Cavedweller (37 page)

“The weak link in old women,” the doctor said. That hip was the evidence that finally proved just how fragile Nadine had become. The doctor also suggested there might have been a mild stroke, but there was no evidence of that except for the rage, towering and unpredictable, that now burned in Nadine. Nolan did not hesitate. He had already taken over full-time at Biscuit World. He knew how, and no one was going to refuse him the job or that high school diploma everyone knew he deserved. He was determined and uncompromising. He would manage. He would support Nadine, take his time deciding what to do, and meanwhile play his clarinet all afternoon out on the porch, where he could look down Terrill Road to the convenience store. Dede was working there now, and if he got up the nerve, he could savor a cold drink that she would have to put in his hand.

When Nolan started to feel like he was going crazy, there were afternoon classes out at the junior college, and clarinet auditions for visiting band directors, who would stare at him in awe. None could believe that he could play like that and then ignore their advice about his professional future.

“My God, boy, you could do something.”

“I’m doing something.” He would smile then, pack up his case, and walk away. That tight smile told Cissy everything. Several times she had gone over to Atlanta with Nolan. Mostly she would hang out south of Peachtree and haunt the record stores looking for bootleg tapes of Mud Dog, but once or twice she sat in the back of some darkened hall and watched Nolan perform what seemed to be his only sin. It had to be sin, the awful satisfaction he took in those auditions, smiling that way throughout, playing like a wicked angel until the rest of the clarinet section turned sour and pale. It was as if he harbored a rage bigger than the one buffeting his mama and it came out in runs of staccato-tongued sixteenth notes alternated with pure, piercing tones. Maybe that was the way music really worked, Cissy thought. Maybe talent was a blade cutting hard through those who had less. Watching Nolan, Cissy saw him as a deeply hurt boy, made rich through an accident of fate and hoarding his wealth. It made her slightly dizzy, the way. he smiled through the despair of everyone else at his auditions.

Afterward, though, Nolan would be himself again, shy and eager to hear what Cissy thought. He would take her out for a big rich meal and laugh gently at the frustration of the orchestra leader. This Nolan was her friend, and a genuinely kind soul. It was hard then for Cissy to remember how he was in the audition. Only when he talked about the other musicians did the nature of his resentment become apparent.

“Oh, they always think they’re something until I show them what I can do. Humility, that’s what these boys lack. It’s what I give them.” He smiled wide, and chewed with a satisfaction that scared Cissy, startled her into speaking.

“You should get out,” she said, her expression stern.

Nolan took a sip of water and looked at her inquisitively. Cissy truly cared about him, he knew, had from the first time Dede snubbed him. But Cissy was no musician. She did not know what he felt when he sat down with those little groups of overly ambitious horn players. Nor could he tell her. He tried to smile and wave her words away, but she caught his hand and spoke fiercely.

“I’m telling you right now. You should go to Atlanta or New York City or Boston or anywhere you can. Go somewhere. Do something. Audition for an orchestra for real. Take a position or get a music degree. You got to stop this and get out of here.”

When Nolan just smiled again and shrugged, the weight of her own resentment almost crushed Cissy. Anytime Nolan decided to leave Cayro, there would be people waiting to welcome him. Anytime he could face what was happening to him and walk away from his mother, he could have a career that would vindicate every bad choice he had ever made. But no one anywhere was waiting for Cissy. Sometimes Nolan’s smile would make her feel more debased than those sweating clarinet players he had just skunked so completely.

Who was she? Delia Byrd’s daughter. No talent, not special. She was like those bugs caught in amber, stuck in time. She’d never been in love, never dated. No boyfriend, no friends except Nolan and Dede, and Dede didn’t count. What did Cissy have? Nothing. Nothing but the caves.

Cissy had been out to Paula’s Lost half a dozen times with Nolan before he stopped going, and a couple of times with Charlie, though she gave that up when Charlie got drunk and tried to wrestle her down in the first passage past the entrance. Cissy could not explain how she felt about the caves. Nolan was too busy, Charlie wanted to get her naked, and Dede thought the whole idea was silly. Cissy had managed to talk three members of the swim team into going caving with her that spring. They went out to Little Mouth with a park ranger as a guide, and he was impressed with Cissy. What she told no one, because people would have thought her frankly crazy if they knew, was that she seized every chance that came her way for a ride out to one of the caves and went down on her own. Mostly she hitchhiked out to the Lost and climbed just far enough down into the first passage to sit in the welcome dark, sometimes humming to herself happily, more often falling asleep. There was no sleep like the one she surrendered to while wrapped in an old blanket in the sand bed of the first chamber at Brewster’s old party site. But sleeping wasn’t a career, a future, a purpose, any more than caving was.

Faced with Nolan’s bland smile, Cissy would find herself picking on him, being mean just to spite him. “Eat something doesn’t come with gravy,” she would say. Or, “Dede’s going to marry that Tucker boy, just you wait.” Nolan’s smile would evaporate, and he would look at Cissy as if he could see down to where she hid her sins.

Cissy was stilled then, overwhelmed by the power she had to hurt Nolan. It was awful, knowing each other’s weaknesses so precisely. Nolan was unfailingly gentle with her, no matter how frustrated and resentful she became. Maybe he had grown calluses dealing with his mama’s rages, or maybe the dark angel she had seen in the rehearsal hall was not so sinful as she had imagined.

“At least you’re good at something,” Cissy told Nolan.

“I’m not that good,” he would tell her carefully, waiting for the cruelty to turn to embarrassment, waiting for his friend to come back. “Not yet. I’m not near as good as I’m going to be.” Then he would laugh, a deprecating little laugh, and shake his head. “When I’m good enough to pull your sister up Terrill Road to my porch, then we’ll see. We’ll see.”

The music in which Nolan found so much grace was a mystery to Cissy, the clarinet an instrument as imperial and strange as the concept of a wind ensemble or a jazz combo. The daughter of Delia Byrd and Randall Pritchard understood guitars and drums and rock and roll. Lyrics. Words and music. Mr. Clausen had found a Buffet at an estate sale and bought it for Nolan with the help of the other members of the wind ensemble, a gesture Nolan had almost, but not quite, refused. What he played on that gleaming ebony and silver creation was of another order, a language Cissy had never learned to speak and did not even know if she heard accurately. When Nolan played for her, Cissy felt like a Baptist child at a Catholic mass—intimidated, awed, and suspicious. It was gorgeous and scary. The melodies, almost recognizable or fully familiar but extraordinary at the same time, sometimes sent shocks through her nervous system. More extraordinary was the fact that this music was coming out of Nolan, with his flushed full cheeks and puffy eyes. Baking-powder memories rose with the cascading trills of notes. Cissy’s mouth would fall open, and she would feel suddenly small and stupid and completely Cayro, Georgia, while Nolan would enlarge and assume the guise of Bacchus or Orpheus, some mystical god of high, far places as remote from Cayro as Paris or New York. If she closed her eyes when Nolan played, Cissy imagined the lithe figures of ballet dancers against a diamond and velvet sky. With each trill they leaped and Cissy’s heart sank within her.

Maybe Delia knew what that was like—the great, dark power of a melody that could catch your pulse, speed it or slow it, lift you right out of your natural state. She had lived in that outer world. There was magic there, magic that only musicians knew, magic that remade everything and might have remade Cissy. But it was a magic denied to her. Like Dede, she had a pleasant voice, pedestrian, ordinary. Sitting next to Nolan, knowing she had neither her mother’s gift nor his, was torture of a high order. When Cissy got that small, only one thing pulled her out of it: the knowledge that Nolan too had something in life that he wanted desperately and could not have. It should have been the subject they avoided, but it was not. Dede was the one subject Nolan would invariably turn to, the one reference point for both of them.

“Who’s Dede seeing?” he asked when Cissy came by during his afternoon session on the porch the day after their latest trip to Atlanta. His whole body communicated frustration and nervous energy that he could not dissipate. The reed was barely inches from Nolan’s lower lip, his desire plain on his face. “She’s not still chasing that Tucker boy, is she?” He put his tongue out, deliberately threading the reed’s moistened fibers. He was trying to be casual.

“Oh, Nolan.” The tune he had been playing was still sounding in Cissy’s head. Gratefully she shook herself back into the moment, the mundane world of thwarted desire and sexual obsession. Even musicians were subject to the laws of heartbreak. “Give it up. Christ, Dede an’t never gonna go out with you. Even if she wasn’t seeing Billy Tucker, she wouldn’t see you.”

Nolan rubbed his lower lip with his right thumb. “I know, I know.” His eyes were unfocused, distant, his face without the hope of a smile. “I’m just asking.” He tilted the clarinet and looked down its length as if insight lay in the finish.

It was no game. He was not pretending. His misery never abated. Every time Dede broke up with another boyfriend, Nolan’s heart caught fire again. He plied Cissy with questions, ran errands for Delia, and searched out gifts that he took by the convenience store—small things like fabric-covered hair ties or padded fingerless bicycle gloves that would protect Dede’s hands when she opened cases of eggs and butter or slit the tops of cartons of jerky.

“You can’t help who you love,” Nolan told Cissy. He was talking about Brewster but thinking about himself. “Some people are lucky. They find the one for them the first time out. Some never find the right one. Daddy always said Brewster should have stayed married to Aunt Maudy, even if it was like he swore—that she wasn’t his true love. He said true love is rare and a good home life is as much as most can hope for. And then anyway, Aunt Maudy could have kept Brewster a little better focused. He developed sugar diabetes, you know, made it worse drinking. Screwed up his circulation, Daddy said. Almost suicide, if you think about it. Kind of thing didn’t have to happen. Just stupidity, really, and paying yourself no mind. Runs in the family, kind of.” His head dropped.

“Evolution in action?” Cissy joked, but Nolan glared at her. You could never predict when he was going to get his feelings hurt, she thought. She looked at his fingers on the clarinet, poised delicately and with unfailing precision. Infinitely fragile, immensely strong, a force of nature in his profoundly human body.

 

 

E
ven before she graduated from high school, Dede had trouble finding a job she could keep. After she got out of high school, her search for work became desperate and ceaseless. Her problem was only partly the limited number of jobs in Cayro. The real obstacles were temperament and aptitude. Most girls came out of Cayro High ready to leave town or work at the electronics firm that had opened in the new industrial park on the Marietta side of town. But Dede did not want to leave Cayro—she claimed that outside the city limits lay chaos and bad drugs—and she definitely did not want to pull a paycheck wiring guidance systems for missiles and pinning her hair back to do it.

“The pay an’t that good anyway,” Dede complained. “Once you buy enough grass to keep yourself stoned while you’re working that line, you can’t be taking no nice vacations or buying a good car. And hell, I’d rather do my drugs for fun, not just to get myself through God’s own boring workday.” Delia nodded and hid a smile. God’s own boring workday was all most people could expect, after all.

For a while Dede helped out at Benny Davis’s Cayro Dog Shop, grooming poodles and shih tzus and giving flea and tick treatments to dogs so big Benny no longer had the nerve to face them. It was irregular work and didn’t pay very well, but Benny let her come in when she wanted and didn’t care how she dressed.

When a group of women brought a case against the Atlanta police department, Dede took an immediate interest in their struggle. The state announced open exams for deputy and traffic-control positions, and Dede tried to sign on for deputy sheriff. When she came in for the application forms, Emmet Tyler sat down on the edge of his desk and stared at her.

“You want to be a deputy?” He was astonished. “As many times as you’ve almost wound up in jail?”

Emmet Tyler had taken partial disability after he rolled his cruiser chasing a couple of drunk teenagers on the road to Little Mouth. His left arm was stiff, but he refused to let the doctors mess with him. Since the accident, he’d been working at the courthouse escorting prisoners and filing papers for the traffic judge. On the weekends he was supposed to rest and do his physical therapy, but mostly Emmet hung out near the courthouse or over at the café down from the Bee’s Bonnet.

“Almost don’t count,” Dede said, “and traffic an’t no never mind. I’m as street-legal as anyone. I got a high school diploma. I got the right attitude.”

“Girl, you an’t got the right attitude,” Emmet said quietly. He had learned to like Dede the hard way, tangling with her repeatedly since she was fourteen. He knew her temper and admired it, though he prayed never to run full into it in this lifetime. “What would you do if you had to arrest a friend, some boy you dated? Huh? How would you feel then?”