Joe Burke's Last Stand Part 42

Willow lifted groceries from the bicycle basket, took them inside, and set them on the counter with a satisfying thump. Onions, garlic, a green pepper, a red pepper, basil, a can of coconut milk, a can of chicken stock, a small can of curry paste, chicken, lettuce, and two bottles of Gewurztraminer. The wine was extravagant. No doubt about that. But, for once it was her money. Ann had given her a job mornings at the Deli. Willow took her first pay directly to the Grand Union supermarket. She had been to the library and copied a recipe for curry and the name of the recommended wine. She put the wine in the refrigerator. Amber owed Art a meal, and Willow had volunteered to cook.

It was two in the afternoon, warm, too early to start. She was tempted to lie down and read, but instead she took a straw hat from a peg by the door and walked outside. Bees were buzzing in the roses. The tops of the trees were dark against a bright blue sky. Her feet led her into the pine woods on the far side of the studio where a deep layer of pine needles softened her steps. She walked for five minutes and stopped. In the distance, a chainsaw snarled twice and was silent. The air was still and resinous. Small sounds filtered through the branches above her. A young chickadee flew toward her, pausing briefly on low branches. Willow remained motionless. The tiny black and white bird hopped and flew directly to her shoulder. She felt its thin claws shift as its head turned first one way, then the other. It rested a moment as Willow filled with a mixture of elation and deep humility. A quick whirring of wings and the chickadee was ten yards farther on its way.

Willow remained still, her eyes misty, her mouth slightly open. She let the special feeling spread through to her fingertips and the soles of her feet. No words for this, she thought. As if in answer, the chickadee called. That's it, Willow said to herself--two notes descending, a major third. She repeated the two notes in her mind. The call and the feeling and the quiet beating of her heart wove together like a shawl to be saved for the future. Hers. Her.

"G.o.d," she said. She was thirsty. She continued slowly through the woods, working her way downhill. At some point she would meet the lower road, and she could walk back to the beginning of AhnRee's driveway.

She came to the top of a ledge which she followed until she found a place to scramble down. At the base of the ledge, she straightened and listened. Banjo notes were picking their way through the trees. An easy deliberate rhythm drew her along and down the hill, farther from AhnRee's drive. The notes grew louder. Willow could see a clearing and part of a roof line through the trees. Someone was playing in the back yard.

She paused. The player was practicing _Cripple Creek_, getting into it further and further. My day for music, she thought. When it stopped, she clapped with pleasure and emerged from the trees onto a rough lawn.

The banjo player was sitting under a birch tree on a wooden kitchen chair. "Right on! Excuse me," she said, "I was walking and I stopped to listen. Where am I?"

"Cripple Creek," he said and smiled. "My back yard. My mother's, actually." He was tall and thin with shoulder length reddish hair and a wispy mustache that was supposed to make him look older. His hands were large. Long fingers wrapped around the neck of the banjo he was holding upright on his lap.

"I'm Willow. I live up there in AhnRee's studio," She pointed up the mountain.

"Ah, yes--AhnRee. I'm Martin. Lower Byrdcliffe Road is just down at the end of the driveway." Willow couldn't decide whether he was shy or busy. He seemed to be telling her to hoof it. The Devil made me do it, that's what she told Amber later.

"I can play Cripple Creek.

"Oh yeah?" He held the banjo toward her.

"Not on that. Do you have a violin, umm, fiddle?"

"Strangely enough . . . " He stood up, leaned the banjo against the chair, and said, "Be right back." Now what have I done? Willow asked herself. She hadn't touched a violin in two years. He brought her an old violin, nothing special, but the strings and the bow were in good shape. She played a few notes.

"Been a while," she said. She played the first bars of _Cripple Creek_.

Such an easy melody. It sounded horrible. She stopped. "Just a second."

She took two deep breaths and let the feel come back to her. She played one long slow note, listening. Better. She played the note again. She played two notes. Her body began to wake up. It was surprising how you played the violin with your whole body. I mean, G.o.d, she'd been playing since she was three. She began again, more slowly. She had now forgotten Martin. She played it through. Then again, a little faster.

Yes, she thought, and took it at a tempo close to the one she'd heard through the trees. Halfway through, she heard a few tentative notes from the banjo. She smiled, eased back, and let Martin lead. They played until they had managed a decent version and stopped. There was another burst of applause. A woman with short blonde hair and a heart shaped face was clapping by the corner of the house.

"Hi, Mom. This is my mother, Heidi, ah, Willow."

"How do you do," his mother said. "Very nice."

"Willow appeared out of the woods," Martin said.

"Ah," his mother said, "a wood nymph. This is the time of year.

Although, I must say, musical wood nymphs are rare."

"Well," Willow said, handing the violin and bow to Martin, "I'm off to gather mushrooms, back to my dwelling of twigs and pine cones." She smiled at Martin's mother, the pretty b.i.t.c.h, and walked into the woods without looking back, d.a.m.ned if she was going to go down their driveway. A few moments later, she heard _Cripple Creek_, as if in apology. Or was he just going back to work?

There was something familiar about Martin, an intangible set to his att.i.tude, a stubbornness. She thought back over her friends but couldn't come up with the match. Memory is strange, she thought. It's all in there, but you lose the keys, the entry ways. It's like a city that keeps growing and growing. I mean, you have to go back and back to the old neighborhoods? Lennie Rosenbloom, Mr. Rosenbloom to her, encouraging but firm as she struggled through that Mozart sonata, his hurt smile directing her to feel the music--he was shorter than Martin and his hair was sandy colored. G.o.d, the light on his neck and chest.

She was 13, so close to blushing all the time that she had to act like a zombie to keep herself under control. Played like one, too. G.o.d. No, it wasn't Mr. Rosenbloom. The road appeared beyond a clump of bushes.

She pushed through and turned toward AhnRee's.

She had walked farther than she thought. By the time she reached the driveway, she was worrying about dinner. She planned as she hurried up the hill toward the studio: first, the onions and the peppers, get them going in the large cast iron frying pan; second, the chicken, cut in chunks; then the chicken stock and the coconut milk, the curry and the basil. Whoops, forgot the rice. Start that right after the onions and the peppers; give it time to steam a little and not be so wet. She placed the straw hat on its peg, drank a large gla.s.s of water, and played _Highway 61 Revisited_.

"_Like a rolling stone_ . . . " she sang along as she cut up onions.

"_To be on your own_ . . . " Whack, whack. "_How does it feel? _ . . .

" Whack, whack. Amber and Art arrived in the middle of _Desolation Row_.

"Listen to that," she said as Bob Dylan's harmonica blew out the pain and isolation.

"d.a.m.n," Art said, "that smells good."

"Listen!" Willow said, turning up the volume.

_Don't send me no more letters, no--not unless you mail them from Desolation Row._ Dylan's intensity, the smell of curry, Amber's perfect body next to Art's shoulders, and her own unnamed pa.s.sion coalesced into another moment she would never forget. "Too much," she said when the piece ended. "Want some wine?" She busied herself with dinner.

Earlier, with the chickadee on her shoulder, she was a child of the universe. Now, she felt reborn as an adult. It was so lonely and sad, so--terminal.

She looked at Amber and Art. They did not appear to be in crisis. Art was lighting up a joint. Willow took a few hits out of politeness. She didn't mind getting high once in awhile, but the smoke in her lungs felt foreign and unhealthy. Amber, who smoked cigarettes occasionally, dragged away with gusto, the little pothead. Art was following her around with his eyes as though he were chained.

She served and poured; they ate and drank. The evening got blurry.

Willow told them about the chickadee and about playing _Cripple Creek_.

"Yeah," Art said. "He lives in a house behind his mother's. She's got money, or the family does. Don't know much about Martin; he went to private school, was only around summers. His father was a pilot. He died about ten years ago."

"He plays banjo pretty well," Willow said.

"Yeah, I guess. How come you stopped playing the violin?"

Willow scratched one knee. "I love the old greats," she said. "I mean they are great souls, but . . . "

"They weren't your soul," Art said.

"No. I mean, they are, but they aren't." She put her hands behind her head into her hair and paused, spreading her arms out slowly, letting long dark strands run through her fingers and fan across her shoulders.

She shook her head. "I didn't want to be stuck in that scene forever.

Doors were closing."

"Willow's father is a music prof," Amber said.

"My mother plays, too," Willow said. "A nice Jewish musical family with perfect children who know how to get along."

"What's wrong with getting along?" Amber smiled meaningfully in Art's direction.

"Maybe you could sing; you look a little like Joan Baez." Art was a decent guy, really. And he had those shoulders. Willow's ears were buzzing.

"I wish," she said.

"You got any Coltrane?" The guy was full of surprises.

"We do." She rose slowly and flipped through the alb.u.ms that Amber had borrowed from AhnRee. "Night music," she said, putting it on the stereo. Amber was smiling broadly and wiggling her toes.

"Ice cream," she said. Willow remembered that she had to work in the morning.

"Bedtime for me," she said. Amber promised to do the dishes.

"Great dinner," Art said.