Rufus pulled his cart further into town, walking on the edge of the road to save bumping up and down at each intersection. The aftershock of the police station troubled him all the way. That sense of having been under suspicion, set up for an interrogation and then…
That police officer.
Weird, Rufus thought, a momentary shiver running through his shoulders.
He didn’t know which was worse, the freakshow shadow mask, its jagged slit-mouth, or the cold and odd way the officer had mirrored his own speech and questions. And then that read-out of statistics, like he’d been reciting from Wikipedia or something. Two-hundred thousand this, one-hundred-and-fifty-odd that.
Weird.
* * *
People looked at him; of course they did.
This sleepy New England town didn’t often welcome a young drifter come to bring them song.
He was used to it; hardened against it.
Every so often, it was like the guy in the pick-up truck, the mask of initial interest dropping to reveal disdain, or even hostility. But mostly it was sidelong glances at his cart, his guitar, his unkempt hair. If he’d chosen to look back, they’d have looked away, suddenly interested by something they hadn’t noticed until that very moment.
But he didn’t.
He just floated down the street lost in thoughts of the police officer, the missing kid, and where he may find the chance to sing his songs.
Rufus walked on.
* * *
She was sitting on the steps outside a small indie record store called Tunes, black Converse boots, ripped black jeans; hair dyed to match. Heavy black eyeliner, porcelain skin. The piercing in her nose glimmered in the morning sunlight.
“Well, well, well,” she said, in an unmistakably British accent, “what do we have here?”
Rufus stopped walking, letting the handle of the cart lean back. He shook his wrist to loosen the muscles.
She smiled at him. Stood up. She must have been all of eighteen or nineteen, yet to fully lose her puppy fat, but close to the tipping point between child and adult.
Rufus opened his hands, spreading his arms wide and shrugging in answer to the question: me.
She burst out laughing.
“Seriously?” she smiled and Rufus found he couldn’t help but smile back.
He shrugged off his guitar, laid it on the cart and stepped up onto the sidewalk.
He nodded at the record shop.
“Buying something?”
“Nah. I help out here, couple of days a week.”
“Cool,” Rufus said, “mind if I wait with you?”
The girl shrugged, smiled a little.
Rufus sat on the steps next to her, leant back on the wall and, turning his face to the sun, closed his eyes for a moment. Inside his eyelids, he saw flickering lights and red vapor-trails. And all the while, unwelcome, the distorted freakshow mask threatened to intrude.
“Singer, huh?” the girl asked, and Rufus opened his eyes to look at her.
She was scanning the street, eyes ticking as her attention flitted from here to there; wary, suspicious.
“Yup,” he answered and offered his hand even though she was looking the other way, “Rufus.”
His hand hung in mid-air until she finally turned towards him.
“Oh,” she blushed, “sorry.”
She took his hand and shook it once.
“Danni,” she said.
“Pleased to meet you, Danni,” Rufus said and went back to staring at the back of his eyelids, to avoiding the troublesome memory of his mock-interrogation.
“So,” Danni asked, “you sing, right?”
“Yup. Singer-songwriter. Just another guy with a guitar, trying to change the world a little.”
“Ha!” Danni laughed.
Rufus looked at her but she’d already turned her attention to a passing motorcycle.
“What?” Rufus asked.
“You,” she said, watching the bike, “yet another too-skinny white boy with a dodgy beard thinking he’s the next Dylan.”
“Wait!”
Danni turned to look at him, a broad smile arcing across her face.
“Nah, come on. Tell me I’m not right. Tell me I didn’t just nail you.”
“But I…”
“Nailed you!” Danni smiled and held a hand out to him.
Rufus had no choice but to slap her five.
“Yup,” he said, “you did.”
They laughed a little.
“But someone’s got to do it,” Rufus said.
“Really?” Danni challenged. “Only it seems to me that you can’t go to a coffee shop these days without falling over some kid singing some old song about the nineteen-thirties or something.”
“I don’t…”
“Or getting all surf-waster-dude and trying to like, really, really, come across as authentically black, or…”
“I…”
“You’ve probably got a ukelele in there somewhere, haven’t you?”
Rufus burst out laughing.
“No,” he shook his head, submitting to the onslaught, “no, I haven’t.”
Danni stopped, blushed as she laughed.
“I should learn to shut my mouth, right?”
Rufus shook his head.
“Never,” he said, smiling at her.
“Still,” she said, “my gob does run away with itself, sometimes.”
Now she transferred all her attention to him, reaching out to take his hand and staring at him. Rufus was transfixed; there were flecks of amber in her hazel eyes, they seemed to glimmer in the morning sunlight.
The moment stretched.
“You’re a good man, Rufus the singer,” she said eventually, “better than you believe you are.”
“What? What do you…”
Danni dropped his hand, shook her head as if emerging from a dream.
“Oh, never mind,” she said, looking past Rufus now, further down the street, “here comes the boss.”
Rufus glanced that way and, sure enough, there was a guy coming towards them, carrying an enormous cup of coffee.
“Hi, Howard!” Danni exclaimed, standing up.
Rufus followed suit, getting to his feet as the guy arrived.
“Morning,” Howard said, sipping from his coffee.
Rufus couldn’t help but stare at the tattoo that ran up the guy’s neck and across half his face, like a beanstalk, like Jack would be climbing it any second to steal the giant’s golden goose.
“Nice ink,” he said.
As he looked closer, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the ink was hiding something, covering something up. It wasn’t an obvious scar or disfigurement, but… It just made him uneasy.
“This is Rufus,” Danni said, “he’s a singer, just got into town.”
Howard scanned the cart and guitar.
“Travelling light?” he asked.
Rufus shrugged.
“You know how it is.”
“Cool.”
Howard stepped between Rufus and Danni, pulled his keys from his pocket and unlocked the store.
“You looking to play?” he said.
“Sure,” Rufus answered, “as much as I can. You thinking here? I’ve done in-store stuff before.”
“Nope,” Howard said, “not enough room. Well, without moving tons of boxes first.”
He sipped from his coffee.
“He should try the Corner, whaddya think, Danni?”
“Sure,” she agreed, “it’d be a start. Jesse’s pretty cool.”
“The corner?” Rufus asked.
Danni pointed further down the road, in the same direction as the bike had gone earlier.
“Couple of blocks down,” she said.
“Coffee shop?”
“Nah. Book store. The Folded Corner.”
“Oh,” Rufus said, stepping down towards his cart, “I’ll go check it.”
“Cool,” Danni said, turning to follow Howard into the store, “catch you later.”
And with that, Rufus was alone on the sidewalk again.
He shouldered his guitar and pulled his trolley towards the The Folded Corner.
* * *
Rufus stepped through the door of The Folded Corner, and was immediately immersed in the calm, easy sense of sleeping books.
He knew without even looking that the store was empty of customers.
“Hi,” said a woman stepping out from behind the counter. She looked to be in her late-thirties, sandy hair, tie-dyed shirt. Sandals.
“Jesse?” he asked back.
The woman smiled.
“Yes, indeed,” she said, “and who might this be, who doth name me with nary a meeting?”
Really? Rufus thought.
“Rufus,” he said, offering his hand.
They shook.
“Pleased to meet you, Rufus,” Jesse said. “How may I assist?”
“Howard and Danni at the record store sent me over. I’m…”
“A wandering minstrel?” Jesse said.
When Rufus looked up at her, she was staring through the window, at his cart and guitar.
“Right,” he said.
“You should bring your belongings in,” Jesse smiled, “don’t want them purloined whilst we look the other way.”
“Good point.”
Rufus turned towards the door.
Jesse crossed to the counter, to grab a mug of hot coffee, which she sipped as she watched him pull his cart into the shop. She didn’t offer to help.
Rufus parked up, then stretched his arms high above his head; joints and sinews cracked loudly.
“Ouch!” Jesse laughed.
Rufus smiled back.
“It’s not so bad,” he scanned the store. “Busy day.”
Jesse waved a hand, dismissing his sarcasm. She nodded at his guitar.
“So, what do you play?”
“Oh… er… songs,” Rufus stammered, surprised to be down to business so quickly.
“You don’t say,” she smiled, and Rufus blushed afresh.
He breathed for a moment, calming himself.
“I sing the music that is in my heart and soul. I sing to change the world a little for the better. I sing because I have no choice but to do so.”
He paused, staring at her expression; blank as an page yet to be written.
“What?”
She didn’t speak, just smiled at him.
“What?” he repeated, growing tense.
“You speak of your muse with eloquence, my friend,” Jesse said.
You don’t know how often I have to explain myself, Rufus thought, and that was boilerplate.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Though I admit to a suspicion that, while you are able to speak to your muse, you have yet to truly experience its power.”
“Huh?”
“You have yet to inhabit your muse, young man,” she smiled.
“I don’t…”
“Sing for me,” Jesse said.
“Huh?”
“Sing for me.”
And she pointed at his guitar, moving her hand to a reading area back through the bookshelves.
“Now?” Rufus asked, unsettled by the request.
“Well,” Jesse said, walking past him, towards the reading area, “it’s not as if we will disturb a reader’s rhapsodic immersion in the printed word.”
Rufus stared after Jesse and, when he realized she wasn’t turning back, grabbed his guitar.
* * *
He sang, he explained, he blushed, he smiled.
He dived into the deep pool of her attention and acceptance.
And swam in the energy growing behind the book-cases of The Folded Corner; his muse feeding and enriching him with every strummed chord.
* * *
An hour or so later, Rufus was disturbed mid-song by a ringing bell, as an older gentlemen stepped into the shop.
Jesse leant over in her chair.
“Richard!” she exclaimed, jumping to her feet and rushing through the bookshelves.
Rufus sat for a moment, wrestling a strong and sudden sense of abandonment. One moment, she’d been listening to him, wrapped in the music, and then… Then she was gone.
Weird, he thought.
Moving on autopilot, he put his guitar back in its case and then followed Jesse back to the front of the store.
At the counter, she was in deep discussion with the old guy, pointing at the pages of a moth-eaten, brown-paged book.
“Um,” Rufus mumbled, not quite knowing what to say.
Jesse looked up from the book as if seeing him for the first time, as if surprised to find him there.
And Rufus felt another twinge of hurt.
“Oh,” she said, “oh yes… Erm… How about the eve of the morrow, seven until nine?”
“Uh,” Rufus began, adrift and unsure, “sure… That works. Yeah.”
“Then to the morrow it is,” Jesse said, and returned her attention to the book.
Rufus stood for a moment, his feet rooted to the spot. He watched their conversation, waiting for… Waiting for what? The warmth he’d felt back in the reading section, singing for her, sharing his stories and songs, it was already fading to memory.
Eventually, Rufus shook his head, crossed to his cart and made his way back out to the street.
He half expected her to call some Shakespearian parting words, caught himself actually listening for them.
But they never came.
Rufus stood, alone on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next.
Main Street blazed in the midday sunshine.
Despite the weirdness of his reception at The Folder Corner, Rufus had lived this particular movie more than enough times.
“Find somewhere to sleep,” he said to himself and walked back towards Tunes and, beyond, a coffee shop he hadn’t yet discovered.
RUFUS – A NOVEL is a novel-in-progress by Vincent Tuckwood, a Brit author living and working in Waterford, Connecticut, USA. Read more by Vincent Tuckwood.
