Phantom Banjo (26 page)

"Real sorry about your house," Gussie said.
"Damn, you try to do something nice for people and something like
this happens to you. Those cops were just as pure mean as any I'd
ever seen, all except that lady and those two fellows, who seemed
decent enough. That Captain sure had a burr under his tail
though."

Anna Mae shrugged and sat down with her knees
pulled up and her arms wrapped around them in front of Brose. Her
face was half-buried in her arms. "You think they're really dead?"
she asked Brose.

Brose just stared back at her.

"Don't answer that," she said. "Of course,
they're dead."

"Now, Anna Mae, you don't know that," Gussie
said, trying to be soothing.

"Like hell I don't. Sylvia was in that
van."

"People survive accidents," Gussie reminded
her matter-of-factly. She wished she had a bar rag. It was easier
to keep calm if you were polishing something and she definitely
felt that one crisis would keep leading to another as long as
people allowed themselves to be stampeded by imagining the worst,
even when they didn't know. She firmly tried not to think of
someone like the police captain having power of life and death over
Lettie and Mic.

"That was an accident like what happened to
Karen Silkwood was an accident," one of the Irish from Ireland
said. "They're probably just waiting to come back and get the rest
of us."

"Sixties paranoia is a little old hat,
fella," Havelock said disparagingly.

* * *

The Irishman looked at him and said, "Don't
you be sellin' my paranoia short, me lad. I wasn't even born till
yer sixties was nearly over and I've been watchin' for goons of one
sort or the other most of me life. Whether they're coppers,
soldiers, government strongmen, or the bleedin' little people,
somethin' there is that's not wantin' the likes of us to leave here
alive."

After all that Celtic melodrama, the remnants
of the festival crowd did leave alive, if a little muddier. While
some of them slept, Willie paced outside and smoked, carefully
shepherded by the ranger, who, now that he had announced himself,
had to look like he was performing his duty, although he now had
more than a shadow of a reasonable doubt about Willie's involvement
in Mark's death. There was also the little matter of jurisdiction.
Texas was a long way away and if Willie was headed back that way
anyhow, the ranger was going to be on a whole lot firmer ground
accompanying him back to the Lone Star State for questioning.

Brose fiddled with his truck tires and
finally managed to rock the truck out of its trough and drive onto
firmer ground. Others began to follow his example.

* * *

Julianne refused to go when the doctors
filled a van with the injured for transfer to the hospital. She was
okay, really, she said to Gussie and to Clarissa. Feeling her mouth
move and her throat contract as she spoke without hearing her own
voice was an odd experience, but at least she didn't have to listen
to the arguments of the others. After her initial fearful reaction
and a good look at herself in Anna Mae's candlelit bathroom mirror,
she decided that there wasn't much wrong with her, that having
lightning blast a microphone in front of your face would make
anyone a little deaf for a while, and it would probably go
away.

Anyway, if it didn't, there wasn't anything
doctors could do, was there, except charge her a lot of money? Her
ears would get better and her eyebrows would grow back and she'd
rub a little aloe vera on the burns and take extra vitamin E. No
big deal. Right now watching the mouths move and hearing no voices,
being surprised by a touch now and then, was a little surreal.

At least she was well prepared to be deaf.
She'd learned American Sign Language during her days as a dance
major in college, when she'd earned extra money as an interpreter.
In fact, the silence made her think of dance, as if everyone were
moving underwater. It was interesting, the silence. It would not be
permanent. It could not. She was a musician. Even though she hadn't
been playing in a long time while she was waiting tables, she knew
that really, like Cinderella, she was more than she appeared to
be.

She would hitch a ride back to Joplin with
Faron or Brose or Willie and see Lucien and tell him he had to heal
her. George would help him. She would tell them that whatever her
psychic gifts might be, she didn't want to do that. She wanted to
keep doing music. Surely this little trial was just sent to her to
show her how very much she needed to do what Lucien had mistakenly
assumed was just a passing thing. Hadn't he been the one to tell
her she'd been a musician in all those other lives? George would
help him understand. George would be glad. He'd encouraged her to
come here because he knew, really, that she had to rediscover what
the music meant to her— had meant to both of them. And just as soon
as she'd been without the possibility of music long enough to prove
she'd learned its value, she'd get better, her hearing would
return. It had to.

Gussie thought about writing her a note,
explaining what had happened to the people who'd been arrested,
letting her know how urgent it was that they get out of there as
quickly as possible. But then she thought, hell's bells, the girl's
got enough to worry about already. Anyway, if what Willie thinks is
right, they're after musicians and neither one of us qualifies
right now, so at least the two of us should make it out of here
alive.

* * *

Harry who worked in the shipyard looked up
from his Lotto tickets. "Well, did they?"

"Did they what?" the woman called August
asked as she continued to polish glasses.

"Did they get out of there alive?"

"Nope, just then the house exploded and they
were all blown to smithereens. Of course they got out of there
alive, Harry, or what would be the point of the story? Not the ones
in the first van of course. I'm afraid Sylvia, the Highland pipers
and the dancers, and all of the Irish group but that one guy were
goners. Casualties of a war they didn't even know they were
fighting. Maybe if they'd known about it they'd have gone in for
big band music or Lawrence Welk or something."

"These people you're calling devils now
though, August," Lewis the submarine sailor began, "come on,
devils?"

"Well, of course they worked through regular
people sometimes, like I said, people like the crooked cops and
terrorists and corrupt politicians, but who else do you think could
cause lightning to strike and why would anyone else be so
interested in destroying a dead man's banjo?"

"Doesn’t seem to me like they tried really
hard," Lewis's girlfriend Vicki said, in between thoughtful sips of
a virgin daiquiri, which she always drank because she didn't like
booze that much but liked the stories and left it up to Lewis to be
the designated drunk. "I don't see why they couldn't just take it
away from Willie."

"Well, because it was the concentrated memory
of a lifetime of the very songs that had kept the devils from
takin' over for centuries and centuries. They couldn't no more
snatch that thing offa Willie's neck than the Wicked Witch of the
West could take Dorothy's red shoes. But they could make it awful
hot all around him."

"Then how come when Willie squirted them with
water they didn't melt?" Harry scoffed.

"That stuff only works in the movies.
Besides, it's devils we're talking here, not witches," explained
Bill Johnson, who worked on the computers over at the naval
base.

"And that lady cop and the other two did stop
him when they got squirted—I guess you could say they melted in a
way," August said, polishing another glass.

"So then what? Did everybody leave except
Anna Mae?"

"Oh, she left too. Julianne, the ranger, and
Willie rode with Gussie—since the ranger had flown out from Texas
and his rental car was good and stuck. He called a tow truck on the
way out of town. Gussie drove because she was able to get her
front-wheel drive station wagon out the easiest and as long as both
Willie and the ranger were with her, she thought she could make
sure there was no more police brutality for the rest of the
trip.

"Anna Mae rode with Brose, and Faron gave
Hawkins a lift and arranged to meet Brose at a truck stop in
western Virginia after Faron swung up to D. C. to pick up his wife.
We wanted to keep tabs on each other. Knowing people who've just
been killed, missing your own death by nothing more than a skinny
little cobweb of coincidence, that can make you skittish.

"And then there was that banjo of Willie's.
Willie never took it off anymore and Faron watched it a lot, as if
he was studyin' on something. Anna Mae had already said it was a
thing of power and she set great store by it, because when the rest
of them left that night, she deserted her place and her job to go
with them."

* * *

Anna Mae didn't even lock her house when she
left. Brose asked her about that on the way to the next Nickerson
Farms stop, one night when she was brooding and they were well out
of the range of any radio stations and he was drowsy and she was
about as bad and he knew that if they didn't talk he wasn't going
to be able to make it through one more mile and doubted if she
would either.

"You're not afraid somebody's going to go
into your house and steal all your stuff?" Brose asked her. "Your
neighbors watch it good or what?"

She shrugged. "Nope. Somebody's going to take
the stuff and the house. It wasn't exactly mine anyway. I was never
told not makin' music was part of the deal, though."

"What kind of deal did you make, Anna
Mae."

She flinched away from him as if he'd rubbed
sandpaper across her sunburn. "I'd just as soon you didn't use
that name right now, okay?"

"Why not? It's your name, ain't it?"

"Not exactly."

"Exactly whose is it then?"

"You remember the woman they found murdered
by the feds at Pine Ridge?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it was her name. Mine used to be
Mabel."

"Mabel? No shit?"

"Yeah, Mabel Charlie."

"I'd have changed it too."

"That wasn't why. I'd been to college, see,
and I got a job working on the committee investigating alcoholism
on the Navajo reservation out in Arizona. One of the guys I worked
with was this bright kid who was going to be a lawyer when he got
out. He dated a cousin of mine. He was tactless enough to point out
to the committee chairman, who was also the mayor of this little
town—I'm not going to say where—that the mayor ran the first bar on
the highway as Indians came off the reservation. He started
organizing a protest against it—that was while the whole Wounded
Knee thing and the Alcatraz thing were going on. I didn't really go
along with that Red Power stuff much. I'd gotten my education and I
felt like the system had treated me pretty well. I told one of the
other men on the committee maybe it would be a good idea if the
mayor was to resign, because of this demonstration my cousin's
boyfriend was arranging. Instead, all of a sudden there's cops come
looking for my cousin and the next thing you know, they 'find' her
dead in her boyfriend's car. The boyfriend said he'd been driving
down the road and saw her in the headlights, lying on the road. He
stopped and even though he thought she was dead, he put her in the
car to take her to the hospital. They claimed he murdered her.
Later, her brother busted him out of jail and they kidnapped the
mayor but there was a shootout and both young men were killed. I
couldn't believe it. I wrote letters to my congressmen and right
after that the one that was sponsoring the anti-alcoholism program
asked me to come to Washington as a lobbyist.

"He was a good-looking, dynamic man and I
thought he was really interested in our problems at first. He took
me to a lot of meetings where I wasn't supposed to say anything and
a lot of parties and eventually let me know about this 'cheap'
property he had found that I could buy, where he could come and
visit me. He never came, once I moved out here, and never returned
my calls, and the lobbying job turned out to be as a secretary. But
a lot of other people came by asking me questions about what
happened in that little town, and later I learned that everybody my
cousin's boyfriend had tried to rally together was under
investigation—all because I blew the whistle on them. They told me
that.

"I heard about Anna Mae dying because she
wouldn't talk, no matter what they did to her, and here I had just
told them everything to betray my people because I thought cowboys
and Indians wasn't a problem anymore. So I took her name to remind
me how stupid I'd been. Every time somebody calls me her name I
think how she gave her life to keep from betraying her people and I
got a house for betraying them because I wanted to suck up to the
all-powerful white men."

"You mean you changed your name to hers on
account of you figure you didn't deserve it?" Brose asked.

"Yeah."

"That's weird," he said.

"It's another customary kind of thing some of
us do to remember something important," she said. "Sam Hawthorne
knew about it, but he'd only call me Mae. Something about that man.
I met him at a rally—I went to a lot of those once my congressman
boyfriend left me here with my hard-earned property, though this is
the first time I've been punished for it. Anyway, I ended up
sitting next to Sam at a sit-in and he asked me about the name too.
I didn't want him to think I was as good as he was—I wanted him to
know all about it so he'd know not to trust me. Only he just said
anybody could be fooled.

"That was what we were doing in the
demonstrations, making sure that the bullshit the people trying to
control the government dished out didn't fool the public like it
fooled me. He said that's what musicians had always done, from
before the time of the old minstrels in Europe, that Indian people
and African people had had their own equivalents too of a special
profession whose job it was to wander around, spreading the news
and debunking nonsense. He said it probably wasn't a kid at all who
told everybody that the emperor was running around flashing. He
said it was probably a folksinger. He said some other things too,
recently, but . . ." but she hesitated to talk about that right
now. Too much had been happening that she couldn't explain and
didn't understand. She was sure the dream message phone call had
come from Sam—had to have come from Sam, but what if it hadn't?
What if she had been used by these people Willie was talking about,
tricked? Maybe they could sound like Sam. She knew even very
mundane tricksters like her boss had ways of discovering things she
wouldn't have thought he could know.