Page 166 of Levi

After the box, after the belt, after a father who taught me with his hands that the real me had to be beaten down into something else.

The answer comes back, up in lights, on the face of a man who could have anybody alive, standing down front crying and nodding at me.

I drop my eyes to the strings. I can’t see them through my own tears. I don’t need to. I keep playing. The song isn’t finished, and neither am I.

By the last chorus the crowd has worked it out. You can hear it move through them like wind through a cornfield, the crowd turning over the same card at once.

Somebody who matters. The man up on the screen. Hold on, isn’t that the realtor, the one in all the videos, the one everybody’s been talking about? Oh. The #whoisthisguy.

And the sound that comes back isn’t one sound. Some of them roar for it, that good thunder that means yes, we’re with you. Some have gone silent and stiff. Off to the right a group of people start in booing. Off to the left others are crying, holding each other up. A fella in a seed cap turns and walks for the exit. Two kids grip the rail with their faces lit, tears coming down too, like I just flipped a light on in a place they’ve been living dark.

Here’s the curious part of it all. I don’t really care which way it breaks.

I just blew up Lee Streeter in front of everyone. The brand, the lie, the straight golden boy off the radio. Country radio doesn’t play a fella who looks at another fella like I just looked up on a screen.

The label will scramble. Freddie will have a stroke. The machine that’s owned me since I was seventeen is crumbling in real time, and all of it is the price I’m gladly paying with both hands.

Because none of it was ever what I wanted. Not the fame, not the money. Lee Streeter was a costume they stitched onto an abused kid.

What I wanted is this. My own song in my own hands. A man down front who leaves the door open. The right to stand in the light and want what I want where anybody on earth can see me do it.

I’m trading fame and fortune for those three, and it’s the best deal I’ve ever made.

And then I sing him the last of the song, eyes up on his face in the lights. The field is still arguing with itself when I start the verse, and it dies away row by row. Even the ones booing want to hear how it ends.

I’d been counted, kept and sold till I forgot I could care.

You left the door open, and I remembered air.

I let the guitar carry the next part by itself. The three chords going around, no words, the field holding its breath with me. Then I lean back into the mic for the last of it.

My whole life I was for sale, every note, every string.

You left the door open.

And then I do the last thing Lee Streeter would ever do. I lay my hand flat on the strings and stop them. No guitar. No band. Ten thousand people gone silent, and I lean into the mic and give them the last line the way you’d tell it to one person.

You can’t hold your breath and sing.

The words go out over the field. Over ten thousand held breaths, over Dante’s wet face down at the rail, over the beautiful wreck of it.

And I breathe.

I stand up, pull the air all the way in, and nothing reaches out of my dark past to stop it.

The boy they locked in the box for letting it show, just let it show. To everybody. The sky didn’t come down on him. Or maybe it did. But it doesn’t matter.

He’s free now anyway.

I set the guitar down. Out past the lights, down at the rail, Dante’s still looking up at me, still smiling and crying, Benji sobbing against his shoulder.

The box is open.

I broke the padlock myself.

I walked out of it, in front of everybody, and left the door standing wide.

Chapter 66: Dante