Phantom Banjo (2 page)

"All the other devils certainly agreed that
they could drink to something like that and they clapped some more
and said 'Bravo' and 'Hear hear' and so on, making an awful racket
until the Chairdevil shushed them again.

" 'It has come to my notice, however,' he
continued, 'that while we're doin' just dandy in the department of
adding little complications to people's lives, we have been remiss
in the taking-things-away department.'

"Well, the devil in charge of the root of all
evil got himself in an uproar over that and he stood up on his high
horse and told the Chairdevil that he objected, because hadn't he
caused recessions, depressions, inflations, and a doozy of a stock
crash that sent the world's money supply on a roller-coaster ride
and made several prime ministers and premiers, one or two
presidents, and a couple of kings wonder who they couldn't start a
measly little war with, just to raise steel and oil prices a mite
and get rid of more of the excess population?

"But the Chairdevil waved him down and said,
'Now, Root, you know that's not at all what I mean. Anyone can see
you have been doing a fine job and it would take a real nincompoop
not to be so plain depressed about the way things are going in the
world that they eliminate themselves. But the fact of the matter
is, there are a lot of nincompoops in the world. And you know what
nincompoops do when we do all this stuff we do so well?'

"The other devils had several suggestions but
the head devil just kept shakin' his head. 'What do they do if they
work a hard dirty job with low pay, plenty of danger, something
like mining or herding cattle or working in cotton mills or
farming? What do the damned fools do to keep going?'

" 'Get drunk? Take drugs?' asked one
devil.

" 'That too, but what else?' the Chairdevil
asked.

"After a long stupefied silence, he told
them.

" 'They sing,' the Chairdevil said. 'Remember
we're talking nincompoops here. How about parents kept up all night
by a puling squawling shitting peeing slobbery useless baby? What
do they do when the kid's howling wakes them up again?'

" 'Beat it to death?' one of the devils
asked.

" 'Beat each other to death?' Root asked.

" 'No, the biggest one beats the smallest one
to death unless the smallest one has a butcher knife or a gun,' a
colleague told him.

" 'I know!' the youngest devil said. 'The big
one beats the little one to death and then beats the baby to
death.'

"The Chairdevil shook his head sadly. 'No
such luck. They sing.'

" 'Sing?' the devil committee cried all
together as if they'd stuck each other with pitchforks.

" 'Ever hear of lullabies?' asked the
Chairdevil. 'It's been the same every time we've got them right
where we want them. Put them on death row for stabbing some uppity
truelove who isn't so true after all and they sing. Shanghai them
out to sea and they sing. Put them on a chain gang busting rocks
and they sing. Send them off to war and one side sings one kinda
songs, the other side sings another, and all the blasted pacifists
sing another, and a lot of the time they all use the same tune! We
haven't come up with a single scenario yet, no matter how
miserable, unfair, heart or backbreaking that some damn fool
doesn't make up a song about it or remember an old one that hasn't
even ever been played on the radio.'

" 'That's disgusting,' said a she-devil with
a delicate shudder.

" 'That's insulting,' said another.

" 'Perverted, I'd call it,' the one sitting
next to him said.

" 'Wait up a minute, something's not right
here,' said another one finally. This one was the one in charge of
drink and drugs and general debauchery. 'I get down there quite a
bit, and lately I can't say I've noticed anything like what you're
talking about. Mostly people don't sing much anymore. It's a
specialty, like everything else. People sing on the radio, and in
concerts, and on television, and sometimes at the movies, but they
don't sing at work unless their work is singing.'

" 'Exactly,' said the Chairdevil. 'That's
exactly what they do. If they were all still singing the way
everybody used to, do you think we'd be able to have ourselves a
meeting like this? Or make ourselves not only nuclear bombs so that
they can blow each other up but reactors so they can get blown up
right there in their own neighborhoods? All our really good stuff
has come up since they gave up singing on their own and started
hiring somebody else to do it for them. But the point is, the damn
fools still haven't pushed the button, nobody big has invaded,
raped, and pillaged anybody else big for a long time now.'

"Now all the devils exchanged knowing looks.
They knew he had finally gotten at what was really bothering him.
The shows the musicians gave were getting in the way of the really
big show he was always longing to see.

"He went on. 'Those songs aren't as strong as
they used to be—fortunately, people have progressed nowadays to the
point where they'd much rather work for a company that dumps crap
into a river than work for free to clean it up. Practical people
know that it is more realistic to have their foot on somebody
else's neck than to lend a hand, which would probably be bitten by
other, equally practical and realistic people.

" 'But that's beside the point. Even though
those songs don't get sung as often and by as many as used to sing
them, the ones we've had to put up with for all these millennia are
still polluting our atmosphere, destroying the ambience we work so
hard to create. Furthermore, these hired singers are making up new
songs all the time. Despite the example Our Boys made of Victor
Jarra in Chile and of Sam Hawthorne and his ilk during the McCarthy
era, more and more misguided fools want to sing that wretched kind
of song than are able to make a living at it. They have to go. The
songs have to go.'

" 'Just a minute, Chairdevil,' said the
Debauchery Devil. 'Some of those singers are my best people.'

" 'Fine. Then they'll be reunited with you
real soon.'

"And the devils all took a vote and everybody
but the Debauchery Devil raised their hands and then finally the
Debauchery Devil's hand went up too."

* * *

"What happened then?" asked the boy
cautiously.

Though what the woman had been saying was
funny, she didn't look or sound funny now. Her eyes had a far-off
expression, like his mother's when she was thinking about flying to
the coast for a merger. Her voice didn't sound sweet anymore and as
much as he'd mistrusted that, he preferred it to the one she was
using. It made him think of something baked so hard it got little
cracks all over it, like Oklahoma on the Geographic Special.

"Well," she said, taking a deep breath and
looking away from them for a moment to look at her hands. Her hands
were small, wrinkled around the knuckles, veined on the backs, and
still looked as if they could make kites, cut out paper dolls, or
pour drinks, which was what they'd been doing most of their life,
though the boy had no way of knowing that.

* * *

"Well, the devils wanted to dive right in and
start after the singers of those songs but the Chairdevil held up
his hand for silence.

" 'Can't do it,' he told them.

" 'Why not?' they wanted to know.

" 'Cause it won't work, not that way. Didn't
I just tell you what happens when we attack them directly? You have
to understand that these are not reasonable people we're dealing
with here. They're as crazy about martyrs as your average religious
fanatic. Attacking them directly only encourages them. Besides, the
songs protect them.'

" 'You mean there's spells in the songs?'
S&I asked.

" 'Hell, yes, there's spells in them,' the
Chairdevil hollered back, temporarily blowing the
cool-and-in-control impression he was trying to create. The
Stupidity and Ignorance Devil had that effect on everybody
sometimes. 'What do you think I've been telling you? Why do you
think they're so dangerous? They are spells, charms, and a
do-gooder conspiracy so old—well, not as old as we are, but old
enough—so old that hardly any of the singers know what they're
about anymore. Not all of them are important, of course. But all of
these people seem to sing at least some of the dangerous ones along
with the others. Naturally, the singers we most urgently need to
eliminate are the ones that know the most powerful songs, which
will free us to pick off the others at our leisure. But those who
know the spelled ones are difficult for us to cope with,
personally. So we'll have to be careful about this and use minions.
Our best people.'

" 'Demons?' one asked.

" 'Terrorists?' asked another.

" 'I got it! Generals!' said another. 'Or is
it mass murderers or banshees or ghouls we need here? Monsters
maybe.'

" 'Shoot,' said the Chairdevil. 'We'll need
all of that kind of thing before we're done. And worse.' "

* * *

"Worse?" the little boy interrupted the story
to ask. "What could be worse than mass murderers and monsters?"

"And demons," his sister reminded him.

The storyteller lowered her voice and leaned
forward as she told him. "Why, they called out the worst forces all
their hells had to offer, honey: bureaucrats. Bureaucrats and
politicians."

And with that the recess bell rang and the
woman smoothed her short skirt around her fine legs with her old
hands and left them to go to class.

* * *

She was back the next day though, in the same
place, the place the boy's eyes had gone to as soon as the teacher
let them out the door. It was sort of in the shadows. She was so
small she could easily be mistaken for one of the children from a
distance. They hunkered around her as if they were playing marbles.
It was nice to have an adult, even a small, old, strange one, talk
to them. The mother of the boy and girl didn't have much time
anymore and the housekeeper only spoke Cambodian. Their father had
left a long time ago. Some of the other children wished their
fathers had left too. They came to school sleepless from listening
to fights all night or with bruises peeking out from under their
sleeves or on their stomachs when their shirts rode up during
playtime.

The woman didn’t wait for them to be quiet.
She just started right in and they had to shut up if they wanted to
hear the story.

She took up exactly where she left off.
"Since the devils decided to use such a fearsome sort of army as
bureaucrats and politicians, they thought it would be best to start
trouble in one area and then gradually expand it until songs were
gone all over the world. They decided to start with these here
United States of America and with Canada, settin' up trouble
between the two of them, which was not all that hard to do."

Jennifer Thomsen raised her hand. "What about
Mexico? Mexico is on our other border," Jennifer said. She was just
showing off for the woman how good she was in geography.

"That's a real good question, honey. But
you're a little smarter than those devils were. Those devils
figured since nobody sung songs in English down there in Mexico,
they could deal with Mexican singers and Central and South American
singers later. Besides, the Latin American devils had a lot going
on already and were wiping out singers right and left. What with
all the coups and revolutions down there, everybody with any brains
whatsoever, including singers, tended to get wiped just for the fun
of it. But I'm glad you brought that up, because I'm going to start
by telling you a story that takes place around the Mexican border.
It's about a cowboy. You kids like cowboy stories?"

They said they did, though the boy wasn't
really sure what a cowboy was. Maybe it was like the picture in the
old book of the Minotaur. A cow on the top and a boy on the bottom.
Maybe he'd seen one on PBS sometime, on a special about zoological
curiosities, but right now he was indignant. He had been promised
something else. "You said you 'd tell us about the bureaucrats and
politicians."

"And businesspersons," his sister, who wanted
to be just like her mother when she grew up, prompted eagerly. "Oh,
please, I want there to be businesspersons making shrewd deals and
finding wonderful tax loopholes and all . . ."

The woman chuckled. Times had changed some
since she'd started this line of work. But if she was going to
accomplish her mission, she couldn't start in preaching right away
about what she thought her audience needed to hear. She needed to
please them first, tie in their interests with what she knew was
good for 'em. "Okay, sis, you got it. Plenty of heroic
businesspersons, though I'm warning you, this is a real story and
they don't always win."

The girl nodded gravely and the other
children wriggled with anticipation. If the good guys didn't always
win that just added to the excitement.

"Don't leave out the bureaucrats," the boy
reminded her.

"No sweat, buster. Cowboys and bureaucrats,
politicians and businesspersons it is. Now, I want you to remember
that devils are a lot older than you or even me, and they carry
grudges a long, long time. The reason the head devil knew so much
about using politicians to get at the songs was he'd tried it once
before, when he used a tin-eared politician to invoke an evil spell
upon the land called a blacklist. He destroyed many singers then,
turning them one against the other for reasons that had nothing to
do with music, silencing some forever, causing some to all but die
of despair. Until only a very few, including the great Sam
Hawthorne, who you’ll hear about a little later, were able to
withstand his power."

"Wait, "said the boy. "If this blacklist was
an evil spell, how could that Hawthorne guy have beat it? Was he a
devil too?"