Long Black Curl

by Alex Bledsoe

  Time travel—there was no other word for it, really—was such a basic part of Tufa existence that few even commented on it anymore. It often took place in dreams, or waking visions, moments that gave glimpses through the eyes of someone who lived through the events. Occasionally the night wind took people as they were and let them observe. But for Mandalay, it was a literal experience of being uprooted and dropped into another era, one as vivid as the reality she’d left.

  Which is exactly what happened to her now.

  She opened her eyes. She knew immediately that she was a different person: her perspective was higher, farther from the ground, and her physical form felt heavier. She knew she was an adult. She stood outside, beneath a heavy sky of surging gray clouds, but it wasn’t cold. It was the opposite: heavy, humid, and with the tension of thunder in the air. And she was not alone.

  She stood on a flat mountain top: Emania Knob, a place she recognized. No one outside Cloud County knew why trees failed to grow here, leaving only uneven grass; the Tufa knew it was the very spot where, back when the mountain itself was jagged and new, they had arrived to begin their exile, thanks to their leader’s hubris and failure. He’d been thrown across the sea by the Queen, and his impact flattened the mountain.

  If she looked hard enough into the clouds, Mandalay could see the transitory images of faces, vaguely human but with just enough distortion to make her wish she hadn’t seen them at all. Wind moved through the tops of the trees visible below the bare mountaintop, although the air on the peak itself was utterly still.

  Mandalay wondered which ancestor’s body she now shared. It could have been Radella, who’d come over with the original Tufa and helped them settle this new world. It might have been Scathac Scaith, a warrior woman who essentially divided the Tufa for all time following the Third Battle of Mag Tuired and drove the dark Tufa into the cave they still used as their meeting place. Or maybe it was even Layla Mae Hemlock, the Singing Siren, whose voice could bring angry men to tears and who sang away the threats during the Civil War.

  It didn’t matter. Whoever she was, Mandalay saw through her eyes now, and what she saw was far more important than whoever was seeing it.

  All the Tufa, hundreds of them, from both groups, were there on that mountaintop. They formed a ring around two people at the center. Their clothes were of another era, but Mandalay couldn’t say whether it was twenty years earlier, or two hundred; her sense of the passage of time, when she was in this vision state, was nonexistent. Everything happened in the present, and she felt it all as if it were life and death. In this case, that didn’t seem to be an exaggeration.

  The two in the middle, a young man and woman, clutched at each other as if they expected to be attacked. The man was tall and handsome, clad in jeans and a leather bomber jacket that zipped diagonally across his chest. The woman wore a tight blouse and capri pants. They had the Tufa coloring of dark hair, dusky skin, and white, perfect teeth. But the woman’s hair was made up of long, wavy curls that fell around her face and danced in the wind. They behaved like two animals herded into a corral, and now being slowly cornered to be harnessed, bridled, and broken.

  Or slaughtered.

  Rockhouse Hicks stepped into the open. His hair was gray, not the white of his current incarnation nor the black of his youth. And he looked truly worried and afraid, emotions that seldom crossed his typically arrogant, sarcastic countenance.

  “Bo-Kate Wisby and Jefferson Powell,” he said loud enough for all to hear. “This is where it stops, you two. Enough people have died. Enough property’s been destroyed. Enough shit has been spread around.” He turned to look straight at Mandalay. “Right?”

  Mandalay heard the voice of the head she was inhabiting. “We agree. This all has to end. We don’t begrudge you your love, but your actions have left us no choice.”

  Bo-Kate said, “You go to hell! All of you! You all tried to keep us apart, but we fucking showed you, didn’t we? And now you want to destroy us!”

  “We want to keep you from destroyin’ us, you malignant little harpy,” Rockhouse said.

  “If you really think we can destroy you, old man,” Jefferson said, chest puffed defiantly out, “then you’re not nearly so powerful as we’ve always thought. And if that’s true, maybe you should be destroyed.”

  “And us?” Mandalay’s other voice said. “Your own people? Your family, who raised you and loves you? Should we be destroyed, too? Because that’s what you’re on your way to doing.”

  Bo-Kate said, “Stop trying to drive us apart. You want us to leave, we’ll leave. But someday we’ll come back, and—”

  “See, that’s what we’re all afraid of,” Rockhouse said. The clouds swirled, slow and majestic, above the crowd, and the faces within them grew more defined. “So we ain’t gonna run you out. We’re gonna sing you out.”

  Bo-Kate and Jefferson looked at each other in horror. “You can’t do that,” Jefferson said.

  “Give me one reason why not,” Rockhouse said.

  “We’re Tufa! We’re almost purebloods, even! You’ve heard us sing and play!”

  “Yes,” Mandalay heard her voice say, “you are. That makes everything you’ve done that much worse. Did you need to kill that entire family? Children, even their dogs?”

  “Nobody can prove I did that!” she snapped defiantly.

  “This ain’t a court of law,” Rockhouse said. “And the wind is all the proof we need.” He gestured up, where the half-visible cloud-faces now glared down in obvious anger.

  “We do know what you did to Penny Hadlow,” Mandalay’s voice said. She glanced across the circle, where a teenage girl with a huge disfiguring scar on her face stood with her family.

  “Penny started it!” Bo-Kate fired back. “If she’d kept her eyes off my prize, she’d be fine!”

  “And Michael Finley?” Rockhouse added, looking at Jefferson.

  “That was a fair fight,” Jefferson said.

  “Except that you kept smashing his head into the road even after you knocked him out.”

  Jefferson managed a slow little smile. “Didn’t want him coming back someday when I wasn’t looking.”

  Rockhouse looked over at Mandalay, who said, “And then there was Adele’s baby.”

  “It’s not mine,” Jefferson said. “I swear, I never touched that girl.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Bo-Kate insisted.

  “That’s beside the point,” Mandalay said. “You were plotting to kill a baby because you took offense at a pathetic girl’s desperate cry for attention.”

  “She was spreading lies!” Bo-Kate shouted.

  “She was spreading wishes,” Mandalay’s voice said. “She just wanted to be noticed and not forgotten. She certainly didn’t deserve to have her baby killed.”

  “Well, we didn’t do it, so you got nothing on us,” Jefferson said.

  “We got all we need,” Rockhouse said. “What you’ve done is bad enough, what you tried to do was worse, and what you might do is scary enough that we ain’t gonna take any chances.” He looked back at Mandalay. “Enough talk. Count us off, Ruby.”

  So now she knew. She was looking through the eyes of her immediate predecessor, Ruby Montana.

  “No!” Bo-Kate and Jefferson cried in unison.

  “One, two, one two three four…”

  Mandalay snapped out of the vision.

  She looked around her tiny room in the trailer. Her heart pounded, tight and hard in her chest. Sweat made her heavy winter clothes stick to her body. She knew about what she’d just seen, of course; like everything else to do with the Tufa, the memory was packed into her head, there to call up at will. But remembering it and experiencing it were different things. She remembered the words that were spoken, then sung; but now she recalled anew the fear in everyone’s eyes, not just Bo-Kate’s and Jefferson’s. She remembered the smell of the air, charged with static and magic, as the night wind came forward to take an active hand, one of the few times in their ancient
history it had done so.

  She fell back on her bed and dug her fingers into the comforter, reconnecting with her present. She was where she was supposed to be. But then again, if some future self was reexperiencing this moment, would she even know it?

  “Oh, good God,” she sighed in disgust, looking up at the ceiling fan. A strand of cobweb stretched from one unmoving blade to the wall. Leshell would have her hide if she saw that. “We may live in a trailer,” she said often, “but we don’t have to act like we live in a trailer.”

  Mandalay dug her cell phone out of her school backpack and found Bliss Overbay’s number. Bliss was her guardian, her adopted sister, her second-in-command, and the woman who came closest to understanding what it felt like to be Mandalay Harris.

  Bliss worked as a paramedic, and so should always answer her phone, but many times she’d be stuck somewhere in the hills and hollers where cell signals didn’t reach. This seemed to be one of those times, since the call went straight to voice mail.

  Mandalay said, “Hey, Bliss, it’s me. Something … Ah, never mind. I just had a thought, but it passed. Call me when you can. No hurry.”

  She hung up and thought who else she might call. She didn’t want to discuss her vision; she just wanted to reconnect with the real world in some way. Her emotions were all skewed, half drawn in by her ancestor’s fear, half the numb boredom of a girl at home by herself. She needed some immediate reality.

  She looked at the tiple, still on the bed beside her. The last verse of “Paranoid” came to her:

  You’re making me nervous

  Stop standing so close

  Do I deserve this

  Or is this a hoax

  You’re like a mystery

  That’s hard to avoid

  “Either you’re out to get me,” she whisper-sang, “or I’m just paranoid.”

  She had the urge to run, but the snow outside was too heavy for her usual flight into the depths of the woods. Still, she couldn’t just stay here, not with all these adult emotions surging through her twelve-year-old heart. She had to do something.

  She grabbed her coat and ran outside. The snow was ankle deep, and each step seemed twice as difficult as it normally would. She didn’t go into the forest, though; she walked down the road, then began to jog, running as much as the weather allowed. The cold air burned in her nose and lungs, and after a while the snow fell so heavily, she worried she couldn’t find her way back.

  A truck approached her, its lights on in the winter afternoon dimness. She stepped down into the ditch, crunching through the ice over the shallow water, and back up onto the bank. She held on to the fence there as the truck passed, its plume of snow and slush just missing her. If the driver saw her, he gave no sign. She didn’t recognize the vehicle.

  When it was gone, she climbed back onto the road and continued away from her home. Something called to her, with an urgency she’d never before experienced. It had to be connected to the recent vision, to that memory of Bo-Kate Wisby and Jefferson Powell being sung out of the Tufa, banished from both the community and from all music forever.

  In her haste, she hadn’t grabbed a hat, scarf, or gloves. And now one foot was soaked by icy ditch water. Her coat had a hood, but with the wind in her face, it just billowed around her head. And she wore tennis shoes, not snow boots. She was cold, and getting colder.

  Still, if anyone in Cloud County was protected, it was Mandalay Harris. And if she was being driven to do something as apparently foolish as run through a snowstorm, then there had to be a reason.

  4

  Bo-Kate Wisby looked out the SUV’s window at the mountains looming behind the haze of falling snow. Unable to stand the silence, Nigel said, “Did you know there’s a place called ‘Frozen Head State Park’?”

  “Yeah,” she said absently.

  “How does a place acquire that name? Is someone’s head truly held on ice, and displayed there? I mean, your country is certainly in touch with its barbaric side, but that sounds positively Romanesque.”

  “No, it’s because the mountain’s top is so high, it’s always got ice on it.”

  “Ah. That’s a relief. I thought perhaps your Davy Crockett’s cranium was kept there in its original coonskin cap.”

  This brought her back to the moment. “How the hell do you know about Davy Crockett?”

  “Television, my pumpernickel. I can even sing the song for you, including a delightful racial variant my lighter-skinned chums enjoyed singing to me.”

  “You’re not old enough to remember the Davy Crockett TV show,” she snapped.

  He gave no indication he noticed her tone. “Your original colonial rulers have embraced the concept of the syndicated rerun.”

  She sighed. “Sorry, Nigel. I have a lot on my mind.”

  “Chopping off fingers will preoccupy one, I imagine.”

  “There was a good reason for that.”

  “I’d certainly hope it wasn’t an idle impulse.”

  “That old man exiled me from my home, and my family.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  She paused and mustered her resolve. She’d never told him what she was about to. “He did worse than that, too, Nigel.”

  Nigel didn’t look at her, but simply said quietly, “I suspected as much. I’ve known other women who were … mistreated as girls.”

  “No, not that, although he did grope my butt once. He … Have you ever wondered why you never heard me sing until recently?”

  “One never hears me sing, either. I sound like a garbage disposal with silverware caught in its teeth.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard you sing along with your iPod, or something on the radio. I mean, you’re right, that is what you sound like, but I have heard you.”

  He gave her a dour sideways smile. “You’re such a charmer.”

  “But you never heard me, did you? Before three weeks ago.”

  “No, I suppose I didn’t.”

  “And I sound pretty good, don’t I?”

  He nodded. “You do indeed, actually. I recall wondering why you never pursued music itself as a career, instead of concert promotion.”

  “It’s because that old man … and others … took away my ability to make music. To sing, to play, to dance. All of it.”

  “And how did he, or they, do that?”

  She looked away, out the window. “If I say magic, will you roll your eyes that way you do?”

  “Indeed I will not. But I will ask, if it’s not impertinent, why they did that?”

  Bo-Kate did not answer. After several minutes, Nigel accepted that she was not going to.

  Eventually she said, “You know, every time I see Cloud County again, it’s like seeing it fresh for the first time. And every time that happens, I keep asking myself the same question.” She turned and looked at Nigel. “How can I be so damn stupid to keep coming back here?”

  “That’s from a movie,” Nigel said.

  “So? It still fits.”

  “Indeed. You know, there had better be a good reason for you insisting I accompany you. The mountains are like roach motels for black people: We go in, but we don’t come out.”

  “For a long time, people thought the Tufa were black. Hell, you thought I was half-black when you first met me.”

  “For an instant or two.”

  “Oh, yeah? What changed your mind?”

  “There are subtle differences, my lady, that I cannot explain to you and still keep my eyes on these abandoned streambeds you refer to as ‘roads.’”

  “Don’t worry about anything. As long as you’re with me, nobody will bother you, even if you were plaid.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t want to bet my life on that.”

  Bo-Kate grinned. Nigel might be her executive assistant and occasional lover, but they bickered like siblings.

  “So will people here believe I, too, am a Tufa?” Nigel added.

  “Not a chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Two re
asons. One’s your hair. You have real black people’s hair. The curliest any Tufa’s hair gets is mine.” She pulled one strand down into her eyes, then let it go. It bounced back into place.

  “And the other?”

  “Like you said, subtle differences that I can’t explain to you.”

  “Oh, more Good Folk magic, eh?”

  She glared at him, and the anger he saw sent chills down his spine. “That’s enough of that, Nigel. I don’t care what you think about it in the privacy of your own head, but you keep a civil tongue in that mouth of yours, or somebody might just snatch it out.”

  She turned away and looked out the window at the passing trees. Everything around her ached with familiarity. The Tufa connection to the physical reality of Cloud County was so tangible, it was almost like an umbilical cord. When the original exiles had landed here, back when the Appalachians were as high and rugged as the Rockies, they had bonded with the rock and soil and trees just as they’d once done in their original home. The songs they brought with them became tunes about the land they now inhabited, and the original songs they composed sealed that relationship like the first marital kiss at a wedding.

  Beneath this awareness, of course, was the memory of two strands of that cord being forcibly cut that day on Emania Knob. And beneath that, thumping along like the bass note in a techno remix, was the fury that drove her desire for revenge.

  Nigel pulled the SUV onto the paved road, grateful for the relative quiet. He turned west, toward the tiny town of Needsville. The road was still winding and treacherous, with patches of black ice where the sun never struck, but their progress was much faster.

  Bo-Kate gazed through the bare tree branches at the rolling mountains visible in the distance. Eventually the snow became too heavy, so Nigel turned on the windshield wipers. The rhythmic squeaking finally got to him, so he risked a question: “How long has it been since you’ve seen your family?”

  “Longer than you can imagine. When they chased me out, I didn’t plan to ever return. But … things change.”

  “That sounds delightfully enigmatic.”