Across the Spectrum (18 page)

He smiles tremulously, repeating, “Staying power.” Dawn’s
heart fills, heated. The hostess leads him away.

The drummer whacks out a marching summons. The party, sunk
in place as if the air is falling out of it, reinflates, bouncing. Dawn
exchanges her grain alcohol for water and puts away a quart, quick.

“Got a feeling this one’s going to be the marathon,” she
smiles at the bass player, and he nods agreement, though he’s still drinking
booze. He seems down.

Then they’re back onstage. For a ragged minute the four of
them tussle over the next number: is it to be one of the fiddler’s embroidered
jigs, or something noisy and fast by the Spudboys voted in by the bass player,
or will Dawn and the drummer have their way with I’m So Glad? They compromise,
and in a few bars Dawn realizes she’s in that lucky lucky place a musician
rarely finds, where four strangers are making it up as they go along and it
works. Her leg-bones begin to tremble. Can we keep it up?

Confidently they turn from one another as if hinged. They
face the dancers. She feels their agreement at her back, one organism making a
wave of sound. Floating in it, she concentrates on staying in that good place
where she knows what each of them will do for the next sixteen bars. She finds
that she has been watching the dance, which gradually loses its air of a
beehive at rush hour and shapes into a beehive with something on its mind,
look, there are the little circles, now a line dance, ooh don’t they look like
they’re fucking, no, now she’s going to kiss the next one, and around they go!
Together she and the fiddler sweep the circles into the lap of the tireless
drummer, who chops up the patterns so they can make new. The bass player signs
for a key change, one thumb jerking up.

Their host and hostess sort themselves out in the center, close
to the bandstand. A little clearing opens around them. They whirl and step,
stamp and skank, she bouncing rounder and rounder, her nostrils snorting like a
comic steam-engine in the cold air, he a mere sketch of himself, a dancing,
flickering stick puppet. Dawn remembers how his frail cheery voice says,
“Staying power,” and an iron rod forms in her backbone. All night, she vows,
all night. She can. She feels a change in the band, the others drop back, and
she lets the voice of her guitar slide free and soar, clawing its way to the
highest point of the ceiling, then juddering and hacking its way down again, a
jacob’s ladder of bright sound fracturing into splinters of one true thing.

On the dance floor at her feet, her host falters. He stops,
turns, as if the music has disappeared suddenly and he cannot hear it. His
eyeglass darkens. It springs from his face and falls. A look of great
tenderness comes into his face. He topples into his wife’s arms.

Dawn feels her own heart falter, but her hands cannot stop.
The iron rod in her backbone will not dissolve. The dancers likewise cannot
stop. They clear the area round the motionless pair but the mass of spangled
velvet and feathers still shivers. They stamp, and all begin to clap, clap,
clap. The drummer pounds on. The bass player and the fiddler have let their
instruments down for Dawn’s solo. Everyone looks at her. Clap, clap, clap,
clap, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. Her ax wails of its own accord.

She looks at the couple in the clearing. His face is
half-sunk in his wife’s great cloven bosom. The old lady turns her face up,
grief and pleading in her eyes. Dawn panics. Her hands still. The drummer
slows. His foot twitches, thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each beat sounds
like the last. Thump.

The revelers clap and stamp. They know what they want.

Dawn can’t move.

The other musicians exchange glances. The bass player hoists
his Fender sorrowfully and, stony-faced, hauls a slow minor chord out of it,
one note at a time. The drummer picks up behind him, brushing silver rain out
of his cymbals as if he is unconvinced that this tune has a pulse.

It has, barely. The clapping does not slow, but the bass can
only seem to make half-speed. His severe little tune telegraphs its ending
almost as soon as it as it has begun. He plunks his way across it like a
mammoth one-finger harpsichord all weepy with vibrato and an occasional angry
fuzz on the lowest notes, a drunk coming apart in the middle of a sad song. On
the last lugubrious drone the drummer comes awake again, thump, pause, thump,
while the fiddler looks at Dawn and she looks back blindly over the clap, clap,
clap, stamp, stamp, stamp of the crowd swaying before them, all the eager faces
lit with anticipation. Her host lies wilted over his wife’s huge body. Clap, clap,
stamp, stamp. Dawn feels she has fallen among horrifying aliens. The fiddler
nods and tucks his chin.

His music is formless, a whirling darkness full of flashing
wings and sharp things you might cut your hand on. For a while it sounds
Arabic, a repetitive ululating cry like widow-prayer or a harlot calling for a
deeper thrust. The drummer makes up his own mind about that one. Definitely
sex. They have at it bump and grind, screwing the downbeat with the
single-minded smack of a headboard against the wall. The fiddle double-stops,
braids in threes, tangles, rejoints itself. Turkey in the Straw pokes its head
through.

Dawn takes a deep breath, her first in hours it seems.
Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, clap, clap, clap, clap.

She thinks she knows what she must do now. She leans over to
the bass player and bellows, “Zarathustra!”

The fiddler overhears, loses his course in that moment. His
fiddle skids, ki-yi-ing like a stepped-on dog. Startled, the drummer halts.

And the bass player, at a glance from Dawn, lays down the
bottom of the world’s biggest chord. It goes on and on, never louder, never
fading. Dawn breathes a prayer of thanks. She realizes now that the dancers
dare not stop. They clap and stomp over the bass drone, keeping their part of
the faith. She’s pretty sure she remembers hers.

The fiddler sends his bow skittering over the strings, a
flight of bats. Ah, he does know this. But the drum’s the important part. She
gathers the eyes of the band, drummer, fiddler, bass. The bass note steps up
suddenly, a loud warning drone.

Dawn breaks in, one clear trumpety crow-call rising tonic to
dominant to octave. Gathers their eyes. Crash! a crack of stringed lightning
falls off to a boding minor chord that fades, then swells hugely. The drummer
rolls over the skins of his biggest toms and whacks the thunder out of them,
boom-boom, boom-boom, boom, boom, boom, drawls it to an impressive halt, a
pause only. Her heart flies, oh thank god. The bass player steps up the volume
a notch and the floor seems to rise under them, bearing them upward to the
distant ceiling. Dawn’s guitar sings out again, and the answering lightning
splits the other way, into a major chord. Again the drummer carries them across
the bass drone, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom! Dawn can feel the hairs parting on
the back of her neck, lifting off her forearms. The bass player doubles his
string into octaves of solid power. The floor rises again. Dawn repeats her
summons, this time as loud as the guitar will shout and, when the fiddle
screams in at last, they jam that chord straight into the ceiling, through the
floor, straight out the walls on every side. The drummer goes nuts on his
cymbals, his set, the stagefloor, his toms, the cymbals again, and when Dawn
lifts her chin and points her guitar neck at the ceiling the three of them roar
out the last of that huge noise, and stop.

But the bass is hanging on, still giving them the whole
chord. Dawn turns with a dirty look. He’s grinning. She sees movement on the
dance floor below. The revelers set up a cheer and she looks down.

Her host is standing. His wife is holding his hands. He
beams at her. The revelers close in around them, shouting and laughing, all
their hands stretched to touch him, and the thin man with butter-colored hair
turns with chicken steps, nodding to them all. Jauntily, he puts his glass in
his eye and it catches a thousand candles, throwing yellow light everywhere at
once.

Dawn blinks. The drummer smacks into a backbeat, and the
bass player keeps pretending he’s an organist for two bars, and Dawn’s hands
move over the strings of their own accord into a Santana number. The dance
floor seethes. She can’t stop laughing, or crying.

She doesn’t remember the end of the party. They play at
least two more sets, rest, play again. Out of the muzzy night she remembers how
the bass player helps find her hiking boots, remembers eating—god, eating
everything, and the way the fiddler tries to tell her in some language
certainly not English but not possibly anything else how wonderful she is and
how they must do this again next year, and drinking eggnog “for the protein”
the bass player says seriously, how he laces her boots on for her
wrong-foot-about and makes her dance with him, and then a turn each with her
host and hostess, how the drummer puts her guitar into its case for her and
they all squeeze out the door together giggling and shoving to stand on the
bare prairie looking east at a pale, overcast sky.

“Surely you want to see the results of your handiwork,” the
bass player murmurs in her ear, his arms wrapped round her from behind. They
watch the horizon redden, a thin line of color between the black earth and the
leaden sky.

Dawn notices they are alone on the hillside. “Where’d
everybody get to?”

The bass player nibbles her ear. “When, not where. Speaking
of which, have you a watch?” She puts up her wrist, her eyes on the sunrise,
clutching his arm to her waist, feeling absurdly pleased. He says, “Ah,
digital, very good. The year and everything.” This is obviously the answer to a
question that’s been eating him all night. He’s very happy about it.

She giggles. “What are you talking about?” She twists to
look into his face.

He kisses her sideways. “What I’m talking about is, not only
can you come back again next year, but,” another kiss, “and, I can take you
home.”

She glances back at the barn door and finds instead an
enormous boulder half-buried in the hillside. No door, no windows. No barn. She
shakes her head. “God, am I drunk?”

The boulder reddens while she watches. Gooseflesh ripples
over her. The whole prairie reddens. She shudders once, and looks back at the
sunrise. “How do I find it again?” she says, wondering.

“The missus finds us.”

The sun flashes across the curve of the planet like a
thousand candles, shooting yellow light everywhere at once. Then it disappears
into the cloud ceiling.

She turns around in the bass player’s arms and kisses him
properly. “Are you real?” she says, tangling her hands in the back of his coat.

“Of course I’m real,” he says indignantly. “What’s your
name, anyway?”

She tells him.

Jennifer Stevenson

In wealthy winter time
she dwelleth underground
her husband waneth thin
she waxeth round and round

In wealthy winter time
her music is renowned
for rhythm or for rhyme
there is no richer sound

In wealthy winter time
she gilds the iron ground
and all her kin she welcomes in
when blossom pear and blossom lime
are nowhere to be found

∞

On wealthy winter’s night
she dwelleth underground
her kin therein do raise a din
it is a merry sound

On wealthy winter’s night
the hostess waxes round
and in his skin the host wanes thin
from dancing up and down

On wealthy winter’s night
she gilds the iron ground
and wassails in the year again
that now is brown and white
and once was green and brown

“Cuckoo” is a fantasy set in rural America, ca. 1905, about a
woman who adopts a foundling gargoyle. I love it because it really is the first
story I published that did exactly what I wanted it to do, where the ending
echoes the story itself. It was published in
The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in 1984. No awards, but still my
favorite.

∞ ∞ ∞

Tannesburg was too small to have an orphanage. When the
hired man from Sarah Eamon’s place found a baby swaddled tightly in grimy cloth
and propped against a tree at the edge of Miss Eamon’s property, he brought it
with him into town and left it with the doctor. And although the village was
not yet connected to the new telephone line, Tannesburg had an efficient
grapevine, and Miss Eamons had heard all about the foundling and the way it had
squalled, tucked under Pete Hargill’s arm like a laundry bundle, long before
Pete returned to work the next day. Then Sarah called at the doctor’s house,
justifying her curiosity with a sense of responsibility: Had not the baby been
abandoned beneath her elm tree for anyone to find?

Mrs. Pratt, the doctor’s wife, ushered Sarah upstairs to the
second best bedroom to see “the little stranger,” hastily accommodated in a
makeshift crib. Mrs. Pratt went on about the child in nursery-room whispers,
her voice squeezed high and girlish from her tight-corseted body, waving her
hands with their accompaniments of lace and floating cambric while Sarah looked
at the baby. She had expected a pudgy infant with a vapid baby’s face, but he
was not like that. Even in sleep the tiny face was narrow, bony, with eyes set
deeply below dark arched brows, and large elfin ears. Above his high, slanting
forehead there was a dark thatch of coarse hair; about him altogether an air of
strangeness, of slight deformity. As she looked at him, Sarah felt pity, and
that vague wistfulness that sometimes hurt her at the sight of a baby. Then the
child opened his eyes and stared soundlessly up at her, and Sarah felt a shock
of familiarity run through her. They watched each other for a long moment; the
baby’s eyes were violet.

“. . . and so ugly, poor little thing. Who’s
to take care of him is what I want to know, Miss Eamons. We’ve no provision for
this sort of thing; the Doctor and I cannot be expected—after all, I’m not a
young woman any more, and my health—”