Nightingale

Chapter 18 A Tribute to a Huntress

Bron woke amid dreams of Whitney. He'd seen her soulful green eyes peering up at him from behind a living curtain of honeysuckle that parted like hair. White and golden flowers trailed down her bare arms.

In the dream, she was more than human, something wild, like a fawn, quick and playful and dangerous.

She had been singing in the trees, and he realized now that he'd dreamt that she'd been a creature of legend, a wood nymph perhaps, singing in a deep forest, secreted by vines and secluded within the shadows of weeping willows. She sang, but her song was incomplete.

His guitar needed to accompany her.

Bron's eyes flew open. He'd dreamt of that guitar riff, and in the dream it had been perfect. He went to his guitar.

He heard a creak in another room that might have come from the weight of a footfall. He froze. He wanted privacy.

A little voice inside reminded, "You're going to a high school for the performing arts."

He felt stupid trying to hide from Mike and Olivia, but it was the crack of dawn and he didn't want to wake them.

He took his guitar and crept out the back door, where he stood in the mist and gazed into the fields. Not a hundred feet from the house was a herd of elk—a bull, five cows, and six calves. The huge bull had six tines on each antler, which were still in velvet, so that they were covered with wheat-colored fuzz.

The bull fed contentedly. Two cows lay under an apple tree, while at the edge of the yard, the other animals grazed, legs straddled and heads lowered as they cropped the grass.

The sun wasn't yet peeking over the mountains to the east, though the sky was colored in ribbons of violet and plum, ruddy orange and gold. The air smelled of a drenching fog.

Bron did not want to disturb the animals, so he struck south, hoping to circle the herd, but had not gone ten yards when the bull raised its massive head, gave a whistle of warning, and loped away. The herd followed, and the bull slowed, letting the cows and calves take the lead while he guarded them from danger.

The bull gazed back over its shoulder. It hesitated, as if it might continue its watch, but at last strode away.

Humbled by the majesty of the animal, Bron crept to the barn. He climbed into the hayloft, looked out over the valley, and saw several deer down among the Oreo Cookie cattle. The animals would be his audience.

He sat for a moment, relishing the touch of his Yamaha guitar. It didn't have a single scratch or scuff. The back was made from rosewood, while the surface was all of spruce. He caressed the wood, laid his cheek along the neck and just enjoyed the scent.

He closed his eyes, touched the strings, positioned his grip, and strummed once.

He was gone. For a solid hour Bron began to pick, thrilled at the way the guitar strings responded to his touch. The nylon strings were easy on the fingers of a beginner, and the music came mellow. But he found himself hungering for steel strings. They gave a pithier sound, greater volume. Mastering them would be hell on the hands.

He began to strum the song that Whitney had sung, playing from memory. When he reached the guitar solo, he re-cast the bridge and captured that wild, sultry undertone of Whitney's, borrowing from the storm the night before—the grumble of distant thunder, the hiss of the wind and rain. Then he brought in his own harmony to answer and draw out her melody.

It was not until he had practiced the piece several times that he stopped and recognized that something was wrong.

He'd begun playing the song from memory, and he'd been able to finger the piece even though he hadn't seen the written music. He'd never done that before. Nor had he ever felt the music spring to his hands so willingly.

It couldn't have come from practice. He'd been so exhausted on Monday that he hadn't touched the guitar. There was only one answer: Olivia had wormed her way inside his head.

Bron flushed with anger. He wondered what memories she might have pried, what secrets she might have learned from him.

Had she taken anything? She'd asked if there were painful memories that he might want removed. Sometimes memories fester. Sometimes the infection spreads, until the whole body is wracked with fevers. Had she tried to do him any favors?

And what about new memories? Had she added anything pleasant?

No, he decided. If she had wanted to play with his mind, she would have erased his memories of their talk. She would have left him ignorant, never knowing her powers, or his.

After consideration, he suspected that she had left him only with this gift: the ability to play the guitar.

He experimented, fingering riffs that he'd never tried. Whole new songs sprang to mind, songs that he knew how to play in theory but had never mastered.

He experimented, put the guitar behind his back and played "God Bless America," as Jimi Hendrix had once done. He fumbled a few notes, but it was passable.

Then he brought his instrument around front and moved smoothly into Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption," struggling to adapt it to the acoustic guitar. He was surprised at how good it sounded.

Without amplifiers and the distortion common to an electric guitar, the music felt classical in texture, and he thrilled to the sense of reckless abandon in Van Halen's style warring with the need for precision and beauty.

He didn't have Van Halen's control, but he could feel it coming, just out of reach. It was like trying to pick an apple from a high limb. He could touch it, juggle it on the tips of his fingers, but not quite grasp it.

What had Olivia said? "Deep teaching takes days." Yet she'd only offered to teach him the guitar yesterday.

She must have come to his room more than once. He'd been here only since Friday; he had learned more about technique in that time than he could have learned in five years on his own.

Yet there was something more. He could feel that imaginary apple, the rough texture of its surface. He could thump it and almost taste the crispness of its interior. He was only hours or perhaps days from being able to take it, make it his own.

He yearned for it.

He was angry at Olivia for having violated his privacy, delving into his mind, and yet he was more grateful than words could express. What price would I be willing to pay to be touched by the gods? he wondered.

He knew.

He returned to the house and found Olivia making breakfast, dropping whole wheat bread into the toaster. Bron could hear Mike in the shower, singing a country song accompanied by a hiss like warm rain.

Olivia glanced up, saw Bron with his guitar, and froze. "Everything all right?" She looked pointedly at the guitar.

"Yeah."

"Do you want more lessons?"

He knew what she was asking. "How many more do I need?"

"Three, maybe four."

"To be as good as Hendrix?"

"A few lessons, yes, and a lot of practice," Olivia said. "I heard that song in your head. You have a gift, Bron, one that I didn't give you, one that you were born with. You could be great."

He could see now that Olivia was tired. She had dark bags, like bruises, forming beneath her eyes. She must have been up half the night, and the workload was costing her. "Do I ever wake up when you're doing it?"

"Part of your mind does," she says. "That's why all of your dreams lately have been about playing guitar."

Bron nodded. "You're exhausted. You should take tonight off."

"I can handle my part. I can teach your neural pathways, train your fingers and brain to work in harmony, but even Beethoven lost his skills if he didn't practice every day."

"So will I learn faster if I practice more?"

Mike's shower turned off and the singing abruptly stopped. Olivia nodded, then whispered, "Don't show people what you can do yet. It would frighten them."

Bron guffawed. He couldn't imagine it frightening anyone.

"I'm serious," Olivia said softly. "The things I can teach you.... They'll say that you're in league with the devil, just like Poe and Paganini and Mozart." She was so serious, Bron stifled a laugh. "More than that, you could attract unwanted attention."

"Okay," he said. Bron went to his room. He imagined fingering a song, a more-complex version of the piece that he wanted to do for Whitney. He grinned.

Me, touched by the gods, he thought, and in league with the devil!

School buzzed that morning with news of upcoming auditions. Tryouts began for the Hyperion Club—the most prestigious of all. Everywhere Bron went, people were prepping. Thespians wandered about the grounds delivering lines, talking to the empty air as if they were schizophrenics. Out on the plaza by the Green Open Theater, kids were doing voice exercises. Down in the dance studio, everyone was leaping about.

Amid all the excitement, Bron felt alone, like a wolf on the prowl. He wasn't into musical theater, and because he had nothing else to do, he took his backpack and guitar up to the plaza and sat at a table.

He pulled out his guitar and began to tune.

Suddenly Whitney appeared, sneaking up from behind, took a seat next to him, and sat smiling.

Bron bumped shoulders, drank in her eyes.

"You ready to show us what you've got?" Whitney asked.

Bron froze, looked up at the crowd. Already heads were turning. Whitney had a couple of friends at her back, including Sheriff Walton's son.

Bron had never felt quite so embarrassed.

Whitney said, "Don't worry. We're all performers, and we support each other. We all need applause, so we give it freely."

Bron felt blood rush to his face. He wanted so badly to impress Whitney.

He'd once heard that if you were shy about speaking in public, all you had to do was imagine the audience naked. One glance at Whitney, and his blush deepened.

So he imagined that he was in the barn, playing to the open fields, and to the elk and the cattle.

He swept into the intro, and let instinct take over. With eyes closed, he played by touch, never looking at his fingers or the strings. Whitney fell in, and she took his lead on the rhythm, singing:

At first, Whitney was hesitant, and she listened as much as she sang, as if they were a duet, her voice with his guitar. Most listeners wouldn't have heard the clumsiness or recognized that the timing was off by milliseconds, but when Whitney's voice merged with the guitar, they gathered power, creating an overtone.

It was as if an electric arc shot through Bron and into the crowd. The audience responded with gasps of surprise, sighs of relaxation, feet tapping in time, a shuffling and swishing as people began to sway. Someone near the back of the crowd called excitedly, "Hey, you guys, come here!"

This is the way Stevie Wonder experiences music, Bron realized. He can hear when the audience captures the joy, can feel how he moves them. They blended seamlessly on the chorus:

Bron gave himself to the music then, as Whitney cycled through the verses. When she finished with the bridge, he hit the guitar solo and didn't even think about fingering, just capturing the joy of the tune, enhancing it. It was a complex piece, worthy of Slash or Keith Richards.

In it, he stripped Whitney's song down to its bare essence, like a humble cottage stripped to its foundation, and then he rebuilt it stone by stone, turning it into a castle bold and majestic, towering above the hills.

It was perhaps more complex and intricate a piece than he had first imagined, but he purposely embellished it, hoping to impress Whitney.

As Olivia had warned, he had just been too good.

In the silence, one young man whispered in awe, "Damn, you can grind that ax!"

Then the applause began, people hooting and clapping. Whitney grabbed him and kissed his cheek, and said a heartfelt "Thank you," with tears in her eyes. He gave her a brief hug, but she kept clutching him, as if she never wanted to let go.

Students surged forward to slap him on the back and tell him, "That was sooo great!" and he heard one girl tell a friend, "No wonder Mrs. Hernandez wants to adopt!"

Her friend answered, as if he were a puppy, "Oooh, I want him, too!"

Amid the congratulations and fist bumping a young man asked, "Can I get your autograph?"

Bron was so startled he said, "No one has ever asked me for that before."

The young man shoved a pen and paper his way. "Can you write on it, 'To Joel, my first autograph'? Then put the date on it?"

Bron signed the paper, glanced up at the crowd, wondering how Justin Walton might have reacted to the song, but he was gone. Bron imagined that he had just sulked off in anger.

A boy who looked too young to be even a freshman asked, "Where did you learn to play like that?"

"Uh, Guitar Hero," Bron lied. Other kids began to ask for autographs. The bell for first period rang, and people hurried off to class.

A young man with curly hair, beefy in stature, got Bron's guitar case and opened it, and then laid Bron's guitar in reverently. "Wow," he said as everyone else was leaving. "I think you're going to be the most popular guy in school."

Whitney smiled at that. "I think he will."

The young man stuck out his hand to shake. "I'm Kendall. I've got a band. Want to join?"

Kendall stood shyly, almost as if he were overwhelmed to be in Bron's presence, and Bron couldn't just say no. It would have broken Kendall's heart.

"Your band any good?" Bron asked.

Kendall shrugged. "With you in it, it could be great."

Bron nodded. "I'll give it a try." He glanced at Whitney, expecting a smile, but saw panic instead. He realized his mistake. "So long as it doesn't conflict with playing for Whitney."

Kendall nodded thoughtfully. "I think we can reach an amicable agreement."

Whitney clutched Bron all the harder, and her smile spread across her face, encompassing her entire body—eyes, skin, soul.

Bron reached for his guitar case, but Kendall swooped it from the table. "Allow me, sir." He took the guitar gingerly, as if it were a treasure. "I liked your playing," he said. "It was as if you ... took the essence of her song and stripped it bare. At first, I thought that you would hold it up for ridicule, something so weak and so pop, but instead you clothed it again, more majestically than I could have imagined, and then you just gave it back to her! Damn, that was righteous!"

Bron smiled. He appreciated the criticism, but he had to wonder: Is that what I was doing? He realized that in part, the young man was right.

"So what's the band called," Bron asked.

"Wasteland," Kendall said. "When we play, we all act like we're wasted. It's not a cultural statement or anything, just theater."

Bron peered at the guy curiously. Kendall was beefy, like a lineman on a football team, with dark curly hair and a killer's pale blue eyes.

I don't just have a band, Bron realized. I have a fan and a valet. Kendall walked with a dangerous swagger, as if he might beat up anyone who imposed on Bron's time. The kid seemed like a follower, one of those clingy ones who latch onto rockers and movie stars.

What am I getting myself into? Bron wondered.