Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) (6 page)

This time the response, if possible, was even louder. The banjo picker scooted his stool to one side, but not very far, as if he resented sharing the center spot.

A slender woman stepped onto the stage. She had long jet-black hair in a single braid that fell down her back almost to her waist. Her dark face had deep smile lines bracketing her wide mouth, which made guessing her age difficult; she could’ve been anywhere between twenty and forty. Her eyes were dark, but Rob swore they actually
twinkled
like they were illuminated from within. She wore a long, dark skirt and a simple sleeveless blouse that hinted at the same tough, exquisite shape so many rural women possessed in their girlhood: broad shoulders, narrow waist, wide hips, and strong legs. A snake tattoo ran around her upper arm and disappeared under her clothing. Through a momentary gap in the crowd, he glimpsed her bare feet.

“Well, if it ain’t Miss La-Dee-Da,” Berklee sniffed.

“Stop it,” Doyle said patiently, as if he’d said it a million times before.

*   *   *

Bliss faced the packed room. Her decision to sit in with the boys had been sudden and inexplicable, one of those urges sourced somewhere deep inside, beneath her veneer of civilization. She’d taken a change of clothes with her to work, something she almost never did, and headed straight to the Pair-A-Dice instead of home.
One song,
she told herself;
one song to honor the night wind and the eternal truce between her people and the others, and then back home, straight into the shower and then to bed.

She smiled as the applause, and the energy it generated, rippled over her like a thousand caresses. Not all these people liked her, and some rightly feared her, but they all appreciated her musical skill; the songs were the common ground where all the Tufa met. She let her eyes drift over the crowd, observing the faces that had changed and the ones that hadn’t.

“Wow, thank you,” Bliss said. “Before we get started, just wanted to mention that there’s a yellow Chevy Nova outside with its lights on. Also, the kitchen’s closing in about ten minutes, so if you’re hungry, you better make up your mind now.” She looked down, and her demeanor shifted from casual to something more serious. She exchanged a long, enigmatic look with the six-fingered banjo player, then spoke. “This is one of my own, which y’all have been nice enough to ask us to play before. Hope you like it this time, too.”

She began to sway, her skirt waving against her body; then she counted four. The band came in behind her with practiced precision. Their tightness impressed Rob; they clearly played together often. He imagined them as young boys on a mountain cabin porch making music for barefoot girls in long summer dresses, who swayed to the music with their eyes closed just as Bliss Overbay now did.

Then Bliss stepped to the microphone and let out a long, deep wail, a counterpoint melody to the banjo and guitar. The fiddle came in as harmony, soaring over the woman’s smoky voice. The sound quieted errant conversations and stilled the dancers as everyone turned their attention toward the stage. Rob got chills that had nothing to do with the weather.

She wrapped one hand lightly around the microphone on its stand and began to sing.

I’m driving down the mountain

As the sun begins to sink

I’ve got the music blasting off the ridges

So I don’t have to think

I hear the wind in the pines moan low under the beat

For the price of my heart, I’d trade these wheels for wings,

But I dance in the dying daylight as I sing

The song that reminds me of you.

The guitar kept the rhythm, while the banjo plucked a metronomic counterpoint. The fiddler wailed softly beneath the woman’s full voice.

*   *   *

The crowd was absolutely rapt. Even Berklee and Doyle kept their eyes on Bliss. Rob had never seen anyone so thoroughly command a crowd’s attention. Even the packed audiences at the TV show tapings had not been this riveted. The cliché said that at a good concert, each audience member felt as if the performer sang directly to him or her; here, that was no cliché at all.

*   *   *

Bliss closed her eyes and bent her head back, letting her long braid sway with the music. She knew that, when she sang right and truly embodied the music, she
was
beautiful, that all the empty superlatives slathered on her were, at that moment, entirely true. If the song was graceful, so was she; if the words were biting and yet playful, her smile shone the same way. The twinkle in her eye gleamed like the notes flying from the banjo, and she swayed like the fiddler’s bow. The clunky, flesh-bound bulk of her life was made bearable by these freed-spirit moments when she became what the Tufa ultimately were: a song. Then she slowly twirled, the skirt flaring around her, and timed it perfectly so that her hand slid back around the microphone as she began to sing again.

Tell me what’s remembered or forgotten

When my heart hits the ground

There’s things I can’t get out of my mind

And they’re pulling me down.

She threw her free hand into the air, and the band stopped instantly, except for the plinking beat carried on the banjo.

I tried to run for the hills

But they were here and I was already theirs

I wanted to crawl into my grave

Give up my time to the things I can’t bear

But your voice called me from the edge

As I looked down into the comforting dark

And now I huddle at your feet

Bruised and bursting the seams of my heart.

Then the band thundered back, or at least as much as a bluegrass trio could thunder, carrying the melody as Bliss sang wordlessly in a style half yodel, half blues wail.

When they finished a measure later, the place went nuts.

*   *   *

Rob applauded and whistled through his teeth, as impressed by her presence as by her song. He’d just encountered a whole new genre; it was fucking
Goth bluegrass
.

And for a brief moment, the pain and loneliness no longer enveloped him.

*   *   *

The appreciative noise fell over Bliss like an old, comfortable blanket until a sharp whistle stood out from the rest. Her eyes flitted among the familiar faces until, this time, she spotted the new one. He had black hair and Tufa-dark skin, although like Peggy Goins, she instantly knew he had no Tufa blood in him. He watched her with the inadvertently blatant look she knew so well. She didn’t know
him,
though; how had she missed him earlier? His presence recalled the previous night’s dream, and that connection sent a rush of panic through her. Suddenly the room felt small, hot, and dangerous. Hiding it as best she could, she made for the exit.

*   *   *

Rob leaned close to Doyle and shouted over the noise, “Who is that again?”

“Bliss Overbay,” he said with real admiration. “Something, ain’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s something, all right,” Berklee said, “and it rhymes with ‘rich.’” She finished her beer in one long drink, belched, and waved to the bartender for another.

“She just does one song and then
leaves
?” Rob asked.

“It
is
a weeknight, and she lives pretty far out of town,” Doyle said.

“Good thing, too,” Berklee added as she took a drink of her fresh beer. “Much closer, and I don’t think you boys could stand it.”

“I have to meet her, man,” Rob said. “I have to tell her how good she was.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Berklee sighed.

“You better hurry, then,” Doyle said. “She’s probably already gone.”

*   *   *

Bliss saw the stranger break away from Doyle and Berklee Collins and move toward her, hindered by the crowd. It panicked her even more. She moved her fingers in a certain way, taught to her by her mother and stretching back in her family to a time when the rolling mountains grew jagged and tall into the ancient sky. It had the desired effect of hiding her from non-Tufa eyes, and she made her escape.

*   *   *

Rob pushed through the crowd as politely as he could. Outside, he saw no sign of Bliss, or dust from any recently departed vehicle. He rushed around the building, surprising the giddy young couple in the bed of a truck. But he saw no trace of the elusive dark-haired girl.

He walked to the highway and looked for taillights topping any of the hills in the distance. Gradually the excitement dissolved, and he realized how uncharacteristically he’d behaved. It was too soon after Anna, he reminded himself. Sure, he’d noticed how hot Berklee Collins was, but that was normal and he could handle it. He’d never seriously pursue a married woman, and he wasn’t the kind of man to inspire thoughts of infidelity in them anyway. But Bliss Overbay was something else entirely, and he couldn’t even identify what about her attracted him so strongly: her voice, her smile, her eyes, or her song. It was as if she’d simply sent out some kind of emotional tentacle and wrapped it around him as she sang.

But as his breathing slowed and he felt the cool night air on his sweaty skin, that intense hold faded. He turned and walked back to the Pair-A-Dice, his footsteps loud on the gravel.

6

Inside, Doyle and Berklee huddled together. Their expressions and gestures told Rob they were arguing. Not wanting to intrude, he detoured around the wall, until he tripped over the feet of the six-fingered banjo player.

The old man sat by himself on a wall bench, sipping coffee from a faded, stained mug. Even in the crowded, noisy room, he radiated a kind of earthy calm, and everyone seemed to respect his personal space. He looked up sharply as Rob nearly fell over him, and swung the cup away so it wouldn’t splash on his lap. “Careful, son. This is hot.”

“Sorry,” Rob said. When he realized who this was, he added, “Wow, you guys were great. I really enjoyed your set.”

The man had the same sparkly eyes as Bliss Overbay, only the skin around them was drawn tight and deeply lined with crow’s-feet, giving him the gaze of a Spaghetti Western cowboy. When he turned his head a certain way he reminded Rob of someone, but it faded before he could place it. “Thank you, son,” the old man said. “You a musician, too, I see.”

“How could you tell?”

“Only place you got work muscles is from the elbow down. If you just had ’em in one arm, I’d reckon you spent a little too much time in your room, pluckin’ your own banjo. But since you got ’em in both, I figure it’s from playing the gee-tar or something.”

“Good eye.”

“I been around a long time.”

Rob nodded at the empty space on the bench beside him. “May I join you?”

“Reckon not. I figure you’ll want to talk about music and all, and I just ain’t interested. Talking about music is for the folks who can’t play it.”

Rob paused, startled by the blatant rejection. Did the guy secretly recognize him from the TV show? “Well … I play,
and
I talk about it. What does that make me?”

“You must not do either one of them too well, I reckon.” Then the old man turned to watch the people across the room, and Rob knew he’d been dismissed.

Annoyed, he worked his way back to the bar, where Doyle now stood alone, scowling into his beer.

“Where’s Berklee?” he asked.

“Pissed off,” Doyle answered with no apparent malice. “Apparently, I didn’t blink enough while Bliss was singing, so she thought I was staring.”

“Hard not to,” Rob acknowledged.

“Yeah,” he agreed with weary admiration. “But you’d think after damn near twenty years of knowing that me and Bliss ain’t never going to be nothing but friends, Berklee would be
over
this. I mean, we all grew up together, it’s a little bitty town, and if I ain’t hooked up with Bliss before now, I ain’t likely to, you know?”

“Women are funny.”

“True enough.”

“So what’s this Bliss girl’s story? She live around here?”

“Other end of the valley, up the mountain.” He pointed with his beer. “Her family used to own a lot of land around here, and she managed to hang on to some of it, including that big ole house.”

“What does her husband do?”

He smiled. “Bliss ain’t the kind to let a man have too much influence, you know?”

“She’s gay?”

“Naw, she ain’t gay, or at least I don’t think she is. She’s just … comfortable being alone. She’s a big deal in the Tufa. What they call a ‘First Daughter.’”

Berklee pushed through the crowd and stood before them, arms folded. “I’m sorry,” she barked, in the same way another woman might’ve said, “Go to hell.”

“Ah, me, too, honey,” Doyle said magnanimously. He stepped aside and gallantly gestured at the empty space against the wall. She slid into it, still glaring. “That’s how she apologizes,” he explained to Rob as he handed his wife a fresh beer.

“My whole life, every guy in this goddam town has wanted to get in Bliss Overbay’s blue jeans, and it’s just getting old.” Berklee said sulkily. “It ain’t solid gold down there, you know? It just ain’t.”

“I don’t want in anybody’s blue jeans but yours,” Doyle said patiently.

Rob took a long drink of his beer, unable to get the image of Bliss out of his mind. As the band began to play again, he found himself picturing her standing at the front of the stage, swaying to the music, dancing alone like a pagan priestess in her circle.

*   *   *

Doyle and Berklee dropped Rob off at the Catamount Corner just before midnight. He had to use the buzzer to get Mrs. Goins to let him in. He was a little drunk, and as he undressed, he felt the usual pangs of loneliness begin. He thought about shutting the window, but the slight chill made the prospect of the thick blankets even more inviting.

So, as he had done so many times in the past three months, he carefully turned off all the lights, crawled into bed alone, and cried himself to sleep.

*   *   *