the car slowly pulled into the driveway. A man in all black, his silk shirt open at the collar, his jeans stuffed into cowboy boots, slowly closed the car door behind him, walked furtively to a car parked down the street, and drove away into the gloaming grayness before dawn.
Larry woke up early and walked out to the porch. He had slept poorly, fraught with anxiety. Since the record came out, this had become typical: a fear of what failure might do for him and Ellie.
They were young, married, and living in the city where they grew up in the Appalachians. They wanted children and spoke about having a girl and a boy. They lived in an old house, where they played music in the parlor. Larry’s grandparents were still alive, and earlier that week, he had met with his great aunt, worried that his grandfather was due for another coronary.
Then he turned and saw it.
The Plymouth Satellite convertible was parked behind the red Toyota pickup on the gravel driveway.
The car was white, with a red top. Everything was in mint condition, including the red leather interior.
Larry stood in disbelief, then walked to the vehicle and pulled out the note attached to the side mirror.
It read: “Congrats on stirrin’ the shit. You did all right, kids.” The note came from the man who had sat in on the recording session, watching Larry and Ellie cut the tracks for the EP that was released. One song was always playing on the radio.
Larry touched the hood, running his fingers along the side. He saw the car keys and recognized the attached fob. The man drove it here himself, all the way from Tennessee. He could still be in town, or he could be on the road back with his assistant. Either way, Larry was amazed and couldn’t fully comprehend the gift.
But that key fob, man. He opened the car door and got in, sinking into the red leather.
The fob was a gold double eagle. He noticed the man had it on his keychain when he drove Ellie and him to the hotel they were staying at.
Ellie yelled from the porch. “What the fuck?”
She came down. “Where’d you get this, baby?”
“The man gave it to us.”
Larry pointed to the fob. “He also gave us this.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Get in and let’s give it a drive. I got my wallet on me.”
Larry turned the engine on. The Hemi 426 roared.
Ellie reached over to run her fingers over the customized cassette deck. She punched in the FM station in time to hear More Than This by Roxy Music.
Larry slowly pulled out of the driveway and roared up the hill, turning left to start on a morning cruise. By the time they hit the main drag, their song was playing.
Larry walked toward Haver Street, the two-lane blacktop straddling the forested hill to the Carver Road intersection. In the 1950s, a developer bought the hillside with plans to build another housing subdivision; however, geologists deemed the ground prone to landslides. So the city bought the land at a loss.
The city considered turning it into a park. However, due to an agreement made during the Great Depression, when spending was restricted to prevent defaulting on city bonds, no improvements were made.
Instead, the green space was undeveloped and became a playground for the neighborhood, with generations of kids playing games before growing into teenage heads getting stoned in the urban wilderness. The southern pines stood sentinel to more than sixty years of stupid shit and survived a couple of small fires set off by lightning and discarded cigarette butts.
It was the place of a couple of dozen immaculate conceptions, most notably his own.
The pine forest was the remaining wild area on the south side of town; after Loop 100A was constructed in the mid-1960s, the piney woods on both sides of the highway were developed into strip malls, gas stations, and themed fast-food restaurants.
All that remained of the old wilderness in the city was the pines of Haver Street.
Larry met her while hiking through a rocky, dry gully that ran through the center of the forest. When it rained especially hard, water rushed from a metal drain opening at Haver to what had now become a sizable creek, flowing into the ditch next to the highway. In winter, snowmelt turned the gully into a trickling brook.
It was spring, and the weather was warm and humid for the time of year. Larry’s sweat stained his white T-shirt, and climbing over the rocks in his black dingo boots wasn’t easy.
The drain opening lay about 20 yards ahead. Stepping close, Larry could hear banging sounds from inside the drain.
When he went into the opening, he saw a girl playing with a lunchbox. Larry saw her turn it at different angles, reflecting light to various points against the corrugated metal.
He crawled forward toward her. As he did, the girl turned to look at him.
“Hi. Do you see the lights? It’s like I made a kaleidoscope.”
Larry and Ellie met when 10-year-olds could wander along big highways. Just kids, walking,
Ellie wore a floral top and a pink rayon skirt, gladiator sandals, and thick glasses. Her dark hair was tied with a clip at the top, like Pebbles from The Flintstones.
Larry wore hand-me-down Farah slacks and a rayon short-sleeved dickey. Black Keds and ugly red socks. He needed glasses, but his mother couldn’t afford them.
They went to the Dairy Queen and bought a couple of large Dr. Peppers. They sat cross-legged on the concrete stoop, waiting for the city bus to take them downtown.
Ellie took a long sip. “Ahhh, so refreshing and effervescent.”
She smiled at Larry, reached out, and pecked him on the cheek. Her eyes were bright as peridots, and her smile invited you into her world, which was often mysterious but still open to exploration. They spoke without words, relying on instincts. When they were older, they learned about dyads. That explained the kaleidoscopic afternoon with the lunchbox and the reflections in the storm tunnel.
Ellie’s favorite color was purple. Larry is basic black. Ellie played the cello and a little guitar, and taught Larry basic open major chords at a downtown guitar store near the pocket park in the city center.
They watched folk musicians play the music of the Scots-Irish mountaineers, as men and women danced on boards to provide the rhythm. The banjos were plucked by aging fingers that knew experience and history, some good, but mostly hard times.
That afternoon, a man asked if they knew how to play. They nodded, but Ellie said they weren’t experienced enough.
He was in his twenties, with long black hair and a devilish goatee. “Doesn’t matter. I can see your hearts in your eyes, and y’all found your place here.”
Ellie was handed a battered old Martin dreadnought while Larry got a Silvertone acoustic with F-holes. Larry was left-handed but could play open chords upside down. They played a song they had made up together, and the man nodded along with the others, clapping in rhythm while the banjo player provided accompaniment.
Afterward, they taught them some easy songs and instructed them to return next Saturday.
Through high school, they were inseparable. People were jealous of them. They teased them. Ellie and Larry didn’t care. We were alone, they told each other, and it helped that Punk arrived in time for first year.
Patti Smith, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols; hundreds of bands featured in magazines like Rock Scene and Creem. When the record store wouldn’t order what they wanted, they bought records by mail order with the money they earned bussing tables at a diner. They sat in front of Larry’s old Sears stereo, nodding along, entranced by the tribal beat and the intensity of the complicated willow down to three chords and a cloud of indignation.
The recording studio was in Austin, Texas. The producer chose it for its affordability, and Ellie and Larry agreed that the cedar paneling resonated during rehearsals. Jimmy, a drummer they met in Atlanta, was accompanying, while Ellie’s friend Kathy joined on bass.
As they finished the rehearsal, the producer clicked on the intercom. “You guys stick around. There’s someone you should meet.”
The producer turned to his left. “He heard your demo.” He got up from his seat and shook the man’s hand.
The door opened, and the man walked in. He stared at them like someone who belonged in that room.
The four musicians stared in disbelief. Ellie later remembered that she wanted to throw up; she was so scared. Years later, the man told her he was damned scared, too. They laughed.
The man strapped on an acoustic and stepped up to a waist-high microphone. “Play that first song from the demo--Blue Ridge. I’ll take rhythm and do a fill I thought of during the bridge. Just go for it and be folks.”
Shaking, Larry switched from his acoustic to his Gibson ES-335 and flipped on the switch to his Fender amplifier.
The producer sat at the control board and announced.
“Blue Ridge. On four.”
The clicking metronome countdown seemed longer than the first run-through of the song.
They laid down the track in three takes. No one spoke, but the man stood before them, staring, playing guitar, knowing everything about them as much as they knew him.
After the take, Larry and the man shook hands.
“You certainly have a way of saying hello.”
The man smiled and held up three fingers. “That’s how we got it done in three takes.”
The years passed into decades. Ellie left after the band completed a UK and Scotland tour, where “Blue Ridge” had sold best, and returned to college. Reece replaced her. Larry had known him since elementary school. He lasted a year, then moved on. Larry and Ellie hadn’t heard from him since the 1990s.
Kathy and Jimmy stuck with them and got married after their tour with REM in 1988. After that, they all called it quits. Kat and Jimmy settled in West Asheville, a few blocks from Ellie and Larry. Their kids grew up together, and they all profited from the royalties, which surprisingly stayed constant, just enough for all of them not to find a real job, though the man pointed out to them on one of his visits that they didn’t need a job, just a calling, and they had that.
And that was enough. The man called several times and asked to record with him. Those kept the calling alive.
One day, Larry decided to climb the old Georgia Pacific tower, rusting at the abandoned lumber yard out by the Swannanoa River in Azalea on the outskirts of East Asheville.
After reaching the platform, he heard the man shout from below.
“Hey, let me come on up there.”
The man stood by a vintage red Cadillac convertible. It looked so good, as if he bent time and space driving it from the showroom to the tower.
He yelled, “Just throw me your keys.”
“What?”
“C’mon. Do it.”
Larry reached into his pocket and tossed the keys. When the Double Eagle fob left his fingers, it transformed into magical tape, and the man climbed up without using the stairs.
Larry wasn’t sure what to say.
“Glad to see you.”
“Happy to be here.” The man paused and pointed toward the north.
“That’s Mount Mitchell, right?
“Yes, sir. Behind you is Pisgah. Shrouded in the clouds behind her is Cold Mountain.”
The man stared off southward. “This is an ancient land. I read that the Swannanoa flows into the French Broad, one of the oldest rivers of Earth.”
The tape had coiled back into the Double Eagle. The man handed the fob back to Larry.
The man wore a black shiny suit with a bolo. He straightened his lapels.
“I went to see Ellie before you. I sat with her on the porch, and she told me where you were.”
“I know why you are here.”
“I’m just a part of you and Ellie’s personal mythology. You have kids now, and you will tell them that.”
“You changed our lives, sir.”
“I was just there when it had the greatest impact on your lives. Finding that girl with the lunchbox in the storm tunnel was what changed your lives. All I did was show up in the studio with my gitfiddle.”
They laughed and hugged until Larry’s arms held only the air.
Larry looked below to see that the Cadillac was gone, leaving no tire tracks.
Beside it, sitting on the hood of the white Satellite was Ellie, with their children Johnny and June sitting at her side. Johnny is a senior at Reynolds and has already been accepted to Duke. June is a sophomore and a left-handed guitar player like her Daddy. She has straight red hair that cascades down her shoulders and aspires to be a writer and musician. Applied to the Sewanee Young Writers’ Program for next summer.
They all go to Pritchard Park on Saturdays to jam. Nobody from their childhood remains. Ellie and Larry are the elders, teaching a new generation while busking for fun.
Ellie published a book about their experiences, but mainly she teaches music workshops in the community.
She has the same smile as when they first met. Brown hair with gray streaks, but still the same girl trying to figure things out on her own—then sharing what she learned.
With both hands, Ellie holds the lunchbox. She holds it up, moving it with both hands, reflecting the sunlight onto Larry, just like she did in that tunnel that time they met.
As the lights bounced off the metal above him, Larry sang the song that got them here: Well, they’re all right. In the Blue Ridge, drivin’ a White Satellite.
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