Long Black Curl (4 page)

He rose to a seated position, his hands still cradled against his chest. The hatred blazing from his eyes would once have terrified her.

“I'll give you one warning,” she said, and pushed him flat again with one boot. “You move against me, old man, and it's the last move you'll make. I'm paying you the respect of letting you live. Don't make me regret it.”

Rockhouse raised one bloodied hand and tried to make a symbol with it, but it shook too much. Blood dribbled from the stump of his finger onto the floor.

Bo-Kate laughed. Then she slammed the door behind her.

Rockhouse got to his knees. He could hardly breathe, and it took all his energy to crawl up into one of the chairs and rest his mutilated hands on the table. He sat over them, mutely sobbing. A gust of wind came down the chimney and caused his fire to blaze, as if expressing the rage he could not.

*   *   *

The flurry ended almost at once, and the faded winter sun reemerged from the clouds. As she started the long walk down the mountain, Bo-Kate Wisby sang “Silent All These Years.” She had Tori Amos's range, so the words echoed back to her with a purity that almost made her cry.

She loved the woods in the winter. There were no ticks, no deer or snakes, nothing but the dead world glossed over with the cleanness of ice and snow. Most importantly, everything
sounded
different in the winter: music, like her own voice, tinkled like a shattering icicle.

The last time she prowled the winter woods in Cloud County, she'd been nineteen. And
he
had been twenty. They walked hand in gloved hand, harmonizing from the ridges that looked down over the valley, fully aware that they could be heard by anyone with true Tufa blood, no matter how far away. They didn't care. At least,
she
didn't. She still didn't know for sure about him.

She was so wrapped up in her happiness, in her ability to sing after all those years of enforced quiet, that she didn't notice the man hiding behind the trunk of a maple tree. She passed within ten feet of him, and although the tree was too narrow to fully block him, he was dressed in winter browns that didn't draw her eye. He held perfectly still until she passed out of sight.

When she was gone, Junior Damo stepped out and gazed down the trail after her. He recognized her, all right: there was hardly a Tufa who wouldn't have. Bo-Kate Wisby was one of only two Tufa who had been totally, irrevocably cast out of their society, banished from Needsville, Cloud County, and the night wind. Which made her presence here, now, that much more perplexing.

Not that Junior had any doubt where she'd just been. There was only one destination for a Tufa on this mountain, and it was his as well. He resumed climbing.

Junior was thirty, with the standard black hair and perfect teeth of the Tufa, but he had a slightly dazed look most of the time, as if day-to-day events confused him. Along with the forelock that fell across his eyes no matter how much he combed it back, he sported an eternally boyish appearance that helped immensely with the ladies.

As a long-haul trucker for Diversified Transport, he had been out of town in Iowa when Rockhouse was mauled at the Pair-A-Dice, but he knew the story. It would make a great song someday: the daughter-molesting old man hated by everyone, who finally got his comeuppance at the hands of the very child he'd both raped and tried to destroy. The fact that Curnen Overbay had torn his throat out with her very teeth would be tricky to couch in lyrical poetry, but someone would manage it. And the story's end, with Curnen leaving Cloud County along with her non-Tufa lover, would be perfect.

He knew the injury had destroyed the old man's voice, although his musical talent with the banjo would be undimmed. No one, in fact, played anything like old Rockhouse, with his six working fingers on each hand. No one else could.

He reached Rockhouse's dwelling and knocked on the door. “Rockhouse? It's Junior Damo. I need to talk to you, sir.” There was no reply.

He glanced up at the chimney, where a solid column of smoke emerged into the cold air. He put his ear to the door, and heard something move inside. He knocked again. “Rockhouse? My feets are getting cold out here.” He pushed on the door, and it opened inward.

A bright shaft of clean winter sun cut across the dim interior and fell onto the old man seated at the table. It took a long moment for Junior to understand what he was seeing: the tears, the blood, the mutilated hands. “Great googa-mooga,” he said, and made a protective hand gesture.

Rockhouse, whose glare could once reduce even the biggest, bravest man to quivering jelly, waved at the floor with his left hand. Junior saw the cylindrical device and for an instant wondered why the old man had a light saber. Then he realized what it was, picked it up, and put it on the table. The door closed behind him.

Rockhouse put the electrolarynx to his throat. “Bo-Kate Wisby did this,” he said, the flat tones a contrast with his distorted expression. “She cut off my fingers.”

“I seen her coming down the mountain,” Junior said numbly.

“How did she get back here?” the old man asked. “How did that murdering bitch get back here?”

“Beats me,” Junior said. He looked around the little room, which had been Rockhouse's home for longer than most Tufa, let alone most humans, could believe. This was where the Fairy Feller landed, and where he lorded over his exiled people until they split into two groups, leaving him in charge of one, and his archrival Radella ruling the other. Radella's wisdom passed down through generations of women, but Rockhouse stubbornly refused to move on.

“But I got a better question,” Junior continued. “What does she
want
here?”

“I don't know,” Rockhouse said. He was no longer breathing so heavily, and Junior wondered if the pain was sending him into shock.

The handle of his knife, in its belt sheath under his coat, dug into his side, and Junior remembered why
he
had come here. He'd heard of Rockhouse's fall, and figured the easiest way to step into the old man's place was to kill him outright. As usual with his plans, he'd impulsively begun to implement it without entirely thinking it through. But now, faced with this pathetic shell of the towering presence he'd expected, he found he couldn't do it. It would be like killing that cougar who'd mauled his cousin after the animal's teeth, claws, and eyesight had all gone bad.

“Well,” he said at last, drawing the word out, “you just take care of yourself, Rockhouse. Might want to pack them hands in snow for a while.” He backed to the door, never taking his eyes off the old man.

Rockhouse's face was a mask of self-pity. “You ain't gonna just leave me like this, are you?”

Junior opened the door. When he did, a crow zoomed into the room. In the confined place it seemed gigantic, and its
caw-caw
was so loud, it made Junior want to cover his ears. But before he could, the crow flew back out and disappeared into the forest.

Junior stared after it. A bird flying into your house was an omen of death; everyone knew that.

He looked back at the old man sitting pitifully at his bare table. “Rockhouse, you remember when I was a senior in high school, my ol' truck broke down on the way to Rosalia Mullins's house? You drove right by me in that old station wagon of yours and didn't stop. In fact, you laughed out the window at me. Yelled back that you'd go tell her I just wasn't that interested. She ended up going out with Larry Heard that very night. I might've married that girl, Rockhouse, instead of that porcupine I'm stuck with now, you know that?”

Rockhouse said nothing.

“So I'll tell you now what I shoulda told you then: Fuck you, old man.” Then he slammed the door behind him.

*   *   *

Far down the mountain, Bo-Kate paused to listen. Had she just heard a distant hunter's gunshot, the echo of a car backfiring, or, as she really thought, the sound of a door slamming high above her on the mountain, where there was only one door to slam?

It took a fraction of the time to descend that it had for the climb. She stepped around the root ball of an immense toppled tree and reached the head of the logging road, where Nigel and the SUV waited. She heard the engine and smelled the exhaust before she saw the vehicle, its black finish gleaming. She spotted the tracks of the emu that had terrified him; it made her smile to imagine Nigel, so British and urbane, face-to-face with actual wildlife. The man had probably never seen anything bigger than a lapdog anywhere except the zoo.

She crept up on the vehicle, deliberately staying in the blind spot. When she was close, she slapped the side panel and heard him yelp. She stepped back so he could see her laughing, then waited for him to unlock the passenger door.

Nigel Hawtrey stared daggers at her. He was British, of African descent, and his position as her executive assistant—and more—did not keep him from expressing his true opinions, a quality she treasured. He said very properly, “Yes, you gave me a start. Proud of yourself? Shall I alert the media?”

“I only wish I could've seen your face.”

“Yes, well, how did your hunting expedition go?”

“I got what I needed.” She held up the plastic baggy with the severed fingers.

Nigel's eyes opened wide. Softly he said, “My God, are those—?”

“They are. Don't worry, he still has a full set left, that's the beauty of it.”

“I thought you were just going after some bauble.”

She held up the tiny axe. “Got that, too.” Then she sucked in her breath as the blade nicked her skin. A lone drop of blood appeared on her fingertip. “Anyway, let's get going. I want to stop somewhere in town on the way to my folks.”

“The town we drove through?” he said as he put the vehicle in gear. “We could stop
everywhere
and not lose an hour.”

“Oh, don't be so snide. Besides, there's more going on there than you think. Needsville's got a lot of secrets.”

“Like the ones you told me about your people?”

His arch, superior tone usually amused her, but not this time. “Nigel, I know you think you're funny, but this is no joke. Everything I told you about the Tufa is true. The fact that you don't believe it doesn't change that.”

“Oh, my cocklebur, but I do. I grew up hearing stories of the Good Folk. I just never supposed they would also be good ol' boys.”

She looked out at the trees as he backed the SUV around and pointed it the way they'd come. Fresh snow fell as clouds slid over the sun. “We ain't that good, my friend,” she said almost to herself. “Not at all.”

 

3

Mandalay Harris sat in the back of the school bus, watching the snow come down. School had let out at noon, when it became clear that the snow was going to continue at least sporadically throughout the day.

She was the last student on the route, and her home was located just down the road from the bus driver's. So every afternoon, even on an early release day like this, she and Mr. Dalton rode home together, usually in silence except for the AM radio that played the right-wing talk station from Knoxville. He always turned it up loud when it was just the two of them.

“We live in a fascist state,” the radio voice ranted. “Our government at the highest levels is infested with radical, revolutionary, and in some cases Marxist people that no one elected!”

“Damn right,” Mr. Dalton said to himself.

Mandalay wondered what all of this meant to the outside world. Her head was so filled with the history of the Tufa, from Radella on down, that it took all her concentration just to make it through the day. Most of the kids in her sixth-grade class were at least partly Tufa, and they understood that she just wasn't like them. They didn't hold it against her, but neither did they go out of their way to cross the boundaries that separated them. She couldn't, and didn't, blame them; it was hard to look and feel like a child but think like a woman with vast swaths of ancient knowledge.

All across the county, parents explained to their children, often in vague and unsatisfying ways, why Mandalay was special and had to be treated with deference. Yet she was also just what she appeared to be: a twelve-year-old girl growing up in the twenty-first century. And if that seemed contradictory to the rest of the Tufa, she thought, just imagine how it felt to her.

When Mandalay was born, her mother had died. That was not unexpected: often, the heads of the clans died passing on their wisdom, experience, and everything else. Her mother had not been the prior leader: that was the semi-legendary Ruby Montana, who had lived high in the mountains and held court on Saturday nights at the barn dance. On rare occasions she would visit the Pair-A-Dice roadhouse, neutral ground where both sides of the Tufa could come together and play. It was said her voice had been so pure, it could melt icicles and summon fish from the bottom of lakes; she also played the autoharp so well, she could produce notes no one, human or Tufa, had ever heard before.

Ruby Montana had been dead for ten years prior to Mandalay's birth, although given the Tufa's rather malleable relationship with time, she'd managed to make sure there was no gap in leadership. Before her death, she'd told the First Daughters who would give birth to her successor, when and where it would happen, and even what to name the girl. But she hadn't warned them that Mandalay's mother would die. There had been no omens, no signs, so no one was prepared for it, least of all her father. Raising a newborn daughter alone was bad enough, but he had no idea how to help her sort through the generations of knowledge lurking in her mind. His extended family had pitched in, as had the entire Tufa community, but none of them had the slightest clue what she was going through when her eyes glazed over, or when the words that others heard as mere whispers on the night wind spoke to her with total clarity.