Devil and the Bluebird

by Jennifer Mason-Black

  Blue shook her head, tried to rub the snow off the back of her neck. The meltwater ran a cold river down her back.

  “Snowballs are better.” Dill squinted in the bright light. He held out a pair of red knit mittens. “Hands’ll get cold fast, though, and it’s hard to warm them up again.”

  She thought about the fingerless gloves, about Steve and the church basement, about playing in the park. That was what she wanted. To play. Not just to play, though. To sing.

  Her guitar. She’d left it back in the room. Stupid—some lessons were impossible for her to grasp, apparently. She stepped back toward her trail.

  “Sorry, did I scare you?” He held his hands up, flat, the universal symbol for I am not going to hit you.

  She shook her head, made a strumming motion. That was probably stupid, too, to show him what she cared about. Then again, who would carry a guitar along with her everywhere if she didn’t care about it?

  “You really have a guitar in the case?” He followed her as she headed back.

  She strummed again. To write would slow things down. Had she set it down on the ground? Was it getting wet?

  “Cool. Hey, I have a real question for you. Can you hold up a minute?”

  She didn’t exactly stop, just slowed a little.

  “What’s your name?”

  She didn’t know how to mime that one out. She took out her notebook.

  Interstate.

  “Interstate? Cool. That’s a road name. Is Andrea really your sister?”

  Of course he would have noticed. Probably everyone else, too. Probably by the time she got there, they’d have thrown her guitar out in the snow.

  “It’s okay if she’s not, at least with me. On the road, families can be all kinds of things.” He sounded like Javier. It was true that she’d felt closer to Steve in just a few days than she’d felt to anyone at home for a long time. “I’m curious about your story, if you’re willing to share.”

  She stopped walking, took her paper out.

  It’s a long thing. Plz don’t tell anyone that Andrea’s not my sis. K? Not for me, for her. Don’t want her in trouble.

  “No big deal. I’m just a curious guy. I like to hear stories. Like yours. Tell me something about yourself.”

  You 1st. The real one.

  He tilted his head, considered the tree branches above him. “The one I told in the car is real.”

  She wiggled her fingers in a gimme sign.

  “Really. Um, I’m here because I’ve been studying communities. People taking care of each other. Things are getting bad for folks without homes, without money. Really bad.”

  You have a home?

  “I do. Doesn’t mean I can’t imagine . . .”

  She stared at him, watching his face shift, twist, open.

  “I have three sisters. My oldest one ended up with a bad guy, for a while. She didn’t tell us, and she didn’t have much help. She’s okay now, but . . . I want to know what to do, you know? Plus, I don’t know, last year was pretty tough, and I felt like I needed room to breathe.”

  She did, though. She wanted to hear everything, and not think about going back and sleeping in the ground.

  Hopping trains?

  He grinned. “So good. You have to try it someday. It can be dangerous, but if you’re sober and careful, know what you’re doing, it’s more a question of watching out for people looking to mess with you. It’s like being free, really free. Bothers my folks a bit, but we’ve talked it through. They get that I’m not buying into much of this stuff pushed on us by society.”

  There was something about Dill—half mysterious and half sweet—that made her want to be around him. Only she didn’t really know him at all. He was just some guy who had driven her and Andrea and Lacey to the middle of nowhere and tried to get her to start a snowball fight.

  Plus . . .

  How old are you?

  He glanced at the words sideways. “Nineteen. Why?”

  No reason.

  He wasn’t all that old. Not that it made a difference. She didn’t have time for . . . That was what she was doing, wasn’t it? Almost flirting. She didn’t have time to be almost flirting with an almost stranger. That was the sort of thing you did when you had a home and a family and a friend to giggle with it all about.

  That was what she was doing, though.

  Almost flirting.

  Her guitar was where she’d left it. Not wet, not opened, not damaged in any way. Lacey perked up to see her open it, and Dill poked her again. “Come on, Interstate. Let’s hear what you can do.”

  This time, holding the guitar felt different. Not like wood and strings. More like lips and tongue and vocal cords and air. She couldn’t use her voice, and she couldn’t use ASL, but she could still use her fingers to speak. Blue played a few of her usual tunes, then tried something she hardly ever did, a song her mom had written.

  Soft as silence, here it comes, it went. She could hear Mama’s voice, the way it caught a little on silence. We’ve finally started our downhill run.

  She couldn’t think about the song without remembering how, toward the end, Tish sometimes stumbled on the stage. How what had been a drink with friends became drinking after everyone else left. How she stopped staying over, sometimes stayed away for days; and how, when she was there, she and Mama fought more often than not.

  Strange pick to play in her dirt home, to a little girl and a boy she secretly wanted to impress. Only, she didn’t want to impress him, she wanted to speak to him, and this was the best way she could do it.

  Dill sat next to Lacey on the bed, watching quietly. When Blue finished, Lacey said, somberly, “My dad isn’t here.”

  “Nope,” said Dill.

  “He doesn’t know where we are. It’s a secret.”

  “Yeah, sometimes it’s like that, isn’t it?” Dill nudged the girl with his elbow. “What did you think about Interstate’s song?”

  “I think it was made out of feathers.”

  “Feathers, huh?”

  She didn’t continue, and Dill didn’t push. Blue tried to imagine what a song made out of feathers meant. Was it light? Soft? Fluffy?

  She didn’t think so. She thought that a song made of feathers would be more like a swan—fighting to lift its body up out of the water on long, fierce wings.

  Dill left before dinner. With him gone, the gray felt grayer. Night would come, and more cold, and Blue would be underground with her pretend family. Like moles. Or roots. Stuck there.

  In truth, the hole was better than she expected. It did smell of earth, but it was warmer down here than above ground. And the mat was more comfortable than sleeping on the ground. Well, technically it was in the ground.

  It didn’t matter. This was a hole, and she was there with Andrea and Lacey, who’d started to cry at the slightest thing. She hated the hole more than Blue did, and she hated the cold, and she hated her mother for bringing her, and the bed for not having ladybug sheets. Andrea waffled between forced cheer and edgy frustration, smiling one minute and growling the next.

  By the time they entered their hole for the night, Blue was ready for sleep. They took off their coats, but left everything else on. Andrea told Lacey a story, something about a cloud princess, and when she finished, she got up and turned the flashlight off.

  The dark swallowed them whole. Blue couldn’t have found her way out of bed, let alone out of the tunnel. Lacey whimpered.

  “I’m right here,” Andrea said. “Interstate’s over there. He’d say hi if his throat didn’t hurt. Just go to sleep, and when we wake up it will be morning and everything will be fine.”

  Everything wouldn’t be fine. It would still be dark there, underground. They still wouldn’t be home. Blue wouldn’t have said that, even if she could. No reason to make things worse. That didn’t mean she couldn’t think it.

  After a while, Andrea spoke. “I’m gonna turn the light back on for a few. She’s out. Nothing wakes her when she’s this tired.”

 
; A rustling noise and the sound of feet moving across the ground, slowly, carefully. Then a bright flash as she flipped the flashlight on. In the unforgiving glow, she looked tired and young. Pregnant and married when she was seventeen. Blue thought of Beck and shuddered.

  Andrea came over close to Blue’s bed. “You worried at all? You know, about people looking for you?”

  People, no. The woman in the red dress? Yes. Then she thought of Rat, of his hands around her neck. He’d hurt her and Steve, and they’d run away. Together. This close, she could see a faint scar on Andrea’s right cheek, another at the corner of her eye.

  Andrea caught her look. For an instant, she looked even younger, like a child in need of a mother. Then, it was gone. “It just gets so you don’t know what to do. It’s not like I wanted it, you know?”

  Blue shook her head, reached for her notebook.

  “But, well, my mom was—” She circled her finger in the air by her ear. “Sick, you know. She, uh, so, she killed herself. After Lacey was born. So he said that it was just a matter of time. That everyone knew I’d be crazy, too.”

  Would she? For a moment, Blue wondered whether it was all a story Andrea made up. She could have stolen Lacey from someone. Only, there was how Lacey rested her head against Andrea’s neck, and the scars on Andrea’s face, and the certainty, the absolute certainty, inside Blue, that Andrea told her the truth. She could hear the flute that played within Andrea, and never once did its music falter as she spoke.

  Blue held a finger up. Andrea watched while Blue took the guitar out, strummed it softly, then launched into “Avenue A.” She played as quietly as she could, thinking the whole time of watching Mama from backstage, of Andrea at ten, watching while her mother sang along with every Dry Gully song.

  A fight brewed up in the morning. It had something to do with Andrea coming up late, and something to do with Lacey playing around one of the ventilation pipes to her unit, and other things that Blue didn’t follow at all. Arguments, at least the ones Blue knew, usually started about something like broccoli and ended up being about hurt feelings.

  This argument started with what might happen if a vent was blocked, and moved on to whether it was right to take in a girl from Chicago when there was a girl living under a bridge nearby whose boyfriend had threatened her life twice and stabbed her once. It ended when Andrea lifted her shirt with her back to them, exposing fine white scars that spelled out MINE across her ribs.

  Lacey had been stomping the snow into slush. Blue grabbed her hand and led her back into the tunnel, as Andrea, her face gone red, walked off into the trees. Once inside, Blue took out her guitar and tried to think of fun songs. Lacey listened for a while, eventually growing bored and heading out again.

  Blue stayed behind. Something Lacey had said yesterday had stuck with her, rubbing against her thoughts. A song made of feathers. She didn’t know anything that sounded like that, not to her, at least. No song of her mom’s, or Tish’s, or anyone else’s. She kept playing around, trying to find a sound that worked.

  The feeling was about more than just chords. The swan was in her, long feathers tickling at the tips of her fingers, muscles stirring along her back. She put the guitar down, picked up her notebook.

  She’d seen her mom and Tish work on songs together, but it was just something they did, like dishes. She hadn’t listened closely enough. They’d bounce music back and forth between them, or one of them would hum the tune, the other test out the words. Always together. But that had to be the end of the process, not the beginning. Where did it start?

  She didn’t even know what she wanted to write. There was just a line stuck in her head, and as silly as it felt, she wrote it down.

  I got a dollar in my pocket, fifty cents of that is yours.

  Okay. What now? She looked at the words for a few minutes. She felt like a fake, but also real, as if she had something true to say.

  I got a dollar in my pocket, fifty cents of that is yours.

  I got a sleeping bag in my pack with room for just one more.

  By themselves, the words were lonely. They needed music to tell listeners how to hear them. But she didn’t know how to write songs. When Cass made up songs, they were about the hot guy showing up at Ren’s Pizza, and she sang them in that voice all the boys loved. What Blue heard inside sounded nothing like that.

  It sounded like feathers growing through skin.

  Blue stayed away during lunch. She walked out along the trail instead, took a turn out into the field, and wandered for a while. Everywhere the landscape looked the same. Snow, trees, flat open spaces with tufts of grass accenting the snow. Clouds. Animal tracks here and there, tiny ones, mice or squirrels, and bigger ones, metronome steady, from a fox. She followed the fox, clumsily sinking deep behind the dainty steps. Clumsy, always, but alone, too, one more creature wandering toward its solitary destination.

  “Hey.”

  Or maybe not so solitary. She turned. Dill waved, his breath cottony steam around his face. The snow hid no one’s trails, the fox’s or hers.

  He walked to her, steady on his feet despite the snow. His cheeks were flushed, and he looked younger than he was, like one of the little kids from the holes.

  There had to be a different name for them than the holes. She felt in her pocket, found nothing there. Her notebook was back with her guitar. A moment or two of silent cursing, then she reached down and began to make lines in the snow. He watched, silent, intent, until she’d finished.

  “The holes? It’s called Beyond.”

  She raised her shoulders in a question.

  “Like, going beyond where everyone else is? Americans have all these lines, like, all life takes place within certain boxes. And people who live beyond that, people who don’t have homes, or who choose not to have homes, people who don’t look or act or have the same things as we believe they should—well, they become invisible.”

  Blue pulled one glove off and splayed her fingers. Her skin was pale, the veins blue beneath, but solid nonetheless.

  Dill nodded. “That’s the thing. You know you’re real. Everyone in Beyond is real. How do we make everyone see everyone else? ’Cause without that, we’re never gonna figure things out.”

  The desire to talk came like a wave, swamping her, working through a thousand tiny cracks she never knew she had. So many things to say, and only her hands to use and the snow to write on.

  “Listen.” Dill’s eyes were dark, his eyelashes darker, stretching out in fine black arcs. “I want to take you somewhere.”

  She must have frowned, because he studied her face, spoke slowly, trying to be offhand but deeply serious. “It’s . . . Is it me? Did something happen? I’m not going to hurt you at all, but I know you don’t have any reason to believe that. Except, well, I don’t know what I could tell you that would make you trust me. My mom would say I’m ninety-nine percent curious and one percent stubborn, which is dangerous mostly to me.”

  What did he see when he looked at her? How she wasn’t a boy, how bad things followed her, how the people she cared about left her, one way or another, and she had just one chance to change that?

  Only, Steve hadn’t left her. She’d left him.

  “What do you think?”

  She looked across the snow, the light hurting her eyes. She couldn’t stay, not for long, not anywhere, not even in a hole. But Dill didn’t feel dangerous. Not even a little.

  “It involves music,” he wheedled.

  She stuck her finger in the snow, wrote with an icicle hand.

  OK.

  Dill wouldn’t tell her where they were going, just that she needed her guitar. They took a long route hiking through the snow, the minivan a welcome relief by the time it came into view.

  Blue leaned to catch sight of herself in the side mirror as they drove. Someone else—a boy with a shorn head and long-lashed eyes and a pimple on his chin—stared back at her. It figured she could lose everything else and still have acne find her address.

&nb
sp; They drove for a long time, long enough that she started to wonder whether Dill was like Florida, whether he was returning her to Rat on a route of all back roads. She should have been more scared, she thought. In books, in movies, bad things happened, and then you were scarred for life, always afraid, until someone good came along and took care of you.

  But inside, she felt numb rather than scared. Not sad, not happy, just dull, like the walls of the tunnel—solid, brown, impervious to everything. She wasn’t scared of Dill because she couldn’t be. Aside from the desire to talk when he’d found her earlier, she hadn’t really felt much since leaving Chicago.

  They stopped at yet another middle-of-nowhere destination. They’d followed wheel ruts up to a farmhouse. A few other cars were parked there, and a large white van trimmed with rust, but the windows of the house were boarded shut and the front door was padlocked.

  Exactly the kind of place you might bring someone to murder them. The fear still didn’t come, though, and she got out of the car, guitar in hand, and followed him.

  He didn’t go to the house. Instead, he followed a path around the back. There, the footprints in the snow spread out, leading across a field. The sun was setting, and all Blue could make out was a large gray lump. Another minute of walking, and she recognized the outline of a large barn.

  A barn full of people. Musicians, the air full of the twangs of tuning instruments. An old woodstove in the middle of the space, the stovepipe running up and out the roof, a pot of something on the cookplate, the area around the stove cordoned off with what looked like bits of chain-link fence and pieces of guardrail. A woman with cornrows and work boots and a calico skirt over jeans paced off a space that seemed meant for a dance floor, drawing lines in the dirt.

  “I told you you’d like it.” Dill grinned, as if the scene made immediate sense. She looked to her left as a man wearing a worn overcoat lit a lantern, the sudden glow illuminating a mouth mostly empty of teeth.

  What is this?

  Her pen caught a little, the ink not flowing smoothly. A pencil would be better, though she’d have to sharpen it all the time.