Phantom Banjo (15 page)

She slowed as she approached the car and saw
the outline of the two men. Brose wasn't fully awake so Willie
reached across him and opened the door, keeping the gun close, just
in case.

"Hi," she said, peering in at them but
backing away slightly, cautious. Brose was a pretty rough-looking
character unless you happened to be an injured animal. "Where you
guys headed?"

The feeling that there was something familiar
about her grew stronger as Willie said, "Fredericks, Maryland,
wherever the hell that may be. How about you, ma'am?" He never
called women darlin' under circumstances where the lady in question
might possibly suspect him of being a rapist-pervert. At least not
before they'd been formally introduced.

She took two fast steps closer. "Hey, Willie?
Willie MacKai? Is that you?"

"Sure is, sugar, but who's askin'?"

She was already scooting into the truck cab,
butting Brose to one side. He woke up just enough to grumble and
put his arm around Willie and his head on Willie's shoulder. Willie
patted his shoulder absently.

"Julianne Martin. Remember, Juli and George?
You told me I played the spoons like a hula dancer. I said I didn't
know hula dancers played the spoons."

He remembered, vaguely. He met a lot of
people, a lot of musicians. "Oh, sure, that Juli Martin. Brose,
wake up. We got company. This here is Julianne Martin. Well, hi,
Juli." He wasn't sure whether to ask about George or not. Maybe
they'd split the sheets.

"Are you going to the memorial festival,
Willie?"

"Yes, ma'am. Josh, Sam, Nedra, they were good
friends of mine. Why, Sam was the man got me into singing the music
of our land to begin with. And one time back in the sixties when I
was playing some club in New York and some drunk charged the stage,
little old Nedra Buchanan picked up a chair and brained him with
it. And Josh Grisholm, ah well, God, we're all gonna miss Josh. I
never heard tell of anybody could cut the bullshit artists down to
size like ol' Josh could."

Juli nodded solemnly and wiped the rainwater
from her face.

All of a sudden Willie wondered what the hell
he thought he was doing. Was he going to try to warn these people
at the festival of something some crazy whore had told him? What
would he tell them, that he had seen a really wild videotape? For
Christ's sake, he'd been speaking out for thirty years and nobody
had listened to him, in spite of all he'd done. Why should he
bother now? What did he owe these people anyway? He almost asked it
out loud, asked Brose and Julianne Martin, but he hadn't had enough
to drink to be that bold.

"Wow, this is really incredible," Juli said,
chasing off the uneasy silence as the headlights chased the tufts
of mist. "George and Lucien told me to come and now I know it was
meant to be. My God, Willie MacKai. I haven't seen you since Dumas
in—was it 1982?"

"That's right. You and George went on just
before me. Do you mind my askin' where George is?" He thought it
seemed pretty funny that George would tell his wife to go to a
festival by herself even if she had to hitch across country to do
it.

"You didn't hear about it, huh? About George,
I mean?"

The smooth way her voice slid past her
husband's name sounded sorrier to Willie than if she'd sobbed and
all of a sudden he forgot about himself and his problems and said
softly, "No, darlin'. I didn't hear anything. I've been out of
touch. What about George?"

She told him very calmly about George being
shot to death during a robbery.

"Jesus, Julianne. Darlin', that's just awful.
I don't know what to say."

"Oh, it's okay now," she said. "He's doing
fine on the other side and anyway, as Lucien says, we brought it on
ourselves. It's just that I miss him and I miss playing music, even
though I know now that that isn't my true path. But anyway, I wrote
this song and both George and Lucien wanted me to come so here I am
and now that I've run into you guys I know it's a sign that it was
the right thing to do."

"Uh-huh," Willie said. He was watching the
road closely now and preoccupied wondering if he ought not to warn
her now of what he knew, so although it sunk in that something was
wrong about what she was saying, he wasn't listening closely enough
to know what it was. He was more worried about how crazy he'd sound
and she was still young and pretty and he didn't want it to look
foolish. He'd have to think how to phrase it so she'd be properly
impressed and a little scared—he sure as hell didn't want to be the
only one who was scared. There was also the fact that he was a
wanted man and even though it was a mistake, he didn't think it was
all that great an idea to go advertising it around.

"You got any idea where this shindig is being
held?" he asked.

She slung her pack up in front of her and dug
around. "I don't know but it looked to me like it was pretty
impromptu from the flier. I never heard of the producer and she
didn't say who else was coming but it might be fun anyway, like an
old-fashioned sing."

The banjo faintly tinkled "There's a Meetin'
Here Tonight." Juli's silhouette dipped to examine it. "For
heaven's sake. I could swear that banjo played by itself."

"Just a trick of the car bumping I suppose,"
he said.

"Mind if I look at it?" she asked.

He shrugged.

She picked it up, watched the vibrating
strings for a moment, then turned it over and examined it, as if
looking for a tape recorder, thinking it was a joke or something.
"This is pretty amazing," she said.

"Ain't it just?" he agreed. "Impresses the
hell out of me, darlin’.”

"I can't figure out how you're doing this,
Willie, and it's really fantastic the way you've fixed this thing
up so it looks so much like Lazarus, Sam Hawthorne's banjo."

"Is that what he called it?"

"Urn hmm. I read all about it, how he
designed the first one that you could play without retuning all the
time and how Manny Golden, the head of Uprising Records, had one
special made by an Appalachian instrument maker. I remember because
I was in college at the time and was fascinated by folk medicine
and magic and the banjo maker was supposed to be from a long line
of white witches. The interviewer from the Folk Music Journal asked
him if that was why he was such a good instrument maker and the guy
said sure, all his instruments had a spell to them. Hey, you know,
I'd always thought this little quote here, 'May the circle be
unbroken,' was Hawthorne's idea, but now I wonder, maybe it's part
of the spell, do you think? The whole blacklist business ruined
Manny and he died in the middle of it all and Sam has never talked
much about any of it."

They drove off the beltway at about nine and
pulled into a service station to call the contact number. A machine
answered in a woman's low, rather nasal voice and gave directions
to a small farming community outside of town. The directions said
which country road to turn off on, mentioning that acts should sign
up by five o'clock that evening.

"It does sound pretty casual," Juli remarked
doubtfully. "Not like what you're used to, Willie."

"No indeed," he said. The festival he had
been associated with had had only the top names, and not enough
room for all of them, with the program carefully planned out so
that the most expensive performers got the best slots,
exceptionally talented people without names just sitting in the
audience, playing at the all-night jam sessions, and hoping to win
songwriting contests. The festival got so big, just before it
collapsed due to a lot of bad weather and financial overextension
at the time the oil boom went bust, that his name and photo were no
longer considered a big enough draw for the promotional
pamphlets.

They took a break at the first highway rest
stop. Willie and Brose stretched out under the tarp in the bed of
the truck, leaving Juli curled up in the cab. Willie was
dreaming:

He was at the old
Flugerville Festival with its rows of crafts booths and thinking
how peculiar it was that one of the booths had been let out to an
Irish instrument maker. Meanwhile some hippie girl whose eyes he
couldn’t see for a big hat and whose body he couldn't tell much
about because she wore a loose huipil tried to sell him a doll
dressed in Guatemalan handweaving
.
He knew it was a voodoo doll and had either a little
microphone in it or some kind of drugs but since he didn't know
which, he wasn’t about to buy it. The girl's eyes burned red clear
through her hat brim and the guy onstage was singing Hoyt Axton 's
song about the devil being a joker, lying, and in general acting
like the old mule who'll be nice to you for two weeks just to get
the chance to kick you.
Someone was
playing that one, on the banjo, and in his sleep Willie could feel
his mouth moving to the music, the words slipping over his vocal
chords and lifting his tongue and passing through his lips, and
then he realized that he was the singer, and he was seeing the
red-eyed hippie girl from onstage and her little voodoo doll was
playing banjo except that the neck was strung with glittering pins
and the tuning pegs were the heads of hatpins.
And he heard a flapping above him and he thought, thunder,
and he looked out over the audience, smiling, clapping people
wearing leather bras and Mexican embroidered clothes and concho
hatbands on wide straw hats, or Flugerville T-shirts or no shirts
at all, all of them grinning and laughing and talking. All of them
on benches around the stage except those lined up at the booths
where
vendors sold beer and hot dogs,
barbecue ribs and sweet corn on the cob, cinnamon buns and popcorn,
fajitas and nachos and soda pop. Some of the craft vendors were
still doing business too, selling beaded earrings that shimmered
like rainbows on waterfalls, tie-dyed shirts, Mexican and South
American clothes woven in patterns of red, orange, green, purple,
bright blue, birds, flowers, fish
,
cats, llamas.
There was Indian
silver work, Hopi. Navajo, concho belts, belt buckles, earrings,
leatherwork, all manner of instrument makers with dulcimers and
guitars inlaid with gold and pearl birds and dragons and eagles.
There were songbooks and tapes, musical spoons and bones, face
painters, hatters with rows of feather-banded Stetsons in felt and
straw hung from hooks in pegboard,
covered
with awnings that flapped with the wind. Why, it wasn't thunder
after all, just the awning. Because the sun was still shining
bright and pretty, even though it was time for the evening show and
he was it. And then there was a shadow over it and the flapping was
louder and he looked up to see what looked like a silhouette of the
Angel Gabriel blowing sax, accompanying the banjo, but as the angel
flew closer, it grew enormous and it was still blacker than the ace
of spades, its crow-black, feathered wings flapping and making a
mighty breeze and he could just make out the face and it was
painted up like Lulubelle Baker's.

And the banjo changed to start playing "House
of the Rising Sun," and he couldn't remember the words because, of
course, Sam Hawthorne had done that one once. That wasn't any angel
up there, it was an angle, the Angle Gabrielle-Belle, and it was
more like a cupid than an angel, a great big bare-assed cupid with
a quiver on its back, except that it shot big hypodermic syringes
and he knew they were full of dope and probably poisoned, like
darts, with all those cruddy diseases you caught nowadays if you
messed with women like Lulubelle. And she shot and he felt it hit
him like a thunderbolt and thought, hell, maybe I got that Angle
wrong, maybe it's Thor—shore is thore—and then it knocked him over
again.

He was rolling around in the truck bed with
the tarp flapping over him as Brose, who had given up sleeping in
the heat that made Willie stink like a billy goat and made him
sweat so bad that even his toes were sweating, put the truck in
gear and jolted onto the highway.

They found the turnoff just after one
o'clock. A few cars, vans, and trucks were ahead of them, but no
big crowd Willie could see yet. A black-haired woman stood by a
cattle gate. A sign that said “private property no trespassers” was
posted on the fence beside her left leg.

"Hi," she said, leaning over to look into the
truck cab.

"This the Gunn place, ma'am?" Brose asked.
"Place where the music festival is this weekend?"

"You folks pickers, are you?"

"Yes, ma'am," Brose said. "I'm Brose
Fairchild and these here are. . ."

Willie leaned over the rim of the truck bed,
"We're Brose's Bouncin' Balkan Band, ma'am. And who might you
be?"

"I'm Anna Mae Gunn. This is my place. I've
heard of you, Brose, from the old times when you played blues with
some South Texas cowboy, but I hadn't heard about your band."

She nodded curtly at Juli and Willie. She
didn't look thrilled to see any of them. Her eyes were narrow under
heavy black brows, her nose hawkish, and in a rounded face her
mouth was thin, bitter-looking. Funny woman to be having a
festival. But then, this was a memorial festival. Maybe she had a
talent for grieving. "Go ahead on in, and welcome," she said
formally, straightening up. "I'm just screening people right now.
Set up your camp somewhere outside the bleachers. There are some
fire pits dug for cooking already. Sylvia Bemis will sign you up
for a spot tonight."

"Many other acts come through?" Willie
asked.

"Check with Sylvia," she said abruptly, and
swung the gate open for them.

They drove through it, and Anna Mae waved
them down again. "Just one thing," she said. "We'll be bringing
supplies in but we'd just as soon once you get here you stay here.
I guess I can have on my property who I want and I'm not expecting
a large crowd, but this is by invitation. I don't want strangers
following you back to see what the traffic is all about."