Bluegrass Symphony

by Lisa L. Hannett

He’ll never speak to her again.

  Tentacles punch holes through his sneakers, burst through his sweatshirt, tear out the knees of his jeans. Three, five, seven writhing wires—still transparent, but swiftly becoming real. One latches onto the fire escape, refuses to dislodge. Bo keeps moving. He jumps on his bike and cycles as if a whole squadron of crop-dusters, all piloted by Reverends, were begging for a race. The wire tying him to Mamma whizzes out of his chest as he rides. It wrenches, hurts, but grows thicker and stronger as the distance between them increases.

  The photo flashes through his mind. Pa never looked so happy.

  An image of Mamma on the motel room bed, wiping her eyes.

  Pa at the table, staring. Not tired. Broken.

  Mamma’s lips curled in a smile, pompoms forgotten.

  Movie star love.

  And no sign of Jethro.

  The Reverend will ruin it all.

  Pain surges through Bo’s body. His shirt hangs in shreds, his jeans tatter like a castaway’s. Everywhere, wires snake, crackling with truth and electricity. He hears it all. And knows it’s time to speak.

  HeeHaw goes wild as Bo speeds into the trailer park and up the path to their lot. The dog snarls and strains at his rope until it looks ready to snap. Bo pays no attention to his pet’s raving. The station wagon—where’s the station wagon?

  He hops off his bike while it’s still moving, watches it crash into the shopping trolley Mamma once filled with petunias. He falls to his knees, straining for breath.

  “Pa!”

  Please be awake, he thinks. “Pa!”

  The Reverend’s car pulls up the drive. Neighbours come to their screen doors, press their faces to small square windows. They watch, silently or with phones in hand, but nobody comes out to help. A few of them nod, knowingly.

  “Pa,” Bo calls, quieter now because the central tentacle is crushing his lungs, forcing him to lie down. Gravel presses into his spine and the back of his skull; it crunches beneath the Reverend’s tires as the wagon slows down out front. The engine dies. An alarm bell hollers keys still in the ignition! as the door swings open.

  One minute HeeHaw howls like a demon; the next he cowers beneath the front stoop, as far from the Reverend as he can get. Far away from the trunk shooting out of Bo’s sternum.

  “Pa,” he croaks. Finally, the screen door bangs open.

  “Maggie?” His father pounds down the steps into the yard. “Bo?”

  No static, Bo thinks, seeing distress crease Pa’s face, hearing nothing but the sound of a man worried sick about his wife. About him.

  “Bo!”

  This is love, he realizes. No singing. No dancing. Just a girl’s long legs covered in tights and orange polyester. A boy’s too-greasy hair all fallen out, bristles soft and sharp beneath his son’s hand. Both carrying a chest full of pain.

  “What the hell happened, son?” Phone lines unfurl from Bo’s ribcage. They launch into the air, high above Pa’s head as he attempts to scoop Bo into his arms. Two strands solidify into crossbars, stationed near the top of the pole. Two others quickly attach to Bo’s trailer, insinuate themselves into the utility box. One speeds down the highway to join its partner at the motel. Bo looks up at his father, and says, “It ain’t true, Pa. It ain’t true.”

  Next trailer over, the Reverend knocks on Charlie’s front door. He tilts the brim of his cowboy hat as it swings open. “Sorry to bother you again, Ma’am. Your daughter, Charlotte, said I might have another word with you. Shelby’s out, ain’t she?” Mrs. Morales welcomes the Reverend back into the caravan.

  “What ain’t true?” Pa hugs Bo close.

  “Nothing,” he says, as he hears the Reverend begin, “Good. Then, about one Teddy Lucas . . .”

  With a crack of splitting timber, the telephone pole dislodges from Bo’s chest. He rolls on his side, watches it send showers of gravel flying as it burrows deep into the earth, right there in the middle of the yard. Its shimmering blue surface turns into veined yellow pine freshly stripped of its bark. A roughly hewn, permanent brown.

  Immediately, a hush softens the evening. Particles of conversation disintegrate, blow away on the wind. Wires hum in foreign, untranslated languages. Whispers sneak from trailer to trailer; but now Bo hears them only with his ears, not his mind. HeeHaw settles, places his head on his front paws, and sleeps.

  Bo breathes deeply. The quiet loosens his tongue.

  “Hey,” he says, tightening his grasp on Pa.

  “You gave me one hell of a scare there, boy.”

  “Sorry.” Inside, a new phone rings. “Go get it.”

  “No way—”

  Bo cuts him off with a laugh. “Get it. It’s for you.”

  As Pa’s footsteps retreat, Bo closes his eyes and stretches on the ground. He reaches out, rubs his palm across the pole’s smooth roughness.

  The spice of Mamma’s voice, he imagines, now fills the silence following his father’s gruff, “Hullo?”

  Let’s talk, babe, he supposes she’ll say. I think we need to talk.

  “Yeah,” Pa says. Bo can almost hear him swallow, hesitate.

  C’mon . . . Bo sits up. Opens his eyes. Slowly, he stands and leans against the sturdy pole for balance. Say something.

  Pa takes a shuddering breath. “Please come home,” he says. Nothing more. Then he gently lays the receiver in its cradle.

  Within seconds, a scritch-scritch-scritching noise sounds next to Bo’s ear. Curls of wood and sawdust pepper his bare shoulder. Confused, he begins to pull away—and freezes. Then he smiles until his cheeks hurt.

  I can’t wait to tell Charlie about this.

  Gouged deep into the post, the letters “M + R” appear before his eyes, carved in enduring capitals. They remain raw for only a few seconds. Soon, they’re burnished as if they’d been there for years. Worn, but not worn out. Surrounded by the outline of an uneven, but complete, love heart.

  Forever Miss Tapekwa County

  Verralee trusted the bluebird tattooed behind her mother’s

  right ear.

  She couldn’t hear what it chirped—those songs were for Kaylene alone—but long ago she’d learned to decipher its colouring, to translate the rhythm of inked wings flapping. Ultramarine feathers blurred with excitement meant Kaylene’s tattoo had truths to tell. If he had gossip to share, little black-beaked lies, the sialia’s downy throat would flush lurid red, and moulting shoulders would slump beneath the weight of false news. His voice, as far as Verralee was concerned, sounded just like her mother’s. His insights were shaped on her tongue.

  In the makeshift kitchen backstage, Kaylene’s frosted-blonde hair was pulled back, unbleached roots framing the bird’s sapphire promises, his sketched body still visible through the steam of canning pots boiling on the camp stovetop. Smile pretty, he said with her mother’s mouth. Tilt your head to avoid doubling your chin. Keep your hair out of your face. Clean pickling jars were extracted with tongs from scalding water. And don’t hold your breath, my girl. Don’t repeat your Mamma’s mistakes. One by one, three wide-mouthed Masons were expertly lined up on a small countertop, the workspace identical to six others the judges had ordered made for this year’s contestants. Prepared for their test runs.

  The glass cooled, waiting to be filled with a practice-round of preserves.

  One last time, for lungs’ sakes. Pay attention.

  He didn’t always make sense, at least not at first, but Verralee was used to the bird’s riddles. She looked up at the clock: fifteen minutes until the final round. Quickly, she changed into her bikini as the audience, hidden now beyond the stage curtain, babbled in the auditorium. She joined her mother at the stove while the crowd quaffed shots of whiskey, wolf-whistling as last year’s winner was paraded around for their entertainment. The tattoo chirruped nonsense—breathe deep, breathe deep—and though she still didn’t catc
h his meaning, Verralee believed in that deep Egyptian hue, that lapis lazuli warbling. With his fluttering wings mussing Kaylene’s loose French roll, and that grin curling her mother’s magenta lips as she spoke, Verralee knew things would turn out fine. One way or the other.

  For fins’ sakes, pay attention, the bluebird repeated. Don’t you want to win?

  She was—honest—and yes, she really, really did.

  Goldfish whirlpooled in her stomach whenever she thought about being crowned Miss Tapekwa County. Though she tried not to care—she’d primed herself to be a good sport, even practised her gracious-loser smile—in truth her hopes were sky-high, tied fast to her soul with kite strings. Sometimes she wanted to win so bad, it felt like a hurricane raged around her. Hope yanked at her heart, dragged it up her throat, blocked her windpipe, cut off all rational thought.

  She watched polliwogs swimming in the clear round beads of Kaylene’s long necklace and knew just how they felt: spinning, spinning in cramped bubbles, stuck in one spot, all heads and tails, half-formed limbs and inhibited growth. She was eighteen now; she had to stretch out of her plain-girl shell, shine like the ageless harvest queens, and prove that her face looked best when not darkened by the shadow of a book. If Verralee won the pageant—and she would, wouldn’t she? The bluebird was rarely wrong; only that one time, all those years ago, just that once. When it’d been her mother’s turn to compete, when he’d said, without the slightest trace of red at his throat, that Kaylene could win. Not would, Verralee reminded herself, could. That one simple letter made all the difference: could, not would. Like he’d known without knowing that tattooed Kaylene, stunner though she was, would never transform into a true Miss Tapekwa County. But once Verralee won, her smooth olive skin coloured only with spray-tan and dabs of makeup, her hair dyed a black so convincing it almost looked natural, she’d see things and go places her mother, in losing, had missed.

  She’d be one of Town Hall’s main girls. They’d take her to Nationals, staged on an island on the far side of the country, where ladies with flower jewellery and grass skirts danced beneath palm trees, where they cooked pigs in coal-filled holes in the ground. Where she’d perform too, under that foreign sun, and when they liked her best she’d be given a special crown; one she could bring back to Tapekwa County after her nation-wide tour. Goldfish churned at the thought of how pretty she’d be then. Officially.

  The bluebird said it would be so.

  Kaylene plucked one tadpole bead from the strand around her neck, popped it into a jar, handed another to Verralee. You watching? asked the tattoo, as his high-heeled interpreter filled the vessel with jellied liquid. She spoke secret words that didn’t come from his beak. Last chance, Vee. Then it’s all you.

  Verralee paused, frogling in her palm.

  It’s all you.

  That’s what Simon had said yesterday, holding her hand, pressing her close, his glasses knocked to the ground from the urgency with which he hugged her, begging her not to compete. You’ll be different, he’d said to the only girl he’d called his own since the eighth grade. He didn’t ask her how hard it all was, didn’t mention the fact that winning might hurt more than losing. No relationship can survive what you’ll become—but Verralee had cut him off. She couldn’t cry the night before the pageant. She couldn’t afford the puffiness.

  This isn’t about us, she’d said.

  No, he’d agreed. It’s all you.

  The polliwog rolled into the jar. Verralee splashed in a cupful of water, added a frond of seaweed, then rested her hand on the rim. The rest of the spell, caught between her tongue and teeth, refused to form.

  This wasn’t just about her, not completely. Not only. Winning this title would make her part of a larger, more beautiful story. She’d follow in her great-auntie’s footsteps, pick up the trail where Kaylene had gone astray. Folk would come from all over to see the display at Town Hall, to bathe in the wonder of Miss Tapekwa County: Now and Forever. Just like Verralee had each year, donning her new birthday dress and the polished shoes Kaylene wouldn’t let her wear ’round the farm. They’d gaze with reverence at row upon row of dewy faces. Barriers would prevent spectators from touching the winners’ sequins and shimmer and shine—but every last one of them would want to. Oh, how they’d want to. Instead, under the guards’ watchful eyes, they’d resign themselves to commenting on the changing fashions over the years; on the curve of that one’s waist, the glimmer in that one’s eyes. All would agree, even without touching or tasting or knowing them intimately, that each girl was the most beautiful in the world. And as they turned for home, back to dry fields and cold dairies and dwindling bales of hay, their bellies would warm with pride. These perfect girls in their swimmers, they’d say, these paragons of aquatic beauty, came not just from God, but from the very soul of Tapekwa County.

  What was wrong with wanting to give folk such pleasure?

  Verralee shook her head and again looked at the clock. She hoped Simon would continue to visit the show, if and when she won.

  Focus, said the bird. We’ve rehearsed this a million times. While Kaylene’s tadpole flourished, transforming in the pickling solution she’d charmed, Verralee’s sank listless to the bottom. The producers had kept the light dim backstage, but even so she could make out the unmoving shadow in her jar; she could see sparks and phosphorescence illuminate Kaylene’s. You’ll always regret it, you know. If you mess things up now.

  True.

  The songbird’s collar glowed Persian blue, the lines of each feather delicately rendered, thin as the fine crescent scars ribbing both sides of Kaylene’s neck. Traces of gills half-formed. Permanent reminders of the only time the tattoo’s truth had been one letter off.

  Focus, he repeated, after Kaylene cleared the lump from her throat. You can do this, darlin’. Make us proud.

  Kaylene passed the necklace to Verralee, watched intently as she slipped the length of gelatinous beads over her head.

  We’ve dreamt of this day for years.

  Verralee’s arms shook as she lowered herself into the tank.

  It stood on a wheeled mahogany platform, the third of seven stationed in a gentle arc across the stage for all to see. Twelve feet high and twice as wide, its faint green glass ballooned like a brandy snifter. Verralee’s fingers caught on its scalloped rim, then slid into a recessed ridge that would, once she’d won, support a silver filigreed lid moulded into the shape of a crown. Footlights refracted through the tanks’ gallons of liquid, casting rainbows across the ceiling and the lucky few who’d snagged seats in the front row. Overhead, spotlights shone so hot Verralee worried the mascara would melt from her lashes before she had a chance to submerge; so bright she could not longer see Johnny, her stepfather, standing in the wings at stage left.

  They’re ready for you, hon, he’d said with a wink, his pomade-slick head poking through a split in the curtains. I’d say break a leg but, you know. Somehow that don’t seem right. He stepped through the gap and held the drapes closed behind him, avoiding the stagehands cleaning Verralee’s rehearsal space before her performance. Johnny leaned forward, jolly as a clarinet, and kept his voice low.

  You look gorgeous, Vee. Real gorgeous. Glad you done yerself natural—the rest of them girls is painted up like a herd of carousel ponies.

  Gods love you, Pa, she’d laughed, the sound only slightly forced. He’d blown her a kiss before ducking back out, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the “natural” look took the most makeup to achieve.

  The viscous tonic smelled faintly of lime and was cold on her bare legs. She wriggled her feet, savoured the sensation of chill creeping up from her toes. Her mind wandered as the Master of Ceremonies announced the final task; the pickling challenge, the preserving. Breathe deep, breathe deep, the bluebird had said. And she’d intended to, she really had: but now her teeth were chattering as the liquid reached her shoulders; and the chain of tadpoles was squirm
ing around her neck, floating up to her chin as her hair fanned out behind; and Simon, her quiet Simon, all fancy in dress pants and a collared t-shirt, was leaving the auditorium. Fluorescent bulbs over the audience reflected off his lenses, blinding ovals of white that obscured his grey eyes. He stared at her for a moment from the end of the aisle, a gash between rows of threadbare velvet seats.

  Her fingers slipped as Simon snuck out the back door.

  Water cooled the flush from her cheeks.

  Inside the tank Verralee’s world blurred. Folk were reduced to diluted colours, glowing patches of liquefied light. Echoes of the band’s music grew deeper, more resonant, sound felt as vibration; chords thickened into tangible waves, harmonies licked her long tresses into art nouveau swirls. Air caught in her lungs, nostrils and ears; bubbles jewelled her limbs and gilded her gold lycra bikini. She closed her eyes. Listened to herself sinking.

  Though her pulse raced, though the goldfish in her belly fought their way down to her bowels, it was too late to shout Wait! or Simon! or I’ve changed my mind! But had she, really? Changed it? Shaking the bubbles from her head, she blinked. Plucked the beads from their chain, squeezed pollywogs from their round crystal prisons. Wait! she could’ve called; but she hadn’t. If she were the bluebird, her larynx might’ve reddened at such an exclamation.

  The spell Kaylene had taught her frothed from Verralee’s mouth, from lips gone cerulean.

  She pushed sinuous strands of hair away from her face, like her mother had instructed. Let the judges see your fine features. Pain seared through her chest as she ran out of oxygen; it speared through her guts, sent shocks to the tips of her fingers, shredded her inner thighs, calves, toes. Don’t forget to spin; let them see how fresh water accentuates the arrival of your new fins, your new curves.

  To her right and left, contestants floundered in their tanks. Two girls were hauled from the water, their limp bodies thrown to the floor. A third came up for air, just a quick gasp, hoping the panel of judges would be too busy with the drowned to notice her infraction. No luck. The men took to her tank with cast-iron canes, smashed its rippled glass as she went back under for a second attempt at winning the crown.