Once There Were Sad Songs

by Velda Brotherton

  This woman, Liz, now trailing along behind him and his two friends, carried a promise for his salvation, and she didn’t even know it. He had sensed it early on and been frightened. Now he simply waited for it to happen. Like he used to in ’Nam when you could do nothing but hang on for the ride and try to believe that nothing mattered anyway. Too late, he’d learned that everything mattered. A great deal.

  The sun blazed through the trees, bouncing a ball of light along the hood of the blue Ford. Mary Elizabeth kept her distance from the three bikers as they ascended the twisting, steep Wilhelmina Drive headed west toward Oklahoma. She had no idea where they were going. About midmorning they pulled off onto an overlook and she followed, parking a distance away from them. It was strange how they gathered at the rail, ignoring her. Stranger still how she played along, standing quietly at the edge of the precipice and leaving a required space between them. Far below, graceful birds soared against a patchwork of faraway green and brown fields cut by streams that looked like gleaming ribbons wrapped around flat ponds and clumps of trees. A humid blue haze blurred the peaks against the horizon.

  When her companions stirred restlessly, tossed their empty beer cans over the edge like untrained children, and clomped back to their bikes, she returned to her car. Now that her decision had been made to remain with the men, she was afraid they would run off and leave her. She had no idea where she would go if they did, but it wouldn’t be home. Nausea fluttered deep down in her stomach, brought on by a nascent fear that made her lightheaded. It was like she was becoming someone else, that timid, well-behaved little good girl fading resolutely into some dark dungeon. Accustomed to obeying all the rules, she felt very courageous to be breaking them. The Devil no longer rode at her shoulder, for she had cast him out, much like the Lord had done when he grew tired of that particular angel residing in his heaven.

  She knew well the danger of denying the Devil’s existence, for that opened the door to his possession of her very soul. She couldn’t fight something in which she didn’t believe, so she believed very strongly in the Devil and his Hell. Odd that she found it easier to deny God. She had seen his vengeance when he took Levi from her and cast her into a life she hated. Suppose he struck again, that vengeful God? Just as she was getting her wits about her.

  Shaking off such nonsense, she stared out the open window. Lefty and Steven appeared to be arguing, the shorter man rising on his toes and waving both arms around as he shouted. It was about her. She heard wisps of his obscene conversation, words that made her cover her ears. Steven put an end to the argument by simply turning from Lefty, mounting his bike, and firing it up.

  She glanced quickly at him, and he raised a hand and nodded. Before she could consider the consequences of continuing on with the frenetic group, they roared off, tires shooting gravel that pinged sharply against the sides of her car.

  As they rode on, the sun climbed, grew hotter and brighter, and she finally rolled up her window and switched on the air conditioner. The morning had been chilly, and she’d worn stiff new jeans that chafed the perspiring flesh between her legs; her stomach rumbled. Obviously there would be no stopping for lunch.

  In Heavener, Oklahoma, the men switched direction and headed back east toward Arkansas. They had obviously taken the little side trip simply to include the treacherous mountain drive through Queen Wilhelmina State Park, for when they reached Highway 71 they headed north. They could have done that without taking the detour into Oklahoma. Earlier she’d seen the sign for 71 in Mena and knew that way led home. Now here they were, heading toward all-too-familiar territory. Ahead was Chapel Hill and its church and Reudell.

  Had Steven somehow found out where she lived so he could deliberately lead her home? He’d made it clear he thought that’s where she belonged. Immediately she dismissed such nonsense. Yet, suppose, when they drew closer, a nosy neighbor or church member spotted her and told Reudell? And he came looking for her? Just suppose that happened, and he found her. The runaway, errant, disobedient, sinful wife, dressed like a harlot and in the company of three dreadful men.

  She’d be on her knees from now on, till they turned bloody, till she fainted from the strain, begging for forgiveness. Why had she put up with that all those years? Was she being just as foolish, trading it for this flight of fancy?

  There was still time to turn back, leave them to their life of wandering. But she didn’t.

  She was relieved when the bikers pulled into a huge truck stop at the intersection of 71 and I-40. She was half starved, the car was low on gas, and she desperately needed a bathroom. It never occurred to her to stop on her own. Though she vaguely realized that she had shifted her dependence from a fanatical old husband to three ageless hippies, she felt totally incapable of dealing with it. It was simply the way things were with her, maybe always would be.

  So she hadn’t actually run away from anything, after all. At least, not yet. But then, she wasn’t finished.

  At the top of the mountain, with the tiny town of Mountainburg in sight in the valley far below, the sparkling ribbon of Frog Bayou cutting the green pastures, Steven gestured for a turn on a wide, well graveled road. Everyone followed, including Liz in her Ford. She’d never make it in that low-hung car where he had a mind to go, but he could take her in on his bike. If she lasted that long.

  Soon the road narrowed, intersected with others with signs pointing to places like White Rock and Locke and Shores Lake. Always he kept to the narrowest, following a chosen route deeper into the Ozark wilderness until they followed nothing more than a two-rut clay-and-rock path that cut through thick woods. Before it dwindled to nothing, he swung to the right, following faint tracks across a meadow, through a stream, and back into the woods.

  In the dense shadows, slanting rays of afternoon sunlight flashed through the thick canopy of leaves, striking him off-and-on blind. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of wildlife, mostly critters that darted from sight before he could recognize them. Deep-woods beings who did not wish to deal with such interlopers. White-tailed deer and bobcat and wild turkeys, maybe even a reclusive black bear or the legendary mountain boomer.

  The damp root smell of earth, the sense of untamed wildness, propelled him back to his first year in the woods after he came out of ’Nam, his home a cave halfway up a north slope not far from here, well hidden by gigantic hickory and pin oaks. He’d spent that summer, fall, and winter in the company of ghosts of the Quapaw, the downstream people of the mighty northern Sioux. He walked with their bronzed women and handsome children, their lustful warriors, the wise and withered old men in this Arkansas land that was named for them. Their ghosts spoke to him, taught him to survive, to find peace. He thought later he might have been hallucinating on leftover LSD, yet when he studied the tribe, reading about them in the tattered pages of yard sale treasures scrounged as best he could, he found his visions to be quite close to the truth. The knowledge brought him at last to a certain serenity. Perhaps there was a higher power caring for his bruised soul. Leading him beside the still waters.

  Amazed and awed, he had grown content to rest in the slanting golden rays of sunlight, immersed himself in the power of the flow of clear green water, and on occasion joined in mourning with the call of the mockingbird and whippoorwill. He existed in such a way for so long that he forgot the real world, except to pick up his check and cash it. He forgot that time passed. Then, one hot summer, temporarily insane, he crawled from his haven to join in the Atoka, Oklahoma, madness of drugs and rock-and-roll and sex. He found it a disgusting and feeble attempt to recreate Woodstock, which he’d missed due to the distractions of a minor conflict in Asia, and he couldn’t return to the woods soon enough.

  He didn’t emerge from his wilderness retreat again until Lefty lured him out with his pleas of loneliness and approaching madness after his wife took off. It was then he learned to his great surprise that he had spent nearly seven years living in seclusion. Once out, he never went back. Someone had to keep Lefty from killing
himself.

  Today, he was aware that he lived in the summer of 1985 because Shadow insisted on keeping a calendar of events he deemed of importance. He packed and unpacked the thick and tattered records with a reverence he gave to nothing else. Perhaps he felt they were all he had to prove his existence.

  Steven wanted no such ties, in case they bound him to some sort of reality. Anyway, that’s what he’d thought until he dragged the wet and half-drowned woman out of Lake Ouachita a few days earlier and found himself hauled from the brink of his own mortality by her mere existence.

  Negotiating a horseshoe bend in the track, he glanced upward to see her little blue car on a snakelike curve above. Following along. He hadn’t thought she would actually come this far. Perhaps he’d been testing her. Faced with the fact of her presence, he began to build a fantasy of the way it would be to have her with them. He was suddenly as excited as a child awaiting his birthday, forgetting what often happened after the party was over, the ice cream eaten and cake crumbs scattered all over the place. Only a mess to clean up.

  ****

  Gripping the wheel of the jouncing car, Mary Elizabeth rounded a curve, uttered an exclamation of surprise, and jammed on the brakes to keep from hitting a huge tree lying across the road. She opened the door and climbed out. A faint echo of engines bounced between bluffs that rose high above either side of the narrow hollow into which the men had led, and apparently abandoned, her.

  She gazed back the way she had come. Could she find her way out? They’d twisted and turned, taken so many different roads, rights and lefts, Ts and Ys. Shading her eyes, she peered beyond the tree’s branches.

  Tracks in the dust showed the three bikes had gone around the fallen tree, but she couldn’t. Rocks and brush and a deep ditch barred the way. Disappointed that they’d run off and left her, she contemplated backing up to a wide spot and turning around. Most roads led somewhere. They were on the east side of the wide valley through which the Frog ran. Chapel Hill lay to the north and west. If she could fly she wasn’t too far from home, but going there was not an option.

  Picking her way carefully, lest she surprise a rattler, she checked out the tree. Its rotted, brittle limbs littered the ground like shed appendages. No one had been this way in a very long while. On the steep bank to her right, remnants of the splintered trunk marked where the dying giant had once reached for the sun. Behind her the exhausted car engine cooled down with an intrusive ticking that broke the silence. Nearby something small rustled through dry leaves. The air hung still, bereft of any lingering echoes from the bikes.

  They had tricked her, played another of their childish games and intentionally left her to her own devices. How could she have been so stupid?

  Off to the southwest, thunderheads boiled menacingly into the crystal blue sky, and a rain-scented breeze freshened, lifting strands of her hair, caught loosely in a clip at the nape of her neck. Its caress soothed her, and for a moment she forgot to be afraid.

  The sound of an approaching engine shattered the tranquil setting. A single bike burst from the thick forest and rushed toward her, its wheels kicking up a thin trail of dust. Steven grinned from a grimy face, rolled to a halt, twisted the throttle to send out a blast, then cut off the ignition and sat there, legs spread wide to prop up the heavy bike.

  “Like a ride, ma’am?”

  The hills swallowed up the last of the engine’s roar and she eyed the gleaming, one-eyed monster and its smiling passenger.

  “On that? I don’t think so. It looks dangerous. Besides, what about my stuff?”

  He grinned wider. So sure she would crawl on the beast behind him. “We can pack some of it on here. What you’ll need today. We’ll come back for the rest later.”

  “And just leave my car here?”

  He exaggerated a look all around. “I don’t think anyone will bother it. Maybe a bear might use it for a hockey puck. We’ll lock it, just in case. Looks like there’s a storm coming. We’d better get what you need and get outta here.”

  Even as he spoke, he dismounted and strode toward the barrier separating them. Just on the opposite side of the tree, he planted hands on hips and regarded her quizzically. “Well? It’s decision time, Liz. Yes? No?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “After coming all this way? Suppose you go back. Then you’ll never know what you missed.”

  Gazing at his stance, one hip cocked, she swallowed harshly. Levi’s love, that’s what I missed the last time. She nodded. “Okay.”

  He scrambled over the fallen tree. Afraid to think of the bike ride ahead, she watched him stop and look back at her. She had a sudden vision of a foolish, middle-aged woman taking off on a lark with an irreverent, irascible man and his two disgusting buddies. Saw herself as the good church folk at home would.

  “Coming?”

  Fists gripped at her sides, she stared up at the sky. Go, the voice inside her said, but she didn’t know if it urged her to flee or accompany this man.

  He took his hand off the door handle. “Your call,” he said and headed back toward his bike, going right on past her like she wasn’t there.

  “Wait. Are you just going to leave me here?”

  He stopped, once more raised his shoulders, then turned toward her. She thought he intended to argue, but instead he startled her with a question.

  “What’s the one thing you’d most like to do right this very minute? More than anything else in the whole fuckin’ world?”

  She flinched at his use of the vulgar word but considered his question. When she replied, her answer surprised her as much as it did him.

  “I’d like to go fishing,” she said softly. “Would you take me?”

  Beaming with pleasure, he returned to stand before her. “Let’s get your stuff and heist our butts back down to the site, ’cause there’s one mother-fuckin’ hole of water there. I’ll just bet if you can get a line wet before that rain hits, you’ll come up lucky. Fish always bite right before a storm.”

  Swallowing a criticism of his language, she followed him to the car to choose what they would take to the new campsite.

  The Devil walked quietly behind her. She could hear his footsteps padding through the green grass and feel the heat of his breath on her neck.

  Chapter Ten

  With obvious eagerness, Steven fetched the keys from the ignition, opened the trunk, and began to sort through her things, as if he knew better than she did what was needed. He came out with her tent and sleeping bag.

  “Get you some clothes and whatever food you’ll need tonight. We’ll come back in the morning for the rest.”

  Nodding, she did so, and together they wrestled her supplies across the fallen tree and onto his bike. He tied them down, straddled the seat, and kicked the bike to life.

  “Climb on,” he shouted above the din.

  She gauged the small space between his behind and her bundles, eyed the roaring monster with enough misgiving to dry her mouth, and stepped backward. “I think I’ll walk.”

  “You’ll walk?” He yelled over the noise, then glared at her and shook his head. “Don’t be such a baby. Shut your eyes and climb on. It won’t bite.”

  “I’ve never ridden one of these things.”

  “I'll do the riding, you just hang on.” He eyed her for another moment. “Time to start. It’s a hell of a long way to walk, through a wide meadow, up a steep hill, and around the bench, back down into the holler. Why would you want to walk when you can ride?”

  Crossing her arms over her breasts, she said, “Gee, I don’t know how anyone could turn down such an offer. I don’t even think I’d fit in that space.”

  “Come on, Liz. Get on. You can’t walk as fast as I can ride, and we’ll be all night getting there. That storm is coming fast, and I’m tired of yelling.”

  As if to add truth to his words, lightning jagged along the horizon, trailed by distant thunder.

  “Okay, I’ll ride on the thing, but you’d better not play any of your ga
mes with me.”

  He twisted at the handlebars so the engine blatted and snapped a wicked grin at her. “Would I do that?”

  “Yes. Yes, you would. I’m asking you not to. Asking you for once to be a grownup and remember I’m old.” Her voice trembled and so did her insides.

  Laughing, he pointed. “Okay, old woman. See that? Put one foot there and the other over here, if you’re not too decrepit to mount up. Don’t stick out your feet or put them down, no matter what happens. And that’s hot.” He pointed.

  She looked, saw mud-splattered chrome and a black pipe.

  With a great deal of trepidation, she straddled the bike, placed her feet where he’d indicated, and waited.

  “Put your arms around me. There aren’t any handles to hold on to. All you gotta do is hug up tight and don’t look.”

  Terrified speechless, she followed his directions. Even his solid, leather-vested back under her cheek didn’t quell the mind-numbing fear.

  “Maybe you could tie me on, so when I pass out I won’t fall off.”

  With his laughter rumbling in her ears, she hunched against him and waited for the worst to happen. But he rolled the bike slowly, gentled it over the rough terrain. It purred under her backsides like a great cat.

  So far, so good. She’d almost let out her breath when he goosed the thing and it leaped forward.

  About the time she felt sure she could make no sound at all, a squeal burst from her mouth. Grasshoppers, flying beetles, tree limbs, clumps of weeds, even butterflies rushed past, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Wind ripped at her clothing, making sharp snapping sounds, fingered through her hair and tore it from the clip, batted at her face until her flesh tingled.

  A heady rush of exhilaration sponged away the fear. She tasted an unknown sensation, a metallic flavor akin to sheer terror but laced with a bright tartness, an expectation of something astonishing about to grab her up and race off.

  “How do you like it?” The question vibrated through his back into her ear.