The Dragon's Playlist

by Laura Bickle

  When he completed the song, he placed his violin and bow back in the case. His withered hands were shaky on the latches.

  “That song...what is it?” I asked.

  He laid his hands on the case, as if making certain the music was contained. The lines on his hands looked like the rivers of land against a black sea. He smiled and shook his head. “Music from a long time ago,” he said. “From the war.”

  I kept very still. He would speak of the war as if in a trance, and I didn’t want to interrupt it.

  “The song is from Nam. In my mind, Nam will always be trees and earth-bound clouds and blood. Green and white and red. The Cong sniped at us for days in August of ’70. My company got slowly picked off at night, but we did our best to hold the line until the rest of the division showed up. Ground was too muddy to bury the dead. The blood became the color of rust in the dirt, and the ground kept spitting our guys back up again. Like some monster rejecting even the dead. The sniper bullets rattled on in the darkness for a week. Always at night. But then things became very quiet. No shots for hours.

  “We were on orders to stay at the line. Our company was new, inexperienced. But that didn’t matter. We patrolled the line. One of my buddies and I were doing recon one night in August. Mud was up to our knees. The mud kept spitting up strange things. Signs and portents.” He shook his head and laughed. “Bones. Knives. Bits of pottery and cigarette lighters. I even found a piece of a vinyl record. The rain never let up. The heavens poured down and the earth vomited up. The line between sky and earth blurred. It was all just one hellish green mush and silver sky clinging to the ground. Easy to get turned around and lost. And we sure as hell got lost.

  “We found a little house in the woods that night. Not much more than a hut. Just one light on, burning. And there was music.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “My buddy and I crept to a gap in the reeds, watched. There was a little boy inside with his mother, playing music together. It sounded like strings, a bit like the fiddle that I remembered.

  “They heard us. Mother scooted the little boy away, doused the light. We circled around to the opening. I swore I heard a knife scraping in the darkness.

  “So...I did only what a dumb American would do. I knocked. I had picked up a few words of Vietnamese in our time there...a very few words. I told her we were American soldiers. That we meant her no harm...but could we warm ourselves by her fire for a few minutes?

  “I think that’s what I said. Or else I told her that we were on fire.

  “The door opened a crack, and the blade of a machete peeked through. The woman said something to us in Vietnamese. Her eyes locked on mine, through a tangle of hair. It was like looking into the face of this wild, godforsaken place.

  “But I thought I understood: ‘Đi vào. Come.’

  “The door opened, and we came inside. She didn’t speak to us any further. At first, we thought she was afraid. There were many stories of soldiers, on both sides, who raped and killed innocent civilians. Opening her door to us was...such an exercise in trust on her part.” Grandpa shook his head.

  “Or a trap. We were the enemy.

  “We didn’t know that at first, of course. She fed us rice. She brought some of her husband’s clothes for us to wear while she dried ours over the fire. I assumed he was off to war, a soldier. The boy was too young to fight. Maybe five. He was quiet. Silent as fog.

  “And I was right about the husband. There was a folded pamphlet in the pocket of the pants she gave me. I couldn’t read it, but I recognized the flag printed on it. Gold star on a red and blue background. My buddy and I exchanged glances, but didn’t speak of it.”

  “She was one of the Viet Cong?” I breathed.

  Grandpa sighed. “It’s hard to know for sure. It could’ve just been a bit of propaganda the husband had picked up. He could’ve been a soldier, or he could’ve been dead.

  “People get swept up in war. Little wars, big wars. They’re much the same thing. Each side believes in its own moral superiority. No side believes they’re on the side of the monsters. And friends can sometimes be found among the enemy.

  “This woman was kind to us. She fed us, clothed us with her meager possessions, let us wash in her rain bucket, and let her son play the Đàn hồ for us. She allowed us to sleep by the fire, didn’t try to slit our throats as we slept. She had, I imagine, very little power over her world. But it’s in small things that we show who we are and what we’re capable of. Those times when no one is watching.

  “My friend and I found our way back to our regiment the next day, clean, shaved, and with full bellies. Our fellows questioned where we had been, but we never told. We simply smiled, smoked the last of our cigarettes, and said an angel had visited us. And that much was true.”

  Grandpa stared out the window, lost in another time and another place. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my time on this earth, it’s that there’s no black and white. Nothing is ever that simple.

  “I looked for her after. I remembered the way…the way her tangled hair fell over her shoulder, and the eyes of that little boy. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. But I bribed a helo pilot to take me back to that area to search for friendlies. I found nothing. I don’t know if the house had been destroyed and the jungle grown up over it. Or if she’d never really existed.”

  Silence stretched, and I knew his tale was done. I asked, “Will you teach me that music?” I wanted to taste it, to understand how he saw the music of his enemy.

  He smiled, nodded. I could see him pushing the past back from the present, as if it were a physical effort. He reached for the violin. “Try the harmony first.”

  *

  I learned three new songs before Grandpa faded, and a nurse came in to impose a nap on him. I kissed his cheek and headed out into the afternoon. The sun was warm on my face, gently releasing the fragrance of the weak cherry blossoms in the parking lot.

  I frowned as I approached the car. A piece of paper was stuck beneath the windshield wiper. My hands balled into fists. I couldn’t afford a ticket, but I’d told the deputy I’d fix the broken windshield. A distinctive spider web crack glinted prominently in the sunshine. I’d been easy to find.

  I snatched the ticket from the windshield. I don’t know if I was angrier at the cop or myself. I knew a lot of people who seemed to get away with a lot of things. But I always toed the line, because I was certain I’d get busted for the slightest infraction. And this was proof, I decided glumly.

  Only...it wasn’t a ticket. It was a note, written on the same paper I’d left at the Enchanted Broomstick. Below my handwriting, someone had scrawled:

  Meet me at the Black River State Campground at noon tomorrow.

  It wasn’t signed. But I knew who it was from. Will.

  I turned on my heel, scanning the parking lot. There was no trace of him. The idea that he could find me this easily both excited and worried me. It was like standing too close to a campfire, the heat prickling against my skin.

  I wadded the note up, jammed it into my pocket, and climbed behind the wheel. No one followed me as I left the parking lot and pulled out onto the road.

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be followed. Maybe I did.

  *

  It seemed Will wasn’t the only one shadowing me.

  When I got back to the house, Jason’s truck was in the driveway. The tailgate was down, and the sun sparkled off a new windshield. I pulled up beside it and looked inside the bed of the truck. It rested on a blanket to keep it from sliding around, the glass still hot from the kiss of the sun.

  Jason came out of the house, his hands in his pockets. “Merry early Christmas.”

  I blinked stupidly. “You shouldn’t have... How much do I owe you?”

  He waved me off. “It’s not new. I got it at the junkyard for twenty dollars. I’ll put it in for you today, but just be careful with the sealant.” He squinted up at the sky. “It’s not supposed to rain for a couple days, so you should be fine.”
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  “I should pay you,” I insisted.

  “Nah. Your mom already plied me with cookies.” He rubbed his belly. “If you want, you can help me, though. It’s sorta a two-person job.”

  “What do I need to do?”

  “Fun stuff.” He grinned. “You’ll see. But first, go ahead and get the mirror off the inside. It should slide off the holder.”

  That was a bit of a simplification. I wrestled with the rearview mirror for a few minutes before I finally figured out it was supposed to slide up, not down. It gave way suddenly, landing me in the passenger’s seat with a thud. The tassel from my high school graduation cap that had been looped around the arm landed in my mouth, and I spat it out.

  Jason’s shoulders were shaking with laughter as he cut around the edge of the windshield with a knife. I cast him a black look as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “That wasn’t fun.”

  “That wasn’t fun for you. It was hysterical for me.”

  I punched his shoulder. “Now what?”

  “Here’s the fun part for you. Do as I do.” He put his long legs up on the dash, his feet against the windshield

  “Kinky,” I said, but followed suit.

  “Heh. I wish.” He blushed, but pointed to the glass. “We’re gonna kick it out. Like we’re cops in the movies with a shot-up window. We gotta get the glass out to continue our car chase, Detective Di.” He pantomimed putting on a pair of sunglasses.

  “Cool.” I shoved my sneakers up against the glass and held my hands together in a pistol shape.

  “On three.”

  I grinned. I never got the chance to be purely destructive, and I loved the idea of working out my frustration on the car. “Okay.”

  “One...two...three.”

  Our feet smashed against the windshield with a deafening crack. The fracture in the glass widened, and the top part of the windshield separated from the frame.

  “Again!” Jason shouted.

  Giggling, I kicked at the rest of the glass. It became a flexible sheet, splitting and catching around the hem of my jeans as my foot went through. I kicked at my trapped foot, freed it, and the sheet of glass crashed down on the hood.

  Breathless, I stared at the broken glass.

  Jason gave me a high five. “Nice work, Detective.”

  We found some gardening gloves and dragged the glass off the hood. I swept up the loose pieces, while Jason cleared the last bits from the frame.

  “What’s next?”

  “Goop. Goop is next. If you want to use some window cleaner along the edges of the new windshield, that’ll make it stick better.”

  He dug a bag from the auto parts store out of the truck and produced a tube of adhesive. He carefully caulked a bead of the clear goop along the frame. I got some window cleaner and paper towels from the house and scrubbed at the new windshield. I plucked bits of old, resin-like adhesive off the edges. This windshield was almost perfect, except for a tiny stone chip at the corner. I rubbed at it with a towel.

  “You’ll never see that once it’s installed,” Jason said. “It’ll be on the right corner.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said. “I’ve been squinting through a spider web for a week.”

  “Let’s pick it up and carry it to the car.”

  I climbed into the back of the truck to get a good grip on it. It was heavier than it looked. I scuttled out over the edge of the tailgate, careful not to drop it.

  We carried the windshield to the front of the car, over the hood.

  “Gentle,” he said. “Let’s try to line it up with the frame without spreading the glue around.”

  We set the bottom of the windshield in first and pressed it in.

  “Perfect!”

  Jason wiped around the edges with a paper towel, where some of the adhesive had squished out. He hung my old mirror on the metal tab on the inside, then pressed again around the margins of the exterior.

  “It’s not super pretty, but it’ll do,” he said, surveying the job. He rubbed the corner of the glass, the chip, with his thumb.

  “We do good work,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He grinned. “It should set up in a couple of days and be almost as good as new. Like it never happened.”

  I reached out and took his hand. The glow on his face was as if no time had passed.

  My mom made dinner for us. When I was a kid, Saturdays were always spaghetti nights. It hadn’t changed. After so many months of dorm food, I’d missed this. We sat on the living room couch as we ate. My mother cut up my dad’s spaghetti into little pieces, and I tried not to watch.

  He’d developed a cough. I heard it sometimes at night. He coughed during dinner, small bubbles summoned around his lips. My mom fussed over him with a napkin, and he waved her away.

  As we were washing dishes, I asked, “When does Dad go to the doctor again?”

  “Next week. Thursday.”

  “Do you think he needs to be seen sooner?”

  “I’ll call and see if they can work him in.”

  I heard Dad hacking again in the living room, followed by the sound of Jason slapping him on the back.

  “He sounds like a cat with a hairball,” I said.

  “He’ll be all right,” my mom said. I thought she believed it. Wasn’t sure I did, though.

  After dinner, Jason and I went walking. I left my violin case at home—I didn’t want to accidentally summon Afakos with any witnesses. We melted into the firefly-spangled darkness, our feet scuffing along the dirt path into the woods. We fell into the same easy rhythm we always did, our steps crunching together in unison.

  I thought of several different ways to bring up Afakos. But each time, my voice clotted in my throat. I wasn’t sure Jason would understand. I wasn’t sure he could appreciate Afakos as more than a beast, or that he would even believe in that kind of magic. Maybe that was the real reason we hadn’t stayed together. Or maybe I’d moved past him, outgrown him somehow.

  “I’m worried about your dad,” he said.

  “The cough.”

  “Yeah. I don’t mean to butt in...but I think he should go for a second opinion. Someplace...” His hand sketched the starry sky. “Someplace larger. With more people in white coats.”

  I nodded. “I think so, too. But Mom’s...”

  “Your mom’s worried about money,” he said, reading my thoughts. “She’s afraid of losing everything.”

  “Yeah. I think she feels...stuck.” I stared into the darkness. My charred tree stood before us. “Do you ever feel like that?”

  “Stuck?” He offered me a leg up, interlacing his fingers. I stepped into them, and he lifted me into the tree.

  “Yeah. Stuck.”

  I climbed up onto my little tree house platform and sat down. I pulled my knees to my chin, wrapped my arms around them. Jason hauled himself up beside me. I leaned against his side, and he draped an arm over me.

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “Every day.”

  “I wanted...” I hung my head. “I wanted to be a professional violin player. To go to New York. To travel. Play music for people all over the world.” My fingers twitched, as if they were working strings.

  “Maybe you could play for one of the churches in town?” he suggested. “Or start giving lessons.”

  I shook my head, and my eyes grew hot. “It’s not the same.”

  He sighed. “I think...the trick is to try to have part of the dream.”

  I bit my lip. His dreams—being a forest ranger, going to college—still seemed achievable, while mine seemed to be winging away as fast as a bird. I didn’t know how to explain to him the damage a year or two off school would do to my nascent music career. I felt that my life was over before I’d gotten more than two steps beyond the gate.

  “Like...I’m thinking about doing some trail riding. I could do that on the weekends, I think,” he continued.

  “I can’t...I can’t give up on my whole dream. It’s so...all or nothing
. I can’t break it down into pieces.”

  He looked away. His voice was quiet, but taut. “You’re not the only one with dreams, Di. You think this is what I wanted? Working in the mine?”

  “No. I think you had things you wanted.”

  “But what? I sold out? I gave up, took the path of least resistance? Got seduced by money and some small-town hero worship?”

  “I think you deserve the money and the hero-worship. But…yeah.” It stung to say it, like acid in my mouth.

  “Jesus, Di. Give me some credit. Not everything is all or nothing, or works out exactly like you want it to the first time around. I had to make a compromise—that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on everything.” He turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me.

  We sat in hot silence.

  We’d rarely argued in all the time we’d known each other. Ours was not one of the tumultuous relationships I’d seen among my peers in high school. There’d been no torrents of tears, burning jealousies, ultimatums, or desires to play games. I thought that meant we weren’t really in love. That love required hurt, estrangement, and drama—that this was the passionate fuel that sustained true love. Otherwise, how could it be real?

  I’d been wrong. And I could admit it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for his hand. “I’ve been...really focused on what I’ve wanted for a long time. I’ve been a self-centered ass.”

  His black-stained fingers curved around mine. “And that’s one of the things I admire about you. Your drive, your ambition. I don’t want you to change. But don’t let it make you miserable. And don’t forget that there are people who love you.”

  I leaned in to kiss him. His lips were warm, and he reached up to tuck a streak of blue hair behind my ear. This kiss deepened, and I had the surreal sense of falling into him.

  There was something so familiar and reassuring about his touch. I was hungry for it, for the acceptance, for the idea of the quiet, unconditional love he offered. I hadn’t ever slept with Jason. He’d always been okay with that, had never gotten angry or pushed me the way I knew that some of the other guys did with their girlfriends.