Tommy Johnson becomes part of a loving family when he’s lucky enough to be adopted out of the foster system. He’s the proverbial nerd who tends to fade into the background, and while he might wish Zack Jones, the jock who is football royalty in their little town, would want to date him, he knows that’s impossible, especially when Zack goes west to college and Tom goes south. Tom was never the sort of person to draw attention to himself; once he graduates, this makes him the perfect candidate for the Washington Bureau of Intelligence and Security. He enjoys his work until he’s almost killed, so he returns home to take the most boring job he can find.
Zack’s homelife was never ideal, so he found solace with a friend, until that friend abruptly disappeared from his life. To compensate, Zack becomes the epitome of jockdom, eventually earning a scholarship to a prestigious Midwestern college. An unlucky tackle on the football field leaves him with a badly broken femur, putting an end to his hopes of one day going pro. Rather than brood on the unfairness of life, he and some fellow jocks create a band and, after graduation begin to tour the country, becoming wildly popular as The Broken Legs. He enjoys his career until writer’s block puts a halt to his songwriting. And then one day, a package from home reminds him of his lost friend, and “Lyin’ in the Green Grass,” the song that results from this eureka moment, leads to a resurgence of his music.
The problem is the name he’s added to the song is Tommy Johnson, and it puts Tom into the crosshairs of a deadly adversary. All Tom knows is if he’s going to be miserable, so is Zack Jones, and he sets out to track down the illusive singer. What will happen when the two men finally meet after all these years? And what about the adversary who plans to make sure Tom Johnson winds up dead?
“Hey, Tommy, get over here!”
Tom went into the breakroom. “What’s up, Ginny?”
“Have you heard The Broken Legs’s latest release?”
“Can’t say I have.” He didn’t listen to hard rock.
Zack Jones, who’d once lived in Walkerville, had formed the band even before graduating from college, naming it because a broken femur had precluded him from playing pro football. He was pretty much the town’s one claim to fame.
“You gotta hear this.” She turned up the sound on her phone, and Zack’s voice came out of the speakers. For a change, instead of being rough and almost savage, it was warm and mellow.
“That’s pretty.”
“Wait for it.”
“Wait for what?”
She waggled her eyebrows but said nothing more.
So he waited, while Zack sang of a high school crush, of sweet touches and shy glances and shared dreams. He had to admit, in spite of everything, he was impressed.
“And the clouds passed overhead, and the sky was as blue as your eyes, while the sun shown down upon us after we made love,
“And I was lyin’ on the green grass with you, Tommy ... with you, Tommy ...” Zack’s voice softened to almost a whisper. “... with you, my own Tommy Johnson ...”
Tom’s mouth dropped open. What the actual fuck?
“Have you been keeping something from us, Tommy Johnson?” Ginny asked archly.
“Me? No. Why would you even think that?”
“It was leaked that this song is autobiographical --”
“So?”
“Well, you’re the only person in Walkerville named Tommy Johnson.”
“What difference does that make? There have to be about a million Tommy Johnsons in the world.”
“Maybe, but Zack Jones is a Walkerville boy, and so are you. Didn’t you go to high school together?”
Tom stared at her. “He sat behind me through all our time in school -- Johnson, Jones ... get it?” Although mostly the jock slept through that mid-morning period in high school. “He doesn’t know me. He certainly never pined for me.”
“Are you sure about that?” she singsonged.
“And besides, my eyes aren’t blue.”
“Poetic license. No way the sky could be brown.”
He gave her a flat look, but she had the temerity to giggle.
“I ... er ... I guess you’d be sure if anyone was.” But she swallowed another giggle as she turned off her phone.
“Yeah.” After that debacle in DC, he’d made a point of fading into the woodwork; no one except The Boss -- and yeah, that was in capital letters -- knew he was alive, much less where he’d gone, and he trusted that information would never be revealed. Well, as he’d told her, there were countless Tommy Johnsons in the world. Why should it come back to him?
And maybe, with a little luck, the song would be a dud.
* * * *
Goddammit, his luck wasn’t that good. The damned song went viral.
Okay. He drew in a deep breath. Okay. That didn’t mean anyone would think he was the Tommy Johnson mentioned in the song, especially since it wasn’t him.
Yeah. He was overreacting. It would be okay.
