The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  "Jo, you won't even eat at Dom's. Isn't there anything else?"

  "Haven't you heard, we've got a fucking recession on. Fifteen restaurants and gin joints and greasy spoons in two hours, working downwards. Fourteen places ain't hiring. At least four of them are thinking of letting people go. Three guesses who was at the bottom of the list, and the first two don't count."

  "But . . . Dom's?"

  "Look, babe, I'll do lap dances down at The London Derriere if that's what it takes to stay warm and fed. What are you planning to do?"

  Now the corners of her lips had turned white with tension. David felt the hairs standing up on his forearms and the crown of his skull, the static charge of a thunderstorm right overhead. He reminded himself of what this woman was, what she could do. He needed to defuse the bomb before that timer hit zero. "They're closed, remember? Burned out?"

  "Moved over two blocks and reopened. Can't keep a good strip-joint down. Essential civic service."

  Jeezum. She'd checked. He'd been joking. She wasn't.

  "What about the CAD jobs? You've got the certificate, you've got the experience . . . ." He stopped. That knife-edge on her forehead was getting deeper, and her eyes had narrowed to slits.

  "Screwed. They check with Rob. He just tells them the truth. I didn't show up. I didn't call. He had a deadline, and I didn't even answer the frigging phone. Two expletive deleted months, and our official tale is, I was off on a drunk. Would you hire me, with that word out on the street?"

  "Do you have to tell them about your last job? Can't you just go in with your certificate --"

  Her right hand chopped air. "Small town. You know every musician in this piss-ant burg, right? Played gigs with most of them, one time or another? Same thing with the architects and engineers. It's a frigging club, everybody knows everybody else. I've been blackballed. For cause."

  Then she turned deadly calm. "What are you doing about a job? Or are you pulling a Maureen on me?" He could cut himself on her voice.

  Maureen. Maureen used to live in this apartment -- eating half the food, drinking nine-tenths of the booze, sucking out about five times what she put in. Certified crazy, fit only for a part-time job at minimum wage. Dumping her in the Summer Country had solved a major problem for Jo. Kid even seemed happy there.

  And now Jo saw him the same way?

  "I've got cards up at all the music shops and clubs, spread word around that I'm available again. Give it a few weeks, I'll find some gigs."

  "Available. Available? Fucking a-vail-a-ble?" Now she was shouting. "Mother of God, you think you're Adam fucking Lester? I'm slinging hash browns to hung-over drunks at five AM in fucking Dom's so you can sit home and wait for the fucking music fairy to tap you on the shoulder with her fucking magic wand?"

  Normal conditions, Jo cussed maybe a tenth as much as Maureen. Profanity served as a psychic barometer with her, and right now the needle pointed at "Hurricane." David found himself backing away.

  "Look . . . here . . . mister . . . man." She bit each word off, stabbing her forefinger at him. He expected blue flame to shoot from it. "Get yourself a fucking job. There's probably twenty guitarists in this hick town looking for work. Ten of them are better than you. You wait for the fucking music fairy, the Red Sox will win the World Series first. I like eating at least once a week."

  Her hand scrabbled around on the table, as if searching for something to throw at him, some way to discharge the lightning she'd been building. "Fuck this!" She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and stood up. She grabbed her coat, wrenched the door open, and turned back. "Get a fucking job, already!" And the door slammed shut, with her on the far side of it.

  God. Almighty. Damn. David squashed his impulse to throw the deadbolt and chain the door behind her. She'd just blow it open, anyway, if she wanted in to get a clear shot at frying his ass. He dropped into a chair, hands shaking, sweat chilling on his back. That woman could kill him.

  She didn't even have to be mad at him. PMS or a bad day at the office, anything in the neighborhood could get scorched. He'd known that, back before the world twisted around him and dumped him into magic. But now her temper came with built-in tactical nukes.

  His hands started the mechanical process of sorting the mail she'd dumped. Wet cold floppy mail, any of it he didn't drop directly into the trash bucket would need a spell on the radiator to dry out. Well over a hundred years and the damned postal service still hadn't figured out that mail satchels needed rain covers.

  Ads. Ads. Bill, electrical service, David winced at that one, time to check into the winter shut-off laws. Credit card application, "transfer your balance," brought a wry snort. As if they needed that particular quicksand pit added to their swamp. Ads. Envelope with a PO Box return-address, Naskeag Falls, no other info. Probably an offer of investment advice. David almost tossed it unopened, then noticed the Elvis stamp and figured a stockbroker who pasted Elvis on his mail might at least be amusing.

  Letterhead, Adam Lester Productions. Offer to buy nonexclusive rights to perform certain original songs, royalty schedule attached, with further offer that the principals would like the chance to review any future work with right of first refusal on an exclusive basis. Performances to be by Adam Lester and Ayisha Powell, with selected local musicians backing up.

  What the fuck? David stopped, blinked his eyes, and read the letter through again. Songs? David had never written any songs. He wrote poems, when they forced themselves into his head, and he tended to keep them mostly to himself. Some members of Dé hAoine might have copies from when he'd lived with the band before he met Jo . . .

  A handwritten note scrawled across the bottom of the page, "Call me when you get a chance -- Adam." A phone number followed, looked like a cell phone from the code.

  He shook his head and frowned. Adam and Ish were Names, capital "N," big-money performers. Wicked good. They made a true musical fairy tale, guitar wizard and princess royal of the blues who had climbed out of the grungy Naskeag Falls bar scene and onto a world stage. The best set Dé hAoine had ever played was the time Adam had borrowed David's guitar, leaving him to sit and watch and tap his feet. That reel had been magic, true enough, but he hadn't played a note of it.

  But Jo's blood warped the world around her. What she really wanted, happened. Like she'd said, Naskeag Falls was a small town and the music scene a tiny fraction of it. If you owned an instrument, you were family. Family gossip, family feuds, family ties you could lean on when life turned shitty. And, once or twice a lifetime, family connections that opened doors . . .

  Adam had lived on the grimy end of it all for years, an army vet blinded by a head injury in the Gulf War. He'd worked the same bars, starved on the same piss-poor gigs, paid the same dues, dreamed the same dreams. Only, for him they'd come true.

  And there was Ayisha Powell, short and wide and black. Ish hadn't even been a performer two years ago. She'd been a heavy machinist at the local GE plant, carving turbine shafts out of steel billets on the day shift and hauling Adam to gigs at night. She still had the muscles to show for it, used to win her drinks for the night from suckers who tried to arm-wrestle her. You didn't want to get her mad.

  Then she'd filled in for a missing singer when Adam cut a demo record. Fairy tale . . .

  David picked up the phone, hoping against the odds to hear a dial tone rather than the dead hollow of a disconnected line. Luck still held. He punched in the number. He listened to the ring on the other end, holding his breath. Two rings. Three. Four. A click, and David expected to hear an answering machine.

  "Yo."

  "Adam?"

  "Himself in person. What's it to you?"

  Yep, that was Adam. "This is David, David Marx. I just got your letter."

  David heard a crackling pause on the line, as if Adam had to shift mental gears -- or was thinking of a way to crawfish out of his offer.

  "Yeah. David. Been trying to get in touch with you. Heard about Dé hAoine, heard about Jo's job, heard about her mothe
r. Bad scene all around."

  Family gossip. "Yeah. We haven't been sleeping too well."

  "Look, how's it going with her mother?"

  Ugh. "They moved her out of the hospital a couple of days ago, nothing more they could do for her there. Nursing home, long term care. Different window, same view." And not a pretty one.

  "Man, that sucks. Look, I just stepped out of a meeting, so we'll have to catch up later. What I wrote you about was, these damn fools want another album from Ish, hit the market quick while she's still hot. We're talking fusion stuff this time, not blues. 'World Music' and 'Cross-over' are big. We were thinking maybe like some of the stuff Dé hAoine backed on that disk I cut. Ish really likes that flavor."

  David winced again. "Dé hAoine dumped me. I thought you'd heard."

  "Yeah, we'd heard. Macht nichts. That's not what we're after. What we want, what Ish wants, is to throw a couple of your songs into the mix and maybe make one of them the title cut."

  "Songs? Hey, man, I'm a musician. Not a songwriter."

  "Songs. She's thinking of 'Derry' and 'Grania' and maybe 'Naskeag Mollie.' 'Derry' might be the title cut. Depends on what fits in with the rest of the stuff."

  "But . . ." David sat there for a moment, lost and vaguely stunned. "Those aren't songs, they're just poems."

  "Hey, man, songs are poems. And those three just about rip your guts out and dance on 'em. 'Derry' and those poor kids caught up in all the hate . . . anyway, I've started in on settings for them, worked out the melody and some of the harmony. Celtic flavor, of course, and we think it'll be more electric than acoustic. 'Derry' is too hard and modern and nasty for a traditional treatment, and we think that will set the theme for the entire album. Give 'em a different side of Ish."

  Silence hung between them. David hadn't thought of those poems as songs, never even crossed his mind. And he sure hadn't tried to market them -- somebody in Dé hAoine must have passed his photocopy along, as a kind of penance for booting him out of the band.

  "You want my songs?" David struggled to wrap his mind around the concept. He'd always thought you needed to write words to a tune, not the other way around.

  David could almost hear Adam shaking his head in amusement. "Hey, man, if you think we're trying to screw you, don't worry. Ish isn't big on getting rich -- she always says she can only ride one Harley at a time. Check that schedule with whoever you like. We pay good royalties."

  David swallowed, his mouth suddenly gone dry. "Uh, the answer is yes. Hell, yes! I'm just taking a while to get used to the idea."

  "Get used to it. Look, man, I gotta go. The meter's running. I'll have our agent get a contract and advance check over to you." The phone clicked in his ear, and he hung it up and stared at it.

  Royalties. Money, by damn, money for words, words he'd already written. He jerked the door open and bounced down the stairs, two and three at a time, and shot out onto the front steps of the tenement. If he could catch Jo . . .

  The cop cruiser had left. The only figure in sight was a scrawny stubble-faced man with a garbage bag at his feet, pawing through the trash in search of bottles and cans.

  David checked the parking lot. Jo had taken Maureen's car, real safe, driving in the mood she was in. But that meant he couldn't find her just by walking around the block.

  He climbed back up the stairs, imagining. That voice, Ish's powerful voice, evoking all the gut-wringing emotion that she brought to the blues. Singing his poems. With Adam crafting the tune.

  "And the Catholic child,

  "And the Protestant child,

  "Scream their hate 'cross the barbed wire border.

  "And each finds a rock,

  "But he can't throw it far,

  "And he swears he'll be back when he's older."

  Chapter Twelve

  Jo stared at her knuckles, white with strain from squeezing the steering wheel. Maureen's steering wheel, the damned rust-bucket Toyota that had spent two months of a Maine winter frozen into a snow-bank but still started bang-off because Brian had once laid hands on it like a televangelist at a faith-healing.

  She was turning into her sister.

  Unemployed, hearing "voices," boozing, believing that the world was out to get her. Jeeze Louise.

  Flying into rages and lashing out at those closest to her. And now, driving over to Carlysle Woods to seek wisdom and healing from the trees. Driving drunk, for Chrissakes, just like Grandfather O'Brian. But she'd walked out of that goddamned nursing home and right into the bar down the street. Good marketing move, that was, putting your whisky shop within walking distance of a reliable source of depressed people.

  She'd ordered three quick shots of bar Scotch as a sedative, stared into the bottom of the second, and froze with it half-way to her lips. Her sister was a drunk. Her father was a drunk. Her grandfather had died from drink, and there'd been others. Odds were, if she went on and drank that second and third shot, she'd follow her family down the neck of a whisky bottle and drown there.

  Heredity or environment, nature or nurture, she was screwed either way. Hand shaking, she'd set the shot glass down on the bar and backed away from it, then climbed into Maureen's car.

  That didn't erase the reason why she'd wanted a drink. Three cheers for modern medicine. Bastards couldn't even tell the difference between a stroke or faint followed by a fall down the front stairs, and good old fashioned wife-beating. They couldn't do anything about the results, either way, so let's clear the bed out and move the goddamn empty husk off to a warehouse for long-term storage.

  And Dad wouldn't pay the extra for a private room that his insurance wouldn't cover. So now Mom was in a double with a fat blind diabetic Indian who could really have used a roommate she could talk to.

  She relaxed her hands, took a deep breath, and shut off the engine. She climbed out, slammed the car door because if you didn't slam it hard enough to shake rust loose from the body, it wouldn't latch, and locked it before she sobered up. Or sanity intervened. Or something.

  The city plowed out this parking lot, chewing up the gravel surface and piling mud in the corners, but did nothing about the paths winding through the woods. Jo climbed over the heaps of old snow and followed snowshoe tracks that led between two birches, her boots sinking ankle-deep into the gray surface of Maine "spring." Snow rarely hung on so late, but this year looked like a record.

  Maureen had dragged her out here a few times, sharing her world and trying to explain the differences between this tree and that. Birches were easy, the white papery bark peeling and curling loose to show pale orange underneath. Jo had also figured out the smooth-trunked gray beeches and could tell an oak if it dropped an acorn on her head, but that was about it. All the evergreens were pines to her.

  The old snow was filthy, heavy, wet, shifting almost like loose gravel under her feet. Tracks had turned into grotesque negatives with the thaw so that the hard-packed trail was actually higher than the sides, with reversed ski and snowshoe prints made of ice that resisted the sun and rain. She closed her eyes, matching up the trail turns and branches with her memory. There was a certain tree that Maureen loved above all others; she called it Father Oak. She'd claimed it talked to her. She'd claimed it gave her strength.

  Well, Jo had always been the strong one, protecting her little sister. Maybe it was time to tap into Maureen's support network for a refill.

  Jo's memories led her down trails to the right and then left, until she found an old beech by the beaten path. A hole showed dark against the gray; Maureen said it was the daytime roost of some kind of owl. Jo couldn't tell, but she remembered that shape and smooth bark and the hole about twenty feet above the ground. Except that it was lower now, with something like five feet of drifted snow paring down the height.

  Okay. Now it got tricky, moving off the trail and into unmarked snow. Second step, she sank up to her knees, above her boot-tops, and the wet cold washed right through her jeans. Bad choice for clothing, but she hadn't planned to go for a hike in the w
oods when she'd dressed that morning. She ignored the chill and pushed on.

  She barely remembered the way to Father Oak. Maureen had brought her out in summer, with leaves all over and bugs whining in her ears. Winter gave the woods a very different look. Did she want to go right, now, or left, climb that rise or go downhill? There'd been a small creek, but it must lie buried underneath the ice and the winter's accumulated litter of small twigs and drifted grit. So maybe she wanted to go down and then up again.

  At least she couldn't get lost. Her tracks made sure of that, leaving a trail like a moose floundering through the woods. She wiped sweat off her forehead and unzipped her jacket. Hiking through deep snow was perilously close to work. She waded on, once or twice almost swimming through the endless waves of sodden off-white crap.

  Jo stopped and stood still, panting, up to her waist in a thawing snowdrift and with ice-water running into her boots. Another hundred yards through the drifts and she might not be able to get back to the car, even if she wasn't lost.

  And the chilled sweat on her back reminded her of that panicked afternoon in Dougal's forest when she'd accidentally followed Maureen into the Summer Country.

  Panic fear. Maureen always said that was the most dangerous animal in the woods. Forget about the lions and tigers and bears, oh my -- if you gave in to panic, you were dead. All the other stuff, ranging from poison ivy up to running flat out off a cliff, was just choosing the way you died.

  And Jo had already tried that last route once. It sucked. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes. Maureen had said you could feel the power of her sacred tree. That was how she'd found it.

  {Come.}

  The hair rose on her arms and on the back of her neck. The dragon had talked like that, a voice that reached inside her skull and echoed without the bother of touching her ears on the way. She'd come out here to try to find some calm. Those memories didn't help one bit.

  However, something to her left felt soothing, like a fire crackling warm and yellow and fragrant on the hearth. She followed it, uphill, and the snow grew both harder and shallower as she climbed. Soon she was only ankle deep again, and her breathing calmed.