“Pauline knows you’re telling me about this?”
“She doesn’t know I’m doing it right this moment,” Obie said, “but she knows I plan to tell you and everyone else. We’ve talked about this and she agrees with my reasoning.”
“I see,” Jake said slowly.
“How do you feel about this, Jake?” Obie wanted to know.
“I’m not really sure,” he answered honestly. “Still trying to process it, mostly, but I like you, Obie. Are you treating her well?”
“I treat all my ladies well,” he said with conviction.
“You’re not beating her, humiliating her, trying to get her to do shit she doesn’t want to do?”
“I do not hit women, Jake,” he said firmly. “I did that once in my life, back when I was in my late twenties and just starting to get into the whole fame and fortune thing. I popped the woman I was with at the time a backhand across the face—and I’m here to tell you, that if there was ever a woman who deserved that shit, that fuckin’ bitch was her. You see this scar on my face?” He lifted up his hat a little, revealing a four-inch, jagged scar atop his forehead.
“I see it,” Jake said.
“She did that shit with a pound of frozen elk sausage out of the freezer.”
“She hit you with a pound of sausage?”
“Frozen,” Obie said. “It packed quite a punch. Took twelve stitches to close it. Do you know why she did it?”
“Why?”
“She was drunk and belligerent and I told her I didn’t want to take her out for dinner that night because she was drunk and belligerent. Told her to cook something up instead because I didn’t want to be seen in public with her. So she went to the freezer, got that pound of sausage, and fileted my fuckin’ forehead open. That’s when I backhanded her—the only time in my life I hit a woman.” He then rolled up the sleeve on his right arm, revealing another scar, this one a ragged mass of tissue on the back of his bicep. “You see this one?”
“Nasty looking,” Jake said. “What caused that?”
“That would be the police dog that bit me when they came to arrest me for domestic violence. You see, them cops were all men, and I have been known to fight with men on occasion. I lost that fight. Aside from the dog bite, I got three broken ribs from getting hit with those sticks of theirs and a dislocated shoulder from when they wrenched my arms behind me to slap on the cuffs.”
“And this story is supposed to make me feel better about you being with my sister?” Jake asked.
“It is,” Obie said. “You see, I learned my lesson from that incident. Even if Pauline does grab a pound of frozen elk sausage out of the freezer and lays my fuckin’ head open with it, I’m still not gonna hit her. Once was enough for a lifetime. And Pauline is hardly the type to be so provocative, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say,” he had to agree.
“As for all that other stuff, I treat ladies like ladies, Jake. That’s kind of how I do things. And your sister is a lady in every sense of the word. And you should know that she’s strong willed enough not to put up with any shit, from me or anyone else.”
“Yeah, I do know that, Obie. Sorry, wasn’t trying to interrogate you. Like I said, still trying to process this.”
“Then we’re cool?” Obie asked.
“Yeah,” Jake told him. “We’re cool.”
Obie gave the promotion instructions he’d been given by Jake to the suits in the National Records’ promotion department. They argued with him, telling him that Jake Kingsley didn’t know shit about how KVA’s music should be promoted. They cited their hundreds of collective years of experience in promoting music. They tried to find loopholes in the contract they had signed (there weren’t any, Pauline had been thorough). They even resorted to begging. In the end, however, they put things into motion, just as directed. Mick Riley and the other independent music promotors across the US and Canada were given their instructions and they informed the corporate offices of the radio conglomerates and the program directors of the local independents what those instructions were. And in the week before Christmas, while kids were out of school and the nation was in the festive, celebratory mood, both Playing Those Games and Insignificance began to get saturation airplay.
Roundup, Montana
December 21st, 1992
It was the first official day of Christmas break and it was cold. Snow covered the land and the Musselshell River, a tributary of the Missouri, was covered with ice four inches thick as it wound its way through the small prairie town fifty miles north of Billings. The official temperature was six degrees Fahrenheit, but the icy wind blowing across the gently rolling hills from the north instilled a wind chill of around negative fifteen degrees. This was nothing to John Callaway, Renee Brown, and Corey Stillson, all members of the Roundup High School’s senior class and all lifelong residents of the mining and cattle town of 1500 or so residents.
They were sitting on a small rise on the banks of the Musselshell just outside of town. Below them, on the frozen surface of the river, a group of their classmates, mostly males, were playing an improvised game of hockey using upside-down push brooms taken from their father’s garages and a medium sized flat rock that someone had painted black. A pile of wooden pallets swiped from the rear of the local store had been busted up and turned into a respectable bonfire that offered a little warmth if you could tolerate the greasy black smoke it produced as a byproduct. Stuck into the snowbanks here and there were six packs and twelve packs of Milwaukee’s Best beer. Perversely, the beer had been covered in the snowbanks to keep it warm, not to cool it. If left to the open air, a can of beer would freeze solid in about thirty minutes. This was all part of being a teenager in small town Montana.
The three teens were all dressed very similarly to each other. They had on jeans—not Wranglers or Levis, as neither they nor their parents could afford name brands—heavy snow boots, thick jackets covering sweaters, woolen caps upon their heads, and knitted scarves protecting their necks. Each held a can of beer in their hands. John and Renee were both smoking cigarettes—Basics they’d picked up from the supermarket. Sitting on a rock near them was a battered old boombox tuned to KCLD out of Billings—the nearest station that played something other than country music exclusively.
Renee had a cute, rounded face and the body of a farm girl—a body she had earned by working her entire life on her father’s pig farm just west of town. Many of her male classmates—and even a few of her female classmates—had had more than a few unholy thoughts about her large breasts and full hips. She was not a girly girl by any means—such a thing did not really exist in Roundup—and she was not a member of the ruling clique in her class. Her family was dirt poor, but they were hard workers and she was justifiably proud of her heritage.
John and Corey had been her friends since they had all been wearing diapers together. John’s family owned the dairy farm just to the north of the Brown property. Corey’s family owned the auto wrecking yard just to the south. They had all gone to Roundup Elementary School and Roundup Junior High school together—said schools both being located in the same building—and had then gone onto Roundup High. And though both John and Corey had been attracted to her since approximately fourth grade, she thought of them as nothing more than brothers and friends—well, maybe in the case of John, a step-brother, she sometimes thought in her more pensive moments.
“Can you believe it?” Renee asked them. “Only five more months and we graduate. How bitchin’ is that?”
“Pretty fuckin’ bitchin’” John said sourly. Unlike Renee and Corey, he would not be leaving Roundup once he had that diploma in hand. There was no money for him to go to college so he would just remain at home, continuing to be a part of the family business. He would simply be a high school graduate going out to hook cows up to the milking machines and scramble to make sure they were all in their barns on freezing ass days like this one.