Phantom Banjo (16 page)

Willie thought this was a peculiar way to run
an entertainment business, but when he caught her eye for a moment,
he realized she looked like he felt, spooked. She broke eye contact
and she turned on her heel to greet another car.

The stage was the patio deck of a farmhouse,
with logs and a few pieces of lawn furniture set all along the
driveway. The side pastures had been cleared of whatever stock
might be kept there and several vans, tents, and pickups with
campers on the back were parked there instead. Rent-a-privies were
lined up between the camping area and the audience seating.

Brose parked near a fire pit. "That thing
ain't going to do us a lot of good," Willie remarked, gesturing at
the fire pit. "I hate to say it, buddy, but except for this here
package of Oreos and half a paper plate of cold nachos, we ain't
got a whole hell of a lot of stuff to camp with." Normally, he
would have been touchy about the Gunn woman's admonition against
leaving the site, but under the circumstances, he didn't blame her.
He figured the same thing was on her mind as his. Well, maybe not
Lulubelle, but some of the things he'd learned from her seemed to
have occurred to Gunn.

Since they were early, they captured one of
the best spots, with a tree and a little brush for shade and
privacy. Brose picked it out, figuring they could sleep the same
way they had on the way over. Willie didn't mind living rough, but
he wasn't real used to doing it before he was going to perform.

Cars kept rolling in beside them and parking,
and for a while they talked sleepily and watched who was coming.
Then Willie said, "Well, friends, since there ain't no camp to set
up and no coffee to brew, I reckon I'll catch up on some more of
that napping. Seems to be the best thing going." He stretched out
in the cab and Brose and Juli retired to the truck bed this
time.

Sometime later, he awakened to the tickle of
fur on his outstretched bare arm, brush, brush, pause, brush, and
opened one eye to stare into that of an orange cat that perched
with all four paws on the sill of the truck-cab window, the tail
flicking softly against him as the cat tried to decide if there was
room enough for them both in there. He was fully prepared to wallop
the beast if it started talking to him but it looked down at him as
if he were so completely out of its class it wouldn't bother if it
could. Watching it, he became conscious of the sound of guitars and
banjos being tuned, voices raised in greeting, song, argument, and
sales pitch.

"It takes a worried man to sing a worried
song . . ." some obviously worried man sang.

"Only a nitwit would credit the Lomaxes with
that song. Frank Warner got that song from Yankee John Galusha in
the forties ..."

"Who gives a shit about that old stuff that's
been done over and over anyway? You gotta add something new . .
."

"Have a beer?"

"Stop border harassment!" A wide West Texas
voice brayed, "Free the Chaveses! Yes, sir, sign right here. What's
it about? I'll tell you what it's about, mister. It's about the
goddamn feds lockin' up my little girl and her husband and a better
man never lived than our Mic, let me tell you, just because they
gave a friend a ride."

"Whoa!" Willie came awake and opened the cab
door so fast the cat had no time to vacate before he swung it wide
and jumped to the ground, right into the leavings of the last
tenant of the pasture.

He looked around at the gathered instruments,
the musicians talking, tuning, necking, and generally hanging out.
A tiny woman with a frizz of gray hair and shapely tanned legs
sticking out of khaki shorts was handing fliers to passersby,
gesturing with the papers when she wasn't waving them in the face
of a bare-chested biker type.

"Sounds to me, woman, like you are
bad-mouthin' our northernmost neighbors," the man said between
belligerent pops of bubble gum.

"No, you asshole, not the Canadian feds, our
feds. Oh, the Canadians do it too, the other way around, but our
damn fool government started it. Claimed it was for drugs. Well,
I'm here to tell you my Lettie nor my Mic never did so much as a
teeny little pointy leaf of marijuana a day in their lives. Why,
you should have heard Lettie when she caught me smoking with that
no-account Harold Beconovich in the parking lot outside the
Bide-a-wee Motel . . . what the Sam He. . ."

"Augusta Turner, you delicious little morsel
of feisty female, it really is you!" Willie exclaimed, picking the
woman up, locking his arms around the Flugerville Folk Festival
logo that engulfed most of her torso, and whirling her around two
or three times.

She broke loose from him long enough to twist
in his arms and give him an enthusiastic bear hug, "Willie MacKai!
As I live and breathe! I might have knowed you'd be here." The wind
tore the papers from her hands. "Damn! Help me catch these things,
Willie. Won't do to go litterin' Miz Gunn's pasture."

He helped. The papers flipped up against
tents and legs, slid under cars, and plastered themselves onto
trees. "What's all this about now, Gussie?" he called to her across
two jam sessions and a tarot reading. "What's this about Lettie and
Mic?"

She snatched up the last errant paper they
had any hope of catching and slumped down against a tree. He
flopped down beside her. "Busted for smuggling drugs, of all
things. Can you believe it?"

"I'm sad to say that of a large percentage of
my acquaintance, yes, ma'am, I could believe it, but Lettie and
Mic? No way. Who was this friend? Maybe he carried them in."

"That's what the feds claimed but, Willie, it
was Hy MacDonald, this Scotch singer who's a friend of theirs. The
customs people didn't do nothin' to Hy but send him back to
Scotland but they locked up my children pending trial by a federal
judge and I am not a rich woman, Willie, and I do not have the
money to bail them out. And anyway, Hy MacDonald has written to me
and to friends of mine and says it was absolutely a frame. He says
he had nary a thing on him, not even a bottle, and yet they were
calling him a drug runner and a political troublemaker right out
there in the customs station before they'd even searched anything.
Of course, I don't know the man, but I do know my Lettie and my Mic
and I do know Craig Lee over at Triumph Music and he's been to Hy's
house in Scotland and to hear him tell it, Hy's the goddamn deacon
of the goddamn church over there and, besides, wouldn't be caught
dead smokin' anything but Players and gettin' high on anything but
good scotch whiskey—patriotic man, Craig says he is."

Willie could easily believe that. He had the
same feelings himself. He was religious too—though he favored
bourbon over scotch, he never had cared a whole lot for drugs. For
all the big deal made over it during and since the sixties,
marijuana was still to him what it had been as a boy raised in a
Bible Belt South Texas town a spittin' distance from Mexico: weed
was what kids fooled around with and the Mexicans smoked because
foreigners did them things. It was nothing a grown man old enough
to drink good whiskey should concern himself with. He said so.

"Well, and I wouldn't be so surprised, still
and all, if it was pot they claimed to find, though Lord knows
Lettie's got more sense than to take it across the border even if
she did it, which she doesn't. But, Willie, it was cocaine they
found. Not a lot of it. But they claimed they found it in Lettie's
purse. With a copy of her catalog."

"The owner of a record distribution company
is a better target than a foreign musician, huh?" he mumbled, half
to himself, so that Gussie said, "Huh?"

"Look, Gussie, there's a little more to this
than it looks like. As a matter of fact, I ain't in awful good
graces with the law myself right now. Mark Mosby upped and died on
my doorstep the other day and now they're wantin' me to assist 'em
with their inquiries, which does not sound all that good,
especially considerin' some of the other weird shit that's been
happenin' in my immediate vicinity these days."

"That's the dumbest damn thing I ever heard
tell of," she said indignantly. "Well, second dumbest. No, come to
think of it, that takes the cake but both are just plain stupid to
anybody that knows any of y'all, though Lord knows there've been
times when I've wanted to wring Mark's neck myself, nothin' fatal
you understand, just to get his attention."

"Too bad nobody's asked you to be a character
witness," Willie said wryly.

She snorted disgustedly and stared at the
ground. The tanned skin of her face and arms looked as fragile as a
Civil War-era newspaper. She shouldn't look so damned old, he
thought. Gussie was only a few years older than he was.

He stared out across the parked RV's to the
next pasture. A few head of cattle stood together in one section,
several horses in another. The orange cat was now on the roof of
someone's camper, sunning itself. In the opposite pasture, the one
on the other side of the audience area, Anna Mae Gunn directed as a
truck backed up next to a big stone barbecue pit he hadn't noticed
before and two men started unloading big slabs of meat. Smoke rose
from the pit. Elsewhere on the grounds, a soft-drink stand had been
set up and a tent that advertised homemade pies.

* * *

Brose and Juli stood talking to a woman at a
card table up near the stage. Willie was suddenly worried about
what they would say, worried about the banjo, worried about being
there. "Say, Gus?"

"Yeah?"

"I'd be grateful if you'd keep what I told
you about Mark to yourself. See, there's quite a bit more to it
than that. It's kind of weird but unless I'm real mistaken, it ties
in with what happened to Lettie and Mic."

"Do tell? Matter of fact, Willie, there's
been a thing or two besides that happen that I'm not lettin' out
for general consumption, but if you've got a minute, I'll tell you
about it."

"I got all day, far as I know," he said.

"Well, then, about a month or so after the
kids were arrested, I went to Spokane for a week to talk to a
special lawyer Craig Lee recommended. I was wore out with worry and
didn't want to hassle with the drive, so I flew out there and got a
neighbor of mine to watch the house. I left my car with my
girlfriend Marty. She lives over near the Sea-Tac airport, so it
was no problem for her to pick me up either.

"Well, she met my plane and drove me back to
her place where my car had been parked out in the street outside
her house. I caught a cold in Spokane that was damn near pneumonia,
complete with sore throat and laryngitis. I'd only barely been able
to talk to that lawyer in squeaks and whispers and little notes all
week long and couldn't hardly talk on the phone at all. I was
looking forward to my bed, pettin' my cats, and readin' my mail so
much it hurt. But when we got to Marty's my car wouldn't start. It
had worked fine the last time Marty drove it, the way I asked her
to. I thought I was sunk. It was about midnight by then, and the
garages were closed, and it was raining. Marty and I stood outside
trying to jump-start the damned thing from her pickup. Marty's real
clever with cars, but she sure as hell couldn't get it to run so
finally she gave in and called an all-night service station down on
the corner. It had a garage and she thought one of those boys might
know what to do and she got the boy on duty to say he'd come up and
have a look.

"Well, there went all that bushwah about
teenage boys and cars. That poor dumb kid couldn't figure it out
any better than Marty, but he put on a good show and bulled it
through. I don't think he'd have bothered on my account, but
Marty's a cute little thing. You know how it is, Willie." Willie
nodded. He did indeed know how it was. "Well, the kid tried rolling
the car down the hill to compression start it, was what he called
it I think. Damned if it didn't catch on fire just as he reached
the filling station. He was a sight better with fire extinguishers
than he was with cars, lucky for me, and he got the fire out, but
meanwhile somebody called the cops and the fire department and they
came over and did absolutely nothing but have me fill out a lot of
dumb forms. So there I am with double pneumonia, a dead car that it
was going to take a minimum of a week and a few hundred dollars to
fix, and I'm still a good forty-five minutes from home.

"I was about near to cryin' but Marty said I
should leave the car there and she'd have it towed to her favorite
garage the next morning and meanwhile I could stay with her or
she'd take me home. I wanted to go home so bad I could taste it, so
we got back in her pickup and off we went.

"Well, it was still pourin' down rain and
foggy and blacker than a banker's heart. We started jokin' about
how bad things were goin' and how they couldn't get much worse, so
of course they did. All of a sudden the road in front of the car
blacked out and the dash went dark. The lights had gone clean
out."

Willie had been pacing back and forth like a
dog on a short lead, and now he stopped and looked at Gussie
wide-eyed. "You mean both cars went out on the same night? Sounds
to me like somebody didn't want you to get home, darlin'."

"Wait. You ain't heard nothin' yet. Marty
steered us over on the shoulder and put on her blinkers. At least
they still worked, thank merciful heaven. The car kept runnin' but
the lights still wouldn't work. We were about to take the next exit
off or try to flag somebody down when Marty remembered this
mechanic she'd met while she was out dancing had a place somewhere
near the Federal Way exit. He had been a pretty cute guy, lucky for
us, so she had his card. Also lucky his place was real easy to find
because no sooner had we pulled up in his drive than the car went
dead too."

The hairs on Willie's arms were starting to
stand at attention.