Phantom Banjo (29 page)

At least his jailer was awake to keep him
company. "I know you don't believe this," Willie told the ranger,
"but I was framed."

"Actually, not that I can do anything about
it, but that's beginning to look pretty damned obvious," the ranger
said. "What I can't figure out is why? Most of the other people in
your line of work that have been bothered are fairly well known,
aren't they? I mean, there could be money or something involved.
Mob connections maybe?"

Willie shook his head. "No, unfortunately,
officer, you are dead right. With the possible exception of
yourself I can't see why anyone, for better or worse, would come
after us. Short of a few jealous husbands and boyfriends, I've
never made an enemy in my life that I know of. And no, sir, I was
not as well known as say Sam Hawthorne or Josh Grisholm or any of
the others.

"See, it's this way, officer. This so-called
folk music we all claim to care so much about supposedly originated
with simple, uneducated folks singing songs while they worked and
partied and went about their daily lives. These were not top hits
they'd learned off the radio, you understand, but songs they had
known all their lives and like as not their parents had known all
their lives. Nowadays, to receive any recognition for singing that
kind of a song, you have to have a college education and a degree
that says you're a folklorist or an ethnomusicologist entitled to
examine these folks like they were amoebas or
micro-fucking-organisms of some kind. Either that, or you have to
make up your own brand-new folk songs. I don't do neither, sir. I
worked most of my way through college singing and then the singing
seemed more profitable than the education. Besides, a person who's
going to work as a folklorist, in order to eat while he's
collectin', either has to have a little money to begin with or a
big fat grant, of which there ain't a hell of a lot. As for writing
songs, I'm sorry to say I never had the knack. I'm not a writer,
I'm a singer, an actor, a performer. I can hold an audience in the
palm of my hand and make them feel the song, make them laugh, cry,
make them mad, make them proud of themselves but—"

"Sounds to me like that's enough to make you
dangerous to somebody," the ranger said.

"Maybe so. But just offhand I'd say it's the
banjo they're after," Willie admitted.

The grill of the truck behind him bore down
on the back bumper of the station wagon. He'd once checked out a
videocassette of a Stephen King movie and the artist who did the
box design had whimsically made the grill of a truck look like a
huge set of teeth. This grill looked that way. All teeth and high
beams breathing down his neck, pushing him toward the back end of
the tanker in front of him.

They moved, but not far and not fast. Slowly
Willie inched the station wagon forward, keeping a fine balance
between ramming into the tanker and being rammed into by the pipe
truck. The temperature gauge crept up toward the red and the gas
gauge dropped toward the E. between what seemed like one turn of
the tires and the next, the station wagon began laboring up a
hill.

Behind them there was a clank and a grind and
Willie saw that pipe no longer protruded out the front of the
truck. In the next moment there was a rattle and a bang as one of
the wrecks on the transport truck slid back into another one. The
log chains on the truck to the right creaked ominously.

The ranger leaned out the window and craned
to see around the trucks. The logging truck swerved forward,
rocking the trailer back toward the station wagon. The ranger
pulled his head back in before he lost it. "Shee-it, did you see
that? I think he did it deliberately. Why, if this was Texas, I'd
pull that sucker over and throw the book at him. But I'll tell you
the truth. I don't know where this is. I never seen anything like
this. There's so many cars and so much light and those bastards are
so close, I couldn't even see the road. Judging from the headlight
pattern though, I think we're on a cloverleaf of some kind."

Willie just nodded and paid very close
attention to the vehicles around them. The bark from the logs on
the logging truck was scraping off on Gussie's window and they
could smell the resin through the exhaust fumes. And if the pipe on
that truck in back of them slid backward when the truck went
uphill, it might slide right through the roof of the station wagon
when the truck pointed downhill. "According to my friend there,"
Willie told the ranger, nodding toward the banjo, "we're somewhere
on the Oregon Trail. You know, that's a funny thing . . ."

"A traffic jam on a cloverleaf in the middle
of the Oregon Trail?" the ranger snorted. "Yeah. I'd say so."

"No. I think that's the first time the
banjo's played a fairly modern song, a composed one at that . . .
hey, Gussie, you still awake?"

"Umph."

"That song that fella wrote about the Oregon
Trail, is there anything in it that would give us some idea what
the situation is?"

"Well, I don't remember all the words,
Willie, but basically it's about all these families coming out and
dying of thirst and falling off cliffs and drowning and stuff . .
." Her voice faded toward the end of the sentence.

"Thank you, ma'am, that's mighty
encouragin'," the ranger muttered.

Willie chewed on his mustache for a long
time. Meanwhile the car kept climbing slow as a snail up the side
of an aquarium, playing tag with the rear bumper of one truck and
the front bumper of the other. The lanes were far too narrow too,
and seemed to get narrower as the station wagon climbed. The
logging truck remained scraping against their side and on the left
side, the wrecker pulled in so that the loose junked car parts
jiggled and rattled against the left-hand windows.

At the risk of having a junked car in his
lap, Willie rolled the window down to get some air, then had to
take a hand off the wheel to push a piece of twisted chrome back
out again so he could roll the window back up before he choked to
death on exhaust fumes.

The banjo began chiming "The MTA," a
political campaign song about a fellow trapped on a subway when he
couldn't pay the increased fare. Willie found himself singing
softly to himself the part about the protagonist, Charlie, never
returning, and stopped when he realized what he was singing.

The needle on the gas gauge dipped to the
middle bar of the E.

"Not that it hasn't been slow enough," Willie
told the ranger with some satisfaction, "but this whole shebang is
about to come to a screeching halt. We, my friend, are about out of
gas."

By this time they had stopped climbing and
had been crawling along a fairly level stretch, but all of a sudden
the hood dipped down and the clanking and banging of the trucks
around them reversed itself. Willie glanced in the rearview mirror
to see three of the heavy pipes looming out over the cab, so far
beyond the hood of the truck that he could not see the ends of
them. If only they kept going as slowly as they had been, the pipe
might not break loose. Willie couldn't see the face of the driver,
though the night was fading to navy, then gray.

The banjo tune switched to "Roll on, Buddy—"
and Willie's mind finished the rest of the line as he'd heard Doc
Watson do it, "Don't you roll too slow, tell me how can I roll when
the wheels won't go?"

About that time one of the wrecks screamed,
slamming into the driver's side as it rolled toward the cab of the
truck. The wreck's loose bumper screeched and squealed and tore a
chunk out of Gussie's front bumper as it slid forward.

A sound like a rifle shot cracked from the
other side of the car and the ranger cried, "Holeee . . ." and dove
toward Willie, arms covering his head as the length of chain that
had snapped loose off the log load smashed onto the roof and
cracked against the window, crumbling it into an opaque spider web
of fractured glass. With a mighty rumble the logs shifted, slewing
sideways as they readjusted themselves to the lost restraint, and
the ends of some of the bottom ones jutted out to push the station
wagon so that it rocked toward the wrecker. Juli woke up whimpering
and rolled toward Gussie, who was propped up on her elbows,
wide-eyed and shaking like a leaf.

"Oh, my Lord, oh, my Lord, we're all gonna be
crushed like cockroaches," she said.

The car's engine chose that moment to die
with a sputter and a shudder, but the wheels continued to roll
downhill, a little faster now, propelled by the momentum of the
trucks squashing them on three sides.

Willie wished the traffic would pick up in
the logging truck's lane. If that other chain broke from the strain
of holding those tons of timber up all by itself, they'd be crushed
beneath the load. On the other hand, it might carry them with it,
right into the back of the fuel tanker, and even if it tore free of
the station wagon before coming even with the tanker, if the chain
broke and the logs flew into the tanker, they could all look
forward to burning to death. It didn't seem like a whole lot of
choice.

What the devil could they be doing up there?
Construction? An accident? There should be big yellow signs or flag
people or guide cars or flares or some of those signal orange cones
anyway, dammit. This was no civilized way to run a traffic hazard.
On the other hand, if they did have those things, he wouldn't have
been able to see them anyhow for the trucks.

Why had Gussie driven this way anyhow? The
Oregon Trail, if he remembered correctly, stretched from
Independence, Missouri, to somewhere in the Willamette Valley so
they could be anywhere along it—although he didn't think there were
any cities right on the road big enough to justify this kind of
jam. All of these cars were sure as hell not going to a folk
festival.

As he wondered he became aware that the
trucks on either side gave the station wagon just enough room that
the noise wasn't so awful and he could hear the banjo again, in
waltz time now, the low notes mournful and mellow, the high ones
piercing—what was the tune?

He knew it—he used to do it—it was one of
those truly awful songs he used to do for fun. Religious, sort of,
it seemed. One of those lugubrious moralistic things from revival
tent times. Something about a drunkard who had a dream about
punishment for his sins and—oh, shit, it was "The Hell-Bound
Train."

"Thanks a lot, buddy," he said bitterly to
the banjo. "You're a big fat help."

"Who? Me?" the ranger asked, still yelling,
even though the noise was no longer so loud. "What do you expect me
to do?"

"Get out and direct traffic?" Willie
suggested through teeth gritted so they wouldn't chatter with the
fear of death that was sending little icy runners up and down his
spinal cord. "I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the banjo,
Lazarus."

"Why?"

"Because, in case you hadn't noticed, it has
a way of playing songs to indicate the situation you're in. So far
it's been right on target. If it is this time, let's put it this
way, I don't want to meet the drivers of these trucks."

Another bump flung them toward the
windshield, in spite of their seat belts. In the rearview mirror,
the grill of the pipe truck leered in through the back window,
jammed up against it.

Willie took his hands from the steering
wheel. "Well, I guess that's it."

"What do you mean, man? This is a dangerous
situation."

"Nope," Willie told him. "It's not just
dangerous. It's fatal. You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette,
would you?"

"You're awful damned calm."

"Call it a last request," Willie sighed. The
icy runners up his spine had grown vines that now permeated every
inch of him, and oddly enough that quieted him as much as being
doused with cold water will quiet a hot temper. He told the ranger,
"I'm not exactly calm. More like I'm resigned. It's bigger than
both of us, sweetheart. I should have signed the damned contract
that Nicholson character offered me. At least then I'd have gotten
some fun out of life before they took me. It don't seem fair that I
didn't sign anything and they're going to take me anyhow. Not to
mention you poor bastards. What in the world did you do, officer,
to end up going to hell in my company?"

The ranger didn't answer because about then
the station wagon's front bumper tapped against the back of the
tanker—gently, very gently, just enough to let them know they were
trapped.

"Urn," Willie said, feeling a certain
intellectual interest in the situation, "you know, whoever's
driving these rigs must be good—they're keeping us fenced in nice
and cozy and not runnin' into each other so far."

"So far," the ranger said. "Dammit, there's
got to be a way out of here—"

"Nah," Willie said. He was surprised at how
detached he sounded, "We've bought it. Unless I misunderstand, for
the crime of carrying this banjo around and singing a few songs,
not for any drinkin', sinnin', or carousin', you understand. They
kind of liked that—no, for the crime of singing a few songs, I have
landed us all in hell." He looked out the window. "Or maybe it's
only purgatory. It doesn't seem to hurt yet." Then he decided he
was being thoughtless. "I mean, at least I don't. You hurtin',
buddy?"

The ranger shook his head. "No, but I'm sure
as hell sweatin' up a storm."

"You could just push the glass on out of that
broken window. It's not going to stop anything if that log by your
nose decides to come crashin' in."

"Well, I'd like to delay it just a little bit
if it's all the goddamn same to you, mister," the ranger responded
angrily. "What the fuck's the matter with you?"

Willie shrugged. He was feeling less and less
all the time. Shock maybe, mercifully numbing him the way he'd
heard it does sometimes. It was better than being scared shitless
anyway. "It's just that it's all over, my friend. This is it. We've
bought it. Relax and let your life pass before your eyes."