Free Moody Food by Ray Robertson Page A

instrument. “It’s just that it’s so beautiful. It’s a mandolin, right?”
    Explaining what he’d really meant, how smoking was very dangerous in an old house like this, “But you can look at, touch, and play anything in this room you want,” Thomas said. “Nothing would please me more, in fact.”
    Christine didn’t need any more encouragement. She picked up the mandolin and brought it low against her body like an
undersized guitar. Thomas placed two fingers underneath its neck and gently raised the instrument upward, chest-high, where it was intended to be played.
    â€œYou have good taste, Miss Christine. This is a Gibson F-5, the same kind Bill Monroe made famous in the twenties.”
    â€œAre they that old?” she said.
    â€œThis one is.”
    Christine lost for the moment trying to adjust her fingers to the tiny fretboard and its tightly tuned strings, Thomas caught me staring at the black drum kit on the other side of the room and nodded me over.
    I knew I should have wanted to sit right down and start bashing away—as much fun as it had been, pounding on my pillows and mattress at home was definitely starting to lose its beginner’s charm—but all at once I was trembling eleven years old again and petrified to kiss Tracy Linden behind the gym bleachers my first ever kiss on the lips because, my God, I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do. And what if I went ahead and just did it anyway but mangled it all so badly—my nose in her eye; my lips too hard, too soft—that she rips herself away from me and I am known to every girl for all time everywhere as Bill “The Kissing Geek” Hansen? A first kiss, after all, is forever.
    â€œNice,” I said, risking a timid forefinger touch to the crash cymbal.
    â€œNothing special,” he said, “pretty much your basic snare, tom-tom, floor tom setup. Should get the job done, though. And may the Good Lord keep you from the temptation to play ten-minute drum solos, Amen.”
    I smiled and gave the cymbal another light rap.
    Thomas picked the drumsticks off the snare. “Feel like having a go?” he said.

    Christine stopped moving her fingers over the strings of the mandolin and everything all of a sudden just a little too quiet. She looked over at Thomas offering me the sticks and I moved my eyes from her to him to the door of the studio, wishing I were somehow on its other side and down the stairs and back home alone in my room.
    Laying the mandolin back in its case, “So, Thomas, what’s the deal?” Christine said. “Where’d you get the money for this place and all this great stuff?”
    Now Thomas was the one with his eyes darting toward the door. But only for an instant. He carefully placed the sticks back on top of the drums and cleared his throat.
    â€œWell, I was going to let y’all in on this sooner or later, but I figured we’d be a little further down the road as a group. But you’ve got a right to know and I guess now’s as good a time as any.”
    Picking up on the words we and group , Christine caught my eye but I looked right back at Thomas.
    â€œYou see, in the South,” he said, “there’s a long tradition of someone in the community who’s not actually an artist themself lending what they do have—money, basically—to help out someone else who God has blessed with talent and vision. It’s like in medieval times, kings and queens giving the cats who wrote the symphonies a salary to live on so they could do their thing. You’ve got to understand, the South is still a very feudal place.”
    â€œYou’ve got a patron?” I said.
    â€œNo, we’ve got a patron,” he answered. “Me, you, Christine—the band, Buckskin, The Duckhead Secret Society.”
    This time more than a mere attempt at making puzzled eye contact. “Me?” Christine