The Tin Whistle

The Tin Whistle

 By Kyle MacDonald

 

   As evening fell in Queen's Park, and tangled red maple trees grew longer shadows, Lewis scuffed his feet in the dead grass. He pulled the hoodie tighter around himself, and looked up at the batting cage from the bench where he was sitting. Cold chain-link steel met his eyes and cast its own faint shadow on the baseball diamond's white cinder. He looked back down at the bench. “FUCK”, “Jack Myers screwed Lisa DuPré”, and a symbol identifying the bench as gang property sneered at him in faded ink from the smooth grey wood. These told him nothing, except that Jack Myers had a ballpoint pen.

   The air smelled like fries and smoke. The chip wagon was down the street, and the anti-smoking sign on the telephone pole on the other side of the park invited tobacco like cliffs invite lemmings. Or did lemmings actually do that? Lewis thought he'd read somewhere that it was a myth. Whatever. A girl on the sidewalk looked over at him, but looked away faster when she took in Lewis's greasy brown curls, threadbare jeans, and ripped black hoodie. It had been a dry week; Lewis looked around anyway for a puddle in which to check his reflection, or maybe to drown himself.

   Lewis's movement made him notice the darkening air. He hauled himself up from the bench and started walking; on impulse, he looked at his wrist, knowing perfectly well that he didn't have a watch. Thus distracted, he tripped over something and lost his balance. He flung out his arms, went sprawling in the coarse grass, and felt a loud whump! as the air was knocked out of him. Instinct told Lewis to curl into a ball, but he didn't have the strength, so he just lay in the sun-warmed bristles until he could breathe again. His arms didn't hurt when he propped himself up on his elbows, and when he got up, a long cut on his arm was the only sign of injury.

   Lewis bent down to see what had snagged his foot, and a few moments of searching in the grass produced a battered metal tube, half an inch thick and a foot long. At first, he thought it was a strange crack pipe, but then he noticed half a dozen holes along its length. It looked to Lewis like some kind of flute. He was about to throw it aside and keep walking when a rough, crackly voice behind him shouted, “Hey! Boy!”

   He spun, dropping the flute and raising his hands above his head. Then, confused, he looked around for the speaker. It had not become much darker, but he saw no one, until he squinted into the bushes by the river, a few feet from a dim streetlight. There, camouflaged by his beard and mud-caked jeans, was a stooped old hobo, carrying a blackened burlap sack and leaning on a long knobbly stick. His rough raven's voice cawed out again, “Bring me my whistle!”

   Lewis had a curious suspicion that this old hobo was not dangerous. Anyway, Lewis thought, if the old box of arthritis did get agitated, Lewis could easily run away. So he picked up the flute and walked slowly, loosely, towards the man.

   As he got closer to the streetlight, Lewis saw that the man's right eye was blue, but the other was milky and blind. The blue one scowled at him with a feverish intensity. Lewis figured the old guy was probably drunk, but when he stood only a few steps from the stooped figure, there was no smell of booze on the man's breath. Mildly surprised, Lewis held out the flute. The old man took it with a hand that shook with tremors and was stained by tobacco, liver spots, and varicose veins.

   “Thanks,” he growled. The word seemed to cost him, and he started into a coughing fit that wracked his wiry body from head to rattily-shod foot. Lewis turned to leave – it was almost completely dark – but he heard a small clatter behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see that the man's makeshift cane had fallen to the ground. Something in the way the old hobo leaned on his knee, back twisted so the ribs showed through his shirt, made Lewis turn back and pick up the man's stick for him. When the man's coughs finally subsided, he looked at Lewis with a strange penetrating stare in his eye.

   “Thank you, son,” he said, and his voice was slightly less rough this time. “Not many would have done that.”

   Lewis mumbled a vague, half-formed disclaimer. The ancient, ill face was only a foot from Lewis's own.

   “I'm Bill,” the old hobo continued hoarsely, “I live here. I sit here and eat other men's crap from the garbage, and I play my whistle.” As if to prove his point, Bill leaned his cane against the streetlight, put the strange flute to his cracked lips, and began to play. At first it was so quiet that Lewis thought Bill was having trouble breathing again. Soon, however, the tin whistle's music grew from quiet breathing to a small winding tune with an odd offbeat rhythm. The whistle had a low, misty sound, but its silvery tone possessed an indescribable clarity. It was like a beautiful girl singing quietly in a lover's ear, thought Lewis. He immediately thought thereafter, How would you know that, dumbass?

   The music continued for a few minutes, and after a while Lewis found it difficult to listen to the music: Bill was not playing a happy song; the tune with its unforgiving jumps of rhythm and long shaking notes seemed to mirror Bill perfectly. Finally, the melody slowed, the tin whistle whispered one last note, and was silent.

   Lewis did not break the silence for several seconds; he was staring intently at Bill's worn, craggy face. There was mud in the old man's beard, and his good eye was turned toward the ground. Despite the streetlight, Bill's features seemed to be in darkness.

   “Some of that sounded familiar,” Lewis said hesitantly.

   “It was a medley of Scottish reels with a Jewish folk dance thrown in for flavour,” growled Bill. He laughed; the sound was as eerie as the tin whistle, like pebbles being shaken in a bucket. Lewis shook his head.

   “Familiar like rock and roll,” he insisted. “I've heard some of that tune before.”

   The old whistler squinted at Lewis through his one good eye. “It's the pain that you recognize, son,” Bill said, “the pain of living. Young people like you say it more,” Bill waved his hand at Lewis's clothes and hair, “but old crackpots like me feel it the worst.” He coughed. “My music stayed young longer than I did, but even a song has to get old sometime – and mine got old years ago. I sit in this park, and eat other men's crap, and I play my whistle.” Lewis was getting nervous. Bill was repeating himself, and his words were now feverish. “I play it because nobody hears me otherwise. At least this way, someone hears me. But they never listen. You probably know what it's like, not being listened to – no one listens to shabby kids like you.” The old man peered at Lewis, and chuckled lucidly. “No offence.”

   “None taken.” Lewis was put at ease for the moment, but still felt that Bill was slightly delirious.

   “But you have no idea how it aches, to know that from the day I was born to this moment as I talk to you, no one ever listened to me: my parents, my succession of bosses, my wife in our short-lived marriage. How is that possible, that I have lived leaving no impression on the face of this earth? That my life has gone entirely ignored?” This last impassioned rant forced Bill into another coughing fit as severe as the first, his body bent double and shaking. Lewis wanted to help, but wasn't sure that he could. Making up his mind on the grounds of the completely dark sky, he turned and walked away from the stooped figure in the park, and soon he could not hear the old hobo's coughs at all.

   It was only as Lewis sat down at the bus stop at Toronto Street and Dunlop Street, tired and confused, that he noticed his old AC/DC wallet was missing from his hoodie pocket. The old asthmatic palmed my wallet, thought Lewis. Damn. The bastard was probably crazy anyway.

   And on that thought, the bus came out of the darkness and stopped with a screech of brakes. Lewis climbed on, paid the driver, and sat down as the bus started moving. It shifted into a higher gear, and drove away from the dark glass bus stop and the maple-shadowed park. But hell, Lewis thought, could that guy play.

thunderstorm

This is by and large a true story, though my mother's blue vehicle is an SUV, not a sedan. I would appreciate feedback from anybody who reads the story. Under Canadian intellectual property laws, I am the sole owner of the story and I retain full rights to it.

The Night the Weather Brawled

By Kyle MacDonald

Thunderstorms played to a heavenly house that night, cracking knuckles of ribbed lightning in the alleys of the city’s steel and glass, casting light on the sunset but making no sound. The clouds, too, seemed distant, and there were far too many of them for the woman to feel at ease. She pulled out of the parking lot and drove through streets lined by streetlights that knew tonight they were out of their league. Behind her, the sky was black with the business of a hurricane-in-training; ahead, clear blue haunted the silhouetted trees on the horizon, free there of clouds but not of their sublime, terrible personality; eastward, a rainbow hung in the murky, disastrous storm like the shine on a three-day-old bruise. Her eyes, however, went inexorably west, for the sun’s last twilit stand was almost beckoning in the pale, disquieting way that a sunset has aflame.

Clouds did not hang in the sky but neither did they soar. They made the woman shiver in the hot August night. Her sons were mostly silent. When they did speak it was to indicate some other cloudy ridge that they all saw, that was at the same time unnatural and yet firmly Natural. A panoramic nimbostratus veil, miles thick and worlds above them, stretched across the entire gulf from east to west to deep on high; the elder son tried to count the smaller pastel-coloured clouds set sharply, brightly, against it. Resembling five or six, they numbered three dozen when he lost count. The sky had never been as vast.

The blue car wound its way into the river’s age-old valley, the geography tonight a backdrop on a one-player stage; though she drove slowly past the shadowy ankles of maple and oak spectres, she feared nothing: tonight nothing earthly could harm them, though ghosts of terrors past could conceivably emerge from the black trees. It was a night when anything was possible but the mundane. The mother braked, and the tires squealed softly beside a concrete bridge. Again a young girl, she held her cellphone out the window and focused the lens on everything. It was overexposure in the word’s most original sense. She stared at the screen’s blurred display, too awed to be frustrated – the sky would remember this night anyway in a way that photographs are blind. Her tail-lights came on, and the blue sedan hazed back onto the pavement and she followed the road home. Trees hummed past, but the sky hung above in a way that usually goes unnoticed.