The Hum and the Shiver

31

Don Swayback stared up at the stars. He could never recall doing that before, although he must’ve stargazed as a child. Yet now the vista above him seemed the most beautiful, amazing thing ever, and he wondered how he’d lived this long without noticing it.

The sky had been clear when he started, but now clouds began to edge in from the southwest. Wind made the tops of the trees wave in growing animation. And it was that wind that held his attention, that seemed to be whispering, humming, singing something he just couldn’t quite catch.

He glanced back at his house. Susie was home but asleep, after more vigorous lovemaking that caused her to wonder aloud, “You’re not stockpiling a certain little blue pill, are you?” He was exhausted, too, but ever since meeting the little girl earlier that day, he knew he’d end up outside looking up at the stars. He’d intended to tell Susie about it at dinner, but the altercation at the Waffle House made it slip his mind, and she was peacefully snoring by the time he remembered.

He’d met the girl when he drove through Needsville again. He’d taken to doing it at least once a day, spending his entire lunch hour in the car listening to CDs of the Carter Family and other bluegrass pioneers. The first few times he told himself it was to build up familiarity with the area for his eventual interview with Bronwyn Hyatt, but it had become its own reward, a kind of rolling meditation on the nature of his own nature.

This time, as he drove slowly down the main street, he recalled suddenly Susie asking him to pick up postage stamps. He parked outside the new brick post office building, and as he climbed the steps to the porch a voice said, “Hello.”

He turned. An old man sat in the far rocking chair, but he hadn’t spoken. Instead it had been the young girl in the chair beside him. She wore green cotton shorts, a sleeveless jersey, and flip-flops. Her black hair was in two braids. She held an old-fashioned bottled Coke with a bendy straw poking from the top.

“Hi,” Don said.

“You were at the barn dance the other night, weren’t you?”

Don smiled. “Yeah, I was. Were you there?”

She shook her head. “I just heard about it.”

“You heard about me?”

She patted the arm of the third rocking chair. “Sit down.”

The girl had an odd demeanor, nothing like a normal child, and he was a little disconcerted. The old man in the chair on her other side just looked at him, saying nothing. His eyes were narrow, squinting slits.

Don settled into the rocker and said, “Did you want to ask me something, Miss—?”

She shook her head. “My name is Mandalay. And I want to tell you something.” The seriousness in her words was belied by the way she slurped the last of the Coke through the straw.

“Okay,” he said. “What?”

She burped lightly, then said, “You’ve come awake inside, and it’s probably messing with you a little bit. You’ve been knowing things you didn’t think you were supposed to know, singing songs you’d never heard before. Am I right?”

Don stared and nodded.

She spoke as if discussing Barbies with another child. “You’ll have a choice pretty soon. Your Grandma Benji wasn’t one of my people, but we all loved her anyway. You can go either way. With me, or with Rockhouse here, who’s head of her people.” She nodded at the old man, who said nothing. “You don’t have to choose right now. But you will have to choose pretty soon.”

He couldn’t stop gazing into her eyes. They weren’t those of a child.

“He done chose,” Rockhouse finally said. “He went to your barn dance, not our hootenanny.”

“A man can’t choose if he don’t know both sides,” Mandalay snapped, and the old man fell silent. To Don she said, “You have to pick which one of us you want to join.”

“Like the Seelie or the Unseelie?”

She shrugged. “Call it what you want.”

“What do you call it?” Don asked.

“The Tufa. The Tufa blood in you is singing now. You can either sing along, or wait for it to go quiet again. Or…”

She motioned him closer and spoke softly. “Go outside tonight. Look up at the sky. Listen to the wind. See what it says to you.”

“Hey!” Rockhouse said. “He ain’t got no right—”

“He’s got every right,” the girl fired back, and the old man again fell silent. Then she returned her attention to Don. “Listen for the wind. Listen for the riders. Listen for what calls in your own blood. Then go to Cricket and look at the painting in their library. Then decide.”

He could think of nothing to say. Mandalay smiled, wizened and old now like a Tibetan lama. He nodded, turned, and went back to his car. He was almost to the county line before realizing he’d forgotten the stamps. He wasn’t about to go back for them.

That night he and Susie picked up ice cream on their way home from the Waffle House, and as they sat on the couch eating and flirting, Don said, “Can I ask you something about your work?”

“Is this for your work?”

“No, I’m just curious.”

She nodded as she provocatively licked chocolate syrup from her spoon. “As long as it’s not about a specific patient.”

“You guys get a lot of Tufas in there, right? So they get the usual tests done, I assume. Tell me, is there anything different about them? I mean, different from…” He waved at the air with his own spoon.

“Different from what?” she asked.

“You know… human beings.”

She laughed. “The Tufa are human beings. Just like black people, or Eskimos, or Asians.”

“So, like, blood tests and stuff never come back… weird?”

“No, they come back with all the same things you’d find in anybody’s blood.” She touched the tip of his nose with her spoon, depositing a bit of vanilla ice cream on it. “I think you’re spending too much time dwelling on this.”

He wiped his nose and was hit anew by her attractiveness. “Well,” he said throatily, “I can think of one thing that might take my mind off it.”

“We haven’t finished our ice cream,” she pointed out.

He reached for her hand. “Bring it along.”

Now he looked up at the sky, the wind, the night, and felt something impending within him, a change he both dreaded and desperately longed for. He spread his arms like wings and whispered, “Okay, if anybody’s up there riding the night wind, I’m ready for a ride, too.”

If Susie had looked outside a moment later, she would’ve found the backyard empty.

Mandalay Harris sat beside the stream, her feet in the water. Even at night the air was humid and warm, and she felt mosquitoes approach, alight on her skin and then buzz away, repelled by something in her nature. A strange but welcome perk of being a trueblood Tufa. She plucked idly at her autoharp, sending random notes out on the wind.

The porch light came on, and her stepmother, Leshell, stuck her head out the trailer door. “Mandy? Y’all out here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mandalay called. She kicked the water and watched it twinkle in the moonlight. The stream was barely a foot deep, and the rock on which she sat bisected its yard-wide channel.

“It’s past midnight,” Leshell said.

“I know.”

Leshell, in a long yellow T-shirt with a deer’s head drawn on it, walked across the wet grass to the edge of the stream. “I think you’re going to have company.”

Mandalay looked at her stepmother and nodded. “I heard. I’ll be in when I’m done.”

When she turned back to the stream, Bronwyn Hyatt stood beside it.

“Hey,” Mandalay said, as if the woman’s sudden appearance was the most normal thing in the world.

“Hey, Mandalay,” Bronwyn said, a little breathless. “Leshell.”

“Bronwyn.” Leshell nodded and went back inside.

Bronwyn’s hair was windblown, and big sweat circles spread from under her arms. “Got a minute?”

The girl shrugged. At moments like this, her reality as a ten-year-old seemed strongest. She played a few bars of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” “Not much happens this time of night.”

Favoring her ribs, Bronwyn pulled up an old milk crate that lay in the weeds beside the creek and sat. She took long, deep breaths until she could speak without gasping. “You know what happened tonight, I suppose.”

The girl nodded. “I’m real sorry. We all read the signs wrong. Some days it seems like the only sign that’s clear is red and says Stop. The night wind was there for him, though.”

“Is it there for me?”

Mandalay kicked at the water again. A distant rumble of thunder came over the mountains. “If you want it. You’re a trueblood, and a First Daughter. If you call the wind, it’ll answer.”

“Even if I call it for something selfish and wrong?”

Mandalay giggled. “Listen to you. What’s selfish and wrong? You want revenge for Kell’s dying. Who can blame you?”

“I don’t want revenge, Mandalay, I want Dwayne to be stopped. If he’s not, somebody else will suffer like I am, like my parents and little brother are. And…”

“And what?”

“I think I’m the one who’s supposed to stop him. It has to be me because I’ve killed people before. It won’t change my song like it would my daddy’s, or Aiden’s, or Terry Joe’s.”

“So you remembered what happened to you, then?”

“No. I know what happened, and that’s enough. If I remembered what happened, then the next time I tried to do it, it’d get all tangled up with those memories.” She recalled the cliff-top conversation with Bliss. “The night wind’s been preparing me for this, Mandalay. There’s a need out there, and I can fill it. But it’ll be on my terms.”

“And what’re those?”

Bronwyn smiled coldly. “Whatever I say they are.”

“And how’s that different from how you used to be? The Bronwynator, doing whatever she wants?”

“Maybe the ‘how’ ain’t any different. But the ‘why’ is. You and the First Daughters wanted me back, didn’t you? Now you’ve got me. And if it means you got the hum you wanted but the shiver’s different, well, that’s tough.”

Mandalay looked down at the silver wakes caused by her dangling feet. “Is this one of those times when we should’ve been careful what we wished for?”

Bronwyn laughed. “Maybe so.”

Mandalay kicked at the water. “Then why are you here asking me? I’m just a kid. It sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

“Yeah,” Bronwyn said sadly.

Mandalay shook her head in that smug way children have when they know something their parents don’t. The collective wisdom and history of the Tufa was bound in this little girl who could talk before she was a year old and pick out tunes on a piano by age two. She had the history, but not the experience; so often her pronouncements and warnings would come out in little-girl metaphors or childish descriptions. Now that she was older this happened less often, but the dichotomy was both disconcerting and sad. “That’s not right, you know. I’m not a kid.”

“I know you’re not, sweetie.”

Mandalay leaned down and let the current play over her fingers. “What was the desert like? I always wanted to see it.”

Bronwyn laughed. “You want to talk about it now?”

“Might not get another chance.”

Bronwyn caught the warning, but let it go. It didn’t matter anyway. “Well, it’s all space. There’s no trees, no mountains. It rattles you at first, makes you feel even more exposed than you do ordinarily.”

“Did you know the Tufa were called Yellowbacks for a long time because we never fought in any of the wars, even when we were drafted?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But you fought.”

“Daddy thinks it’s because the war over there was easier to fight than the one here.”

“Was it?”

She shrugged. “It was different. It took a lot of nerve just to stand there, knowing a bullet or a bomb could come from anywhere. But you also didn’t know the people shooting at you or blowing you up. Here… well… they’re family.”

She laughed at her own joke, then looked up at the sky. The clouds were creeping in, and the wind tore at the trees higher on the slopes. With calm certainty she said, “I’m also going to marry that preacher, Mandalay. Not Terry-Joe Gitterman.”

“Because that’s what the Bronwynator wants?”

She shook her head. She felt serene, as if this were all reasoned out and decided even though it was literally coming to her as she spoke. “Nope. Because just when I thought I was all alone, he showed me I wasn’t. I had every intention of this being my last flight on the wind in this world.”

“You’d do that to your parents? Two of their children gone?”

“Hell, they ain’t sure I’m back yet anyway. But it’s beside the point. I’m gonna marry the preacher, but I’m still going to have Terry-Joe’s baby. Probably a girl. Next year, or the year after. Another First Daughter.”

“She won’t be a pureblood.”

“No. We have to get past that idea anyway. Her blood will be true, and that’s enough.”

“How will the preacher take that?”

“Between now and then, I’ll have to get both him and Terry-Joe ready to understand it.”

“If you survive the night.”

Bronwyn smiled wryly. “Mandalay, you’ve been watching too much TV. You sound like the bad guy in a spy movie.”

“I can’t see you in the morning, though. I can’t hear your song.”

Bronwyn was silent for a moment. At last she said quietly, “Maybe that’s because I’ll have a new one by then.” She stood, suddenly feeling stronger than ever before in her life. “Thanks, Mandalay. You take care.”

“You, too,” the girl said.

She watched as Bronwyn opened herself to her full Tufa nature, spread her wings, and once again caught the night wind.