The Radiance Midnighters
By late that day the sky above Radiance was a sunless gray-blue as I sat looking at store windows full of mannequins in dresses ten years out of style. I wandered, not sure what I would find or do, waiting for some sign. I filled myself up with Nabs from a machine beside a one-pump Mobil station, then walked the main street up and back without seeing a hint of a motel. A brick house with a caved-in roof promised rooms for rent on a sign hanging by a steel thread, a grocery store advertised dog bones and Bunny Bread, and past that a little boy with ripped sneakers was kicking an empty can, a rattle-rhythm against gravel and heaved-up concrete. I came again to the door of the warehouse-looking place I’d seen earlier. Couples held hands there, waiting at a sign that promised end-of-summertime fun.
I stood listening to a cowboy song as boots and dancing sounds floated out the open doors and landed right at my feet. Behind the song was a scratchy guitar strum and drumsticks stroking down.
“You want you a ticket?” A woman with a brown-gummed smile held up a tin can for my money.
Inside I stopped at a table with a coffee pot and bought a cup. A gymnasium floor was waxed to a glossy wood shine, bleachers laid out all along the far back. Against one side a table was set up with speakers big enough to come right out of a sixties dance, and they sent out shimmy-and-shake sound. On a stage an all-cowboy band was setting up a keyboard, a big bass, a set of drums. They wore matching ten-gallon hats and blue fringed shirts.
“The Radiance Midnighters,” a woman in boots said, like she was introducing them. She knocked a cigarette pack against her wrist and pulled one out, patted her pocket for a light.
A few ladies in crinoline skirts and cheerleader jackets stood along the opposite wall, waiting for their dance partners. One of them was by herself in the middle of the floor, her leather boots scuffing time.
“Not much of a crowd.”
“Usually starts that way,” she said. “But I hear they might bring on a guest tonight.”
“Who’d that be?” I took the cigarette she offered, twisted its end.
“Used to be, honey, you said the name Loving and the air in the room started dancing.”
My heart skipped its beat, held steady. “That so?”
“Wasn’t a finer fiddler to be found.”
“You mean Leroy Loving?” The name came small out of my throat and I breathed deep, wanting to ask her all she knew, but by then big folding tables and cast-iron kettles were being hauled into the gym and she hurried over to lend a hand. Scents rose, smoke and fatback frying.
Onstage the cowboys were tuning up, the whine of strings sounding as pegs were jacked up a notch or two. Metal sticks scratched against the skin of a drum, fingers felt for a pulse, notes as close to right as they could get out into the air. “Nothing sounds sweeter than the sound of somebody tuning up to God’s own key,” said a woman with a bag and a ball of bright green yarn as I took a chair next to her. Then a hush. Someone up there pushed his hat back, wiped his brow, straightened a lean tie. A finger tapped against a microphone and then hands clapped and feet stamped and there was shouting.
“Welcome them back, ladies and gents! The Radiance Midnighters!”
A bent-over old man in a brand-new denim jacket with a bandana tied around his head grabbed my hand.
“Just let me do the leading,” he said, but I waved him away.
“I don’t dance much, mister,” I said. “I’m more of a looker that way.”
He shrugged and took the hand of a blonde-headed teenager with pale pink lipstick. They launched into some dance between a two-step and a waltz and swept away toward the stage. Up there, the cowboy hats were shiny with age, the felt worn to a gloss.
An elbow poked me in the ribs. It was the Timberlands motel guy, scooted up so close to me I could smell his hair oil. “Here you go.” He passed me a jar, and I sipped as yodels led into rockabilly.
A farmer with overalls with a patch that said Betty took the jar from me. “What’s your name, little miss?”
“Miracelle,” I said. “Miracelle Loving.”
“Loving?” he said. “Loving’s a fiddle player if ever there was one.”
“What you know about that fiddler?” I began, but he was up and gone.
I stood with the crowd, songs mixing inside us, ones about lost lovers and sick babies and moons behind stars. Notes collided with the soft catch in the voice of a woman in spiky heeled boots who joined the cowboys for a round or two. The crowd cheered. The room tilted and righted with sipping, dancing, yodels, light from ropes of leftover blue and green and red Christmas lights at the back of the stage. Names at the back of my mouth burned fierce as the moonshine. Ruby. Cody Black. Love. That word circled and settled and stood up again in the middle of my chest. My head circled and hummed with the crowd on the dance floor, its crinoline skirts and overalls, its work boots and pretty Chinese slippers.
“Happen to know a guy named Loving?” I asked no one in particular, but the no-tooth woman who’d been the ticket seller had stopped beside me.
“I know about every soul around here.”
I went with it, dancing with her to the next tune. Patsy Cline, this time. I held on to her damp hands as the room whirled its skirts and dance shoes.
Then the stage went dark for a couple of minutes and the music we’d been hearing cranked down to the sound of chords slamming against chords and the crash of somebody into the drum stand, then voices. “I told you he’d drag ass up there again, and now look.”
The no-tooth woman was holding on to my shoulder as she pointed at the stage and whispered in my ear. “Loving? That’s him.”
A heavyset man with snow-white hair was seated, a fiddle across his lap. The stage went dark except for a lamp sitting behind his ladder-back chair. A low-watt spotlight on a strong-jawed face.
“Leroy Loving,” the no-tooth woman said again, but her voice was drowned out in a mix of applause and throat clearings and chuckles.
The band was doing a quiet tune-up, fixing all that was off kilter. A drummer trailed his sticks, testing the waters while another cowboy bowed and did the introductions. “Onetime greatest fiddle player these mountains has known, ladies and misters,” he said. “Radiance’s own.”
The old man’s fingers looped around the fiddle’s neck, his bow raised and another song began, this one so gentle it made me think of wind settling in a field below quiet stars. Behind him, song words. Sounds from one short draw, bow to strings. The refrain again. He raised the fiddle to the crook of his arm, his body quiet with the notes his bow sent out, the song a fierce wanting I’d felt all my life.
The tips of his fingers found this string, not that one, and a note shimmied and jumped. A shrillness hurt my ears and shame settled on his face as he lost his way in the song and couldn’t turn back, but I held still and followed where I thought he might have gone. If this was my father, the one I’d wanted all my life, where had he been? Here in these streets, their storefront windows broken and empty? When he fiddled a tune about loneliness, did he follow it down? Was I somewhere inside him at the end of a long road he tried to fill up with music? The stage stayed dark except for his face, its crags and hollows, and I held still, looking for myself.
The crowd tittered, then outright laughter was here and there. “Used to be the finest fiddler there was,” the no-tooth woman said as she handed me the liquor jar and I drank, deeper than I meant. “Just some sad old man now,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. Ruby’s voice was in my ear, soft as I’d ever heard it. Go slow, girl. He began to play again, and I listened like I was hearing about some home I’d never known so long and long ago.