Bad Apple 1: Sweet Cider Read online

  “I saw that.”

  “It’s as if they’re acting out a movie.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “With nothing to go on, they can only look to a movie to tell them how to behave. Unfortunately, most movies they like are violent. They don’t...”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Have anything. Fighting at the bar is the only achievement, the only status, available to them. Being tough is a way for Toby to prove herself.”

  “What about Joe?”

  “Same thing but he’s not here. He’s doing it in Louisiana, I can guarantee it.”

  “So can I.”

  “You got his police records from New Orleans.”

  “Can I tell you that?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  We arrived at Janie’s house, the place where I lived, and he stopped the car close to the walk for me.

  “I don’t have reservations about you, Neal.”

  “You probably checked through all the report cards on me from school. ‘Keeps to herself. Straight A’s. Walks with scissors.’”

  He smiled at that. “This is a police investigation, I can’t talk about it.”

  “You probably know what I had for dinner last night.” I opened the car door.

  “That was a hamburger with Tru.”

  “I have no secrets anymore.” I got out and closed the car door.

  “Maybe you don’t need them anymore,” Steve said through the open window.

  Chapter 6

  Truly was parked outside my school waiting when I got out for the day.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Why should you be riding all around the countryside on a bus when you can just go straight home? We have to rehearse.”

  I opened the door and got in. “I didn’t say yes.”

  He started the truck. “Can we rehearse until you make up your mind? The date’s bearing down upon us.”

  “Shouldn’t you be looking for someone else in case I say no?”

  Truly turned to me in surprise. “You won’t.”

  “I might.”

  “If it makes you feel independent, you don’t ever have to say yes as long as you keep singing with the group.”

  “It’s not about being independent or trying to hold something over you. You have such a head start on me. You’ve been performing for years. Besides my so-called family, I never sang in front of anyone before you.”

  “Not even in school?”

  “I wasn’t good enough for chorus.”

  He laughed.

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “It’s like the AV Club, everyone is good enough.”

  I gave him a look.

  “You do have a distinctive voice.”

  Without knowing the right of it or the wrong of it, I just made the words conform to the melody. If I got up on a stage, I was afraid I would open my mouth and nothing would come out.

  He stopped the truck at Maude’s house. “Go clean up, then I’ll introduce you to the guys.”

  “Guys?”

  “It was always a four person group.”

  “I thought we were going to work on our own for a while,” I said walking to the door. I didn’t want to be humiliated in front of people already.

  “How do you feel about Southern Rock?” He followed me into the house.

  “That’s not traditional either.”

  “I know but you’re giving me ideas,” he called from the kitchen as I continued into the house.

  Maude appeared. “What kind of ideas, young man?”

  “Just music, ma’am,” I heard him say.

  Country. Bluegrass. Southern Rock. What was next on his agenda? And would I be familiar with it I wondered as I washed the school day from my face. Luckily, Paul had an extensive music collection that ranged over centuries and included just about everything except tunes played on spoons.

  When I got back to the kitchen, Maude was packing him a picnic basket of date bars, apples, milk and water to keep us going. She was completely behind the effort, more so than I felt.

  We walked the short way to the barn and found two guys there with everything set up already.

  “Neal, this is Quinn on percussion and Sonny on mandolin. Guys, this is Neal Marchal our new lead singer.”

  “Truly,” I said under my breath.”

  “I’m sorry, I got that wrong. She’s the hat-check girl.”

  “Oh, miss,” Quinn waved at me. “Do you have a pack of gum?”

  “Don’t tease her,” Truly said. “She may bolt.”

  I felt like leaving.

  “You’re not going to be handled with kid gloves. This is the real world,” Truly leaned in and whispered to me.

  “I need this, why?”

  “I need you. Are you staying?”

  “Yeah. What do you want me to sing?”

  “Midnight Rider.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Quinn asked. “We don’t do that kind of music. To review, we play traditional music, folk, regional, sea chanties.”

  “Is this a rebellion?” Truly asked.

  “It might be.”

  “Anyone who doesn’t want to do this, leave now and let me get on with it.”

  No one moved.

  “Should I take that as a sign of confidence?”

  “No.”

  “Neal?”

  “Midnight Rider. I suppose you have something in mind.”

  “Yeah. Sing it like you mean it.”

  I shook my head. All I could picture was the Allman Brothers in a stadium with ten thousand fans screaming so loud the lyrics were unintelligible.

  “You’re alone. You’re in trouble. You’re on the run. You’re broke. And you’re scared.”

  “What about...” I held up my fiddle. It wasn’t possible to sing and play the fiddle at the same time.

  He took it from me. “I’m playing it. You’re playing my guitar.” He pushed his guitar into my hands. “Is everyone okay with this or do we need group therapy?”

  Sonny shrugged. I pulled the guitar strap over my head. I had less experience with this than the fiddle. Years less. If he wanted to make me more uncomfortable than I already was, Truly had succeeded.

  He drew the bow across the strings of my fiddle and I immediately knew where he was going. I started to sing.

  Two bars later, he stopped me. “Don’t sing it like someone else sings it, sing like you.”

  “You do it.”

  “I don’t want you to sound like me. I sound like me.”

  “It’s a guy song.” I let my hand rest on the neck of the guitar.

  “Why.”

  “It’s full of swagger, arrogance. Not gonna let them catch me. Every criminal on the run boasts that.”

  “What if it was can’t let them catch me, instead?”

  “It changes the song completely, now it’s about fear.”

  Truly nodded. “Sing that song.”

  “It’s rock. It’s loud. It’s not sung, it’s screamed,” I pointed out.

  “Sing it like a ballad,” he countered.

  Quinn glared at Truly. “You’re delusional.”

  “I’ve been called worse.” Truly looked to me. “Prove me wrong. It’ll take three minutes then we can go back to singing about The Eddystone Light. Then the porpoise and the porgy and you all will be happy. No one will come to our concerts except the docents from the history museums and the first graders from the local grammar schools but we’ll be purists.”

  I put my fingers back on the strings of his guitar and he put my fiddle under his chin.

  Singing the lyrics his way, for the first time, I understood the song in a personal way. I didn’t know if he was following me or I was following him as we wound our way through the harmonies, somehow we wound up at the same place in the end.

  “Sorry, Tru,” Quinn said. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “I can do it better,” I apologized.

  “No, you can
’t.”

  I pulled the guitar strap from around my shoulders and held the guitar out to him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not good enough for the group, right?” I felt like I had lost something that I hadn’t known was important to me. Maybe if I moved in with Maude I could practice more, that way I wouldn’t be bothering Toby, raising her hackles, competing with her own favorite music blasting day and night. Maybe I could try again in a couple months.

  “You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Now we sound like something,” Sonny said. “Before we were just people playing together.”

  “You want me in the group?”

  “Yeah,” they said in unison.

  I leaned the guitar against a bale of hay.

  “Now what?”

  “I need to take a short break,” I replied and walked out of the barn.

  The smell of dry leaves was in the air, the sky was the color of dishwater. Making it to the bank of the creek, I sat on a flat rock.

  “The road ahead is like a river,” Truly said coming up behind me. He threw a fallen leaf into the water and it was carried away. “You step in it and you don’t know where it’ll take you.”

  “This is a big thing.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  I didn’t look up.

  “I told you that.”

  “I didn’t believe you.”

  He sat down next to me. “What do you have to lose?”

  “I don’t know. There’s plenty you could take from me.”

  “The same things you could take from me.”

  Everything up until this moment had been about loss. My mother, my father, the strength of my leg, Paul. What little I had left, I had clutched to me, protectively, silently. To make a sound was to be visible. To be visible was to become a target. I learned how to stay in the background, to fade away, to recede so they wouldn’t prey upon me when I had no way to defend myself.

  He was asking so much.

  I hadn’t thought any of this was a possibility for me. To sing and play music, that was for other people. I was the damaged girl who couldn’t get away. Now maybe I was just someone who had a bad leg. Lots of people had a bad leg. Maude had two bad knees.

  Truly stood and held out his hand to help me up.

  “Do you know how we’re going to do this?”

  He smiled. “Yeah. As a team.”

  Chapter 7

  With no electricity in the barn, we rehearsed until we couldn’t see each other without turning on the headlights of the trucks.

  Sonny and Quinn packed up, said goodbye and drove off.

  “Are you okay with this?”

  “You don’t have to keep checking on me.”

  “I don’t want you to run off. Hobble, in your case.” He picked up his guitar case. “If there’s something wrong, I want to fix it before it goes too far. I’ll take you back to the house.”

  “You better leave me at Maude’s.”

  “Why?” He asked we walked up the path.

  “I don’t want them to see you, to know there’s something going on.”

  “You won’t be able to keep it from them forever.”

  I knew that. Toby was a snoop of the first order. She could detect any change of energy in the force field like some bizarre early warning system.

  “How are you going to explain your absences? Did you ever leave the house on the weekend?”

  “That is a problem to be solved.”

  We stopped at his truck parked in the yard.

  “I know it seems complicated.”

  “Is complicated.”

  “My stepmother is freaking out this week. Next week, she’ll be better--for her--and I’ll ask if I can go stay at Maude’s until the semester ends because the workload is crushing or something. I’ll just never go back. As long as I don’t give the appearance of enjoying the move, it’ll be fine. They won’t object.”

  He started to say something but Maude came to the door and waved us inside.

  “Have some dinner.”

  “I couldn’t impose,” Truly said.

  “I already did all the extra work,” Maude said with her smile. “Besides, I have to find out what you two are up to down at the barn.”

  “The four of us, Maude,” I corrected.

  “That’s good. Wash up,” Maude said.

  I pointed Truly in the direction of the downstairs bathroom and he stopped me on my way up the stairs.

  “If you’ve had enough of me for one day, I’ll make an excuse and go.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had considered my feelings and hardly knew how to react. “You’re being just a little too nice to me.”

  “Suffer with me then, I’m hungry and staying to have dinner. And two pieces of pie for dessert. If you don’t like it, too damn bad.”

  I looked at him in shock.

  “Is that better for you?” He laughed.

  “Someone said you can’t trust happiness.”

  “Who was that idiot?”

  I shrugged.

  “Let yourself be happy, Neal.”

  ***

  We had dinner. Maude asked Truly a lot of questions to which he had all the answers. He described how he had been trying to climb up on stage for as far back as he could remember. It became obvious to his parents they’d have to find him teachers to keep him busy but that didn’t work, he still escaped to get up in front of people. He did anything, accompanied singers on the piano, or played in the school orchestra, studied, and took a great many lessons. He started this band over a year ago when his father transferred to this troop. During the summers, he attended music camps held at colleges around the country, like Interlochen this year.

  I had to envy him because all that training showed. Truly had all the benefits of a musical education and I didn’t. Paul did help me a good deal but he wasn’t a musician, he was just a music lover. Being in the band was going to be a crash course and I just hoped I’d be able to keep up with them.

  He had everything going for him. Maybe if my parents hadn’t died, my life would have turned out more like his. But maybe then I would never have learned how to play the fiddle and I wouldn’t have had to rely on music to survive the situation I was trapped in.

  Perhaps he felt me looking at him so he turned and gave me a smile. He was happy. His parents loved him and he loved them. He was safe. No matter what Truly did, there was no danger involved.

  Life is about challenges and disappointments. I was certain that when Ed left the band, Truly felt a loss after a partnership of a year. He thought they were working toward the same goal. Ed left. But Truly bounced back. A couple days later, he was at the cider mill trying to talk me into joining the group. There was no threat, it was just a bump in the road.

  Thirty years later, Janie was still crying over Big Man’s death. There was really something wrong with her. Medications and counseling hadn’t made one bit of difference. Everyone was forced to deal with her episodes. It was no stunner that no one wanted to stay in the house, except Toby, who figured she was going to inherit it at some point. They all wanted something and they were prepared to grab it at any cost.

  I think that’s what made him seem so alien to me. Truly was innately generous. He had plenty to give and no need to take.

  It scared me. I had been smart enough to resist the band but as soon as I saw it offering me the potential to get out of that house, maybe changing my life up just a little, I was there. Didn’t that make me just like the people I disdained at every turn? Was I going to use him? Was I already doing so? I didn’t want to be anything like them but maybe that’s all I knew anymore.

  “Neal. We’re talking to you.”

  I looked up. “What did you say?”

  Maude pushed another piece of apple pie toward Truly. “I asked what kind of songs you want to sing.”

  “I have no idea. Since it’s Truly’s band, maybe it should be up to him.”

  “If you leave
it up to me, you won’t believe what I’ll have you singing.”

  “I thought you did traditional music.”

  “To accommodate Ed,” Truly replied.

  “What’s changed?” Maude asked.

  “I have to accommodate Neal now.”

  Chapter 8

  In the dark, we walked to the cider mill and sat on the deck. Behind us and to the east, I could hear the water caressing the rocks in the streambed as it made its way to the river.

  “Don’t let me take advantage of you,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. “That’s a new take on things. Usually it’s the other way around, the guy is accused of taking advantage of the girl.”

  “This is going to be a different kind of relationship.”

  “Looks like it. How would you take advantage of me?”

  “Being in your band, looking forward, using that to improve my life.”

  “You’ll rehearse hundreds of hours, perform under crummy conditions, keep your grades up, get laryngitis constantly, bleeding fingers, endless arguments, boring road trips, cold and heat and lousy food, and in general put up with me, and let me clue you in on that, I’m no picnic, all for pocket change. But you’re taking advantage of me.”

  Neither of us said anything.

  “I like where your head is!” He gave me a big pat on the back.

  “Tru, I don’t think I’ll be ready for the canoe rental thing.” The date was rapidly approaching and I was sure no amount of practice could bring me close to their level of capability.

  “Let’s take one thing at a time. You’ll be ready. You know the songs.”

  He had put together a set of few songs I already knew well so I wouldn’t be starting from zero. There were additional songs he would take the lead on which they had performed many times before. Like a general preparing his troops, Truly thought of everything and had given me a portable media player with all the songs loaded so I could listen on the bus or at night to familiarize myself with the arrangements.

  “Once you start singing, you’ll forget about the audience.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Do you have any other non-problems?”

  “Don’t change the band because of me.”