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

  “Her plane crashed,” Berklee finished in a small voice. “I remember. Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too,” Rob agreed. “It was all such a stupid situation. I only auditioned on a dare, I can’t stand shows like that. They celebrate all the wrong things about music, you know? Technique over talent, skill over soul. I mean, I write my own songs and that’s what I want to play, not the stuff a bunch of market researchers pick out. But I kept getting selected for the next round, and before I knew it, there I was, in fucking Hollywood.”

  The flames blurred in his vision. He realized as he spoke that he had yet to just talk about what happened, to anyone.

  “You sang George Jones,” Berklee said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know why, really. The damn producers kept wanting it to be ‘Wind Beneath My Wings.’ But I told them I’d either sing what I wanted, or just sit there without making a sound. They weren’t about to take that chance.”

  “So why are you here?” Doyle asked gently.

  “Because God wants me to suffer, I guess.”

  “No, I mean, why are you here in Needsville?”

  “The truth? You’ll laugh.”

  “No, we won’t,” Berklee assured him. Sympathetic tears streaked her face.

  “I had to do the final show, right? I’d signed a contract, and only your own death gets you out of that. So I was backstage at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, where they were staging it, and I was a wreck. Really. They hadn’t given me any time to myself to deal with things, I guess because they knew if they did, I’d just collapse into jelly. I was waiting in this stairwell all alone, and it … just … hit me. She was really dead.

  “And then this guy appeared. He was dressed like one of those old country music guys, with the sequins and the fancy boots, but he couldn’t have been more than forty. He sat with me while I was crying, and then he told me he could help. He said…”

  He trailed off. I’ll sound like a lunatic, he thought.

  “What did he say?” Doyle prompted.

  Rob took a deep breath. “He said, ‘There’s a song that heals broken hearts. I’m not kidding, and I’m not exaggerating. Go find this song, learn to play it, and all that pain you have inside will be gone.’”

  Doyle and Berklee exchanged a look.

  “I didn’t believe him, needless to say,” he continued. “But he told me to come here, to Needsville, and get to know the Tufa. He said it was one of their songs, and since I looked like them, they’d share it with me. He said they’d been around since before the wind rounded off the Smokies, and that I’d find the song I wanted ‘on a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone.’”

  “So you came here,” Berklee said.

  “Had nothing better to do,” Rob said. “I didn’t really want to be around people I knew. I knew the sequin cowboy was nuts, of course. But I couldn’t stop thinking about his story. And after I read about the Tufa online, I decided it might be the kind of vacation I needed. Away from everything that reminded me of her.”

  “The Tufa don’t have their own songs,” Doyle said. “They know the same ones everyone else does. There’s no mystery to them. They’re just … folks.”

  “Well, except for Bliss Overbay,” Berklee said bitterly. She finished her beer and crushed the can between her hands. “Right, Doyle? She’s a mystery, ain’t she?”

  Doyle looked at her over the top of his beer. “You’re doing that thing we talked about again.” He tapped his can with one finger to indicate her drinking.

  “How do I know you’re not?” she shot back. “Doing that thang, I mean?” She drew the word out into a long, accusatory snarl.

  “Because I have never, ever in my entire life slept with Bliss Overbay,” he said calmly. “And I never will. I love you.”

  “And I love you so much, I can’t imagine life without you,” she said sarcastically.

  “Is that you or the beer talking?”

  “I was talking to the beer,” she shot back.

  “Whoa, guys, I didn’t mean to start anything,” Rob said.

  “Oh, this was started long before you showed up,” Doyle said. “Berklee and Bliss have what y’all city folks call ‘issues.’ Never mind that they’re both damn near thirty years old and all this stuff happened in high school. Some people just can’t let things go.”

  “Well, some of us didn’t run off to college,” Berklee snapped. “Some of us had to stay here and work and watch all the boys ignore us and chase after that smug heifer. You ever think about that?” Berklee seemed about to cry.

  With no malice, Doyle said simply, “You’re right, I ran off to college. And then I ran back to you.”

  Rob stood. “Look, maybe I should run back to the motel. My head really hurts, and if I drink any more, I can’t outsmart these mountain roads. Thanks for dinner, guys.”

  A coyote howled in the distance. Rob froze, every sense alert, to see if the eerie voice from the previous night would reply.

  “What is it?” Doyle asked.

  “Shh!” Rob hissed. “Listen.”

  “It’s just a coyote,” Berklee said, her voice slurred. She pronounced it “ci-yo-tay,” and giggled.

  “Just wait,” Rob said.

  The response came, just as it had the night before, a long lilting wail that almost, but not quite, hid its human origins in mimicry.

  “There!” Rob said triumphantly. “I heard that in town last night. What is that?”

  Doyle shrugged. “Sounded like a dog to me. They holler back at the coyotes sometimes.”

  “No, that’s a person,” Rob insisted. “Someone howling back.”

  “Girls howl at the moon sometimes, y’know,” Berklee said woozily.

  “Hush, sweetie,” Doyle said gently.

  Then the cry came again, considerably louder and closer.

  “Well,” Doyle said quickly, with stiff nonchalance, “I, uh, guess we’ll turn in as well.” He nudged Berklee with his elbow.

  “Yeah. Nice to see you again, Rob,” Berklee said, and unsteadily got to her feet.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe we can have lunch or something, grab a beer after work,” Doyle said as he practically shoved his wife toward the trailer. By the time Rob reached his car, Doyle and Berklee were inside with the door locked and all the lights off. He lowered the car’s window, but heard nothing over the chorus of insects that filled the darkness. There was no additional howl, either human or animal.

  * * *

  Bliss sat in her bathtub, feet propped on opposite corners, a wet rag over her eyes. Only a single candle in a jar provided light. She had both windows open, and the breeze grew cold almost as soon as night fell. She ran some more hot water into the tub and resumed her attempt to relax.

  She felt the weight of the house almost the way normal people felt the clothes against their skin. This spot had housed Overbays for longer than most could imagine, and now she was the last one. Well … not entirely, of course. The last true one, if not the last with the true. And she was alone, and childless, and probably barren, and definitely not going anywhere.

  A coyote’s cry broke the silence, followed by the inevitable response. She sighed and sank farther into the water. That second sound felt as heavy as the very mountains around her. Once it could make her cry; now it got only a weary exhalation, bubbled into the bathwater just below her nose. She closed her eyes and slid all the way under, enjoying the moments of silence and peace it granted. Soon enough, she would emerge from the warm water into the cool night, a pointless symbolic rebirth that gave no sense of change or future. For the moment, she’d forgotten the upheavals promised by her dreams.

  The same Kate Campbell song ran through her head:

  I have seen hope and glory fade away

  I’ve heard old folks talk of better days

  When she broke the surface, her cell phone was ringing. She got out of the bath, dripped water across the tile floor, and fished the phone from her jeans. “Hello?”

  “It’s M
andalay,” the voice said. “Are you feeling the wind?”

  Her wet skin was pebbled from the chill. “I sure am.”

  “It has a message for you. And a job. Watch for the sign. Bye.” The line went dead.

  Bliss shoved the phone back in her jeans pocket, in the process dislodging two guitar picks. Both fell into the bath and floated on the surface. As she reached for them, a gust of wind rippled the water and blew the two picks together.

  She picked them up. Here was her sign, just as Mandalay had said, and it sure wasn’t hard to interpret. Only now, her chills had nothing to do with the wind.

  11

  When Rob returned to the Catamount Corner, he parked next to a dust-covered SUV with Michigan plates. Otherwise, the street was deserted. He double-checked the post office porch, but it, too, was empty.

  He heard angry voices as he got out of the car, and it took him a moment to realize they came from above him, through a partially open window. The dim blue light from a laptop computer glowed on the room’s ceiling, which was all he could see from his angle. Shadows moved through this light, as one of the arguing people paced the floor. A female hand reached through the opening and flicked cigarette ash into the night.

  Rob smiled wryly. There were at least ten NO SMOKING signs in each room. This must be the couple that had checked in while he was out at the Pair-A-Dice the previous night. They sure didn’t sound like honeymooners, though.

  “That’s not what you said before!” a male voice said.

  “I know, but that was before we were married!” a woman responded.

  “So everything’s magically different now just because we wear these stupid rings?”

  “Yes, it’s different because it counts now! Now your stupid little fuckups affect me, too!”

  “You said you had all these issues worked out!”

  “Well, I was wrong!” The woman paused, then added in a calmer voice, “There, I said it. That should make you happy.”

  Rob quietly shut his car door. He carried his guitar onto the porch and settled into the swing. Except for the voices above him, the night was quiet. Only a dozen streetlights were needed to go all the way down Main Street, and three of them had failed, so the darkness seemed like a heavy tent held up by these isolated poles. He felt like a small child hiding under a blanket, safe and deliciously frightened at the same time.

  He plucked lightly at the strings of his guitar as occasional phrases drifted down from the argument.

  “… flirting like that with every guy who…”

  “… not change who I am for you…”

  “… don’t respect me at…”

  “… trust me as far as you can…”

  As he played, the voices above him provided the harsh, chopping rhythm. He echoed their words in his head and tried to fit them to his tune.

  “… goddammit, I have every right to…”

  I have every right to feel this way.…

  “… not my fault that people just like being around me…”

  It’s not your fault, you always say.…

  “… work all damn day and come home to…”

  At night I feel like you just don’t care.…

  “… don’t like to do any of the things I like to…”

  There’s nothing that we like to share.…

  Finally he heard a door slam, and then silence.

  It was the first time since Anna’s death he’d been moved to write about anything other than her death. He worked on the tune a bit more, barely touching the strings, until the combination of alcohol and headache finally won out. He quietly went to his room, wrote down the lyrics, and slept.

  * * *

  This time, a smell woke him.

  A fetid odor filled his room. It reminded him of the old junior high bathrooms that were never really cleaned and thus constantly smelled of urine, feces, and sweat. This odor was similar, although he also caught whiffs of dirt, like a freshly turned garden.

  He sat up and winced at the fresh pain around his stitches. Except for the moonlight outside the open window, the room was dark. The blowing curtains made shadows across the floor. He remained very still as his eyes adjusted, and listened for the slightest sound.

  Then, despite the silence, he had the very definite sense that someone else was in the room.

  Had Tiffany come back to knife him in his sleep? He imagined her on tiptoes, like a cartoon elephant sneaking up on him. But there was no place for anyone her size to hide.

  “Hello?” he said, his voice raspy from sleep. There was no response.

  He considered turning on the lamp, but decided against it, since it would blind him as well as any intruder. He carefully slid out of bed. He wore only his boxers, and when his bare feet hit the cold wooden floor, it creaked under his weight. As he crept to the door, the night chill raised bumps on his skin.

  He stopped. Wait a minute, he thought. Chill? I didn’t open the window. In fact, he was certain he’d closed it before he went to bed, so he wouldn’t be awakened again by the strange cry.

  The first real moment of panic struck, and he stood with his back against the locked door for a long time, waiting for anything in the room to move. But nothing did, and by then, the smell had almost vanished.

  At last he felt along the wall for the light switch. In the sudden illumination, he saw every detail of the lace-encrusted room, nothing odd or out of place. No furtive figures dashed for cover. He was just about to chide himself for his excessive imagination when he noticed something shiny and wet on the floor.

  He knelt beside it. The spot of mud was in the shape of a small, bare human foot. He spotted another one closer to the bed, then saw a whole trail of them, half-dry and rapidly disappearing, that led from his bedside to the floor beneath the open window.

  “What the hell?” he said softly to himself.

  He leaned out and looked down at the wall below his window. An agile person could climb the gutter drain and then get access to his room. But who would want to?

  His fingers slid into something wet. On the windowsill was the muddy outline of a hand. He put his own down next to it; the print was smaller, but the fingers were long and slender, reaching past his own, almost like some kind of monkey. He envisioned a half-simian gargoyle creature perched on the sill, watching him with big, night-vision eyes, like a giant lemur.

  And the print seemed to have six fingers.

  The smell was almost gone now, as were the prints. Soon they’d be only amorphous patches of dried mud. He couldn’t tell anybody, because there’d be no proof. And what if this was all just some weird hallucination brought on by the whack to his head?

  “You’re losing it, Rob,” he told himself. He closed and locked the window, turned off the light, and went back to bed. He was asleep again almost instantly.

  * * *

  The next morning Rob managed a shower, enduring the agony as he washed the blood, Vaseline, spiderwebs, and pine needles from his hair. Luckily, the scab around the stitches held. He opened the window and let the cool air and bright sunshine flood into the room, dispelling the night’s heebie-jeebies. As he expected, the muddy prints on the sill were now indistinct patches of dried dirt that blew away in the morning breeze.

  He got dressed and went downstairs to the Catamount Corner’s dining room. A heavyset man with a goatee and glasses, his eyes red from sleeplessness, sat alone at one of the three tables. Rob assumed he was the male voice he’d heard from the porch. He had the general cast of the Tufas—dark hair, dusky skin, and big white teeth—but the qualities weren’t so obvious as they were in the locals. A road map lay open on the table in front of him, and he was comparing it to notes on an iPad. They nodded at each other as Rob got coffee and sat at the table closest to the door.

  Rob opened his notebook to the lyrics he’d scrawled the previous night. They seemed awfully trite in the clear light of morning, but they might work as a start. With a little tweaking …

  A tall redhead entered t
he room, glanced at Rob, and smiled. She sat down opposite the goatee guy.

  “Sleep well?” the man asked sarcastically.

  “Like a baby,” the woman said, deliberately blithe.

  “I bet,” he snorted. “Look, if we’re just going to fight all—”

  “We’re only going to fight if you start it.”

  “Can I finish my sentence?”

  “Sure.” She waved her hand dismissively.

  “I was saying, if we’re just going to fight all day, maybe I should go do the cemeteries alone. You can do whatever you want.”

  “Oh, yeah, lots to do here.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t go check these last couple of graveyards, then I’ll always wonder about them. It would be stupid to leave without doing it. I’ll do it as fast as I can, and you can, I don’t know, read a book or something.”

  “Fine. Next year I pick the vacation. And no more of this idiotic grave-robbing.”

  “It’s grave-rubbing. And it’s for our kids, too, if we ever have any.”

  “Our kids won’t care who’s buried in what little town. They probably won’t even care where we’re buried. I think it’s a little morbid, anyway.” She stood. “I’m going up to the room. You do what you want.” She gave Rob another smile as she passed his table; she was long and athletic and clearly aware of her effect on men.

  When she’d gone, Rob realized her husband was glaring at him. “That’s my wife you’re drooling over.”

  Rob shrugged apologetically; he had been staring. “Sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just pretty to look at.”

  The other man nodded sadly. “Yeah. I’m sorry, we’ve just been fighting nonstop for a week now. It seems like everything I do or say just pisses her off, and—” He stopped. “Well, you’re not interested in our problems, I’m sure. How’d you get the shiner?”

  “One of the local Southern belles rang my bell yesterday.” Rob turned to show his stitches.

  “Ow. A girl did that?”

  “She was bigger than me.”