Wisp of a Thing

8

A single pickup passed Rob as he negotiated the uneven sidewalk. It was the same one he’d seen the day before, when he left Doyle’s service station. In the bed, three dark-haired, dark-skinned teenagers stared blankly at him. Two of them, boys around fifteen or sixteen, were so thin, they reminded him of famine victims. The other one, a girl of about twelve, was bigger than both of them combined.

The brand-new post office was a brick square with bright blue mailboxes out front and a flagpole that gleamed silver in the sunrise. A narrow covered porch ran the length of the building. The plaque next to the door stated that it had been built four years earlier on the site of the original post office. Rob assumed the ancient rocking chairs that lined the porch had been inherited from that prior building.

The customer service window wouldn’t open for another hour, but Rockhouse Hicks already sat in one of the rockers. The chair creaked in the morning silence; his banjo case hung on the back and occasionally tapped the brick wall behind him. At the opposite end of the porch, a shrunken elderly woman sat working on a huge quilt that covered her lap and pooled at her feet.

“Morning, Mr. Hicks,” Rob said as he stepped onto the porch. He also nodded at the old woman. “Ma’am.”

She did not look up or respond.

Rob continued, “Looks like it’s going to be a fine day once it warms up, doesn’t it?”

Rockhouse glanced up at him. His beard hid any change in his expression. “If it ain’t the talking musician.”

“Mind if I join you?” Rob said as he took the empty chair next to the old man.

Hicks’s expression, whatever it was, stayed hidden in the creases of his face. “You one of them people coming around to see if their family tree goes back to the Tufa?”

“No, sir, I’m just here… Well, I’m looking for a song.”

He smiled, or scowled, depending on the way the light hit his face. “You can find a song on the radio, or one of them fancy lap computers.”

“Not this kind of song.”

“And what kind would that be?”

Rob suddenly felt self-conscious under Hicks’s withering, unspoken contempt. On a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone, he wanted to say, but chickened out at the last instant. He laughed nervously and said, “Ah, never mind. I see you’ve got your banjo; why don’t we just jam a little bit?”

Hicks laughed scornfully. “Only jam I know is what I put on my toast with my sorghum. Besides, I don’t reckon we know too many of the same tunes. Can you play ‘Hares on the Mountain’?”

Rob knew that the same folk song could have half a dozen different titles. “No, not as such.”

Rockhouse closed his eyes and leaned his head back. His voice was surprisingly high and clear.

Hicks smiled smugly, and then the old woman, without looking up from her quilt, sang:

This made Hicks grin even wider. “Do you know that one?” he challenged.

“I do now,” Rob said, and bent to open the guitar case.

A heavy foot slammed down on it. “This the boy you said was bothering you, Grandpa Rockhouse?”

Rob looked up. The backlit figure looming over him was broad shouldered, square headed, and the size of a portable toilet. Slowly Rob sat back in the chair until he could make out the face, and realized this was a woman.

“Yeah, he’s one of them song-catching Yankees, I think,” Hicks said dismissively.

“Huh,” the woman said. Derision filled the single syllable.

“Ma’am, would you please take your foot off my guitar?” Rob said. His stomach began to tighten with fear. He hadn’t heard the old man say anything about being bothered, let alone summon help. Where had this woman come from?

“I’ll take my foot off when I goddam feel like it,” the woman said, and for emphasis leaned more weight down until Rob heard the thin case start to crack. “Who the hell you people think you are, coming into town and bothering folks, anyway? Bet you even dyed your damn hair black, thinking we’re too stupid to tell.”

“You tell him,” agreed the old woman without looking up from her quilting.

Rob realized this creature outweighed him, and her huge hands looked as if they could twist off his head like a bottle cap. She wore a crew cut, a loose T-shirt with no bra, and jeans with splits in the knees. She was fat, but clearly there was hard muscle beneath it. A musty, sweaty smell surrounded her.

He pushed the rocking chair back and stood. He looked up into her dark, opaque eyes. Quietly, careful not to sound belligerent, he said, “If the gentleman doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll be on my way. I’m not trying to start any trouble here.”

Hicks laughed and shook his head. “Lordy, you done said the wrong thing.”

This distracted Rob just enough so that he didn’t see the punch coming. A ham-sized fist slammed into his left eye and knocked him back between two rocking chairs into the brick wall. His head struck with a solid, melon-sounding thunk. Stunned, he would’ve slid to the concrete porch, but the immense woman grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him forward. She slapped him, both flat- and back-handed. The blows seemed to come from far away. He never lost consciousness, but he was too dazed to defend himself.

The woman dropped him back in his chair. His entire head felt numb, and his vision wavered. For an instant it was like two different TV signals battling for the same channel. Then he heard an off-key twang, and his sight cleared just as the woman grabbed his guitar from its case and raised it like a club.

My guitar, he thought calmly. Then the pain and rage hit simultaneously, and he was suddenly back in the moment. With no time to think, he reflexively kicked her in the groin as hard as he could.

It felt like trying to punt a sack of wet cat litter. The big woman let out a squeak and dropped the guitar; Rob caught it in midair. She took a step backwards off the porch and sank to her knees in the grass beside the flagpole.

Rob checked his guitar for damage, and when he looked back, the woman was on her feet. She snapped open a large pocketknife with a practiced toss of her wrist. She whispered furiously, “I’m going to cut your heart out, peckerwood.”

He held up the guitar to block the blow, closed his eyes, and gritted his teeth against the anticipated slashing.

A vehicle skidded to a halt in the street. “Tiffany!” a sharp female voice said.

Rob peeked out from behind the guitar. Bliss Overbay stood outside a pickup truck stopped crossways in the street. Dust from her sudden stop hung in the air. She wore dark pants and some kind of official-looking jacket over a white shirt. Two long braids hung from beneath a weathered baseball cap.

The big woman said, “You stay out of this, Bliss.”

“No. You want to bust heads, Tiffany, you’ll have to start with mine, and it’s too early in the morning for that.”

Rob just stared. It was hard to say what surprised him more: Bliss’s appearance out of the blue, or the fact that this female Gargantua was named Tiffany.

“You been getting away with this shit for twenty years,” Bliss continued, “and it’s time for you to grow the hell up. We ain’t in school, and you can’t just beat up anybody you feel like.”

“Grandpa Rockhouse said he was pestering him,” Tiffany said, like a guilty child confronted by a strict parent.

“Bullshit, Tiffany. He’s littler than you, and he’s a stranger, and you don’t need any more reason than that to start a fight. You’re my cousin, and I’ve known you all my life, and I know you’re a bully. But not today.”

“You ain’t the boss of me, Bliss,” Tiffany pouted. “You ain’t Mandalay. I could snap your skinny ass in half.”

Bliss’s expression darkened with her own anger. “You think?”

Tiffany took a step toward her, but Bliss simply raised her left hand and made a motion with her fingers. Tiffany stopped dead, her eyes wide.

“That’s your ass talking, Tiffany, because your mouth knows better,” Bliss said as she lowered her hand. “Go home. Don’t make me do what you know I will if I have to, just because you woke up on the bitch side of the bed today.”

Rob glanced back at Hicks. The old man sat very still, his eyes locked on Bliss. The amusement had gone from his face, although Rob couldn’t read his new expression.

Finally Tiffany sighed, and her huge shoulders slumped with defeat. She put away the knife. Bliss also visibly relaxed. Rob heard the creak as Hicks again slowly rocked.

“Lots of fuss over nothin’, if you ask me,” the quilting woman muttered.

The same truck Rob had seen twice before stopped behind Bliss’s vehicle. An old man so small, he could barely see over the dashboard leaned out the driver’s side window. “Get in, Tiffany,” he said.

“Yes, Daddy,” Tiffany said. She climbed over the tailgate, and the whole vehicle creaked in protest. The two bone-thin boys scurried to get out of her way, while the other enormous girl shifted to one side to redistribute the weight.

Tiffany settled in with her back to the cab, then fixed her eyes on Rob. In his experience, most fat people had little pig eyes, but Tiffany had huge, menacing black orbs that looked like they might roll over white like a shark’s. A jolt of pain shot through his head, and again two images fought for supremacy: one the street scene before him, the other a freakish variation in which the people in the truck seemed to have eyes like insects and big, folded bat wings.

He sat back down in the closest rocking chair and closed his eyes. An hour seemed to pass as he thought about random, idle things like what color he wanted his next pair of pants to be. He jumped when feather-light fingertips brushed the hair from his face, and realized only an instant had passed.

Bliss stood over him. “You probably shouldn’t sleep for a while until we know if you’ve got a concussion,” she said clinically. “Look at me.”

He raised his eyes to hers. This close, she looked older than she had in the Pair-A-Dice, with little strands of gray at her temples. Her eyes were also a lighter shade of blue, filled with intelligence and compassion, along with something indefinably distant and sad. She said, “Well, your pupils aren’t dilated, so I reckon you’ll just have a lump. But you might want to get some aspirin and some ice.”

Annoyed, he waved her hands away from his face. “Never mind that, where do you find the cops in this town?”

Bliss said patiently, “Talking to the police about Tiffany won’t do you any good.”

“So people can just attack you with a knife in broad daylight, right on Main Street, and nobody does anything?” He struggled to rise.

“Calm down. I just meant—”

All his life, people had told Rob to calm down when he got upset. It had led to conflicts with parents, teachers, friends, and the occasional law enforcement officer. He’d even punched the TV executive who told him to calm down after informing him that his contract required him to perform two days after Anna’s death. There was no surer way to send him over the edge into genuine, ranting fury than to tell him not to do it.

So now he jumped to his feet and roared, “Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down!”

Bliss jumped, startled by his vehemence, and for an instant her expression filled with such rage that it seemed possible she’d hit him, too. Then it was gone, and she said quietly, “Please.”

Rob had to remind himself to breathe. The anger he’d glimpsed in her eyes had short-circuited his own, and that single, muted syllable slipped through his rage and ran a light, cooling touch over him. Bliss had also somehow changed in that same instant, and now he saw the woman who’d been onstage the night before, as gentle and soulful as a medieval painting of the Virgin Mary. He felt suddenly enveloped in an almost absurdly metaphysical calm that drained all his fury as surely as any therapist’s technique.

He closed his eyes, disoriented by the rush of peace, and out of habit ran his hand through his hair. When he withdrew it, he saw blood on his fingers. “Uh-oh.”

“Let me see.” Bliss turned him and stood on tiptoes to examine the spot where he bled. He found himself facing Rockhouse Hicks. He winced as Bliss touched his scalp. “Enjoying the show?” he said to the old man.

“Ain’t nothing to me, one way or the other,” Hicks said.

“You didn’t have to call for help.”

“Son, I didn’t call nobody. We just watch out for our own.”

Bliss finished her exam. “You need a couple of stitches.”

“I’ll be all right,” Rob said. “Now, are you going to tell me where the police are in this town, or do I just dial 911?”

“The police won’t do anything about Tiffany. She’s been that way her whole life, and nothing helps it. The Gwinns only come into town every three months or so, so it’s best to just stay out of her way.” He started to protest, but she cut him off. “And if the police went looking for her, they’d never find her. The Gwinns live way back in the hills, and the people up there take care of their own.”

“Really,” he said, with a pointed glare at Rockhouse.

“Really,” she said patiently. “You stood up to her, and most people around here don’t do that, so maybe she’ll skip the next couple of trips into town until she knows for sure that you’re gone. That means nobody will see her until next spring.” She waited for him to say something else, but he simply scowled.

“Okay,” she said when it was clear he was done. “Come with me and we’ll get you stitched up.”

“Oh, are you a doctor, too?” The back of his head began to throb.

“I’m an EMT,” she said, and turned her shoulder to display the patch on her sleeve. “Nearest doctor is an hour and a half away. The local fire station is fifteen minutes up the mountain. Everything the doctor would have, I’ve got there.” Then she walked to her truck.

Rockhouse’s eyes followed Bliss, and Rob thought he saw real, genuine animosity in them. That was odd, considering they’d played together so well onstage, although he knew from experience that musicians didn’t have to be friends in order to sound great. There were more undercurrents here than among the contestants of SYTYCS?, and that was saying something.

Bliss sat down in the driver’s seat, put the truck in gear, and looked back at him. “Well? You coming with me, or you just going to stand there and bleed?”

Rob put his guitar back in its case. “Thanks for the Southern hospitality,” he muttered to Rockhouse as he went to the truck.

“Bless your heart,” the old woman called after him.