Phantom Banjo (20 page)

"A man just came up to me and demanded
to know why I only played the one true verse of 'Amazing Grace' and
why we made up the others. Actually, I could have told him,
I
didn't exactly play the one true
verse. This banjo played it and its strings jogged my memory, after
a few run-throughs, and the one real verse I'd heard the most came
back to me. The banjo was given to me by a friend who is now dead
and it was given to him by its owner, and I'm sure a lot of you
know that that owner was Sam Hawthorne, who was struck down on a
stage in Austin after hearing that a large part of his life's work
had been destroyed. Sam's death was supposed to be natural. My
friend Mark's death was supposed to be either an accident, or my
fault, if some people have their way. This banjo is just supposed
to be a banjo but can't you hear it, my friends? Let me pause for a
moment now and let you listen real careful and you'll
hear—"

Dramatically, he lifted his hands aloft,
palms up, away from the banjo. Across the fire faces tilted
forward, flames dancing shadow patterns across hollowed cheeks,
shining on sharp-watching eyes and the bald spots of men of long
experience. The banjo strings vibrated with, "I Was Born About Ten
Thousand Years Ago."

People looked puzzled or nodded cautiously.
Faron Randolph ducked his head as if to hide his grin and Julianne
smiled and craned her neck to watch the ribbons of cloud tattering
in the wake of the sailing moon.

Gussie thought, it's not him that's being
foolish, it's me. Willie never has been much good at talking to one
person at a time but he's spent most of his life twisting crowds
around his little finger.

And he told about the van accident and about
the snakes and about Lulubelle Baker's videotapes. And people began
muttering and tuning and talking to each other. Among the mumblings
were the words "boozer" and "AA" and Gussie could tell Willie
heard.

* * *

A shaft of dirty moonlight filtered through
the high, half-painted windows of the old warehouse that had been
converted to a shelter. It wasn't much of a light, but it was
enough to see by as the bag lady known as Gussie tippy-toed past
the snoring Pete, paused beside Tony’s cot as he sat up coughing
and fell right back to sleep, and finally drew even with and
outdistanced the doggy aroma wafting from Crazy Ruthie.

Kathie Jorgensen lay curled
in her own sleeping bag near the front door, and didn’t notice as
Gussie picked the lock and slipped out into the
night
.
These people had been
a fine audience, but they were starting to get too nosy. Gussie
shuffled three blocks up Yesler, turned right onto Alaska Way, and
up the moving walkway into the ferry terminal. No predators were
out in that neck of the woods tonight, thanks be to God, and no
cops either. Inside the ferry terminal, she slipped into the
ladies', shed three layers of baggy, dirty clothing, washed the
worst of the stink off, and pulled a plastic-bag-wrapped pink and
lavender pastel jogging suit and a pair of Nikes from beneath the
junk in her shopping bag and put them on. She left the bag in the
trash for the next scavenger, took the ferry fare from the pocket
of her pants, and boarded the Bremerton Ferry. From the dock,
she
walked into one of the waterfront bars
and applied for a job. The bartender hired a woman who called
herself merely August, which wasn't so unusual with all the post
hippies around, though privately, the owner thought the woman
looked as though she might be heading more toward November than
August.

She was popular with the customers, though,
and those who liked to sit around the bar and visit between buying
Lotto tickets took to ignoring the TV to listen to this tall tale
she made up while mixing drinks and wiping down the bar. Business
picked up, in fact, because all her regulars kept coming back to
hear new installments of the story and some of them brought friends
back. It chased their blues better than the TV or telling her all
their own same old sad stories would have done. Seemed like nobody
ever got too drunk or out of line much anymore either. They were
too afraid of missing the latest installment to get really bombed,
and the regulars helped August keep would-be rowdies in line so she
could concentrate on doing her job and telling the story.

She had gotten to the part about the campfire
at the folk festival, and how people were laughing at Willie just
because he liked a little drink now and then.

* * *

From behind Willie a bottle emerged, the hand
holding it shining pale as the moon in the firelight, pouring a
ribbon of bright liquid into the plastic tumbler. Willie drank
about half of it and set to watching the crowd again, his mouth
tight and his eyes swinging contemptuously from one to the
other.

Faron Randolph cleared his throat. "You
know," he said quietly, as if he were speaking only to Willie. His
voice had a startling quality to it, quiet as it was, and people
hushed to listen, as if it were a shooting star that they wouldn't
see for a long time to come if they missed it this time around.
"You know, my daddy and cousin Vance Randolph had a good friend,
fellow name of Manly Wellman. Mr. Wellman used to go song-finding
with them sometimes. He was a writer, and he wrote about the songs
and the mountain folks and especially about a friend of his named
John. What he wrote about, people took to be fanciful, what they
call fantasy stories, about John meeting up with all manner of evil
creatures and wicked conjurers and kind of what I guess you might
call the country version of monster and horror movie characters.
They were good yarns so they got published by big New York
publishing houses. Mr. Wellman never would give John a last name
though and most people reckoned that was just to add a little more
mystery to the story. Daddy said that wasn't it. He said the reason
John was never given a last name was that he was a real person that
those things actually happened to and Mr. Wellman never wanted to
interfere with him too much by naming him outright, names having a
lot of power to conjurers. I don't exactly know what to make of
what's been happening to Mr. MacKai here, or of his banjo, but it
reminds me a little of John and his silver-strung guitar and I have
a feeling John would have been able to shed some light on what Mr.
MacKai's been talking about."

"The most supernatural thing about this whole
conversation, Faron, is that it's jarred more than two words strung
together out of you," a voice said from the shadows. The owner
scooted forward into the firelight, his face glowing with the
intense earnestness of a missionary trying to convert the heathen.
Willie recognized the folk-purist asshole who had been railing him
earlier.

"The reason these songs are disappearing, now
that Sam Hawthorne and the others are dead, is that the rest of you
never troubled yourselves to really learn and care about the words
except to ape Sam and the real folk interpreters in this country.
I'm surprised at you, Faron, with your reputation, for not seeing
through this bullshit. Half the people who've been killed off
weren't folk musicians at all—hell, Josh Grisholm wrote most of his
own songs, and a lot of the others were nothing but little tin
movie stars with acoustic instruments as props. They never cared
about the origins or meaning of the songs. They never cared to get
the story straight. And now the audience is tired of your little
fad and is moving on to the next one and frankly, I'm glad. Because
now we scholars can get back to our work without being lumped with
the rest of you."

"Sing 'Leatherwing Bat,' " Faron Randolph
said.

"Huh?"

" 'Leatherwing Bat.' Sing it. It's a folk
song, right?"

"Of course it is!"

"And you just said that you, Eric Havelock,
and those like you are the only pure people who care enough about
the words that you haven't forgotten just because Sam's dead. So
sing it."

"I—uh—I don't call it to mind right now,"
Havelock said. "And I don't sing on dares."

"This so-called jam session is too batty for
me, anyhow," Clarissa said. "I didn't take a break from repairing
burn patients in the OR all week to come out here and listen to
this. Let's play or let's turn in."

They started one of those Irish tunes that
sounds like about seven hundred other Irish tunes. Willie made a
disgusted face. Well, the music world had never listened to
anything else he had to say. Why did he think they'd listen to
this? He drank another slug of whiskey and felt like crying, right
here in the middle of everything. A hand tapped him on the
shoulder.

"I found what you had to say real
interesting, Mr. MacKai, and I'd like to talk to you about it,"
that familiar voice belonging to the whiskey pourer said. "Maybe we
could have a private talk."

"I don't see why not," Willie said. "I
thought I was among friends here but I see I'm mistaken." He said
it loud enough for the others to hear but nobody was interested
except Brose, Juli, Faron and Gussie, who were his friends and who
might have been annoyed at being lumped with the rest.

The man with the bottle was a handsome
fellow, his hair whiter than his pale hands. He wore a sweatshirt
with a logo Willie couldn't read with only the moon for a reading
lamp.

"I've been wanting to talk to you ever since
I got here, Mr. MacKai, but especially after seeing the shameful
way those people were treating you I just had to speak up," the man
said in a voice so oozy with sympathy, Willie was a tiny bit
alarmed, wondering if the guy was about to make a pass at him.

But Willie replied politely, trying to sound
grateful, "Mighty kind of you, sir." Now why did it always have to
be strangers who seemed to understand, he wondered, instead of the
people who claimed to care about you?

"Willie—may I call you Willie? Willie, I
represent some major interests in the music business. There's a lot
of truth in what you've been saying. We both know that. But there's
also a lot of truth in what that other fellow was saying. The folk
thing has been a trend. America is ready for another trend. I
think—those I represent think—you're just the kind of man to lead
this trend, to be our first major recording star."

"You do?" Willie sounded a little more
cautious but very pleased. "Now what would make you think a thing
like that?"

"Well, sir, the fact of the matter is, the
average age of America is a little older these days. The time for
teenage rock stars is over. There are a lot of lonesome folks out
there between marriages, their kids raised maybe, maybe never
connected with anybody, who are looking for someone to fantasize
about, someone possible to sing to them and lull their fears, tell
them they can be somebody even if they have no one."

"Why me?" Willie asked. "Not to question your
good judgment and discernin' taste, Mr.—"

"Nicholson. B. B. Nicholson. Sorry," he stuck
his hand out and Willie pumped it.

"Not to try to make you change your mind, but
I ain't exactly the idol type. There's handsomer fellows, better
singers, better guitar players. If getting old is all you need, you
got a whole lot of 'em here."

"Ah, yes, Willie, but we want you, not the
others. Haven't you read the studies that indicate that people who
are too good-looking are intimidating? And any lacks in your voice
our studios can augment. As for guitar playing, you won't be
needing a guitar or one of those things"—he indicated the
banjo—"for the sort of career we have in mind for you."

The banjo had been stuck on "Whiskey, You're
the Devil" a great deal of the night but now it switched to
"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," as mournful and sorry
for itself as Willie was feeling for himself.

"Is that so?" Willie asked. "Mind if I bum a
cigarette?"

"Be my guest" Nicholson replied, and supplied
one. Willie stuck it between his lips. Life missed a beat. The
familiar, comforting gesture of lighting the smoke had gotten lost
someplace in the transaction. He could have been drunker than he
realized, but it seemed to him the cigarette Nicholson supplied was
already lit. Willie wished he could see more of Nicholson than that
general impression of paleness. The man was thin and chiseled as
was the fashion: his axe-blade-sharp cheekbones flashed, his teeth
snapped open, snapped closed again when he talked, like icebergs
closing in on a ship. The hair he flipped back from his face with
an elegant toss of his head rose and fell like a spray of sea foam.
He was a smooth customer all right.

Willie's horse-trading instincts were
stronger than the liquor. "Just what kind of music is it you'd be
wanting me to do, B.B.? You people aren't going to start up a great
folk revival, now, are you?"

"I'm afraid not, Willie, though of course
we'd like to. I just love those drinking, drug, and murder ballads
you do so well."

"Thank you, sir. That's the second time I've
gotten a compliment on that lately."

"Unfortunately, your modern-day listening
audiences aren't into that kind of thing. No, sir, but don't let it
worry you. The fact of the matter is, Willie, in your case the kind
of music doesn't matter really. We'll use a top-forty format, I
imagine, to launch you . . ."

"Maybe country would be a better way to go
then, if it doesn't matter, like you say. I can't stand top forty.
It's not like it's still rock and roll. That stuff on now all
sounds alike."

"Country is a dying market, Willie. A year
from now, it'll be as dead as folk. People are hipper now. They
aren't interested in listening to other people's problems. They
have their own lives to get on with. They want something that
doesn't intrude. Your music these days has to stimulate them and
interest them without making them feel that they have to get
involved. Country just doesn't do that. People are tired of yuppies
trying to sound like hicks."