Ever since Sam had knocked on my door one day the previous summer, I’d been going to all of Don’s shows. Don was a banjo player and the front man for a band that was sort of famous around the county, Sam had told me. Later I would find out this was an understatement—Don’s band was notable throughout West Virginia and many other places where bluegrass music is revered.
The first time I’d seen him play, his band had stood on the wooden portion of a flatbed truck, shaded by a white pop-up tent. He tapped the microphone and smiled. He did not pander, but the crowd paid attention. I didn’t know the songs yet, but I knew they were being played very well. The sound a bluegrass banjo makes when it repeats itself—metal up, metal down. They seemed to throw the song around to each other. Don would sing the verse and then step back from the mic. Then all five men would lean together for the chorus.
When you encounter for the first time a thing that will change your experience of living, something like an alarm bell goes off. The tall woman who did not love me was like that. Her shaved neck and the backs of her ears and how she turned them to me when she danced and the light that bounced off the skin there—very pale. Also, bluegrass.
I sat in the back of the sedan. The mandolin player was driving, and a man who worked as the chef in the gourmet cafeteria that served the scientists who worked on the famous Pocahontas County telescope sat shotgun. He drank from a can of Nattie Light nestled in a yellow coozie.
So you’re gonna DD? he said to the mandolin player.
Well, the mandolin player said, within reason. He made a gimme gesture, and the Chef took a beer from a twenty-four pack at his feet and handed it to the mandolin player, who opened it with one hand and plopped it into the driver’s cup holder. I had been around the proverbial block long enough by this point to know that drinking in a moving car was a thing not infrequently done here and not necessarily cause for extreme alarm, but not long enough to let my sense overcome the thrill.
We stopped at a green double-wide set back from the road. The thin man from that afternoon—Jesse—got in the back with me. He had to fold himself to fit, then hunched low and forward. He took off his bright yellow West Virginia Mountaineers hoodie to reveal a T-shirt that bore the name of Don’s band. The faces of its members hung loose on his body.
You’re a big fan, then? I said.
Yeah, Jesse said. They’re cool as shit. Don’s my uncle.
The Chef passed back two silver beers, and Jesse and I took them and opened them in twin pops. Jesse fished an Altoids box from his deep jeans pocket, opened it, and withdrew a joint. He lit it and passed it around without hitting it himself. When it returned to him, Jesse pulled on it a long time, then slumped back against the sedan’s leather seat. When the mandolin player prompted him to pass it forward again, Jesse snapped to attention. He had been somewhere else.
We wound our way down the south side of Droop Mountain. The mandolin player talked. I learned he had a male roommate he took care of and that he drove race cars. It showed—he drove the curves of 219 with a speed I’d never known and let the car drift over the center line into the other lane to keep from braking, even when we went around a blind curve.
If someone’s coming, I’ll see their lights, he said.
Route 219 widened and flattened as we cruised into Lewisburg, where I went every week for Kashi cereal and fresh grapefruits, purchased with food stamps issued to me by the US government. Buoyed by funding for the nearby women’s prison and the osteopathic medical school, Lewisburg had been recently reborn as a prosperous college town, drawing cool young Appalachians and DC summer people. There was an Irish pub for craft beer and folk music. Teenagers stood on corners sipping smoothies from bubble-topped plastic cups, and young men in khaki pants and institution-bearing sweatshirts held glass doors open for their skirted dates.
The mandolin player turned the car down a little side street, then maneuvered it through an alley, where we parked in a special, semi-legal spot behind the bar where Don’s band was playing. My companions scooped ice cubes into red Solo cups and fixed themselves Old Crow and Sprites. I accepted mine with thanks. I appreciated that drink, the way it fizzed and popped carbonation into my nostrils, the way I appreciated the whole night—it was free, something gotten for nothing.
Don’s band stood with their backs to the bar’s plate-glass front window, so that a passerby outside would get just the butts of their baseball caps. Inside we were luckier. If old-time music is sweet, all strum and pluck, bluegrass is salty. A banjo made for bluegrass has a metal resonator and is played three-finger style with metal finger picks so that its sound is one hundred times louder than a drum skin alone, either plucked or strummed.
The sign above the liquor bottles behind the bar was red, the tips of the crowd’s cigarettes were red, and Don’s Converse sneakers were red. The sparked ends of fifty cigarettes went down every time Don thunked on a melody note with his thumb pick, then up again with every whirring of his index and middle fingers over the drone notes. This happened freaky fast—cigarettes twitched to keep up; people jangled their limbs with the same energy they might use to appreciate a rangy electric guitar solo. I perceived the low-down power of the upright bass, played by a billiard bald man in a Hawaiian button-down shirt, almost subaudibly—felt in my throat more than heard in my ears.
This is good, I said aloud, to Jesse apparently, as he was suddenly the only person within spitting distance I knew.
Jesse had a beer to his lips, but he was looking hard at the band over its rim. His eyes were open. He barely moved, but he did move. His breath filled his small chest and then left it; his throat, white beneath a puff of goatee, glugged. Little whiffs of vitality—he emitted them like a star, first in blasts, then in a steady, gentle pattern to match the song’s rhythm. He seemed to plump, turn redder, perhaps trying to match the bar’s color. Jesse let the beer can fall and looked down at me. I arranged my face to show him that I was serious about what I had said about the music, that it was meant to be truer than a thumbs-up. Jesse lifted his eyes back to the band, but I felt him see me too, felt him register my greeting and reply in kind. The extra fabric of his jeans, loose on his body, tented ever so slightly in my direction.
Jesse was a frequency you had to tune into. Once I tuned in, I started noticing things. If you asked him a question, he’d say, “Ummm,” or “Hmm,” and think about it—really think about it—a long time. He asked me questions and listened to my answers. Questions! It’s such a small thing, the construction of a sentence and its intonation, ending high instead of low, but it was huge to me, a quiet and obedient child; it created a space for me to move into. What did you study in college? Jesse asked me. Do you miss your family? Why did you come here?
I bought Jesse a shot. He went down to it instead of lifting it up to him. He bought me a shot and a beer. I drank them. Girl can drink, he said. I could; I had the genes for it—an alcoholic’s tolerance and ability to stay upright even when blitzed. We went back to the sedan and made ourselves another drink, except with less Sprite and more Old Crow. We sat on two cement parking barriers. He told me that he had grown up listening to his uncle play, but that now he had his own band, in which he played the upright bass.
They don’t want to practice like I want to practice, he said.
I think I might be a writer, I said.
I remember coming back up Droop Mountain, Jesse’s hand up my shirt, the lights of an oncoming car lighting up his neck, his mouth on my neck, the Chef turning around to look at us, the mandolin player watching in the rearview mirror. I remember waking, dry-mouthed, naked, and on my back, as I never slept, my big breasts lolled out across my stomach, Jesse’s spine to me, his white ass, my white comforter, my cat trotting around the bed wanting to get fed. The light shifting; Jesse shifting to face me.
He got up and rooted around in my cupboards until he found the coffee. Sitting stock-still in bed, I listened to him place the filter, scoop the grains, and pour the water. He brought me some in a
yellow mug.
Jesse pointed to a cowboy hat hanging from a peg on the white wall, another thing left by a previous VISTA girl.
You’d look good in that cowboy hat, he said.
Yeah? I said.
Yeah, he said.
We talked like that from the beginning—easy.
I drove him back to his parents’ house, which had a pretty wooden fence I hadn’t noticed when we’d picked him up the night before. He kept his neck slotted through my open passenger-side window a long time before he said good-bye. He told me about what he was going to do that day—help his mother around the house—and asked what I would do.
Work, I said. I had girls to call, and I wondered what I could possibly say to them now. I felt damaged, unfit for consumption or dispensation of counsel. I knew I had a prescription for Plan B somewhere in my house, in one of the boxes of books I’d lugged from Philadelphia. Finding it would take some time, a couple hours maybe. I drove away, turned onto a side road, opened my car door—ding ding ding—bedded down in the snow like a deer, and sat there for a long time.
Jesse began inviting me to the Tuesday music nights he hosted at the white board-and-batten house near the Greenbrier River that his grandmother had roamed until she died. At first, I used the truth that Tuesday nights were tutoring nights at Mountain Views as my excuse; the way that night had gone down with Jesse gave me an unsettled feeling I didn’t want to linger over. The red-haired girl continued to struggle over the algebra problems I gave her. She was razor smart, that much was clear; she just got the order of operations mixed up.
When tutoring was over, I drove my Nicholas County charges up to the crest of Cheat Mountain, battling snow or rain as the altitude rose, to where their parents would meet my car. There was often comedy in those rides—How old are you? one girl would ask cheerfully as she scrolled through my iPod looking for Rihanna or Lady Gaga, anything but the pop country played by the only reliable radio station—and there was often joy: snacks and pumping the music loud against the cold night and just being together, people of not so different ages but very different origins, swapping stories of fish not caught and insults not internalized. There was sometimes something else—what is it about being in a moving car at night with music playing that makes questions that have long been burning in silence finally break into speech?
Usually after the students slammed my doors and climbed into their parents’ cars, I turned around and drove the curves back down to 219 and then to my home on Droop. But one Tuesday night there was only one girl for me to drive up the mountain, and she told me a story so long and so good about how generous she and her parents had been to each other through a medical situation involving the failings of so many people who are not supposed to fail you, and then we sat in silence listening to Rihanna for the rest of the ride. Her resilience and her ambition and the weight of her responsibilities rolled off of her in waves, a smell I could have kept smelling forever. That night when I got back to 219, instead of cruising on into Hillsboro toward home, I took the left at the church with the slender white steeple and parked beside Jesse’s house.
That house was kitchen—ancient black cast-iron stove, washing machine that served as counter space, Tweety Bird highball glasses—and it was living room—pink couch, ruffled curtains, trays of cigarette or weed ash stuffing the air. It was always the mandolin player, Jesse on bass, the Chef on guitar, and a bearish, good-natured blond man on banjo—clawhammer for old-time, not three-finger for bluegrass, but he was Jesse’s friend, and even the wrong kind of banjo was better to Jesse than none at all. Other people often stopped by—Ruth, Peter, the boisterous DMHB brother, the driver of the black hatchback.
The mandolin player would call a song—“How Mountain Girls Can Love” or “This Weary Heart You Stole Away” or “Little Maggie”—and they would all sing. I wait for you dear all night long, It seems you never do get home, I fall asleep at the break of day, Just to drive these awful blues away. These songs are mostly about heartbreak, cheating on someone and being cheated on, leaving home, or death. Oh yonder stands little Maggie, With a dram glass in her hands, She’s drinking away her troubles, She’s a courting some other man. There was almost always longing, there was almost always sorrow. I recognized myself in them.
Music nights were long. They began for the men around 7 or 8 o’clock with dinner, usually hot dogs or a pot of sautéed meat that Jesse would fix on the cast-iron stove and that he and the band would eat together around the darkened TV. I usually arrived during the beer phase, Budweiser or Nattie Light in twenty-four-packs that sat front and center in Jesse’s fridge and that I sometimes brought myself, stopping first at the Marathon gas station. Playing music and drinking were yoked together, and if in the pause between one song and the next there was not a beer ready and waiting, the men and I turned around looking at each other, confused, until someone—usually Jesse—got up to toss another round.
Generous does not approach what Jesse was—he would give you a ride home and a can of Natural Light and thank you for it. He put in ten-hour days hanging drywall with Peter and Trey, and then liked to sit quietly watching television or drinking a beer. I believe he was happiest in this way, when he could be quiet, when he could look out from behind his eyes at a room full of people and watch them and not be expected to do anything. He liked for the party to be big; he liked for people to have a good time.
Unlike many bass players who lean into the mammoth instrument and work it over with bopping shoulders, when Jesse played, only his fingers moved. His left hand went high, fretting the chords, and his right hand went low, plucking at the bass’s great ropes. He didn’t hit the string with the long sides of his fingers, but rather hooked each string with his fingertip and pulled it, with insane gentleness.
Liquor came later in the night—plastic handles of Old Crow mixed with soda. A certain mood took over then. We might make necklaces from Froot Loops and licorice strands, or duct-tape beer cans together like scepters and pronounce each other knights. It was delight; it was camp—the sensibility that Susan Sontag wrote about.
There was no end to how long I could sit and listen to Jesse and his friends play. More, I would say at midnight, when I had to be at work at nine the next morning. Then, later: More, I would say at four in the morning, when I had to get up at eight to take the girls on a college trip to North Carolina.
Eventually, they would all put down their instruments, too drunk to play. There was a feeling at that point in the night of approaching a tight rope and choosing, masterfully, to walk across it. You could begin to feel triumphant, like a victor in your own life, a victor in your own story. Perhaps it was the Quiet Zone or perhaps it was the quiet hills around this electric white house, but there was a sense here that whatever you did could not possibly count, that no one was watching and no one was keeping score. No one in the life I’d known before knew where I was or could imagine it.
One evening in May 2010, Jesse let me and Ruth host a full-on, flowered-hat-wearing, mint-julep-drinking, Kentucky Derby party at his grandmother’s house. It was Ruth’s idea—she was from Kentucky and knew all the real things to do. We came to Jesse’s house early, and Jesse played sous chef, watching dutifully as Ruth demonstrated how to crush the fresh mint with powdered sugar into each glass for the perfect julep, then repeating her instructions with his own hands in glass after glass.
I felt glad to see Jesse in a new way that night: something was growing there, but I didn’t know what. It wasn’t sexual exactly or romantic; after Jesse and I had slept together, I’d told him it was a onetime thing. He said he understood, that being friends was fine with him.
I had the sense that some of his friends thought Jesse was, on the whole, a weak man. They teased him a good bit and sometimes spoke over him, but it was his usually gentle demeanor, I think, that drew me to Jesse. We could sit next to one another on a couch on a porch and talk all night about nothing in particular. We had no shared experience like these words might suggest, b
ut we shared something else—a drive, maybe, or an obsession, deep down at the bottom of our quiet selves. We both wanted to say something, I think, something we had each long been keeping inside—but what?
Peter came that night, and his sister who was in town did too, and a few VISTA girls who were new, working at sites in Marlinton and Lewisburg. Trey and Bill and the other DMHB pulled up in their Subarus and Tacomas and hatchbacks. After we’d bet on our horses and watched the races and lost, we sat on the roofs of our cars in floppy hats. As the light died across the field behind Jesse’s house and the clouds moved fast over the valley, we flew kites and played ultimate Frisbee. The Chef and the mandolin player showed up, and the men of music night played outside in the cool May air, and we drank the last of the mint julep syrup. When that ran out, we drank straight bourbon, and when that ran out, Old Milwaukee, and when that ran out, Natural Light, and when that ran out, we piled into Bill and Peter’s pickups and drove the miles down to the Greenbrier River, where the drivers turned the trucks around and backed them straight down the embankment, and we fell out into the water and floated on our backs in the dark.
My clothes were wet, and my throat was dry, and it was maybe two in the morning. Several couples had already taken the bedrooms on the first floor, and I knew there would be more Frisbee and fun in the morning. Jesse told me I could stay in the attic—there was an air mattress there—so I made my way up the narrow stairs to the stuffy attic and climbed aboard. Before I closed my eyes, I saw a pink tube jutting out of the attic closet, and I stood to see what it was. It was an inflatable blow-up doll of a woman with voluminous breasts that fell out of her string bikini top. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were dumb. I put her back in the closet.
The Third Rainbow Girl Page 23