Alex Bledsoe: Wisp of a Thing

“Is this a rowdy bunch?” Rob asked Doyle over the music.

“It’s a golden retriever, on a dog scale.”

“On a what?”

“Dog scale. Worst is a Rottweiler, best is a collie. A golden retriever is pretty easygoing until you get out of line. These folks are like that.”

“You’re big on animal metaphors, aren’t you?”

Doyle laughed.

The crowd was so thick near the entrance that they could barely close the door behind them. Other than the eager young lovers, people weren’t trying to leave, though; rather, they had backed up to clear the small dance floor. Beyond them, Rob saw the bobbing heads of the actual dancers.

Berklee stood on tiptoe and looked around almost frantically. At last she sighed, settled back to her feet, and sagged with disappointment.

“Hey!” a short, round woman called to Doyle and Berklee. “Y’all lookin’ mighty fancy tonight!”

Since the woman appeared to be wearing every cosmetic known to man, Rob thought this quite a statement. She wedged through the people standing near the door and hugged Doyle around the waist. Then Berklee bent to receive her embrace.

She looked up expectantly at Rob, then realized she didn’t know him. Her too-small dress buttoned up the front, but just barely, and she apparently wore nothing under it. “And just who’s this handsome blade of grass here?” she asked.

“Rob Quillen,” he said, and shook her hand.

She brushed his hair back from his face and scrutinized him. “Hm. I figured he was from another ridge somewhere, but he don’t talk like us. One of them people comin’ through lookin’ for your roots?”

“No, ma’am, I’m pretty sure I know my roots.”

The woman’s eyes shone from alcohol. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, anyway. I’ll save a dance for you.” Then she bulldozed past them to hug someone else.

Doyle responded to Rob’s quizzical look with a shrug. “That’s Opal Duncan. She’s always here.”

“She work here?”

“No. She’s just… always here.”

“She fell out of the ugly tree,” Berklee added, “and hit every branch on the way down.”

“Be nice,” Doyle said. “We can’t all be pretty as you.”

Rob followed Doyle and Berklee to the bar, where they all ordered beer. Doyle and Berklee both drank healthy swallows, but Rob put his tongue over the bottle’s mouth so it only looked like he was drinking. He liked to stay mostly sober in strange bars.

The walls were lined with wood paneling that should have ruined the acoustics but somehow didn’t. Torn, stained posters and faded photos lined the walls; some went back more than sixty years, to a time when giants like Hank Williams walked the earth in a haze of whiskey-drenched loneliness. Rob felt a, tangible connection to this history, and imagined the way Bill Monroe’s cowboy boots must’ve sounded as they walked across this floor, or the snap as Earl Scruggs opened his banjo case. Back then, no one knew they were creating a whole new form of music; hell, people barely grasped the true scope of it now.

The room buzzed with energy, and it surprised him how many kids he saw, many of them too young to even be in a bar. He wondered if they came for the social aspects, the lack of alternatives, or if they, too, were drawn by the music.

Rob stood on tiptoes to see the band on the riser in the corner. Two old Peavey amplifiers were stacked on either side of the stage, and a single dim spotlight hung from a bracket on the low ceiling. He saw no mixing board anywhere, or any sign of monitors. He wondered how they heard themselves over the crowd.

Three men and a woman were onstage. All looked to be in their fifties, although he’d read that age could be deceptive among the mountain folk due to their hard lives. Two of the men, the fiddler and the guitarist, were dressed in Western-style finery, with big cowboy hats and pearl-snap shirts.

The lone woman stood facing the fiddler, her back to the room. She wore a long denim skirt and her black hair pulled up into a bun atop her head. She held two knitting needles, and hammered out a rhythm on the fiddle strings while the fiddler played the melody. Rob had never seen anything like that before.

The third man played banjo. He wore overalls and a baseball cap turned backwards, and sported a thick white beard. The banjo’s skin face cover was stained dark in the center from years of use.

“I got you now, you old rascal!” the guitarist called out.

“You got it goin’ on, I tell ya!” the fiddler yelled back.

Something about the banjo player drew Rob’s eye, but he couldn’t identify it. Had he seen the man’s picture somewhere? No, there was something different about the way he played. Not how he held the instrument, not the way he picked, it was—

He had six fingers on each hand.

Rob stared as the bearded man ran them up and down the banjo’s neck and plucked expertly at the strings. He’d never seen anyone with extra digits before, and the fact that they all seemed to work added to his surprise. With a flourish, the band finished their current number, and the banjo picker threw his hands up in mock supplication, as if his skill was a gift from heaven. The sight of the twelve fingers spread wide was even stranger.

The crowd applauded, laughed, whistled, and stomped their approval.

“Thankee, thankee,” the guitarist said as the applause faded to an excited murmur. The woman took her knitting needles, picked up the canvas bag at her feet, and left the stage. She sat nearby in an old folding chair and began to work on one end of a sweater sleeve.

The banjo player stage-muttered, “Boy, I tell you what, I’m gonna kick the ass of the fella that thought up mountin’ a set of strings on a damn drumhead.”

“’Cause he made you love it,” the guitarist fired back. To the crowd, he said, “We’re about to bring a special guest up here now to join us on this next song. Y’all all know her, so let’s have a big round of applause for Miss Bliss Overbay.”

This time the response, if possible, was even louder. The banjo picker scooted his stool to one side, but not very far, as if he resented sharing the center spot.

A slender woman stepped onto the stage. She had long jet-black hair in a single braid that fell down her back almost to her waist. Her dark face had deep smile lines bracketing her wide mouth, which made guessing her age difficult; she could’ve been anywhere between twenty and forty. Her eyes were dark, but Rob swore they actually twinkled like they were illuminated from within. She wore a long, dark skirt and a simple sleeveless blouse that hinted at the same tough, exquisite shape so many rural women possessed in their girlhood: broad shoulders, narrow waist, wide hips, and strong legs. A snake tattoo ran around her upper arm and disappeared under her clothing. Through a momentary gap in the crowd, he glimpsed her bare feet.

“Well, if it ain’t Miss La-Dee-Da,” Berklee sniffed.

“Stop it,” Doyle said patiently, as if he’d said it a million times before.

Bliss faced the packed room. Her decision to sit in with the boys had been sudden and inexplicable, one of those urges sourced somewhere deep inside, beneath her veneer of civilization. She’d taken a change of clothes with her to work, something she almost never did, and headed straight to the Pair-A-Dice instead of home. One song, she told herself; one song to honor the night wind and the eternal truce between her people and the others, and then back home, straight into the shower and then to bed.

She smiled as the applause, and the energy it generated, rippled over her like a thousand caresses. Not all these people liked her, and some rightly feared her, but they all appreciated her musical skill; the songs were the common ground where all the Tufa met. She let her eyes drift over the crowd, observing the faces that had changed and the ones that hadn’t.