Blue Bottle Tree

by Beaird Glover

  “What do you think about that cave of his?”

  “What cave?”

  “At the top of the hill.” I pointed, even though the hill was too far away to see.

  “Oh yeah, I went in there when I was a kid. We all did. It’s no big deal, just a little opening. It’s not really even deep enough to call a cave.”

  “You don’t know about it, then?”

  He licked the paper he was working on and finished rolling, took a cigarette out of a pack, dropped the joint into its place, and lit the cigarette. Now we were going to talk. “I know about it, but it’s no big deal.”

  “You don’t know there’s a crawl space that opens up to a whole ’nother room, do you?”

  “Maybe.” He was scanning the depths of his stoned mind for a crawl space in that cave. Finding nothing, he veered toward what he considered a brilliant tactic. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did know. What do you know about it?”

  I shook my head slowly and gave him a little crinkled smile, up at one corner and down at the other. “Nope. You first.” He laughed.

  “Seven LaVey. How’s he doing these days? Is he still in school?”

  “Of course he’s still in school. He’s a junior.”

  “But, I mean after what happened to his mom. I thought he had to move or something. They’re not letting him live alone, are they?”

  I had to be cool, but still pinch him for the info. “Who’s not?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever decides that stuff. He’s not old enough to live by himself.”

  “What happened to his mom?”

  “Didn’t she die?” His faraway glance indicated he had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Well, he’s still in school.”

  “I don’t think they’d let him live with his grandmother. She’s a witch. What are you saying—he’s moved into a cave?”

  “I’m not saying anything. What happened to his mom?”

  “She died.” He sounded more sure of himself but his eyes cut away again, and I had the feeling he was making it up as he went along.

  “I heard that the first time. Do you know how his mom died?”

  He was getting uncomfortable. He stiffened up on the driver’s seat and turned the key. “Gotta run, Penny. Be cool.”

  There did not seem to be anything else to say. He looked both ways, eased through the red light, and headed out of town.

  I sat down on the single wooden bench, admiring the etchings, the dozen names of loves and loves lost, the scratchings-off that had come to be there.

  I felt his eyes on me before looking up. He was still on the other side of the block, but he was staring and lurching toward me. He was a chunky kid who seemed way too energetic for his body habitus. I was stuck and he waved, cementing the obvious, that he was coming to see me. Mad Dog Rickey Smith was on me before I knew it. “What’s up, P-Lang?” He held his hands out in gangster symbols, then tickled the air between us, encouraging me to embrace.

  I slid back on the bench. “Do you know what Seven’s up to?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. But if I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

  “You know about the cave, don’t you?”

  His head swayed. “What cave?”

  “Come on, Rickey. That one.” I pointed over my shoulder. No doubt he knew about it. He should be the one living there, not Seven.

  “Call me Mad Dog, P-Lang.” He narrowed his eyes like I had insulted him.

  “Sorry, Mad Dog.”

  He grinned, victorious. “What about a cave?”

  “Do you know about …anything weird in there?”

  “Did you know that redheads have iron in their blood that makes their hair red?”

  “Everybody has iron in their blood. Iron is a building block for red blood cells.”

  “Whoa!” He put on a singsong voice. “Dr. P-Lang gettin’ all tech-ni-cal.”

  “I’m serious, Mad Dog. You and Seven hang out all the time. I’ve seen you up at that cave. You’ve got to know. Have you seen any bones in the cave? Human bones. Of a kid?”

  “I’m serious about that fire in your blood. That’s what it is. You’re a wildcat, girl. You wanna go out sometime?”

  “You’re fifteen, Mad Dog. And you don’t have a driver’s license. Not to mention a car.”

  “Never stopped me before.” He winked. Total bullshit.

  He started breathing harder. This was not going in the direction I wanted it to go. “What happened to Seven LaVey’s mother?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t see that much of old Seven these days.”

  “You don’t know what happened to his mother?”

  “I think she died.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He doesn’t talk about it.”

  At least that much was true. In my experience, Seven did not talk much about anything. He was a good listener, though. Of course, I had a secret too, and I couldn’t tell him everything. Whenever I got anxious, thinking about what happened with Velvet, he would say something like, Oh, nobody’s perfect, Longstocking. Or he said he was going to join a biker gang and come back with them if Velvet ever gave me any trouble. Which was cute. Now, maybe he needed my help.

  What if he was in trouble? What if he had a little brother and that could be his brother’s bones. Maybe he doesn’t want his mother to get in trouble. Or his grandmother. There was a rumor that his grandmother was a devil worshipper and a fortune-teller. A wiccan at least. That she sold moonshine and juju stuff. No wonder Seven never talked about it.

  Some people in Bellin would probably burn their house down if it was true.

  Back to Mad Dog, I said, “Right, that’s what I heard. Do you know any details? Like, the reason of her death?”

  “You wanna squeeze the Mad Dog for knowledge, you gotta give. How’s about a little kiss? Just right here.” He leaned in and tapped his cheek.

  I was running out of patience. “No, thanks. You don’t know, do you? Does anybody know?”

  “Umm, the police? You ever think of that? The police know how people die, when it’s like, not the normal way.”

  His head ticked over to the other side and he seemed to evaluate something in the distance, something so absorbing that he forgot I was there. He looked back over his shoulder and got jittery, like he was being chased. Without another word, he careened away on an axis that was his alone.

  A little speckled bird lit on the park bench beside me. Whippoorwill. Whippoorwill. He tilted his head to look me in the eye, said it again, speaking to me. There was another bird like this, or maybe this particular one, that was always hanging around my tree. It would flit back and forth to the cave.

  Whippoorwill. Whippoorwill. He sprang into the air and darted between branches like lightning, leaving as abruptly as he had come. But it left an impression—made me realize that I needed to know more about Seven. Not just the bones. Maybe he was right about them. Maybe they had been there forever. But I was missing something about him. Something I needed to know.

  5 Spirit in a Bottle

  The curiosity got me moving. My skin tingled and I hopped off the bench. My thoughts were racing, and the one thing I had to do, first and foremost, was play my clarinet. I rushed home and got it, marched away from my house playing. I was the pied piper of Bellin. I wanted animals to follow me. Curtains were jerked and ruffled back in place. Nobody had ever seen a high school kid marching and practicing by herself. I didn’t care.

  After playing through our parade song twice, I took a break and held the clarinet out stiffly in front of me. There he was again. The little brown bird flitted onto a branch I was about to walk under. Whippoorwill. Without thinking, my fingers knew just where to go and I played it right back. Whippoorwill, on a clarinet! It sounded perfect, and then we went crazy. The bird said it and I said it, he hopped along in front of me, made a turn and passed outside the city limits of Bellin.

  I was dazzled by the moment, heady with the oneness I had found
with this bird. Even dogs had never been very friendly toward me. But then he was gone. I had not been paying attention to where I was going and I found myself on a little dirt road called Jack Rabbit Lane. I was stepping around potholes and mud puddles, and the bird had stopped answering my calls. I still felt like I was driven, so I kept going, despite not knowing where I was.

  The road was narrow and trees grew tall on both sides. They were providing a lot of shade and the wind blew huge shadows from the limbs, dancing in my path. Finally, one side opened up into a sunny field and cows were grazing in the distance.

  I played our marching song again, but my heart was not really in it. Seven steps for every five yards, head perfectly still, notes smooth. But I was bored. Without warning, a new melody developed from the old one. I jazzed up the number, changed it, and made a new song. My new one was pretty short, but the end fed back into the beginning, making it easy to repeat. I liked it but I felt like it was missing something. I had never made up a song before. Maybe I could be a songwriter, a real musician. I was having so much fun that my head bobbled and I had to hold the mouthpiece with my teeth, which flattened the reed and made a screech.

  Just then I came upon another road which crossed Jack Rabbit Lane. There were no stop signs. I imagined three old cars and a truck coming from all four directions at once, none of them knowing about the others, and the huge collision that would happen. I shuddered and looked for crosses. There would probably be crosses by the sides of the road, to show that people had died there. I did not see any, but between the two roads stood an old willow tree, with bottles swinging in the breeze. Most of the bottles were blue—old medicine bottles, liquor bottles, big ones and small. I would have guessed it was somebody’s weird yard art, but it was more intense than that. It did not look like the spirit of fun. They did not tinkle like wind chimes—they made rumbles and murmurs. Limbs brushing against them sounded like old iron ancient hinges. When the bottles struck each other I heard windows shattering and broken gongs. I saw a sparkle and peered more closely into one of the blue bottles. It was hanging from a limb by twine.

  There was a fire pit behind the willow, and behind that a little house further back. The willow’s limbs were still bare from the winter, even though foliage was sprouting everywhere else. The bottles bent the branches down even more than normal for a weepy willow. All the limbs were laden and straining to the breaking point, but none of the bottles touched the ground. I grabbed the blue bottle that had caught my interest, the one that had twinkled inside, and an old woman shrieked from the house. “Don’t touch that, missy!”

  She darted down the steps and was already halfway across the yard. She had a walking stick and was pretending to use it, but she was simultaneously agile, graceful even. Her gold hoop earrings flashed in the sun and she had dozens of gold bracelets that jangled up and down her arms. Her hair was pulled back in a white bun and her back hunched forward. She wore black laced boots and a faded housedress. People had not worn those for years. She was both elegant and fierce, fragile and commanding. The closer she got, the younger she looked. She was either very spry for a seventy-year-old, or she had stopped aging at thirty. While I would have guessed eighty before she came down the steps, now she seemed about the same age as my mother.

  I had recoiled when she yelled, and now I let the gasped breath go. She whipped her stick through the air and stood to her full height, which was as tall as me.

  As she raised her eyes, they were pale, almost pink. Like an aberration. Something more than human. I saw now that her face was drawn up tight from the way her hair was pulled back. It was a great trick, how old ladies knew things like how to pull the wrinkles out. I immediately had the feeling that I would like to please her, no matter what she asked.

  My own hand was still in the air, a few inches from the blue bottle hanging on the tree. She cupped her hand around it and led me back, like a grandmother protecting her precious from a stove’s burning eye. She said, “Baby, you don’t want to be touching that.” She drew out the word baby for so long that it took a familiar tone, like I was one of her own.

  “Why not? Isn’t it just a decoration?”

  “It’s a sight more than that, my baby.”

  “Like what?”

  “Humph.” She looked back down the lane, marking my steps with her gaze. “Did you see it?”

  I followed her eyes back to the road, to the cross I had not seen before. In my peripheral vision, the blue bottle flashed and I startled. The sun hit it just right and made a prism, a rainbow. “Did I see what?”

  “There was a bad accident here, some years ago. All four of them were barreling down at the same time. None of them paying any attention. Crashed right where the roads meet. The one driving the truck was thrown through the windshield. He died where you’re standing.”

  A chill ran down my spine. “I must have heard about that. It was here?”

  “Right where you’re standing.” My skin felt clammy and I held my hair off the back of my neck, twisted it and let it fall over my shoulder. A breeze washed it back and I twisted it again, held it down. My eyes must have gotten wide, staring at the rainbow in the bottle, emanating from the bottle. She said, “That’s his soul, there.”

  I rubbed the goose bumps on my arms and looked back down Jack Rabbit Lane. I closed my eyes. Couldn’t find my swing. Could not find anything.

  “That’s okay, my baby. Nobody’s going to hurt you here.” Her voice was warm and I felt like I knew her, like we should have been friends from long before. Her pale eyes held mine and took the fear away. The rainbow from the bottle was beautiful, not a fright. The longer she held my eyes, the more my panic dissolved.

  “What were you playing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I giggled and felt my cheeks blush. “I guess I made it up.”

  “You didn’t make that up. It’s an old tune, much older than you. Where did you hear that?”

  “It just came to me. I don’t remember it from anywhere.”

  She sang it back, in perfect pitch:

  * * *

  Eh, Yé, Yé Mamzelle,

  Oh, ouai, yé Mamzelle Marie

  Le konin bien li Grand Zombi!

  * * *

  “Play it again and I’ll sing it with you,” she said. “You were missing a note.” She looked off in the distance, like she was talking to somebody else. “The goat without horns is waiting for it.”

  When I tried to play it again, I couldn’t. She said something in French like she was encouraging me. I started with the wrong fingering and a bad note pooped out. I tried to modulate—tried to bring it back around somehow and not make a fool of myself—but it was gone. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember.” As my eyes drifted away from hers, the fear came back. I could not look at her again because I lost myself when I did. She had a power over me, and my mind was playing tricks. She said there was a soul in that bottle. I saw the wreck. A voice in my head said run, and it sounded like my father. It sounded like the most logical thing to do. Fight or flight was the answer and I was badly disadvantaged against this crazy old lady. She had a legion of spirits behind her and I just had a clarinet.

  “Sometimes the song comes through the person. Or sometimes the instrument remembers it and the person just lets it out. Where did you get that clarinet?”

  Her eyes had found mine again, and I was calmed against my own intention. But it felt better than fight or flight, and she said no one would hurt me. I did not have to run. I could just give in. I stayed with her eyes. She seemed to know what I was thinking and she approved. We were thick as thieves now, this old lady and me—sharing some bond about spirits and car crashes that I did not really know. But it was okay. How she was making me feel calm against my will, that was piquing my curiosity now, and I stepped up to her. I was surprised at my own inner strength and challenged her to look deeper into me. “We got it in Nashville. It’s a Selmer, a pretty good model, but I don’t think it’s anything special.”

  She til
ted her head and examined the clarinet, top to bottom and seemed satisfied. “You’re right. This is not the one. If you played that tune through the right clarinet, oh honey, you could wake the dead.” She looked through one blue bottle without touching it and then another. She said, “These bottles all catch spirits. I think you must have let one out and he gave that song to you.” It was hard to tell if she was being serious or not, so I chuckled. She had to be making a joke. But then her face turned fierce and scary, like she would kill me if I disobeyed her. She totally believed she was capturing spirits in those bottles. “It’s better they don’t get out. I don’t want you to turn one of those bottles up again. I don’t want them in my house.”

  Definitely crazy. “I didn’t mean to…” I looked into a bottle that sparkled, refracting the sun’s light with another rainbow inside it.

  “That particular spirit might be good,” she said, following my eye, literally talking about a spirit in a bottle. “But I don’t take chances. Leave these bottles alone, baby.” I stepped back, conflicted about what was going on. I was watching myself from outside like I was an actor, like none of this was real. Maybe she was drunk. But she held her weird, pale eyes on me and the corners of her lips twitched, trying not to smile. Then she threw her head back and howled, amusing herself. She had been teasing me all along and now she let me know it.

  She hooked her elbow around mine to help hold her up and simultaneously escort her. It felt like a privilege and a duty, but she was actually leading me. She leaned on me a little and walked us back to her house.

  It was not like I made a choice, I just did it. It would have been rude to resist. Her posture dramatically improved when we got to her door. She unwove her arm from mine and slashed her stick through the air like a drum major directing our silent parade.

  We were inside her house at an old wooden table and she made me a cup of tea before I thought anything about how strange it was that I had just come in without thinking. Wouldn’t I usually have resisted going into a stranger’s home? Even if it was an old lady? Time flew and we were chitchatting away, in the middle of three conversations at once. Bread was baking. Maybe I felt comfortable because her house was cozy and the bread smelled good.