Moonlight & Vines (34 page)

“I know. It's not painted on—the color's in the varnish. My grandma gave it to me a couple of years ago. She says it's a spirit fiddle, been in the family forever.”

“Play something else,” he asks. “Unless you're too tired.”

“I'm never too tired to play.”

She sets the bow to the strings, wakes a note, wakes another, and then they're in the middle of a tune, a slow reel. Jake leans back, puts his hands behind his head, looks up into the bare branches of the trees. Just before he closes his eyes, he sees those birds return, one after the other, leafing the branches with their black wings. He doesn't hear a door open, all he hears is Staley's fiddle. He finishes closing his eyes and lets the music take him to a place where he doesn't have to think about the story of his life.

I'm lounging on a bench with Malicorne near a subway station in that no-man's-land between the city and the Tombs, where the buildings are falling down but there's people still living in them, paying rent. Frenchy's sitting on the curb with a piece of cardboard cut into the shape of a guitar, dark hair tied back with a piece of string, holes in his jeans, hole in his heart where his dreams all escaped. He strums the six drawn strings on that cardboard guitar, mouthing “Plonkety, plonkety” and people are actually tossing him quarters and dimes. On the other side of him Casey's telling fortunes. He looks like the burned-out surfer he is, too many miles from any ocean, still tanned, dirty blond hair falling into his face. He gives everybody the same piece of advice: “Do stuff.”

Nobody's paying much attention to us when Jake comes walking down the street, long and lanky, hands deep in the pockets of his black jeans. He sits down beside me, says, “Hey, William,” nods to Malicorne. Doesn't even look at her horn.

“Hey, Jake,” I tell him.

He leans forward on the bench, talks across me. “You ever hear of a spirit fiddle?” he asks Malicorne.

She smiles. “Are you finally starting a story?”

“I'm not starting anything. I'm just wondering. Met that girl who was making the music and she's got herself a blue fiddle—says it's a spirit fiddle. Been in her family a long time.”

“I heard her playing,” I say. “She's good.”

“Her name's Staley Cross.”

“Don't know the name,” Malicorne says. There's a hint of surprise in her voice, as though she thinks she should. I'm not the only one who hears it.

“Any reason you should?” Jake asks.

Malicorne smiles and looks away, not just across the street, it seems, but further than that, like she can see through the buildings, see something we can't. Jake's looking at that horn now but I can't tell what he's thinking.

“Where'd she go?” I ask him.

He gets a puzzled look, like he thinks I'm talking about Malicorne for a second, then he shrugs.

“Downtown,” he says. “She wanted to busk for a couple of hours, see if she can't get herself a stake.”

“Must be nice, having a talent,” I say.

“Everybody's got a talent,” Malicorne says. “Just like everybody's got a story.”

“Unless they give it to you,” Jake breaks in.

Malicorne acts like he hasn't interrupted. “Trouble is,” she goes on, “some people don't pay much attention to either and they end up living with us here.”

“You're living here,” Jake says.

Malicorne shakes her head. “I'm just passing through.”

I know what Jake's thinking. Everybody starts out thinking, this is only temporary. It doesn't take them long to learn different. But then none of them have a horn pushing out of the middle of their forehead. None of them have mystery sticking to them like they've wrapped themselves up in double-sided tape and whatever they touch sticks to them.

“Yeah, well, we'll all really miss you when you're gone,” Jake tells her.

It's quiet then. Except for Frenchy's cardboard guitar. “Plonkety-plonk.” None of us are talking. Casey takes a dime from some kid who wants to know the future. His pale blue eyes stand out against his surfer's tan as he gives the kid a serious look.

“Do stuff,” he says.

The kid laughs, shakes his head and walks away. But I think about what Malicorne was saying, how everybody's got a story, everybody's got a talent, and I wonder if maybe Casey's got it right.

“Blue's the rarest color in nature,” Staley says.

Jake smiles. “You ever look up at the sky?”

They're sharing sandwiches her music bought, coffee in cardboard cups, so hot you can't hold the container. If Jake's still worrying about magic and spirit fiddles, it doesn't show.

Staley returns his smile. “I don't mean it's hard to find. But it's funny you should mention the sky. Of all the hundreds of references to the sky and the heavens in a book like the bible, the color blue is never mentioned.”

“You read the bible a lot?”

“Up in the hills where I come from, that's pretty much the only thing there is to read. That, and the tabloids. But when I was saying blue's the rarest color—”

“You meant it's the most beautiful.”

She nods. “It fills the heart. Like the blue of twilight when anything's possible. Blue makes me feel safe, warm. People think of it as a cool color, but you know, the hottest fire has a blue-white flame. Like stars. The comparatively cooler stars have the reddish glow.” She takes a sip of her coffee, looks at him over the brim. “I make up for all the reading I missed by spending a lot of time in libraries.”

“Good place to visit,” Jake says. “Safe, when you're in a strange town.”

“I thought you'd understand. You can put aside all the unhappiness you've accumulated by opening a book. Listening to music.”

“You think forgetting is a good thing?”

She shrugs. “For me, it's a necessary thing. It's what keeps me sane.”

She looks at him and Jake sees himself through her eyes: a tall, gangly hobo of a man, seen better times, but seen worse ones, too. The worse ones are why he's where he is.

“You know what I mean,” she says.

“I suppose. Don't know if I agree, though.” She lifts her eyebrows, but he doesn't want to take that any further. “So tell me about the spirit in that fiddle of yours,” he says instead.

“It hasn't got a spirit—not like you mean, anyway. It comes from a spirit place. That's why it's blue. It's the color of twilight and my grandma says it's always twilight there.”

“In the Otherworld.”

“If that's what you want to call it.”

“And the black of a raven's wing,” Jake says, “that's really a kind of blue, too, isn't it?”

She gives him a confused look.

“Don't mind me,” he tells her. “I'm just thinking about what someone once told me.”

“Where I come from,” she says, “the raven's an unlucky bird.”

“Depends on how many you see,” Jake says. He starts to repeat the old rhyme for her then. “One for sorrow, two for mirth . . .”

She nods, remembering. “Three for a wedding, four for a birth.”

“That's it. Five for silver, six for gold . . .”

“. . . seven for a secret never to be told . . .”

“. . . eight for heaven, nine for hell . . .”

“. . . and ten for the devil's own sel'.” She smiles. “But I thought that was for crows.”

He shrugs. “I've heard it used for magpies, too. Guess it's for any kind of black bird.” He looks up at the trees, empty now. “That music of yours,” he goes on. “It called up an unkindness of ravens this afternoon.”

“An unkindness of ravens,” she repeats, smiling. “A murder of crows. Where do they come up with that kind of thing?”

He shrugs. “Who knows? Same place they found once in a blue moon, I guess.”

“There was a blue moon the night my great-great-grandma got my fiddle,” Staley tells him. “Least that's how the story goes.”

“That's what I meant about forgetting,” he says. “Maybe you forget some bad things, but work at it hard enough and you forget a story like that, too.”

They're finished eating now, the last inch of coffee cooling in their cups.

“You up to playing a little more music?” Jake asks. “See what it calls up?”

“Sure.”

She takes the instrument from its case, tightens the bow, runs her finger across the strings to check the tuning, adjusts a couple of them. Jake likes to watch her fingers move, even doing this, without the music having started yet, tells her that.

“You're a funny guy,” she says as she brings the fiddle up under her chin.

Jake smiles. “Everybody says that,” he tells her.

But he's thinking of something else, he's thinking of how the little pieces of her history that she's given him add to his own without taking anything away from her. He's thinking about Malicorne and the stories she takes, how she pulls the hurt out of them by listening. He's thinking—

But then Staley starts to play and the music takes him away again.

“I was working on a tune this afternoon,” she says as the music moves into three-four time. “Maybe I'll call it ‘Jake's Waltz.' ”

Jake closes his eyes, listening, not just to her music, but for the sound of wings.

It's past sundown. The fires are burning in the oil drums and bottles are being passed around. Cider and apple juice in some, stronger drink in others. Malicorne's not drinking, never does, least not that I can ever remember seeing. She's sitting off by herself, leaning against a red brick wall, face a smudge of pale in the shadows, horn invisible. The wall was once the side of a factory, now it's standing by itself. There's an owl on top of the wall, three stories up, perched on the bricks, silhouetted by the moon. I saw it land and wonder what owls mean around her. Jake told me about the ravens.

After a while, I walk over to where she's sitting, offer her some apple juice. She shakes her head. I can see the horn now.

“What's it with you and Jake?” I ask.

“Old arguments never die,” she says.

“You go back a long time?”

She shakes her head. “But the kind of man he is and I do. Live long enough, William, and you'll meet every kind of person, hear every kind of story, not once, but a hundred times.”

“I don't get what you mean,” I say.

“No. But Jake does.”

We hear the music then, Staley's fiddle, one-two-three, one-two-three, waltz time, and I see them sitting together on the other side of the fires, shadow shapes, long tall Jake with his raven hair and the firefly glow of Staley's head bent over her instrument. I hear the sound of wings and think of the owl on the wall above us, but when I check, it's gone. These are black birds, ravens, a flock of them, an unkindness, and I feel something in the air, a prickling across my skin and at the nape of my neck, like a storm's coming, but the skies are clear. The stars seem so close we could be up in the mountains instead of here, in the middle of the city.

“What are you thinking about?” Malicorne asks.

I turn to her, see the horn catch the firelight. “Endings,” I find myself saying. “Where things go when they don't fit where they are.”

She smiles. “Are you reading my mind?”

“Never was much inclined for that sort of thing.

“Me, either.”

That catches me by surprise. “But you . . .” You're magic, I was going to say, but my voice trails off.

“I've been here too long,” she says. “Stopped to rest a day or so, and look at me now. Been here all spring and most of the summer.”

“It's been a good summer.”

She nods. “But Jake's right, you know. Your stories do nourish me. Not like he thinks, it's not me feeding on them and you losing something, it's that they connect me to a place.” She taps a finger against the dirt we're sitting on. “They connect me to something real. But I also get you to talk because I know talking heals. I like to think I'm doing some good.”

“Everybody likes you,” I tell her. I don't add, except for Jake.

“But it's like Scheherazade,” she says. “One day the stories are all told and it's time to move on.”

I'm shaking my head. “You don't have to go. When you're standing at the bottom of the ladder like we are, nobody can tell you what to do anymore. It's not much, but at least we've got that.”

“There's that innocence of yours again,” she says.

“What the hell's that supposed to mean?”

She smiles. “Don't be angry.”

“Then don't treat me like a kid.”

“But isn't this like Neverneverland?” she asks. “You said it yourself. Nobody can tell you what to do anymore. Nothing has to ever change. You can be like this forever.”

“You think any of us want to be here? You think we chose to live like this?”

“She's not talking about you, William,” Jake says. “She's talking about me.”

I never heard the music stop, never heard them approach, Jake and the fiddler, standing near us now. I don't know how long they've been there, how much they've heard. Staley lifts her hand to me, says hi. Jake, he's just looking at Malicorne. I can't tell what he's thinking.

“So I guess what you need is my story,” he says, “and then you can go.”

Malicorne shakes her head. “My coming or going has nothing to do with you.”

Jake doesn't believe her. He sits down on the dirt in front of us, got that look in his eye I've seen before, not angry, just he won't be backing down. Staley sits down, too, takes out her fiddle, but doesn't play it. She holds the instrument on her lap, runs the pad of her thumb along the strings, toys with the wooden curlicues on the head, starts to finger a
tune, pressing the strings against the fingerboard, soundlessly. I wish I had something to do with my hands.