“My name’s Chowilawu,” he tells the boy. “But everyone calls me Wil.”
The boy stares at him guardedly. “I heard you talking yesterday. The medicine woman is your mom?”
He nods. The kid looks about thirteen—three years younger than Wil—but something about his eyes makes him seem like he’s going on one hundred. More old-soul style, but of the world-weary kind. Life has done a number on this AWOL.
“Okay if I play my guitar here?” Wil asks, his voice as gentle as he can make it.
The boy squints suspiciously. “Why?”
Wil shrugs. “It’s easier for me than talking.”
The boy hesitates, chewing on his lip. “Sure, okay.”
It starts that way with them. Being an AWOL breaks kids’ spirits—makes them distrustful of the world. But since they can’t see the trickery in listening to a guitar, or how Wil’s music breaks through barriers that betrayal built, they surrender, listening to his fingers caress the strings, his music finally gives voice to their souls’ sorrow.
His ma took a music-therapy seminar at Johns Hopkins, but she only knows its theories. Wil has seen how music heals since the day he picked up a guitar on his third birthday. Not all the AWOLs and not all ChanceFolk with sick spirits heal, though. Some are too far gone. Too early to tell into which camp this boy will fall.
Wil plays for two straight hours, until he smells lunch and feels the cramp in his back. The AWOL sits on the bed, having been awake and listening the whole time. His arms are wrapped around his legs; his chin rests on his knees; his eyes stare at the blanket. The chords of Wil’s music fade to silence.
“Time to eat.” Wil gets to his feet, his guitar swinging over his shoulder to hang down his back. “Probably soup and cornbread. You coming down?”
The boy reminds him of a rabbit, frozen, trapped between staying or fleeing. Wil waits, letting the quiet hum in widening ripples till the boy unwraps his arms from his legs and gets off the bed, standing straighter than Wil expected he would.
“My name’s Lev. I was a tithe.”
Wil accepts this with a nod and no judgment. Maybe this kid will be okay after all.
3 • Lev
Lev watches Wil wash the dishes after lunch, still thinking about what possessed him to tell Wil that he’s a runaway tithe. Giving out too much information can only make things worse for him. Then a dish towel hits him in the face and drops to the counter.
“Hey.” Lev glares at Wil, wondering if it was thrown in anger. Wil may be big as a bear, but he has a teddy-bear grin.
“You can dry the dishes. Meet me at the end of the hall when you finish.”
Lev never did dishes at home: That was the servants’ job. He’s been sick, too. Who makes sick people dry dishes? Still, he does the job. He owes Wil for the one-man concert. He’d never heard guitar playing like that before—and Lev’s folks were big on the arts, making sure their kids had violin lessons, listening to the Cincinnati Pops most Thursday nights.
But Wil’s music was different. It was . . . real. For two hours, and strictly from memory, Wil played a little Bach, Schubert, and Elton, but he mostly played Spanish guitar.
Lev thought such wild, complex music would be too hard to listen to in his weakened state, but it was just the opposite. The music lulled him until it seemed to sing through his synapses: notes rising, sweetening, spinning in perfect synchronicity with his thoughts.
He hangs the towel after he finishes drying the dishes, and thinks about going back to his room, but he’s curious about Wil. He finds him at the end of the hall, closing his bedroom door and putting on a light jacket. He looks somehow incomplete without his guitar. Evidently, Wil feels the same. His hand fingers the doorknob; then with a sigh he opens the door again and retrieves his guitar, and a jacket for Lev, too.
“Are we going somewhere?” Lev asks.
“Here and there.” Which seems a logical answer for a guy like Wil, but the answer makes Lev think about being unwound. The dispersal of every piece of him. Here and there. Lev climbed the rez wall desperate for some sort of sanctuary, but what if he put too much faith in rumors?
“Is it true that reservations are safe for AWOLs?” he asks. “Is it true that People of Chance don’t unwind?”
Wil nods. “We never signed the Unwind Accord. So not only don’t we unwind, we also can’t use unwound parts.”
Lev mulls that over, baffled at how a society could work without harvesting organs. “So . . . where do you get parts?”
“Nature provides,” Wil says. “Sometimes.” An enigmatic look crosses Wil’s face like a shadow behind his eyes. “C’mon, I’ll show you around the rez.”
Moments later they stand on an open balcony, staring down almost four stories to a dry creek below. Across the ravine are other houses, also hewn right out of the red stone wall. They appear to be of ancient design, yet somehow modern and carved with diamond precision. New-world technology serving ancestral respect.
“Not scared of heights, are you?” Wil doesn’t wait for an answer, but makes sure his guitar strap has his instrument secure on his back, then hops on a rope ladder. He climbs down, sometimes sliding for yards at a time.
Lev swallows nervously, but not as nervously as he might have three weeks ago. Lately he’s been doing plenty of dangerous things. He waits till Wil reaches the bottom; then he grits his teeth and follows him. With his left wrist still in a brace, it’s hard, and his stomach rolls every time he looks down, but Lev grins when he reaches bottom, realizing why Wil made him do this. The first thing an AWOL loses is his dignity. By allowing Lev to climb the rope alone, Wil gave his dignity back to him.
When Lev turns to Wil, he’s surprised to see that they’re not alone.
“Lev, this is my uncle Pivane.”
Lev cautiously shakes the large man’s hand, keeping an eye on the shiny tranq rifle cradled in his left arm. His deerskins are worn, and the long graying hair escaping from its rawhide knot makes him look scruffy—but there is no mistaking the designer quality of his boots or the Swiss watch on his wrist. And that rifle with its fine zebrawood stock was probably custom-made.
“How did today’s hunt go?” Wil asks. It should be a casual question, but Lev catches how intently Wil looks at his uncle.
“Tranq’d a lioness, but had to let her go: She was nursing.” Pivane rubs his eyes. “We’re heading to Cash Out Gulch in the morning. Rumors of a male down there. You coming with us for once?”
Wil doesn’t answer, and Lev wonders at the sly look Pivane gives his nephew. Lev assumed all ChanceFolk hunted, but maybe that’s just a myth. Just like everything else in his life has been.
Pivane spares a glance at Lev. “You look better than when I found you. That arm okay?”
“Yeah. Better. Thanks for saving me.” Lev can’t remember being rescued. He can’t remember much after dropping off the wall except the sharp pain in his wrist, then lying in the leaves and pine needles, certain that this was what dying felt like.
Pivane’s gaze sharpens on Wil’s guitar. “Are you going down to the medical warren today? Are you going to visit your grandfather?”
“Maybe not” is all Wil says.
The man’s voice roughens, becoming almost an accusation. “Medicine folk and musicians don’t get to choose who their hands heal. Or whose way they smooth for dying.” Then he points a finger at Wil. “You do it for him, Chowilawu.” A moment of uneasy eye contact between them; then Pivane takes a step back and shifts his rifle. “Tell your grandfather we’ll bag a heart for him tomorrow.” Then he nods a solemn good-bye to Lev and leaves, using not the ropes but an elevator that Lev did not see, and Wil did not see fit to show him.