Moonlight & Vines (33 page)

I think of the last thing Ted said to me before I left his apartment.

“It goes back to stage magicians,” he told me. “What's so amazing about them isn't so much that they can make things disappear, as that they can bring them back.”

I touch the first color to the paper and reach for a taste of that amazement.

It's a mistake to have only one life.

—Dennis Miller Bunker, 1890

Later, he can't remember which came first, the music or the birds in the trees. He seems to become aware of them at the same time. They call up a piece of something he thinks he's forgotten; they dredge through his past, the tangle of memories growing as thick and riddling as a hedgerow, to remind him of an old story he heard once that began, “What follows is imagined, but it happened just so . . .”

The trees are new growth, old before their time. Scrub, leaves more brown than green, half the limbs dead, the other half dying. They struggle for existence in what was once a parking lot, a straggling clot of vegetation fed for years by some runoff, now baking in the sun. Something diverted the water—another building fell down, supports torched by Devil's Night fires, or perhaps the city bulldozed a field of rubble, two or three blocks over, inadvertently creating a levee. It doesn't matter. The trees are dying now, the weeds and grass surrounding them already baked dry.

And they're full of birds. Crows, ravens . . . Jake can't tell the difference. Heavy-billed, black birds with wedge-shaped tails and shaggy ruffs at their throats. Their calls are hoarse, croaking
kraaacks
, interspersed with hollow, knocking sounds and a sweeter
klu-kluck
.

The fiddle plays a counterpoint to the uneven rhythm of their calls, an odd, not quite reasonable music that seems to lie somewhere between a slow dance tune and an air that manages to be at once mournful and jaunty. The fiddle, he sees later, is blue, not painted that color, rather the varnish lends the wood that hue so its grain appears to be viewed as though through water.

Black birds, blue fiddle.

He might consider them portents if he were given to looking for omens, but he lives in a world that is always exactly what it should be, no more and no less, and he has come here to forget, not foretell. He is a man who stands apart, always one step aside from the crowd, an island distanced from the archipelago, spirit individual as much as the flesh. But though we are all islands, separated from one another by indifferent seas that range as wide as we allow them to be, we still congregate. We are still social animals. And Jake is no different. He comes to where the fires burn in the oil drums, where the scent of cedar smudge sticks mingles with cigarette smoke and dust, the same as the rest of us.

The difference is, he watches. He watches, but rarely speaks. He rarely speaks, but he listens well.

“They say,” the woman tells him, “that where ravens gather, a door to the Otherworld stands ajar.”

He never heard her approach. He doesn't turn.

“You don't much like me, do you?” she says.

“I don't know you well enough to dislike you, but I don't like what you do.”

“And what is it that you think I do?”

“Make-believe,” he says. “Pretend.”

“Is that what you call it?”

But he won't be drawn into an argument.

“Everybody sees things differently,” she says. “That's the gift and curse of free will.”

“So what do you hear?” he asks. His voice is a sarcastic drawl. “Fairy music?”

The city died here, in the Tombs. Not all at once, through some natural disaster, but piece by piece, block by block, falling into disrepair, buildings abandoned by citizens and then claimed by the squatters who've got no reason to take care of them. Some of them fall down, some burn.

It's the last place in the world to look for wonder.

“I hear a calling-on music,” she says, “though whether it's calling us to cross over, or calling something to us, I can't tell.”

He turns to look at her finally, with his hair the glossy black of the ravens, his eyes the blue of that fiddle neither of them has seen yet. He notes the horn that rises from the center of her brow, the equine features that make her face seem so long, the chestnut dreadlocks, the dark, wide-set eyes and the something in those eyes he can't read.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“Everything matters on some level or other.”

He smiles. “I think that depends on what story we happen to be in.”

“Yours or mine,” she says, her voice soft.

“I don't have a story,” he tells her.

Now she smiles. “And mine has no end.”

“Listen,” he says.

Silence hangs in the air, a thick gauze dropped from the sky like a blanket, deep enough to cut. The black birds are silent. They sit motionless in the dying trees. The fiddler has taken the bow from the strings. The blue fiddle holds its breath.

“I don't hear anything,” she says.

He nods. “This is what my story sounds like.”

“Are you sure?”

He watches as she lifts her arm and makes a motion with it, a graceful wave of her hand, as though conducting an orchestra. The black birds lift from the trees like a dark cloud, the sound of their wings cutting through the gauze of silence. The fiddle begins to play again, the blue wood vibrating with a thin distant music, a sound that is almost transparent. He looks away from the departing birds to find her watching him with the same lack of curiosity he had for the birds.

“Maybe you're not listening hard enough,” she says.

“I think I'd know if—”

“Remember what I said about the ravens,” she tells him.

He returns his attention to the trees, the birds all gone. When he looks
for her again, she's already halfway down the block, horn glinting, too far away for him to read the expression in her features even if she was looking at him. If he even cared.

“I'd know,” he says, repeating the words for himself.

He puts her out of his mind, forgets the birds and the city lying just beyond these blocks of wasteland, and goes to find the fiddler.

I probably know her better than anyone else around here, but even I forget about the horn sometimes. You want to ask her, why are you hiding out in the Tombs, there's nothing for you here. It's not like she's an alkie or a squatter, got the need for speed or any other kind of jones. But then maybe the sunlight catches that short length of ivory rising up out of her brow, or you see something equally impossible stirring in her dark eyes, and you see that horn like it's the first time all over again, and you understand that it's her difference that puts her here, her strangeness.

Malicorne, is what Frenchy calls her, says it means unicorn. I go to the Crowsea Public Library one day and try to look the word up in a dictionary, but I can only find it in pieces. Now Frenchy got the
corne
right because she's sure enough got a horn. But the word can also mean hoof, while
mal
or
mali . . .
you get your pick of what it can mean. Cunning or sly, which aren't exactly compliments, but mostly it's things worse than that: wickedness, evil, hurt, harm. Maybe Frenchy knows more than he's saying, and maybe she does, too, because she never answers to that name. But she doesn't give us anything better to use instead so the name kind of sticks—at least when we're talking about her among ourselves.

I remember the first time I see her, I'm looking through the trash after the Spring Festival, see if maybe I can sift a little gold from the chaff, which is a nice way of saying I'm a bum and I'm trying to make do. I see her sitting on a bench, looking at me, and at first I don't notice the horn, I'm just wondering, who's this horsy-faced woman and why's she looking at me like she wants to know something about me. Not what I'm doing here, going through the trash, but what put me here.

We've all got stories, a history that sews one piece of who we were to another until you get the reason we're who we are now. But it's not something we offer each other, never mind a stranger. We're not proud of who
we are, of what we've become. We don't talk much about it, we never ask each other about it. There's too much pain in where we've been to go back, even if it's just with words. We don't even want to think about it—why do you think we're looking for oblivion in the bottom of a bottle?

I want to turn my back on her, but even then, right from the start, Malicorne's got this pull in her eyes, draws you in, draws you to her, starts you talking. I've seen rheumy-eyed old alkies who can't even put together “Have you got some spare change?” with their heads leaning close to hers, talking, the slur gone from their voices, some kind of sense working its way back into what they're saying. And I'm not immune. I turn my back, but it's on that trash can, and I find myself shuffling, hands stuck deep into my pockets, over to the bench where she's sitting.

“You're so innocent,” she says.

I have to laugh. I'm forty-five and I look sixty, and the last thing I am is innocent.

“I'm no virgin,” I tell her.

“I didn't say you were. Innocence and virginity aren't necessarily synonymous.”

Her voice wakes something in me that I don't want to think about.

“I suppose,” I say.

I want to go and get on with my business. I want to stay.

She's got a way of stringing together words so that they all seem to mean more than what you think they're saying, like there's a riddle lying in between the lines, and the funny thing is, I can feel something in me responding. Curiosity. Not standing around and looking at something strange, but an intellectual curiosity—the kind that makes you think.

I study her, sitting there beside me on the bench, raggedy clothes and thick chestnut hair so matted it hangs like fat snakes from her head, like a Rasta's dreadlocks. Horsy features. Deep, dark eyes, like they're all pupil, wide-set. And then I see the horn. She smiles when she sees my eyes go wide.

“Jesus,” I say. “You've got a—”

“Long road to travel and the company is scarce. Good company, I mean.”

I don't much care for weird shit, but I don't tell her that. I tell her things I don't tell anybody, not even myself, how it all went wrong for me, how I miss my family, how I miss having something in my life that means
anything. And she listens. She's good at the listening, everybody says so, except for Jake. Jake won't talk to her, says she's feeding on us, feeding on our stories.

“It's give and take,” I try to tell him. “You feel better after you've talked to her.”

“You feel better because there's nothing left inside to make you feel bad,” he says. “Nothing good, nothing bad. She's taking all the stories that make you who you are and putting nothing back.”

“Maybe we don't want to remember those things anyway,” I say.

He shakes his head. “What you've done is who you are. Without it, you're really nothing.” He taps his chest. “What's left inside that belongs to you now?”

“It's not like that,” I try to explain. “I still remember what put me here. It doesn't hurt as much anymore, that's all.”

“Think about that for a moment.”

“She tells you stuff, if you're willing to listen.”

“Everything she says is mumbo-jumbo,” Jake says. “Nothing that makes sense. Nothing that's worth what she's taken from you. Don't you
see?”

I don't see it and he won't be part of it. Doesn't want to know about spirits, things that never were, things that can't be, made-up stories that are supposed to take the place of history. Wants to hold on to his pain, I guess.

But then he meets Staley.

The fiddler's a woman, but she has no sense of age about her; she could be thirty, she could be seventeen. Where Malicorne's tall and angular, horse-lanky, Staley's like a pony, everything in miniature. There's nothing dark about her, nothing gloomy except the music she sometimes wakes from that blue fiddle of hers. Hair the color of straw and cut like a boy's, a slip of a figure, eyes the green of spring growth, face shaped like a heart. She's barefoot, wears an old pair of overalls a couple of sizes too big, some kind of white jersey, sleeves pushed up on her forearms. There's a knapsack on the ground beside her, an open fiddle case. She's sitting on a chunk of stone—piece of a wall, maybe, piece of a roof—playing that blue fiddle of hers, her whole body playing it, leaning into the music,
swaying, head crooked to one side holding the instrument to her shoulder, a smile like the day's just begun stretching across her lips.

Jake stands there, watching her, listening. When the tune comes to an end, he sits down beside her.

“You're good,” he tells her.

She gives him a shy smile in return.

“So did you come over from the other side?” he asks.

“The other side of what?”

Jake's thinking of Malicorne, about black birds and doors to other places. He shrugs.

“Guess that answers my question,” he says.

She hears the disappointment in his voice, but doesn't understand it.

“People call me Jake,” he tells her.

“Staley Cross,” she says as they shake hands.

“And are you?”

The look of a Michelle who's been called
ma belle
too often moves across her features, but she doesn't lose her humor.

“Not often,” she says.

“Where'd you learn to play like that?”

“I don't know. Here and there. I just picked it up. I'm a good listener, I guess. Once I hear a tune, I don't forget it.” The fiddle's lying on her lap. She plays with her bow, loosening and tightening the frog. “Do you play?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “Never saw a blue fiddle before—not blue like that.”