“Jump the groove,” Staley repeated slowly.
Robert nodded. “Why don’t we take a turn out to where you’ve been living and see what we can do?”
I call in a favour from my friend Moth who owns a junkyard up in the Tombs and borrow a car to take us back up to Staley’s trailer. “Take the Chevette,” he tells me, pointing out an old two-door that’s got more primer on it than it does original paint. “The plates are legit.” Staley comes with me, fusses over Moth’s junkyard dogs like they’re old pals, wins Moth over with a smile and that good nature of hers, but mostly because she can run through instrumental versions of a couple of Boxcar Willie songs. After that, so far as Moth’s concerned, she can do no wrong.
“This guy Robert,” she says when we’re driving back to the bar to pick him up. “How come he’s so fixed on the devil?”
“Well,” I tell her. “The way I heard it, a long time ago he met the devil at a crossroads, made a deal with him. Wanted to be the best player the world’d ever seen. ‘No problem,’ the devil tells him. ‘Just sign here.’
“So Robert signs up. Trouble is, he already had it in him. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, with a little time and effort on his part, he would’ve got what he wanted and wouldn’t have owed the devil a damn thing.”
Staley’s looking at me, a smile lifting one corner of her mouth.
“You believe that?” she says.
“Why not? I believed you when you told me there was a boy under the skin of that rabbit.”
She gives me a slow nod.
“So what happened?” she asks.
“What? With Robert? Well, when he figured out he’d been duped, he paid the devil back in kind. You can’t take a man’s soul unless he dies, and Robert, he’s figured out a way to live forever.”
I watch Staley’s mouth open, but then she shakes her head and leaves whatever she was going to say unsaid.
“‘Course,” I go on, “it helps to stay out of the devil’s way, so Robert, he keeps himself a low profile.”
Staley shakes her head. “Now that I can’t believe. Anybody hears him play is going to remember it forever.”
“Well, sure. That’s why he doesn’t play out.”
“But-”
“I’m not saying he keeps his music to himself. You’ll find him sitting in on a session from time to time, but mostly he just plays in places like that bar we found him in today. Sits in a corner during the day when the joint’s half empty and makes music those drunks can’t ever forget-though they’re unlikely to remember exactly where it was that they heard it.”
“That’s so sad.”
I shrug. “Maybe. But it keeps the devil at bay.”
Staley’s quiet for awhile, doesn’t say much until we pull into the alley behind the bar.
“Do you believe in the devil?” she asks before we get out of the car.
“Everybody’s got devils.”
“No, I mean a real devil-like in The Bible.”
I sit for a moment and think on that.
“I believe there’s good in the world,” I tell her finally, “so yeah. I guess I’ve got to believe there’s evil, too. Don’t know if it’s the devil, exactly-you know, pointy horns, hooves and tail and all-but I figure that’s as good a name as any other.”
“You afraid of him?”
“Hell, Staley. Some days I’m afraid of everything. Why do you think I spent half my life looking for oblivion in a bottle?”
“What made you change?”
I don’t even have to think about that.
“Malicorne,” I tell her. “Nothing she said or did-just that she was. I guess her going away made me realize that I had a choice: I could either keep living in the bottom of a bottle, and that’s not living at all. Or I could try to experience ordinary life as something filled with beauty and wonder-you know, the way she did. Make everyday something special.”
Staley nods. “That’s not so easy.”
“Hell, no. But it’s surely worth aiming for.”
William drove, with Staley riding shotgun and Robert lounging in the back, playing that old Gibson of his. He worked up a song about their trip, a sleepy blues, cataloguing the sights, tying them together with walking bass lines and bottleneck solos. Staley had made this drive more times than she could count, but all those past trips were getting swallowed by this one. The soundtrack Robert was putting to it would forever be the memory she carried whenever she thought about leaving the city core and driving north up Highway 14, into the hills.
It took them a couple of hours after picking Robert up at the bar to reach that stretch of county road closest to Staley’s trailer. The late afternoon sun was in the west, but still high in the summer sky when Staley had William pull the Chevette over to the side of the road and park.
“Can we just leave the car like this?” William asked.
Staley nodded. “I doubt anybody’s going to mess with it sitting here on the edge of Indian land.”
She got out and stretched, then held the front seat up against the dash so that Robert could climb out of the rear. He kicked at the dirt road with his shoe and smiled as a thin coat of dust settled over the shiny patent leather. Leaning on the hood of the car, he cradled his guitar against his chest and looked out across the fields, gaze tracking the slow circle of a hawk in the distance.
“Lord, but it’s peaceful out here,” he said. “I could listen to this quiet forever.”
“I know what you mean,” Staley said. “I love to travel, but there’s nowhere else I could call home.”
William wasn’t as content. As soon as he got out of the car, a half-dozen deerflies dive-bombed him, buzzing round and round his head. He waved them off, but all his frantic movement did was make them more frenzied.
“What’s the matter with these things?” he asked.
“Stop egging them on-all it does is aggravate them.”
“Yeah, right. How come they aren’t in your face?”
“I’ve got an arrangement with them,” Staley told him.
They weren’t bothering Robert either. He gave the ones troubling William a baleful stare.
“’Preciate it if you’d leave him alone,” he told them.
They gave a last angry buzz around William’s head, then zoomed off down the road, flying like a fighter squadron in perfect formation. William followed their retreat before turning back to his companions.
“Nice to see some useful hoodoo for a change,” he said.
Robert grinned. “It’s all useful-depending on which side of the spell you’re standing. But that wasn’t hoodoo so much as politeness. Me asking, them deciding to do what I asked.”
“Uh-huh.”
Robert ignored him. “So where’s this trailer of yours?” he asked Staley.
“Back in the woods-over yonder.”
She led them through the raspberry bushes and into the field. Robert started up playing again and for the first time since they’d met, Staley got the itch to join him on her fiddle. She understood this music he was playing. It talked about the dirt and crushed stone on the county road, the sun warm on the fields, the rasp of the tall grass and weeds against their clothes as they walked in single file towards the trees. Under the hemlocks, the music became all bass and treble, roots and high boughs, the midrange set aside. But only temporarily.
When they reached the bottle tree, Staley glanced back. William gave the hanging bottles a puzzled look, but Robert nodded in apparent approval. His bottleneck slide replied to the clink of glass from the bottle tree, a slightly discordant slur of notes pulled off the middle strings of the Gibson.