“It could be bad,” Sam said. “Nobody’s softened up the crowd for us.”
We walked past the one District club I’d been in before—Boot Ilicious, which pointedly flashed a cowboy boot in the middle of its sign, between the “Boot” and the “Ilicious.” It was an eighteen-and-up club Toby had taken me to a couple of weekends in May, right after my birthday. He’d bitched at me before because I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a fake ID. Once inside, he was skilled at acquiring drinks without a wristband. This would have impressed me at the beginning of the school year, but now it seemed immature and lame.
Which didn’t explain why I felt so relieved that we weren’t turning in at Boot Ilicious, or why I held my head down as we passed, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me if he happened to be hanging in the doorway. Toby had made me feel like my talent was something to be embarrassed by. Worse, I half believed him. For some reason, I was concerned about what he thought of me even though I hated him—just as I’d been disappointed to learn I wasn’t the only fiddle player Elvis wanted in his back pocket.
Leaving the club behind, we reached the intersection with Broadway. We were on the lower, less crowded end of the street, so it wasn’t far to the river, with the Titans football stadium on the other side. I leaned around Ace to look up the hill. The sidewalks along Broadway were packed with tourists, country music overflowed onto the street, and neon signs flashed in the shape of cowboy hats and boots and guitars all the way up the sidewalk. The real action was near the top of the hill, in the three or four bars famous for hosting acts that got discovered by record company executives who wandered into the audience, scouting their next star. I felt better just gazing at it—redeemed, like a girl in a country song who stuck to her guns and made it big, despite the stories her boyfriend told her about herself.
The light changed, and we stepped into the crosswalk. Sam was looking up Broadway, too, with his eye on that far corner.
As we crossed the street, I thought I spied the bar where we were headed, only two storefronts down—not a bad gig. But we kept walking right past it, past abandoned and crumbling historic facades, to a building that stood by itself because the buildings all around it had been torn down. A couple of people sat on the sills of the plate glass windows in front, smoking. At least we knew smoking wasn’t allowed inside, and that there were some customers. Two, to be exact. An enormous muscled bouncer stood in the doorway of the building, checking the IDs of some guys wanting in.
Beyond that, the block diminished into businesses that were closed at night, then a slummy area of deserted shells, ending in a huge construction project that wouldn’t be finished for years. I turned around and looked behind us. A few pedestrians peeled off Broadway and ventured down this side street. Very few. The lights of Broadway seemed far away.
If the location bothered Charlotte, she didn’t let on. She still talked animatedly with Sam like he was the only friend she’d ever had. She probably didn’t even notice her surroundings because her eyes had stayed glued to him since we’d left his truck.
“Careful,” Sam told her, pointing out a hypodermic needle lying in the weeds next to the sidewalk.
“Do you want me to carry you?” Ace joked to me.
Honestly, I was tempted to say yes. “No, thanks,” I said instead. “I feel safe with my needle-proof cowgirl boots on.” As I followed Sam through the door, I held my head high in an effort to fake the bouncer out and make him think I belonged here. Nothing would be more embarrassing than to be the one singled out as not looking old enough, especially after Sam had made such a big deal about it. The bouncer didn’t pull me out of our little line or ask me for ID, though. I stepped across the threshold.
The music blasting over the speakers, filler between the live bands, was another country song I loved, but that was the end of my reasons to feel comfortable here. I’d been with my parents to the Station Inn, the most important bluegrass concert hall, which had looked so nasty that I’d been afraid to touch anything. This place made the Station Inn look like the Grand Ole Opry.
The walls were filled with framed and signed photographs of country stars from decades past—names I knew because I’d walked the edges of the biz for years, but these stars weren’t famous enough for someone to impersonate them at the mall. Instead of posing carefully for publicity photos, they closed their eyes and opened their mouths like they were singing their hearts out in front of an audience. The implication was that they’d been photographed here at this very bar, but the photos could have been downloaded off the Internet for all I knew. I didn’t think so, though. Every facet of the frames and every curve of the little 45-speed records strung from the ceiling was coated with a layer of filth like the place hadn’t been dusted since Elvis died. The dim lights and spotlights in blue, green, and pink didn’t quite disguise the dust.
Despite the bar looking deserted on the outside and unsanitary on the inside, quite a few customers pushed past each other to the bar or the restrooms. Sam held up his guitar case like the prow of a ship that broke through the ice pack in the arctic. I hugged my fiddle case. As we wound through the crowd, middle-aged tourists and Vandy frat boys glanced up and down my body, curious what a fiddle player in a rockabilly band looked like up close.
The entrance was a short ramp from street level to the level of the room. At the end of the ramp, Sam stepped three feet up to the tiny stage and pulled me up after him. After being surrounded by people taller than me like I was down in a hole, it was a relief to be saved from the throng. From this vantage point I saw that there were actually two small stages, one to the left of the entrance and one to the right, both of them backed up against the windows onto the street. Charlotte’s drum set took up one stage, and Sam and I balanced on the other, with Ace climbing up behind us. He and Sam both opened their guitar cases in the corner.
I could also tell from up here that the building had two levels. The back was elevated so those customers could get a better view of the band. They were already lining up against the guardrail that separated the upper section from the lower one, staking out a good vantage point for viewing the band—for viewing us, I realized in a sudden moment of disorientation and pure joy.
After plugging his guitar into an amp and setting it in a stand, Sam pulled out his phone and thumbed the screen. He stepped closer to me and spoke in my ear so I could hear him over the music. My skin buzzed with the sensation of his breath on my skin. “Do you have your phone with you?” he asked.