1
Fiddler
By H. Courreges LeBlanc
illustration by Shelton Bryant
3 December 2001
November always dragged around the station, but today was one dead Sunday. Not one car pulled off the interstate all morning. Nothing hit the drive but a thin steady rain, puddling slow rainbows in the oil. Me and Harnie just tilted back our chairs against the cigarette rack, watched the monster movie, and waited for the game to start. The big flying turtle was about set to barbeque downtown Tokyo when the drive bell rang, and up sluiced a car so damn gorgeous it hurt to look at it. A '37 Buick Roadmaster it was, painted a red so rich it was nearly black, that straight eight engine whispering like a lover while teardrops of rain rolled down the chrome grill.
Out climbed this tall fellow, dressed like God's grandpa done up for a wedding or a funeral. His skin was brown as a buckwheat cake, with creases deep as drainage ditches. Took a mighty long stretch of sweat and toil, love and birth and dying, to carve a face like that. He flexed his shoulders, then rolled his neck till it cracked. He pulled a pack of Camel straights from inside his vest and flipped one out.
"Got a light?" His voice was deep and warm, half gravel, half honey.
I tossed him a pack of matches through the open door; he caught it left-handed, then flipped it open, folded over a match, and struck it with his thumb.
"This the town with the dead fiddler?" he said after a long drag on the smoke.
"You might say so," I said, ignoring the look Harnie gave me. Nobody talked about her; I wondered how this fellow had even heard about her. "Ain't a fiddle, though. It's a cello, like in the symphony."
The s