Nine Bar Blues. Sheree Renée Thomas
done, no telling what else the plants had unleashed on the town and its few remaining citizens.
“They can’t sting or bite,” she’d read at the library, her wheels now crunching as she pulled up to Doc’s house. “They sing,” the book said. “Their song can be a hymn-like trance, a lullaby that lulls weaker spirits to waste away, while others rejuvenate, are resurrected.”
“They don’t bite, huh, but they sho’ll can swarm and scare the mess out of you,” she’d thought. One of the books mentioned something about a divine test, a path to transformation. Rachel didn’t have time for none of that. “Hush, loud bugs,” she said as she slammed on her brakes. “Ain’t no way in hell I’m finna let some devil dust bugs suck up my daddy’s soul!”
Rachel was kicking the piles of shells out of her way, determined to get Doc, when the ground shifted and rumbled beneath her. “What did I say that for!” she muttered as she held onto the porch rail.
Low clouds of cicadas swept from the holes in the grass, hovered in the sky, headed for the maple tree. Rachel ran into the house and locked the door behind her but remembered the open window in Doc’s room.
“Daddy!” she cried, racing to his bedroom. “I need you to get up.” She reached for him but discovered that he was covered in a sticky film. If he wasn’t her own father, scared as she was, she would have left him right there.
Rachel wiped her palms on her jacket and reached for Doc again. She unpeeled the cottony layers and tossed the dirty sheet onto the floor.
“I need you to help me, Daddy,” she said. She spoke to him quiet, calm, like he did when she was a small child and had fallen and didn’t want to get up. He had always been there for her; that’s why she vowed she would always be there for him.
“We don’t have to live in this place, no more. We can leave, Daddy. You can leave. We can go right now. Come with me.”
She peeled the spider web-like substance from across his eyes. She was relieved to see recognition there.
“All right, Slick Bean,” he said, as if waking from a dream, and reached for her outstretched hand. He held it, letting the warmth spread through his palms, and then he forced himself to rise.
They waded through the carpet of husks until they were standing outside.
“Daddy, did you see that hole in the ground? I swear, I ain’t never seen nothing like this in my whole life. You think it’s fracking that did all that? Brought all these damn bugs?”
“Not all. I did it,” Doc said as he leaned on her, letting her guide him to the green truck door. He didn’t wait for her puzzled reply. “You know how it is! Here, people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say. They just be talking, thinking aloud. But sometimes, out here, the land be listening.” He turned to the wind, the piles of husks, the moon and the shadows. “Can’t a person think aloud sometime? Wrassle with a thought until they come up with their own good answer?”
He stood and pointed at the dark tower, the V lit up like a bright red scar.
“What’s a good answer for this? How can we fight it?” he shouted into the black mouth of earth. “We opened our mouths and welcomed them here with open arms, helped them build the very thing that would kill us.” He turned to Rachel. “Some things you build, not so easy to tear down again. Now, what’s the answer for that?”
The wind carried his cry through the air, and the question rested in the darkness around them, in the limbs of the tree.
And something else waited under the roots of the trees and beneath their feet. The wind rippled through the leaves, shook the maple’s branches in answer. Loaded with emerald and red-orange cicadas, the branches swayed as the insects split their skins and struggled out. As the ground shook, they emerged from the dark, wet earth, emerged after a lifetime of waiting alone. Night after night, they had awakened. Wave upon wave, they came.
“The ground gon’ sour?” Rachel asked as she opened Big Daddy’s passenger door.
“Not the ground. Us.”
The humming rose, a hymn that seemed to sing the world anew. Up from the jagged edge of earth, a great figure climbed out, six gigantic, jointed legs lifting it up and out of the land Doc and his people had once proudly claimed as their own. Iridescent wings unfolded from its wide, curved back. They glistened and sparkled in the night, unearthing mountains of soil and roots and old things not witnessed since the angel poured its first bowl over the sun, and the moon had opened like a great eye in the sky. Free from its dark sleep, the giant unfurled its wings and thrummed a deep tympani-drum sound that the little ones echoed and joined in, their song a bellowing in the air.
Rachel and Doc covered their ears and watched in wonder, as it raised its great, jewel-encrusted head and turned to them. It seemed as if a million eyes watched them from all directions, all at once, then within minutes, the creature stomped across acres of what had once been the town’s most fertile land. The ground shook beneath its many feet, and the others raised their drumsong as it headed toward the Viscerol plant.
Safe in Big Daddy, Rachel and Doc stared at each other, not speaking in the airless truck. They held each other for a long, long time, and for an even longer time, it seemed like neither one of them breathed. Then they jumped, a startled, delayed reaction after they heard the thunder, a rush of mighty wings as the last of the Viscerol plant and its signature water tower crashed to the ground. The earth rumbled one final time, and Rachel and Doc shook in the truck that rattled like a great tin can. The wind howled, a loud keening, and the old trees lay low, then all was still and quiet, and the only thing they could see was the white mouth of the moon.
Rachel rolled the window down, hands shaking, the old handle squeaking. She started to crank the truck up, but Doc reached for the keys.
“Come on out and let me drive, girl,” he said.
Tired as she was, Rachel didn’t even have the strength to argue. She just shook her head and looked at him. “Daddy, you ain’t driven Big Daddy in years.”
Doc wiped a layer of gossamer threads from around his jaw and his throat. His hands looked smooth, sturdy. His heart felt ripe and strong. “When I leave, you leave,” he said. “Step on out, Slick Bean, and let’s get up out of here.”
Rachel stared at him, her eyes wide with wonder. “Doc?”
He hummed a happy tune as they drove off, some of that old country music Rachel pretended she couldn’t stand. Big Daddy groaned down the road, only empty shells and withering husks remained. But above them and around them, hidden in the dark earth and in the green branches of trees, something like hope remained, listening and waiting for a warm spring night, and a mischievous wind to return again.
AUNT DISSY’S POLICY DREAM BOOK
“Want some candy?” Aunt Dissy asked when I was seven. Delighted, I thrust open my hand.
“Let me see it,” she said. She grabbed my hand before I could hide it in my pocket, forced me to reveal the map that was the dark life lines of my palm. Aunt Dissy shook her head and laughed, her face like water, rippling between a smile and a frown. “See here? I told your mama when you were born.”
The women in my family aged like trees. To Mama, Aunt Dissy was like a grandmama, more big mama than sister. Aunt Dissy was strong and clever, nimble-minded and sure. She pointed at a dark groove, a short river rolling across my palm. “Your love line all broken, your life line zagging, too,” she said. She traced the pattern with the red tip of her nail. “It’s all writ right here,” she said, her face resigned. “Cassie, you ain’t never going to be lucky in love, and you sho’ll ain’t going to be lucky