Phantom Banjo (28 page)

"Hmm, perhaps," the Chairdevil said.

"Cheer up, boss," the Stupidity and Ignorance
Devil said, "we're doing fine."

"I suppose you're right," the Chairdevil
said. "Lightning has a mind of its own and Duck Soul has almost no
mind at all so the combination was never surefire, so to speak, but
nevertheless we did achieve some maiming and bodily injury there.
Definitely going to convince the safety conscious in that crowd
that going to those singing things is at least as harmful to their
health as cigarettes, booze, drugs, and our other products. And if
our police minion was undermined by mutineers, he did manage to
break up that little party and send them flying right back into our
clutches. While it may be a little hard to come up with something
suitably impressive in the middle of a farm, short of sending the
animals on a rampage, and we've done that. And not to be
unnecessarily redundant, now that the adversaries have piled
themselves into vehicles we have them right where we want them.
Because no matter what, the highways are ours."

"Not another fiery smashup," the other devils
all groaned, unanimously bored with that overused ploy.

"Nothing so crude," their leader assured
them.

"I don't see why you couldn't just let that
Texas boy scout take Willie back to jail," the Debauchery Devil
complained. "After we went to all that trouble to frame him."

"If I've told you once I've told you a
thousand times, we don't want these people in jail. Not the
musicians. They'll cause nothing but trouble. Besides, the Texas
boy scout, as you call him, is yet another of those thorns in our
side—an honest cop. No, I've decided to eliminate the problem of
MacKai and that banjo once and for all with what you might call a
nonviolent solution—I've simply sent them into limbo—with a modern
twist or two."

* * *

Willie sat up in his coffin so fast he bumped
his head on the lid. For a moment he felt disoriented, and then he
reckoned that coffins didn't usually accommodate four, and two
sitting up at that. Of course, he had been lying in the back of
Gussie's station wagon, which was rigged so the backseat would fold
down. The car no longer grumbled forward and that, he supposed, was
what woke him, though he had certainly been known to sleep through
many a pit stop.

"Where are we?" he asked, wanting to know if,
for instance, they were in Texas yet and sitting outside the
jailhouse in particular. The sight of the sleeping ranger reminded
him of the delicacy of his position and he wondered if he was in
any immediate danger of being tossed into the pokey.

Gussie sat silently for a while without
answering, then turned and looked at him, the headlights of the
truck behind them glittering off her eyeballs. "You tell me and
we'll both know," she said. "Willie, I don't even know when we are.
Back before the hailstorm it was midnight on Tuesday. According to
my watch it is now midnight on Saturday. According to the sores on
my butt and the shape my hands are in, it's midnight sometime in my
nineties."

"Well, goddamn, Gus, it was real nice of you
to let me sleep but that's ridiculous, darlin'," he said, checking
his own watch at the same time. "SAT" it said, no matter how long
he stared at it. So he hunkered down and looked out the windows
around them. "We at some kind of truck stop or what?"

"We're in some kind of god-awful traffic jam
for what I can make out," she said. "I don't know where we're going
anymore. I was just following that truck up ahead of us until we
got out of the hailstorm. But with all these trucks around us and
it bein' dark and all, I can't even make out where the hell it is
we are so all-fired anxious to get to that we're lined up with all
these other lamebrains to get there."

Willie fought down an interior uneasiness
that made his skin tingle and his gut turn over and decided if he
looked and sounded calm and practical maybe it would absorb from
the outside in. "No matter. Let's trade places while it's quiet and
I'll drive."

Gussie didn't even think about opening the
door with big trucks squashing in from either side with barely a
foot of room to spare. She dug her heels into the seat, put her
palms on the headrest, and boosted herself over. Normally she could
have done this gracefully but her arms and knees and backside were
so sore she caught her toe in the ranger's ear, which woke him
up.

Fortunately, all parties involved were
skinny, and Willie slid sideways to make room for her, then lowered
himself into the driver's seat. As he put his hands on the steering
wheel he saw that his hands had blood from the seat. He twisted to
look behind him. Gussie lay on her belly, facing the front seat. He
held up his bloody fingers and said, "Jesus Christ, Gus."

"Never knew you could get saddle sores from a
station wagon, did you?"

He shook his head and rolled down the window,
adjusted the mirror, then adjusted the other one. "Wish we'd
stopped at a 7-Eleven. Don't hardly feel natural drivin' without
somethin' to drink."

"Don't feel natural to me apprehendin' an
important witness and havin' the suspect—er, witness—drive me
home," said the ranger, awake, thanks to Gussie, and stirring like
a bear from hibernation. "Damn, I'm hungry.

"You're free as you can be to drive if you
want to, buddy, but take a look around and I think it might ease
your mind about any of us goin' anyplace anytime soon."

"I'd like to know where in the hell this
place is."

The banjo accommodatingly started playing a
mournful tune. "Fat lot of help you are," Willie growled at it. "I
don't know what the hell you're playing."

"I do," Gussie said blearily, raising her
hand like a kid who could answer the teacher's question. She was
beginning to have no trouble believing she'd been driving for five
days with no real rest. "It's by a guy named K. W. Todd who used to
come to Tacoma before Triumph had to stop the open mikes. Used to
be a street singer in Seattle before they outlawed that too but
mostly he's a hotshot songwriter. I got Lettie to carry his
album."

"That's real nice, darlin', but we need to
know the song, not the life history of the fellow who wrote
it."

"Just hold your horses, I'm gettin' there,"
she said, her memory fading as sleep kept trying to take over.
"Somethin' about a wheel, oh, yeah . . . hmmm hmmm hm hmm hmmm
hmhmhm—like that . . ."

"We got the banjo for the tune, Gus. What's
the name?"

"I'm workin' up to it," she said, then began,
"Here's a health to the Deveneau's, Jones and O'Malley's," in a
tentative and slightly off-key voice, singing a syllable for each
ring of the banjo, "Who rode from the east on a slow-turnin' wheel.
Who forded wide rivers, past moun-tains and valleys, to leave their
young lives by the Oregon Trail . . ."

"Whoever heard of a traffic jam on the Oregon
Trail?" the ranger asked.

"Do I look like the triple A?" Willie
said.

"No, but on the off chance that you are could
you tell me where the men's room is?"

From all four sides came a sharp mechanical
sigh of air brakes being released.

"You're gonna have to hang it out the window,
now, buddy," Willie said, turning the key and shifting into first,
"looks like we're moving."

* * *

Molly and Barry were attacking their house
with deodorant bombs when Ellie and Faron arrived, Jim Hawkins,
Brose Fairchild, and Anna Mae Gunn right behind them.

"Peeyew, it stinks in here," Ellie said,
wrinkling her nose with distaste. "What happened? The wiring catch
fire?"

Her mother's mouth was tight and her black
eyes flashed with fury as she sprayed a vengeful mist of artificial
pine at a K-Mart Early American lamp.

The room looked oddly naked and it took Ellie
a moment to realize what was wrong. The two tall bookcases and the
short one with the stereo on top were empty except for a few
paperbacks. Her father caught her eye.

"I'm sorry, honey. Somebody came in and took
all of them. Your old Joan Baez records and the Easyriders, all of
the Kingston Trio and the ones we got at the festivals, your mom's
Allen Damron records, all the Sam Hawthorne, Josh Grisholm, Pete
Seeger, Emilie Aronson, Nedra Buchanan, Tim Henderson, Bill
Staines, Hoyt Axton, Tania Opland, Tom Paxton, Malvina Reynolds,
Bob Dylan—everything."

"But, Daddy, didn't you tape them all?"

"That's what you smell. I can understand,
what with the paper telling how the big aircraft companies are
offering cash for the material in phonograph records now, why
somebody would steal them to recycle, but the bastard who broke in
emptied our tapes into the sink, slashed and burned them all. We
had to have the plumbing replaced but we've been tenting in the
backyard until we can get the smell out of the house."

Hawkins sighed deeply. "You know, there seems
to be a run of this kind of thing these days. I keep my stuff with
a girlfriend in Connecticut and while I was at sea a couple of
months ago her place was broken into and all of my stuff I didn't
have with me onboard was taken—records, tapes, extra instruments,
all my books—hers too for that matter. Three people I talked to at
the festival had had the same kind of thing happen to them—their
collections stolen and the tapes missing or destroyed, songbooks
and any extra instruments destroyed."

"Misery loves company," Barry said, and
handed him a stack of mail. Letters from friends from five states
asked if the Curtises couldn't dub certain records or privately
recorded performances for the writers, as their copies had been
destroyed—in two cases in a house fire but most in break-ins. Two
mail-order catalog sources for music and instruments announced in
fliers that they were forced out of business as their inventory had
been wiped out—in a fire, a seizure, a robbery, all seemingly
coincidental but final nonetheless. Folk music publications
announced they were going out of business due to bankruptcy, tax
problems, losing a headquarters, vandalism, death or disease.

Hawkins passed the letters on to Brose and
Anna Mae.

"That's not all. Bessie McGill in Denver just
called to ask me to help her get a fundraiser together for four of
our musician friends who have no medical insurance and have
apparently been messing around with the wrong groupies—they've all
been tested positive for that latest sexually transmitted fatal
virus thing—the one that mutated from AIDS. What do you call
it?"

"Bad's what I call it," Brose replied. "Who
were the victims?"

Barry told him and Brose swore under his
breath. "Shit, man, that's scary. Carmichael and I had a lot of the
same close friendships, you know what I mean. Makes me glad I been
out of circulation for a while. Guess we can be expectin' a lot
more bad phone calls and a few funerals before long."

Faron cleared his throat. "Have there been
any other calls?"

"Several—there was my mother wanting us to
come over and pick up her laundry and then there was—"

"Anything from a lady named Gussie or Willie
MacKai?"

"No—haven't heard from Willie in years.
Gussie Turner, she's Lettie Chaves's mother, isn't she? She's been
running the record business while Lettie and Mic are straightening
out that mess they got into on the border."

Faron's mouth shut like a snapping turtle's
and his Adam's apple took another dip.

"Shit," Brose said again.

"Why? What's the matter?"

"Well, maybe they'll show up," Hawkins said
finally. "Although, the way things have been going, probably
not."

"We should have kept on going," Anna Mae
said. "We shouldn't have taken the exit. We should have just kept
following."

"Following what?" Brose asked. "They flat
fuckin' disappeared."

"At least we didn't see any wrecks," Ellie
offered. "So they're probably okay."

"Maybe," Brose said.

"Maybe the ranger decided Willie was too
dangerous to keep in custody and stopped off in Little Rock or
somewhere for reinforcements or more bullets or something," Ellie
said. Faron had filled her in on the events of the festival and she
tried not to let him see how rattled she was to have come so close
to losing him.

"I can't believe Gussie wouldn't have dawdled
and waited for us, let us know somehow," Hawkins said, shaking his
head.

Brose disappeared into the bathroom for a
moment, stopped at the kitchen sink for a drink of water, and
headed for the door.

"Wait," Anna Mae said. "Where you going?"

"Tacoma," Brose said. "That's where Gussie's
from, ain't it? Julianne's from around here, Willie and the ranger
are from Texas. If they were headin' for Texas they'd have come
through here like we planned. The way I see it, that leaves
Tacoma."

"That's a long shot," Hawkins said, "but
wouldn't a phone call be quicker?"

"Could be," he admitted, and pulled out his
wallet, pulled his calling card out, and punched out the numbers.
After a long time he said, "Morris? How you guys gettin' on? How's
the horse in the barn? Oh, that's good. That's good. Lookit here,
anything I ought to know about? Like warrants for my arrest or
bombs in the mail? No, well, you dudes be cool and if you need to
go back to town, call this number and tell Ray there's free flop
space at my place, okay? There is? Who? Duck Soul—what the hell
does he want? Never mind. Tell you what"—he covered the receiver
and turned to Barry—"Can I have some mail sent here for now?" Barry
nodded. "Okay, Morris, I want you to send it to this address . .
."

* * *

Willie could remember when he liked driving.
He had driven for his living most of his life, more miles than most
truck drivers, probably. He used to tell people he sang for free,
he just charged them for driving to the gig. The ranch job too was
mostly driving. When he was well rested and not beat to pieces, he
didn't really mind driving on the open road. But he hated like hell
inching along in a snake-shaped parking lot in the damn dark with
nothing but those goddamn trucks all around him just as if he was
in a goddamn box canyon with nothing to breathe but exhaust fumes
and nothing to look at but those goddamn truck lights flashing just
like they were laughing at him.