Chapter 5: The Collar

In Louisville the wardrobe assistant came back with a black jacket that buttoned to the chin.

"Vaughn's orders," she said. "High collar. Nobody sees a thing."

Fraser looked at the jacket, and at me over the rim of a coffee mug.

"Aye," he whispered, and took it.

I knew that look.

It was the look of a man who has agreed to something so he can break it.

I sat in the Well that night with the camera feed six inches from my face, and I watched his mouth.

The show opened hot.

By the second song he was sweating through the jacket, and by the third he had dropped it off one shoulder.

Vaughn's voice came into my left ear.

"Keep it buttoned, Fraser," he said, on the band's talkback, meant for nobody to hear.

Fraser mouthed the second verse of "Salt Road" without looking at the wings.

Then he reached up with both hands and tore his collar open to the sternum.

I heard twenty thousand people take a breath.

The big screens that hang over the stage showed his face in a close-up forty feet wide.

They showed his beard, his throat and his tattooed collarbone, and on it a purple crescent of teeth marks as clear as a signature.

For one full beat there was no sound at all.

Then the arena came apart.

I have sung under that kind of noise for nine months, and I have never heard anything.

They screamed, and a girl somewhere near the front screamed, "Who bit you?"

I sat in the dark with my headphones in my lap and my heart going.

My voice kept coming out of the speakers, because I was still singing.

I didn't remember starting the chorus.

He stood in the light with his collar wide open, lifted the mic to the crowd and let them sing for him.

I thought, that's mine.

It went through me, and it wasn't shame.

I wanted every single one of them to know.

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