Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  But I was seriously getting off track.

  The folksinger had died in New Orleans. I had been to New Orleans several times, the first time after Michigan and Keith, before Boulder and Art, and was far from averse to returning there, and Oxford was conveniently located halfway to New Orleans.

  It was a time to ponder the following sad truths.

  Once again I had time on my hands. As usual I wasn’t especially needed anywhere. Nye would have located all my sugar by now. I was driving in the wrong direction if I wanted to head south, but five minutes with Google Maps would quickly remedy that situation.

  Which it did.

  Oxford was over nine hours away. But Interstate 55 was about 150 miles away, and there was a hotel there where I dutifully made a reservation. I would get there early in the evening. I was going to Oxford in the morning. I thought longingly about my house in Boulder, but Nye was there keeping it safe, using my sugar, mysteriously baking or doing something else that didn’t urgently require my presence.

  I was going to search for traces of Logan Kind. And if I needed a reason, which I didn’t, then it could be either that “Pittenweem Girl” was about as pretty a song as I had heard in a very long time, or that I felt slightly guilty and very weird about walking away from a death scene with the dead man’s zip drive.

  Five

  The drive had been a slow crawl through construction.

  As promised, the hotel stood close to where the two highways met. The sign was unlit this early in the evening and rose high over the road, which was good because the entrance was well hidden. As a result, I took the turn too fast, then had to brake even faster as the road climbed and twisted up a steep slope through a bunch of tall pine trees to open into the parking area that ran all four sides, surrounding the brownish red-tiled two-level building.

  “Continental breakfast served till ten in the morning. The gravy’s homemade.” Her name was Ruthie. Not Ruth. Ruthie. She handed me back my credit card. “Y’all like Mexican?” I was momentarily confused. Mexican what? Did she mean the cuisine or the people? Was the continental breakfast Mexican? Was there such a thing as Mexican gravy? There was a slew of options to choose from. I decided she must mean food.

  “Yes Ma’am,” I cautiously ventured.

  “One cent margaritas with your dinner entrée over at Rosa’s tonight.”

  “That sounds reasonable.” I was a lot hungrier now than I had been at lunchtime.

  “Only goes till six.”

  The clock behind the front desk read 5:47. We had both looked at it at the same time.

  Ruthie was seemingly able to read my mind. “Rosa’s is no more than ten minutes away.”

  “I might not make it.”

  She looked hard at me. “It ain’t a real fancy place.” Did she think I was planning on showering and changing into a tux?

  Then Ruthie smiled a smile of quiet power, picked up the phone, and rapidly dialed a number from memory.

  She barked into the receiver. “It’s me. I’m sending y’all one over. He talks funny.” She giggled then abruptly hung up. “They’ll be sure and give you the special when you get there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Hot tub and pool open till eleven tonight.”

  “That’s good.” And I meant it.

  “The hot tub water is good and hot tonight. The manager likes to turn the temperature way down when he’s on duty.”

  “Is he on duty now?” I asked with rising concern.

  Ruthie smiled once. “Nossir,” she said, “he’s visiting his dirty self on a new young lady tonight.” She certainly did like to giggle.

  * * *

  By the time I got to Rosa’s it was a little after six, but the words “Ruthie sent me” had the desired effect, and a huge salt-circumferenced goldfish bowl of a drink came for the next best thing to nothing with my combination enchilada platter. I had to use both hands to get the glass up to my mouth, and when I did I realized I was poised to consume about a gallon of tequila lightly garnished with lime juice.

  * * *

  The temperature in the hotel’s indoor pool was only marginally cooler than the hot tub. Ruthie had not boasted idly. Both were piping hot and, for the first half hour, both were exclusively mine. The only question remaining was which location to broil in—the big pot or the smaller one? The small did have the option of bubbles. The big was theoretically just about large enough to swim in, but doing laps while marinating held little appeal. So I sat in the bubbling pot and stewed myself into a state of mild tranquility, helped by my monster bowl o’ margarita.

  “Can we share with you?”

  It was a young girl’s voice.

  She was perhaps eight or nine—pretty running to puppy fattish, and squeezed into what I assumed was last year’s swimsuit. Her mother—they were simply too alike for any other possibility—who was perhaps in her mid-forties, stood behind her. I smiled and nodded. They both smiled back and clambered in. I couldn’t help but notice that the mother’s green one-piece swimsuit was a loose fit. She was solidly built and stared off in a way that made me think she might normally wear glasses. Fighting my way out of my stupor, I smiled and nodded to them both once again.

  As they started to submerge, the bubbles abruptly ended. The younger of the two was out of the tub in a trice, her little wet hand cranking the jet timer to the maximum setting. Then she got back under the water and settled herself down like an old pro. It’s been my experience that the regulations restricting minors from hot tubs are rarely enforced.

  The little girl sucked in her breath quickly. “It’s hot,” she announced loudly.

  “You’ll get used to it, honey.” Her mother spoke softly. “You can go cool off in the big pool after.”

  There was little chance of that. She was mistaken, although it was certainly a logical enough suggestion under normal circumstances.

  The younger one began to talk.

  “We’re going to Grandma’s.” I could only nod my head.

  “It’s a long way.” I nodded some more.

  “It’s almost my birthday. I’m going to be nine.” I smiled at that.

  She smiled right back. “She’ll take me shopping at the mall. She always does.” I smiled some more.

  “I need to get new folders for school. I’m almost finished third grade.” I went back to nodding.

  “Which kind should I get?”

  This question would require a verbal response. I was in trouble and played for time. “What are the choices?” Good God, I sounded half asleep.

  She thought hard for a moment. “Taylor Swift. Hello Kitty. Minecraft.”

  I was vaguely familiar with the first two.

  It was time for more stalling. “Which do you like best?”

  There was another pause. “I like Taylor Swift.”

  Then she changed tack abruptly. “Do you like to go shopping?” Without thinking I shook my head. That answer clearly surprised her. She looked disbelievingly at me.

  “We’re getting a pizza tonight,” she said. I smiled encouragingly.

  “Do you like pizza?”

  This was much safer territory. “I do.”

  “You could come and have some with my Mom and me. We always get a really big one. Would you like to have some pizza with us?”

  “Honey . . . ” At that her mother tried to cut her off.

  I hadn’t expected the question. I was slightly drunk, and very tired, and the water temperature wasn’t helping.

  “Good God,” I found myself crying out. “No. I wouldn’t.”

  She instantly looked kicked in. I had answered too quickly, in too hurtful a tone. Now I had to do something. Anything. Shit. I hastily backpedaled. “That’s very kind of you. I’ve already had my dinner this evening but thank you so much for asking me.” This was going tits up at a rapid rat
e. If it were humanly possible to sound any more like a pompous ass, I couldn’t imagine how. There was a long moment of silence. I could think of nothing safe to say. The three of us sat in the tub as the bubbles continued to bubble.

  Miserably I reviewed my remaining options. I could offer a retraction; inform them that I would indeed love to have pizza with them. Then I could find a convenience store, buy some ice cream, and offer dessert by way of recompense. Or I could stick my pompous ass head under the hot foaming water until they left or I passed out.

  I was leaning hard towards the latter when they climbed out. It seemed an abrupt action. They said nothing. I noticed that mother and daughter tied the blue hotel towels tightly around their waists as they walked carefully across the wet floor and out into the cool of the hotel hallway.

  A moment later the mother returned. She bent down and began to speak as I sat in the tub feeling stark naked and exposed and apprehensive. She wasn’t smiling. This wasn’t going to go swimmingly. She spoke in the slow measured way people do when they have carefully planned out what they intend to say, and the person they’re saying it to isn’t terribly bright.

  “My daughter thinks I need a man in my life. She’s a sweetie and she means well.”

  “I’m very sorry if I seemed rude. I wasn’t expecting the question.” I briefly considered the notion of admitting to general fatigue and partial inebriation.

  “You were rude. She’s only eight.”

  “She’s very sweet.”

  “She’s asked quite a few men to eat with us before.”

  I said nothing.

  “Mostly they were good sports and said yes. A few were polite and said no but in a nice way.”

  “Then they clearly have much better manners than me.”

  This last lame-assed mea culpa elicited a withering response.

  “That wouldn’t be hard. Can I ask you a question?”

  I was again silent. I waited on the rest of my impending bollocking with very little hope of salvation.

  “Do you stay in places like this because you’re cheap, or because it’s all you can afford?”

  “I’m cheap.” I wondered where was this going.

  She nodded. “That’s what I thought. Some of us stay here because it’s all we can afford. Sometimes it’s more than we can afford. You’re a snob and an asshole. You’re probably hoping some skinny skank half your age will show up. You’d manage to eat with her I’m sure.”

  This conversation was moving along quite wretchedly. I prayed for an end. And mercifully it came. The woman stopped talking at that point, gave me a last look of abject pity, and walked away.

  I waited for a truly shitty two minutes before I grabbed two of the blue towels, slunk out of the hot tub, and turned the bubble maker off. I sat at the side of the pool on a precarious white plastic chair beside a matching plastic table and pulled out my phone.

  Then I looked up.

  From where I sat the hotel foyer was partially visible through a wall of steamy glass. I could clearly see the mother and daughter. They both wore matching fluffy bathrobes as they sat side by side at a glass coffee table. On the table stood an open pizza box, a pile of napkins, a generic soda bottle half filled with alarmingly green liquid, and two red plastic cups. The mother was eating and laughing. The daughter was eating and talking and laughing. There was a television set mounted to a wall and turned on. They were both half-watching. Mostly hotels keep their televisions on the more rabid news programs, but this one was turned to a kid-friendly sitcom where long-in-the-tooth highschoolers in outlandish clothes spent their days engaged in wholesome hijinks in a bright locker-lined hallway.

  The pair of them never looked once in my direction.

  They both ate. It all looked so wonderful, and so blessedly simple. I could easily have shared a pizza with them. I could have offered to pay, and I could have steadfastly refused to take no for an answer. I could have spent some time in their company, watched some dumb television show, and tried not to be a snob and an asshole.

  But I was, as identified, assuredly both these things: a snob, who eats a lot of his meals alone and pretends he likes it, and an asshole, who wastes inordinate amounts of time gazing wistfully at thin women who are considerably younger than him, and who never ever choose to gaze back.

  * * *

  This was getting me nowhere. I turned away from the window and fired up my phone.

  I unwisely Googled the word “circumstance,” which got me predictably everywhere and nowhere; the first few selections were word definitions, with a film on teen lesbians arbitrarily thrown in for light relief. I tried adding the word “song,” and spent the next few screens wading through references to “Pomp and Circumstance,” and more than a few strenuous YouTube school graduation ceremonies. I tried adding the title of Kind’s song and got nothing.

  “The Town Where She Loved Me” was, as I already knew, another track on the Crofter album and, editing it into a separate search, that was pretty much all she wrote. I liked the title. It reminded me of something, a poem maybe, or the name of a poetry collection. Adding the word “circumstance” to that song title produced nothing more.

  Returning to the Amazon site, I scrolled more carefully through track listings for the three Deltatones albums and found nothing. I pulled up reviews of the Crofter album to see if anyone mentioned “The Town Where She Loved Me” by name. Lots of people did. Many people loved it. But no one cared to compare it to any other song, any other song titled “Circumstance” or titled “Pomp and Circumstance,” or any other song by the apparently piece-of-shit Deltatones, or titled anything at all for that matter.

  I opened Amazon music and located Crofter. The year of its original release was listed as 1973. A compact disc reissue had come twenty years later. The album length was short. I recalled that that was more normal in the old analog days; the nine tracks came in at a terse thirty-nine minutes. Perhaps the CD reissue had been extended with alternate takes and the usual bonus material of questionable value. I checked. It wasn’t.

  I opened the MP3. The first track was titled “Eddleston.” I found my earbuds and began to listen. It began with guitar, either tuned high or capoed up. The fingerpicking was unbelievable—a lithe and dexterous blur. There was a droning, bagpiping sort of effect in the background as Logan Kind played. Were there two recorded guitar tracks? If there weren’t, then the lower strings of his guitar were obviously detuned down to create that effect. For some reason, I was prepared to believe that the effect was created in one take on just the one instrument. I listened carefully. At first I was certain that indeed, a capo had been used to get his top strings higher, but the low bass strings refuted that notion. Had he used a partial capo perhaps?

  As I indulged my half-baked guitar theories, it occurred to me that the realm of the Internet had to be a ready, if less than wholly reliable, depository of Kind esoterica, no doubt eagerly posited in frenzied postings by his loyal and persnickety fans. My tuning questions may well have a ready answer close at hand.

  My body had dried and returned to a normal temperature by the time I entered the cyber confines of Croftertales.com, an unofficial website dedicated to Logan Kind and his solitary musical offering that contained a catholic selection of postings by the few, the fervent, and the frighteningly faithful.

  On the site the few musicians who played on the album were listed and discussed, along with the producer and string arranger. The musicians’ names were few and meant nothing to me. Most of the record was solo voice and acoustic guitar. Bass and drums were featured on a few tracks and credited to several session musicians. Logan Kind had not had a full-time band backing him for the recording of Crofter.

  I learned much about Mr. Kind. He had once considered adopting the stage name William McGonagall to honor Scotland’s arguably worst poet and most infamous self-proclaimed tragedian. Kind was reputedly chronically
shy, and often turned his back on his audience when he played. He employed all manner of his own alternate guitar tunings as he played, and used some of the extended time facing away from the crowd to complete his tuning; thus his songs were performed live with long gaps between songs, as he spoke very little to the audience. Kind’s songs were now very difficult to duplicate exactly, as no one could figure out precisely how to go about tuning a guitar to play them. No concert footage was thought to exist of a Logan Kind performance. At least, none had surfaced so far.

  Some facts tended to appear almost randomly.

  Kind had been deeply frustrated at how few copies of Crofter had sold.

  He had loved his big sister deeply, and he was proud of her acting successes. He had hoped to someday create a soundtrack for one of her performances, but this had never transpired.

  He had angered his parents by not completing his university studies.

  He swam on his university team during his first year, but had dropped out of the team before dropping out of college altogether.

  He had attended the local comprehensive high school before that. By contrast, his older sister had attended a posh public school nearby, but that was a girls-only institution where, I had already learned, her mother was the deputy head.

  I paused for a moment to consider the irony that a college swimmer and one-time swimming teacher had managed to drown.

  The recording of Crofter had allegedly been a troubled experience for all concerned. In the studio the producer had recommended a noted London studio arranger for the string parts on Crofter, but the usually timid Logan had apparently argued strenuously that a student he had known at the university could do a much better and cheaper job. Logan had managed to prevail, and Morris Dean had orchestrated the album, using himself, his younger sister, Margery, and two of her very young friends to play the two cellos, viola and violin parts.

  If there was one thing that all the postings agreed on, it was that Morris Dean was a genius, and that Crofter was the finer album because of his participation. If Logan’s career had all but nosedived, then Dean had gone on to become something of a star, or at least, an arranger very much in demand. His orchestrations became all but ubiquitous in British folk rock music for a remarkably long time. There followed an extensive listing of every recording Dean had been involved in. There were many I was familiar with, and several I had both bought and admired.