Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

“Wow. If she was around now, she’d have her own reality show. What happened to her?”

“When she died, they just put sides and a top on her bed and knocked down a wall to get her out. Took a dozen men and two mules to drag her the ten yards down the hill to the family plot. People all switched to white lightning for a month in her honor.”

“Switched from what?” Rob asked.

“Moonshine.”

“What’s the difference?”

“White lightning’s brewed during the day, moonshine’s brewed at night.”

Berklee dropped her empty beer into the garbage with a loud clank. “I hear Bliss—” She said the name with disdain. “—bailed you out.”

Rob nodded. “Ran off the monster, then stitched me up. Probably saved my life. Definitely saved my ass.”

Berklee folded her arms. “That’s Bliss, all right. The answer to every man’s prayers.”

Doyle kissed her on the cheek. “I keep telling you, honey, green ain’t your color.”

“Hmph.” Berklee shrugged off the kiss and opened the fridge for another beer.

To Rob, Doyle said, “Bliss knows a lot of different things.”

“No kidding. All she had to do to run off that psycho bitch was this.” He made an approximation of her hand gesture.

Berklee, just closing the refrigerator, gasped and made a motion with her left hand in response. She caught herself about halfway through, and tried to turn the movement into an innocuous tapping on the counter. But Rob caught it.

“What was that ?”

“What?” Berklee asked innocently.

“What you just did.” He imitated it as accurately as he could.

Berklee glanced at Doyle, who shrugged.

“Oh, it was nothing, you just startled me,” she said dismissively. “It’s stuff we used to do when we were kids.”

“Like what?” Rob pressed.

“Just… stuff,” she said desperately, unable to come up with anything else. “Excuse me, fellas, I have to pee.” She practically shoved Doyle aside to run down the hall.

Rob looked at Doyle. “So are you going to tell me?”

“Son, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Women around here are crazy on a good day. They all get these superstitions from their mommas when they’re young, and they never quite shake ’em.”

“And you’re not superstitious?”

“Not a bit,” he deadpanned, then knocked on the wooden table.

When Berklee returned from the bathroom, Rob did not bring up Bliss or the hand gestures again. They sat around the kitchen and drank beer until Berklee produced the casserole from the oven.

“So you both lived here all your lives?” Rob asked as they ate.

They nodded. Doyle said, “I reckon it’s true, you can take the boy out of the mountains, but not the other way around.”

“And now he’s got his own business,” Berklee said.

“Yeah, long as you quit running off my help.”

Berklee blushed and smiled, and Doyle laughed. Rob said, “What am I missing here?”

“I came by to bring Doyle his lunch one day, and he was up under a car working on it,” Berklee explained. “I was feeling kinda silly, so since his legs were sticking out, I bent down and unzipped his pants on my way into his office.”

“Where she found me sitting at my desk,” Doyle added.

“Seems he’d hired this Barnes boy without mentioning it to me,” Berklee said, “and now the poor kid came staggering in, bleeding from where he’d smacked his head when he jumped ’cause somebody opened his fly.”

They shared more stories as the empty beer cans piled up. Later, Doyle lit a fire in a pit in the backyard, and they sat under the stars, surrounded by the sounds of the mountain night.

At last, after a long period of silence except for the fire’s crackling, Rob turned to Doyle. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Doyle said guiltily. “Knew you looked familiar, so I looked you up online.”

Berklee looked from Rob to her husband. “Who is he? Is he famous?”

“I guess,” Rob said. He gazed into the fire. “I was a contestant on that TV show, So You Think You Can Sing? I made it all the way to the finals. Me and two other idiots. The producers were going to fly my girlfriend Anna in for the show, to surprise me.”

“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.