Phantom Banjo (25 page)

* * *

On the back of the rise behind the house,
Brose, surprisingly fast on his feet, caught up with the fleeing
Willie. "Where you goin'? You leavin' all them folks down there to
take the rap for you?"

Willie wasn't even winded. The banjo had
switched to another old outlaw song, "Run the Ridges." "Damn,
buddy, I think you stepped in something. I got a good whiff of
bullshit just then."

"Come off it, man. Where the hell you think
you gonna go?"

"Not to jail and have one of those red-eyed
things show up as prosecuting attorney, that's for damned sure. You
may not have noticed, brother, but things ain't happenin' exactly
like they ought to these days."

"I noticed. Why else they be sendin' cop cars
to take care of people struck by lightnin'? Like me, for instance.
We been friends a long time, Willie. I always knowed you was a fool
about some things and I never mistook you for no hero but I never
thought you was a coward either."

"Like you said, we been friends a long time.
So I'll let what you just said pass. But think of it this way. If
they try to go after that Indian gal for harborin' a fugitive and
they can't find me, they can't very well say she's harboring me,
can they?"

But the argument was curtailed suddenly by
Anna Mae's voice crying out over the general cacophony. A faint
pulsing glow brushed the tops of their heads from the rotating
lights of the police cars, but this was suddenly pierced by a
brilliant shot of flame and the shattering of glass.

Brose had been very near to the truth in
accusing Willie of cowardice, for in his realistic, everyday life
Willie was not big on risks or extra worrisome responsibilities of
any kind. However, Willie, like Brose, did have another self, the
one that he was when he cheered for the hero of a movie or a book,
the one that he used to use when he sang of high adventure and
strong hearts against impossible odds.

The plain fact was that the noise and the
lights and the crashing and the shouting seemed more like a movie
than it did like real life so Willie acted like his movie-fied
self. The banjo still slung across his back, he hit the hillside on
his hands and knees and low-crawled up to peer over the edge.

Brose landed with a thump beside him. A
policewoman was throwing a guitar into what was left of the bonfire
while another cop threw a log at the house. Anna Mae struggled with
a plainclothesman twice her size. The smoke and flames played on
the faces of the cops, the lights on the faces of the former
festival goers lined up against the cars—Willie was reminded of
World War II movies where the Nazis were rounding up victims for
the concentration camps.

* * *

Gussie had a hard time believing she wasn't
in the midst of a nightmare. The strobing police lights, the
dancing fire on the stern, malicious faces as they delivered the
final blow, one by one feeding expensive guitars and fiddles to the
fire. Policemen did not behave like this. They didn't treat people
and their property this way for no reason. The strings twanged and
somewhere, among it all, she heard other strings twanging "We Shall
Not Be Moved," anthem of the sixties passive resistance movement
for civil rights and against war. And from the general cacophony
she picked out Willie's voice whispering fiercely, "Not now,
dammit. Cut it out. If I'm going to be a damn martyr you could let
me pick the time at least."

But the banjo kept twanging and the people
lined up waiting for the police van folded like dominoes in a
supposed Asian political situation, until all sat on the ground
with their arms over their heads. And the gospel-singing EENT man
had a sob in his voice as he chanted, rather than sang, "We shall
not, we shall not be moved," and the others joined in.

The police hauled several of them, including
Anna Mae's friend Sylvia, into one of the vans and it drove off,
siren blaring and lights flashing.

It was just the diversion needed to cover
Willie and Brose commandeering the garden hose and slipping down to
the back of the house to turn on the faucet. Suddenly from the
shadows, a spray of water squirted onto the flames at the window
and played over them, hitting in the face the policeman who tried
to add another log to the house fire. By now the banjo was so loud
it seemed amplified, but the singing was louder. The hose detoured
from the house briefly to wet down several of the other cops.

"Over there, in the shadows!" the Captain
said, drawing his gun. "Get those assholes."

A shot rang out and Gussie's first thought
was, oh, God, they've started killing us. But when she peeked under
her armpit, she saw that the policewoman who had been examining
wallets for ID had moved back from the cars and now held her arms
in the air with her weapon in her hands. The woman's cap was off
and her hair clung wet and shiny against her head. She leveled her
gun in the direction of the Captain and asked in a puzzled,
suspicious voice, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. What are we doing
here?"

"You got a problem, Ms. Sergeant?" the
Captain asked nastily.

"Yeah. What the hell's going on here, sir?
Who authorized this? I been checking ID and so far we have two
attorneys and four doctors, a priest, a nurse, three daycare
workers, six waiters and waitresses, a sailor, two carpenters, a
welder, three teamsters—their union is going to get our ass
somehow, sir, you wait and see—twelve social workers, a
congressional page, and—get this—a Texas Ranger."

"Drug runners. They're all drug runners,
little lady. Why do you think we're doing all this?"

"Doing what, destroying the evidence?"

"Put down your weapon now, Sergeant. This is
insubordination."

"Just a minute, sir. She's right," a black
officer said. "We got no call to harass these people. Some of them
are hurt. What you doin' burnin' property like this? Which
department did you say you on loan from anyway?" He felt befuddled
and stupid, coming on night duty, after a day of little sleep, and
had gone along with the orders with perfunctory verification, had
hardly noticed how strange and brutal the new captain's orders had
been. It was as if he were moving in a daze, as if he'd been
drugged, by his own power, by the fear that always nagged at him
when he went into a confrontation, by the authority flashing out of
the Captain's eyes, glinting dark maroon in the flash of the patrol
car lights. But the little tune tinkling out of the banjo, the way
these people looked and dressed, the instruments, reminded him of
another time, when he was just a kid, and having people sing him
into the white grade school in Biloxi. He felt real bad being on
the wrong end of that song, on the wielding end of the
nightstick.

Another van arrived then and the Captain
said, "Never mind the chatter. Load these people up and, you two,
find out who's got that hose and stop them."

"Don't move," warned the Sergeant, shaking
her wet head. When the water first hit her, she had drawn her
weapon instinctively, as she had been trained to do when
threatened. But as the water ran off and the funny plunky tune
trickled into her ears, she realized that the real threat lay with
the unorthodox orders she had been following. The sense of unease
that had grown on her since she started patting down the prisoners
and realizing they were not, as they seemed, merely some itinerant
group of musical hooligans, but working people, even professional
people, and injured at that—no one had said anything about
injuries. Why weren't ambulances called? What the hell was going on
here? And what was with this new captain that he issued such
orders—illegal orders, she was sure. She was going to lose her job
for pointing her weapon at him, maybe even go to jail, but if
anybody found out about this raid, she'd lose her job anyway.

The older of the two men who'd been feeding
musical instruments to the fire snatched a Gibson Hummingbird
guitar back from the hissing flames and stared at it, and beyond
it, to the Asian huts he had burned in the sixties and to other,
worse things he'd done because he was ordered, things that he was
still living down, things that spoiled his aim when he was on the
firing range. And here he was again, destroying, uselessly causing
pain, because some asshole that outranked him told him to. He
picked up the guitar and carried it back to his patrol car.
Sergeant Emilie Gray, with her gun leveled at the Captain, just
watched him. He leaned into the car and picked up the radio.

"Wait. What are you doing, Del?" Emilie Gray
demanded.

"Covering your butt, Gray. I'm calling the
chief in on this and see if he authorizes what our fearless leader
here has put us up to. And if he does, I'm calling my congressman
and we'll see if she agrees, and if she does, well, hell, I might
start a second career in broadcast news."

"Call an ambulance while you're at it, then,"
Sergeant Gray said. "A lot of these people have been hurt."

"I'd like to remind you insubordinate fools
that there's a murder suspect and his accomplice loose on this
place, probably at the other end of that garden hose," the Captain
said. "If they escape, I'll have your asses for obstructing justice
and aiding and abetting a felon in addition to all of the other
charges I'm totting up against you—and any of the rest of you who
are just standing around .”

"Why don't you let me worry about that,
Captain?" asked a burly blond man who slowly turned with his hands
still on his head until he faced the house, and the raging
plainclothesman. "I'm the investigating officer in that case.
Detective Sergeant Bud Lamprey, Texas Rangers. The lady sergeant
with the gun there has my badge. I've been observin' the
proceedings all day now and I was just fixin' to take Willie MacKai
back to Texas for questioning as soon as we got these casualties
taken care of, before you folks showed up and started nailin'
everybody and settin' fire to everything. I gotta say, y'all sure
do things mighty strange around here."

While the ranger spoke, the officer Sergeant
Gray had called Del was listening to the squawk box. Suddenly he
tensed, leaned inside, and turned up the volume. The dispatcher,
even through the static, sounded a little excited as she babbled a
string of numbers loosely connected by words. Del held out the
receiver so the Captain could hear and the two men glared at each
other. Gussie had the oddest impression that the anger in the
Captain's gestures as he snatched the receiver out of the lead car
was not as genuine as he wanted the others to think. She caught the
glitter of predator's teeth through curved lip as he snapped a
response into the microphone, then turned back to the other
officers.

"Those of you who prefer to disobey orders
can make up your own minds about whether to obey this one or not,
but the rest of us are needed out on the highway. There's been a
pileup and the van that just left here is involved."

"What about the prisoners, sir?" asked a cop
who sounded disappointed.

"The hell with 'em," the Captain said.

"How bad is the accident?" Clarissa, the
plastic surgeon-bodhran player, asked.

The Captain smiled at her. "Turn yourself in
at the station later and we'll let you know if anybody survived the
fire. Right now it doesn't look like it."

The steel drummer held on to Clarissa so that
her fists were out of range of the Captain until he could climb
back into his car, followed by the rest of his officers. The
prisoners, still uncertain of their status, fell away from the cars
as the policemen pushed past them and flung open doors. Del and
Emilie Gray exchanged a long look, then Emilie holstered her gun
and ran for a car, as did the black officer, who threw a backward
glance, which seemed to Gussie a mixture of yearning and apology,
at the people standing among the wreckage of the stage, the fire,
and Anna Mae's house.

* * *

The sirens diminished to no more than a
baby's cry in the distance and two wet, smoke-smudged figures
walked cautiously out from behind the house. Like everyone else,
their features were hard to make out in the moonlight. The police
had been thorough in their destruction.

"I'm sorry about your house, Anna Mae,"
Willie said. "Is the Texas Ranger still here?"

"I'm right here, MacKai."

"Then I surrender. I won't give you no
trouble. I didn't do nothing wrong and even if it might be proved
otherwise to the satisfaction of some, I ain't lettin' any more
innocent folks get hurt on account of me."

"We can talk about that later, MacKai. I've
already heard what you have to say for yourself, and after
witnessin' that disgustin' display of unprofessional behavior I'm
inclined to give you that there's sure as hell somethin' screwy
about all this."

Anna Mae emerged from her house. "The fire's
out. Everybody come on inside."

Her voice was as featureless as her face in
the shadows but by the time Gussie and Brose, with Juli between
them, followed the others through the sooty kitchen into the living
room, which was on the far side of the house from the fire and had
sustained little damage. Anna Mae had set out two kerosene lanterns
and a slew of scented votive candles in little blue and red glass
cups that made the place look like a church and smell like a
department store cosmetic counter, with an underlay of burnt wiring
and charred cloth from where the kitchen curtains lay in ruins in
the sink, as Gussie had seen through the moonlit window on the way
in.

Navajo rugs softened the hardwood floors and
a real brick fireplace with a wood stove inside of it squatted in
the center of the room. Quilts were draped across the couches and
Anna Mae pulled one off and handed it to Gussie to wrap around Juli
before the couch filled up with people.