Wisp of a Thing

10

The Collins’s trailer home looked isolated and vulnerable in the twilight. The trees around it were thick, old, and more densely packed than the rest of the forest. A creek ran along one edge of the lot, crossed by a small decorative bridge.

Rob parked next to Doyle’s truck beneath a solitary old oak that shaded most of the front yard. One branch had grown so long and heavy that halfway along its length, a makeshift metal brace supported its weight. The yard was neat and boasted no half-assembled cars or sleepy dogs, something Rob realized he’d expected to find.

Berklee greeted him at the door. She wore khaki shorts despite the chill and a criminally tight white T-shirt, and looked absolutely stunning. She held a beer, and the slight red flush to her cheeks said it wasn’t her first of the day. She stepped aside to let him enter and said, “Hi, glad you could make it. See you found us okay.”

Rob tapped the brim of his Royals cap. “Sorry for wearing a hat indoors. I know better, but I’ve got fresh stitches and Vaseline in my hair, and I just didn’t think I could stand shampoo on it just yet.”

“You’re not the first person Tiffany Gwinn’s made get stitches,” Berklee said sympathetically. “Seems like every town’s got someone like her, doesn’t it?”

Berklee took his jacket and hung it on the rack by the door. The trailer’s living room was furnished in matching couch and recliner, while the little dining area had new-looking table and chairs. Everything was neat and organized, in contrast to the cliché image of trailer people. Rob took a seat on one of the barstools in front of the counter that divided the kitchen and living room.

Doyle came down the hall in jeans and a dark sweater. “Well, look who took on the Queen Bitch of the Mountains and lived to tell about it. Quite a shiner you’ve got going there.”

Rob touched the skin around his left eye. It felt tender and hot. “Apparently, I don’t have to tell about it, everyone already knows.”

“Someone usually gets their head busted when the Gwinns come to town. You ever hear of Great Kate Gwinn?”

“No.”

“Back about seventy years ago, she was the biggest moonshiner around Needsville, in every sense. They say she weighed seven hundred pounds, but I figure there’s a thirty percent exaggeration factor in that. She lived up at the Gwinn house, but she was too big to get out the door, so nobody ever arrested her. The local cops told the feds, ‘She’s catchable, but not fetchable.’”

“Wow. If she was around now, she’d have her own reality show. What happened to her?”

“When she died, they just put sides and a top on her bed and knocked down a wall to get her out. Took a dozen men and two mules to drag her the ten yards down the hill to the family plot. People all switched to white lightning for a month in her honor.”

“Switched from what?” Rob asked.

“Moonshine.”

“What’s the difference?”

“White lightning’s brewed during the day, moonshine’s brewed at night.”

Berklee dropped her empty beer into the garbage with a loud clank. “I hear Bliss—” She said the name with disdain. “—bailed you out.”

Rob nodded. “Ran off the monster, then stitched me up. Probably saved my life. Definitely saved my ass.”

Berklee folded her arms. “That’s Bliss, all right. The answer to every man’s prayers.”

Doyle kissed her on the cheek. “I keep telling you, honey, green ain’t your color.”

“Hmph.” Berklee shrugged off the kiss and opened the fridge for another beer.

To Rob, Doyle said, “Bliss knows a lot of different things.”

“No kidding. All she had to do to run off that psycho bitch was this.” He made an approximation of her hand gesture.

Berklee, just closing the refrigerator, gasped and made a motion with her left hand in response. She caught herself about halfway through, and tried to turn the movement into an innocuous tapping on the counter. But Rob caught it.

“What was that?”

“What?” Berklee asked innocently.

“What you just did.” He imitated it as accurately as he could.

Berklee glanced at Doyle, who shrugged.

“Oh, it was nothing, you just startled me,” she said dismissively. “It’s stuff we used to do when we were kids.”

“Like what?” Rob pressed.

“Just… stuff,” she said desperately, unable to come up with anything else. “Excuse me, fellas, I have to pee.” She practically shoved Doyle aside to run down the hall.

Rob looked at Doyle. “So are you going to tell me?”

“Son, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Women around here are crazy on a good day. They all get these superstitions from their mommas when they’re young, and they never quite shake ’em.”

“And you’re not superstitious?”

“Not a bit,” he deadpanned, then knocked on the wooden table.

When Berklee returned from the bathroom, Rob did not bring up Bliss or the hand gestures again. They sat around the kitchen and drank beer until Berklee produced the casserole from the oven.

“So you both lived here all your lives?” Rob asked as they ate.

They nodded. Doyle said, “I reckon it’s true, you can take the boy out of the mountains, but not the other way around.”

“And now he’s got his own business,” Berklee said.

“Yeah, long as you quit running off my help.”

Berklee blushed and smiled, and Doyle laughed. Rob said, “What am I missing here?”

“I came by to bring Doyle his lunch one day, and he was up under a car working on it,” Berklee explained. “I was feeling kinda silly, so since his legs were sticking out, I bent down and unzipped his pants on my way into his office.”

“Where she found me sitting at my desk,” Doyle added.

“Seems he’d hired this Barnes boy without mentioning it to me,” Berklee said, “and now the poor kid came staggering in, bleeding from where he’d smacked his head when he jumped ’cause somebody opened his fly.”

They shared more stories as the empty beer cans piled up. Later, Doyle lit a fire in a pit in the backyard, and they sat under the stars, surrounded by the sounds of the mountain night.

At last, after a long period of silence except for the fire’s crackling, Rob turned to Doyle. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Doyle said guiltily. “Knew you looked familiar, so I looked you up online.”

Berklee looked from Rob to her husband. “Who is he? Is he famous?”

“I guess,” Rob said. He gazed into the fire. “I was a contestant on that TV show, So You Think You Can Sing? I made it all the way to the finals. Me and two other idiots. The producers were going to fly my girlfriend Anna in for the show, to surprise me.”

“Her plane crashed,” Berklee finished in a small voice. “I remember. Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too,” Rob agreed. “It was all such a stupid situation. I only auditioned on a dare, I can’t stand shows like that. They celebrate all the wrong things about music, you know? Technique over talent, skill over soul. I mean, I write my own songs and that’s what I want to play, not the stuff a bunch of market researchers pick out. But I kept getting selected for the next round, and before I knew it, there I was, in fucking Hollywood.”

The flames blurred in his vision. He realized as he spoke that he had yet to just talk about what happened, to anyone.

“You sang George Jones,” Berklee said.

“Yeah. I don’t know why, really. The damn producers kept wanting it to be ‘Wind Beneath My Wings.’ But I told them I’d either sing what I wanted, or just sit there without making a sound. They weren’t about to take that chance.”

“So why are you here?” Doyle asked gently.

“Because God wants me to suffer, I guess.”

“No, I mean, why are you here in Needsville?”

“The truth? You’ll laugh.”

“No, we won’t,” Berklee assured him. Sympathetic tears streaked her face.

“I had to do the final show, right? I’d signed a contract, and only your own death gets you out of that. So I was backstage at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, where they were staging it, and I was a wreck. Really. They hadn’t given me any time to myself to deal with things, I guess because they knew if they did, I’d just collapse into jelly. I was waiting in this stairwell all alone, and it… just… hit me. She was really dead.

“And then this guy appeared. He was dressed like one of those old country music guys, with the sequins and the fancy boots, but he couldn’t have been more than forty. He sat with me while I was crying, and then he told me he could help. He said…”

He trailed off. I’ll sound like a lunatic, he thought.

“What did he say?” Doyle prompted.

Rob took a deep breath. “He said, ‘There’s a song that heals broken hearts. I’m not kidding, and I’m not exaggerating. Go find this song, learn to play it, and all that pain you have inside will be gone.’”

Doyle and Berklee exchanged a look.

“I didn’t believe him, needless to say,” he continued. “But he told me to come here, to Needsville, and get to know the Tufa. He said it was one of their songs, and since I looked like them, they’d share it with me. He said they’d been around since before the wind rounded off the Smokies, and that I’d find the song I wanted ‘on a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone.’”

“So you came here,” Berklee said.

“Had nothing better to do,” Rob said. “I didn’t really want to be around people I knew. I knew the sequin cowboy was nuts, of course. But I couldn’t stop thinking about his story. And after I read about the Tufa online, I decided it might be the kind of vacation I needed. Away from everything that reminded me of her.”

“The Tufa don’t have their own songs,” Doyle said. “They know the same ones everyone else does. There’s no mystery to them. They’re just… folks.”

“Well, except for Bliss Overbay,” Berklee said bitterly. She finished her beer and crushed the can between her hands. “Right, Doyle? She’s a mystery, ain’t she?”

Doyle looked at her over the top of his beer. “You’re doing that thing we talked about again.” He tapped his can with one finger to indicate her drinking.

“How do I know you’re not?” she shot back. “Doing that thang, I mean?” She drew the word out into a long, accusatory snarl.

“Because I have never, ever in my entire life slept with Bliss Overbay,” he said calmly. “And I never will. I love you.”

“And I love you so much, I can’t imagine life without you,” she said sarcastically.

“Is that you or the beer talking?”

“I was talking to the beer,” she shot back.

“Whoa, guys, I didn’t mean to start anything,” Rob said.

“Oh, this was started long before you showed up,” Doyle said. “Berklee and Bliss have what y’all city folks call ‘issues.’ Never mind that they’re both damn near thirty years old and all this stuff happened in high school. Some people just can’t let things go.”

“Well, some of us didn’t run off to college,” Berklee snapped. “Some of us had to stay here and work and watch all the boys ignore us and chase after that smug heifer. You ever think about that?” Berklee seemed about to cry.

With no malice, Doyle said simply, “You’re right, I ran off to college. And then I ran back to you.”

Rob stood. “Look, maybe I should run back to the motel. My head really hurts, and if I drink any more, I can’t outsmart these mountain roads. Thanks for dinner, guys.”

A coyote howled in the distance. Rob froze, every sense alert, to see if the eerie voice from the previous night would reply.

“What is it?” Doyle asked.

“Shh!” Rob hissed. “Listen.”

“It’s just a coyote,” Berklee said, her voice slurred. She pronounced it “ci-yo-tay,” and giggled.

“Just wait,” Rob said.

The response came, just as it had the night before, a long lilting wail that almost, but not quite, hid its human origins in mimicry.

“There!” Rob said triumphantly. “I heard that in town last night. What is that?”

Doyle shrugged. “Sounded like a dog to me. They holler back at the coyotes sometimes.”

“No, that’s a person,” Rob insisted. “Someone howling back.”

“Girls howl at the moon sometimes, y’know,” Berklee said woozily.

“Hush, sweetie,” Doyle said gently.

Then the cry came again, considerably louder and closer.

“Well,” Doyle said quickly, with stiff nonchalance, “I, uh, guess we’ll turn in as well.” He nudged Berklee with his elbow.

“Yeah. Nice to see you again, Rob,” Berklee said, and unsteadily got to her feet.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe we can have lunch or something, grab a beer after work,” Doyle said as he practically shoved his wife toward the trailer. By the time Rob reached his car, Doyle and Berklee were inside with the door locked and all the lights off. He lowered the car’s window, but heard nothing over the chorus of insects that filled the darkness. There was no additional howl, either human or animal.

Bliss sat in her bathtub, feet propped on opposite corners, a wet rag over her eyes. Only a single candle in a jar provided light. She had both windows open, and the breeze grew cold almost as soon as night fell. She ran some more hot water into the tub and resumed her attempt to relax.

She felt the weight of the house almost the way normal people felt the clothes against their skin. This spot had housed Overbays for longer than most could imagine, and now she was the last one. Well… not entirely, of course. The last true one, if not the last with the true. And she was alone, and childless, and probably barren, and definitely not going anywhere.

A coyote’s cry broke the silence, followed by the inevitable response. She sighed and sank farther into the water. That second sound felt as heavy as the very mountains around her. Once it could make her cry; now it got only a weary exhalation, bubbled into the bathwater just below her nose. She closed her eyes and slid all the way under, enjoying the moments of silence and peace it granted. Soon enough, she would emerge from the warm water into the cool night, a pointless symbolic rebirth that gave no sense of change or future. For the moment, she’d forgotten the upheavals promised by her dreams.

The same Kate Campbell song ran through her head:

When she broke the surface, her cell phone was ringing. She got out of the bath, dripped water across the tile floor, and fished the phone from her jeans. “Hello?”

“It’s Mandalay,” the voice said. “Are you feeling the wind?”

Her wet skin was pebbled from the chill. “I sure am.”

“It has a message for you. And a job. Watch for the sign. Bye.” The line went dead.

Bliss shoved the phone back in her jeans pocket, in the process dislodging two guitar picks. Both fell into the bath and floated on the surface. As she reached for them, a gust of wind rippled the water and blew the two picks together.

She picked them up. Here was her sign, just as Mandalay had said, and it sure wasn’t hard to interpret. Only now, her chills had nothing to do with the wind.