Across the Spectrum (17 page)

I wrote and submitted three stories to
The Horns of Elfland
before they accepted one. It was my first
attempt to write something absolutely avoiding past tense. The poem
accompanying “Solstice” inspired the story; I had written it years earlier in
upstate New York. Many strong poems came out of that mind-bogglingly boring
summer, which proves what your brain can do if you unplug it.

∞ ∞ ∞

This story is about a small-time rocker full of ambition and
careful big plans. She lives for the day when she can come up like thunder on
the rest of the herd, so she’s a little stunned to find herself fighting with
her boyfriend on the night of the big gig, slamming out of his van and marching
across a frosty prairie outside Madison, Wisconsin, her guitar in her hand and
her hot, angry breath making her scarf all scummy with ice crumbs as she curses
him and her stupidity at coming so far in his company. Why should she have to
dump him tonight? Only a doofus breaks up with her boyfriend in a moving
vehicle. She vows here and now to make a new start, while she is alone, nowhere,
storming across the empty fields, suspended between her humble origins and her
destiny. Under the colorless starlight she looks to herself like a
stick-drawing person, white parka and grey jeans against the black corn
stubble, drawn but not yet painted. The ground is parched for moisture, the
loam frost-heaved, last summer’s daisies and black-eyed susans and sweet grass
killed by frost and just now crisp with it, though tomorrow under a pale sun
they will warm up enough to make her slip with every step, especially if she
stays mad enough to stomp all night long the way she is doing now. That would
mean spending the night in the fields, however, not, as she would prefer,
finding a road to follow to a roadside bar, not, as she expects she must,
sleeping in a barn next to some smelly cow. She swears and stomps and swings
her ax in the frozen air, scattering sibilants (his name is Stassen, which is a
good name for hissing angrily) and gouting steam without regard to the threat
of the cold. Her name is Dawn.

Slip she does. She lands on her bottom, her wind knocked
out, and lies back in her parka feeling the heat bleed out of her into the
throbbing ground. What a world of stars is up there, she thinks, fields and
fields of them, sheep for days. She remembers sheep pouring over the Nebraska
plains in galaxies, white on black. The land back home is much flatter than
this boggy, lumpy prairie, yet the sheep eat these same stale grasses with
their backs to the same stars. These stars. A wave of vertigo swamps her. She
sees the heavens turn. This is how stars must feel, she imagines, opening her
eyes deliberately as they spin. So big, so slow. Only we frenetic particles
can’t see how they run hump-rumped over the vast prairie. We’re moving much too
fast.

Her fingers tingle. Way too pissed off for my own good, she
thinks, and calms instantly. She has that sensible streak that lets her
suddenly take command of her emotions, letting go once they’ve done their work.
She smiles. That bum Stassen will stay mad for a week. She is at peace. Still
the ground throbs. She feels it through her whole body. Good grief, what have I
done to my ass?

It’s slippery stone under her, and she crawls cautiously to
her hands and knees.

A mitten appears before her face. She takes it without thinking
and is hoisted upright.

“Hello?” A hearty fat farm-wife complete with red mittens
and stocking cap looks her up and down. Dawn looks around for the sensible car
that goes with such biddies, or, hopeful thought, a farmhouse with yellow
light. Ah. There’s the yellow light. She warms up again. “Lost?” says the
farm-wife.

“Half,” says Dawn ruefully. She picks up her instrument. No
damage to the case, good sign.

“On a night like this!” says the other, and waits. Jolly
potato-faced type. Dawn likes her immediately. The stars light her with a
strange clarity. It is the sort of night when chance-met faces look dear and
familiar, and time plays tricks with memory. It’s a nice face, full of
generosity. This dame is simply panting to do her a kindness.

Dawn looks at the sky again. The Pleiades totter and shiver
like new lambs. She remembers the gig she is supposed to play oh miles away by
now with the unforgivable Stassen, and is suddenly sad. “Darkest night of the
year,” she says, checking her watch. “The longest, too.” Cold soaks into her
again, chilling her bones.

The older woman beams. “Righty-rooty! Hey? Can you play
that? Tune for your supper?” She beckons at the yellow light, as if it must
come to Dawn and not she to it.

Dawn picks up her feet willingly. Her behind complains.
“Well, if you don’t mind. I’m sort of stranded.” Snatches of many voices
distract her. There’s a party going on in there, and how warm and wonderful the
smells coming out! She shrugs apologetically. “I don’t have my amp with me.”

“Don’t fret. I’m sure we can scrape something together,” the
old biddy says, and stumps to the doorway. The walls are thick limestone, one
of those old hillside dairy barns, deep as a mine, done over inside with the
maximum of modern luxury. She pauses, blocking the opening, her round face
ashimmer now with candlelight, lamplight. “If it’s not imposing.” She means it.
“I’m not dragging you into this.”

Dawn can now hear music ramping and stamping somewhere
deeper, rockabilly with a coarse metal twang. She brightens.

“No prob. I should—I’m up for playing tonight anyway—”

All at once she cannot get out any words to tell. She holds
up the guitar as if the story of her fight with Stassen is written on it. Down
inside the house somewhere a bass player is making the walls throb. She smiles.

Her hostess nods, again delighted. With a broad red hand,
she yanks the door shut. It swings ponderously, made of stone as thick as the
unhewn walls and floor. The foyer closes up like an egg. She leads the way
toward the golden center.

Dawn walks into the party. She accepts a drink without
thinking: glogg, hot and spicy, that stings her mouth and fills her head. Her
parka sheds cool air like a chunk of dry ice. It’s the host’s birthday.
Everyone is dressed for winter, layers and layers of velvet and padded satin
and furs as for an Elizabethan snowball fight, although this chintzy Midwestern
winter has offered no snow yet, Dawn thinks, remembering Decembers in Nebraska.
She is introduced a few times, handed off, kissed, introduced again, and
brought at arm’s length like a bride (Horrors child you are cold! with a
giggle) to the great table loaded and pouring forth welcoming smells.

The table stretches the dim length of the room. What amazing
bounty. Ribs, roast beef, roast piglet, roast lamb, an astounding goose with a
chicken in her cavity, and a grouse inside of her, and a quail inside of her,
and far in the fragrant center a hard boiled egg with a gem in the middle like
a pomegranate seed, perfectly divided just this minute by a grinning chef
waving a whacking great cleaver. Glazed fish, their scales picked out in jelly.
Fish in cream, fish in wine, red-fleshed fish shaved thin, smothered in capers
and heaped with grainy caviar. Hot vats of noodles Swedish style, noodles with
sauerbraten, noodles layered between pork chops, noodles tossed in sesame paste
and ginger and red hot peppers. Fruits in and out of season: musk melon,
honeydew, pears and alligator pears, mangos, pineapple, a dozen kinds of
apples: golden green orange crimson scarlet blueblack and white and their
piebald miscegenations. Breads shaped like suns, breads studded with raisins.
Doubled buns steaming indecently, with butter running in their crevices. Dawn
isn’t hungry yet but she clutches her mug of glogg, grinning mistily.

She’s looking for the music. She can hear it but she can’t
find it. There are candles everywhere. Some parts of the room are low-ceilinged
and high-cushioned, just right for kissing and gossip and splitting a bottle.
Some parts are ballroom-size. The floor slopes down, away from the stone
ceiling. Dawn trips a little, blames the drink. The bass gongs through her
blood, a fiddle skirls, the faraway downbeat (alone of a tinny fusillade)
cracks two glasses touching, a false blow, ting! Not in this room. Nor the
next.

Finally it occurs to her that the sound is in the floor, and
she takes her hiking boots off and stands on the cold body of the stone,
feeling the beat. She bounces. “Yep.” One step at a time she feels her way to
it—someone whirls by, pauses with a steaming pitcher, and she says “Yep” again,
holding out her mug. She cocks her head to the faint lure. She is still zipped
into her parka and warm all through by now, but it feels delicious to drink hot
glogg, smell the icy breath of the night on her shoulders, take a pheasanty
kiss on the fly from a stranger in spandex, and walk barefoot on the cold, cold
stone floor letting the music lead her by feel, one step at a time. She laughs,
giddy.

The room where the dancing is going on is completely packed.
She can barely see past the backs of standees at the door. This song ends and
the millwheel of bodies turns, but there’s no room for them to let her pass,
even if they were to notice her. Anxiety grips her. It’s not my party, she
thinks, daunted, but. The drummer whacks into a noisy backbeat, the fiddler
lays a guttural double-stopped drone over it, oh so he’s electrified, no wonder
it’s so darn loud, and the bass lifts her clean off her feet like a church
bell. Dawn can’t help herself. She touches the shoulder in front of her.

“Here.” She smiles, handing over her mug as if awarding a
prize, and then motions him aside, holding up her holstered guitar in the other
hand. Magic musician’s password. It works. She thinks, Gotta play for my
supper, my hostess wishes, and is jostled and squeezed (slower than a melon
seed but with as much force) and finally carried the last twelve feet, barefoot
and laughing, over plumed heads and winking jewels, to the stage.

The fiddler and bassist put their equipment down and the
drummer flails with renewed frenzy, alone at last with three hundred
merry-makers and a lot of things to pound on. Her hostess appears. Over the
battle noise she shouts introductions, Dawn, fiddler, Dawn, bass player, Dawn,
host, which last is an incredibly thin man in yellow velvet, with
butter-colored hair and an eyeglass that catches every candle in the room at
once, so that Dawn can hardly stand to look at it.

He smiles at her as they shake hands, such a frail hand. She
is reminded of her first pet rooster, just so chinless and gay, and awards him
the chicken-love at once. He is a vigorous dancer however and with his lady
puts up a hell of a fight, pursued foxhound-wise by the remorseless drummer
with a flying beat through false casts, back-doublings, and sudden
disappearances which Dawn finds hysterically funny. Meanwhile the fiddler has
rounded up some cable and the bass player shows her how to jack into the floor,
good grief the whole stage is the sound system. Then they turn their faces to
the crowd and take up the cry.

Dawn touches her strings. They are warmer than she is, much
warmer than the wooden stage floor. She bends her ear, trying to get a pitch,
but it’s no use in this racket, may as well get a bang on. And she does.

They play oldies, things they can count on everybody
knowing. The fiddler seems to be from another planet, all he can do is jam, but
he’s got the gift, and nobody is more surprised than she when the bass signals
the opening for Proud Mary and suddenly that fiddleboy is there. Dawn falls
back and lets him do the lead guitar part. Different, goofier, like it could
turn any moment into something weird. Two minutes later it does. She shrieks to
the bass player:

“What the hell is that he’s doing?”

“Corelli chains,” he shrieks back, and signals a break. Soon
the two of them step down and reluctantly the drummer follows. The fiddler
stands alone crooning out a swoony slow-dance to the swaying crowd.

Over white lightning on ice, the bass player tells Dawn,
“Really, really glad you’re here. I love this party. Never have to worry what
to do with my New Year’s Eve,” he says. He puts his tongue into her ear and
then withdraws it with a thoughtful expression. “But god you need new tunes now
and then. We get stuck.” His accent is funny, like a Welshman who’s been to
Australia on a slow boat from Texas.

She puts one finger on his wrist, as if taking his pulse. It
feels silky. “Don’t you guys play other gigs together?”

“Nope,” he says. His eyes are a light speckled brown, like a
wren’s egg. Stassen’s are blue. The jerk, she thinks, and forgets him again.
The bass player says, “It’s just me and the fiddle, really, and you know what
his tunes are like.”

“Wherever did you find him?”

“The missus finds,” he shrugs. “It’s staying power that
counts. Shouldn’t you put some shoes on? This floor is freezing.”

“I like to feel the beat.”

He kisses her, slips a piece of ice between her lips.
“You’re all right.”

Their host and hostess appear. She looks if anything fatter
and jollier. The host has shrunk. Dawn can barely see him sideways. Curved at
his wife’s ample side he is an old moon to her fullness, a sliver of yellow
velvet and butter-colored hair. She thinks with pain of her rooster in his
dotage, gone too old to mount hens and too scrawny to eat.

The bass player shakes his hand cheerfully.

“Ready, sir?”

“Ready!” her host says gaily. The candles wink, dimmed, in
his eyeglass. When he puts his hand in Dawn’s she is afraid to squeeze. What
bones, like a bird’s. This close she can now appreciate his wistfully sweet, pointy
smile.

“I’m very glad you’re here. My wife tells me you’re going to
play for me tonight,” the host says to her.

Moved she cannot say by what, Dawn covers his hand in both
of hers. “Staying power,” she says, as for a toast.