Copyright ©2015
by Wes Boyd

[Editor’s note: This is a very short story start, like Bulldog Spirit, but only a few pages long. The main female character sounds like she’d be a lot of fun, and it’s unfortunate that Wes never took the story any further.]

There before him stood a small girl – well no, at second glance, a small woman. She was short enough to be a kid, somewhere well less than five feet for sure, but she looked older. She was on the chunky side, but with a smiling, oval face. She was wearing a wild print knee-length dress over jeans, hiking boots and a jacket; she carried a big magenta backpack and had a guitar gig bag in her hand. “Hi,” she said, “are you Carl Gutierrez?”

“Yes I am. How can I help you?”

“Hmmm,” she grinned, eyeing him up and down. “Not bad. But the question is more like how can I help you?”

“Help me?”

“Yeah, Carole said you needed some help.”

“Carole? Carole Hunt? She said that?”

“Yeah, that Carole. Can I come in? Gods know this pack is heavy, I’d like to dump it.”

This was already a little strange, but this girl, or woman, or whatever, she was someone to talk to, and other than Carole he hadn’t had much of that for a while. “Yeah, come on in, I guess,” he replied. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. All Carole said was that she was going to get back with me, but she hasn’t yet.”

“Maybe I jumped the gun a little,” she said as she walked inside; Carl closed the door behind her. “Carole said she thought I would be good for what ails you. When she told me about you the whole dealie sounded interesting, so I thought maybe I ought to check things out before we got down to the nitty-gritty with her. I knew someone who was heading up to Three Pines so I hitched a ride. I guess Carole will fill you in on the details when she gets around to it.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying it, but I think I’m a little lost.”

“I can dig lost, this place wasn’t easy to find,” she replied, setting down the gig bag before peeling off the pack and setting it on the floor. When she did, a long braid of dark hair fell to her waist. “I found it though, so I guess that counts. Hey, I didn’t get around to introducing myself. I’m Windchime Mackenzie.”

“Windchime?” Carl frowned. “That’s unusual.”

“So my parents were hippies, I can’t help that. My friends often call me ‘Windy’ though.”

“Sounds logical,” he replied, a little bemused at his visitor.

“Not quite as logical as you think. Sometimes it’s because I run off at the mouth so much, but mostly it’s because my parents were nut ball vegetarians, and that meant I used to fart an awful lot when I was a kid. Still do, sometimes. Actually, I consider myself a little lucky in the name department. At least usually nobody calls me ‘Tinkle.’”

“Tinkle?”

“You know, like the word moms use when they’re trying to teach their kids to go potty. That would piss me off, so to speak.”

“Uh, yeah,” Carl shook his head. “That would be a little awkward.”

“Too damn bad my parents didn’t think about that, but my guess is that they were so stoned that it never crossed their minds. But then, they often don’t think about things like that. They’re too wrapped up in the now to consider the then.”

“Some people are like that, I guess,” he replied for lack of a more intelligent thing to say. “Would you like to sit down?”

“Naw, I’d just as soon stand up for a few minutes, I got a little tired of riding in the car,” she said, peeling off her jacket. “Nice place you have here.”

“It’s a work in progress,” he replied, sitting down in his easy chair. “I’m remodeling it slowly and it helps to not have a lot of furniture in the way. When I get done with it I’ll probably move somewhere else, and that means I won’t have a lot to move.”

“Nothing wrong with sparse so long as you like it,” she smiled. “Possessions are a pain in the butt at best, and too many of them is downright evil. That’s part of why I don’t have very much, and it makes it easy to move when I decide to move on.”

Carl just looked at her for a moment. Whoever he’d been expecting Carole to come up with, Windchime certainly was nothing like what he had imagined. In the last couple of minutes, it had become clear that Windchime was full of herself – or at least full of something. Right off the top of his head he had doubts that she was going to be a lot of help with his problems, but at the same time, she seemed to be someone way out of the ordinary. At least talking with her might fill a couple of hours of what would otherwise be a pretty dull evening, and that would be worth something.

“Do you move a lot?”

“When the time comes to go, I go where I’m needed,” she shrugged. “It was getting to that point in Camden, maybe even a little past the point, so when Carole came to me I figured this was the next place I was being called to.”

Somehow that sounded a little strange. “Where do you live?”

“Wherever I happen to be,” she shrugged. “Wherever I’m needed. Marsha and Nick and their kids needed me for quite a while, but they’re getting past that and it’s time they flew on their own wings. I think I still need to look in on them once in a while, so it will be good if I can stay close for a bit, but really, it was getting time to go.”

“What was that all about?”

“Oh, that’s right, they’re in Camden and you wouldn’t know them. They got themselves busted up pretty bad in a car crash back last summer. Couldn’t really take care of themselves, and they have three little kids, one housebroken, one sometimes, and one still going in her diapers, so there was no way in hell they could take care of the kids. They don’t have any family nearby to help out and no friends who could put in the kind of time that was needed, so when I heard about them I offered to help out. That’s kinda what I do.”

“It sounds like it’s good you could help out. That’s a different kind of job.”

“Oh, it’s not a job. It’s more a mission, although it’s not anything religious or like that. It’s just that they needed help for a while and I could do it. I didn’t get paid for it or anything. It wouldn’t have been right on top of all the other stuff they were going through. I mean, people ought to help out other people in time of need, shouldn’t they? So I stayed with them about eight months until they could take care of themselves and the kids most of the time.”

“And you didn’t get paid for it?”

“Oh, no,” she said, plopping down in one of the living room chairs. When she sat, Carl could see she had very stubby legs that barely allowed her feet to reach the floor. “I’d never ask anyone for pay me for something like that,” she went on. “Whoever the philosopher was that said that money is the root of all evil got it pretty close to on the nose. All I wanted was food on the table, a dry place to sleep, and a warm place to shit. Marsha and Nick could supply that.”

Carl couldn’t do anything but shake his head. He figured that Windchime must have a heart about as big as all outdoors, just to take care of someone who needed taking care of and ask for nothing much in return. It was the kind of thing that families used to do for each other, and maybe there were a few who still did. Hell, his aunt, despite her desire to marry him off to the nearest illegal, had played a big part in helping his mother out during his father’s last months. He still felt a little guilty that he hadn’t been able to help more, but it had been in the heart of construction season and he’d had only a few brief chances to get away.

Still … “It seems like you ought to have gotten something for taking all that time and effort.”

“Oh, I did. I had the satisfaction of knowing I was doing the right thing. Well, that and the food on the table I mentioned, and like that. That’s one of the nice things about not having much, because it means I don’t need much. No car, so no car payments or expenses, and I don’t have to worry about the price of gas. No credit cards, so no credit card bills. No home, so no mortgage or utilities and that sort of happy stuff. It frees me up so I can do what I really want to do.”

“So you’re telling me you’re essentially homeless.”

“Well, pretty much. I can go home to my folks any time I want to but it’s been a while. I probably ought to think about dropping in sometime, but I really haven’t felt the need recently. I’ll get back there sooner or later, probably when I’m needed.”

Right at that moment Carl couldn’t be sure he wasn’t talking to an angel, except that he couldn’t imagine an angel being a chubby little runt like her, with her jovial manner and mildly foul mouth. While he wasn’t religious beyond what he’d picked up from being dragged to church when he was younger, he somehow had the mental picture of an angel being solemn, ethereal, and coming equipped with wings. Windchime didn’t have any wings, at least that he could see, and none of the other attributes seemed to apply, either.

“Let me get this straight. You spend your life helping people out when they need help, and you don’t ask for much of anything but room and board to do it, right?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I do. I like doing it, and I feel it’s like what I’m supposed to be doing. Before the Garrisons, they’re the people I’ve been staying with for the last few months, there was an older guy, Rollie, who had several surgeries right on top of each other, colon cancer being one of them. It was close to six months before he got to the point where he could take care of himself, and that was about the point where I heard about the Garrisons.”

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