He leaves the clothes and turns his back, except you're not sure you can get the pants on by yourself. You'd call him, but you don't know his name, and after you say "Hey!" a couple of times you remember what he said about not being able to hear, and how loud he spoke.
Well, you made it into the chair. You can probably make it into the trousers.
With a little help from the chair you do. You're pulling the flannel shirt over the t-shirt when he comes back with a big blue plastic travel mug with a gas station logo on the side. It steams when he gives it over. Some of the warmth within seeps through the empty spaces between its inner and outer walls and stings your hands, but you cup it close anyway. It's white, which makes it cool enough to drink, and you don't stop until you've drained it to the bottom. It tastes like oily vanilla creamer and boiled coffee grounds and enough sugar to make your teeth ache and leave grit on your tongue and at the bottom of the cup, which right this second makes it the best thing you've ever tasted.
When you hand the cup back to the man, he fills it up from a thermos that sits on a knocked-together wood table along one side of the schoolbus. He must sleep underneath it, because a cot mattress is just visible behind the curtains tacked up to its underside. The second mug of coffee you cradle between your palms and savor, and when he's looking at your mouth you say, "Thank you."
Your voice startles you a little. Maybe it's the cold stopping up your ears, but it sounds plummier and more resonant than it should.
"T'ain't nothing," he says, and grins. "You're not the first one to meet the girl in the cave and come off worse-and better-for it." He touches his ear. "I can't hear her singing anymore, but I keep an eye out for anybody else who does."
"Are there a lot of us?"
He shrugs. "Every five, ten years or so. It's been a while since the last one. You'll probably more or less recover, given time."
"More or less?" You swallow more coffee, scrub the sweet sand of sugar across your palate with your tongue.
"Don't expect you won't be changed. By the way, I'm Marty."
"I'm Missy," you say, which is what your mom called you when she wasn't mad. You nerve yourself, as if bracing against some cold that's inside you, and say, "She's under my skin."
"She gets there," he says. "What are you going to do about it?"
You shrug. He hands you a pair of wool socks-your own socks, washed out and damp still.
"I've got some work," he says. "You're welcome to stay in here until you feel well enough to go. There's soup in the cupboard. You can heat it on the stove if you want."
He points, tins in a series of stacked Guida crates. You see Progresso lentil, Campbell 's clam chowder. Boxes of crackers stuffed inside plastic freezer bags so the mice don't smell them.
"Thanks," you say. "I'm good. What kind of work?"
"Excuse me?"
"Your work," you say. "What kind of work do you do?"
"Oh." He stares down at his hands. "I make dulcimers and stuff."
"You're a musician?" He's not looking at you when you say it, though, and you have to repeat.
He shakes his head. "Luthier," he says. His eyes slide shyly aside. "I make instruments for other people. Do you want to see my shop?"
You put on your boots, which he must have rescued from the cave also. When you get outside in the cold, you realize that the schoolbus is parked in a clearing in the midst of a winter-bare multiflora rose and blackberry bramble, the canes bent and the sprays of withered crimson hips, no bigger than the head of a big sewing pin, bowed under tiny hats of snow. Beyond them, reached by tunnel-like paths that Marty must clear with a machete during the growing season, lies a ring of trees-the border of the woods, with its cave and its mermaid.
Other than the cold and the thorns, the first thing you notice when you step outside is the hum of a diesel generator, isolated off to the side in a little tin shack, its feet propped off the ground on cinder blocks. Marty's "shop" proves to be a wooden shed, also on blocks from what you can see through the snow, up against the side of the schoolbus so the bus serves as a windbreak. On the far side is the rusted out corpse of a DeSoto, the hood tatted to lacework by years.
The shed's other three walls have hay bales stacked against them, which might make you worry about fire, but the hay looks so wet it wouldn't burn if you soaked it in gasoline.
When he opens the door, heat comes out like a sticky wall. You hear the crackle of a woodstove in here too, and smell sharp sweet frankincense. A handful of resin smokes on the iron stove lid, giving the sixteen-by-sixteen room funereal or cathedral airs. Sawdust covers the floor inside, worktables lining every wall, lathes and sanders greased and dirty. Shaker pegboards circle eighteen inches below the topwall, unfinished instruments dangling by their necks. Dulcimers, yes. Mandolins, basses, guitars. A single white unsanded fiddle hanging from a neck like the wrung neck of a swan, like the curled tendril of a fern.
You draw a breath full of sawdust and incense and think, Too perfect. You might even say it, but Marty wouldn't hear you, and sometimes talking to yourself is really talking to be overheard. So you wait until he turns to check your reaction, moving into the warm shop with the snow dripping off your cuffs, and you say, "You made all these?"
"Every one." He reaches out and taps the hull of a double bass, the face striped purpleheart and rosewood and something gold. It thumps like a melon, sweet and ripe, so you wonder if he can feel the resonance through lingering fingertips.
"Do you sell them?" You want to touch the jazz guitar hanging over the lathe. Its faceplate is honey-colored, riddled with holes from worms that must have worked in the tree after it was fallen. The neck is mahogany, and it too has small scars, the imperfections of salvaged wood.
"I give them away," he says, and lifts down the guitar you were eyeing. It's finished and strung; he sets an electric tuner on the bench and bends over the strings. You probably couldn't tune as fast by ear as he does in his deafness.
When he's done, he scoops up the beast and holds it out to you like a toddler, archtop gleaming under the worklights. It's strung left-handed, and you wonder how he knew.
He says, "Care to try her?"
Your cold-stung fingers itch for it. "Give them away?" you ask. "How can you afford that?"
He gestures around and grins. "It doesn't take a lot of money to live like this, and I made some when I was young. When I still played myself, a little. Go on, take the guitar."
He has a point there. So you lift the guitar off his palms and stroke it for a second, finding where your hands should fall. You glance up, about to ask him what he wants to hear, and find him staring at your fingers. Oh, of course.
So you pick out a Simon and Garfunkel tune, because it's easy and fun and suits the instrument. And then you play a little Pete Seeger something, until your cracked fingertips start to more-than-sting. You don't bother singing: Marty's not listening, and you want to hear the guitar. You'd give it back, but it feels good in your arms, close and friendly, so you let it sit there and puppy-snuggle for a minute while you chat. You play a couple of bars of "Peggy Sue" and a couple of bars of "I Wanna Be Sedated," and it all sounds good. You expect a little buzz at the bottom of the neck, but it's clean all the way down.
"Who do you give them away to?"
"Deserving folks," he says. "Folks with music people listen to. Folks whose music makes a better world. That one's yours."
Your right hand locks on the neck. "I can't take this."
"I made it for you," he says. "The siren called you, Missy. There's no two ways about it. That there's your guitar."
You'd have expected to be too ill and exhausted to continue your vest-pocket tour, but you wake up rested and strong on Thursday, and in fine voice as if in spite of having been half-drowned in ice water and left on the stones. You hum to yourself in the mirror while you fix your hair, and you pick out a white button shirt and patchwork vest with swingy glass bead fringe across the chest to pull on over threadbare jeans. Spiked up hair and too much makeup gives you cheekbones that will read from stage. You're getting too old for the scapegrace gamine schtick.