He never heard her approach. He doesn’t turn.
“You don’t much like me, do you?” she says.
“I don’t know you well enough to dislike you, but I don’t like what you do.”
“And what is it that you think I do?”
“Make-believe,” he says. “Pretend.”
“Is that what you call it?”
But he won’t be drawn into an argument.
“Everybody sees things differently,” she says. “That’s the gift and curse of free will.”
“So what do you hear?” he asks. His voice is a sarcastic drawl. “Fairy music?”
The city died here, in the Tombs. Not all at once, through some natural disaster, but piece by piece, block by block, falling into disrepair, buildings abandoned by citizens and then claimed by the squatters who’ve got no reason to take care of them. Some of them fall down, some burn.
It’s the last place in the world to look for wonder.
“I hear a calling-on music,” she says, “though whether it’s calling us to cross over, or calling something to us, I can’t tell.”
He turns to look at her finally, with his hair the glossy black of the ravens, his eyes the blue of that fiddle neither of them has seen yet. He notes the horn that rises from the center of her brow, the equine features that make her face seem so long, the chestnut dreadlocks, the dark, wide-set eyes and the something in those eyes he can’t read.
“Does it matter?” he asks.
“Everything matters on some level or other.”
He smiles. “I think that depends on what story we happen to be in.”
“Yours or mine,” she says, her voice soft.
“I don’t have a story,” he tells her.
Now she smiles. “And mine has no end.”
“Listen,” he says.
Silence hangs in the air, a thick gauze dropped from the sky like a blanket, deep enough to cut. The black birds are silent. They sit motionless in the dying trees. The fiddler has taken the bow from the strings. The blue fiddle holds its breath.
“I don’t hear anything,” she says.
He nods. “This is what my story sounds like.”
“Are you sure?”
He watches as she lifts her arm and makes a motion with it, a graceful wave of her hand, as though conducting an orchestra. The black birds lift from the trees like a dark cloud, the sound of their wings cutting through the gauze of silence. The fiddle begins to play again, the blue wood vibrating with a thin distant music, a sound that is almost transparent. He looks away from the departing birds to find her watching him with the same lack of curiosity he had for the birds.
“Maybe you’re not listening hard enough,” she says.
“I think I’d know if—”
“Remember what I said about the ravens,” she tells him.
He returns his attention to the trees, the birds all gone. When he looks for her again, she’s already halfway down the block, horn glinting, too far away for him to read the expression in her features even if she was looking at him. If he even cared.
“I’d know,” he says, repeating the words for himself.
He puts her out of his mind, forgets the birds and the city lying just beyond these blocks of wasteland, and goes to find the fiddler.
3
I probably know her better than anyone else around here, but even I forget about the horn sometimes. You want to ask her, why are you hiding out in the Tombs, there’s nothing for you here. It’s not like she’s an alkie or a squatter, got the need for speed or any other kind of jones. But then maybe the sunlight catches that short length of ivory rising up out of her brow, or you see something equally impossible stirring in her dark eyes, and you see that horn like it’s the first time all over again, and you understand that it’s her difference that puts her here, her strangeness.
Malicorne, is what Frenchy calls her, says it means unicorn. I go to the Crowsea Public Library one day and try to look the word up in a dictionary, but I can only find it in pieces. Now Frenchy got the corne right because she’s sure enough got a horn. But the word can also mean hoof, while mal or mali . . . you get your pick of what it can mean. Cunning or sly, which aren’t exactly compliments, but mostly it’s things worse than that: wickedness, evil, hurt, harm. Maybe Frenchy knows more than he’s saying, and maybe she does, too, because she never answers to that name. But she doesn’t give us anything better to use instead so the name kind of sticks—at least when we’re talking about her among ourselves.
I remember the first time I see her, I’m looking through the trash after the Spring Festival, see if maybe I can sift a little gold from the chaff, which is a nice way of saying I’m a bum and I’m trying to make do. I see her sitting on a bench, looking at me, and at first I don’t notice the horn, I’m just wondering, who’s this horsy-faced woman and why’s she looking at me like she wants to know something about me. Not what I’m doing here, going through the trash, but what put me here.
We’ve all got stories, a history that sews one piece of who we were to another until you get the reason we’re who we are now. But it’s not something we offer each other, never mind a stranger. We’re not proud of who we are, of what we’ve become. We don’t talk much about it, we never ask each other about it. There’s too much pain in where we’ve been to go back, even if it’s just with words. We don’t even want to think about it—why do you think we’re looking for oblivion in the bottom of a bottle?
I want to turn my back on her, but even then, right from the start, Malicorne’s got this pull in her eyes, draws you in, draws you to her, starts you talking. I’ve seen rheumy-eyed old alkies who can’t even put together “Have you got some spare change?” with their heads leaning close to hers, talking, the slur gone from their voices, some kind of sense working its way back into what they’re saying. And I’m not immune. I turn my back, but it’s on that trash can, and I find myself shuffling, hands stuck deep into my pockets, over to the bench where she’s sitting.
“You’re so innocent,” she says.
I have to laugh. I’m forty-five and I look sixty, and the last thing I am is innocent.
“I’m no virgin,” I tell her.
“I didn’t say you were. Innocence and virginity aren’t necessarily synonymous.”
Her voice wakes something in me that I don’t want to think about.
“I suppose,” I say.
I want to go and get on with my business. I want to stay.
She’s got a way of stringing together words so that they all seem to mean more than what you think they’re saying, like there’s a riddle lying in between the lines, and the funny thing is, I can feel something in me responding. Curiosity. Not standing around and looking at something strange, but an intellectual curiosity—the kind that makes you think.
I study her, sitting there beside me on the bench, raggedy clothes and thick chestnut hair so matted it hangs like fat snakes from her head, like a Rasta’s dreadlocks. Horsy features. Deep, dark eyes, like they’re all pupil, wide-set. And then I see the horn. She smiles when she sees my eyes go wide.
“Jesus,” I say. “You’ve got a—”
“Long road to travel and the company is scarce. Good company, I mean.”
I don’t much care for weird shit, but I don’t tell her that. I tell her things I don’t tell anybody, not even myself, how it all went wrong for me, how I miss my family, how I miss having something in my life that means anything. And she listens. She’s good at the listening, everybody says so, except for Jake. Jake won’t talk to her, says she’s feeding on us, feeding on our stories.
“It’s give and take,” I try to tell him. “You feel better after you’ve talked to her.”
“You feel better because there’s nothing left inside to make you feel bad,” he says. “Nothing good, nothing bad. She’s taking all the stories that make you who you are and putting nothing back.”
“Maybe we don’t want to remember those things anyway,” I say.
/>
He shakes his head. “What you’ve done is who you are. Without it, you’re really nothing.” He taps his chest. “What’s left inside that belongs to you now?”
“It’s not like that,” I try to explain. “I still remember what put me here. It doesn’t hurt as much anymore, that’s all.”
“Think about that for a moment.”
“She tells you stuff, if you’re willing to listen.”
“Everything she says is mumbo-jumbo,” Jake says. “Nothing that makes sense. Nothing that’s worth what she’s taken from you. Don’t you see?”
I don’t see it and he won’t be part of it. Doesn’t want to know about spirits, things that never were, things that can’t be, made-up stories that are supposed to take the place of history. Wants to hold on to his pain, I guess.
But then he meets Staley.
4
The fiddler’s a woman, but she has no sense of age about her; she could be thirty, she could be seventeen. Where Malicorne’s tall and angular, horse-lanky, Staley’s like a pony, everything in miniature. There’s nothing dark about her, nothing gloomy except the music she sometimes wakes from that blue fiddle of hers. Hair the color of straw and cut like a boy’s, a slip of a figure, eyes the green of spring growth, face shaped like a heart. She’s barefoot, wears an old pair of overalls a couple of sizes too big, some kind of white jersey, sleeves pushed up on her forearms. There’s a knapsack on the ground beside her, an open fiddle case. She’s sitting on a chunk of stone—piece of a wall, maybe, piece of a roof—playing that blue fiddle of hers, her whole body playing it, leaning into the music, swaying, head crooked to one side holding the instrument to her shoulder, a smile like the day’s just begun stretching across her lips.
Jake stands there, watching her, listening. When the tune comes to an end, he sits down beside her.
“You’re good,” he tells her.
She gives him a shy smile in return.
“So did you come over from the other side?” he asks.
“The other side of what?”
Jake’s thinking of Malicorne, about black birds and doors to other places. He shrugs.
“Guess that answers my question,” he says.
She hears the disappointment in his voice, but doesn’t understand it.
“People call me Jake,” he tells her.
“Staley Cross,” she says as they shake hands.
“And are you?”
The look of a Michelle who’s been called ma belle too often moves across her features, but she doesn’t lose her humor.
“Not often,” she says.
“Where’d you learn to play like that?”
“I don’t know. Here and there. I just picked it up. I’m a good listener, I guess. Once I hear a tune, I don’t forget it.” The fiddle’s lying on her lap. She plays with her bow, loosening and tightening the frog. “Do you play?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Never saw a blue fiddle before—not blue like that.”
“I know. It’s not painted on—the color’s in the varnish. My grandma gave it to me a couple of years ago. She says it’s a spirit fiddle, been in the family forever.”
“Play something else,” he asks. “Unless you’re too tired.”
“I’m never too tired to play.”
She sets the bow to the strings, wakes a note, wakes another, and then they’re in the middle of a tune, a slow reel. Jake leans back, puts his hands behind his head, looks up into the bare branches of the trees. Just before he closes his eyes, he sees those birds return, one after the other, leafing the branches with their black wings. He doesn’t hear a door open, all he hears is Staley’s fiddle. He finishes closing his eyes and lets the music take him to a place where he doesn’t have to think about the story of his life.
5
I’m lounging on a bench with Malicorne near a subway station in that no-man’s-land between the city and the Tombs, where the buildings are falling down but there’s people still living in them, paying rent. Frenchy’s sitting on the curb with a piece of cardboard cut into the shape of a guitar, dark hair tied back with a piece of string, holes in his jeans, hole in his heart where his dreams all escaped. He strums the six drawn strings on that cardboard guitar, mouthing “Plonkety, plonkety” and people are actually tossing him quarters and dimes. On the other side of him Casey’s telling fortunes. He looks like the burned-out surfer he is, too many miles from any ocean, still tanned, dirty blond hair falling into his face. He gives everybody the same piece of advice: “Do stuff.”
Nobody’s paying much attention to us when Jake comes walking down the street, long and lanky, hands deep in the pockets of his black jeans. He sits down beside me, says, “Hey, William,” nods to Malicorne. Doesn’t even look at her horn.
“Hey, Jake,” I tell him.
He leans forward on the bench, talks across me. “You ever hear of a spirit fiddle?” he asks Malicorne.
She smiles. “Are you finally starting a story?”
“I’m not starting anything. I’m just wondering. Met that girl who was making the music and she’s got herself a blue fiddle—says it’s a spirit fiddle. Been in her family a long time.”
“I heard her playing,” I say. “She’s good.”
“Her name’s Staley Cross.”
“Don’t know the name,” Malicorne says. There’s a hint of surprise in her voice, as though she thinks she should. I’m not the only one who hears it.
“Any reason you should?” Jake asks.
Malicorne smiles and looks away, not just across the street, it seems, but further than that, like she can see through the buildings, see something we can’t. Jake’s looking at that horn now but I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“Where’d she go?” I ask him.
He gets a puzzled look, like he thinks I’m talking about Malicorne for a second, then he shrugs.
“Downtown,” he says. “She wanted to busk for a couple of hours, see if she can’t get herself a stake.”
“Must be nice, having a talent,” I say.
“Everybody’s got a talent,” Malicorne says. “Just like everybody’s got a story.”
“Unless they give it to you,” Jake breaks in.
Malicorne acts like he hasn’t interrupted. “Trouble is,” she goes on, “some people don’t pay much attention to either and they end up living with us here.”
“You’re living here,” Jake says.
Malicorne shakes her head. “I’m just passing through.”
I know what Jake’s thinking. Everybody starts out thinking, this is only temporary. It doesn’t take them long to learn different. But then none of them have a horn pushing out of the middle of their forehead. None of them have mystery sticking to them like they’ve wrapped themselves up in double-sided tape and whatever they touch sticks to them.
“Yeah, well, we’ll all really miss you when you’re gone,” Jake tells her.
It’s quiet then. Except for Frenchy’s cardboard guitar. “Plonkety-plonk.” None of us are talking. Casey takes a dime from some kid who wants to know the future. His pale blue eyes stand out against his surfer’s tan as he gives the kid a serious look.
“Do stuff,” he says.
The kid laughs, shakes his head and walks away. But I think about what Malicorne was saying, how everybody’s got a story, everybody’s got a talent, and I wonder if maybe Casey’s got it right.
6
“Blue’s the rarest color in nature,” Staley says.
Jake smiles. “You ever look up at the sky?”
They’re sharing sandwiches her music bought, coffee in cardboard cups, so hot you can’t hold the container. If Jake’s still worrying about magic and spirit fiddles, it doesn’t show.
Staley returns his smile. “I don’t mean it’s hard to find. But it’s funny you should mention the sky. Of all the hundreds of references to the sky and the heavens in a book like the bible, the color blue is never mentioned.”
“You read the bible a lot?”
/>
“Up in the hills where I come from, that’s pretty much the only thing there is to read. That, and the tabloids. But when I was saying blue’s the rarest color—”
“You meant it’s the most beautiful.”
She nods. “It fills the heart. Like the blue of twilight when anything’s possible. Blue makes me feel safe, warm. People think of it as a cool color, but you know, the hottest fire has a blue-white flame. Like stars. The comparatively cooler stars have the reddish glow.” She takes a sip of her coffee, looks at him over the brim. “I make up for all the reading I missed by spending a lot of time in libraries.”
“Good place to visit,” Jake says. “Safe, when you’re in a strange town.”
“I thought you’d understand. You can put aside all the unhappiness you’ve accumulated by opening a book. Listening to music.”
“You think forgetting is a good thing?”
She shrugs. “For me, it’s a necessary thing. It’s what keeps me sane.”
She looks at him and Jake sees himself through her eyes: a tall, gangly hobo of a man, seen better times, but seen worse ones, too. The worse ones are why he’s where he is.
“You know what I mean,” she says.
“I suppose. Don’t know if I agree, though.” She lifts her eyebrows, but he doesn’t want to take that any further. “So tell me about the spirit in that fiddle of yours,” he says instead.
“It hasn’t got a spirit—not like you mean, anyway. It comes from a spirit place. That’s why it’s blue. It’s the color of twilight and my grandma says it’s always twilight there.”
“In the Otherworld.”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“And the black of a raven’s wing,” Jake says, “that’s really a kind of blue, too, isn’t it?”
She gives him a confused look.
“Don’t mind me,” he tells her. “I’m just thinking about what someone once told me.”
“Where I come from,” she says, “the raven’s an unlucky bird.”
“Depends on how many you see,” Jake says. He starts to repeat the old rhyme for her then. “One for sorrow, two for mirth . . .”