Long Black Curl

by Alex Bledsoe

  They topped the rise and came down into Needsville itself. The entire town fronted on the highway, with no real side streets. A lone traffic light flashed yellow, cautioning people about the crossroads at the center of town. There was a new-looking convenience store and post office building, but all the other businesses seemed ancient, abandoned, or both.

  “There,” Bo-Kate said. “That motel. The Catamount Corner. Stop there. I want to see somebody.”

  “What’s a ‘catamount,’ anyway?”

  “A bobcat.”

  “That’s not any clearer, actually. Who is ‘Bob’?”

  “It’s like a mountain lion, only smaller.”

  “Do they have those here, too, as well as giant flightless birds?”

  “They have ’em.”

  Nigel parked in front of the steps leading to the porch. He saw the warm glow in the café windows and said, “May we eat here? It’s after lunchtime, and I’m a bit peckish.”

  “No.” The way she said it left no room for debate.

  He took it in stride. “I’ll just wait in the car, then. Maintain the vital communications link, as Marlin Perkins would say.”

  “And I know there’s no way you remember Marlin Perkins.”

  “Actually, that’s true. I got the DVDs from the library. Fascinating stuff. Jim and Stan really were idiots.” He unwrapped a granola bar from the bag between the seats. “Have fun. I’ll use this to stave off dissolution.”

  Bo-Kate got out and climbed the steps. How many times had she done that as a little girl, to get a free Co-Cola from Peggy or her husband, Marshall? As if to dispel the warmth of that memory, the snow blew almost horizontally, right into her face. She squinted through it and opened the lobby door.

  Inside, the fireplace crackled in the corner of the empty café. There was no one behind the desk, so Bo-Kate rang the little bell and waited, reading the text beneath the framed picture of Bronwyn Hyatt, Needsville’s lone celebrity.

  WAR HERO’S TRIUMPHANT RETURN, the headline announced above the photo of a pretty dark-haired girl in an army dress uniform. A separate frame displayed another clipping that read, WAR HERO MARRIES LOCAL MINISTER; this time the photo featured the same girl standing beside a handsome, sandy-haired young man.

  “Bronwyn,” Bo-Kate murmured. She knew all about this girl, both from the news, where for fifteen minutes she was unavoidable, and from the innate sense all Tufa had of each other. Something warned her that Bronwyn Hyatt, now Chess, would be a formidable opponent.

  Peggy Goins emerged from the back, where she lived with her husband. “Sorry, I was using the little girls’ room. Can I—?”

  Bo-Kate smiled and said, “Hello, there, Miss Peggy.”

  Peggy stared, then said, “Hello yourself, Bo-Kate. Been a long time.”

  “Has indeed. How’s Marshall these days?”

  “No different. How’s the big city?”

  “Nashville’s Nashville.”

  Peggy straightened some of the tourist brochures in the desk display. She looked to be in her fifties, with immaculate black hair starting to go gray. She wore a sweatshirt with an image of a bear cuddling a guitar. At last she said, “You and I could exchange pleasantries all day, Bo-Kate, but I know damn well you ain’t here just to visit. So tell me what you want.”

  She smiled. “I want Rockhouse’s old job. He can’t do it anymore.”

  “So you heard about that?”

  Bo-Kate smiled. “Night wind blows all the way to Nashville, you know. I heard he got called out, his dirge got sung, and his inbred daughter ripped out his throat. Might’ve been easier for everybody if she’d just killed him outright, but that ain’t the way it happened, is it?”

  Peggy hid her surprise as much as she could. “So you can hear the night wind?”

  Bo-Kate laughed. “That’s all you’ve got to say, Miss Peggy? What about me taking over for Rockhouse?”

  “Anything to do with Rockhouse and his people, you’ll have to take up with him, and them.”

  “Oh, I have.” She reached into her purse and pulled out the baggy. She placed it on the desk between them. Against the bright white paint, the bloody fingers looked even more ghastly.

  Peggy gasped and looked up at Bo-Kate, eyes wide. “You didn’t.”

  “I did. He’s done, Peggy. He can’t sing, and now he can’t play. Believe me, I know how that feels. But I’m not just aiming for his job. I want it all. I want to bring us back together, one tribe, and I have some ideas about how to also bring us into the present. No more hiding, no more singing just for ourselves. What do you think of that?”

  “I think you’ll find that the other seat is still occupied.”

  “By that girl Mandalay? Please. That kid is even less of a problem than Rockhouse, and just as easy to fix.”

  “You’re threatening a child again? You didn’t learn a damn thing, did you?”

  “I’m not threatening anyone. If she wants to step down and live here quietly, that’s perfectly fine with me. I might even keep her on as an advisor. I’m just saying, I’ll be coming for what I want, and if anyone gets in my way, no matter how old or young they are, they’ll have to deal with the consequences.”

  “You are a vile woman, Bo-Kate Wisby,” Peggy said. “Vile. It’s the only word for it.”

  “Yeah, well, sticks and stones, Miss Peggy. You know ‘Bonnie Annie,’ right? I’ll steal my father’s gold and my mother’s money, just like the song says. But I don’t need a sea captain; I’ll make myself a lady.”

  “Not if somebody stops you.”

  Now she laughed outright. “There’s not a person in this town, in this valley, who can stop me. Not you, and for sure not that creepy-ass little girl. I’ll see you soon, Miss Peggy.” She turned and strode out of the lobby.

  * * *

  Peggy Goins stared down at the baggy with the severed fingers. The skin was cut clean, with the ends of the bones visible in the stump. Blood pooled in one corner of the bag. One finger lay nail-up, while the other displayed its pad. The distinctive fingerprint whorls were crisscrossed by tiny scars, and blocked in places by calluses from more years of banjo playing that anyone could imagine.

  How many times had she, girl and woman, heard those fingers in action? The old man was a vicious, lying, perverted bastard, but he could make a banjo ring out like the bells of Christian heaven. Now, even if his other fingers remained, that sound was gone; no more would he create notes and chords only he could play.

  Softly, she sang,

  As I was a-walking down by St. James’ Hospital,

  I was a-walking down by there one day,

  What should I spy but one of my comrades

  All wrapped up in flannel though warm was the day.

  She snatched a tissue from the nearby box and draped it over the bag of fingers like a burial shroud. Something essential had just died, permanently and irrevocably. It was like losing the rain. And it left a vacuum into which the awful Bo-Kate Wisby hoped to step.

  She had to call someone. Mandalay was the obvious choice, but something stopped her. It wasn’t like Mandalay wouldn’t know what had happened on her own, anyway. That girl knew everything. Instead she pulled up Bliss Overbay’s number on the speed dial, but hesitated at the last moment. She couldn’t go around spreading a panic.

  So she went to the door to her apartment and hollered, “Marshall? Come on out here, and be quick about it, you hear me?”

  Her husband emerged, yawning from his afternoon nap. “What’s wrong?”

  She told him. And then she showed him the fingers.

  * * *

  As Bo-Kate climbed back into the SUV, Nigel looked up from the game on his phone and said, “So, are we staying here at the Bobcat Arms?”

  “No, I told you. We’re staying at my family’s house.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of houses in Appalachia. I’m not sure I know outhouse etiquette.” He paused, then added, “So how did it go?”

  “Delightfully. I left her spe
echless.”

  “You showed her the fingers, didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t just show them. I left them with her. Now everyone in the county will know I ain’t fooling.”

  “Won’t the police come looking for you, then? I mean, I know this is the hills and all, but isn’t taking body parts, even excess ones, frowned upon?”

  “You just trust me, Nigel. What I’ve got in mind for this dump will blow your mind as much as it will theirs.” She pointed down the highway. “Onward, sir. Our castle awaits.”

  * * *

  Bliss Overbay awoke on her couch. She was confused for a moment, as the dream she’d just been experiencing was so vivid.

  She’d been in an airplane, the small single-engine kind with a lone propeller, flying over the mountains at night. She could smell fuel, and sweat, and a kind of hair product once known as pomade, something she recognized from sitting on her grandfather’s lap as he taught her chords on her tiple.

  She hadn’t been alone on the airplane, either. There had been a bespectacled young man, barely out of his teens, seated in the copilot’s seat. He’d gotten up and come into the back passenger section to speak with the others. One of those was a middle-aged man whose shoes gleamed even in the dim lighting.

  The other, in the cramped confines of the airplane, seemed to be a giant.

  His face was broad and strong, with the kind of jawline that defined superheroes in the comics, and he wore a leather jacket that made him look like a thug. But his left leg held her attention—it extended straight out, with only the slightest bend at the knee, and she could see the mechanism of a leg brace under his jeans, and the metal heel loop wrapped with duct tape to keep it from scratching floors when he walked.

  She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the drone of the engine, but they were smiling, so it couldn’t have been bad news. The fact that she was hovering like a ghost didn’t strike her as unusual. She frequently had dreams like this, and often found that what they showed her turned out to be true, if you compensated for the malleable dream-language of the images. She once thought it might be astral projection sending her out into the world, but too many times there had been true dream abstractions involved. Now she believed it was like a TV channel that your antenna could pick up only for those brief periods when the atmospheric conditions were exactly right, and even then there was usually some sort of static or distortion.

  Then she was traveling outside the plane, flying as a Tufa flew. The night must have been cold, since the bare spots visible on the mountains below were all covered with snow. But she felt nothing.

  Then she was looping around the plane in great swirling arcs, coming within inches of the propeller blades. It was incredibly dangerous, because not only did it mean she might get caught on a wing or other protrusion, but the pilot might see her and panic, too. But there was no denying the glorious freedom, this sense of moving with impunity through an element denied to mere humans.

  And then a gust of wind blew her sideways into the propeller, and she snapped awake just as the blades began to shred her.

  She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and started coffee in the kitchen. As she waited for it to brew, she thought back to the dream, wondering what it was trying to tell her. Had it been a true vision from the night winds, or just her subconscious’s free-form choreography?

  Just as she thought about calling Mandalay, the phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Bliss,” Peggy Goins said, sounding both tense and relieved. “Bo-Kate Wisby is back. And she’s … You won’t believe what she’s done!”

  Instantly Bliss put the dream aside. “Tell me what happened.”

  5

  Marshall Goins wheezed with exhaustion, the cold air tightening his lungs with every breath. The hike up to Rockhouse’s place was designed to discourage visitors, and he was definitely discouraged. But after seeing the severed fingers, he’d told Peggy he’d go up and check on the old man. So here he was.

  He’d gone a secret way, and wandered into something that ended up taking a lot longer than he’d expected. Now he was back on track, and in the grand scheme of the regular world, he’d lost no more than a few minutes. But the Tufa ability to slip in and out of time always took a lot out of him, and lately he’d found the transitions harder and harder. He knew the reason: He’d lived in that regular world so long, and so thoroughly, that it had begun to rub off on him. The Tufa might not be entirely human, but they were close enough that mortality could hum in their ear in many of the same ways.

  Then he heard whistling, and stopped to listen. It grew louder, and then Junior Damo appeared on the trail above him, coming down the mountain and jauntily twirling a stick.

  He cut off in midnote when he saw Marshall.

  “What are you doing, Junior?” Marshall asked.

  “Might ask you the same thing,” Junior shot back.

  “Might, but I asked you first.”

  “Just taking a walk.”

  “Good God, Junior, that’s the worst lie I’ve heard this week, and I had to talk to a state senator on Wednesday. But you can save me some trouble. How is Rockhouse?”

  “What makes you think I’ve seen him?”

  “There ain’t a goddamn other thing on this mountain besides him that could get either one of us out here, that’s what.”

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  “Damn it, Junior, I’m not in the mood.” He made a quick, decisive hand gesture, one that asserted his status in the Tufa hierarchy. “Now, tell me.”

  Junior sighed. “He’s been better.” When Marshall glared at him, he continued, “Somebody done come along and cut off two of his fingers. Them extra pinkies he had.”

  Marshall kept his face neutral. “Somebody like you?”

  Junior held up his own hands defensively. “Not me, man, I swear. Somebody got there before I did.”

  “Which brings me back to why you were there in the first place.” When Junior still didn’t answer, Marshall shook his head. “Junior, I don’t know who’ll end up taking Rockhouse’s place, but it ain’t gonna be you. You don’t even scare me, and I’m almost as old as Rockhouse.”

  “Maybe it ain’t about scaring,” Junior said. “Maybe it’s about pushing past where we been. Rockhouse wouldn’t never even think about that. Maybe it’s about time somebody did.”

  Marshall blinked in surprise. The same issues had come up among his half of the people, the ones governed by the First Daughters and protected by the Silent Sons. Bronwyn Hyatt, after her stint in the army and her now-famous rescue in the Iraq desert, insisted the Tufa could not continue the way they had for so many generations. And Mandalay seemed to sympathize with that idea, although she’d made no changes yet. “Damn, Junior. That’s downright insightful.”

  Junior said nothing, but Marshall thought he blushed.

  “But I still got to climb up there and see the old man for myself.”

  “He ain’t much to see.”

  Marshall smiled wryly. “He never has been, has he?”

  * * *

  Mandalay climbed down the hill slowly, high-stepping through the drifts stacked by the wind. Whatever lay down in this hollow, just off Skunk’s Misery Road and on land owned by the Somervilles, had been calling to her with an urgency that only grew stronger the closer she got. It pulled her off the road and into the forest despite the weather and encroaching evening. She couldn’t tell what it was, though; it seemed to exist in a fog of perception, hiding from her by ducking out of sight whenever her mind’s eye landed on it.

  But now she could tell that it had a tune: “I’m Nine Hundred Miles from My Home.” She recognized it from the few clear notes that cut through the mental and magical noise. She’d heard many versions and with many changes, but the one that always spoke to her most—and that this half-heard song seemed to mimic—was recorded by Fiddlin’ John Carson back in 1924.

  You can count the days I’m gone

  On the train that I left on
>
  You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

  If that train runs right

  I’ll be home tomorrow night

  Lord, I’m nine hundred miles from my home.

  At last she had to stop, exhausted, and lean against a tree. Snow peppered her cheeks and eyes. When she looked around again, she realized she was totally lost: not only did she not know where she was going, but the blowing snow had already filled in her footprints. She couldn’t even find her way back.

  She dug out her cell phone but got no signal. She tried to listen to the wind, to hear its voice, but there was nothing. Suddenly she was only a twelve-year-old girl in the woods, underdressed and disoriented, and the fear that came with that realization threatened to choke her.

  What had the night winds done to her?

  She began to sing “Babes in the Wood,” a song so spot-on, it made her smile despite the wind, snow, and fear.

  Now the day being long and the night coming on

  These two little babies laid under a stone.

  They wept and they cried, they sobbed and they sighed;

  These two little babies, they laid down and died.

  She moved around to the back side of the tree to block the wind as much as possible. She stuffed her hands in her jacket pocket, wishing for the umpteenth time that she’d taken her gloves from her school backpack. There was not even a stone for her to crawl under.

  She was in serious trouble, all right.

  And then she heard a man’s voice clearly singing, “I’m Nine Hundred Miles from My Home.”

  * * *

  As he drove back toward town, Marshall Goins tried to ignore the pain in his back and legs. He kept glancing down at his cell phone, waiting for the NO SIGNAL message to go away. At last he got a single bar, and quickly hit the name DEACON HYATT. After a few rings, the call connected, and a voice said, “Hello.”

  “Deacon, it’s Marshall. Some shit’s hit the fan. I’m on my way to pick you up.”

  “Which fan, and which shit?”

  “The big fan, and some big shit. Somebody’s cut off Rockhouse’s extra fingers.”

  The line hissed in the lull, and then Deacon said, “That a fact.”