The Future Falls, Page 2

  Hearing her own qualifier thrown back at her, Charlie grinned and hummed a quick charm onto his tattooed forearm, the sound slipping through pauses in the room’s ambient noise. There were powers that respected a Gale charm, even this far south, and this man, who understood what music meant, needed a little luck in his life. From the moment he’d sat down beside her, she’d been half afraid of a lightning strike from the metaphysical black cloud hanging over his head.

  A few days later, the music led her to a campground on a river, emptied of the summer tourists and filled with family in all but blood. Although the days were still pleasant enough, the nights nudged freezing. Charlie barely noticed the chill as she jammed until dawn with old women and young men and old men and young women and banjos and mandolins and fiddles and a dozen guitars. There was even a set of pipes and although the piper got pelted with bottle caps every time he began to play, he was clearly a familiar and loved part of the circle. Charlie had to fight to keep her power from rising with the music. She let it go once, after midnight had safely passed and let her creation hang in the air for a moment after the last note had been played.

  “Well, damn,” breathed the piper as wings and scales and fire dissolved into the night.

  Then one of the banjo players picked out the opening bars of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.”

  And they were off again.

  The next day Charlie stopped off at a coin laundromat in Austin—even Gale girls needed clean underwear—then stepped out of the world, back into the Wood, and listened for where the music would take her next.

  Allie’s song wove through a stand of rowan, berries formed in the Wood’s perpetual late summer but never getting a chance to ripen. She could follow Allie’s song home, only Charlie wasn’t ready to go home yet—and not only because Allie’s song sounded a little sharp. Allie wanted Charlie to stop wandering. To stay home for more than a few months at a time. To allow herself to be gathered in under Allie’s newly maternal wing.

  Jack’s song moved through the crowns of the birches, never settling, skirting the line between the Wood and what passed for sky in a place that ended where the trees ended. Like Allie’s song, Jack’s song had always been separate from the family symphony—hardly surprising given the unique combination of Dragon Prince, sorcerer, and Wild Power. Charlie stood for a moment, wrapped in what was almost a symphony on its own, well aware that with very little encouragement, Jack’s song would fill the Wood until it was the only song she could hear. “Oh, no, you don’t.” Hands clenched so tightly her knuckles ached, she concentrated on not hearing him, not veering toward him, pulled by the power of his song.

  Fortunately, Charlie had been walking the Wood for almost as long as Jack had been alive.

  “Unfortunately,” she muttered, following a fiddle through the maples, “I’ve been walking the Wood for almost as long as Jack’s been alive.” Irony was a bitch.

  The fiddle joined a drum and led into the shadows under the oldest oaks where she lost the melody. Drums often led back to the aunties and she really wasn’t in the mood to deal with that. Them. They’d poke and they’d pry and, while misdirection was possible, she’d pay for it later. Where the aunties were concerned, later was a guarantee. Avoidance had been working for her so far, so avoidance remained her best bet.

  Spanish guitars. An accordion. A pipe organ that made the leaves on the alders quiver.

  Curiosity almost sent her after a marching band, but the memory of the 2011 Rose Parade stopped her. Who knew massed potted roses would be enough greenery to give her an exit from the Wood? Or that the Rose Queen would be so high-strung? Although the screaming and the flailing had provided an opportunity for Charlie to slip away.

  Power prickling under her skin, she cocked her head to catch something that sounded like a bluegrass mandolin. Richer. Fuller. A little like a cittern . . . No, a bouzouki. Flat picking “Snug in a Blanket,” interwoven around a bass guitar, a fiddle, and a bodhran. Irish then, not Greek.

  Now that was a worthy distraction.

  Grinning, Charlie followed the song in and around the willows and out of the Wood, humming a countermelody as she stepped out from between two browning verbena and down off a concrete planter. Fortunately, at 9:10, the optometrist behind the planter was closed, and although there were a fair number of people still out on the old, red-brick sidewalks, no one seemed to have noticed her arrival. The surrounding buzz said fairly large city, the traffic told her she was in the US, and the license plates of the passing cars declared specifically for Maryland. To be on the safe side—not that stepping out of a planter was even close to the weirdest thing she’d ever been spotted doing—Charlie sang out a quick charm to erase her arrival from the memory of anyone who might have seen her.

  Then “Mama Mia”—from the Abba Gold album, not the Meryl Streep movie version—rang out from the gig bag on Charlie’s back, demanding attention and re-attracting every eye for blocks.

  “Family,” she sighed to the couple who stared at her as they passed. The nearer woman nodded in understanding. Slipping her gig bag off her shoulders, she dropped her butt down on the edge of the planter as she rummaged for her phone. She’d tossed it into a washing machine on her way out of the laundromat in Austin after fifteen minutes of her mother complaining about her twin sisters, twenty minutes of Auntie Meredith telling her about the weather in southern Ontario, and five minutes of her sisters declaring it wasn’t their fault—where it remained mercifully undefined. Unfortunately, Gale family phones were hard to lose.

  Not so much smart as scary after the aunties finished messing with the basics, these days the phones were handed out to every member of the family as soon as they turned fifteen. Although the general consensus was that the aunties used the phones in ways that would make James Bond shit jealous bricks, no one refused the gift—cheap, reliable cell service was far from the default on the Canadian side of the border.

  “Okay, you’ve had three weeks to play around. Come home.”

  “You sound stressed, Allie-cat.” Phone clamped between her shoulder and ear, Charlie tucked her guitar safely away and zipped the bag up.

  “You know what would make me less stressed? If you came home. I know, I know, you’re Wild—outside the family, beyond the laws . . .”

  “Actually, I think that’s Torchwood.”

  “Charlie! I have something to tell you.”

  “Okay.” Charlie slid her voice into a soothing register, not quite a charm, but intended to calm. “I’m listening. Tell me now.”

  “Not over the phone.”

  Ah. Allie didn’t want the aunties to overhear and, being Allie, didn’t care if the aunties knew it. Odds were high there’d been more problems between Auntie Bea and Auntie Trisha. Auntie Trisha’s initiating first circle ritual as an auntie had been in Calgary with David, so her ties to the original branch of the family back in southern Ontario were significantly less deep than Auntie Bea’s—or Auntie Carmen’s or even Auntie Gwen’s. As the heart of the family in Calgary, Allie constantly had to play peacemaker between the dominant personalities. Not that dominant personality wasn’t essentially a redundant description when referring to the aunties.

  A door opened across the alley next to the optometrist’s and the bouzouki music Charlie’d followed from the Wood spilled out onto the sidewalk, lifting her onto to her feet. “I’m chasing a piece of music right now, Allie, but I promise I’ll be home later tonight.”

  A red sign over the scarred wooden door identified the bar as Nick O’Connell’s. A sign taped to one of the three big vertical windows announced that the bands started at nine-thirty and there was no cover. Gales didn’t pay cover charges, but Charlie appreciated the thought. Slinging her gig bag over one shoulder, she opened the door . . .

  “Charlie, are you going into a bar?”

  ...and hung up the phone, allowing the music to draw her into a narrow room; a lon
g wooden bar along one wall, tiny tables along the other. The clientele seemed younger than she often saw in these kind of quasi pubs and the number of sweating bodies already in place defeated the cooler air that entered with her. The fans hanging from the high, pale ceiling merely pushed the warm air around.

  The pass-through at the far end of the bar showed part of a second room. Specifically, a stage and musicians. The music pulled her forward.

  As much dining room as bar, the inner room was twice the width of the outer, the ceiling half as high. The stage had been tucked into the front corner by the bar, the walls were lined with booth seating, and the rest of the room filled with small round tables. This room was significantly less crowded and two of the three tables closest to the stage were empty. Charlie’d seen enough girlfriends, boyfriends, techs, and roadies to know that the occupants of the third table were with the band.

  The bouzouki player was a slender man in his late thirties, early forties, with brown hair that curled around his ears and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed aviator-style glasses. He wore jeans and sneakers topped by a blue flannel shirt over a dark gray T-shirt. A ten-string Irish bouzouki hung from his shoulder by an embroidered strap—it was the wrong angle for Charlie to get a good look at the headstock—and the finish had the kind of small nicks and scratches that told her it was both well loved and well played.

  Most people preferred to sit where the band couldn’t see their reactions, but Charlie wasn’t most people. She tucked her guitar under one of the open tables by the stage, caught the waitress’ eye and ordered a Fat Tire as the song ended and the bouzouki player moved to the front microphone.

  “I want to thank you all for coming out tonight, we’re Four Men Down . . .”

  There were five of them. The fifth was a woman with blue streaks in her hair and a smile that could probably be seen from space.

  “. . . and we call Baltimore home.”

  He waited until the crowd’s cheering died down a bit before continuing. “I’d like to take a moment now to introduce the band. On guitar, Dave Anders. On electric bass, Mike Carter. On fiddle, our mistress of the bow, Tara McAllister. On drums, Paul Stephens. And I’m Gary Ehrlich on bouzouki.”

  “Can you do that in public?” someone yelled from the back.

  “We can’t get him to stop,” the bass player responded.

  Gary dipped his head and grinned, adjusting his tuning pegs as the room filled with laughter and innuendo. When he drew a fingernail across the strings, Charlie set her beer down and took notice. He’d re-tuned to FCDG, one tone below standard, in a noisy bar, by ear. Not too shabby. Bouzoukis usually played an interwoven accompaniment—a mix of open-string drones, two-note intervals, bass lines and melodic play—but Gary took the lead, fingers flying into “Boys of Blue Hill,” a popular Irish session tune, familiar, given the reaction, to many of the people listening.

  He played a double drop style, two adjacent strings struck simultaneously, one with a flat pick and the other with his first fingernail. More importantly, at least as far as Charlie was concerned, he played like he was exactly where he wanted to be, doing exactly what he wanted to be doing. She drank her beer and drew petty, inconsequential charms in the condensation. Charms that said, I want what he has and were wiped away again before they could take.

  Damn, he was good. This music didn’t cleanse, it moved in and made itself at home, leaving little room for anything else and that made it totally worth the crap she’d catch from Allie when she finally got back to Calgary.

  By quarter to one, the three tables by the stage had been pulled together and O’Connell’s had emptied but for Charlie, the band, the band’s extended family, and Brian and Kevin Trang-Murphy who’d kept the original name when they bought the bar. No one remembered or cared that Charlie was a stranger—the universe arranging itself to fit the needs of a Gale girl.

  “Specials didn’t do so well tonight.” Brian set two platters of wontons stuffed with cheese and potato down on the tables then dropped into an empty chair. “We might as well eat them, they won’t keep.”

  “No bacon this week?” Dave asked. When Brian assured him they were as close to kosher as Vietnamese/Irish bar food got, he smacked Tara’s fingers away from the wonton closest to him and popped it in his mouth. Tara cradled her hand and declared she’d never play the piano again. Someone pointed out she was a fiddler. Someone else said violinist and all fourteen of them got into a discussion about the difference, arguments tumbling over and wrapping around each other like puppies.

  Charlie kept at least part of her attention on Gary, who sat drinking a coffee and eating his share of the wontons. When he spoke, she heard so many layers in his voice it took her four wontons and half a beer before she managed to separate the parts. Granted, less beer earlier on might have made the separation a bit easier, but since the beer also blunted a few other edges, screw it.

  She heard contentment. As when he was playing, he was, right now, exactly where he wanted to be.

  She heard love. For these people, these friends in general, and for Sheryl, his wife, in particular. When he spoke to Sheryl, that layer overwhelmed the others, obvious to anyone with working ears and half a brain.

  She heard sadness. It sounded as though he were counting down the days to loss. Half of what he said had good-bye as the subtext.

  He had a secret, Charlie realized with a sudden sense of kinship. He’d made his peace with keeping whatever it was to himself, but every now and then he wondered if he’d made the right choice. Every now and then, he’d shift his shoulders as though he were shifting the weight of the world.

  He wasn’t dying. Charlie’d heard Death join in every conversation she’d had with Auntie Grace last spring—they’d buried her in June—but Death didn’t lurk behind Gary’s laughter. Although death did. It was a subtle difference that seemed a bit emo for the bouzouki; it wasn’t an instrument that lent itself to eyeliner and studded wrist bands.

  She heard fear and anticipation. Doubt and joy.

  “So, Charlie, got any advice about the whole itinerant musician gig?”

  “Learn to depend on the kindness of strangers.” Charlie snatched the last wonton out from under Mike’s fingers and saluted him with it. “Why? You planning on trying it?”

  “Not likely,” Mike’s wife Rhianna snorted. “And speaking of the kids . . .” She pushed her chair out and stood, one hand smacking her husband’s shoulder. “. . . we should get back to them before my brother sells them for scientific experiments.”

  “Nothing’s open this late,” Mike told her, then turned back to Charlie as he got to his feet. “I’m not trying it, Gary is. Well, Gary and Sheryl. They sold the townhouse, bought an RV, loaded the cats, and are heading off to see the world.”

  “Or as much of it as you can reach in an RV with a cat,” Paul added.

  “This was in the manner of a good-bye gig,” Kevin said, stacking the empty platters. “Next week at this time, they’ll be hell and gone away from here.”

  “You can’t get to hell in an RV,” Dave pointed out. “Even with cats.”

  “I have a few gigs lined up.” Gary ducked his head, adjusting and readjusting his glasses. “We’ll be fine.”

  “We have savings,” Sheryl added.

  While that wasn’t his secret, quitting a secure job for the road certainly explained the fear, anticipation, and doubt as well as the undercurrent of good-bye. Charlie helped sort cables and listened as Gary talked about finding their wedding DVD when they packed up the townhouse.

  “We have no idea how it ended up behind the hot water tank.”

  “I suspect the cats,” Sheryl sighed.

  Charlie’d already bought both the band’s CDs and when Gary tried to give her a copy of his EP, she paid for that, too. “This is your living now, dude. Don’t give it away.”

  Half an hour later, they all stood out on the si
dewalk in front of the bar as Kevin locked the door and Brian waved good-bye from inside the nearer front window. There were hugs and some tears and promises to stay in touch then, as Dave and Tara headed south, Charlie fell into step on Sheryl’s right, heading north.

  “My ride’s this way,” she explained, glancing up at the sky. It looked as though the clouds were resting on top of the streetlights and, as little as she wanted to be caught out when the storm finally broke, she could feel a small park or a large yard a block or two away—either less likely to attract attention than waving good-bye and jumping back into the planter outside the optometrist’s.

  “So, Charlie . . .” Gary shifted his case to his left hand and put his right arm around Sheryl’s shoulders. “. . . do you have any words of wisdom about the whole itinerant musician gig?”

  Her itinerant musician gig wasn’t exactly typical, but most of her friends walked the same road without her advantages. And some things were universal. “Getting called for three months’ session work in Vancouver while your cousin’s twins are teething is a godsend.” In more ways than one. She’d even managed to slip away before Jack could beg to go with her. Deciding to drive rather than drag half a dozen instruments through the Wood had meant she hadn’t been able to use her inability to shift his scaled size as an excuse to leave him behind.

  “Uh . . . Teething’s not really an option. Anything a little less specific?”

  Charlie waited for her phone to ring with one of Auntie Carmen’s random bits of advice about clean underwear. When it didn’t, although Auntie Carmen seldom missed so obvious a cue, she said, “Like anything else, music can be as much who you know as what. You’ll have to work your contacts.”

  “Contacts? He was an engineer until two weeks ago,” Sheryl laughed. The theme from Jaws ran under her words.