Free Hillbilly Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus, Todd Gold Page B

Playboy would lift his spirits. He loved girls. Oh man, did he love pretty women.
    “Man, you’re the only person who’s visited me,” he said. “The only one. When I get out of here, I’m going to go to church and get me a good girlfriend like you’ve got.”
    “You can do that,” I said. “That’d be a good idea.”
    “When I get out of here, me and you will start working out again,” he said. “We’ll go back and hit the weights hard, like we used to.”
    “Definitely,” I agreed.
    I told him that I’d gotten into canoeing and had competed in a couple of contests. His face brightened. He wanted to go with me.
    After he got out of the hospital, we canoed down the Little Sandy River and had a great time, even after it began to rain. It was a warm shower, the kind that feels good. We came upon a little bank where we found an old wooden swing attached to a tree. As we swung over the water and dropped in, a violent electrical storm filled the sky with thunder and lightning, and we laughed at it. We knew that we were flirting with danger, but we had been through worse. Plus, the risk made it fun.
    We talked about God and what life was like without being all messed up. I said that I was really happy, and Robbie seemed genuinely happy to hear it.
    We got back in the canoe and finished our trip. A ways down the river, Robbie spotted a glass pint of Jim Beam that someone had tossed into the shitty-ass mud of the bank. Who knows how long it had been there. The bottle was covered with moss. But there were a couple of swigs left in the bottle. Robbie held it up.
    “Want a hit?” he asked.
    “No,” I laughed.
    He cranked the lid off and slugged it down. I didn’t know whether that was cool or desperate. But that was Robbie.
    A couple of days later, I was in the middle of my shift at Greenbo Lake when the phone rang. It was Susie.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    “At the campground,” I said. “You just called me here.”
    I could hear people in the background screaming or crying. I couldn’t tell which it was, but I could tell wherever she was it was pretty chaotic.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “Are you sitting down?” she said.
    “I can be. Do I need to?”
    “Yes,” she said, her voice sounding wobbly. “You need to sit down.”
    I pulled a little stool up close to the phone.
    “Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”
    “They just found Robbie Tooley dead in his basement,” she said. “They say he killed himself.”
    “What? I don’t think I heard you right. What’d you say?”
    “Robbie,” she said. “He committed suicide. They found him in the basement.”
    If Susie kept talking, I didn’t hear her. I dropped the receiver, picked up a golf club and started swinging it against the shack. Glass shattered. I swung it again and more glass shattered. I did it again and the cash register exploded. Then I busted the phone. More glass broke, half a wall came down, and I was steadily beating that shack to the ground when I saw a car coming off the far hill.Soon a state park ranger pulled up in front of the destroyed shack. I was standing in the middle of the rubble, holding a golf club.
    “Cyrus?” he asked. “Are you OK?”
    “Yeah,” I said. But I wasn’t OK.
    “You have an emergency in Flatwoods,” he said. “I need to take you home.”
    He loaded me into the back of his car and drove me straight to 2317 Long Street. My mom embraced me at the door, her eyes red from crying. Neighbors had gathered inside and on our front porch. I worked my way through the crowd, past the living room, and down the narrow hallway till I got to my room. I went in, locked the door, and fell face-first onto my bed.
    I could have been like that for ten minutes, thirty minutes, or thirty seconds—I have no idea—when suddenly words came to me. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I didn’t know what the words were, just that they were there and I had to get them out