Silence on Cold River

by Casey Dunn

  No This is on the prosecution. The case should’ve been a slam dunk for them. All the evidence was there. This is on them, not me. I will not be punished for being good at my job. This is their fault. I will live through this, if only to sue their asses for every penny they’re worth.

  She closed her eyes, channeling resolve, then opened them to glower at Michael.

  “Ama Shoemaker,” he responded, his entire body settling. “So good to see you again. You know, it’s absolutely critical that an instrument remembers each of the three meetings, or the sounds just aren’t the same value. Worthless, really. I tried once with an instrument that didn’t remember the second time we’d met. The inspiration fell flat, and I could hear it in the music. I had to throw out every note. It happened one other time—a man, a large man, big mouth, deep chest. I just knew he was going to have this great lower range that’s so hard to find. But he didn’t remember crossing paths, and I had to let him go. So knowing that you remember our meeting in Atlanta is a relief. Letting you go would’ve been the devastation of my career.” He smiled, his expression practically boyish with delight. “Let’s have another note, shall we?”

  MICHAEL Chapter 18 | October 11, 1989 | Tarson, Georgia

  I SIT ATOP THE PIANO bench, fingertips balanced on the cherrywood frame, thinking at this moment of how the one-inch strip of wood is like a lip, the keys like a row of perfect teeth. I cannot touch the keys until my mother has granted permission. This is her piano, the crown jewel of the house, and when I play it, I feel like a frantic, nervous virgin bungling the bra straps of an old hooker. In my mind, it is my mother’s face, and she turns to me over her bare shoulder, teeth exposed in a sneer.

  Don’t you know how to play anything?

  I blink against the image, my spine a two-by-four, my knees squeezed together, and my weight and her expectations pressing my feet to the floor. Not for the first time, I am grateful she cannot witness my rigid posture. She’ll see it, though. She’s been in the dark of blindness for years, but she’ll see it. She would still be able to play the piano were it not for the onset of the shakes two years later. That’s when she stopped playing and teaching altogether, and her rage turned into something entirely different.

  She passes behind me, her white cane held between loose, thin fingers. She’s memorized this arc from corner to corner of the bench. The cane is meant for me.

  “Do you think you’ve improved in your time away?” Her voice comes from the top of her chest, a little higher and tighter than normal. I cannot turn around or she’ll strike, but I can imagine her posture, hands clasped at the small of her back, lips pursed, her shoulders pulled slightly behind the vertical of her hips.

  “They didn’t have a piano in juvie,” I say, straining all sarcasm from my answer. This is true.

  You would know that if you’d visited Or if you’d paid bail, I could’ve been home practicing every minute of every day before the trial began. I don’t speak any of these thoughts aloud. But they’re equally true.

  “Whose fault is it that you spent months awaiting trial in a detention center?” She is directly behind me now. Her breath, always cold, pricks the hair at the base of my neck.

  “I was found not guilty.”

  “You aren’t innocent. This town owed us a debt, and they knew it. You really think they’d lock you up? Your father died trying to save this town, and that factory cost me everything. My sight. My career. My… I will go to an early grave.”

  I ease my chin ten degrees, fifteen, peering at her knuckles, which are swollen with rheumatoid arthritis. It has caused her pain and instability, but I would swear it has made her stronger, her swing faster, harder. Agony will do that, I have learned. But she won’t go to a doctor. Not after what happened to Father.

  “This piano belongs to me,” she says.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  She brings the cane against my spine. I clamp my lips shut, trapping air.

  “This piano belongs to me. It is my instrument. I ask, it sings. This instrument is the only thing in my life that has never failed me, never disappointed me.” She stops again. Exhales. I squeeze my eyes shut for one second—two—three.

  “Stand up,” she orders.

  My eyes fly open, and I stand.

  “This is not your instrument. It is not fair to this piano to let you bludgeon her keys. It is not fair to call the sounds you pry from her music. You must find your instrument, Michael. But this is not it.”

  I step out from the bench on trembling legs.

  “How will I practice?”

  “That is not my problem to solve.” Her eyes shudder, useless in their deep sockets. I imagine plucking them from her skull, finding new, glistening eyeballs emerging from beneath. “You may not utter a sound or eat a bite until you have found an instrument.”

  “I can go to the—”

  She swings the cane at me like a batter at a pitch. I want to jump back, but it will be worse if she misses. The narrow end strikes between two of my ribs.

  “Not a sound,” she hisses.

  I push my hand against my throbbing side and walk to my room. Mother is a predator. Running only serves to excite her. I close the door behind me, heaving air between my gaping jaws. Not a sound. Not a sound. Not a sound. I clamp my hands over my ears, the silence full and buzzing. Jail would be better than this sentence. I would be separated from a piano by bars and walls and miles, three things I could not change.

  I open my closet and reach above my hanging clothes, where a silver coffee can sits in the back right corner, the only thing on the shelf. I have three dollars left.

  Three.

  I squeeze the bills in my sweaty hand. Three will not buy me a piano at the secondhand store on Main Street, if there’s even one in stock today. But three tells me I need to try.

  I grab Father’s walking stick from its hiding place beneath my bed and walk to the door. Feeling Mother’s eyes upon me, I turn around, my fingertips poised on the handle.

  “And, Michael, even if you manage to find another instrument,” she says, “we will never say another word about the trial or what you did to get you there.”

  Even though she can’t see me, I nod before slipping through the door.

  The October air is a blade in my throat, squeezing tight with the effects of lingering panic. I forgot to grab a jacket, and the front pockets of my jeans are too small to shove my hands inside. A car rolls down my street. I hunker my chin against my neck, curling to block my face as much as I can, and pretend to scan the ground. I cannot speak about the trial, and if they recognize me, they’ll ask. Or they’ll ask how I am. And I am not to make a sound.

  No sounds. No sounds. No sounds.

  I step farther off the road and slide between the trees, exhaling a vaporous breath once I’m no longer visible from the road. Leaves crunch underfoot. Squirrels chide at me from perches on branches like old women screeching from their front porches at young boys tearing across lawns: Stay out of my yard, Michael Walton!

  “So it’s true. You got off.” A familiar voice spins me around. Timmy Roberts stands between two trees, his red hair cut in a bowl around his head, a single faded strap of his book bag slung over one shoulder. I remember the way his cat hissed at me, then screeched, clawing and spitting, tongue curled like a straw, and I catch myself smiling. She’d been thin and easier to cut through than the others.

  Timmy sneers, and the pigment in his freckles becomes more pronounced. I stare back at him, unmoving. He must be skipping school, I realize. It’s Wednesday and barely midmorning.

  “What? Cat got your tongue? I heard you have a thing for tongues.” He sticks his out and wags it. “You think you’re too good now, is that it?” He advances, shoulders leaned toward me, his hands balled to fists. “You’re still Tarson trash. Nobody’s scared of you, whether you did it or not.”

  He scoops up a rock and hurls it at me. I twist at the hip, and it glances off my stomach.

  “Say something, you piece o
f trash. Or did your momma sew your mouth shut? I bet she whipped you good when you got home. I bet you ain’t got no skin left on your ass. She should’ve done us all a favor and buried you alongside your daddy.” His face is red now, his dark eyes squinting. “You a ghost now? Is that it? Somebody killed you and your ghost is haunting these woods? You’re just standing there like a damn ghost! Could I run right through you, you son of a bitch? Could I?” He screams the question, his voice echoing in the expanse of the still, foggy woods. He slings his book bag to the ground, and he charges me.

  Maybe he doesn’t see my father’s walking stick.

  Maybe he doesn’t think I’ll use it.

  Maybe he doesn’t think I did any of it, after all.

  I sweep the stick behind my head, the way my mother has a hundred times, remembering the one September my father helped me learn how to swing a bat for the boys’ church baseball team.

  It’s in the wrists, Michael. Step your weight forward, back to front, through the hip. Don’t lift the elbow high; keep it low. A level swing makes the bat sing. Drive the elbow, then come the wrists, fast and smooth.

  Timmy’s face splits like a dropped melon. He falls backward, his body a cut tree, and he crashes to the mat of rotting leaves. He slaps his hands at his liquid features. His front teeth are gone. He’s sputtering, sounds choking through the fluid at random. I pull off his shoes and socks. He kicks at me, unseeing, his eyes filled with blood and tears. I cover my hands with his socks and wipe his mouth out, clearing the chamber for want of cleaner sound. He screams, and the note is shocking, sharp, and true. A black key pressed down, a foot on the pedal, holding the note. I rock back on my feet, goose bumps rising on my arms, pure vibrations shimmering through every bone in my body.

  Timmy stops thrashing, the initial daze and shock appearing to wane, and struggles to sit up. So I coil the stick behind my head and bring it down again.

  * * *

  Timmy has a hundred-dollar bill folded into a square in the toe of one shoe. If I’m Tarson trash, so is he, and I’d bet my life he stole the money. It’s been at least a year since I set foot in his house, but I can’t imagine it’s changed much since then. His daddy is alive but gone, and his mom is here but passes each day on the couch in the smoke-filled front room of their house, a bottle of whisky always within reach. His mom got sick about the same time mine did. Sick looks different on everybody.

  I pick up his ankles and drag him backward. He is shorter than me but heavier, and within a minute I am sweating despite the cool air. His hands trail behind his head. His fingers are pudgy and soft, and I imagine he would have a better feel for piano keys than I do.

  I stop and kneel to examine the fat pads on each fingertips and compare them to mine, which are narrow, the bone just beneath the surface. Is this all I lack—a quarter-inch layer of flesh?

  I drop his hand and stand to search the surroundings. No one comes out here anymore, but once Timmy doesn’t come home, it’ll be only a day or two before someone suggests searching Tarson Woods. But no one knows these woods like I do.

  A stone’s throw from here, Cold River cuts through Tarson Woods and bends in a teardrop shape. An old tree uprooted last fall and fell across the water. It’s tempted plenty of kids across, and some come to school wet and sandy after an attempt. One boy was swept nearly a mile downstream when he plunged into the frothy current, swollen with a week’s worth of rain. But we haven’t had a drop in weeks. Rocks will be exposed, water slow and thin. It would be the perfect place for a boy skipping school to take off his shoes and book bag and try to walk across, arms out to the side, toes gripping the slick, bright moss, chin held up so he couldn’t become fixated on how high he was, what might happen should he lose his balance.

  MICHAEL Chapter 19 | October 11, 1989 | Tarson, Georgia

  TWO HOURS LATER, I STAND at the counter of the secondhand shop, Timmy’s hundred-dollar bill in one hand, my other hand resting on an electric keyboard.

  “Sixteen dollars, even,” the cashier says.

  I hand him the hundred.

  “Do you have anything smaller? I don’t have enough change to break this.”

  I want to tell him it’s all I have, aside from the three singles in my jeans pocket, but I can’t speak. Not yet. The instrument doesn’t belong to me.

  I stare beyond the man, blinking away a surge of heat. The man blurs, the background becoming clear. On the shelves behind the counter stands a line of wooden carvings of miniature pianos, most of them uprights, with one baby grand, scale perfect, sitting dead center.

  “Is there anything else you might want?”

  I point to the baby grand carving.

  “Oh, that’s more than…” He pauses, regarding my face. “That would make up the difference.” He takes Tommy’s hundred-dollar bill, then plucks the piano from the counter and hands it to me. It’s surprisingly light, not laden with legacy and expectation and failure.

  “Do you have a hobby? Baseball or hunting?”

  I shake my head.

  “I could teach you how to carve. If you want. You could carve a little design into your stick. Your initials or something. Make it harder for somebody else to claim as their own. Not when it’s wet, mind you. You’ll want to let it dry all the way out first.”

  As he wraps the piano in paper, I examine the stick, making sure the side with the darker streaks faces me. Cold River couldn’t draw all of Timmy out of the wood, but the red has faded to brown and could be mistaken for a natural effect.

  “There you go.” He hands me a bag with the piano carving with one hand and the keyboard with the other, the cord wound around the body. “My name is Rick. Come back any time, okay? I’ll teach you how to make those. It’s more patience than anything.”

  “I might take you up on that,” I say.

  EDDIE Chapter 20 | 7:55 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  A HUNDRED YARDS REMAINED BETWEEN Eddie and the peak. He grabbed the slick trunk of a tree and stared at the place where the rise finally leveled. His knees ached. The soles of his feet were hot and tender, having soaked too long in his wet socks. His breath was labored, and the cold air stung his throat.

  He leaned into the tree and let out a bitter, choking laugh.

  I’m never going to make it And what for? That woman isn’t out here. I scared her out of whatever she’d come here to do. She’s at a friend’s house with a cup of hot tea in her hands and a blanket over her shoulders, telling about the man she was sure was going to snatch her.

  Eddie squeezed his eyes shut. He slowly straightened, stretching the cramping out of his legs, when the ghost of a scream sailed over the top of the mountain and hung in the sky.

  He jerked to attention, looking at the black above as if the sound he heard might emit a glow. He started to shout back, not sure if the scream had been real. He stopped. If someone was out here, screaming like that, they were in the worst kind of trouble. Shouting back would only serve to alert the possible danger of his presence. Eddie wasn’t fast, and he wasn’t as strong as he used to be. He’d need surprise on his side if something really was happening down the hill. If he reached the clearing and didn’t see anything, he’d call out.

  Adrenaline coursed through him, dimming the pain and exhaustion, and the peak seemed to rush at him. Once the ground leveled, he broke into an uneven jog. His pulse beat a rhythm against his palms and pounded in his ears. At last, the trees opened and the trail ended at a lookout point over a sharp descent, revealing foothills rolling to the south.

  Eddie felt his way to the edge of the drop-off and peered over. Except for the wind, the forest was silent. He raised his hands to his mouth, preparing to shout, when a flicker of light peeked from the valley floor. He squinted and leaned forward. The glow disappeared, and then came back. Someone was down there.

  A thinning patch of clouds allowed moonlight through. Eddie searched for a way down. The trail ended here for a reason. People turned around and went back the way they came in for
a reason. No out-of-shape old man in his right mind would try to make this descent. But no father would turn back now.

  MICHAEL Chapter 21 | May 1, 1992 | Tarson, Georgia

  FRIDAY EVENINGS BREATHE LIFE INTO Main Street’s one-block promenade. It’s the same stores, the same street, but string lights in blooming trees, turn the soundtrack up a little louder, and leave every door open, and the mood shifts from errand to event. Yet all I can think about is the keyboard Mother flung against the wall, the cracks in the plastic where it gave way under pressure.

  Get out of my house! Take that piece of trash with you!

  So I am on Main Street, wondering if there’s an instrument I can put on layaway in the junk shop, and my keyboard is in the dumpster. At least I still have my walking stick. It feels like more of a home than the walls of our house.

  The vibrant cadence of a bow on a fiddle draws my ear. I track the music into an art gallery. A petite girl sits on the ground with a fiddle in her arms and a piece of cardboard at her feet with the words DONATIONS WELCOME scrawled in purple marker. Her eyes close. The fingers on her right hand flutter from string to string as her left hand draws the bow back and forth.

  She cries out a wailing note, and I am rooted to the spot, the sensation buzzing in my toes and fingers and scalp. I watch the blood pulse on the side of her neck, her chest rise and fall with each breath. I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, suddenly dry, and I want to know if she’d hiss like a cat with my hands around her neck.

  She opens her eyes and catches me staring. Her lips curl in a snarl.

  “Freak,” she says.

  I walk away from her and tuck myself inside the doorframe of the secondhand store, and when she leaves, I follow her. Down the road, between a row of abandoned redbrick buildings, across a yard, and into Tarson Woods.