Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels)

by Alex Bledsoe

He chuckled. “John Hiatt wrote a whole song about that. He related to you?”

  “He spells his name differently from mine.”

  They were quiet for a time. The sadness in her eyes touched him, and he asked gently, “I don’t mean to pry, and it’s totally none of my business, but … you said your brother was stabbed?”

  “Yes. By my ex-boyfriend.”

  “Yikes. That’s tough.”

  She nodded. “More than you know. They were arguing about me. Hard not to feel responsible somehow.” She returned to the flower bed. “I laid awake thinking that for a lot of nights. If I’d done this, or said that, then it might not have happened. It was all my fault.”

  “I know what you mean,” Rob said slowly. The numbness grew within him, threatening to choke him anew. “Had a lot of those nights myself.”

  “But I realized something,” she continued as she weeded. “Something real important.”

  “Which was?”

  “I didn’t hold the knife.”

  He knelt opposite her and began helping. There weren’t many weeds, but they had long roots that clung tenaciously to the soil. “Sometimes you don’t have to.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said firmly. “Someone kills for their own reasons, not yours. And they carry the responsibility for it, not you.”

  “Your boyfriend get that message from God?” he said with a half grin.

  She laughed. “Maybe. He did help me understand it.”

  They worked together in silence after that. For some reason, Rob felt it was important to help Bronwyn spruce up her memorial. By the time they finished, it was almost noon, and he was starving, thirsty, and exhausted. He realized that except for his brief nap at the bottom of the cliff, he hadn’t slept in nearly two days.

  “Thanks,” she said as they stood. “It went a lot faster with your help.”

  He tried not to appreciate her sweaty cleavage, but failed. “Always honored to help a war hero. I don’t suppose you could give me a ride? My car’s up there.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t drive. But there’s a trail over there behind that stand of cedar trees. Meanders a bit, but goes right to the top. Comes out by the old mill.”

  “Thanks.” He paused, then said, “I know Bliss Overbay. And her sister, Curnen. They’ve told me some wild things about the Tufa, but you know what? I believe them. So … thanks for catching me.”

  She said nothing, but just enigmatically smiled. As he turned to walk away, she called, “There’s one more thing I learned about sadness.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’ll follow you as long as it knows you’re watching. So don’t look back.”

  “I’ll remember that,” he said. He walked on, then turned, but as he’d now learned to expect, Bronwyn Hyatt was gone.

  * * *

  Bliss’s truck burst through the briars and nearly rear-ended Rob’s rental car. She jumped out and yelled, “Rob! Rob!”

  She ran to the mouth of the cave. “Rob!” she called down, her voice echoing back at her. There was no reply. She took a deep breath, made a gesture of protection, and went quickly down the steps.

  The cave was empty.

  She gagged on the smell, and almost vomited. But there was no one present. All the fires were out, and even the meth equipment was cold. It looked like it had been abandoned for months.

  “Rob!” she yelled. “Goddammit, Rob!”

  Her cry bounced around the great rock dome. When it faded, only absolute silence remained.

  She climbed the stairs. She felt as if she’d been pummeled, and the slight headache from last night’s moonshine only added to it. There would be nothing to do but look for his body at the bottom of the cliff.

  She was about to cry when a voice said, “I thought you couldn’t go down there.”

  He stood beside his car, disheveled but clearly in one piece. She ran to him and threw her arms around him. “What happened?” she demanded. “The cave’s empty.”

  “Beats me. It was hopping when I left.”

  “Left? Where did you go?”

  He made a long, descending whistle.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Better than fine, actually. Nothing hurts anymore. At all.”

  She hugged him again. “I’m really glad to hear that. Really.”

  “But I still need to talk to Stella.”

  “Y’ain’t gonna find her this way,” a new voice said.

  Rob and Bliss both turned. An old man now sat on the hood of Rob’s car. He wore overalls and a sweat-stained Jack Daniel’s baseball cap. The shade from the bill hid his face. Something about him struck Rob as familiar, but with all his recent odd experiences, he couldn’t place it.

  Bliss stepped toward him. “Where are they?” she said through her teeth.

  The old man spit on the ground. “Rockhouse knows this boy’s been diggin’ around.” He indicated Rob, then pointed at Bliss. “And you spooked him good this morning. So he’s moved things.”

  “He can’t just move things,” Bliss insisted.

  The old man grinned; he showed only three teeth. “Rockhouse can do a whole bunch of things he don’t tell people about.”

  “I’m not trying to spook anybody,” Rob protested. “I just want to talk to my friend’s wife.”

  The old man snorted. “Nobody dragged her anywhere, you know. She went on her own two feet.”

  “Well, Pops, if that’s true, why does everybody want to keep me from hearing her say it for herself?”

  The old man shifted his foot, and suddenly Rob recognized him: Jessup, the strange tree gnome from his dream. Now he was normal sized and dressed in regular clothes, but the face and voice were the same, and he rested an identically swollen foot on the car’s bumper. “All right, no need to get all cattywompus about it,” Jessup said. “He’s moved down to the Pair-A-Dice.”

  Bliss gasped. “No way.”

  “Yes indeedy way. Moved his whole bunch down there. Maybe for good, I don’t know. Least until all this blows over.”

  “That’s … he can’t do that.”

  “He surely did.”

  Bliss turned to Rob. “The Pair-A-Dice is neutral ground, it’s where we can all meet and play together without fighting. If he’s moved his bunch into it, he’s broken his own agreement with the community.” She turned back to the old man. “You’re sure about this?”

  “Course I’m sure!” the old man said. “Go see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I will.” She stamped back to her truck.

  Jessup slid from the fender and, favoring his swollen foot, moved aside. “Will Stoney be there?” Rob called to Bliss as he opened his car door.

  “Where else?” She was already in the seat and buckled up.

  An impossibly strong gust of air struck then. Rob knew the Kansas straight-line winds, and this was stronger. He covered his eyes and peeked between his fingers.

  The wind sheared the leaves from the trees with the ferocity of a bladed weapon. Where moments earlier, the colors of autumn were everywhere, now he saw bare branches appear, still swaying from being suddenly denuded.

  “Oh, no,” Bliss said, so softly it was barely a breath. The Widow’s Tree waved in the distance, more branches newly stripped. She had no time.

  Before Rob even turned his key, Bliss gunned her truck’s engine, made a wide 180 turn across the uneven ground, and roared away. Rob knew he couldn’t find the Pair-A-Dice by himself, and wasn’t even sure he could remember how to get back to town. He tried to catch up, but the rental car just couldn’t handle the roads like the truck. By the time he reached blacktop again, she was long gone.

  31

  Doyle wiped his hands as Rob finished an extremely condensed version of the last twenty-four hours. He left out most of the really strange bits, including the poetry fragment and the fall from the cliff, but it was still a wildly improbable tale, and hearing it spoken aloud only reinforced that.

  “So the upshot of
this is you need directions to the Pair-A-Dice?” Doyle summarized as he closed the hood on the old Chevy pickup. “Or did I miss something?”

  “I need help,” Rob said. “Even if I find it, I can’t just march in there by myself.”

  “No, if Rockhouse’s people are crawlin’ all over it, that wouldn’t be too bright,” Doyle agreed. “But really, this ain’t any of your business. If your buddy’s wife wants to be with Stoney—”

  “I just want to hear her say it!” he almost yelled. “And I want someone else to hear it, so we can both go to the cops and tell them Terry’s wife is not a crime victim.”

  A car pulled up outside, and a moment later, Berklee appeared silhouetted in the garage door. She wore low-rider black pants and a top that revealed her navel. She carried a small cooler, evidently Doyle’s lunch. “Am I interrupting anything?” she asked guardedly. “I can come back later.”

  “You know,” Rob said to her, now unable to keep the desperation from his voice. “You know what Stoney Hicks can do. I just want to make sure my friend’s wife is with him because she wants to be, and she’s not being forced into anything.”

  Berklee froze as if Rob had just pointed a gun at her: eyes wide, mouth open in a gasp that never quite appeared, weight rocked back on her heels. She and Doyle exchanged a quick glance. Then she composed herself and said carefully, with tight faux casualness, “I’m not sure I know what you mean. I knew Stoney in high school, but—”

  “Oh, come on,” Rob snapped.

  “Uhm,” Doyle said quickly, “as a rule, we don’t mess in Tufa stuff.”

  “I thought you were part Tufa, both of you.”

  “Yeah, and you’re part Japanese or whatever—”

  “Filipino.”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t go to the Philippines and start telling ’em what to do, would you?”

  He had a point, which took some of the steam from Rob’s annoyance. He threw up his hands and said, “Look, you don’t want to help, don’t. No one else in town seems to care, either. It’s just some stranger, she’s there because she wants to be, nobody’s business, yadda yadda. Just give me directions to the damn place, and I’ll go do the best I can by myself.”

  In a tone neither angry nor annoyed, Berklee asked, “Why do you care?”

  He looked at her seriously. “Because I know how Terry Kizer feels, and I can help.”

  Doyle and Berklee exchanged another look. “Would you excuse us for a moment?” Doyle asked.

  Rob went outside the garage. The winds were still stripping the trees, making the branches sway and crack, and he squinted against the peppering dust. He’d given it his best, most persuasive shot, and if it didn’t work, then he’d just have to go into the Tufa den alone. If he could even find it.

  The tall tree he’d seen from the mountain outside the cave waved in the wind. Its limbs were now almost totally bare; only a few leaves remained, fiercely rattling like flags on a ship.

  All his recent exertions caught up to him. His shoulders throbbed, his head alternately pounded and itched, and his black eye tingled maddeningly. Even his hands hurt. A musician should take better care of his hands.

  At last Doyle and Berklee emerged from the garage. Neither looked happy. “All right,” Doyle said. “Daddy’ll watch the station while we’re gone. What exactly do you want us to do?”

  Rob felt an immense flood of relief. “Doyle, you don’t know how much I appreciate this,” he said with genuine feeling. Then he turned to Berklee. “Are you sure you want to go? It might get a little rough. And, you know, Stoney’ll most likely be there.”

  “If he’s not, then your friend’s wife won’t be, either,” Berklee said. She had a distant, haunted look about her. “And yes, I want to go.”

  He nodded. In answer to Doyle, he said, “All I need you to do is stop anyone from messing with me once I get going.”

  “Get going doing what, exactly?”

  Rob smiled coldly. “The very thing that brought me here.”

  * * *

  Bliss reached the Pair-A-Dice. Vehicles already filled the parking lot. She clipped one old station wagon as she parked, but neither her truck nor the other vehicle would notice one more ding in the paint. She slammed her door closed and stalked between rusted old flatbeds and huge vintage Buicks, batting leaves from her face. She looked at the distant Widow’s Tree towering above the forest and felt her stomach tighten. What should’ve taken weeks was now being done in hours, if not minutes. In a triumph of utter vindictiveness, Rockhouse wanted to ensure Curnen was gone for good.

  Bliss stopped at the entrance and listened. Over the wind she heard the muffled noises of many people inside. When she pulled the handle, though, she found it locked.

  She stepped back and kicked the door hard. “Open this goddam door now!” she yelled. Her voice had a timbre she rarely used, something her mother taught her and then warned her to employ only sparingly. “It’s like when you beat a dog,” she’d explained. “If you do it all the time, eventually the dog don’t notice.”

  The dogs noticed this time. The door creaked open and a face peered out. It belonged to a man in his late teens, and seemed to be covered in red paint. “Miz Overbay?” he asked in disbelief.

  She yanked the door from his grip and pushed past him. “What the hell happened to you, Cartille, you look like you got licked by a damn tomato. And where is that bastard uncle of yours?”

  Cartille said nothing and quickly disappeared into the crowd. She pushed through the tightly packed mob until she reached the stage, where Rockhouse sat alone, tuning his banjo. The old man looked up, looked away, and then did a perfect double take. “What in the—?”

  Bliss snatched the banjo out of his hands. “You and me, fart-knocker,” she growled so only he could hear. “In the kitchen, now.”

  He sputtered, “You ain’t got no—”

  Bliss slammed the instrument into its case, then made a hand gesture at him, another of the ones she’d been warned to save for special occasions. He drew back as if physically slapped. “You’re crazy,” he whispered.

  “No, I’m pissed off. Now follow me.” She grabbed him by the strap of his overalls and pulled him to his feet. He felt small and fragile to her, but she knew that was as deliberate a disguise as the way she made sure no one else in the room paid any attention to them. She slammed the kitchen door shut behind them, leaned back against it, and crossed her arms. The rowdy noise that came through the horizontal service window did not distract them.

  “Honey, you must be on the rag something fierce to come stompin’ in here like this,” Rockhouse said.

  “You insufferable old glob of possum spit,” she hissed. “Tell me why you did this.”

  “Just felt like playin’ me some music, that’s—”

  Before she even realized it, Bliss had slapped him so hard, her fingers were instantly numb. The blow knocked him onto the griddle surface, which luckily was not heated for cooking. He clutched the appliance to keep from falling, then turned and looked back over his shoulder at her. His eyes were black with rage. “You done made—”

  She hit him again, this time a short punch to the kidney guided by her skill as an EMT. He groaned and fell to his knees, clipping his chin on the edge of the stove.

  She was breathing rapidly now, and sweat coated her body under her clothes. She’d never physically attacked anyone before, and the thrill was almost sexual. “Now stop jerking me around,” she whispered hoarsely, “and tell me what you’re after.”

  He got slowly to his feet. Blood ran from his chin down onto his shirt. “Careful I don’t git ahold of you like Stoney does his girls,” he said as he eased himself back onto his chair.

  She laughed. “Not a chance, old man. We’re equals, remember?”

  “Equals,” he repeated dully.

  “But since you brought it up, what’s the deal with Stoney and this Yankee girl? I know he’s done with her by now; why won’t he just send her back to her husband?”


  Rockhouse laughed. “Says she gives the best blow job in the valley.”

  “That’s not it.”

  He wiped his chin and stared at the blood on his palm. “Ain’t nobody broke my skin in a coon’s age,” he muttered.

  She took a step toward him, and he flinched. She felt a rush of power. “Tell me,” she repeated.

  “Her husband done found some of the poem on the Swett gravestones,” he said with a sigh. “Too much of it for my tastes. Needed to get hold a’them rubbings he made, but none of us could sneak into Peggy Goins’s place without her knowing. So we had her go git ’em. That woulda ended it, except Stoney decided he liked having a Yankee girlfriend.”

  Bliss gasped. The utter cruelty of what he’d revealed was more than she’d imagined even Rockhouse capable of. A debilitating enchantment that could never be broken doomed the hapless Stella to waste slowly away for no more reason than Rockhouse’s convenience. “You mean you ruined that woman’s whole life for nothing more than some drawings?”

  “I didn’t ruin nothing!” Rockhouse cried, suddenly furious. “It was you! You brung that Yankee boy around, showing him everything. You showed him the Swett plot, you took him up to y’all’s singing.”

  Bliss slowly shook her head. For the first time in her short life, she truly felt her authority. “I always knew you were small, Rockhouse,” she said softly. “I never knew how pitiful you were until now. I can’t believe you ever scared me.”

  He smiled, his eyes atwinkle with malevolence. “You best be scared, Bliss. If that song gets out, if I go down … you all go with me. Including that little snot Mandalay.”

  She laughed. “Do you think I’d mind? You really ain’t paying attention. The only reason I care is because I don’t want to lose something so important to our people. You brought us here by pretending it was your idea, even though everyone knew you’d been kicked out on your fat ass. We’ve all played along because it’s in our nature to do it, but you knew eventually we’d outgrow you. That’s why you tried to keep us pure, and when that didn’t work, you trotted out that idiotic music career. Did you really think the winds couldn’t find you just down the road in Nashville?”