Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) (7 page)

Bliss sat on the short, age-warped dock that extended out over the lake behind her house. Her bare feet dangled in the cold water, and she held her guitar across her lap. She idly picked notes as she watched the ripple patterns, losing herself in the rings of reflected moonlight. The sky blazed with stars occasionally blocked as small clouds scudded along with the night wind. Insects and frogs provided a steady accompaniment, and the owl that lived across the water called out to its mate. Mosquitoes swarmed about her, but none landed to feed. They knew better.

Suddenly she realized she was playing the song that had been stuck in her head all week, “Wrought Iron Fences” by the Mississippi singer-songwriter Kate Campbell. Her tentative picking grew stronger, and she sang:

Tangled vines cover the lattice

They creep and crawl around the house

Nobody lives there

Only ghosts hang around

She reviewed the night’s events as she played. She’d gone to the Pair-A-Dice on a whim, wanting only to sing and feel the musical blood rushing through her. Nothing ever replaced performing in front of people, especially
her
people, who knew just how crucial music could be. She’d seen Doyle and Berklee, and noted again the woman’s deteriorating condition. The hateful glares Berklee directed at her held no threat; Bliss understood their source. She wished Doyle did, and would admit it, and take the only action possible. She’d known Doyle all his life, knew both his goodness and weakness, and hated to see the former suffer due to the latter. But there was nothing she or anyone else could do. Some things were irreversible.

Doyle’s heartbreak hadn’t brought her to the water this night, though. The boy with them, the stranger,
obsessed
her. He looked vaguely, distantly familiar. Who
was
he? He had Tufa hair and Tufa skin, but he wasn’t Tufa; of that, she was sure. Why had he stared at her with such intensity? She was attractive, sure, but no great beauty and certainly not worthy of that sort of attention. She knew after one song that she had to get out before he approached her, but now she couldn’t get him out of her head. What would he have said to her?

She finished “Wrought Iron Fences” and closed her eyes as the music changed, grew softer and more sensual. She was a First Daughter, and more than that, she was the regent for her people until Mandalay reached her majority. She was resigned to the solitude those roles demanded, and any feelings that arose and made her reconsider it were, she knew by now, mere fleeting hormones. The feel of the cold water on her toes was all she needed to endure it. She’d never see the boy again, and the urgent thoughts would fade, and Needsville would return to its routine.

But on this night, under the moon, she could almost howl with frustration.

As if reading her mind, a distant cry echoed through her little wooded hollow. She stopped playing immediately and listened for any subsequent sound. She thought she heard one, but it was much farther away and may have just been the wind. Sometimes even she couldn’t be certain.

It broke the moment. She went inside, leaving the night to its creatures, and the night wind to its riders.

*   *   *

Rob snapped awake.

Every muscle tight with anticipation, he listened again, unable to clearly recall what awoke him. An echo seemed to hover in the room, but it faded before he could identify it.

In the distance, a screech owl cried. Somewhere a car crunched gravel. But these were normal sounds, and too faint to rouse him out of his exhausted sleep. What had he heard?

Somewhere a coyote faintly yipped. It sounded amused.

It must have been a dream. Maybe the airplane nightmare again. Or just noise in the building, another guest or something. Or someone outside in the street, although at this time of night, Needsville seemed abandoned to its ghosts.

He took several deep, regular breaths and closed his eyes.

Then the sound came again, and he sat straight up in bed.

It was a cry similar to the coyote’s, with the same rhythm and timbre. But it was in a somewhat higher range, and had an unmistakable human quality. Somewhere outside, fairly close, some
one
was howling back at the night.

Then the sound turned into a long, despondent wail, a new sound not native to the wild. It was the sound of a human being in true pain, of someone demanding answers from a God who refused to reply.

The cry faded into the night. After a few moments, the crickets and other insects resumed their music, and the real coyote yelped once, as if to acknowledge the human crier’s superior torment. Rob lay awake for a long time, but the noise never came again.

7

“Yeah, I’m on my way,” Bliss Overbay said into the phone. She watched dust float in the sun blazing through the window over her sink. “Just wanted to warn you I’ll be a few minutes late, I have to run through town and pick up some things. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up the ancient rotary phone and leaned against the kitchen wall beside it. She remembered that same phone from when she’d been a child in this house, ringing with the good and bad news that marked transitions in her life. She yawned, then padded across the hardwood floor, leaving wet footprints from the shower. She’d lied to her boss: She had nothing to pick up in town. She did, however, have a major sense that something important required her presence there, and she knew better than to ignore it.

In the bathroom, she undid the towel from her hair and let the water-heavy black strands fall down her bare shoulders and back. The unadorned face she seldom showed to the world looked out from her mirror. To her, she looked as old as the hills around her, and far less graceful.

As she brushed her hair, the snake tattoo coiled around her biceps seemed to move independently of her arm. Its one visible eye watched her in the mirror.

She yawned again, this time so hard, her ears popped. She’d slept only in fits, and in between had endured the entirely inappropriate desire she’d felt since making eye contact with that strange boy at the Pair-A-Dice. At last, just before dawn, it faded enough for her to get a bit of deep, dreamless sleep. Then her alarm clock yanked her back to the mundane world.

Now she slowly braided her hair, her movements as lethargic as her thoughts. She needed coffee, and clear air, and a song to get her connected back to this existence. The coffee was brewing, and she opened the window to allow the cool morning breeze to caress her still-damp skin. And as for the song, there was only one that would do.

Her voice, the one she used only for occasions when the song meant life or death, rang through the empty old house. The air trembled the way it always did, and she felt the presence of those the song summoned, praised, and kept in their proper places.

Oh, time makes men grow sad

And rivers change their ways

But the night wind and her riders

Will ever stay the same.…

*   *   *

“Oh, God,” Berklee said, her arm draped across her eyes. “There ought to be some exercise to thicken your eyelids so the sun can’t get through. Do you think every time you blink, you wear them down a little?”

She lay in bed, naked except for her bra and one sock. Doyle stood at the closet holding a clean shirt. He’d slept on the couch once he saw that Berklee was going to toss and mutter all night, and even in the other room, with the door shut and the air conditioner running, his wife’s drunken snoring kept him awake until nearly dawn.

“I can put some tinfoil over the windows if you want,” he said.

She sat up, blinking. “No, that’s just stupid. Besides, I have to go to work. Is there coffee?”

“Same as every morning.”

She scooted to the edge of the bed. Her hair was matted where she’d sweated out the effects of the alcohol. She stumbled into the bathroom, and he heard her throw up. It wasn’t an epic puke like some mornings, but it was enough to envelop him in sadness. She emerged wrapped in her bathrobe and went into the kitchen.

He followed, pulling on his shirt. “So how’d you like Rob?”

“Who?” she said as she poured herself some coffee. She ignored his empty travel cup waiting beside the machine.

“The guy we took to the Pair-A-Dice.”

“Oh. He was all right, I guess.” Then her memory grew a bit clearer. “Wait—did he run off with Bliss?”

“No, we took him home. Alone.”

“Oh.”

He gently nudged her aside and filled his cup. “You know, he was a nice guy. Thought we might have him over for dinner tonight. I could grill out, maybe he’d bring his guitar and play for us.”

“You planning to invite Bliss, too?” she said. Her hangover kept her sarcasm from being too venomous.

“No, just him.”

She nodded, careful with her tender head. “Okay. I’ll pick up some stuff after work. Maybe start a casserole or something when I get home.”

He wondered why she was so accepting of this. Was she just grateful for an excuse to go through the motions of normality? Was it one more way she denied there was any problem?

He snapped the lid onto his travel cup. “Well … I have to go.”

“Have a good day,” she said in a small voice, like a little girl playing at being a wife.

“Do my best,” he assured her.

*   *   *

Peggy Goins stretched toward the sky and yawned. Her feet twisted with the movement and crunched the gravel beneath them. The exhalation from her first cigarette of the morning trickled out of her open mouth like incense from a brazier.

She finished her sunrise smoke and started to go back inside when she heard the faint sounds of a guitar. She paused, ground her butt into the gravel alongside years of its comrades, then peeked at the porch around the corner of the building.

Rob sat in one of the front porch rockers, his guitar across his lap, picking so faintly, she could barely hear it. He had an easy touch with the instrument; his fingers slid on the neck with little of that annoying screech some players produced when they changed chords.

She mainly watched his face, though. She believed a musician’s expression when he played in solitude told you more about him than anything else. Some made exaggerated “stage” faces even when alone, while others looked bored with the tedium of maintaining their skills. Rob’s face, though, mirrored his music. The old perennial tune he played now, trickling softly through the cool air like a brook over its rounded bed-stones, exactly reflected the sad, weary look on his face.

Oh, listen to my story, I’ll tell you no lies,

How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise.…

No one who knew his story could doubt what inspired this choice of song. Tears unexpectedly welled up and she slipped back out of sight, not wanting to be caught spying.

She wiped the corners of her eyes, then checked her fingertips for mascara. The boy’s tragedy had seemed abstract and distant until this moment. She imagined how she’d feel if Marshall died that way, and the guilt that would come with knowing he was coming to surprise her. They had sat together on the couch, holding hands as they watched Rob, on TV, struggle through George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” while the celebrity judges, even that smug English one, openly wept. The obvious choice of song, the fact that it was on TV, and the overall falseness of the show had kept her from feeling anything at the time. Now, though, it came in a rush and threatened to overwhelm her.

When she emerged behind the motel desk, she was surprised to see another young man on the other side. This one, though, she recognized immediately. “Reverend Chess,” she said.

Craig Chess, the young Methodist minister from nearby Smithborough, said, “Hey, Ms. Peggy.” Then he saw her red eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Reverend.” There were no churches in Cloud County, and never would be as long as the Tufa lived here, but Craig had quietly earned the Tufa’s trust by not proselytizing or evangelizing. He simply lived his beliefs, something the Tufa understood and accepted even if they didn’t share them. “Bronwyn gave you my message, then?”

“She did.”

“Well, I sure do appreciate you coming by.”

“Always glad to help. What can I do for you?”

“Did you see that young man on the porch?”

“The one playing guitar? Yeah.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“Ms. Peggy, I’ve only lived here a little while—”

“No, not from here, he’s not one of us.”

“He’s not? He’s got the look.”

She leaned close and said quietly, “That’s
Rob Quillen.
”

Just as softly, Craig asked, “Who’s Rob Quillen?”

“That boy from the TV show,
So You Think You Can Sing?
The one whose girlfriend died flying out to surprise him at the finals. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah. I read about that, I didn’t watch the show. That’s tragic.”

“Yes, exactly. And it’s eating that poor boy up, I can see it just as plain as I see you.” She leaned closer and said, softly and urgently, “He was just playing ‘Omie Wise.’”

Craig’s expression told her he didn’t get the significance.

Peggy continued, “If he were a Tufa, if he had even a drop of Tufa in him, I’d know what to do to help him, but I don’t. I was hoping you could point me toward something.”

He smiled sympathetically. Peggy’s genuine desire to help this stranger reminded him why, despite their prickly and evasive attitude toward strangers, he’d continued trying to earn the Tufa’s trust. “Ms. Peggy, I wish I had a simple answer for you. Grief hits everyone differently. All you can do is let him know that you’re here if he needs anything, especially if he wants to talk. That old saying about how grief shared is grief halved is usually true.”

She nodded. “Thank you, Reverend.”

Craig looked out the front window, where he could see the back of Rob’s head over the rocking chair. “Tell me, though. If it’s not rude to ask, why is he here if he’s not a Tufa?”

She shook her head. “He’s looking for something. I don’t know what, yet. I don’t think
he
truly knows. A little peace away from the fame, maybe. Like when Bronwyn came home from the army. How is she, by the way?”