That’s why he’d set up his little videotape operation out at the house: to give him something to do on those long nights when there weren’t any shows to perform, there weren’t any people, and there wasn’t even any bus. (In fact, there was a bus, stashed at the farthest corner of the parking lot out behind the theater, and sometimes, in the deepest winter, when the Branson tourist business at last dried up, Ray still did a southern tour or two, mostly out of nostalgia, his as well as the customers. But it would be six months at least before he rode that bus again — or maybe, if things went wrong with this Belle Hardwick thing, a lot longer than six months.)
The Belle Hardwick thing had been a disruption in a number of ways, but now that the trial had started, the disruption was even more complete. Because he had to be in court all day long, showing his honest citizen’s face to the honest citizens of the jury, he couldn’t do a 3:00 P.M. show, only the 8:00 P.M. That had now become the first show, and his mind and body just craved a second show three hours later, just when everybody else in his world had gone to sleep.
God, it was tough. He was raring to go, ready to let performance soothe his shattered nerves and battered psyche, ready to let those hours under the lights on the stage clean out all the bad thoughts and bad vibes, fears and apprehensions, but the world was shut down. Meantime, with the trial going on and all, the pressure from the fans who wanted to see that one and only show per day was extreme. Flouting the fire laws, his people had put a row of folding chairs in front of the first row of regular seating and two more folding chairs at the top end of the aisles. They’d even dropped the Elvis gag so they could sell the Elvis seat; the girl reporter and her editor wouldn’t be able to get in at all these nights.
With all those people out front, laughing and applauding and approving and adoring, it was hard to stop. The shows got longer and longer. Songs he’d decided for reasons of personal image not to perform until the Belle Hardwick thing was over, he had begun to sing again. (Not all of them; “My Ideal,” for instance, he still wouldn’t touch, maybe never would again.)
But the fact of the matter is, the fans wanted Ray to be a rogue, if a lovable rogue. He was one of their outlaws, like Willie Nelson and David Allan Coe, and they wanted that whiff of brimstone they knew he could if he chose deliver. So that was why (in addition to the fact that he didn’t want to get off the damn stage) he was bringing back into the repertory songs like “L.A. Lady” and “The Dog Come Back.” The people who knew “L.A. Lady” was about his ex-wife. Cherry, liked that one, but just about everybody liked “The Dog Come Back”:
Oh, if that could only be the whole of life. To get up here and sing the songs, backed by the good old pals and terrific musicians of the band, with the cheering fans out front, everybody happy, everybody simple and clean, the good music flowing out, the good times happening, these are the good old days.
If only.
34
For Bob Sangster, the big-nosed Aussie from the Weekly Galaxy, permanent member of the Down Under Trio, life as a shadow juror was one long vacation. All he had to do was laze around the motel all day: in and out of the swimming pool; in and out of the special dining room set aside for the jurors and stocked at all times with a working buffet; in and out of the common room full of magazines and board games and VCR movies, where he flirted dispassionately with three of the five female jurors — shadowettes, he called them — the other two being just too ridiculous. Then, late in the day, all fourteen shadows would get into the bus and be driven from Branson over to Forsyth to look at the video of that day in court, or, that is, as much of that day in court as the real jury had seen, which tended to be not very much.
Bob was known to his fellow shadows as Jock O’Shanley, a naturalized American citizen originally from Galway Bay, brrrrightest jew-wel aff the Umerald Aysle. The actual Jock O’Shanley, a night cook at Skaggs Community Hospital, a divorced loner living in an amazingly filthy cottage down by Ozark Beach, and a dedicated alcoholic, was at the moment having his own vacation, at Weekly Galaxy expense, in San Diego, where most of the alcoholics are seamen and therefore expected to stagger a little on land.
Jock O’Shanley wasn’t the sort of amiable Irish drunk who made friends easily, or at all, so it was unlikely any old pal of good old Jock’s would suddenly pop up and say, “You ain’t Jock O’Shanley, bugger me eyes!” Nor were Jock’s employers at the hospital surprised when he’d called to say he was taking a couple weeks away from the job; well, actually, they were surprised he’d called. Physically, Bob Sangster and Jock were alike enough, both being rangy gnarly guys consisting mostly of bone and gristle marinated for a good long time in booze, and in Taney County an Australian accent can pass for an Irish accent with no trouble at all.
For the two days of the trial so far, Friday and Monday, Bob was conscientious enough in his simulation of Jock O’Shanley the shadow juror. Over in Forsyth each day, after the fourteen of them had watched the videotape of that day in court, Warren Thurbridge and his assistants would ask questions and solicit opinions, and Bob, not wanting to invalidate the process by his presence any more than was absolutely necessary, did his best to give responses a Jock O’Shanley might give. In the second part of each afternoon’s exercise, when the lawyers discussed with their shadow jurors various strategies and ploys that might be put into play on the morrow. Bob again let his knowledge of the beliefs and prejudices and ignorances and knowledges of such a fellow as Jock O’Shanley guide his tongue, and all was well.
His actual work, though, the work he did for the Weekly Galaxy, came at the end of the day, when the jurors were bused back to the motel in Branson. There, in the semi-privacy of his room — two jurors per room, each juror with a king-size bed, Bob’s roommate being a retired upholsterer from Cleveland named Hacker — Bob would remove the cassette recorder taped to his side — ouch — take out the cassette, and pass it to the maid named Laverne. In the morning, she would bring him the blank to take the used one’s place, which he would install in the machine and tape the machine again to his side.