I look at Staley a little longer, smiling as well to see her standing there so straight-backed in her overalls, barefoot in the grass, the sun glowing golden on her short hair. After awhile I lean back against the door of the trailer again and close my eyes. I’m drifting on the music, not really thinking much of anything, when I realize the sound of the fiddle’s starting to fade away.
“Shit,” I hear Robert say.
I open my eyes, but before I can turn to look at him, I see Staley’s gone. It’s the damnedest thing. I can still hear her fiddling, only it’s getting fainter and fainter like she’s walking away and I can’t see a sign of her anywhere. I can’t imagine a person could run as fast as she’d have to to disappear like this and still keep playing that sleepy music.
When Robert stands up, I scramble to my feet as well.
“What’s going on?” I ask him.
“She let it take her away.”
“What do you mean? Take her away where?”
But he doesn’t answer. He’s looking into the woods and then I see them too. A rabbit being chased by some ugly old dog. Might be the same rabbit that ran off on us in the city, but I can’t tell. It comes tearing out from under the trees, running straight across the meadow towards us, and then it just disappears.
I blink, not sure I actually saw what I just saw. But then the same thing happens to the dog. It’s like it goes through some door I can’t see. There one minute, gone the next.
“Well, she managed to pull them back across,” Robert says. “But I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”
Hearing him talk like that makes me real nervous.
“Why?” I ask him. “This is what we wanted, right? She was going to play some music to put things back the way they were. Wasn’t that the plan?”
He nods. “But her going over wasn’t.”
“I don’t get it.”
Robert turns to look at me. “How’s she going to get back?”
“Same way she went away-right?”
He answers with a shrug and then I get a bad feeling. It’s like what happened with Malicorne and Jake, I realize. Stepped away, right out of the world, and they never came back. The only difference is, they meant to go.
“She won’t know what to do,” Robert says softly. “She’ll be upset and maybe a little scared, and then he’s going to show up, offer to show her the way back.”
I don’t have to ask who he’s talking about.
“But she’ll know better than to bargain with him,” I say.
“We can hope.”
“We’ve got to be able to do better than that,” I tell him.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
I look at that guitar in his hands.
“You could call her back,” I say.
Robert shakes his head. “The devil, he’s got himself a guitar, too.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Think about it,” Robert says. “Whose music is she going to know to follow?”
The stranger laid his guitar case on the grass and opened it up. The instrument he took out was an old Martin D-45 with the pearl inlaid “CD MARTIN” logo on the headstock-a classic, pre-war picker’s guitar.
“Don’t see many of those anymore,” Staley said.
“They didn’t make all that many.” He smiled. “Though I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen me a blue fiddle like you’ve got, not ever.”
“Got it from my grandma.”
“Well, she had taste. Give me an A, would you?”
Staley ran her bow across the A string of her fiddle and the stranger quickly tuned up to it.
“You ever play any contests?” he asked as he finished tuning.
He ran his pick across the strings, fingering an A minor chord. The guitar had a big, rich sound with lots of bottom end.
“I don’t believe in contests,” Staley said. “I think they take all the pleasure out of a music.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean nothing serious. More like swapping tunes, taking turns ’till one of you stumps the other player. Just for fun, like.”
Staley shrugged.
“’Course to make it interesting,” he added, “we could put a small wager on the outcome.”
“What kind of wager would we be talking about here?”
Staley didn’t know why she was even asking that, why she hadn’t just shut down this idea of a contest right from the get-go. It was like something in the air was turning her head all around.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How about if I win, you’ll give me a kiss?”
“A kiss?”
He shrugged. “And if you enjoy it, maybe you’ll give me something more.”
“And if I win?”
“Well, what’s the one thing you’d like most in the world?”
Staley smiled. “Tell you the truth, I don’t want for much of anything. I keep my expectations low-makes for a simple life.”
“I’m impressed,” he said. “Most people have a hankering for something they can’t have. You know, money, or fame, or a true love. Maybe living forever.”
“Don’t see much point in living forever,” Staley told him. “Come a time when everybody you care about would be long gone, but there you’d be, still trudging along on your own.”
“Well, sure. But-”
“And as for money and fame, I think they’re pretty much overrated. I don’t really need much to be happy and I surely don’t need anybody nosing in on my business.”
“So what about a true love?”
“Well, now,” Staley said. “Seems to me true love’s something that comes to you, not something you can take or arrange.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“That’d be sad, but you make do. I don’t know how other folks get by, but I’ve got my music. I’ve got my friends.”
The stranger regarded her with an odd, frustrated look.
“You can’t tell me there’s nothing you don’t have a yearning for,” he said. “Everybody wants for something.”
“You mean for myself, or in general, like for there to be no more hurt in the world or the like?”
“For yourself,” he said.
Staley shook her head. “Nothing I can’t wait for it to find me in its own good time.” She put her fiddle up under her chin. “So what do you want to play?”
But the stranger pulled his string strap back over his head and started to put his guitar away.
“What’s the matter?” Staley asked. “We don’t need some silly contest just to play a few tunes.”
The stranger wouldn’t look at her.
“I’ve kind of lost my appetite for music,” he said, snapping closed the clasps on his case.
He stood up, his gaze finally meeting hers, and she saw something else in those clear blue eyes of his, a dark storm of anger, but a hurting, too. A loneliness that seemed so out of place, given his easy-going manner. A man like him, he should be friends with everyone he met, she’d thought. Except…
“I know who you are,” she said.
She didn’t know how she knew, but it came to her, like a gauze slipping from in front of her eyes, like she’d suddenly shucked the dreamy quality of the otherworld and could see true once more.
“You don’t look nothing like what I expected,” she added.
“Yeah, well, you’ve had your fun. Now let me be.”
But something her grandmother had told her once came back to her. “I tell you,” she’d said. “If I was ever to meet the devil, I’d kill him with kindness. That’s the one thing old Lucifer can’t stand.”
Staley grinned, remembering.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t go off all mad.”
The devil glared at her.
“Or at least let me give you that kiss before you go.”
He actually backed away from her at that.
“What?” Staley asked. “Suddenly you don’t fancy me anymore?”
“You put up a good front,” he said. “I didn’t make you for such an accomplished liar.”
Staley shook her head. “I never lied to you. I really am happy with things the way they are. And anything I don’t have, I don’t mind waiting on.”