Under The Lights, Make It Sing

Have you ever wondered how it might be that they seem to always come away clean?

They're cloaked in fame, of course. Most of the ones you know of, anyway. But there always seems to be a bit of magic, even for those whose lights only extend so far as the local bar.

And so that brings us, dear reader, to this week's story. When your heart leads you to sing, to the stage and the song and the power that comes along with it... what does it take to be called to account?

Under The Lights, Make It Sing - an In Council story by M. K. Dreysen

The guitar didn't have any particular heritage but that which the player who picked it understood. The doghouse bass thumping and slapping behind him brought it all along.

The mandolin should have sung out like the mockingbird it had been patterned after. Only the singer, all golden mane and silken red-gold beard and lean sinew, didn't so much play as he stood under the light and let his throat call the magic. He strummed his heart occasionally, the one he held there on his chest, but he'd committed to the voice that night, every night.

There in the ice house with the crowd spilling out under the stars. He let the humidity and the cold beer awaitin' sooth his throat. The crowd danced and he found it good.

He had eyes for all of them. The girls and the women, when they drifted past between sets, when they stood at the edge of the tiny little stage, he stood straighter and he sang softer and he looked at each of them in turn.

When she asked him about the mandolin, he told her, "It's my heart." The first of his lies, all of them true. "She keeps me company wherever I go."

He loved her eyes; he loved all of their eyes. Pools there of light and laughter and the lust that came with the songs. Especially the faster songs; he could sing of the high lonesome and the girl at home when he wanted to. But the Special and Uncle Penn and the highway songs called the ladies to the floor and asked them to lift their skirts and move their feet.

Which the mandolin player loved most of all. He sipped the cold beer and let himself drown in her eyes. "Does she help you sing the songs?" the lady asked.

The mandolin player spun stories for a living, in song or at the corner table where the crowd didn't linger. He knew the answers to a thousand questions, all of them variations of a pocket full of themes. He didn't often need to dig into the feel of his heart. Not anymore. "You're testing me, aren't you?"

She smiled. "Of course I am. Don't you test all of the ladies who work their way to this moment?"

He hid his return smile behind another sip of beer. "I wouldn't know what to do without a mandolin at my chest. This one time I tried to record..." and he told her of the producer who'd never managed to get a clean recording, not until the mandolin player had brought out his oldest friend and refused to sing without it strapped across him.

She nodded, laughter and something else shining from her eyes. "Do you need her with you for everything?"

****

He waited in the dark for the next round of questions. The ones about the road and when he planned on coming back this way. The answers, the stories there waiting on his tongue, would herald the second round of lovemaking.

"Do these little places make you happy?"

He remembered the arenas and the press of real crowds. His heart, the physical one, hammered at his chest; his heart, cased, stood in the corner and hummed along. He couldn't remember the last time the want the need the attention had called him this way.

The mandolin player had buried those desires, yeah he'd walked down to a crossroads and he'd dug a little patch of grass and dirt there and he'd poured out every bit of the songs that lead to fame and fortune into that red clay.

And he'd added a measure of vomit and tears and piss to that hole in the ground to go along with it. When he'd turned the earth three times more, he'd covered the hole in the ground with dead leaves and an old beer can bleached from the sun and he'd walked away from all of it.

For what, his heart whispered from the case in the corner?

For scams. Three counties where he didn't dare set foot under certain names because of the kited check list. The little bank robberies, but those at least didn't have his picture because hats disguises made a difference. Pill runs. Most of all a trail of lovers and broken hearts that he never needed to confront.

Varieties and flavors of a life of petty crime; the kinds of crimes that, if anyone had had the time and inspiration to look for and connect the dots to certain sorts of folk songs and stories of the singers and hill bandits that had gone before...

The mandolin player had heard of someone, someone who could, for the right kind of price, fix it so that no one could ever make those sorts of connections. Sure, suspicions might float but the world had its ways of disappearing. If you knew who to pay the price to.

He'd fallen on his knees in red dirt to rid himself of the desire for the big time. Erasing himself from the world had taken the work of another, someone more connected than a singer with a couple of accidental top 40's.

His heart thrummed in her case. The singer stared up in the dark and avoided the memory. The one that told him just how he'd acquired the mandolin he called his heart but couldn't stand to do more than strum occasionally.

"Yes, I do love these little gigs. They keep me sane."

****

It had been ages since the mandolin player had woken up second, and alone. It had been only a couple weeks. In another life, he'd have reached over for the mandolin, his old one that he'd sold on the day before he'd visited a blank spot on a map. Today, these days, he didn't reach for the instrument.

He no longer felt the need.

****

Martha Hazard set the mandolin, the heart of a curse or a blessing depending, in the corner of her couch. She stood the instrument up so that she could get a good look at it, before she cased it away.

She'd worked hard to find the copy. She'd sweated, more than just from the summer night's heat; Martha had known a musician or two.

She would have bet a lot of money that the fret board would have been marked by nicotine stains and hours, and the pickguard and the bowl back... but no. Martha had breathed a sigh of relief when she'd seen how little the singer played his instrument. And when she'd stepped close enough to verify it, and closer still as the night wore on...

Old good mandolins weren't vanishingly rare. Martha had found one to match, and then she'd worked and woven soft thoughts and warm songs into the strings, behind the sound hole, through the pegs and beneath the bridge.

Harmonies and chords of memory that responded to the bearer's emotions. Just as this one sitting on her couch did. The singer would know his heart by the way it hummed whenever he thought of the next scam, the next little robbery, the next dance with someone he'd never feel the need to remember.

But the blessing that protected and hid him from paying the price for his actions sat now on Martha Hazard's couch.

Martha nodded. Then she cased the singer's heart in a binding of leather and velvet and quiet so dense as to sever those threads of blessing.