Rhythm and Bluegrass

by Molly Harper

  “Flintstone.”

  My mouth fell open. “Really?”

  “For at least the next month.”

  “Did he lose a bet?” I asked.

  He shook his head in mock sadness, a small smile playing on his lips. “Never put your faith or your dignity in the hands of the Cincinnati Reds. You’re sure ya don’t want to come with me?” he asked. I chuckled. “I’ll call Fred later and check on ya. Maybe I can help ya get a rental out here. We don’t have an agency in town, but—” He cursed softly when his cell phone rang again. He checked the screen and groaned. “I’m sorry. I really have to go.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “I appreciate your attempted baby-saving.”

  He opened the driver’s side door of his battered red-and-silver early-model pickup, which was marked with a hand-lettered logo, MUD CREEK HOME REPAIRS. He tossed me a bottle of water, dripping with condensation. “Just stay back from the truck, in case it decides to blow. Drink that. And when Fred shows up, try not to stare at his eye.”

  “What about his eye?” I called as the man climbed into his truck. “Hey!”

  His sandy head bobbed out of his truck cab. “Yeah?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Will, and yours?”

  “Bonnie!”

  “I’ll catch up with ya soon, Bonnie!” he yelled, grinning as he fired up his engine and pulled onto the highway. “Welcome to Mud Creek!”

  2

  In Which I Spot the Mayor Topless

  Fred—whose real last name turned out to be Farrow—arrived, sirens blaring, in a fire truck that looked like it had been purchased sometime during the Eisenhower administration.

  Being short, I was used to people towering over me. But Fred was a veritable giant, at least six foot five, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a timber wolf howling on his forearm. There was nothing wrong with either of his eyes, as far as I could tell, but my staring at them to try to determine what was wrong with them seemed to put him off—which may have been Will’s point. Despite his size and the fact that he was wearing a T-shirt that read ONE “HAVE A NICE DAY” AWAY FROM SNAPPING underneath his firefighter’s gear, he was very kind about the whole extinguishing-my-car thing. He didn’t even ask, “How the hell did this happen?” Which I was still wondering myself.

  Fred was apparently used to working as a one-man fire crew, putting out orange traffic cones, unfurling the hose, and dousing my car with quiet competency. I tried to look somewhere other than his eyes, but my only other option was looking at my burning truck, and that was just painful. And then I tried not to look like I was looking, which made me look like I had a neck twitch.

  Fred was pouring chemical-absorbent gravel in a rough outline around my SUV when he caught sight of my neck-twitchery. “Damn it, did Will tell you I had a funny eye? I’ve told him to stop doing that. He thinks he’s funny. Jackass.”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s just hard for me to make eye contact with people who are cleaning up the messes made by my boneheaded decisions.”

  Fred snorted as a slightly newer tow truck pulled up to the shoulder. “Speaking of boneheaded . . .”

  Fred’s tow truck driver, Joe Bob, was a bearded teddy bear whose beer belly was so big, you’d think it would interfere with his ability to steer. Bald as an egg, he was dressed a bit more formally, in a stained red polo shirt advertising Fred’s Tow and Tire and dungarees held up with both a belt and suspenders. His accent wasn’t quite as thick as Fred’s, and his grammar was considerably better. But he and Fred were clearly pretty close friends, given the way they taunted each other over penis size and work ethic. Joe Bob either hadn’t noticed or had forgotten I was there, because he was on the verge of implying that Fred was in fact born without genitalia, or, as he put it, was “smooth like one of them Ken dolls,” when he rounded the back bumper of my vehicle and saw me. The goofy grin melted away and he straightened, adjusting his pants around his belly.

  He cleared his throat and, with a much more sober tone, said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but in my professional opinion, your car’s a loss. I can haul it to the scrap heap for ya.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Is there someplace in town where I can get a rental?” I asked. “I’m going to need one.”

  “Naw, I’m sorry, we don’t have anything like that. But I can take ya as far as Murphysboro myself. Maybe you’ll be able to find something there.”

  “Oh, I don’t need to go on to Murphysboro. I’m staying in Mud Creek.”

  “You’re movin’ here?” Joe Bob marveled. “Well, what do ya think about that? We haven’t had anybody move here in years. Plenty of people move out, but nobody moves in. It’s like one of them roach motels, only backwards.”

  “We tried puttin’ that on the town’s water tower, but folks didn’t see the charm in it,” Fred said drily.

  I snickered, but covered it with a cough. “Smoke,” I told Fred, who smirked.

  My fantasies of a pretty apartment overlooking a scenic thoroughfare evaporated as Joe Bob and I followed Fred’s fire truck into town.

  Mud Creek’s Main Street had a drab, ghost-town sort of feel to it. The rolling hills and thickets of trees were a tarnished setting for a cracked paste-glass “jewel.” It was like someone had told Mother Nature that this was the most depressing town in America and she had vegetated accordingly.

  Was “vegetated” a word?

  I knew that the town was facing significant budget problems and had one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. The last big employer had been GloboMap, a manufacturer of global positioning units that had closed because more and more people were using their phones or in-car units. The company had shut down the plant and its three-hundred-plus jobs, stripped it, and sold off the parts. This had increased the county’s unemployment rate to more than 40 percent, a number that hadn’t improved in the last two years.

  From what I could see, the town had managed to attract only a handful of national chains like McDonalds and Walmart, and those buildings looked like they hadn’t been updated since the days of Grimace and the Fry Guys. Many of the shop windows were papered over with newsprint or spray painted with the words “For Rent.” The only building with a fully functional neon sign was the Gold Rush Pawn Shop. But an old-fashioned diner called the Dinner Bell had the fullest parking lot.

  While he yammered on about the Wildcats’ chances this year, Joe Bob made a bit of a show dragging the carcass of my SUV down Main Street. The few people milling around on the sidewalk actually stopped and stared as we drove past. I slipped lower in my seat and attempted to cover my face with my hand.

  “Why ya hidin’ your pretty face, there, Miss Bonnie?”

  “Because I’m embarrassed, Joe Bob. This was not the first impression I wanted to make on my new neighbors.”

  He grinned, a pearly split in his windburned, weathered face. “Embarrassed? Heck, this is nothin’. This isn’t even your fault. Last summer, Sissie McNabb found her husband, Sammy, passed out behind the wheel of their Honda in front of the Suds Bucket. She took off all the inside handles, the window cranks, and the lock buttons. Then she locked him inside and had me tow him through town with a sign on the back of the car that said, ‘Drunk Asshole.’”

  “That would be worse,” I admitted as Fred flashed the fire truck’s lights and turned toward the station.

  “The worst part was that she misspelled ‘asshole’ as ass-whole, with a ‘W.’ That just made it more embarrassin’.”

  I grimaced. “So what’s going on with the library?”

  “Oh, Crazy Penny locked herself in the ladies’ room and flushed a bunch of panty hose down the toilet.” He sighed. “She said it would keep the aliens from tracking her signal, or some such thing. She does this once or twice a month. Miss Earlene, the librarian, would have chased her out a while ago, but sh
e’s got a real tender heart and she feels sorry for Penny. Anyway, this time, I guess one of the trees in the library yard has grown its roots through the pipes. The hose got stuck on the roots and backed the whole damn system up. Poor Miss Earlene is hauling books up the stairs like the Great Flood is coming.”

  “Well, in a way, she’s not wrong,” I said, shuddering.

  Joe Bob screwed up his face, clearly trying not to laugh. I’d noticed that most small towns had a “Crazy (Insert Name Here)” who served as a cautionary tale to everybody else. And for some reason, they always gravitated back to the library. It was enough to make grad students reconsider mastering in library science.

  “Poor Miss Earlene.” Joe Bob sighed again. “I’ll go by later and see if she needs any help. Speaking of which, where should I drop ya, Miss Bonnie? I know I’m supposed to haul your car to the dump, but where am I supposed to take you?”

  I glanced at the clock and groaned. What with the destruction of my transportation and the total loss of most of my belongings, I’d forgotten that I had a meeting with the mayor, Tommy McGlory, scheduled at three. It was a courtesy call with Mayor McGlory acting as a liaison for the McBride family, in which he would give me the keys to the music hall. Technically the Mud Creek Municipal Bank owned the building, but thanks to small-town courtesies, the McBride family still held the keys and controlled access to it. I would give assurances that I would practice due diligence while sifting through the contents of the music hall, keeping an eye out for particularly valuable items and giving the town and the McBride family full credit when I turned the items over to various state museums for their musical heritage collections.

  Back before my car blew up, I’d figured I’d charm Mayor McGlory into submission, find my apartment, and go about moving. I’d had a perfectly respectable pantsuit in my truck for this sort of thing, but I had to assume the poly-blend that Kelsey hated so much had probably liquefied in the fire. At least I had a clean floral-print blouse in my shoulder bag. I would just have to meet His Honor in my jeans. I caught sight of myself in the side mirror and winced. I should probably wash the soot smudges off my face.

  It would be really difficult to take me seriously if I looked like Urchin #3 from Oliver!

  I stood in front of what was supposed to be the town square. I held up the town’s brochure, which looked like it had been printed in 1984. It showed a badly lit but beautifully bricked town hall with a stunning beaten copper cupola and bell tower. I lowered the brochure to reveal a caved-in metal shell dangling over a crumbling brick exterior.

  “Hmm,” I murmured.

  I’d read news clippings about the collapse that destroyed Mud Creek’s historic town hall in 2005. The hall, which had also served as the county courthouse, was being refurbished for the town’s centennial when a construction crew managed to knock out a key support column for the cupola. The weight shift brought the cupola crashing into the lobby, taking out another column, which caused a chain reaction that destroyed most of the interior walls. The civic staff barely had time to evacuate the building before it crumbled in on itself like a deflated balloon. The town’s insurance carrier objected to paying, claiming that the construction company’s insurer was responsible. They got into the legal equivalent of a slap fight in civil court, which prevented any sort of payout for the city and forced its government to set up “temporary” workspace in a FEMA trailer in front of the ruined town hall. “Temporary” had stretched into more than five years, and the city was no closer to getting a new building, but no one had the heart to tear down the old one.

  I straightened my clothes and tried to look as professional as possible as I navigated the creaky wooden steps. Joe Bob had been kind enough to drop me at a gas station down the street so I could wash up a bit in the restroom. I had a clean face and was freshly lip-glossed, but that was about as good as it was going to get. I knew I wasn’t exactly unfortunate looking, even in the jeans and blouse ensemble. My dark hair was pulled into a neat bun. My skin was good, if a little pale. My features were delicate and my lips were full. My main problem was my eyes. They were a perfectly acceptable blue, but they were huge. Hence the “Fraggle Eyes” nickname. And they tended to express every single emotion in my head, so I sucked at poker and never seemed to pull off even the whitest of lies.

  Like when I told Joe Bob that I was perfectly fine hauling all of the boxes and bins from my truck around town while I met with the mayor and my landlord. The truth was, I didn’t even know how I was going to get to my new apartment without a car, much less how I could haul a mobile office around with me. Joe Bob insisted that I leave my stuff with him. At first, I thought maybe it was some sort of collateral, in case I didn’t pay for the tow, but he honestly seemed worried about how I would manage to tote all those rescued boxes around town. If this was the sort of reception I’d be getting from my new neighbors, I would enjoy living in Mud Creek.

  I opened the wobbly storm door, sure that the resounding squeak would announce my presence to anyone within a five-mile radius. The town hall’s reception area was an open room paneled in wood laminate and occupied by two huge desks—but no people. “Hello?” I called.

  I glanced around at the cheap imitation-wood walls, noting the yellowed photos hanging in random groupings. Clearly, city employees had grabbed whatever they could as they fled the crumbling town hall, whether it was a 1982 employee softball team photo or a picture of Henry Naysmith, Mud Creek’s first mayor. An enormous color-coded map on one wall showed the town’s business zones and residential spaces. The desks had dozens of snapshots in mismatched frames strewn across them, with the exception of one that was almost empty, stacked with neatly arranged file folders and bearing a nameplate that read SHERIFF J. FELTER.

  I noticed an enormous plastic jar with a peeling label stating MAMA’S GIANT DILL PICKLES. The sticker was partially covered with a homemade white cardstock sign that read SWEAR JAR. The jar was half-full of quarters, which made me wonder about the staff’s verbal habits.

  I heard a thump from behind a closed door across the room. “Hello?”

  There was no response beyond another soft thump. Would it be rude to open the door? Would I find something that would emotionally scar me for life? My gentle knock on the door was enough to disengage its wobbly latch from the doorjamb. The door swung open and—

  “Yipe!” I yelped.

  It was Mr. Roadside Cowboy, stripped to the waist, leaning against a cluttered desk, scrubbing scrupulously at his hands with wet wipes. I chose not to think about his reasons, considering the earlier “raw sewage” conversation. Still, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sight. He was all smooth golden skin, slightly darker in the forearms and neck. He wasn’t gym built, but he had a pretty respectable set of pecs on him. And his belly was far less keg-shaped than Joe Bob’s.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed, grinning at me as if I hadn’t just barged in on him half-dressed. “There’s the bright spot to my day. Come on in!”

  “Hi,” I said, glancing around me. The dirty shirtless man was inviting me to come closer. Why was the dirty shirtless man inviting me to come closer?

  “Did Joe Bob drop ya off?” he asked, slipping on a blue plaid shirt.

  “Yeah . . .” The plaque on the door read MAYOR’S OFFICE. The nameplate on the desk read MAYOR WILL MCBRIDE. Where the heck was Mayor McGlory? And I knew the name McBride should be setting off some sort of bells for me, but I’d had a really long day, Will was shirtless, and all of this was triggering my internal babble response, which could get me into trouble if it switched to “audible” mode.

  I cleared my throat and commanded myself to take a deep breath and produce one—just one—coherent thought. “You’re the mayor?”

  A full sentence! Progress!

  “Guilty,” he said cheerfully as he buttoned the shirt. It covered up all of that distracting tan skin, but the pattern did make the azure of his eyes pop, so it was a dra
w in terms of trying not to ogle him. “Sorry we got interrupted earlier, but it was definitely an emergency. The plumbing at the public library— Well, I’ll spare you. Thank God it was over my pay grade and we had to call in a septic-tank man. I used to think it was kinda gross that Greg rode around town in a service truck with a skunk on the side, but now I understand.”

  I would take time to be properly grossed out by that later. Right now, I was having a hard time adjusting my well-constructed “flattering an older city official in exchange for full cooperation” schemes for this new audience—a man who had seen me ineffectually fluttering in the face of fire and heard me refer to an inanimate object as my “baby.”

  “You didn’t have to come by the office, but I’m glad ya did because now ya have no choice but to let me take ya out to dinner.”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t?”

  “It’s an old Mud Creek law—save a damsel in distress, take her out for chicken-fried steak at the Dinner Bell. If you refuse, you’ll be breaking a hundred years of sacred local tradition. There’s a curse and everything,” he promised. “Seven years’ bad luck and premature hair loss.” I burst out laughing. “What do ya think happened to Joe Bob?”

  I ventured, “Turned down by a damsel in distress?”

  “Naw, he ate her chicken-fried steak while she wasn’t lookin’.”

  I pursed my lips. “Nice.”

  “I have an appointment at three, but if ya like, you can take your stuff to the motel down the street and I’ll pick ya up around six?”

  Oh, right. His appointment, with me. In which I had to charm him. I gave him my best smile, the one Sadie called the “resistance to the Disney princess is futile” smile.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. I am your three o’clock appointment. Bonnie Turkle,” I said, extending my hand toward him.