Widdershins (2 page)

For me, hope runs eternal, even though my relationships never really work out in the long run. Maybe I set my sights too high. Maybe I’m just hopeless. I don’t know. Or maybe I just never met the right woman, for all the times I thought I did.

Or maybe I did meet the right woman, but I never knew it and went out with her sister or her friend instead.

Or maybe I did know it, but I told myself it was never going to work out. . . .

The Dispute at the Crossroads

Lizzie Mahone

March 2004

The crossroads at midnight. Or at least
a
crossroads, and while it was long past midnight, it still had the feel of the witching hour about it.

If Lizzie Mahone had been superstitious, she might have been more nervous about her car breaking down as it had, here where two county roads crossed in the middle of nowhere with nothing to mark the spot but an enormous old elm tree, half dead from a lightning strike. And the thought still crossed her mind as she got out of the car and popped the hood, her flashlight beam playing over the Chevy’s V-6 engine. You couldn’t be a musician and not know the story, how the old bluesman Robert Johnson once met the devil himself at the crossroads. But that had been in the Delta, deep south. This was just the dusty meeting place of a couple of dirt roads, surrounded by farmers’ fields and bush. Nothing mysterious here, though that big old moon lent an eerie light to the elm tree and there was something in the wind. . . .

Yes, Lizzie thought. Her imagination. Better it should concentrate instead on what was wrong with the car.

She jiggled the wires going to the distributor cap and battery, but that was about the extent of her mechanical knowledge when it came to cars, and she only tried it because it was something that others had done when the car broke down in the past. Sometimes it had even worked. She didn’t really have a clue what she was doing, or what she should be looking for. Cars started when you turned the key, or they didn’t. The world between the two was as mysterious as where the tunes she made up came from, though with the latter, at least, she had the faith that if she needed a piece of music, it would come. Maybe not right away. It could be late, sneaking up on her while she was in the shower, or down at the grocery store, walking down the aisles, hours or even days after she first started looking for the melody to go with a title or a feeling or the first couple of bars she already had. But it would come.

That wouldn’t happen trying to figure out what was wrong with this confusing mess of wires, pipes, and engine parts. She didn’t have faith, for one thing. And she certainly didn’t have the mechanical background the way she had such an easy familiarity with her fiddle.

So a spontaneous solution to her problem was pretty much out of the question.

And, of course, she’d let her cell phone go dead when she could have easily had it charging while they were up on stage this evening. But she hadn’t thought of that until she was in the parking lot after the show, getting into her car.

She looked up and down the dirt road she was standing on. There were no headlights visible in either direction. She hadn’t seen another car or a farmhouse or pretty much anything since leaving Sweetwater and the bar where the band had played tonight. In retrospect, she should have stayed over as the others were doing. Right now they’d be hanging around in the bar, or in one of the rooms that the bar had provided for them upstairs, playing some tunes or just sharing a drink and some chat. But wishful thinking was always easier in retrospect, wasn’t it? And if she had stayed, there probably would have been problems with Con, who couldn’t seem to get it through that thick head of his that they weren’t an item, never had been, never would be.

There was nothing really wrong with him. He was charming and good looking, easy to get along with, and while he might be just a touch too fond of the drink, he was a wonderful guitar player. She simply had her rules.

“What do you have against dating musicians?” he’d asked the last time the subject came up.

“Absolutely nothing—so long as I’m not playing in the same band as they are.”

“But—”

“Oh, I know. What could be more perfect? Working and playing and loving together. Except, my somewhat drunk and certainly randy friend, when it all comes apart, then you’re still stuck playing together. Or more likely, one of you has to leave, and I want neither to start a new band nor to break in yet another guitarist.”

“It didn’t take that long for me to come up to speed with your repertoire.”

“Exactly. You’re a great guitarist, so I don’t want to lose you.”

“Maybe this rejection will hurt so much that I’ll have to leave.”

She’d smiled. “And maybe when you sober up in the morning, you’ll realize that this is a great gig you have with us and isn’t it lucky you didn’t let your libido screw it up.”

That conversation had taken place last weekend when they were in Champion, north of Tyson and on the other side of the mountains. Sweetwater, being as close to home as it was—only an hour and a half if you went by the back roads as she’d been doing—made it much easier to come up with some excuse about having stuff to do in the city tomorrow morning and get in the car, rather than have to go through it all again with him.

Except now she was stuck in the middle of nowhere at—she checked her watch—three
A.M.
She’d probably have to sleep in the car, because there certainly didn’t seem to be anybody else on the road, which might actually be a good thing, considering. But she’d be more nervous breaking down on her own in some parts of the city than she was here. Country folk could get as rambunctious and rowdy as their more cosmopolitan cousins—more so, if some of the gigs they played were any barometer—but they usually didn’t have the meanness you could sometimes find in urban centers. She felt safer watching a bar fight from the relative safety of the stage in a country bar than walking alone at night down, say, any of the streets running off Palm back in the city.

And even if some cowboy got out of hand . . . well, it never came to much. She knew how to take care of herself, as more than one big strapping lug who wouldn’t hear the word
no
had found out. While she might look like “just a wee lass with too much hair,” as Pappy liked to describe her—though still standing six-foot-six at eighty-two years of age, pretty much everybody was smaller than her grandfather—she was stronger than she looked. She could box and wrestle, not to mention fight as dirty as most men half again her size. It wasn’t how big or small you were—Johnny, her sparring partner at the gym was forever saying—but what you did with what you had.

At least the night was balmy. There were still patches of snow to be seen in some of the fields and in the bottoms of the ditches, but the temperature was well above freezing. Typical spring weather for these parts, really: spring one day, the trees filled with the welcome calls of migratory songbirds, and the next it could snow again. But tonight was mild and the air smelled expectant, ready for spring.

She left the hood up so that if anybody did come by they’d know she was having car trouble and not just drive by while she was fast sleep in the backseat. She had a blanket, and a candle in case it got colder, though she doubted she’d need the latter. In the trunk there was also an umbrella, a collapsible shovel, a jug of water, a box of crackers, and a couple of chocolate bars. The other band members teased her sometimes about always being so prepared, though if she was really the Girl Scout they thought she was, she’d have at least charged her phone before leaving the bar.

Still, what was done, was done. She’d make her bed in the backseat and she’d get some sleep in it, too. Tomorrow morning was soon enough to worry about how she was going to get the car up and running again.

But first she had to have a pee.

She could have just gone beside the car—it wasn’t as though there was any traffic, or even much chance of it—but she still felt better pushing through the old dead weeds in the ditch and going behind the elm tree.

It was when she was pulling her jeans up that she heard the voices.

She zipped up quickly, then hesitated about showing herself. There were too many voices, low and rumbling, joking and laughing. She made out four, maybe five different ones. Peeking around the elm, she looked either way down the road.

At first she didn’t see anyone. Then she realized she was looking too high. Approaching from the direction she’d been heading in, before the car up and died on her, was a gang of boys, almost hidden from her sight by the weeds. She’d been looking for men, because the voices were men’s voices.

As they drew nearer, she readjusted her thinking yet again. The bright moonlight showed a group of little men tramping down the road toward her. She was five-foot-six, but not one of them would come up to her shoulder. Their heads seemed large for their bodies, and they were dressed as though they were returning from some medieval reenactment—a Renaissance Faire, perhaps—with old-fashioned leather trousers and jerkins, and short swords or long knives sheathed at their belts. They all had quivers and carried bows, and three of them were carrying the bloodied remains of some kind of large animal. A deer, perhaps.

About the same time as she was able to make them out better, they became aware of her car, though why they hadn’t noticed it sooner, she couldn’t say. Probably they’d been too busy with joking and congratulating each other on a good hunt. But they had noticed it now.

They stopped, the two not carrying meat immediately nocking arrows to bowstrings as they all looked around.

Lizzie ducked back behind the elm.

“What’s this?” she heard one of them say.

“Someone’s bad luck.”

That brought a round of laughter.

“Maybe good luck for us. Anything inside worth nicking?”

Oh, no, Lizzie thought. Her fiddle case was lying right there on the backseat.

“Anybody inside worth eating?” someone added to more laughter.

Lizzie had been about to step out from behind the tree and take the chance that they were more wind than bite, but at that last comment she stayed hidden, pressed herself tightly against the bark, and tried not to breathe.

“There’s food in the boot,” one of them said.

“Anything good?”

“Chokky bars and biscuits . . . oh, and a jug.”

“Lovely, lovely.”

“ ‘Cept it’s just bloody water.”

“Now who’d waste a good jug on carrying about water?”

Lizzie had left the trunk open while she went to have her pee. Maybe they’d be satisfied with what they found in it. Maybe they wouldn’t look in the car itself.

But then she heard one of the car doors open.

“Looks to be our fool’s a musician. There’s a fiddle case just a-lying here.”

“That can’t be right. Where’s the fiddler who doesn’t drink?”

“Better question still, where’s the fiddler?”

All of Lizzie’s bravery had long since fled. There was something not right about these little men.

She’d thought they were midgets or dwarves.

She’d thought they’d come from some Faire.

She’d thought that she wasn’t really in any danger.

But there were no Faires at this time of year—not around here. If there was, she’d know, because her band would probably be playing at it.

And these little men . . . there was a nasty undercurrent to the jovial delivery of their conversation. She could sense it as clearly as she could on those nights when the band just couldn’t connect with a crowd, when nothing you did up there on the stage was right.

“Hiding on us, do you suppose?”

“Unless some green-brees had him for a late-night snack.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“Unless he’s not a
he.”

“What’ve you got there?”

Lizzie already knew. Whoever was rummaging around in the back of the car must have found her little knapsack with its toiletry bag and change of clothing and underwear in it.