.”

  That went on for three years—three years of cuts, and singles, and awards . . . and the checks, oh Lord the checks. My wife and I felt like such normal people that we started having kids—two of them, as I recall. Oh—and we’d be invited to sing our songs at the little writers’ shows around town. Funny thing. Our songs weren’t any better than when we weren’t getting hits, but now that we had hits, we were considered expert songwriters. Folks assumed we knew what we were doing.

  So did we? After three years of hits, did we have confidence? Oh yeah!

  Maybe so. Duke and I would come into the Hitlannd building where they gave us our own little writer room and we’d get to work, and along about eleven, Dwarf would knock on the door and tell us we’d better get this one finished because Warner Bros. had put a hold on our last one for Travis Tritt. Then he’d take us to lunch. At lunch he’d sometimes talk about how he wished he could write like us, and how glad he was that he had the talent to pitch songs, and great songs to pitch like the ones we were writing. Oh man, did he gush. And we ate it up, along with the free food. All that money we were making, and we didn’t even have to buy our own lunch. One time I called home to tell my mom that my song was being sung on the Leno show, and she called everyone in town about it. Later she sent me an article from the Jamesville Sentinel about us, me and Duke, and all the hits we were getting. Tell you what. I’ve saved all the Billboard charts that had our songs on them, saved all the articles I could find, even a couple of videos of our songs, taped right off TNN, but nothing satisfied quite so much as knowing that all the girls back in Jamesville who had turned their noses up at me would have to read about me. Hell, I could’ve written “How Do Ya Like Me Now” years before it was actually written—I wanted to. I did, in fact, more than once, but Dwarf just said it was too obnoxious. It’d never get cut. We never even saved a lyric.

  I can remember sitting in the backyard at the house, watching the kids splashing in the wading pool, the sun a big red ball on the edge of the horizon, me looking at my wife as she watched the kids, a glow so warm around both of us, both of us believing this was gonna go on, and on, and on. Living like it was gonna go on and on and on. Disney World for the kids, new cars, a bigger house with a bigger yard. Don’t tell me I didn’t appreciate what we had. I appreciated every damn bit of it, and so did she—and that’s why we wanted more of it.

  Guess what? Me and Duke didn’t split up to write with more famous writers. Dwarf didn’t get drunk and run his car under an eighteen-wheeler. Hitlannd didn’t sell out to Sony Tree. None of that happened. We didn’t even stop getting cuts—not all at once. Just . . . just, one year the cuts (there were eleven of them) stopped turning into singles. And it happened that the albums they came out on were not multi-platinum. Soon our draws began to morph into debt. After about a year and a half of that, I began to notice that Dwarf would not bubble quite as much when he’d walk in, and when we’d play him our new song he’d say, “You better get a bastard demo on that one.” Duke must have been hurt by stuff like that, because we weren’t writing as often as we had. That’s what happens to writing partners when the hits stop coming.

  At the two-year mark without a hit, I noticed that Dwarf was beginning to say things like, “We need a hit, boys” a little too often to be a joke. Then came that third year, the first time in six years I didn’t get a single song recorded on a major label. That was the year Mr. Crawford called me into his office and said, “Jack, been lookin’ at your statements—you’re into us pretty good, don’t you think?”

  I sighed. It wasn’t unexpected, but it hurt.“Yeah, guess so.” I wanted to ask him how about all the money we’d made him when we were making money—before they started pitching these three new guys they’d signed the year before. I wanted to tell him our new songs were the best in years. I wanted to beg him not to break up a winning team. And I wanted to tell him to shove a red-hot poker up his ungrateful butt.

  Maybe, just maybe, the script should have called for him to say, “We’re gonna pick up this last option, but this year better be a good year for you,” because I knew this year was gonna be a good year for us, I just knew it. I always just knew it.

  “Writers . . .” He sighed.“They have their time, then it’s done.”

  What the hell did he mean, “done”? “Have you heard our new stuff?” I asked. Stupid question. Mr. Crawford was not a music man. Mr. Crawford listened to Dwarf. It was Dwarf who had told him to cut us loose.

  Only it wasn’t us they’d cut loose, it was just me. Duke had seen the writing on the wall before I had, and after hours he’d started writing with our song plugger. Dwarf was a salesman. He could get the job done when he really wanted to. I didn’t know it, but Duke and Dwarf had four songs on hold the day Mr. Crawford cut me loose.

  So there I was, without a deal after six years. I tried to find new writing partners, but I was about two years too cold for any of the good ones to be inter
ested. I went to all the publishers who had tried to woo me away from Hitlannd in the good old days, and not a one of them had the guts to turn me down right then. They all said they liked my songs and they’d see if they had the money to do a deal and they’d get back to me.

  I guess I got discouraged pretty quickly. I went to everybody I knew on Music Row who had a job and liked me. I asked for advice and got sympathy but nothing else. One person who grew short on sympathy after about nine months of that was my wife. I’m not gonna be too hard on her. She had worked at Kroger for eight years without complaint, waiting for me to turn a trick or two for us. She’d beamed with pride at every success. She’d found her dream: raising a family and taking care of a happy, fulfilled husband. We had passed through that moment of concern when it seemed every young female songwriter had me in their sights and we had emerged without a scratch.

  Now, suddenly, it seemed like we were back to square one. Money was running out, the mortgage was too high, our car payments were high, the kids were expensive items, bless their little hearts. We’d have to downsize—not the kids, everything else. Such a nice simple word, downsize—means selling this, buying that, losing this, keeping that, meanwhile knowing that when it was all done we would be coated with a rancid layer of failure. And she would have to go back to Kroger.

  Oh, no she wouldn’t. That’s what she told me the night we moved into a precious little cottage we’d found in South Nashville, a place stuck in a pocket that the developers had forgotten, with a grassy yard, trees, surrounded by country folks living in the city, a long way from the West Meade climb we had made, only to fall.“I am not going to put these kids in day care,” she said, her teeth clenched in barely suppressed fury.“They are going to have a mo-ther!”

  I knew what that meant. I was going to have to get a job—not a music-business job, a job job. My wife was telling me that I had, after all, failed to achieve a career as a professional songwriter. I could not accept that.