Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  George snorted. “You can get a kid to play fear, Stephen. It’s called acting, and it’s the one emotion they can do. They’re close to it because they’re afraid of everything. And Jack is afraid as well, I’d wager. The Reverend Peter Koenig has the boy on a short leash over there—Jack’s from a prominent family in case you’ve forgotten—and there’s no way the reverend will loosen his grip, especially to let loose the likes of us upon America’s impressionable youth.”

  “I suppose,” Stephen conceded. “But here is the thing about Koenig. I know him a little—met him through Dolores, at a time when she wasn’t too fond of me.”

  “Unlike now?”

  “I know, I know. But actually the drinking has mellowed her. I met him back when she stared poisons, gave me that narrowed eye glare that they issue to angry white-trash girls though she would be appalled to know she received one. I guess you know she and Koenig dated a little back then—a ridiculous match, but Dolores was never good at pickin’ them.

  “At any rate….Koenig. Met him at a couple of theatre events. He went out of his way to be decent, all the time that Dolores was doing her best Joan Crawford. I asked him why so civil, knowing how Dolores felt, and he went on about peace and reconciliation—things he was supposed to talk about as a minister, I thought at the time, but I ended up rather liking him despite that kind of earnest thing that ministers do. They say he’s changed enough that they like him at Antioch. But I remember him younger and in character.”

  “Just a new part, I’m guessing,” George said, reaching for the pack of Winstons. “Just because he can be the religieux du jour doesn’t mean they all can act at Antioch. Jack Rausch could be the Baptist Keanu, gorgeous and dreadful.”

  Stephen laughed. “May I have another of those smokes, George? So what you’re saying is that we go to the dance with the cast what brung us?”

  A car rushed uphill over the cobbled street below them—one of the few left unpaved in Louisville, a picturesque and suspension-crippling obstacle course of masonry. As always, the sound passed like a remote and remembered thunder.

  “I think we should assume that’s the way things will be, Stephen. It’s the way in our town: we’re Jesus-haunted and judgment-drunk, like we’ve been since the Great Awakening. Nothing’s going to change in this town. Unless…”

  He looked at Stephen and winked. “Unless, of course, Jack Rausch can be and will be rescued.”

  22 Episode: The Qeej

  They sat on the tiered upper platform of the stage. The other boys were busy shifting the mirrors, as Stephen had requested before he left, but Jack sat down by Maia, lying back and peering through the netting of new leaves at the encircling street lamps.

  It was time for them to get home. The police precinct headquarters lay at the other side of the grounds, but the residents knew that by this time of night the officers had been dispatched south toward the university and north along Fourth Street as it passed by Park, by Ormsby, and to the intersection of Fourth and Oak, better known as Fourth and Fellini for the company you kept there.

  Maia hugged her knees and half-closed her eyes. Something in Jack Rausch settled her, and when he lay by where she was sitting, steepling his fingers under his head, it was like she floated at the edge of a light and restful sleep, the traffic noises from Fourth Street fading into the cry of migratory birds, the whirr and bull-roaring ratchet of newly emerged cicadas, weeks early this year, they said.

  She told Jack she was single—between boyfriends, she said.

  “But that’s pretty recent, isn’t it?” he asked, the cicadas suddenly revving down as if to make room for her answer.

  “It is. How did you know?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “You said between boyfriends. And why are you between them?”

  She hugged her knees tighter, surprised that she was about to answer this boy, ingenuous and two years at least her junior. But Jack was evocative: there was a space around him that was calmly tidal, where attentions circled and stilled. So she told him about the heartbreak of Cowboy Copass.

  Nurtured at Maia De Chevre’s high school, Billy Copass had received the nickname to rhyme with his grandfather’s favorite entertainer. He blossomed early, was the recurring dream of Kentucky’s land grant university—6’3 and white, with an arching jump shot they called Copass’s compass. The coaches in Lexington knew two things at first sight: that Cowboy was good enough only to ride the end of the bench and shoot three-pointers near game’s end, but that a white guard guaranteed a state-wide adoration.

  Cowboy was the whole package, but saddled with a fourth-grade reading level. That was where Maia had joined the nurturing, guiding him through the maze of class work in his junior and senior years. In return for her kindness, he had deflowered her, made the southern commute to school, and dumped her for a debutante the past October. Maia knew as well as anyone that he would try to reconcile when Lexington left him stranded—social class and horse money would eventually trump athletic celebrity, and Cowboy would sell insurance or run for State Legislature. But that would be later, and he was already as good as gone to her, a strange narcotic dream of high school glory.

  Jack seemed to understand her story. His almond-shaped dark eyes stirred her guilelessly, and she felt awakened by his regard. So she spoke on from there, about her songs and her poems and her stage dreams suddenly unveiled. In return Jack simply listened, at the end of her accounts showing her his necklace, from which hung a small copper charm he claimed had belonged to his mother. It was a qeej, he said, spelled it then pronounced it gheng again to her confusion and amusement.

  “Vietnamese pipes,” he said. “Played most often at funerals, so there’s a sadness to them. But the notes make a language, they say. Each note is a word. And there’s a legend to its making.”

  It was Maia De Chevre’s turn to listen.

  “Long ago,” Jack said, “there was a hero by the name of Sinsay. He was a great and eager warrior, and after each victory, he would marry one beautiful woman from the kingdom he conquered, enjoy a brief honeymoon, then move on.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Maia lamented, but Jack was off on the tale. “Eventually, he conquered seven kingdoms and married seven brides.

  “One day, the Great King—the liege lord of Sinsay—decided to have a festival. Everyone was invited and excitement was high, especially for the seven young wives Sinsay had left behind in the care of their families. They knew their husband would be there, and each made her own plans to find Sinsay and be reunited with him. Sinsay, too, looked forward to attending the festival, to be praised as a champion and to find his seven wives.

  “When the fair began, Sinsay searched the crowd for his wives, and each of them searched for him. But it had been so long since they parted that he could not recognize them, nor could they recognize him. Disappointed but unwilling to give up the search, each wife began to sing her own lug txaj, courtship songs that only a husband or wife would know.”

  He spelled and pronounced again for Maia.

  “And so, one by one, Sinsay found his wives because of their lug txaj. And, one by one, he sang lug txaj back to the women, acknowledging each of them to be his wife.

  “But the women were angry to find that Sinsay had seven wives. They quarreled over him until the Great King finally intervened, posing them a task. If all seven were wives, he said, each will be able to make something that can speak her lug txaj. If not, her claim was not true.

  “So the wives went home, and in nine days each came back with a pipe. At first, each pipe made only a sound, a note, and both Sinsay and the king were perplexed. But the women smiled, for they knew better. You see, they had learned in the absence and the making. So when the seven pipes were put together into one instrument, Sinsay blew through the reeds, and it made words. So the great king declared that all of the women were Sinsay’s true wives.”

  Maia was not sure she liked the story. But she leaned against Jack’s shoulder as he continued.

  “Ac
cording to legends,” he said, looking out over the stage toward the old park promenade, the stone lions and the row of trees to their west, “the qeej once had powers far beyond making words. The master qeej players were wizards who could fly through the air, read other people’s minds, disappear, and set enemies on fire. Wizardry was a guarded art, learned only from the master and tested in competitions. At first these contests were just to show how much each player had learned. But over time, they became harsh, ill-natured, and the masters took away the magic part of the teaching until the qeej was another flute. Because the masters did not pass on this learning, the magical powers of the qeej were lost.”

  “You almost sound like you believe the story,” Maia remarked, expecting, in this moment of intimacy, Jack would confess he did.

  But instead he laughed merrily, and rubbed the copper pendant between his thumb and forefinger. “Oh, not at all, Maia!” he exclaimed, and for a moment, caught in the shadow and artificial light, the qeej seemed to glow white beneath his skin. “I expect we should be going now. Aron’s been glaring at us ever since I sat down here.”

  23 Episode: The Game’s Revenge

  Again the flicker of multicolored dice behind the cardboard screen, as Aron plotted the late-night game.

  The party had descended to the fifth circle of the imaginary maze, and it was Aron’s task to plan out the monsters, obstacles, and puzzles they would encounter on their way downward to rescue the enchanted prince.

  He scrawled listlessly on a legal pad. He was no longer in the mood for gaming.

  He had walked to the back of the stage, down the gentle slope behind it, his thoughts still troubled by the distortions in the mirror. He had gone almost to Fourth Street when voices, overheard and unfamiliar, reached him from the bus stop, where he saw four shapes—ragged and gesturing—whose presence made him turn back.

  But on the battlements of Hamlet’s Elsinore designed by his mother last spring, he saw Jack and Maia, silhouetted by street light, sitting and talking too close to each other. He hoped what he suspected about Jack was true, which would make it simply two pals conniving. Nevertheless, the sight unsettled and annoyed him, even though he was certain by now that he had no chance with Maia.

  Now he watched her take a seat by Jack, bristled as the dark boy drew the chair out for her. Nosed down into scrawlings and rulebooks and hexagonal maps. Half-heartedly he had devised a band of adversaries and a series of traps, descriptive phrases, and columns of numbers to be transformed by his telling into something fantastical and plausible.

  They were a rather absurd party to begin with, he decided. All of them playing to their weaknesses. Apache’s character was a nimble and confident thief, Billy Shepard’s a fighter with maxed strength and even more agility, while Vincent’s was a druid whose light guided the party through subterranean intricacy. And Maia’s magic-user was poised and resourceful, a tactic for every predicament, a spell for every jam. Perhaps their greatest roleplay, Aron decided, was passionately being whatever they were not.

  He was the one who knew the rules, who improvised ingeniously, knew when to fudge dice rolls and when to stick to the letter. If he said so himself, he was no shabby game master.

  But even in this setting, in the world Aron Starr had created for his friends, Rausch was an intruder, a disruption. All those great preliminary dice rolls had ensured he could play virtually any character in this quasi-medieval universe, and he had chosen a cleric, of all roles. A female cleric at that.

  Ambrosia, Jack called himself. Aron knew it was some kind of inside joke, which he was missing.

  Sullenly he added a row of numbers and covered his legal pad with notes to himself. Meanwhile, Maia and Jack were going on about Our Town.

  He joined in from behind the game master’s screen. “How can you stand it, Jack? Cheesiest play in Western drama, and they give you the cheese of the cheese. George Gibbs, for God’s sake. Romantic lead in a play totally without romance.”

  Jack shrugged and laughed, letting Maia rise to his defense.

  “Oh, Aron, it isn’t that bad. Everyone produces it now and then. Mr. Castille makes fun of it, and even he produces it sometime, because it guarantees a packed house. It’s gentle and calm in a sad way, and it kind of appeals to everyone, even if they don’t admit it.”

  “It’s sentimental,” Aron insisted. “It’s weird, and nothing really happens. If it was a movie you’d walk out on it thirty minutes in.”

  “What does happen?” Apache asked.

  Jack cleared his throat. “It’s mainly the daily lives of an American family. Maybe even the American family, you know? First act kinda sets up two families, living next to each other. They have kids—George Gibbs and Emily Webb—who are sweet on each other and eager to grow up. Second act is all about their wedding, and between the second and third act Emily dies in childbirth, so the third act is all about her as a kind of ghost going back in time and seeing the everyday she had as a kid and realizing how important the little things are.”

  “Pretty lame,” Apache said, as Billy and Aron nodded in agreement.

  “But there’s other things besides action and big events, Aron,” Jack continued, addressing Aron alone, ignoring the other boys. “I mean, if George Gibbs stalked the town mutilating and eating everyone like Hannibal Lecter it might have some cool moments, but what’s important is not always what is settled that way.”

  “I know,” Aron snapped, his patience fraying. “War is not the answer, and whatever. Roll for initiative.”

  Which meant that the first game encounter of the evening was ready to begin. Rolling for initiative meant the start of combat. And Aron had a tight spot for his adventurers: a party of ten orcs whose number he had just increased to fifteen out of spite. He usually let his characters explore their surroundings for a few minutes, soak the atmosphere he loved to create, but he was feeling combative tonight.

  As always, Apache rolled for the party. This time a four.

  And though Aron rolled a three, he did so behind the screen, so announced it as a five to the players, and moved first in the streamlined, simple combat of board movement and dice.

  From the beginning, the players could tell that the feel of the game had shifted. As the die rolls exchanged and the orc casualties piled up, Aron swore under his breath several times at Jack’s high tosses—something they’d all laughed about in earlier sessions, but had become (inexplicably to most, if not all of them) a serious matter.

  “Three orcs approach Ambrosia, their scimitars drawn,” Aron intoned.

  Jack frowned at the circumstance. “Ambrosia steps back, casts an Inflict Light Wounds spell on the first of ’em.”

  Aron masked his roll again. “Roll for damage.”

  Jack tossed the rhomboid eight-sided die against the game-master’s screen. “Seven!” he exclaimed, and his fellow players looked at the game master with satisfaction—indeed, with a little smugness that Aron certainly noticed.

  “The orc reels, but keeps coming.”

  “With seven points damage, plus 2 for Ambrosia’s level?” Billy protested.

  Aron peered over the screen. “Five points max for the spell, Billy….I mean, Hrothgar. Check the rules.”

  Billy reached for the Game Master’s Guide, but Jack waved him away. “He’s in charge, Billy. He knows the rules and applies them fairly.”

  Aron frowned and rolled the dice. “The second orc brings his scimitar across in a savage slash, its blade descending on the dark locks of Ambrosia. “ Then looked up. “It crashes hard into her shoulder, cutting bone and gristle…”

  “Aron!” Maia exclaimed.

  “Six points damage,” Aron announced. “He has initiative, slashes across again…”

  Maia looked to her brother, whose gaze was maddeningly elsewhere. She turned to Apache, then to Billy. They both gaped, but both were silent, the only sound in the room that of the dice hitting the back of the screen.

  “Eight more points damage,” Aron declared flat
ly.

  “That’s it,” Jack conceded with a cryptic smile.

  “You killed him, Aron,” Apache said, his voice quiet and accusatory.

  “No, Apache,” Jack said. “The orc killed Ambrosia. It’s RPG, remember?”

  24 Stasimon: Strophe: Polymnia and the Muses

  Polymnia: Like a tale told by drunks in a park, Aron Starr’s story of rescue and descent builds on consent with others.

  Here, when the will lies in danger, art descends and rescues, arriving as a saving, healing magician. Art alone can turn those moments of horror, or absurdity, or even resentment, into something imagined by all. Only then are all things bearable, and only then can the game continue.

  We watch from the parlor along with Jack—four sisters called to an assembly, an agon, surrounding a pouting, translucent boy, whose comrades now begin their small rebellions. The calm of Asia, a mask to his friends, hides a turbulence Republican and entitled and Hoosier, an anger at having been treated like this, dismissed from the game and the community by concealed dice rolls, and a greater anger that he cannot return the dishonor in kind. He knows that Aron has gilded the dice rolls, so we coddle the boy, canoodling with invisible hands his face and chest and extremities, Thalia’s ethereal fingers halfway up his inner thigh before Melpomene stops her sternly, as adored Jack murmurs, arches his ailurean back and falls into a doze, pampered and caressed, his copy of Our Town tented on his chest.

  Calliope: The agon begins here. Together, Jack’s friends rescue the moment from disgust, from absurdity.

  You might say they rescue Jack himself.