A Solitary Blue (19 page)

But Jeff couldn't shake the vague, unsettled feeling. He didn't think about Melody, he didn't want to; but he was aware of her, without thinking about her, like clouds rising up at the horizon or footsteps behind you on a dark and solitary street. He didn't mention her to the Professor. Carefully, he didn't think about her. Carefully, he kept on with his usual life.

A couple of days before school opened, when Jeff was sitting
on the dock, playing the guitar and singing while he watched the little waves at high tide bouncing against the sides of the creek, Phil Milson came to join him. Phil's hair was bleached white blond, and his skin tanned to coppery brown. “Would you believe this is the first day off my father's given me? How've you been? I'm about ready for a vacation, aren't you?”

Jeff stood up awkwardly. He didn't know what to say.

“Keep playing, you sound good. Are you good?”

Jeff shrugged, he didn't know. “How'd you find us?”

“This is a small town, I keep telling you. I told you I knew the place you'd bought. You've done a lot with it, and it's not half bad now. What do you play, not rock, I can hear that. Country? Bluegrass?”

“I don't know,” Jeff said. They settled themselves on the dock. A midmorning sun shone down hot.

“Play me something. I already heard you so there's nothing left to be modest about.”

Jeff was glad to be able to look at the guitar, rather than at the boy he didn't know how to entertain. He strummed a few chords, thinking, then decided to play the song about the Springhill Mine Disaster. “Through all their lives they dug a grave, two miles of earth for a marking stone, two miles of earth for a marking stone.”

“That's folk,” Phil said, happy to have labelled it.

“Now I know what I play,” Jeff joked.

Phil grinned at him. “You been playing long? You look good too, you look like you know what you're doing, but — I hate that kind of song. It's depressing. I mean we all know we spend our lives digging our graves, but I'm not interested in writing songs about it.” They talked about that for a while, then about their courses, then Jeff asked about Phil's summer, which had been consumed by backbreaking labor, Phil said. They decided to take the boat out. “Did you see my father?” Jeff asked.

“No, I just followed the sound of music.”

They went back to the house, had some juice and a couple of sandwiches, and introduced Phil to the Professor. In the boat, Phil asked, “Your mother's still in Charleston?”

“They're getting divorced.”

“How come you're with him not her? I thought women always got the kids.” There was nothing subtle about Phil.

“She left home when I was in second grade,” Jeff told him.
He didn't look at Phil when he said that. He didn't really want to talk about it, but he didn't want to sound unfriendly.

“She walked out on you? Women are something else, aren't they? They don't play by the same rules. You ever think about that?”

“No.”

“Yeah, I agree; it's too depressing to think about.”

In ninth grade, he discovered, people began to pair off, to talk about dates and steadies. Jeff wasn't interested in girls, but decided that since he'd had good luck with Phil he'd try to be friendly with Andy Barrows as well. Pretty soon the three of them were hanging around together a lot. They suited one another. Phil refused to be serious, and Andy was always serious, so no matter what they did things were pretty lively.

Sometimes they went out fishing or crabbing, and once they tried tonging for oysters. Sometimes they just hung around at Andy's house in town, up in his room where his mother and sisters couldn't get at them, Jeff playing his guitar and listening to the other two quarreling about the tax advantages given to farmers or the relative importance of theoretical and practical physics. “What do you think, Jeff?” one or the other would ask him, and he'd tell them.

Phil went to parties and on dates and decided he was in love with someone for a couple of weeks before he decided he was in love with someone else.

Andy had a crush on one of his older sister's classmates, which they teased him about. “Well, she might get to like me, when I'm older; age difference doesn't matter so much when you've grown up,” he told them.

Jeff suspected that Andy didn't really care, except he didn't want to be freaky. What Andy was really interested in was science. He read science books and science magazines, he often skipped other assignments to work on science and was surprised when the teachers of his other courses yelled at him about that. He was smart enough to see how odd that made him, and he was frightened of being too odd, Jeff saw, because he was afraid of being laughed at. Jeff could sympathize with that.

A girl named Carol Sutter put notes on Jeff's desk in math class and tried to get him to talk to her in the library and cafeteria and stared at him in the halls. But he didn't talk about that. He felt sorry for her and embarrassed for her. She was pretty, he guessed; she
had long blonde hair that she wore loose down her back and big, violet-blue eyes. A lot of the boys liked her, and Jeff wished she would like one of them back. Phil found one of the notes before Jeff did. “You're the cutest boy in the whole school.” It wasn't signed, they never were, but Phil recognized the handwriting.

“Greene, you're wasting opportunities,” he said. “Do you know how many guys would kill for this?”

“Oh, well,” Jeff said.

“You ought to take her out, or something. Why not?”

“I don't like her.”

“So what? She likes you.”

Jeff shrugged.

“That's weird, really weird, Greene. But I forgive you. I'm glad you decided you wanted to be friends with me, whatever weird things you say,” Phil told him. “You'll outgrow this phase.”

Jeff was stopped in his tracks by that. Was that what had happened? Had he, in fact, chosen his friends? And not the other way around?

For Christmas that year his father gave him a book, his book. They also had a tree they'd decorated, and Jeff sat beside it in his pajamas, with the book on his lap. “It's OK for me to read it now, isn't it?”

“I didn't know you wanted to,” the Professor said.

“Professor — you made me promise not to until I was fifteen. And then you didn't give me one for my birthday. What do you mean I didn't want to read it?”

“I'm sorry,” his father said.

“No, that's OK,” Jeff tried to reassure him, tried to keep his eyes off the book, which by then he wanted to read so badly he wanted to end the conversation and get started.

“I never know how to communicate,” the Professor said.

The Professor looked half asleep. Jeff had no idea from his face what he was thinking. “Hey,” he said, “that's not true. That sounds like the kind of thing Melody would say, the way she does. Has she been — ?”

The Professor looked up. “Now I think of it, yes. You'd think I'd learn.”

Jeff opened the cover of the book and turned the blank first
page. He read the title, turned the page, read the copyright information — he had no idea of what he'd find in this book, how it would read, what its subject was. He saw the dedication: for my son.

He put his fingers on the page. He stared and stared at the words, especially at the one word, son. “Professor,” he said, “I'm honored.”

The Professor didn't answer. “She knows we don't live in Baltimore, she knows we moved.”

“It's OK, it's going to be OK. Trust me; I'm your son, it says so right here.” He pointed his finger at the word. “She can't make me live with her. She doesn't even want me to, I bet. There's something, and if she thinks I won't tell the truth she's making a big mistake about me.”

“But — she's your mother.”

“So what?”

He wouldn't choose Melody, not now. He knew that, but he tried to think about why: he'd liked her being beautiful and the sound of her voice, but he didn't trust her and he didn't like the way she talked about need. He suspected that it made her feel good to feel sorry for people. She was dangerous, the way she pulled at your emotions. No, he wouldn't choose her now.

Jeff continued to be satisfied with his two chosen friends at school. They even, at the end of the year and a couple of times over the summer, went to a few parties, where Jeff would play his guitar and sing or jam with some other people who played. Jeff and Andy got along all right at parties, but it was Phil who really fit in, dragging the other two along with him. Jeff even learned how to dance and put his arm around a girl and how to kiss one, although he never took a date and always arranged it so he didn't have to take anyone home. He figured he was still learning how to have friends, and he wasn't interested in having a girl friend. So he kept his distance clear. There was no sense in hurting anyone's feelings. There were enough hurt feelings in the world without him adding to that.

By the time tenth grade began, the Professor was well into another book. “Like the first,” he told Jeff. He wouldn't let Jeff read it in manuscript. “What if you don't like it?”

Jeff didn't pester his father. He was taking driver's ed and
would get his license by the middle of October. He didn't mind school, he liked the way he'd gotten along so far, and he kept his eye out for anybody else he might choose for a friend. One girl, an eighth grader, kept catching his eye in the hall — a mature-looking black girl with a ringing laugh and lively, intelligent eyes. Wilhemina Smiths; he found out her name. Everybody knew her already, even though she was just an eighth grader. “A real fireball,” they said. Jeff thought she looked strong, inside and out, and he thought to himself that he wouldn't call her a real fireball, but a real person.

Except for the permanent uneasiness of what Melody might do, he felt pretty good. She had sent him a note. Why would she do that? How stupid did she think he was? And she'd enclosed it in a letter to the Professor. He knew why she'd sent it that way, instead of sending it separately. The letter accused his father of being unnaturally cruel to her and trying to get back at her by using Jeff and being selfish and having no sympathy for what she'd been through. The note to Jeff was short. It said she missed him, he knew that, and if he was allowed to see the note, which she doubted, she'd know that if he answered it.

Jeff didn't believe a word of it and didn't answer. It didn't make any difference what Melody got up to now, because she didn't matter to him any more. He had locked her out of his mind and out of his life. She could no longer get through to him, to make him feel the way she used to. He just wanted to forget about her and the way she played on his feelings — the same way she used to play on the guitar, he thought, remembering for a minute. He knew now just how badly she had played the guitar.

 

S
OPHOMORES on high honor roll didn't have to go to the study hall for their free periods, so Jeff had the last period of the day entirely free. He liked to spend it outside, sitting on a low wall by the bicycle racks, playing his guitar and working out songs. When the bell rang to end school, he would watch the kids emerge from the double doors, hurrying out and talking. Then he would either join up with Phil or Andy for the afternoon or just say, “See you,” before getting on his bike and going home. Some days the Professor came and picked him up. On those days, Jeff drove the car and the Professor rode beside him, because Jeff had his learner's permit. The afternoons were slow, easy hours, and Jeff savored them, whatever happened in them.

Early in October, he was working out a song he'd heard on a record, trying to figure out how to keep the rhythm in his backup without losing the sense of flowing melody. It was a matter of balancing, of keeping things in proportion. He kept trying to get it right. “When first unto this country, a stranger I came, and I courted a fair maid and Nancy was her name.”

About one second after the final bell rang, a kid came out through the doors. A kid with somewhere to go, Jeff thought, continuing to play. The kid wasn't anyone he knew, a narrow head with ragged, dark hair, cut-offs, T-shirt, and long, skinny legs. What held his eye, as he sat playing his guitar in mild October sunlight, was the lift of the kid's chin. That chin raised — not high, not angry. Brave maybe. Purposeful. He looked at the kid's face. Even features and a straight nose, eyes dark and the mouth large. His hands played as his mind wandered.

The kid turned in Jeff's direction, as if the music were some kind of string winding around the long legs. Jeff kept his eyes down, watching at the periphery of his vision the awkward and reluctant approach, as if the long legs were trying to move away from him but moved instead toward him. He'd never seen more tired-looking
sneakers in his life, he thought, and looked up into a pair of dark hazel eyes, brown shot with greens and golds — a girl? What did she want? An eighth grader, probably; she had no figure — especially in those clothes.

“I never heard that song,” she said. She didn't want to say that, she didn't want to be drawn over to him, but she couldn't do anything to stop herself. She couldn't stop herself from coming over or from asking, even though she wanted to.

Jeff sang the song, all the way through. Her presence affected his voice, which had settled down over the summer: she listened so intently he was confused; she stood so still he barely dared look at her. Or maybe it was her eyes he didn't want to look at, because he had seen the way the music coiled around her and drew her to him, in her eyes, seen something helpless in her against music and melody. She stared at his hands playing and soaked in his song in a way that made him think — for the first time in a long time — of the island, of solitude and space and the waves tumbling up onto the broad white beaches. He finished the song and looked up at her. She had her hands jammed awkwardly into her pockets; the melody of the song still played behind her eyes, he was sure of it. He played a couple of chords so the thread of music wouldn't be broken between them. “Have a sit, kid,” he said, himself awkward, and that broke the spell, and she was free because he'd said it wrong.

She shook her head and turned abruptly away. He watched her back, her straight shoulders, the long-legged way she walked.

About a week later, she marched back up to him, wearing a boy's shirt this time, chin high, and demanded: “What are the words for that song.”

Jeff didn't know how to take it, and why she came up cross to ask a favor. He felt like smiling at her, but kept his face expressionless, because he didn't know how she'd react. He recited the verses, without playing any music. He had all of her attention and he was willing to bet she'd remember the words. Her face and expression looked intelligent, alert. She didn't thank him, just went to get on her bike and ride off.

He saw her a couple of times in the hallways, always alone. He watched for her after school. He would cast out his song like a fisherman his line, and she'd get drawn in because she couldn't help it. Finally he introduced himself. “My name's Jeff Greene.” She
nodded her head, her eyes wary. “What's yours?” he asked. He kept on playing, not even a melody, just any music so she wouldn't take off.

“Dicey Tillerman,” she told him.

He knew the name and remembered the old lady with the red boat. “You related to that old lady with the farm?” he asked. That was the wrong thing to say, he could see it in her eyes, in her chin. He held her with music. “What are you, a grandchild?” She nodded again. She wasn't going to say anything: stubborn. Jeff kept himself from grinning: stubborn and prickly.

“Listen, can you sing the melody for 'the Coat of Many Colors'?” he asked on impulse. “I want to try a harmony.”

She didn't want to, she didn't sit down, but she started to sing. He kept the guitar soft, listening to her voice and trying to harmonize with half of his attention. She didn't have a great voice, but it sang true notes. She sang the song plainly, her voice round and strong; he could hear in her singing how much she liked the song. He had her now, and he thought he'd say something she wanted to hear. “You sing pretty well.”

“Not particularly. Just better than you.” Jeff didn't know how to take that. He didn't know what to say next. “My sister is the one who can really sing,” she continued. “You should hear her sing this song.” She liked her sister. And she wasn't fishing for compliments — that was for sure — and she sure wasn't trying to flatter him. He couldn't imagine her telling a lie.

He put a friendly expression on his face, “I'd like to.” He waited for her to ask him out to her house.

“I gotta go now,” she said.

Jeff was surprised. He felt things shift on him, like a shift in the tide. She was about to run away on him. “Why?” he asked. “I've got another song you might like”

All she answered was, “I gotta go.”

Well, he probably couldn't stop her, he guessed. He bet nobody could stop her when she wanted something or had something she had to do. Probably that was what appealed to him, her determination; opposites attracted, they said. That, and the way he could hold her helpless with music. That and the way she didn't act like most girls, saying one thing and hinting at another with her eyes. She just went her own way, in her own way — she didn't ask or even want anything from him. She was as distant as the ocean, even when
you're up close to it. Independent, but he could pull her in with music.

He saw her in the downtown grocery store, working there. So they must need money, her parents, because eighth grade was young for a job. She didn't expect to see him, and her chin went up when she did, so he spent his time talking with the owner while Dicey stubbornly swabbed down the floors.

One day, just before Thanksgiving, there was a story Phil told him, about how this squirty eighth grader had flattened Chappelle, something about whether or not she'd cheated on the character sketch essay. The kid, Phil said, delighted to be telling such a good story, had stood up to the teacher, and then Wilhemina Smiths had joined up with her and between them they'd reduced Chappelle to nothing. To a puddle of nothing on the floor. “You've got to feel sorry for the guy,” Phil said. Jeff heard the same story, with several variations, over the day and wasn't surprised to see Dicey walking out of school that afternoon with the black girl. It was too cold to play the guitar outside, so he had to keep it in a case, but he tried greeting her anyway. “Hey, Dicey. I hear you put Chappelle into his place.” He waited to see how she'd react to the greeting, to the compliment.

“That wasn't me, that was Mina,” Dicey told him. “Do you know Mina?”

Jeff looked into a pair of laughing eyes. She was as tall as he was. “Everybody knows Mina.”

“Yeah,” the girl answered. “Everybody knows you too, friend.”

“That's what they think,” Jeff told her, thinking how nobody knew at all what he was really like, inside. She chuckled, amused, friendly. He relaxed.

“So, was this essay as good as everybody says?” he asked Dicey. He watched her eyes, wondering how she'd react to a question not about music.

She didn't know what to say, and her eyes looked back into his, brown, green, gold, distant and close, both. “No, of course not,” she said, and he grinned at her. He knew she'd tell the truth. “But it was pretty good,” she said, to be exact. The two girls walked away from him, and he felt his face, smiling goofily, watching them.

That afternoon he risked going back to the little store on purpose, because he had the car for their Thanksgiving shopping, which
the Professor didn't want to do. A little kid was with Dicey, a little blond kid with the same hazel eyes, only rounder and not as dark, and the same prickly attitude, her brother. Jeff made his purchases and offered her a ride home. It turned out she was taking her brother with her on her bike, so she was glad of the offer. Sammy, she called him. Jeff didn't mind waiting. He tried some music on Sammy, who wasn't glad to meet him, but who obeyed Dicey.

“Does she always ride you home?” he asked the boy, after he'd played the longest song he knew and the kid had settled down.

“Nope.”

“How come today?”

The kid shrugged. He didn't want to answer the question. Jeff saw marks on his face and decided he'd been in a fight. He looked tough enough to be able to do well in a fight. Jeff tried another question. “You live with your grandmother?” He thought he'd say next how he lived farther out along the same road.

“So what?” Sammy asked, a wave of anger coming at Jeff. But it was kid's anger and he knew how to answer it.

“So nothing,” Jeff said. “I'm innocent officer; I didn't do nothing,” he teased.

Sammy giggled. He wiped his hand across his cheek, still smiling. He sat cross-legged on the floor, a sturdy little kid in sneakers.

“You and your sister have the worst-looking sneakers I've ever seen,” Jeff said.

“Oh, yeah?” The kid was ready to fight again. Jeff changed the subject, puzzled:

“What're you in, third grade?”

“Naw, second. I've got a sister in third.”

“The one who sings?” At that his face changed again; he liked his sister a lot.

“Yeah.”

“Boy, do you remind me of Dicey,” Jeff said.

Sammy looked at him for a long time, then nodded his head. “Goodo.”

Dicey told Jeff it was all right, so he went to their house the next Saturday. He rode his bike over through unseasonally warm weather. He walked it up the driveway, trying to avoid puddles where Thanksgiving snow flurries had melted. He walked it up because he was nervous about getting there.

The driveway went between two neglected fields and then under a stand of pines. At the front of the house, which looked like nobody ever went in that way, a big tree stretched out bare branches, held firm by thick twisted wires. The path went around the side, past a screen porch. Jeff didn't see anybody around. He had his guitar slung across his back and he stood for a minute, looking around him, feeling awkward, thinking maybe he'd go home, noticing that they had a big garden out behind the house and a path through it that led down to the marshes. He considered just turning around and riding home, but he was curious about this singing sister. The door of the barn, its bottom rotted away in large pieces, had been braced open. He looked inside.

Dicey had her back to him. She wore cutoffs and a T-shirt. She didn't know he was there. She was scraping paint off the hull of a little boat, a sailboat he guessed from the deep curved keel, and he could see a mast laid on the ground over by some stalls. She moved like she was dancing, leaning into each stroke, her legs long, her shoulder blades outlined under the T-shirt. Her short raggedy hair shone dark in the warm sunlight. Except for the noise of the scraper it was absolutely quiet. “Dicey?” he said.

She wheeled around and she was angry at him. He could feel it.

“Whatcha doing?” he asked. He felt like saying I'm sorry.

“I'm the one to ask that,” she said, anger in her eyes and in her face. She held the scraper like a weapon, up against him.

Jeff looked over her shoulder to the stalls, then over her other shoulder to the worktable. Back and forth. Her feelings washed over him, like waves, and he didn't know how he'd let this happen. He had been in this scene before, with Melody, with the anger and dislike attacking him and breaking him down. He could feel himself cracking, inside. He didn't know why he kept forgetting what he was really like. He didn't know it mattered so much to him. If he'd known that, he never would have come out here, he never would have wound her around with music. He'd been fooling himself. Again.

Dicey stared at him and he could see in her face that she didn't think much of him. He agreed with her, he wasn't much. But she didn't have to get angry. He didn't understand women, girls, he never would; he didn't even much want to. Except he hadn't thought Dicey was like that. Kidding himself that he understood her.
Thinking he had cast out his line of music, baited with glittering song, cast it out into the water and slowly reeled her in, so gently that she didn't even know what was happening.