Crickets, Part 4
Part 4 of 4
This is chapter four of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.
Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner
Fourth Movement
It doesn’t take long to tell the whole story, though I have to start all the way at the beginning.
“It was freshman year,” I say. “My dad had just died, and we were pretty much broke after the hospital bills, so we had to sell our house and move in here. I somehow got it into my head that I had to be strong now that Dad was gone, so if I ever felt like I was about to cry, I went into the woods to be alone.”
I’ve never told anyone this before, but instead of looking pitifully at me, Emily is just nodding, like yeah, she can understand that.
“One night, I heard someone playing the violin. I thought it might be someone from school, or—I don’t know what I thought, actually. I just knew I had to find whoever was playing. The woods back there aren’t real woods. There used to be dirt roads and stuff for construction vehicles, so there are little trails that haven’t grown all the way over yet. I picked one that seemed like it went in the right direction and a few minutes later I found Fours’ campsite.”
“Fours? Like the number?”
I shrug. “That’s his name.”
“Weird,” she says. “And he taught you to play the violin?”
“He asked if I had anything to eat, and I said no. I went back a couple times, but he wasn’t always there. I think the first thing I brought him was a granola bar. He played a song and then asked me to copy him. I’d never been able to learn by ear before, but I got close on the first try, and he said I could try again next week.”
“And it’s always Thursday?” She’s leaning forward now, hanging on every word.
“I didn’t pay attention at first, but yeah, I guess so. Thursday works for my schedule because I don’t have work and my mom isn’t here.”
Emily sits back, satisfied. “I should have known,” she says. “You’re way too good at the violin.”
“You’re better than I am,” I point out.
“I started playing when I was four. My parents were intense about it, and it made me really competitive. I’ve only ever known one person who was better than me, and you could be her ghost.”
The Prokofiev sonata, I realize. She picked it because she used to play it with her friend, and I just happened to pick the same song. That’s why we were able to play so well together.
“I guess so. It doesn’t technically prove anything.”
“True,” she says. “But the way I see it, there are three options. Option one, you met a Norwegian fairy in the woods behind your house and traded leftovers for magic violin powers. Option two, you met an elderly homeless virtuoso violinist in the woods behind your house and traded leftovers for magical violin powers. Options one and two are both crazy.”
“What’s the third option?”
“You’re full of shit and you’re just trying to lure me into the woods.”
Mom comes in right at the worst possible time, because this is a thing that moms do. “He better not be,” she says with a sharp glare.
Emily flashes a mysterious smile that I can’t interpret and will probably never forget. But we can’t really talk about Fours any more now that Mom is here, which puts an end to the conversation for now.
***
Emily presses me for details at school, but I’ve already told most of the story and don’t have much else to add. I try my best to dig up anything I might have forgotten. It’s thrilling to know that she’s obsessed with something I told her, that she’s thinking about me when I’m not around.
And I can tell she’s still thinking about it because I see little signs every now and then. In her notebook, she circles the 4/4 time signature on a piece of music and writes “Fours?” next to it in blue colored pencil. She checks out weird books from the library and gets defensive when I ask her about them.
“It’s better than looking it up on the internet,” she argues. “Every website just quotes the same two paragraphs from every other website.”
A week later, she brings a map to school—an honest-to-god printed map, like you get from a gas station—and asks me to point to Fours’ campsite. I do so.
“Aha!”
The reason for this outburst is that the road behind his campsite runs north-south, which means that he’s technically on a north facing overlook, which I could’ve told her. I tell her that a road isn’t the same thing as a waterfall, but she points out that lo mein isn’t the same thing as mutton, as if that proves her point and not mine.
We talk about other things, of course. The Halvorsen symphony isn’t incredibly challenging, but it is long, and practice runs late pretty much every day. It’s surprising to me how unmotivated some of the second violins are, and Emily says the same thing about her section, but maybe this is just what normal looks like when you’re as addicted as we are.
After practice, Emily gives me a ride home and waves to my mom from the driveway as I grab my backpack and violin case from the backseat. It strikes me that she wouldn’t spend this much time with me if she didn’t like me, but I can never work up the courage to say anything during the ride home, and by the time we turn into my shitty trailer park, I’ve talked myself out of it again.
It isn’t long before this frustration bleeds over into other parts of my life. I start to hate my job at the hardware store. I’ve been working myself ragged for years, and I still don’t have enough money for college or a car or anything. It’s like no matter what I do, I can never make any real progress.
One day, while I’m stocking shelves, I realize that my hands have spent more time holding plastic than anything else: walkie talkies, barcode scanners, credit cards, box cutters, shopping baskets, door handles, nametags, spray bottles, stretch wrap, polyester work shirts, the wringer handle of a yellow mop bucket. Somebody once told me that human fingers can feel changes in texture as small as a thousandth of an inch, and I hate the way that touching plastic doesn’t feel like touching anything at all.
A few weeks before the winter concert, Emily passes me a note after class. Finally, I think, because there are only two things this note can be. Best case, it’s a love letter, which is an undeserved win but one I’m not too proud to take. Worst case, it’s the other kind of letter, the one where she knows I like her but wants to stay friends. I wait until I’m alone before I open it, ready for whichever path fate has chosen for me.
Instead, it’s a single sentence written in the margin of a torn-off piece of notebook paper:
Fors is the Old Norse word for a waterfall!
Followed by a smiley face.
I crumple the note in my hand. I wonder if this is what it feels like to run out of oxygen, to drown with your fingertips still above the surface of the water.
***
“I want to meet him.”
I’ve seen this coming, of course. Part of it is Emily’s natural tendency toward obsession, but we also have the winter concert coming up, and the spring semester is right around the corner. By January, we’ll be thinking about competition schedules and music school auditions, and if I’m not nervous about the former, I’m already losing sleep over the latter.
I do my best to lay out the counterargument. I can’t convince Emily—or even myself—that Fours isn’t a Fossegrim, but I do have one last card to play. I tell her about the night before we first played together and Fours’ warning about breaking the rules. I tell her about Hector’s funeral, and three days of missed school, and how I only have one parent left to lose.
“We should be fine as long as we stick to the rules,” she says, but even she looks doubtful, like she’s saying this to convince herself.
“And if we miss something?” I say. “Who gets punished for it?”
But it’s no use. I can’t talk her out of it, and if I’m being honest, I saw that coming too.
Emily shows up on the first Thursday night in December, after Thanksgiving break but a full week before the winter concert. Mom is at work, but at this point she’s halfway to thinking of Emily as a daughter-in-law, so I don’t have to worry about the neighbors ratting us out. She’s wearing a heavy down coat and holding a styrofoam takeout container, which I can smell before I even open the door.
“What is that?”
“Goat Sukha,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Indian restaurant on Third Street. Closest thing I could get.”
Even though I haven’t visited Fours in months, I still remember the trail to his campsite. For all her determination, I can tell that Emily is nervous. We crunch our way through dried leaves and deadfall, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re announcing our presence in enemy territory. The noise we’re making, the smell of Indian takeout, the gleaming black violin case: none of these things belong in the woods.
Before long, I see the light from Fours’ campsite up ahead. I want to slow down, but Emily is only moving faster and I have to speed up to stay even with her. We practically burst into Fours’ camp, then fall still. The sudden absence of sound leaves my ears ringing in the cold.
“Evening,” Fours says without turning.
“Hey, Fours,” I say, taking the lead. No way forward but through. “I brought a friend. This is Emily.”
He turns to wave, but his eyes settle on the takeout container. “You brought something to eat?”
“It’s from both of us,” Emily says, stepping forward. She walks all the way to the tailgate and sets the styrofoam container near him, just barely within arm’s reach. Then she fishes a little cellophane package out of her pocket with a fork and napkin inside. She sets this on top of the styrofoam and steps backward until she’s standing beside me.
“Smells good,” Fours says.
“It’s mutton,” Emily says.
But Fours just nods and picks up the fork. A little cloud of steam escapes as he lifts the styrofoam lid. The smell is overwhelming, even ten feet away.
“What now?” Emily whispers to me.
“He doesn’t talk while he eats,” I explain. “Just let him finish.”
So we stand there and shiver in the cold while Fours eats his dinner. Certain details stick out to me, things I’ve noticed but never thought about, things I can’t ignore after two months of Emily’s newfound obsession with Scandinavian folklore. He looks like a troll to me now, with his hunched shoulders and too-long arms, and I can’t believe I’ve never noticed it before. There’s an expression in his eyes that goes past hunger and savor, a hint of something inhuman and insatiable.
He finishes his food, then reaches for the napkin and wipes his lips. “Welcome, Jake and Emily,” he says. Beside me, I feel Emily relax a bit, and I realize that she had been expecting some kind of test.
I start to reach for my violin case, because this is what I always do after Fours eats, but Emily stops me. “You have an interesting name,” she said. “Fours.”
I know her well enough to know she’s being weird, and after a moment I realize that she’s trying not to phrase this as a question. Fours smiles at her like he’s in on the game. Then he leans over and taps his finger on the back of his truck. Behind the gas cap, time and weather have peeled away the “X” of an old 4x4 logo, leaving a pair of oddly-spaced 4s as a namesake.
“Fours,” he says.
“You can’t even see the X anymore,” Emily says. “You must have been living out here for a while.”
This, I realize, is another not-question, which Fours responds to with another not-answer.
“Long enough.”
Emily frowns. She’s wasted a chance at something, but I can’t guess what it is. I can’t tell whether to be afraid for her or jealous of her. Even though Fours has outsmarted her, she’s playing his game at a level I doubt I can match. She knows this world better than I do, almost instinctively.
But even she has to admit defeat, so she asks the real question, the only question she came here to ask. “Will you teach us to play the violin?”
“I will,” Fours answers. “Play me a song first.”
“That isn’t supposed to be part of the deal.”
“What do you know about deals?” Fours asks, and the pit of my stomach goes cold and heavy. There was a hint of reprimand in that, of anger. I’ve never heard Fours sound angry. Not once in three years.
Emily closes her mouth. She knows she’s crossed a line, and she knows better than I do what the stakes are. She turns to me and whispers. “Do you know Verklärte Nacht?”
“I know some,” I say. It’s a beautiful piece of music, though you need more than two violins to play it properly. I ignore the fact that it’s based on a poem about two lovers meeting in the woods.
“Follow my lead,” Emily says. She pulls her violin from her case, and I follow suit. She raises her bow like she’s about to begin playing. I copy her pose, ready to play as soon as she does, but she just keeps standing there.
“Something wrong?” Fours asks.
Emily answers for the both of us. “We’re waiting for the cello.”
The old man’s face blazes with a sudden smile that matches his own campfire for heat. His eyes are wide with a joy so sharp that it looks like malice. “Good!” he shouts to the wind. “So you do know the song!”
My hands start to shake with the cold, but just as I’m about to lose my nerve, I hear it. A low wind pressing its way through the trees like two mournful half notes, one after the other.
We play. And as we play, Fours waves his hands like he’s conducting a full orchestra. Those hands pull the music from me, from Emily, from the sky itself. Leaves rustle. Trees creak. Owls call to one another in the night. The music comes from somewhere behind me, passes over me, and continues out of my sight and hearing. I can’t turn to look at Emily, can’t do or think of anything else but the music.
I have never played this well, and I know that I will never play this well again.
The song ends, and Emily and I both collapse to the dirt. The cold, forgotten until now, steals its way back into my chest. My fingers ache with it. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to take a full breath.
Fours hops off the tailgate and walks over to us. “Give me your hands.”
Emily raises her hand without hesitation, but all I can think of is Fours dragging my hands over the strings until they bleed, just like in the story. I stand up and shove my hands in my pockets.
“I want to leave,” I say suddenly.
Emily is still crouched in the dirt, left hand raised toward Fours. “Not yet,” she hisses.
I look back and forth between the two of them. I can’t find anything soft in either expression. Merciless, that’s how they look. A blizzard in one face, and a summer storm in the other.
“The food came from both of you,” Fours reminds her. “It has to be both of you, or neither.”
“Jake.”
But it’s no use.
Instead of answering her, I turn and run. Fours laughs again, loud and long. A few seconds later, I hear Emily crashing through the woods behind me, but I can’t seem to slow down to let her catch up. We run until we hit my back porch and I almost break the back door down trying to get it open. Emily finds me on the floor and kneels down to hug me, and she’s saying that she’s sorry, she’s sorry, but she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand.
***
After that night, we don’t play together for another seven years.