But as he came close to room 234, Jack heard laughter and the chatter of female voices. For a minute he wondered if it was the right room. When he peered inside, he saw a boy standing at the foot of a hospital bed, holding a guitar straight up by the neck as it rested on the mattress. Sitting next to the guitar was a woman wearing a pale blue hospital gown dotted with darker blue flowers. The boy must be Merle, and the woman his mother. They might have looked alike if her face hadn’t been covered by two strips of tape that stretched from her forehead to her cheeks, crossing over her nose in a big X.
“Don’t make Arlene laugh,” a woman in a nurse’s aide uniform warned two other women. “She has a tube in her chest because of that punctured lung. Laughing hurts her. I mean, it doesn’t do any damage, it’s just painful.”
“Ooops! Sorry!” exclaimed one of the women, who was actually somewhere in between a woman and girl. Thin and pretty, she wore a nametag pinned to a green sweater, but she didn’t look like a nurse’s aide. Next to her, an older woman in a blue work shirt and jeans stood facing away from Jack so he couldn’t see her too well, but in her back pocket he noticed a pair of garden clippers.
“Uh…are you Merle?” Jack asked from the doorway.
“Yeah,” Merle answered. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Jack Landon. My mom is helping Ranger Firekiller investigate today’s bear attack. He said to tell you he’ll be leaving here pretty soon.”
Merle started to speak, but his mother held out her hand and said, “Pleased to meet you, Jack. I’m Arlene, and that cute young thing there is Corinn, and the hard-workin’ lady reachin’ out to shake your other hand is Bess. Poor Bess’s been havin’ to work twice as hard now that I’m not taggin’ around after her in Dollywood, like I usually do. Bess and Corinn came here to see if I was makin’ any progress. Wasn’t that nice?”
Arlene Chapman looked like she needed a lot more progress. Beneath the X- shaped bandage, her nose was black and blue. Her eyes looked even more bruised, and she panted a little when she spoke, probably from that collapsed lung with the tube in it.
Speaking up again, Merle told Jack. “I gotta be at my job in Gatlinburg by 5:30. Bess said she’d drive me there tonight, and my boss will drive me back to the Firekillers’ house after work.”
Bess, the woman wearing work clothes, spoke up, “But you gotta pay me back, Merle. For the ride, I mean.”
“How, Bess?” he asked.
“Sing one more song before we go.”
The nurse’s aide had left the room, but she poked her head around the door again, saying, “I heard that! Is Merle going to sing again? Sing loud, Merle, so I can hear you from the nurse’s station.”
So Merle was a singer? He didn’t look more than a year older than Jack. In fact, he looked something like Jack, only taller and stockier, with hair a little redder than Jack’s blond color and eyes more gray than blue.
Plucking a few strings on his guitar, Merle announced, “I’ll sing this one ’cause Mom likes it best.” He waited just a moment, strummed a chord, then began to sing:
Downtown by the neon lights
Where trouble runs and the young men fight
There’s a woman singin’ slow
Her voice is rough and low
And when she steps to the microphone
The songs she sings are all her own….
Jack straightened in surprise. Merle was good! Really good! The song went on:
Now I might seem as far apart
From Mona’s world as day from dark
But Mona sings her soul to me
And all her songs, they set me free
She makes me feel I’m not alone
She sings for me as if I was her own.
The women in the room applauded, yelling “yay’” and “whoo hoo.”’ By then Jack wasn’t just surprised, he’d zoomed all the way to astonished! Merle was as good as any singer Jack had ever heard on the radio or on television.
“That’s my favorite of all the songs Merle ever wrote,” his mother was saying, as she smiled and nodded her head.
“You wrote that song? Yourself?” Jack stammered.
“Yes, he did,” Arlene answered proudly. “You know, we named Merle after the country singer Merle Haggard. When he grows up, Merle’s gonna be just as famous as Merle Haggard.”
Who was Merle Haggard? Jack had never heard of him.
Bess asked, “You used to sing, too, Arlene, didn’t you? Back a ways?”
“Well, yes, I did. When Merle’s daddy was alive, we sang together. We wanted to be another Johnny Cash and June Carter, can you imagine?” She laughed a little at that, then clutched her chest, saying, “Ooh, that hurts!”
Johnny Cash! Jack knew about Johnny Cash. “I worked on a Johnny Cash CD cover,” he said.
For a few silent seconds, everyone stared at Jack in amazement. “You…you designed a Johnny Cash record cover? By yourself?” Merle asked.
“No! No, I mean…I never designed it for real. I just fool around with Photoshop. Like…I change pictures to make them look funny or scary. Then I post them to a blog.”
“Oh.” They all looked a little disappointed. “Well, let’s see your Johnny Cash cover then,” Corinn told him, pulling a small laptop from a briefcase near her feet. “I brought my computer today so we could go over Arlene’s Dollywood hospital insurance plan. Here, I’ll turn it on for you.”
Jack wished he’d never mentioned Photoshopping. He felt really stupid as he moved over to the computer Corinn set up on the bedside stand. Taking a deep breath, he signed into the blog and pulled up the picture he’d posted.
There it was, a CD cover of country music superstar Johnny Cash with his famous black shirt and pants all covered with one-dollar bills Jack had pasted on him digitally. “I call it ‘Cash on Cash,’” he said weakly.
Their reaction was a big surprise. Corinn, Bess, and Merle burst out laughing, and Arlene cried, “Oooh, let me see! That is so funny. ‘Cash on Cash!’”
Bess told Jack, “If you did a cover of Merle Haggard, you could make him look haggard—you know, all old and wore out.”
The others laughed even louder when Arlene said, “How ’bout Martina McBride in a weddin’ gown?”
Corinn, the younger one, must have sensed that Jack didn’t recognize those names. In a quieter voice she told him, “You’re not from around here, are you, Jack? This is the home of Dollywood and Nashville, the country music capital of the whole wide world. Every one of us Tennesseans grew up listening to country singers and country music, ’cause it’s all about us and who we are.”
Before Jack had a chance to answer, the phone rang, and Bess picked it up since Arlene couldn’t reach it. “It’s Blue,” she announced. “He says to come right down to the parking lot.”
After Jack said good-bye to the women, Merle told him, “I’ll walk you down the hall so I can tell Blue I already got a ride to Gatlinburg.” As they ambled slowly, Merle exclaimed, “You’re a real artist, Jack, to do stuff like that. How did you learn it? I wish I could do that, but I don’t have a computer at home.”
No computer? Jack didn’t know what he’d do without his own computer—it connected him to the world. He took a closer look at Merle, noticing that he wore a sweatshirt and stained pants that might have come out of a thrift shop. His shoes were pretty worn, with the rubber on the side of the