Phantom Banjo (30 page)

"No thanks," the ranger growled.

"Now, hush. You'll worry the ladies."

Julianne was rolled on her side, staring
wide-eyed and openmouthed at the wrecker. Willie wished she hadn't
been struck deaf so he could talk to her.

He couldn't see any sky at all now but it was
getting lighter and sometime earlier the truck lights had all gone
out. He turned off Gussie's lights. No sense in runnin' down the
battery.

He looked over at the ranger. Sweat ran down
the man's face and darkened his fair hair. His hand clutched his
knee but it was shaking all the same. Poor bastard.

Willie reached behind him and picked up the
banjo, "I don't want any more preachin' out of you," he told it.
"If this is it, least we can do is keep one another company. We got
into this for making music so we may as well give 'em their fire's
worth." Inside he was thinking, here's a captive audience if ever
there was one and if ever there was a good reason to get someone to
feel what he wanted them to feel it was now. Maybe the ranger had
done something purely on his own to get himself into hell, but
Willie couldn't help feeling they were all in this particular hell
because of him.

The least he could do was liven things up a
little. What was it they said, heaven for climate and hell for
society? Might as well make the best of it.

He automatically started to tune and then
realized that it was in tune, had stayed in tune ever since he
first picked it up. Julianne had mentioned something about that but
more than anything, that showed that it was a truly magical
banjo.

"Any requests?" he asked.

" 'Nearer My God to Thee'?" Gussie asked in a
high, shaky voice. She'd been listening all along but she was too
stuporous to care much one way or the other.

"Wrong direction," Willie said cheerfully. In
his mind he ran through a few choices, but many he couldn't
remember.

Then too, songs like "The Wreck of the Old
'97" and "Dark as a Dungeon" and several murder ballads in
succession were all that suggested themselves and they failed, he
felt, to contribute properly to the ambience he wished to create,
even if he could remember them, which he couldn't.

In past hopeless situations, when his dad
died, when his first wife took off on him and the second one died,
when the album he was sure would climb to the country top forty had
sunk without a bubble, he had been able to disappear into sleep or
drinking until either the situation or his feelings about it went
away enough for him to bear it. Too bad for him that he had just
awakened from a sleep that would have done old Rip Van Winkle
proud. And thoughtless of Gussie not to equip her station wagon
with a wet bar.

But he could escape into music too. Music
that might for a time comfort the others and would help drown out
the sound of scraping metal and growling trucks, help him forget
the trap they were caught in, help him forget the deaths of so many
friends and personal heroes, and forget, until he died of thirst,
he supposed—he never had had much of an appetite and couldn't
imagine himself dying of hunger—the heat building inside the car,
and the smell of exhaust fumes and road tar seeping up through the
concrete. Funny how familiar this particular hell smelled. But he
really didn't want to think about that. If he did, he'd get as
panicky as the ranger and the women.

So he struck an idle chord on the banjo and
it reminded him strangely of a Mexican love song, one of the ones
he had learned from the vaqueros when he was a kid. Seemed weird
doing Mexican music to a banjo, but then, Sam had done it with
Venga Jalejo so why not? His current audience was not inclined to
be critical and those whatever-they-weres were not apt to like
anything he did anyway. Which suited him just fine.

CHAPTER 14

Faron persuaded Brose to go with him in his
van, which was large enough to accommodate them all.

Barry at first insisted that the whole
business was too dangerous for Ellie but she said, "Look, Daddy,
from what Faron's told me, it's going to be a whole lot more
dangerous to just stay home and be a sitting duck. I'm your
daughter and Faron's wife—how long do you think this bullshit,
whatever it is, is going to leave me alone?"

Faron looked down at the holes in his Nike
Wannabes and said, "You know, El, it might not be a bad idea for
you to stay here in case something happens to us. Then you could
get word to other people—anybody who sings, anybody we know, just
about. Tell them to lie low, be careful, don't gather together for
a while."

Ellie's dark eyes snapped and her chin,
pointed as a cat's, jutted pugnaciously. "Mom and Dad can do that.
I swear to God, if you're getting sexist on me after only two years
of marriage, Faron Randolph, I'll . . ."

"You'll need this," Molly said, unlocking the
top drawer to her china hutch and taking out a small gun.

"Thanks, Mama. At least somebody's practical
around here."

"You phone us if you find them, you hear, and
if you don't, you phone to say you're okay anyhow."

"Yes, Mama."

"Wait just another ten minutes," Barry said.
"Molly, why don't you get them some of that vanilla ice cream we
got at the 7-Eleven—that sound good to everybody?"

"Thanks, Barry, but we need to get on the
road," Brose said.

"Not that quick you don't. This won't take
any longer than a stoplight. Molly, sprinkle a little of that
powdered Quik on top—you ever had it that way, Brose? Better than
chocolate syrup. While you're doing that I'm going to pack you up
some food for the road."

"That's real nice of you, Barry, but we'll be
okay, really," Anna Mae said.

"Maybe you will, but my kids need to eat and
there's enough for everyone."

Further protests were useless, because Barry
was already slapping cold cuts, peanut butter and jelly, tomatoes,
bananas, leftover tuna salad, and practically anything else he
could find between slices of whole wheat bread, flinging bags of
chips and six packs of diet soda into plastic grocery bags, and
adding a package of Oreos for good measure.

"While you're waiting I think the rest of you
had better write down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of
any family members or friends you'd want to know if something
happens to you," Molly suggested. "Not to be pessimistic or
anything but . . ."

Hawkins stirred his ice cream so that the
little grains of Quick dissolved into chocolate ribbons, much as a
kid might but actually to give him something to do with his hands
and stare at while he thought. He was a practical man by training
if not inclination and before his singing career had had a business
education and had managed his family's dairy for a time. And
despite Gussie's romantic ideas about being at sea, that alone was
plenty to teach him that self-preservation in a changeable and
dangerous environment meant covering all eventualities as
thoroughly as possible.

"You know," he said slowly, after the first
sip of the half-melted ice cream, "in any event, we need to start
some heavy networking about this. Call or write everybody you know
connected with music and warn them about this thing—warn them to
keep a low public profile for a while. At the same time maybe
everyone should begin sharing all the songs people can remember and
record them in every possible way—tape, records, tablature, memory,
computer disk. Each person should store it in as many places as he
has friends, with other musicians, of course, but also with any
civilian friends who might not be expected to have that kind of
thing lying around. Mothers and fond aunts come to mind."

Brose returned to his truck for a few things
to pack in the van along with Barry's provisions. He took his tarp,
the hairy, flea-bitten blanket he kept for sick animals, and the
pistol Willie had brought with him.

They took turns driving and sleeping and
didn't stop, day or night. Somewhere northwest of Cheyenne,
Wyoming, a late summer heat wave set in. They stopped at a rest
stop for ice for the cooler and more soft drinks. Hawkins took the
wheel. Faron had driven as far as Fort Collins, then Ellie had
taken over for half the night, Brose the other half. They'd seen no
sign of the station wagon and though they asked at every truck stop
on the off chance that someone might have remembered the car or one
of its occupants, nobody did.

The drive through that part of the country
was long and monotonous, with nothing to see but flat country where
the little bit of greenery burned brown almost before you could
drive past. The sun was glazed over as white as a hen egg. Lots of
times on this drive you could look off to distant hills and
mountains, but they were lost in the haze today, leaving nothing
but long flat highway, scrubby parched earth, and featureless
horizon. Hawkins, used to looking out over miles of monotonous
stuff wetter than this was dry, did not particularly mind. He
watched the heat waves dance on the pavement as he might watch
others dance on the sea and rolled right over them. The week or two
had given him a lot to keep his mind occupied.

He was musing on the behavior of the weather
and the cops at the festival when he saw the first sign notifying
him of a detour and one of the road signs of a man and a
wheelbarrow that indicated road work ahead. A little farther down
was a slow sign followed by a stop ahead sign followed by some
orange cones.

Through his open window he heard a familiar
tune, "Forty Miles of Bad Road," and in about a mile the figure of
an orange vested, yellow hard-hatted flagwoman rose like a mermaid
from the heat waves. She was even combing her hair, which was waist
length and almost as orange as her jacket. Probably she was getting
ready to tuck it back up into a cooler hairdo, he thought. A big
boom box sat at her feet and blasted out the old tune and she was
nodding and smiling and combing her hair in time to it. He would
have tried to talk to her, ask her how far out of the way the
detour was, how long it would take, what the workmen were doing up
ahead, just to make conversation and break up the drive, but she
was too preoccupied. She gave him a pearly smile and idly waved her
comb off the road in the direction of an exit ramp marked by a line
of the orange cones. Bubble-brain, he thought, and followed the
cones.

Forty-five shock-destroying minutes later,
more cones led up onto paved road. Hawkins saw no signs, but it
looked wrong. Highway 84 was a four-lane highway, well marked with
signs, including those of scenic tragedies that had happened to the
poor settlers who drove wagons along this route when it was known
as the Oregon Trail.

Road Work Next 50 Miles, a sign said. More
cones and another detour sign led him around a mass of heavy
mustard-colored earth-moving and road-building machinery. No
people, just machines, but maybe they were on their lunch—no, it
was early but this was the early nineties after all—their brunch
break. Probably having croissants and espresso or something.

He followed the cones and the detour out into
more scrub country for several miles, until they actually reached
some small hills, just red rock mostly. The detour wound in and
around them, through scrub and black brush.

"Where the hell are we?" Brose asked.

"We're taking the scenic route courtesy of
the highway department," Hawkins said.

* * *

"Our private highway department, that is,"
Nicholson said, chuckling over the receiver connected to the
miniature transmitter his police agent had attached to the van, the
truck, the station wagon, the car Hawkins had ridden in, and Anna
Mae's car. The last two had been left behind but the three critical
ones had provided interesting information.

"Why not just involve that van in your limbo
too?" the Doom and Destruction Devil asked. "Or better yet, have a
fuel truck hit them head-on. It's not as if this group has
that—that—implement of that God-cursed old Marxist archangel with
them, after all. You can just slaughter them."

"I thought you were the one who liked
subtlety," Nicholson said. "I have every intention of slaughtering
them, but have you never heard of poetic justice?"

"I did not think poetry was supposed to be
our forte," D&D said primly.

"Oh contrary, mah cherry," the Debauchery
Devil said. S/He seemed content to remain in Lulubelle's form, but
had changed into tight designer jeans, a hard hat, a signal orange
vest, and nothing else to join in the fun. "Some of—"

"We know," Nicholson said with a yawn. "Some
of your best people have been poets. My point exactly. We are
dealing with poetic types here, not heroic types. That song that
damned instrument was playing—the one the old bag with the terrible
voice was croaking the words to—gave me an idea. My new, improved,
modern limbo is far from the only hazard that ever occurred along
that route. Something older but no less reliable appeals to me in
this case—some of the wonderful old ways we had of thwarting the
travelers these puling nitwits romanticize now in their sentimental
drivel."

"I still think it would have been better to
leave them in the more populated areas, where our minions could
deal with them," pouted the Accounting Devil.

"Don't be greedy," the Chairdevil said. "Your
minions in the IRS have been doing a great job but that phase of
our operation has gone about as far as it can with this particular
bunch. Minions are all well and good. You need them at times, when
direct intervention would look suspicious—after all, if people
start noticing supernatural events and begin truly believing in us
they're going to start believing in the competition too, and that's
counterproductive, to say the least. So your indirect manipulation
is preferable in most cases. And what we've done already should
have been sufficient, if it wasn't for that blessed banjo."