Hello Stranger
LIFE HAS A WAY OF moving on. The weather changes for better or worse, friends come and go, surprises wait around the corner, realities make themselves felt. You adjust, tacking into the wind or sailing large before it. Heartbreaks recede into memory. Wounds heal. Your wake lengthens behind you. Your horizon still appears far away. And so Taz Blackwell sailed on. Only sometimes it seemed more like rowing.
He had promised himself not to play the romantic fool again. Two times was plenty; the first drove him to the Island, the second nearly drove him off again. The scars from folly number two were still tender.
Taz was counting on a quiet day. He had two reports to finish for State’s spooks—the Bureau of Intelligence, Narcotics, and Research. INR’s check would cover his immediate expenses, not to mention clearing his tab at the Pony Pines, the Island’s only bar of note. As to the mortgage on the waterman’s cottage he called Dachateague, the next payment would have to wait for the check from the World Bank. The one to pay for the time spent on a report for his friend Valentina Belin, the director of the Bank’s environment program. Her request had been urgent—they always were—but the Bank’s payment schedule was correspondingly relaxed. Taz
had kept her voicemail. Valentina was Bulgarian by birth, and Taz enjoyed the Balkan rhythms and dark tones of her voice.
“Taz. Shake the sand out of your shoes. I need your help. An independent look at the final draft of our forest conservation strategy. Looks to me like they’re papering over a lot of problems. Our forest loan program in a dozen countries depends on getting it right. You were one of the culprits who got the damn thing started. You owe me. Oh, yeah . . . love, Valentina.”
There were days now when all that seemed so far away. The world of tense late-night negotiations and boring banquets, of deals and runarounds, alliances and deceptions, and words, words, words. The presidency had changed hands and the new denizens of the West Wing were markedly unmoved by his briefings on the country’s environmental challenges. Soon enough, the political purge he knew was coming reached his level and he was liberated from the diplomatic grind, perhaps for good.
The interruption in his career had coincided with the dissolution of his marriage and left him little reason to hang on in the nation’s capital. He took refuge on the Island. After five years, and despite his second romantic fiasco, he had few regrets. These days, he made his living doing odd carpentry jobs, giving guitar lessons, and consulting, which his local friends dubbed “running errands” for his former colleagues. Sometimes the errands meant producing policy analyses for State’s upper echelons or assisting the formulation of diplomatic strategies. Other errands were more operational. The last mission of that kind had pitted him against the Russian ambassador to Iceland, and very nearly cost him his life.
When work slowed, or on the gray and wet days, he read. Napier’s history of the Napoleonic war in Spain. The Colombian novelist Alvaro Mutis. Flann O’Brien’s Irish comic masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds:
“Is it life? I would rather be without it,” he said, “for there is queer small utility in it.”
Taz opened a new recording by Lucinda Williams. He sat at the kitchen table, listening closely as the Louisiana songstress cycled her blues-drenched voice through moods from loneliness and a tired resignation to defiance and a steely determination to go on. He kept looking at the telephone pad with his list of chores. A good day to spend some time ripping out the rotten dock planking that had been nagging at him all winter. Or to load and haul the half ton of broken cinderblock riprap that he needed to protect his marsh grass. He only had about a hundred and fifty feet of shoreline on Chincoteague Bay, but he figured that if he correctly shaped the riprap, it would hold enough marsh grass to shelter at least a small colony of mud fiddlers, snails, mussels, baby blue crabs, and migrating elvers.
First, the dishes. He handwashed the glasses and the few plates and forks. He considered his dog-eared to-do list for a moment, smiled to himself, turned it over, and threw on a threadbare yellow beach shirt. Retrieved his old cherry-red dreadnought guitar and pocketed a bottleneck, a capo, and picks. With his guitar in one hand, he used the other to pour some black coffee, which he carried steaming to the front stoop. He sat on the hard-brush welcome mat; the cracked concrete of the steps was still cold.
It wouldn’t be cold for long. The sun had shed its cloud cover and was just beginning to enforce its warmth on the early morning. Taz nestled the guitar on his thigh and fingered the strings. Tried a few scales and then some random noodles, a little Travis picking, some arpeggios. Moved on to a few of Jerry Garcia’s solo lines. Jerry had been the melodic and spiritual inspiration of the Grateful Dead, his favorite band after Count Basie. Taz had learned the styles and tunes he played by ear, and the best way he knew to sharpen his chops, as the jazz players would put it, was to get as close as he could to Garcia’s free-wheeling sense of melody. When he found a hook, he explored it, relaxed into its groove, then tried a variation or two, enjoying the feeling of happy anarchy that allows a melody to sing, float, trip over itself, and return home.
A flash out of the corner of his eye; two lithe young women in yoga
outfits running down South Main in his direction. They smiled and waved as they passed. Short-time come-heres getting their late morning exercise.
Taz raised his picking hand to wish them well. He recalled seeing the duo wandering through the Saturday market on the grassy expanse outside the Church Street Community Center. He had them at their mid-to-late twenties. They had drawn the attention of most of the men in the crowd. That is, until various wives and significant others gave their partners a gentle nudge—or, if required, a strategic elbow. When they left, the blonde slid into a yellow Fiat convertible with blue and gold plates, and the dark- haired one jumped into a shiny, maroon Jeep. Taz’s friend Cliff Custis, who sold the middle and top-neck clams he dug at fifteen dollars a fifty-count bag, and often unloaded forty net bags on a sunny market morning, smiled with him as they drove off. “You don’t see that every day.”
The blonde was running closest to Taz. Just as they reached the corner at Beebe Road, her partner braked, circled back, stopped in front of him, hands on knees, dark eyes on his, breathing hard. “Sorry. How much farther to the end of the Island?” Sweating, catching her breath, trying her best to smile. Her black hair tinged with red and cut just short enough to reveal her neck and shoulders.
Taz’s attention remained fixed on a chord progression that he knew damn well he didn’t have right. After a moment he looked up. “That’s kind of an existential question. Are we talking miles or years?”
She straightened and made the sign of the cross. Rolled her eyes. Took a deep breath. “Save me Lord. Miles?”
“Two, maybe a little more. You’ll see a little bohemian trailer camp on your right, and a big marina on your left. There’s one other hard-to-miss signal. You won’t be able to go any farther south without a swimsuit.”
She shook her head. “Can’t laugh . . . breathing too hard. Gotta run. Maybe later?” She mopped a little sweat off her brow, brushed her hair out of her eyes, trotted back towards her pal, patted her on the backside, whispered something in her ear. A quick glance back at Taz and they were on their way.
Taz tried a few tunes, fingerpicking and shimmying the bottleneck for another quarter of an hour or so. Then he leaned his guitar against the rusty iron piping that served as a rail for his front steps. A little sun wouldn’t do the soundboard any harm. He finished the last of his coffee
and watched a trawler chug south towards the Chincoteague Inlet. Smiled at the raucous cries of the laughing gulls that trailed the boat like a plume of white and black cinders floating above a burning house. He reflected on the lamentable state of his love life, which had barely risen from the ashes of his romance with Dana Bonner. Dana was Taz’s second romantic failure, the one that about blew him off the Island. He hadn’t seen anyone in the year since they called it quits, at least not for any length of time—hadn’t wanted to. Life was certainly less complicated that way. Sometimes, he even thought he liked it, or at least that’s what he told Laney. Laney Langer, his closest friend on the island and the co-owner of Rainy Day Books, a Chincoteague institution for two decades.
Taz’s friends, his guitars, and his surroundings kept him well enough entertained. On the hard days, he grabbed his binoculars and biked to the beach to watch the shorebirds or climbed in his truck to explore the backroads of the Eastern Shore.
Taz visited the bathroom and then lifted another longneck from the refrigerator, thinking about which of the INR reports he should turn to first. The beer was reassuringly cold. He found the church key and pried off the top. Caught the sound of women’s voices, seemingly close by. He took a look back through the screen door. The two runners, now exhausted, were sitting on his stoop, sweating, still breathing hard, admiring the view. He stood in front of the refrigerator for a minute, weighing the potential entertainment value of joining them against the looming deficit in his accounts. The bottle was beading with condensation as he took his first step towards the stoop.
The two runners looked up as the screen door closed behind him. Using his hand like the bill of a baseball cap, he slowly scanned the horizon. “Any port in a storm?”
“Oh, come on.” Deep breath. “You have a nice view.” The black-haired one with the ironic smile, looking up towards him and shielding her eyes from the sun. “You should share it. I bet you can do the welcome, stranger thing better than that.”
“I’m a little out of practice.” He glanced at her and pointed to the
sign at the entrance to his dock. Six feet off the ground, crimson, the size of an extra-long license plate. A silhouette of a tortoise and the words Fear the Turtle etched in black. The symbol of the University of Maryland Terrapins—the Terps, to their fans. Taz wasn’t much interested in college football. He had played soccer in college. That and baseball were the sports he enjoyed, but he liked turtles, and the message was occasionally helpful. The black-haired one rolled her eyes and made a sound halfway between a yelp and a sneeze. “Oh, sure! That will definitely keep the bad
guys away.”
Taz gave her an appraising look. “And the bad girls at bay. At least that’s what they told me when I bought it.” She shrugged and averted her eyes. Turned again, settled a quizzical gaze on him. Her dark hazel-green eyes showed flecks of gold as the gaze made way for a hesitant smile that was easy enough to return.
“Soooo . . . right. I should’ve known it wouldn’t work. I found it in the hermits’ aisle at the Dollar Store.” She closed her eyes and gave a polite little snort. Taz rambled on. “Let’s start again. Welcome to Chez Taz!’ You must be parched after your run. I’ll bet you could use some water.”
“We brought our own water.” Hazel-eyes again. She made a little duck call out of the corner of her mouth and smiled, pointing to a half-empty Perrier in her hip holder. She wasn’t about to make this easy.
“Well, that is a problem.” Taz ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve got orange juice . . . and . . . I think cranberry.” The dark one, eyebrows raised, seemed less than impressed. “Right — two-thirds of a sunrise.” He sighed. “Out of tequila.” She drummed her fingers lightly on her lips. He could swear her eyes actually twinkled. Two strikes, one more swing. “However, I do make a hell of a mimosa.”
The blonde leapt to the bait. “Mimosas!” Hazel-eyes smiled, nodded her assent. Taz headed back to the kitchen, wondering at the detour his day appeared to be taking. He pulled a bottle of cava and some grapefruit juice from the refrigerator. Found a glass beer pitcher in the lower cabinet, opened the ice drawer, and started ice-mining; his freezer tended to cycle up and down around the freezing point, and the ice frequently congealed into
unwieldy clumps. He used a screwdriver to wedge two large agglomerations off either side, tossed them on the cutting board. Called in the direction of the front door, “I could use a little help in here, you know.”
The feisty one appeared in the door frame. She walked slowly through his rather simple wood-paneled living room, casting a quick gaze here and there. Over the winter, Taz had replaced the old pine slat walls with birds-eye maple fitted on a forty-five-degree slant. The maple shone in the morning light from the two windows facing the side of the front stairs. She brushed the satin surface with her fingers, looked his way with a smile. “You?” He nodded, eyed the ice, reached in the bottom drawer for a hammer. “You have a good eye for wood.”
She paused on the dividing line between the old oak flooring of the living room and the linoleum in the kitchen, as if she was unsure he’d want her to enter. Taz turned her way, dipped his head towards the little round kitchen table. “Despite what you may have heard, I don’t bite.” She smiled hesitantly, stepping to the right to avoid blocking his way to the refrigerator. Stood on the other side of the table with what Taz figured was an unfortunately good view of his bedroom, past the louvered sliding doors that his friend Jimmy had helped him install two years back.
Which were wide open. Not much to see, Taz reflected, except a cheap chest of drawers, a yellowing poster from Les Enfants du Paradis that he had found in Paris years before, and a writing table piled with books. At least he had straightened the bedcovers.
He pulled a glass beer pitcher from beneath the sink. Made himself busy bashing the ice clusters with the side of the hammer, a process he hoped might distract her from further investigations. His third hammer blow launched a cluster of ice cubes off the cutting board and sent it skittering across his little round breakfast table like a hockey puck. She caught it one- handed as it flew off her side of the tabletop. Without thinking, Taz tossed out the line old-time baseball announcers used when a fan of the female persuasion caught a foul ball. “Gold glove for the lady in the front row.”
An arch smile as she came around the table to slide the chunk slowly into the pitcher: “So how can I help? I mean since you have the ice thing
so well under control.”
“Yeah.” Taz grimaced, using the hammer to point to the upper cabinet above the kitchen sink. “There are some champagne flutes up there.” She stretched unselfconsciously to reach the top shelf, the easy arch of her back flexing as she plucked the glasses one at a time. A graceful turn as she placed them on the table with more care than they deserved. He trained his eyes on the pitcher while he poured the juice and the cava. She smiled, aware of his interest, then turned and gently rubbed the back of the nearest of his wood-slatted kitchen chairs, watching him mix the mimosas, swirling the chunks of ice that had actually managed to make their way into the pitcher. Straight stance, shoulders back, she was within two or three inches of his five-foot-eleven. Dark eyes with a hazel tint, keenly intelligent. An ironic but attractive smile. Not at all nervous. She carried herself with a certain confidence that suggested she could be fierce. A narrow waist leading to slim hips and long legs. Exquisite standing there, supple when she moved. He did his best to resist smiling.
She lowered her gaze briefly, amused by the evident impact she was
having on him. Then she continued her visual tour, allowing her eyes to linger on his corner cabinet, where he had a heavy copper ashtray with a small collection of carved birds, a turtle carved from ironwood, and a hand-cast golden raven amulet that had been given to him by a friend from Norway’s far north. He followed her progress with an amused smile. “Do I pass inspection?”
She brought her eyes back to him. “Totally charming. Home away from home?”
“Just home.”
For a brief moment, their eyes locked. Hers held a question. “You’ve done a lot of work on it.”
“It’s pretty quiet here in the winter.”
She raised her eyebrows, then continued survey. Her sweep was arrested by the gallon-jug of Tabasco on the corner of the counter nearest the stove. “There must be a story behind that.”
“There is. But it’s a long one.”
A short laugh. “Of course. The deepest, darkest, spiciest Tabasco secret of all. You can’t reveal that to just anyone.” Her voice was infused with a kind of comic sarcasm, and a smile had just begun to light the corners of her eyes.
Taz handed her mimosa number three, took the first two in either hand. Bowed slightly and swept his left arm low and backhand to suggest that she take the first steps to the door.
When they got back to the stoop, the feisty one’s pal was fingering Taz’s guitar, trying to strum a few basic chords. Her straw-colored hair was fixed in a slightly ragged bun. Blue eyes. Freckles. Nice smile. She had the build of a serious athlete—strong arms and shoulders, a runner’s calves. “Sorry, I was just curious. But I can’t make the chords work.” Frustrated. “I didn’t think you would mind.”
Taz placed his mimosa on the brush mat, put hers on the step next to her. “I don’t. But she’s in a different tuning than you’re used to.”
“There’s more than one? Tuning, I mean?” She strummed another discord and grimaced. The feisty one found a place next to her on the second step.
“Sure.” He smiled. It wasn’t the time for a long explanation. He sat back on the upper step, tasted his mimosa with a smile. Glanced at the blond. “The mimosa—you’re meant to drink it.” He bent and cupped his ear to listen. “It’s feeling unloved.” Took a long sip from his, his eyes on her. She laughed and followed suit.
“So, you speak mimosa?” Hazel-eyes, smiling, pert. “Or who knows?
Maybe you’re multilingual.”
“I’m fluent in martini. But I’ve only just begun flirting with negroni.” Her eyes went beyond a smile to something more like merriment. “It’s really quite complex. Grammatically, I mean. Maintaining correct syntax becomes almost impossible after three.”
She rolled her eyes again, but she couldn’t entirely suppress a laugh, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. Her friend—Taz had decided she would be called Sandy—was watching the exchange, her arm resting easily on the guitar. “I’m just starting lessons. You sounded good
as we were passing by. How long have you been playing?” “Since high school.”
“Wow, that’s a long time.” He winced. “Ouch.”
“That didn’t come out quite right, did it?”
The dark-eyed one rescued them, gently lifting the guitar out of Sandy’s hand. “Play us something?” With great care, she handed him the Guild D-25 dreadnought that he’d been playing since he was seventeen, bought with summer money made driving pilings in creek bottoms for the Palo Pinto County survey crew. All mahogany, a little worn and nicked, particularly around the pickguard, with the dark cherry finish that Guild bestowed on a few of their better models.
“Sure.” Taz thought for a few moments. He caressed the guitar, tapped a random rhythm on the pickguard. Hazel eyes was having difficulty disguising her doubt that he’d be any better than the college boys who built entire repertoires on three folk chords.
Taz scratched his neck, still undecided. Finally strummed a modified D chord, then the opening of “Hello Stranger.” He played it fingerstyle, using a church lick, the way Mother Maybelle did in her famous 1930 recording session.
Hello stranger
Put your loving hand in mine Hello stranger
Put your loving hand in mine You are a stranger
And you’re a friend of mine.
Well I’ll see you
When your troubles are like mine I’ll see you
When your troubles are like mine Yes, I’ll see you
When you haven’t got a dime.
Raven. Somewhere after the second verse, Taz decided that was what she should be called. She had the crooked smile of a trickster. So, there were only three choices, really. Fox, Coyote, Raven. It had to be Raven. The subtle flashes of red in her black hair shone, and she was light on her feet, as if she could take flight at any moment. Now she looked down, then turned to meet his eye.
“So. A girl makes one snarky comment. And you come back with that? For God’s sake don’t tell me you just made it up!”
“It’s a Carter family tune. Doesn’t get much airtime on top-forty radio.”
“Which is what you imagine I listen to?” Indignant.
Taz shifted his guitar under his left arm and leaned forward so that his chin rested on the heel of his right hand. He pondered the question. “Actually, I see you more as the techno type.”
“You know, if I could reach you, I’d pop you one.”
Taz laughed, thinking he might get to like her. Except she’d be gone by the weekend. He’d be better off not wading in too deep. “Seriously, I doubt if you’d know most of the tunes I play. They’re from the Dustbowl—the Depression era.”
“The Depression? Really? Wasn’t that kind of a long time ago? I mean, there’s been a lot of music since then, you know, soul, rock, roll, punk, hip-hop, all of that. The Beatles, for God’s sake.”
“I just like the style.”
“Hate to tell you, but you’re not that old.” “Maybe I’m older than I look.”
She snorted delicately. “Oh, for sure. You’ve got at least three years on me, practically grandfather material. And your guitar is a she? Now that’s old.” Wagged her finger at him, the way a soccer player denies a foul. “You could be tagged with a gender faux pas—and being a senior citizen won’t protect you.”
Taz turned to Sandy, with a back-hand hitchhiker’s thumb in Raven’s
direction. “You didn’t tell me your pal was with the gender police. But I guess it figures, being from California and all.”
“How did you—”
Raven jumped in. “Right. That’d be the coast that’s actually made it out of the nineteenth century.” She shot him a dirty look. Taz continued fixing his eyes on Sandy.
“You’re a long way from home.”
“Tell me. Seems like we’ve been through every state in between.” Nodded at Raven. “She’s never seen a detour she didn’t want to take.”
“Me either. The most interesting paths start as detours, don’t you think?”
Raven seemed at a loss for words. “You don’t seem like an Easterner all that much. You’re not uptight enough. So does your guitar have a name?”
“Big Sister.”
“That’s kind of an odd name for a guitar, isn’t it? Aren’t you supposed to give it a real name? I mean BB King called his Lucille.”
“She’s the eldest member of my little guitar family, you know, the bossy one. I’ll introduce you sometime, I mean if you’re really interested.” She raised an eyebrow at the challenge. “You don’t trust me at all,
do you?”
“I didn’t want to presume.”
“Maybe you’re being a little too careful.”
“After a good enough sunburn, you can’t blame someone for using sunscreen.”
She looked him in the eye. “I wonder. Maybe, if you ever deign to tell me about the sacred Tabasco, we could discuss the ups and downs of sunscreen. I’ve heard that if a person uses too much, it can have some unintended side effects—even freeze you right up.”
Sandy piped up: “Any chance of an encore?”
“Sure, if you want.” Taz looked over his shoulder and lifted the bottleneck, put it in the pocket of his shirt. The cloth was so threadbare it barely disguised the bronze color of the glass. He thought for a second and pulled it back out.
Raven looked at it in horror. “Wait. Did you get that out of a dumpster? That’s not even a real slide. You’re going to play that beautiful guitar with something that looks like it came off a broken wine bottle?”
Taz shook his head, suppressed a smile. He slipped the bottleneck on the ring finger of his left hand, swept it up the neck to get the high shimmying tones he was looking for and then began double thumbing a blues scale for the bass. It was a sound he’d liked since he first heard Blind Willie McTell as a teenager.
If I lose, let me lose,
I don’t care how much I lose If I lose a hundred dollars
while I’m trying to win a dime, ‘cause my baby,
she’s got money all the time.
Raven grinned. “Ooh, I like that one. Cavalier.”
He played another verse or two. “From the thirties. Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers. Cavalier is a good word for them.”
Sandy, staring at him, open-mouthed. “How . . . where did you learn to play like that?” Her cell phone lit. She listened for a few seconds, then turned to Raven. “We’ve got to go.”
Raven was sitting on the first step, Taz on the third. She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Taz. Taz Blackwell.” He was about to ask hers, thought better of it. Didn’t really matter; it wasn’t like he was going to see her again anyway. “And by the way, where I’m from, both coasts look pretty good.”
“Okay, I have to ask.”
“Mineral Wells.” She was completely at a loss. “Texas—west Texas.
The Brazos country—out where it starts to get dry.”
Raven, somewhat abashed, said, “Aren’t you a surprise.” Regaining her composure, she continued, “Well, Señor Taz from Texas, let’s say I’m actually interested in antiquarian music. Where do I go? I mean to slake my thirst for your catalog of happy tunes from yesteryear?”
Taz liked how quickly she coined a phrase. “There’s an eight o’clock jam on Friday at the Rainy Day bookshop. South end of the downtown business district, just by the old bridge. That’s why I’m practicing.”
Sandy reappeared, snapping her cell phone shut. “Doesn’t seem like you need a lot of practice.”
“Trust me, we all do.”
Sandy put her lips to Raven’s ear, whispered something that Taz didn’t try to work out. Raven pulled herself up, took the first step to the street. A glance over her shoulder: “We’re having dinner with some friends that night. So, if we don’t make your jam, it’s not that we aren’t—I’m not—interested.”
Taz offered a silent toast with the remains of his mimosa.
Raven and Sandy exchanged a private look, sprang off the stoop, and trotted up Main Street. After they had run past at least twelve houses, Taz watched to see which one they were staying in. He was pretty sure they turned in at the driveway of the only other yellow house on his end of the Island.
