Wisp of a Thing

14

Rob struggled to free himself, but the girl’s wiry arms encircled his neck, and her legs locked around his waist. Her skin was slick with sweat and dirt. She smelled like a stream.

He got his hands between their bodies and felt the grimy texture of the ragged dress. It took all his strength to push her off him, and she landed silently on the balls of her feet and her fingertips, like a monkey. She stared at him, eyes wide, and he got his first clear sight of her: an unwashed teenage girl with the glazed look of mental retardation.

Her eyes cut toward the open window. Rob, still a little disoriented, realized a moment too late that she was going to leap for it. He reached for her just as she did, and his hand brushed her leg as she sailed past him.

She landed on the sill, again reminding him of a particularly graceful simian. The sky beyond was dark blue, nearing the cusp of sunset. The girl looked back at him, tensed to jump again, and he blurted, “Curnen, wait!”

She hunched down even lower against the sill and stared at him.

He blinked the rest of the way awake. Was that really her name? How did he know it? Wasn’t that the word he’d heard in his mind at the graveyard? No, wait, in his dream Bliss had told him her name, and even introduced them… hadn’t she?

“I won’t hurt you, you just startled me,” he said, keeping his voice even. He knew she could vanish out the window in an instant. “Please… come back inside.”

She looked down, then out at the night, then back at him. Her eyes were too big for her head, and slightly glassy, and he wasn’t sure she understood any words other than her name. But he knew now she’d been his mysterious mud-footed intruder.

“Come on…,” he prompted, hoping he didn’t sound too much like he was calling a dog. “That’s a girl, come on….”

She lowered one leg. Her foot seemed elongated, the toes like a child’s fingers. She flowed to the floor with feral grace and crouched low beneath the window.

He talked softly as he moved around the end of the bed. “Hey, it’s okay, everything’s okay, I just want to see you, that’s all, just see you….”

He knelt in front of her, and she trembled like a nervous colt. Grass and leaves were matted in her hair, which had been raggedly hacked or torn off short. Trickles of sweat wove tracks through the grime coating her skin. She should have been the rankest thing in the world, but this close, she smelled deliciously like freshly turned earth. He felt a weird, instant affection for her.

“Shh, that’s okay, don’t worry,” he said, barely above a whisper. He reached out his hand to her, palm down, like he would to a strange dog. And that’s how she responded, leaning close and sniffing it.

He slowly turned his hand until the palm was open to her. She leaned her cheek into it and closed her eyes. Her lips parted, and a sensual little moan escaped her. He risked stroking her with his thumb.

“Can you talk?” Rob asked softly. “Can you say anything?”

She responded with a sound that reminded him of a cross between a sigh and a purr.

“You’re going to be out that window like a shot if I do anything else, aren’t you?” he murmured. He moved his hand a little and scratched behind her ear. She leaned into it, and he saw more of her lithe, oddly shaped body. Her legs and arms really did seem too long for her, and she looked as comfortable crouched on all fours as most people did standing.

“So how do I know I’m not imagining this?” Rob asked in a whisper. “Or that I’m not still asleep and dreaming?”

The room phone rang.

Rob jumped. The girl shot through the window. When he looked out, he saw no sign of her. He slapped the sill in frustration, then answered the phone.

“Mr. Quillen,” Peggy said brightly, “you have a visitor.”

“I do?”

“You do. She’s waiting on the porch. I’ll tell her you’re on your way.”

“But who—?” Rob started to ask, but Peggy had already hung up.

He sighed, stared at the window, then went into the bathroom to freshen up. Whoever it was could damn well wait a minute.

Bliss Overbay reclined in one of the rocking chairs. She wore jeans and a black tank top under a denim jacket, and her hair hung loose and shiny. She was breathtaking, and he actually spent a moment just staring at her. “Wow,” he said at last. “What a surprise.”

“Pleasant one, I hope,” she said.

“So far.” She stood as he approached. Her smile, all dazzling Tufa teeth, was luminous. “So what brings you around?” he asked.

“Thought I’d see if I could take you to supper.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah.”

“Does the word ‘supper’ mean something different where you’re from? Because here it’s just a meal at the end of the day when you’ve finished working.”

He wanted to blurt out what had happened in his room, but fought down the urge. “Look, my head hurts. I don’t think I’m up to a verbal skirmish right now.”

“Here, let me see.” She stood on tiptoe to check his injury. “Appears that you yanked on the stitches, but they didn’t pull loose. What did you do?”

“Tripped and fell,” he said, and left it at that.

“Did you get dizzy?”

“No, just clumsy.”

“Well, you were lucky. So how about that supper?”

He was still fuzzy from sleep and the abrupt awakening, but she looked so adorable, so sweet, that he couldn’t resist. He looked up at the sky. The sun was low, almost touching the mountains to the west. “Well… all right.”

“Great. Come on, and bring your guitar.”

Rob placed the instrument in the back of her truck, carefully nudging it down between the side panel and the old spare tire. The dream had almost entirely faded, and as a result, he was ready to accept that the girl Curnen had been part of it, too. He shook the guitar slightly to make sure it was snug.

“You’re particular,” Bliss said.

“Found out the hard way that traveling with guitars is like traveling with kids. You can’t leave ’em alone for too long, and you always have to make sure they’re buckled in.”

Rob closed the door, fastened his seat belt, and turned to Bliss. “So. Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. It’s a beautiful spot, especially to watch the sunset.”

As they rode down the street, Rob noticed a new, odd detail about the town. He waited until they had passed all the buildings before remarking, “There aren’t any churches. I thought church was a big deal to Southern people.”

“There’s churches, just not in Needsville or Cloud County,” Bliss said. “Most of them are just across the county line. Have been as long as I can remember.”

“And nobody built any in town?”

“Have you looked around? Except for the post office and convenience store, nobody’s built anything new in years. It’s not a place where much changes. Besides, not many people actually live in town. And a lot of folks don’t like coming into town any more than they have to.”

“Like the Gwinns?”

“Exactly. Here’s what I always heard. Way back in the last century, before the Spanish-American War, a bunch of ministers came through here, setting up churches and schools and trying to bring the word of the Lord to us unchurched heathens. Around here they still talk about one in particular, Brother Bull Damron, this old ‘holiness roller’ who went around preaching against ‘love songs’ while he seduced every girl between fifteen and forty.”

“What did he have against love songs?”

“It’s not what you think. Around here, a song can be about murder, suicide, sex, torture, or war, but if it’s also got a man and a woman in it, it’s a love song. No sweet ladies in May for us, just plenty of jealousy and shame and false true lovers. Anyway, after they got a few converts, they went around renaming places, like changing Devil’s Fork to Sweetwater. But they overplayed their hand when they said our songs were the devil’s music. Even called fiddle-playing ‘the devil’s dream.’ Music’s too big a deal for us to put up with that nonsense, so we sent them packing. They tried to call down fire and brimstone on us, but we just laughed at them. Nothing’s more fun than watching a hypocrite sputter and smoke.”

“You sound like you were there.”

“I’ve heard about it so often, sometimes it feels like I was.” As if to end the conversation, she pushed a cassette tape into the old-fashioned player. Immediately, a woman’s voice came from the speakers, perfectly clear despite the road noise.

“Who’s that?” Rob asked.

“Kate Campbell. The song’s called, ‘When Panthers Roamed in Arkansas.’”

“Is she a Tufa?”

“No, she’s from Mississippi. But she is a preacher’s daughter.”

They passed the turn-off to the fire station and continued up the forested slope. The truck swung with easy familiarity around the curves, and all signs of the modern world vanished. Rob could not even see a cell phone tower on any of the wooded summits. He had a momentary thought that no one would ever find his body if Bliss decided to dump him out here.

He ejected the tape so he could ask, “Where are we going?”

“On a picnic,” she said brightly.

“A supper picnic?”

“Sure. Why not?” She put the tape back in the player.

Rob couldn’t take his eyes off the hills around them. Most were still green, but there were patches where fall had taken hold and the scabby-red leaves seemed to mark open wounds along the slopes. The woods here, he realized, had the same overwhelming presence as those behind Doyle’s trailer, only they were more majestic. They had a sense of ominous importance that he’d never before experienced. One tree in particular, its mostly bare branches towering above the others, looked to him like the groping fingers of a mighty giant drowning in the sea of gold, red, and green leaves.

Bliss pulled off the road and stopped the truck beside an enormous oak tree with a swollen lump in its trunk. This growth, easily the size of a small car, had split the bark sometime in the past, leaving two painful-looking scars grown black with time and decay. The tree shaded a concrete picnic table with a tin garbage can chained to it. “Here we are.”

Rob sat very still. The area, the view, everything was identical to his dream. Even the tree with the huge lump in its trunk. He looked around for Old Man Jessup and the other diminutive tree people.

Trying to sound casual, he asked, “So what made it grow like that? With that big lump?”

“The park rangers say it’s a fungus called oak gall,” she said. “They have a scientific explanation for everything. But you want to really see something?”

She led him to the edge of the slope. It wasn’t exactly a vertical cliff, but it fell away quickly, and a tumble down it could very easily be lethal.

The sun hadn’t lowered at all in the time they were driving. If anything, it was higher, as if time had slightly rewound for them. He squinted and shielded his eyes against the glare.

Mountains rose to the right and left like great waves in a storm, and bracketed a panoramic view of the whole valley. Directly ahead, at eye level, big crows drifted back and forth against the sun, perusing the ground far below.

It was the same as his dream. No, it was almost the same. In his dream, the mountains had been taller, sharper, younger. And the birds were gigantic, practically prehistoric.

Needsville appeared ridiculously small, a few spot-sized buildings clustered along the gray black line of highway. In fact, Rob realized, the town looked out of place; the valley should be pristine and empty, with maybe the occasional farm, but only if it was worked by people who respected and loved the place. It wasn’t meant to be settled by just anyone.

“See that?” Bliss said. She pointed to a gnarled tree thirty feet down the slope. “That hickory tree is nearly three hundred years old. It was here before George Washington was president.”

“Shouldn’t there be a marker or something?”

“So some Yankee tourist could cut it down for a souvenir?”

“Good point.”

“Besides, he’s a friend.”

“The tree’s a ‘friend’?”

She nodded. “He’s an old, tired man who wishes more people would listen to him before he dies because he knows things they’ll need to know later on.”

Rob’s mouth went dry as he recalled the tree-folk in his dream. “Poetic.”

“Is it?” Without waiting for an answer, she walked back to the truck, grabbed her guitar case and the picnic basket.

Rob retrieved his own guitar and followed. Should he tell her about the dream? Would she think he was a lunatic, or that the repeated bonks to his head had driven him slightly mad? And what would she say about the feral girl whom, in his dream at least, she claimed as a sister?

“So, why are we here?” Rob asked as they sat on opposite sides of the table.

“That’s very existential for a picnic.”

“You know what I mean. I thought maybe… you recognized me.”

“Are you famous?”

Why the hell did I bring this up? he wanted to yell at himself. “Well… yeah, actually.”

She skeptically pursed her lips. “Really?”

There was no backing off now, he decided. He said grimly, “Really.”

“In what capacity?”

“I’m Rob from So You Think You Can Sing?”

Her face remained vaguely amused for a moment; then her eyes opened wide and she pressed her fingertips to her lips. “Oh, my God,” she gasped. “You are.”

“I am.”

“Your girlfriend died. Flying out to surprise you.”

“She did.”

Bliss reached across the picnic table and touched his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too.”

“I don’t… I mean—”

“You don’t have to say anything else,” he said wearily. “It’s all been said by now. But I appreciate your sympathy. Seriously, I do.”

“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?”

“It’s kind of hard to drop into casual conversation, especially when someone’s sewing your head closed. Besides,” he added wryly, “I asked Mrs. Goins at the motel to keep it secret, so I figured she might’ve already told you.”

“She’s not as gossipy as she seems.”

“Well… now you know.”

Tentatively, she took his hand. He hadn’t held hands with anyone since Anna died, and the sensation of feminine fingers threading through his own made him jump. They sat in silence, the wind rustling the leaves around them. Rob looked down at the ground, where a train of ants detoured around one foot. It was always weird when his tragedy came up; only this time, he also felt unaccustomed relief.

In a voice as gentle as the breeze around them, she said, “Now I have to ask you: Why are you here? You don’t know anyone, and you’re not descended from the Tufa. Shouldn’t you be at home or something? With your family?”

“Home’s the last place I want to be. Everything there reminds me of her. And way too many people want to tell me how I should feel.”

“But that doesn’t explain why you chose here.”

He thought before answering. “I’ll tell you why, but then you have to answer a question for me. Agreed?”

“What sort of question?”

“Ah, that’s cheating. You have to agree without knowing, otherwise I won’t be able to trust your answer.”

“Agreed, then.”

He told her about the backstage cowboy and the supposedly magical song. He watched her face, but she betrayed no reaction. When he finished, he said, “So what do you think?”

“Is that your question?”

“No. But I’d like to know.”

“It sounds like somebody was just yanking your chain. They knew what had happened to you and were playing a really cruel joke.”

“So you don’t know anything about it?”

“Why would I?”

“I heard you were high up in the Tufa chain of command.”

She laughed. “Who told you that? Doyle Collins? Doyle’s not a Tufa.”

“So he’s wrong?” Before she could answer, he continued, “Look, I’m sorry. Rationally, I don’t really believe a word of it myself. But if there’s even a chance… if a song exists that could get rid of this feeling, this weight…” He looked away and blinked his tears back under control.

“Sorry,” he said. “Slips up on me sometimes. Now, my question. Are the verses from those tombstones behind the fire station part of a song? Maybe part of that song?”

She’d promised to answer, but she had older promises to keep as well. She said carefully, “I’m serious when I say that I’ve never heard of a song like the one you described. As for the graves… you weren’t supposed to see them.”

“Why not?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. You weren’t supposed to be able to see them. Would you accept, for the sake of argument, that there are ways of hiding things in plain sight? Ways of keeping people from seeing them even when they’re looking right at them?”

He recalled the way neither he nor Kizer had been able to see the words earlier. “Like some kind of psychic cloaking field?”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad analogy. Something that keeps non-Tufas from seeing things if they aren’t deliberately shown them.”

“A magic spell?”

She half shrugged, half nodded.

“But I saw them. And so did Terry.”

A pit opened in her belly. “You showed them to someone else?” she whispered.

“Yeah, some guy in town doing genealogy. He said the Swetts were his ancestors, so I took him out there. And he saw them, too.”

She waited for her stomach to hit bottom. How could this get worse?

“But I’m not a Tufa,” Rob finished. “Not a bit. So how did I see them?”

She forced herself to stay calm. She said, “I’ve been pondering that myself. I can’t explain it. But you did see them. They’re verses from something that’s sacred, and secret, and powerful to us. That’s why we hide them.”

“So what’s the rest of the song?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Honestly. I have no idea how the song ends.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s a dirge. A song written for someone’s death. That’s why it’s used as an epitaph.”

“A dirge,” he said, thinking aloud, “could also be a song that takes away grief. And heartache is grief. But how can a song do that?”

She gritted her teeth against the urge to speak. He was so right, so close, and yet he had no business being. How could this non-Tufa comprehend, understand, see so much? What was she missing?

“Look around you, Rob. It looks beautiful and serene, doesn’t it? But there’s more blood soaked into these hills than you can imagine. And not all that blood sits quietly. On the right night, at the right time, if the right song is sung, you can see the shades in the moonlight. And that’s no joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Here, songs… do things. Cause things to happen. The right song at the right time can change everything.”

“Like a spell,” he said again.

“Like, yes. But more so.”

“So the song from those epitaphs has the power to change things,” he said.

Bliss nodded, but inside she was struggling to decide what she should do. Should she kill him now, and end any chance of the secrets coming out? It would be simple, and so easy to make it look like he’d slipped and fallen to his death.

But the night winds had blown them together. The sign was unmistakable. Two guitar picks floating on the water, like two musicians in the rivers of time, drawn together and lightly touching.

And then she knew what she needed to do.

She put her guitar across her lap.

It was a customized black Breedlove C22, with her name set in inlaid faux pearl letters along the neck. “We’ve talked enough,” she said. “Let’s play. This is another song by Kate Campell. See if you can follow me.”

The spotless black truck was parked incongruously outside an old shotgun shack high on the mountain. In a few weeks, enough leaves would have fallen that Needsville would be visible below, through the bare branches. As it was, though, the vehicle and building were hidden from view.

Rockhouse Hicks sat on the tailgate, his banjo in his arms. He softly plucked the strings, just loud enough to cover the sounds of sexual activity coming from the shack. Inside, his nephew Stoney Hicks was having his way with the woman from town. She was willing—they were all always willing—but she had no idea that she’d pay a horrendous price. Non-Tufa girls around here knew to avoid Tufa boys, especially full-blooded ones like Stoney Hicks. Especially Stoney.

The cries and grunts faded, and Stoney emerged, barefoot and clad only in his jeans. He was a staggeringly good-looking young man, with a face like a Native American warrior and matching jet-black hair to his shoulders. He stood six-four, and every muscle was chiseled perfection. He wouldn’t have been out of place on a romance novel cover, were it not for the cold, selfish mockery in his eyes.

“Hey, Uncle Rockhouse,” he said as he opened a cooler in the bed of the truck. “Want a beer?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “How’d it go?”

The younger man grinned. “How’d it sound like it went? Had her on her knees begging before the door even shut. What are we going to do about her husband?”

“Us? We don’t do anything. She’ll take care of that, once you tell her to, just like she got us those tombstone rubbings.”

“What’s so important about ’em?”

“You don’t be worrying about that. You didn’t look at ’em, did you?”

“Nossir, you told me not to.”

“That’s good. Make sure you don’t. You hear me, boy?”

“Yessir,” Stoney said contritely. “So, uhm… her husband?”

Rockhouse shrugged and spit tobacco into the dirt. “Fella comes up in here, being all nosy and asking questions, something happens. Nobody’ll be surprised. Nobody’ll ask too many questions.”

The door to the shack opened. Stella emerged, fully dressed but with unmistakably ruffled hair. She looked around until she saw Stoney, then gasped as if she’d been wandering in the desert and he was an oasis. “H-honey?” she said meekly.

“Fix your damn hair, will you?” he snapped at her, and she quickly went back inside. He took a long drink of his beer. “She’s a good one, though. Knows a lot of city-girl tricks.”

“Enjoy her while you can.”

“Oh, I will.” He finished his beer, tossed the can into the woods, and went back inside.

Rockhouse began playing “Carolina in the Morning.”