Why did I do it, she thought. Why did I drive alone? George would have come, and we coulda had some fun along the way, or Sue and Tasha. We coulda made it a girls' night out. Now I'm stalled out on the exit ramp twenty miles outside of Gary, Indiana, ten miles from anything. I shouldn't have been so cheap. Jason told me to do something about that transmission, and he's always been a good, honest mechanic. I said this car was seventeen years old and I would run her into the ground. Well, I guess I did. I ran the old boat right into the ground at three thirty in the freaking morning on the way to Mom's house. If I was going to be this stupid, driving alone through the rust belt in the middle of the night with a car that a mechanic told me could stop dead at any time, I could have at least charged my cell phone first. Mom could come out here and get me or send her boyfriend to pick me up, but she's not going to know I need a ride and a wrecker unless I can find a phone. Francesca got out of her elderly Ford and headed down the shoulder into town. She almost walked into the sign.
As she went through the grass just off the shoulder, she heard a low moan. Francesca jumped. She stopped and looked around. A rusted, green highway sign missing a few bolts was swinging back and forth in the night breeze, its reflective lettering faded and peeling. The sign and the cold air blown across her back, right through her thin t-shirt, made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Francesca shuddered. She had to squint to make out the words. She thought it said “Welcome to Greersville.” She kept walking, faster than she had been before.
The ramp led down into what was probably a main street before they built a bypass. All the stores looked abandoned, their empty windows gaping like open mouths. Most of them were broken. A few were boarded. Some were burnt out, blackened. There was ash and broken glass all over the cracked sidewalk. Francesca was glad she had left her work boots on. The streetlights loomed like skeletal giraffes. None of them were lit. One was leaning at an improbable angle. Francesca wondered if anyone lived here anymore. No one left at this address, she thought. Just me and the ghosts.
On Monday morning, the boss was gone. My coworker found a note on the office door. She was on a plane to California. I was in charge. She had known on Friday that she would be going. In fact, she had known for weeks. She had forgotten to say anything until after our last shift ended the week before. The remaining two lines scrawled on the post-it note told me that the key to the office was at the Reference Desk and wished us good luck. There was no mention of when she would be back. I cursed myself for taking a job at the Durham Public Library.
On the Martin Luther King weekend of my tenth grade year, it snowed in the mountains. My family owns a house up around Boone, but we have never gotten around to buying a car with four wheel drive. Dad's Camry was built for solid, dependable comfort and economy, not rugged terrain. Mom had an aging van, a heavy Dodge. Its six cylinder engine allowed the lumbering vehicle to pull its own weight up the steep back roads of Appalachia in decent road conditions, but it was never meant to clime steep grades on an equal mixture of cracked blacktop and ice. I went to a teen summer job fair on a whim. I had nothing better to do that frosty morning. I was just fourteen years old, so not much was open to me. I settled for filling out an application for a city work program. It seemed like it was mostly for underprivileged kids, but I was told they let in some teens from fairly prosperous, stable families. I was surprised when they called me back.
After a drug test and more paperwork than I had ever seen before, I sat through three hours of City of Durham employee training. I was pretty much useless for the rest of the day. I was so slack jawed and stupid that I missed a downbeat for the first, and, I hope, last, time in my life. In fact, I missed the entirety of Pomp and Circumstance at graduation later that day. After a week off and a mission trip, I started work for six dollars an hour. I worked thirty hours a week, and this added up to a sum I simply understood as more money than I have ever had before or since. It was with this money that I bought my coat and the oldest book in my collection, a little Florentine volume published in 1640. I also saved. The money was nice. I certainly enjoyed it. I had a big problem, though, a personality quirk that made me utterly ill suited to work at the library. I had a work ethic.
I came home and told my mother that I felt like a leach on society the first time my boss told me to take a long lunch. She was a friend of the man in charge of the program, and he gave her as many teens as she wanted every summer. She took three of us and made us do her job while she sat in her office and discussed her medical conditions with friends on the phone. There were two others in the library, one who commonly worked on our floor and another who stayed upstairs. I was in periodicals. There was very little to do except hide from patrons and look busy. I work hard, and I believe in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I was getting the pay alright, but no one expected me to do anything. On top of my growing concern about the ethicality of lying on my time sheet more than once a week, which my boss told me to do, was the misery of picking up the paycheck I so prized. Every two weeks, I had to go get it from the man who ran the program in person and listen to him make sexist remarks with a smile on my face. The latter problem lasted the length of the ordeal, but the former was temporarily resolved when my boss up and left for the west coast.
The day ticked by neatly. After all, we had been doing her job for several weeks. The one issue was that she was not around to sign our time sheets, but we assumed she would upon her return. Then Jimmy came back from lunch. Jimmy was our resident pot head. He was a weed aficionado, a real connoisseur of this forbidden plant. He was a decent enough guy, but he was often noticeably stoned. That day, his dealer had found him something special. He described it as best he could in his intoxicated state. It was a cigar laced with some sort of hallucinogen. Then he informed me that the tables were growing legs and walking around. I hid him until it was time to lock up and go home. Things went downhill from there.
Jessica's Song
I found you lost and lonely, last lamb in a den of wolves.
They told me you were slow, but I caught a single glimpse
Of the marble pillars of a hidden mind.
I took half a chance on the girl with the smile.
I gave you a few hours of my precious time,
Tried to help dig your undiscovered soul out of the jungle vines.
Looks like you found a palace underneath.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
I gave you what I had, a place to stand,
Told my friends to keep civil tongues in their heads
When you came around; I made them understand
That you were one of mine, had the right to look us in the eye.
As the months dragged on, I wasn't surprised
To watch you have a fling with Buddha and go back to Christ.
When new ideas set your heart on fire,
You etched a smile into my cold face.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
You bought new glasses with purple frames,
Read The Jungle, celebrated with cheap champagne.
You made socialism your dangerous crush,
The one that you never could bring home.
The same weight was pulling everyone down.
We all trudged along in the same ravine,
But in the dusty corners of your head, you found something that looks like wings.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
We talked on the phone the other day,
And your parents' preacher was telling lies,
Trying to cut Jesus' own words with hate.
You told me you wanted to stand up right there, call it out for the bullshit it was.
I could see righteous rage burning in your eyes
From three hundred miles away.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
I thought of you when first we met,
The shy girl and all of the things we said,
How you broke your own chains and found your way.
You grew up in a house without many books.
Teachers were quick to write you off.
Your accent was country; you reading was rough.
You had no help, but you were smart enough
To see what you were missing and look up.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
No one ever thought you had the guts to do more
Than spit out the ideas you were fed,
But you clawed your way up, and you hacked your way through.
You sat in the back row; you light up the room.
You walked through the desert to drink from life's cup.
Ignore the sugar coated barbs, shut out every “bless her heart,” and rise.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
When I have a heavy weight to carry
And a task set before me puts frost on my soul,
I think of you and know that Goliath still falls.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
The park is almost what you would expect. It has a gate, a huge piece of wrought iron that was there when Delokgate was new. The midway is long and flat. The ridge of the only hill in the county hangs over it like a warning. The Ferris wheel stretches its pale, wooden limbs like a dancing starfish frozen in time. The haunted house is down a path to the west that runs along the edge of the forest. It's sad, broken windows look out over the overgrown lawn. It was here before the park, built by the first white owner of this land. After his family was slaughtered by vampires, he drank himself to death. It's a good haunted house, with real ghosts. Three different priests have been brought in to help them move on, but so far no one's had any success. Maybe if I could find someone who wasn't Catholic. Oh, well. They've been there a hundred and fifty years. They can wait a little while longer.
The midway stretches from the gate to the hill's steep sides. It's around a hundred and fifty yards across, maybe seven hundred yards from side to side. It always smells like buttered popcorn and fry oil except late at night and early in the morning in winter. When the park is closed and there aren't any footsteps in the snow, the air is pure and clear. It's like still water. In the half an hour between the setting of the moon and the dawn, when the werewolves walk on two legs again and the vampires have retreated into the dark, my park is the most beautiful sight in the world. There's a kind of rightness in the angle of the rooftops of the booths. The iron fence, and Carl Jaworkski's weed whacker, hold the forest at bay. The paint on the facades of the outbuildings and sheds, the original owner's attempt to recreate his distant hometown in the rosy glow of Victorian idealization, is fresh and clean. The stripes on the tents hold their colors, and the white doesn't look yellowed in the first rays of the rising sun. The poles are perfectly straight. It's my reward for browbeating Sammy Flynn, who is sixteen, into taking his hands off his girlfriend long enough to do the job right. The whole thing looks proper, correct, decent. It looks like a job well done.
Deloksgate is silent in that perfect half an hour. When the gates open, though it fills with all the noise of humanity. People talk and laugh. Babies cry. Lovers argue and make up. Little old ladies argue whether the park has gotten better or worse since I took over. I don't worry about it. Each of them can argue either side, and they switch from hour to hour. Thirteen-year-old boys and girls whisper to each other about ditching their chaperons and heading for the Ferris wheel. The hum, the babble, is like the warm waves of a tropical ocean. It rises and falls, lapping at my ears more or less gently most of the time. Beneath these voices, there's the sub-bass thunder of my train, the piercing falsetto of the whistle. The whistle's cry gets sweeter and more mournful every year. Sometimes, it sounds like the wail of a newly widowed woman or orphaned child. Other times, it's a prayer for the souls of the dead. When it sounds along with the first bright notes of the merry-go-round, it's as haunting as children playing in a cemetery.
The crowds drift from ride to ride in a swirl of color, trailing the smell of candy and fried food that goes sour after they pass. They dazzle my eyes, too used to picking a single movement out of dark monotony. There's always light and music, colored metal spinning. At Halloween, decked out in all her finery, Deloksgate is a grand old lady. My park is also a facade, but that's another story.
The morning I met Aria, I saw the sunrise. I saw the darkness crack and scatter before the pink, then orange, then scarlet glow of the morning. I looked through the back window of the car speeding west down I-40 and watched an everyday miracle play out. I leaned forward in my seat, nervous, exited. I wondered if two and a half years of struggle were about to culminate in the granting of my greatest wish, the achievement of a dream for which so many of my colleagues were too poor to ever hope. We were rocketing towards something that might be a false chance, a red herring, a dead end. However, possibility glitters like metal in the sun. I sat there gnawing a fried chicken biscuit from a drive through window wondering if I was riding towards something like destiny. It was the second day of a summer gathering of tuba players, and I was on my way to meet an instrument I might buy.
Half way through the seventh grade, I was a shy, nervous, nerdy girl with no real passion or direction. A band director told me to go into a practice room and try my hand at the tuba. My life had shifted on its axis by the end of the period. I still wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do with myself, but I knew that whatever it was, it would involve the instrument. I went home and told my parents to start saving for a very expensive horn. While my parents had found ways to put money away, I grew taller, more assertive, more confident. I learned fast, working with all the fanaticism of a convert. By the summer before tenth grade, it was accepted that I would be the highest-ranking tuba player in the school from the coming August on to graduation. As we pulled into the UNCG campus, I reflected on the chance that I might become the first tuba-owning student in the history of my dirt poor school before sundown.
We met the owner of the instrument. My thoughts were cloudy, murky with the early hour. I knew that I could easily end up working with this tuba for the rest of my life. I wondered whether the alchemy of hope and fear churning in my guts was what a person from a culture of arranged marriage feels on the way to meet a likely spouse. A graduate student at the music school led us to a practice room. I had always played American tubas, and this was a German. The proportions, the angle of the bell, the rotary valves like those of a “French” horn were foreign. It looked expensive, intimidating. The thick brass was heavier in my hands than anything else I had played. The bore of the bell and pipes was wide. It took me a few tries to get that colossus to sound. It was only when I began to play that we really met, that I came to understand the power and beauty of this creature of brass and fire.
I saw that she was the pale, faint hue of an alloy between yellow and white gold. The dent guards and the long keys of the valves were silver. She was fire. She was sunlight on Lake Michigan. She was nothing like the plodding, broken down tubas I played at school. This one had a life of her own, or wanted one. I found a yearning cast in brass, a desire to escape. When I later found her only owners had been two old men, I knew why. She seemed to cry out for something more than another twenty years of community band concerts in the park. This was a tuba I could bring back to my school. I told her owner she was satisfactory, that I would speak with my parents. I told my mother I was in love. That evening, we all went out to dinner. My mother gave the old tuba player $3200 in hundred dollar bills.
My parents could no longer understand the daughter whom an urban public school had transformed into a stranger. I performed in a tuxedo and did the work of a man. I fell in love with the son of a repairman who worked for the state and learned to swear. I was a well-respected member of a less than respectable community. All they knew was that the stranger they loved wanted a tuba more than anything else. They found a way to give me one. They bought me an instrument, a companion, a way to keep playing after graduation. It was all they could give a person they no longer knew. I have never seen a more perfect expression of their love.
Aria and I have weathered some storms together these last two years. I kept her safe through severe weather, the occasional outright attack, and a move. Most days, I love her more than anything but God himself. Some mornings, I see the first rays of the sun come through the window and reflect on polished metal. There, before me is the vision of that first morning. Light sparkling on my tuba's contours and dancing on every edge is a lesson in gratitude, in love that outlasts and outlives. That, in my mind, is the image of blessing, of God's grace, of the love of a parent for an unrepentant prodigal child.
I was in my case that morning, locked away in the dark. I had been there a long time. I belonged to an old man. He'd take up with some cute little tuba and left me locked up in that black, plastic shell. He was seventy two, and his lungs weren't what they used to be. The situation wasn't any more his fault than it was mine. It was his nature to get older and mine to need a ton of air. After all, I'm from Germany. Over there, they make us like Hummers. As hard as he tried, Roger just couldn't fill the tank anymore. It got to where I hardly ever saw the sun. After a while, I heard him talk about how I was going to be sold. When he loaded me into his van, didn't know where we were going, but I did know why.
When there was light again, light for the first time in who knows how many weeks, I saw a girl. This was no grandma. She looked like she was about my age. She was an icy blond who had made it to midsummer without getting a tan. I wondered if she would melt if she went out in the sun. Her hands, though, were another story. They belonged to a tuba player. For the first time in so long, I felt myself heating up, absorbing the warmth of a living body. My owner handed her a silver mouthpiece. I lived again, borrowing a pulse and breath from a real organism, a person with a beating heart. That something extra, the music, the way the notes become more than the sum of their parts, was coming out of a human mind and soul.
I saw her. I saw into her. I knew she had been the runt of the litter, the last tuba player made in her beginning band and the only girl. She was also the only one of the five still playing. She clawed her way through the ranks, and now she was about five weeks from taking over the highest position in tuba playing at her school. And the school! Kids planning on sending an applications to Yale ate lunch with hippies and Bloods from East Durham. It was always one desperate quick fix from falling down. This wasn't some old guy who was content to sit in his community band chair until they stuck him in the nursing home. There was fire here, strength and hunger. She wanted to be awesome someday. She wouldn't settle for less. She was going to be one of those people who can take a tuba in their hands and wield it like a force of nature. I was the first nice horn she'd ever been allowed to touch. She was almost intimidated enough to walk away, but I convinced her to stick around. This was my chance to see a bit more of the world, to have some adventures. Besides, as nice as my first two masters were, I'd never fallen head over heels for anyone before. Two years later, we're still together.
Larkin was everything she promised. Besides me, she had seven school tubas and a black sousaphone to her name. She was a crazy workaholic who sometimes went to dinner in full regalia, full freaking penguin suit, before a show. She beat dents out of tubas with machinist's hammers and made a strap out of an old leather coat. There were times she was either working or asleep, but she did find a few days now and then to take me to the mountains. Since she bought me, I've gotten to see all kinds of strange places. We do alright together. We're still figuring things out, still doing our best, still in love.
